Excellent Women (10 page)

B
Y
the time Saturday came things seemed better. It was a sunny day and Dora and I were to go to our old school for the dedication of the window in memory of Miss Ridout, who had been headmistress in our time. In the train we read the school magazine, taking a secret pleasure in belittling those of the Old Girls who had done well and rejoicing over those who had failed to fulfil their early promise.

‘“Evelyn Brandon is still teaching Classics at St. Mark’s, Felixstowe,”’ Dora read in a satisfied tone. ‘And she was so
brilliant.
All those prizes she won at Girton—everyone thought she would go far.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘and yet in a sense we all go far, don’t we? I mean far from those days when we were considered brilliant or otherwise.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you and I have altered much.’

‘Well, we haven’t got shingled hair and waists round the behind still. Isn’t it depressing, really, to think that we remember those fashions? It seems very unromanticto have been young then.’

‘But, Mildred, we were only twelve or thirteen then. Look, here’s a bit about you—“M. Lathbury is still working part-time at the Society for the Care of Aged Gentlewomen”,’ she read. ‘That doesn’t sound much better than Evelyn Brandon.’

‘Yes, of course, that is what I do,’ I agreed, but somehow it seemed so inadequate; it described such a very little part of my life. ‘Of course,’ I went on, ‘some people do write more details about themselves, don’t they, so that one gets more of a picture of their lives.’

‘Oh, yes. Here’s a bit about Maisie Winterbotham: do you remember her, red hair and glasses? She married a missionary or something. “M. Arrowsmith (Winterbotham) writes from Calabar, Nigeria, that her husband is opening a new mission station on the Imo River. ‘My third child (Jeremy Paul) was born out here, so that what with Christopher and Fiona still at the toddling stage I really have my hands full. Luckily I have a wonderful African nurse for them. I ran into Miss Caunce in Lagos, but came on here immediately.’ ” ‘ Dora giggled. ‘The Caunce would be enough to make anyone leave a place immediately. Oh, look, we’re nearly there!’

My heart sank as I recognised familiar landmarks. I could almost imagine myself a schoolgirl again, arriving at the station on a wet September evening for the autumn term and smelling the antiseptic smell of the newly scrubbed cloakrooms.

‘Oh, look, there’s Helen Eggleton and Mavis Bush … ‘

Dora was leaning out of the window as the train drew into the platform. It seemed as if most of the Old Girls had chosen the same train for there was quite a crowd of us getting out of it. Now the printed news in the magazine seemed to come alive. ‘M. Bush is doing Moral Welfare work in Pimlico… . H. B. Eggleton is senior Domestic Science mistress at St. Monica’s, Herne Hill….’ Now one saw them and they were very much as one had remembered them. There were older women too, some of whom might have been grandmothers, and younger ones whose rather too smart clothes indicated that they had left school only very recently. The staff were comfortingly the same. Miss Lightfoot, Miss Gregg, Miss Davis … it seemed that they had not aged at all, but there were one or two new mistresses, younger than we were, mere girls.

Tea was served in the hall before the dedication service and there was an opportunity for conversation, or rather exchange of news, for it could hardly be called conversation, consisting as it did of phrases like ‘What’s so-and-so doing now? Are you still teaching? Fancy old Hurst getting married!’

After tea we moved rather soberly in the direction of the chapel to inspect the new window before the ceremony. The chapel had been built in 1925 and was in a rather cold modern style with white walls, uncomfortable light oak chairs and rather a lot of saxe blue in carpets and hangings. Here Dora and I had been confirmed at the age of fifteen and here we had knelt, uncomfortably, expecting something that never quite came. Certainly I myself had no very inspiring memories of school religion. Only agonised gigglings over certain lines in hymns and psalms and later a watchfulness to reprove those same gigglings in the younger girls. I supposed that Dora and I, who had both been fat as schoolgirls, could now stand side by side singing

Frail children of dust,
And feeble as frail,

without a tremor or the ghost of a smile. It was rather sad, really.

