Author: Barbara Pym
Category: Humorous
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‘Well, it’s a good thing Mr Donne doesn’t have to live there,’ said Harriet stoutly.
CHAPTER FIVE
One afternoon Harriet set out for the curate’s lodgings, carrying a large basket. Besides a cake and some apple jelly, she was taking some very special late plums which she had been guarding jealously for the last few weeks. She hurried along, hoping that she would not meet anybody on the way, as she and Belinda were going to tea with Count Bianco and she had not much time. She therefore felt very annoyed when she saw the Archdeacon coming towards her, and would have hurried on, had they not come face to face on the pavement.
The Archdeacon had been visiting a rich parishioner, who was thought to be dying. The poor were much too frightened of their vicar to regard him as being of any possible comfort to the sick, but the Archdeacon liked to think of himself as fulfilling some of the duties of a parish priest and there was something about a deathbed that appealed to his sense of the dramatic. He had also taken the opportunity of visiting the workhouse that afternoon and was altogether in a pleasant state of melancholy.
‘When I visit these simple people,’ he said affectedly with his head on one side, ‘I am reminded of Gray’s Elegy.’ He began to quote:
Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
‘Oh, quite,’ agreed Harriet, annoyed at being delayed. ‘One of the finest poems in our language,’ she pronounced, hoping that there the matter would end.
But the Archdeacon had had a tiring afternoon and was in no hurry to return to his good works.
‘Indeed it is,’ he agreed. ‘Johnson’s criticism of it is so apt, as you will remember – “Sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”’
But Harriet could stay no longer. ‘Oh, yes, like the Apes of Brazil,’ she remarked, and moved off, leaving the Archdeacon puzzling over what she meant. He thought it unlikely that it would be a literary quotation and yet it seemed somehow Elizabethan. Perhaps Belinda would know it. She often wasted her time reading things that nobody else would dream of reading.
Harriet walked away in the opposite direction. It would be very annoying if the curate was out, although she supposed she could always leave the things in his sitting-room with a note. His lodgings were situated in what Harriet considered one of the more sordid streets of the village, a row of late Victorian red brick villas called Jubilee Terrace. Every window had its lace curtains and she imagined that she detected stealthy movements behind them as she walked along to the house where the curate lodged. Well, let them watch her and gossip about it too if they liked, she thought stoutly, it would do some of them good to realize that charity began at home. That Miss Beard, a Sunday School teacher too, pretending to be watering the ferns in the front room – Harriet called out ‘Good afternoon!’ to her, and was pleased to see her scuttle furtively back into the shelter of the lace curtains.
The curate’s house was called ‘Marazion’. Harriet walked up the little path bordered with shells and rang the front-door bell. Mr Donne himself answered it. He expressed himself delighted to see her and was quite overwhelmed with gratitude when she presented her gifts.
He gazed at the jelly in wonder as if he had never seen anything like it before, but then recovered sufficiently to show Harriet into his sitting-room. This was quite a nice room, not as meanly furnished as Harriet could have wished, though Belinda was relieved that they did not have to provide the curate with furniture as well as food. Harriet looked eagerly round, searching for those personal touches that make a room interesting. Other curates had lodged here, but this was the first time Harriet had visited Mr Donne and there were bound to be differences of detail. The first thing she noticed was a large oar, fastened on the wall over the mantelpiece, with photographs of rowing groups hanging underneath it.
‘Ah, now which one is you?’ she asked, going up to one of the groups and peering at it. They all looked so alike but at last she discovered Mr Donne and he pointed out to her his best friend who was a curate in London and another who had been called to the Mission Field.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said, her face clouding, ‘I hope you will not go overseas. I mean, you aren’t commanded to go by your bishop, are you?’
‘Oh no, it is a personal matter. The call comes from within, as it were,’ explained Mr Donne, rather red in the face.
Harriet seemed satisfied with this explanation and turned her attention to his books, which were not a particularly original selection. Shakespeare, some standard theological works, a few paper-backed detective novels and the Oxford Book of English Verse.
