A Glass of Blessings (22 page)

‘But of course it’s lovely news,’ I said, pulling myself together. ‘Nothing could have pleased me better.’

‘After all, I might have brought disgrace on us all by marrying a man half my age,’ said Sybil. The kind of thing that gets headlines in the lower daily papers.’

‘Really, Mother, I can’t imagine that you have ever had the opportunity of doing
that’
said Rodney, smiling indulgently.

Sybil smiled mysteriously, for which I did not blame her. ‘Arnold
is
eighteen months younger than I am, as it happens,’ she said. ‘I am sixty-nine and he is only sixty-seven. But we have the seventies before us, and perhaps even the eighties.’

‘And you can go to Portugal for your honeymoon. Obviously you won’t want Rodney and me to accompany you,’ I said lightly, for I did not want to dwell too much on the honeymoon aspect, feeling that it might embarrass them. I imagined them going about quietly together looking at buildings, and in the evenings drinking wine in the open air and talking about the kind of abstract subjects they usually discussed when Professor Root came to the house.

‘No, we shall let you have Portugal to yourselves this year,’ said Rodney in a relieved tone. ‘Wilmet and I will go to Cornwall. James and Hilary Cash go to a very good hotel near Penzance—I must get the address from James.’

My heart rather sank but I said nothing. ‘When is the wedding to be?’ I asked brightly.

‘We thought some time in August. In a registrar’s office, of course, with a quiet family luncheon afterwards,’ said Sybil. ‘It will be a rather sober affair, as is fitting.’

‘I hope we need not take that too literally,’ said Professor Root ‘The sobriety, I mean.’

‘Oh no, we’ll make it a jolly party,’ said Rodney rather stiffly.

Sybil caught my eye and we began to laugh. I suddenly realized how much I should miss her if she let the house and went to live with Professor Root. But she would never do that—obviously we should all live here together. The only difference would be that Professor Root would be here always, instead of just rather often. But even as I was thinking these thoughts Rodney was saying something about changes and asking where they were going to live.

‘I shall go on living here, of course,’ said Sybil, ‘in my own house. Arnold has been living at his club lately, as you know, and could not take a wife there. He will come here to me.’

‘Not quite the usual thing, perhaps, but by no means unknown. Matrilocal or uxorilocal residence, they call it,’ said Professor Root drily, ‘where the husband goes to the wife’s village—in certain tribes which follow the system of matriliny, that is.’

‘In that case -‘ Rodney began.

‘Yes, Noddy, I shall be turning you out. You and Wilmet will buy a house of your own: I think Wilmet will enjoy that.’

Rodney looked so dismayed that I couldn’t help teasing him and saying lightly, ‘Darling, is it so very dreadful, the prospect of living alone in a house with me?’ But really I was a little dismayed myself. It had never occurred to me that Sybil and Professor Root would want the house to themselves.

Later that evening, when we were alone, Rodney began to talk in a rather gloomy way about Wembley, Ealing, Walton- on-Thames, Beckenham and other outlying parts of London. He dwelt in turn upon the horrors of the Central Line, the impossibility of getting to Waterloo or Charing Cross in the rush hour, the inaccessibility of London Bridge or Cannon Street from the Ministry.

‘That Mother should do
this,’
he said. ‘It’s a most unnatural thing.’

‘But you can’t blame her,’ I said. ‘And after all it seems rather appropriate that Sybil should act in this way. I’ve always seen her as being rather like a character in Greek tragedy, doing some unnatural thing.’

For my part I had no intention of moving to any of the places Rodney had been talking about. I saw us settled in a nice little house or flat still within easy reach of St Luke’s and the clergy house.

Chapter Twenty

Mary had been anxious that I should go and see her at the retreat house as soon as she was settled there, and I was really glad to get away from the preparations for Sybil’s wedding and Rodney’s agonized speculations as to where we were going to live. The only thing settled was that we should go for a holiday in August, staying at the hotel in Cornwall which James and Hilary Cash had recommended. It seemed that Rodney had been extremely fortunate in getting accommodation there—only the mention of James’s name had made it possible—and I foresaw that we should be carrying with us a burden of gratitude, having to exclaim continually about how lucky we had been.