The window to be dedicated was by a modern stained-glass artist and in keeping with the rest of the chapel. It showed the figure of a saint with the name
OLIVE
STURGIS
RIDOUT
in Gothic lettering, her dates and a Latin inscription. We stood in front of it in a reverent silence, which was unbroken save for an occasional admiring comment. After a few minutes we took our places for the service which was to be conducted by the school chaplain. In our day he had been a tall good-looking middle-aged man, a canon of the town’s cathedral, with whom all of us were more or less secretly or openly in love. Then his visits had been eagerly looked forward to, but now, perhaps wisely, things appeared to be different, for the chaplain was a fussy little man, bald and wearing pince-nez. He conducted a suitable form of service and gave a short address, extolling the virtues of Miss Ridout, the Sturge, we had called her, after her middle name. Suddenly I was moved and felt the tears pricking at the back of my eyes. The Sturge had been a good woman and very kind to me; she had had a keen sense of the ridiculous too, which I had not appreciated until I had grown up. I imagined her now smiling down on us from some kind of Heaven, perhaps a little sardonically.

Going back in the train Dora and I were both in an elegiac mood and started reminiscing. We no longer belittled our successful contemporaries or rejoiced over our unsuccessful ones. For after all, what had
we
done? We had not made particularly brilliant careers for ourselves, and, most important of all, we had neither of us married. That was really it. It was the ring on the left hand that people at the Old Girls’ Reunion looked for. Often, in fact nearly always, it was an uninteresting ring, sometimes no more than the plain gold band or the very smallest and dimmest of diamonds. Perhaps the husband was also of this variety, but as he was not seen at this female gathering he could only be imagined, and somehow I do not think we ever imagined the husbands to be quite so uninteresting as they probably were.

‘Fancy anyone marrying old Hurst!’ said Dora, as if reading my thoughts. ‘I wonder what on earth her husband can be like?’

‘How can we ever know? A little dim man going bald but very kind and good-tempered? An elderly clergyman, perhaps a widower? Or even somebody distinguished and handsome? It might be any of those.’

We fell into a melancholy silence. It was dark now and the train went slowly. Every time I looked out of the window we seemed to be passing a churchyard.

Within the churchyard side by side
Are many long low graves,

I thought, but once we passed a large cemetery and there was something less comfortable about the acres of tombstones, relieved occasionally by a white marble figure whose outstretched arms or wings looked almost menacing in the dim light.

I turned the pages of the school magazine and found something sympathetic to my mood, an obituary notice of an Old Girl who had been at the school from 1896 to 1901. Dorothy Gertrude Pybus, ‘D.G. or Pye to her friends’, with her eager face, her love of practical jokes, her splendid work at St. Crispin’s, and then the poem of an embarrassing badness, a confused thing about mists and mountain tops rather in the style of ‘Excelsior’ … all these details and obscure personal references moved me deeply so that I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. Dora and I were obviously not old enough yet, but there might come a time when one of us might write an obituary for the other, though I hoped that neither of us would be rash enough to attempt a poem.

There was a young woman in the carriage with us, but we did not realise she had come from the school until Dora drifted into conversation with her. She told us that she had left school at the beginning of the war and had afterwards served in the Wrens.

‘I was awfully lucky and got sent to Italy,’ she babbled. ‘Marvellous luck—I was there over a year.’

‘Did you know Rockingham Napier?’ I asked idly. ‘He was in an Admiral’s villa somewhere, I believe.’

‘Did I know Rocky—the most glamorous Flags in the Med.? Why,
everyone
knew him!’

I looked at her with a new interest. She had not seemed to be the kind of person who could have had any interesting experiences, one wouldn’t have given her a second glance, but now I saw her on the terrace of the Admiral’s villa in that little group.

‘You had white uniforms,’ I ventured.

‘Oh, goodness, yes! And they never fitted properly until they had shrunk with washing or been altered. Mine were like sacks on me at first. We were invited to cocktails at the Admiral’s villa the day after we arrived and Rocky Napier was awfully kind to us. You see, it was his job to arrange the Admiral’s social life and be nice to people.’

‘I’m sure he did it well,’ I murmured.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said gaily. ‘People used to fall in love with him but it only lasted about a month or two, usually. After that one saw what a shallow kind of person he really was. He used to take people up for a week or two and then drop them. We Wren officers used to call ourselves the Playthings—sometimes we were taken off our shelf and dusted and looked at, but then we were always put back again. Of course, he had an Italian girl friend, so you see …’

‘Yes, of course …’ An Italian girl friend, yes, that was to be expected. I wondered if Helena had known or minded, and then decided that it was probably naive of me to look at it like that.