‘I do hope your electric light is good,’ she said anxiously. ‘You know how harmful it is to read in a bad light, like Milton or whoever it was, although of course he went blind, so perhaps his eyes were weak to begin with. Oh, good, you have a reading-lamp – I was thinking that I could let you have one that we don’t use very much.’
Mr Donne thanked her for the kind thought. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he assured her, ‘I don’t work very much in the evenings, except when I’m preparing a sermon. The Boys’ Club and the Scouts take up most of my time.’
Scouts seemed to remind Harriet that she had thought of knitting him a pair of socks or stockings.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said, ‘I wear them out terribly quickly and can never have enough. I’ve just had two pairs sent me today, so I shall be quite well off.’
Harriet bristled with indignation. ‘Oh? Who made those for you? Your mother or an aunt perhaps?’ These occurred to her as the only people who could legitimately be allowed to knit socks for a curate whom she regarded as her property.
‘No, as a matter of fact, it was a relation of Mrs Hoccleve’s, she was up at the University when I was, at least she was doing research. She’s a kind of female Don.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Harriet was a little pacified, but the whole thing was unsatisfactory and needed to be looked into. It was not somehow natural for a female Don to knit for a curate, especially as she sounded to be quite a young woman.
‘Her name’s Olivia Berridge and she’s awfully nice,’ said the curate in a kind of burst.
‘Well, I shall have to be going now,’ said Harriet, putting on her gloves. ‘My sister and I are going to tea with Count Bianco.’
The curate thanked her once more for her gifts and came to the front gate with her. Nevertheless Harriet could not help feeling that the visit had been disappointing. This Olivia Berridge knitting socks for him, that was the trouble. Harriet wondered if there could be anything more between them than that. Of course there had been no photographs other than the rowing groups in his sitting-room, though she had not been able to see his bedroom. There might well be a photograph of Miss Berridge there. And yet it seemed that she must be several years older than he was, so perhaps there was nothing in it after all. Mr Donne was so very young, not more than twenty-three or four, and there was really nobody here in whom he could confide. Agatha was so unsympathetic and the Archdeacon was definitely peculiar, perhaps even the tiniest bit mental. He had that odd sloping forehead which was supposed to be a sign of mental deficiency. Harriet had read about it in Harmsworth’s Encyclopaedia. She let her thoughts wander at random on this interesting point, but by the time she reached home the worry of Olivia Berridge was again uppermost and as soon as she saw Belinda she asked her what she knew about ‘a relation of Agatha Hoccleve’s doing research at the University’.
Belinda frowned. ‘I believe she has a niece who does research in Middle English,’ she said. ‘Something to do with The Owl and the Nightingale, I think, but I’m not sure what aspect. Of course there is still much that is obscure in that poem and several disputed readings…’
Harriet interrupted her impatiently. ‘Oh, I dare say,’ she said, ‘but how old is this girl?’
‘Oh, I don’t think s
he’s very young,’ said Belinda, ‘at least, she’s about thirty, I think, which is young really, isn’t it?’
Harriet seemed satisfied and hurried away to change for tea at Count Bianco’s. She came downstairs again looking very elegant in a green suit with a cape trimmed with monkey fur. She had decided to break in her new python-skin shoes.
After some delay, because Harriet couldn’t walk very fast in her new shoes, they arrived at Count Bianco’s house.
They had tea almost at once. The Count had ordered his cook to make all Harriet’s favourite cakes and there were four different kinds of jam.
Belinda enjoyed her tea quietly while Harriet and the Count talked. Every time they visited Ricardo’s house, Belinda was struck by the excellence of everything in it. The house itself was an interesting continental-looking building with a tower at one end and balconies and window-boxes, filled at all times of the year with suitable flowers. And the garden was delightful, with its perfectly tended herbaceous borders and rockeries, a grove of lime trees and some fine Lombardy poplars. The joys of the vegetable garden, too, were considerable. Belinda wondered how anybody could remain unmoved at the sight of the lovely marrows, and the magnificent pears, carefully tied up in little cotton bags, so that they should not fall before they were ripe or be eaten by the birds. At the bottom of the vegetable garden was a meadow, which Ricardo had planted with such of his native Italian flowers as could be induced to grow in the less sunny English climate. This part of the garden was his especial delight, and on fine evenings he would sit for hours in a deck-chair reading Tacitus or Dante, or brooding over the letters of his friend John Akenside.