I did not expect to see many clergy or obvious looking re-treatants on the bus, as I was going in the middle of the week and the retreats were usually held at weekends.

‘There
is
a party of clergy coming on Saturday,’ Mary said, when she met me at the bus stop in the village. ‘Last weekend we had women—my first experience from the domestic side.’

‘Were they troublesome?’ I asked.

‘Yes, one or two of them were a little. One had brought a Primus stove with her to make tea in her room, and it flared up and burnt the curtains; another left old bits of bread and cake in a drawer—so messy.’

‘Poor Mary! It seems odd that their misdemeanours should be concerned with eating and drinking, though I suppose these things assume greater importance when you’re supposed to be mortifying the flesh—the woman with the Primus stove had to have her tea, and the other couldn’t exist without her extra bits of food.’

‘There are gas rings in some of the rooms, and I could have given her a kettle, and if anyone wants extra food they’ve only to ask for it.’

‘Perhaps they’d be ashamed to admit their weakness,’ I suggested. ‘But fancy having to take a Primus about with one—so awkward! Let’s hope the clergy will be better.’

‘There’s no reason why they should be,’ said Mary, they’re only human after all. Marius told me that he once fused all the lights at a retreat by using his electric razor.’

‘The clergy ought not to have such luxuries,’ I said sternly. ‘But I always imagined that you were one of those people who regard the clergy as being better than other beings.’

‘Me?’ Mary seemed surprised and smiled. ‘Perhaps I was like that once, but I don’t think I am any more. Such surprising things seem to happen.’

I wanted to pursue the subject further, but we had now reached the house and I felt bound to utter some exclamation of wonder or disbelief. As it happened it was disbelief, for it seemed hardly possible to imagine how this elaborate Victorian gothic building could have got itself put up in an unpretentious little village.

‘It used to be the vicarage,’ Mary explained, ‘but of course it was too big, so the vicar before last built himself a kind of bungalow. Then the diocese took over the house, first as a home for unmarried mothers and then as a retreat house. Oh, and it was also a boys’ prep school at some time, I can’t remember exactly when.’

‘It looks right for all the horrors of a school,’ I said. ‘Do you have enough domestic help?’

‘Oh yes, we have a woman living in besides myself—she does most of the cooking—and women come in from the village to clean, and the sexton stokes the boiler and does the garden.’

‘Do you like it here?’ I asked.

‘Yes. It’s busy but very peaceful, though I still feel rather useless, as if the life were too pleasant to be a really good one.’

Mary’s remark irritated me because it made me feel guilty myself; but I could understand that after her life of committees and parish work, and the tyranny of her mother, and then her stay in the convent, she might feel like this. Indeed, when I had been at the retreat house a day, I began to feel it myself. I tried to make myself useful but there was very little for me to do. The weather was glorious, but it seemed wanton to be lying in a deckchair in the mornings while Mary was arranging things for the coming retreat, so I took an upright canvas chair, or sat on a hard wooden seat of the kind that looks as if it might have been given in memory of someone. I half expected to see an inscription carved on the back. The only task Mary could find for me was to pick and shell some peas for lunch, and to put the pods on the compost heap under the apple trees at the bottom of the garden. Here, in a kind of greenish twilight, stood a pile of grass cuttings and garden rubbish, and as I added my pods to it I imagined all this richness decaying in the earth and new life springing out of it. Marvell’s lines went jingling through my head.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than Empires and more slow …

There seemed to be a pagan air about this part of the garden, as if Pan—I imagine him with Keith’s face—might at any moment come peering through the leaves. The birds were tame and cheeky, and seemed larger than usual; they came bumping and swooping down, peering at me with their bright insolent eyes, their chirpings louder and more piercing than I had ever heard them. I wondered if people who came here for retreats ever penetrated to this part of the garden. I could imagine the unmarried mothers and the schoolboys here, but not those who were striving to have the right kind of thoughts. Then I noticed that beyond the apple trees there was a group of beehives, and I remembered the old saying about telling things to bees. It seemed that they might be regarded as a kind of primitive confessional.