‘Men are very strange,’ said Dora complacently. ‘You never know what they’ll be up to.’

‘No,’ I agreed, for that seemed a comfortable way of putting it. ‘Of course all men aren’t like that,’ said the Wren officer. ‘There were some very nice Army officers out there too.’

‘And didn’t they have Italian girl friends?’

‘Oh, no. They used to show you photographs of their wives and children.’

I looked at her suspiciously but she appeared to be quite serious.

The train drew into the station and we prepared to get out.

‘By the way, I hope Rocky Napier isn’t a bosom friend of yours or a relation? Perhaps I ought not to have said what I did.’

‘Oh, not a bosom friend,’ I said. ‘He and his wife live in the same house as I do and he always seems very pleasant.’ After all, what did it matter what this depressing woman thought of him? She had only seen him in falsely glamorous surroundings.

The train drew up at a platform and we went our separate ways.

‘Well, there you are,’ said Dora in a satisfied tone. ‘I thought as much. I wasn’t a bit surprised to hear that about him. We’ve had a lucky escape, if you ask me.’

A lucky escape? I thought sadly. But would we have escaped, any of us, if we had been given the opportunity to do otherwise?

‘Perhaps it’s better to be unhappy than not to feel anything at all,’ I said.

‘Oh Love they wrong thee much
That say thy sweet is bitter…’

Dora looked at me in astonishment. ‘I think I’d just like to go into the Ladies,’ she said, ‘before we get the bus home.’

I followed her meekly although I did not really want to go myself. It was a sobering kind of place to be in and a glance at my face in the dusty ill-lit mirror was enough to discourage anybody’s romantic thoughts.

T
HE
next few weeks passed uneventfully. Rocky was as charming as ever, but I was careful to say to myself ‘Italian girl friend’ or ‘rather a shallow sort of person’ whenever I saw him, so that I might stop myself from thinking too well of him. He and Helena had managed to acquire some kind of a country cottage and were now spending quite a lot of time there. He told me that he had started to paint again but I could not make anything of the specimens of his work that he showed me. I did not see Everard Bone at all and soon forgot all about him and my efforts to like him. Dora went back to school with her brown woollen dress and I settled down to my gentlewomen in the mornings and the routine of home and church for the rest of the day. It seemed that the spring had unsettled us all but now that summer had come we were our more sober selves again. I did not see Julian Malory and Allegra Gray holding hands anywhere, although it was obvious that she was very friendly with both Julian and Winifred, and Winifred continued to be enthusiastic about her.

‘Allegra’s going to help me about my summer clothes,’ she said. ‘She has such good taste. Don’t you think so, Mildred?’

I agreed that she always looked very nice.

Yes, and she’s even smartening Julian up. Haven’t you noticed? She’ll probably start on Father Greatorex next.’

‘Are you all getting on well together in the house?’ I asked.

You don’t find that you have lost any of your independence having somebody living above you?’

‘Oh, no, it’s really like having Allegra living with us. We’re in and out of each other’s rooms all the time.’

It was a Saturday morning and we had assembled in the choir vestry before decorating the church for Whit-Sunday. It was the usual gathering, Winifred, Sister Blatt, Miss Enders, Miss Statham and one or two others. The only man present, apart from the clergy, was Jim Storry, a feeble-minded youth who made himself useful in harmless little ways and would sometimes arrange the wire frames on the window-sills for us or fill jam jars with water.

The vestry was a gloomy untidy place, containing two rows of chain, a grand piano and a cupboard full of discarded copies of
Hymns Ancient and Modern
—we used the
English Hymnal,
of course—vases, bowls and brasses in need of cleaning.

‘Well, well, here we all are,’ said Julian in a rather more clerical tone than usual. ‘It’s very good of you all to come along and help and I’m especially grateful to all those who have brought flowers. Lady Farmer,’ he mentioned the only titled member remaining in our congregation, ‘has most kindly sent these magnificent lilies from her country home.’

There was a pause.

‘Is he going to say a prayer?’ whispered Sister Blatt to me, and as nobody broke the silence I bent my head suitably and waited. But the words Julian spoke were not a prayer but a gay greeting to Allegra Gray, who came in through the door at that moment.

‘Ah, here you are, now we can start.’

‘Well, really, were we just waiting for
her
?’ mumbled Sister Blatt. ‘We’ve been decorating for years—long before Mrs. Gray came.’