This afternoon he was anxious that they should see a fine show of Michaelmas daisies, eight different varieties, each one a different colour and one a particularly rare one, which he had brought back from the south of France, when he was there in the spring. And he was thinking of having a pond made, for water-lilies and goldfish, and where did Harriet think would be the best place to have it?
‘Oh, Ricardo, how lovely!’ said Harriet, in raptures at the thought of the pond. ‘Will you swim in it? If it had a nice concrete bottom it would be quite clean, and so romantic to swim in the moonlight with the fishes.’
Belinda shivered. The fishes would be so cold and slimy and besides, Ricardo didn’t do romantic things like that. ‘Leigh Hunt writes rather charmingly about a fish’, she said aloud, ‘Legless, unloving, infamously chaste’; she paused. Perhaps it was hardly suitable, really, and she was a little ashamed of having quoted it, but these little remembered scraps of culture had a way of coming out unexpectedly.
‘Swans would be nice,’ Harriet went on, ‘or would they eat the fishes?’
Ricardo was uncertain, but said that he had thought of getting some peacocks, they would look so effective on the terrace.
Harriet agreed that they would, and they moved off together, leaving Belinda bending over the Michaelmas daisies. She did not want to listen to another proposal of marriage and probably a refusal as well. It was some months since Ricardo had last proposed to Harriet and Belinda could feel that another offer was due.
When they came back to the house she could tell that he had once more been disappointed. It seemed a suitable time to talk about Ricardo’s old friend John Akenside, and how he must miss him, even after all these years.
Yes, indeed, Ricardo wondered at times whether his own end was near. Would Belinda come into his study and see the photograph which he meant to have as the frontispiece to his long-awaited edition of the letters of John Akenside?
They went into the house, leaving Harriet to collect some plants from the gardener.
Ricardo’s study gave the impression that he was a very studious and learned man. The walls were lined with very dull-looking books and the large desk covered with papers and letters written in faded ink. His task of collecting and editing the letters of his friend took up most of his time now, and it was doubtful whether he read anything but a few lines of Dante or a sentence of Tacitus.
A large photograph of John Akenside stood in a prominent position on the desk, showing him in some central European court dress. He looked uncomfortable in the white uniform and faintly ridiculous, like something out of a musical comedy. Perhaps his collar was crooked or the row of medals too ostentatious to be quite convincing, for there was something indefinably wrong about it, which marred the grandeur of the whole effect. Belinda never minded laughing at this photograph, because she felt that somehow John would understand. Indeed, as she looked at the face, she thought she detected a twinkle in the eyes, which seemed to look slyly round the corners of the rimless glasses, and the mouth was curled into a half smile, self-conscious, but at the same time a little defiant.
Together Belinda and Ricardo studied the portrait and for some minutes neither spoke. Then Ricardo said rather sadly, ‘I think he would have wished the world to see this one.’
Belinda agreed. ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right. And yet he never sought worldly glory, did he …’ she mused sentimentally. ‘He was always so humble – hardly downtrodden,’ she added hastily, remembering his rather shambling gait and his fingers stained with red ink, ‘but I think he never realized his unique gifts, from which we, who were privileged to be his friends, received so much benefit …’ Belinda stopped, rather tied up in this sentence of appreciation. She felt as if she were writing his obituary notice in The Times. Being with Ricardo often made her talk like this. Of course, she thought, I believe John Akenside had a finger in nearly every European political pie at the time of his death, and yet one had never been sure what it was that he actually did.