I went slowly back to the lawn, but to a deckchair now; the hard wooden seat seemed out of keeping with my mood.

It was not until the evening of my second day there that Mary and I had a real heart to heart talk. We were in her bed-sitting-room after supper, and I had been telling her about Sybil’s forthcoming marriage and what an upheaval it was going to make in our lives.

‘Yes,’ Mary said, ‘marriage does do that, doesn’t it?—and death, too, of course.’

‘But not birth.’

‘No—people seem to come more quietly into the world. It isn’t until they’ve really become personalities that they make changes and upheavals.’

‘I suppose I was surprised, and perhaps even a little shocked, that Sybil should think of marrying again,’ I admitted.

‘I think I should have felt that too. Yet it’s nice for older people to marry, to be able to comfort each other in their old age. I think people do need help and comfort from others, you know.’

I remembered with a pang Piers saying that we were all, in a sense, colleagues in the grim business of getting through life. It seemed as if Mary was leading up to something—Marius Ransome, I supposed.

‘Drinking coffee is supposed to keep one awake,’ she said. ‘Do you mind, Wilmet?’

‘No, I’m not tired,’ I said. ‘I’ve done nothing all day.’

‘I always used to wish I could have gone to college where people sat up half the night talking about life,’ she said eagerly, ‘but I suppose it’s too late now.’

‘What—to go to college?’

‘I didn’t mean that—I meant that people don’t talk when they’re older in the way they do when they’re young.’

‘I suppose not,’ I said, feeling rather uncomfortable.

‘Wilmet, I want to ask you something. Will you give me an honest answer?’

‘Yes, of course, if I can,’ I said, wondering as one does when challenged in this way whether it would be at all possible.

She clasped her hands round her coffee cup and looked down at the tiles in the fireplace. I noticed that they had a curious pattern of bulrushes alternating with brownish-coloured irises.

‘Do you think it wrong for a priest to marry?’ she asked in a low voice.

‘Do you mean as a general principle?’ I asked, in order to gain time.

‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

‘Well, I don’t see how it can be
wrong,’
I said. ‘After all, there are a great many married priests.’

‘Yes, there are, aren’t there!’ she said quickly. Though most of the ones I’ve known haven’t been married. I mean, it would be unthinkable to have a married priest at St Luke’s.’

‘Father Thames probably wouldn’t approve of it,’ I laughed, ‘but he’s retiring in the autumn and I daresay Father Bode thinks on other lines.’

‘But you couldn’t have a married priest living at the clergy house,’ Mary persisted. ‘Surely the idea of a clergy house is that the priests should be celibate?’

‘Yes, but don’t you remember Father Thames saying that it was originally built as a vicarage, and that the first incumbent had lots of children?’

Mary smiled. ‘You see, Wilmet, Marius has asked me to marry him—that’s what I’ve really been wanting to tell you. Do you think it so very dreadful of him?’

I could hardly confess my first reaction to her news, which was the perhaps typically feminine one of astonishment that such a good looking man as Marius Ransome should want to marry anyone so dim and mousy as Mary Beamish. But as soon as I had pushed aside this unworthy thought I realized what a good wife she would make for a clergyman, especially one as unstable as Marius appeared to be. Mary was obviously just the person he needed to steady him, and the novelty and responsibility of marriage would surely take his mind off Rome.

‘I think it would be a very good thing,’ I said. ‘Have you given him your answer, as they say?’

‘Not in so many words,’ Mary smiled, ‘but I think he knows what it will be.’

‘When did he propose to you?’ I asked. There seems to have been so little opportunity—first of all you were with us, and then you came here –’

‘Just before you arrived,’ said Mary. ‘He came down for the afternoon on his scooter.’