‘Well, she is a newcomer, perhaps Father Malory thought it more polite to wait for her. I dare say he will help her.’

‘Father Malory help with the decorating! Those men never do anything. I expect they’ll slink off and have a cup of coffee once the work starts.’

We went into the church and began sorting out the flowers and deciding what should be used where. Winifred, as the vicar’s sister, had usurped the privilege of a wife and always did the altar, but I must confess that it was not always very well done. I had graduated from a very humble window that nobody ever noticed to helping Sister Blatt with the screen, and we began laboriously fixing old potted-meat jars into place with wires so that they could be filled with flowers. Lady Farmer’s lilies were of course to go on the altar. There was a good deal of chatter, and I was reminded of Trollope’s description of Lily Dale and Grace Crawley, who were both accustomed to churches and ‘almost as irreverent as though they were two curates’. For a time all went peacefully, each helper was busy with her particular corner, while Julian and Father Greatorex wandered round giving encouragement, though no practical help, to all.

‘That’s it!’ said Julian as I placed a cluster of pinks into one of the potted-meat jars. ‘Splendid!’

I did not feel that there was anything particularly splendid about what I was doing and Sister Blatt and I exchanged smiles as he passed on to Miss Statham and Miss Enders at the pulpit. It was at this point that I heard Winifred and Mrs. Gray, who were both doing the altar, having what sounded like an argument.

‘But we always have lilies on the altar,’ I heard Winifred say.

‘Oh, Winifred, why are you always so conventional!’ came Mrs. Gray’s voice rather sharply. ‘Just because you’ve always had lilies on the altar it doesn’t mean that you can never have anything else. I think these peonies and delphiniums would look much more striking. Then we can have the lilies in a great jar on the floor, at the side here. Don’t you think that would look splendid?’

I could not hear Winifred’s reply but it was obvious that the flowers were going to be arranged in the way Mrs. Gray had suggested.

‘Of course she’s been a vicar’s wife,’ said Sister Blatt, ‘so I suppose she’s used to ordering people about and having her own way with the decorations.’

‘I suppose it’s really a question of whether a vicar’s sister should take precedence over a vicar’s widow, I said. I don’t imagine that books of etiquette deal with such refinements. But I didn’t realise Mrs. Gray’s husband had been a vicar—I thought he was just a curate and then an Army chaplain.’

‘Oh, yes, he had a parish before he became a chaplain. They say he was a very good preacher, too, very slangy and modern. But I
have
heard,’ Sister Blatt lowered her voice as if about to tell me something disgraceful, ‘that he had
leanings…’

‘Leanings?’ I echoed.

‘Yes, the Oxford Group movement. He had tendencies that way, I believe.’

‘Oh, dear, then perhaps…’

‘You mean that it was just as well that he was taken, poor man?’ said Sister Blatt, finishing my sentence for me.

‘Do you think Mrs. Gray will marry again?’ I asked craftily, wondering if Sister Blatt had seen or heard anything.

‘Well, who, that’s the point, isn’t it? She’s an attractive woman, I suppose, but there aren’t really any eligible men round here, are there?’

‘What about the clergy?’

‘You mean Father Greatorex?’ asked Sister Blatt in astonishment.

‘He did give her a pot of jam.’

‘Well, well, that’s certainly news to me.’

‘And Father Malory gave her a hearth-rug,’ I went on, unable to stop myself.

‘Oh, that moth-eaten old thing out of his study? I shouldn’t think that means anything. Besides, Father Malory wouldn’t marry,’ said Sister Blatt positively.

‘I don’t know. We have no reason for thinking that he wouldn’t. Anyway, widows nearly always do marry again.’

‘Oh, they have the knack of catching a man. Having done it once I suppose they can do it again. I suppose there’s nothing in it when you know how.

‘Like mending a fuse,’ I suggested, though I had not previously taken this simple view of seeking and finding a life partner.

It was just as well that we were interrupted here by Miss Statham, asking if we had any greenery to spare, for our conversation had not been at all suitable for church and I really felt a little ashamed.

The church looked as beautiful as its Victorian interior would allow when we had finished decorating. The altar was striking and unusual and the lilies stood out very well, so that even if Lady Farmer had been present, which she was not, she would not have thought that they had been overlooked.