Ricardo continued the funeral oration. ‘At the beginning of my edition of the letters,’ he said, ‘which will also contain a short biographical memoir, I am going to quote that beautiful opening sentence from the Agricola of Tactitus – Clarorum virorum facta moresque posteris tradere, antiquitus usitatum, ne nostris quidem temporibus quamquam incuriosa suorum aetas omisit …’ he recited solemnly in his quaint Italian pronunciation.
Belinda waited patiently while Ricardo finished the complicated Latin sentence. She had never been much of a classical scholar.
After he had finished there was a long silence. At last Belinda noticed that it was nearly seven o’clock and at that moment Harriet came into the room, bustling and cheerful, and carrying a basket full of rare rock plants. Her appearance seemed to cheer Ricardo and they began to talk about the care of woolly-leaved alpine plants, a conversation in which Belinda was glad to join.
CHAPTER SIX
On the way home Belinda decided to call at the vicarage to see Agatha. Harriet, calculating that the curate would probably not be there, went home to make some sardine eggs for supper, as it was Emily’s evening out.
Belinda found Agatha sitting in the drawing-room, mending the Archdeacon’s socks. It was a gloomy, unhomely kind of room, though Belinda could never quite decide why she did not like it. The electric light was too dim or the chair covers too drab or perhaps it was just that Agatha was there and that behind her was a bookcase, where, behind glass, was a complete set of the publications of the Early English Text Society. Belinda noticed rather sadly that the crimson socks Henry had bought in Vienna were not among the pile on Agatha’s sewing table. But how stupid of me, she thought, socks don’t last thirty years, and how could a man in Henry’s position wear crimson socks! The ones Belinda noticed tonight were of the most sober archidiaconal colours. She wanted to say, ‘Oh, Agatha, let me help you,’ but thought better of it. Agatha might consider it a reflection on her darning, and certainly would not care to be reminded that Belinda had darned socks for Henry before she had ever set eyes on him. ‘Never interfere between husband and wife’, as Belinda remembered her dear mother telling her, and one could not be too careful, even about an apparently trivial thing like a sock.
Agatha seemed pleased to see her and they began to talk of parish matters. There would be a great deal to do when Agatha went away, indeed,
she was beginning to wonder whether it would be possible to go after all.
Belinda reflected on the truth of the saying that husbands and wives grow to be like each other, for it might almost have been Henry talking. So badly in need of a holiday, and yet who could be left in charge of the Mothers’ Union and there was that rather delicate affair of the altar brasses and the unpleasantness between Miss Jenner and Miss Beard … listening to her Belinda began to feel very gloomy indeed. It seemed almost as if Agatha had decided not to go.
‘I’m sure I should be very willing to do what I could,’ she said doubtfully, aware that she was not a mother and was far too much of a moral coward to deal satisfactorily with even the slightest unpleasantness. ‘I often go into Miss Jenner’s shop to buy knitting wool,’ she added, ‘perhaps I could say a word…’
To Belinda’s surprise, Agatha seemed grateful for her offer of help and they found themselves talking about Mr Donne and what a great asset he was to the parish, after which it was the most natural thing in the world for Belinda to ask after the Archdeacon.
Agatha smiled indulgently. He was well, considering everything, she said.
Considering what? Belinda wondered, and ventured to remark that men were really much more difficult to please than women, who bore their burdens without complaining.
Agatha nodded and sighed. There was a short pause during which Agatha seemed to be intent on finding a piece of wool to match the sock she was mending. Belinda took up the Church Times and began glancing idly through the advertisements. A priest’s cloak for sale, 44-inch chest – clerical evening dress, tall, slim build, never worn – she paused, wondering what story, sad or dramatic, lay behind those words. She had just turned to the back pages and was wondering whether Harriet would care to spend part of their summer holiday at a Bright Christian Guest House at Bognor, when the door opened and the Archdeacon came in.
He kissed Agatha in a hasty, husbandly way, which rather surprised Belinda, who had not thought that any outward signs of affection ever passed between them. Perhaps it distressed her a little, too, but he seemed so genuinely pleased to see her that she soon recovered and was listening happily to his account of how he had spent the afternoon, visiting a deathbed and then going on to see the old people in the workhouse.