‘On his scooter?’ I echoed in amazement ‘But I didn’t know he had one.’

‘He suddenly bought it about a week ago. As a matter of fact, Mother left him a little legacy and I think he used some of that—to buy it. It will be awfully useful for visiting and that kind of thing,’ Mary added eagerly.

It seemed to me highly frivolous and unsuitable, but I could not help being amused after all his talk about being able to do good with money. Then I remembered that we had decided that five hundred pounds was perhaps only enough to do good to oneself. What with the scooter and Mary, I felt that he now had enough to keep his mind firmly on the good Anglican path.

‘Did you fall in love with him that evening at the parish hall?’ I asked. ‘It would be wonderful to think that love could blossom in such surroundings.’ I thought of the chipped Della Robbia plaques, the hissing of gas fires and tea urns and the curious smell of damp mackintoshes that seemed to pervade it, and perhaps all parish halls everywhere. Why, indeed, shouldn’t love blossom here rather more than in conventional romantic surroundings?

‘Not really,’ said Mary. ‘I never thought of myself as marrying. You see, I’ve never had any boy friends’—she brought out the words self-consciously. And what
does
one say, what word can one use, to describe what she meant? Lovers, admirers, suitors, followers—none seems to be quite right.

‘I thought I might have a vocation for the religious life,’ she went on, ‘but I suppose I should have discovered that I hadn’t even if I’d never met Marius.’

‘I think it will be an excellent thing, and I hope you’ll be very happy,’ I said. ‘I suppose Marius will get a living somewhere?’

‘Yes, that would be best. Better than staying on at St Luke’s, really. Of course he’ll have to break the news to Father Thames when he gets back from Italy.’

That
interview should be an interesting one, I thought. Perhaps Mr Bason would listen at the door and let out what he should not have heard. It was wrong of me, I know, but I hoped that he might do this.

‘Goodness, Wilmet, do you know what time it is? Nearly two O’clock! And a clergy retreat coming tomorrow. I shall never be up in time to get things ready.’

We then went to bed, but I lay awake for rather a long time, either because of the coffee or my confused thoughts. It seemed as if life had been going on around me without my knowing it, in the disconcerting way that it sometimes does, like the traffic swirling past when one is standing on an island in the middle of the road. Sybil and Professor Root, Piers and Keith, Marius and Mary—the names
did
sound odd together—all doing things without, as it were, consulting me. And now Rodney and I would have to set up house on our own, a curious and rather disconcerting thought. I tried to remember our time in Italy, but all that came into my mind were curious irrelevant little pictures—a dish of tangerines with the leaves still on them; the immovable shape of Rodney’s driver as we held hands in the back of some strange army vehicle on our way home from a dance; the dark secret face of a Neapolitan boy who used to come to stoke the fire in winter; then Keith’s face peering through leaves, one hand resting lightly on the low bough of an orange tree; and a comfortable looking woman, using number 11 needles and commencing by casting on 64 stitches …

I was woken by bright sunshine and Mary standing by my bed with a cup of tea.

‘There’s quite a lot to do,’ she said, ‘though they won’t actually be arriving till the late afternoon.’

‘Arriving?’ Why, the priests for the retreat, of course. I was fully awake now and anxious to help, though it wasn’t at all like preparing for ordinary guests. The small cell-like rooms needed no last minute feminine touches, the single rose in a glass on the dressing table or the glossy magazine by the bed. They didn’t even, I imagined, need to be particularly clean. The coarse sheets and rough greyish blankets like the skins of donkeys
were
doubtless clean, but presumably the priests would not have noticed or complained had they not been.

When we had done all we could there seemed to be a little time to sit on the lawn in deckchairs, but Mary did not feel that she ought to be discovered thus and was ready to spring up as soon as the first sign of a clergyman should appear in the drive.

‘Most of them will be here for tea, I imagine, won’t they?’ I asked. My own train back to London left just after five o’clock and I was to have my tea alone and secretly before going.

‘Yes, I think that will be a good start for them, a cup of tea,’ said Mary.