The next morning we were all singing
Hail Thee Festival Day,
as the procession wound round the church, and the smell of incense and flowers mingled pleasantly with the sunshine and birdsong outside. The Napiers were away and I was feeling peaceful and happy, as I had felt before they came and disturbed my life. As I walked out of the church Mrs. Gray came up to me. We were both wearing new hats for Whitsuntide, but I felt that hers with its trimming of fruit was smarter and more unusual than mine with its conventional posy of flowers.

‘Oh, dear, that
is
a difficult hymn,’ she said, ‘the one we had for the procession.’

‘But so beautiful,’ I said, ‘and well worth singing even if one falters a little in the verse part sometimes.’

I was wondering if you’d have lunch with me one day,’ said Mrs. Gray suddenly and surprisingly.

‘Lunch?’ I asked as if I had never heard of the meal, for I was wondering whatever could have induced her to want to have lunch with me. ‘Thank you, I should like to very much.’

‘Of course tomorrow is Whit-Monday, so perhaps we had better say Tuesday or Wednesday—if you’re free, that is?”

‘Oh, I’m always free,’ I said unguardedly. ‘Tuesday would suit me very well. Where shall I meet you?’

She named a restaurant in Soho which I had often seen from the outside. ‘Would that be convenient for you? At one-fifteen, say?’

I went back to my flat puzzling a little about this friendly overture. I was sure that she did not really like me, or at best thought of me as a dim sort of person whom one neither liked nor disliked, and I did not feel that I really cared for her very much either. Still, this was no doubt an interesting basis for social intercourse and we might even become friends. The people I was going to become friendly with! It made me laugh to think of them and I began playing with the idea of bringing them together. Everard Bone and Allegra Gray—perhaps they might marry? It would at least take her away from Julian, unless he was really determined to have her. Did the clergy display the same determination in these matters as other men? I wondered. I supposed that they did. And who would win if it came to a fight—Julian or Everard Bone?

On Whit-Monday I decided to tidy out some drawers and cupboards and possibly begin making a summer dress. I always did these tidyings on Easter and Whit-Mondays, but somehow not at any other time. It seemed to be connected with fine weather rather than the great Festivals of the Church—a pagan rather than a Christian rite.

I started with the pigeon-holes of my desk, but I did not get very far because I came upon a bundle of old letters and photographs which set me dreaming and remembering. My mother in a large hat, sitting under the cedar tree on the rectory lawn—I would be too young to remember the exact occasion but I knew the life, even to the shadowy curate who could be seen hovering in the background, his features a little blurred. Then there was one of Dora and me at Oxford, on the river with William and a friend. Presumably the friend, a willowy young man of a type that does not look as if it would marry, had been intended for Dora, as William was regarded as my property. But what had happened that afternoon? I could not even remember the occasion now.

I opened a drawer and came upon a large and solemn-looking studio portrait (in sepia) of the young man with whom I had once imagined myself to be in love, Bernard Hatherley, a bank clerk who occasionally read the Lessons and who used to be included with the curates in Sunday evening supper parties. The face reminded me a little of Everard Bone, except that the features were less striking. It seemed incredible to remember now how often at nineteen I had pressed my cheek against the cold glass, and I found the recollection embarrassing, turning from it quickly and from the remembrance of myself hurrying past his lodgings in the dusk, hoping yet fearing that I might see his face at the window, his hand drawing aside the lace curtain of his first floor sitting-room. ‘Loch Lomond’, Victoria Parade … I could still remember the name of the house and street. He had given me the photograph one Christmas and I had given him an anthology of poetry, which seemed an unfair exchange, my gift being so much more revealing than his. It had all seemed rather romantic, hearing him read the Lessons at Evensong, seeing him by chance in the town or through the open door of the bank, and then the long country walks on Saturday afternoons and the talks about life and about himself. I did not remember that we had ever talked about me. Eventually he had gone on a holiday to Torquay and things were not the same after that. I had suffered, or I supposed that I had, for he had not broken the news of another attachment very gracefully. Perhaps high-principled young men were more cruel in these matters because less experienced. I am sure that Rocky would have done it much more kindly.

I got up stiffly, for I had been crouching uncomfortably on the floor. I bundled the letters and photographs back and decided that it would be more profitable to make tea and cut out my dress. Tidying was over now until next Easter or Whitsuntide.