Excellent Women (11 page)

I
DRESSED
rather carefully in preparation for my lunch with Mrs. Gray and my appearance called forth comments from Mrs. Bonner, who assumed that I was going to have lunch with ‘that good-looking man you spoke to after one of the Lent services’. She was disappointed when I was honest enough to admit that my companion was to be nobody more exciting than another woman.

‘I did hope it was that young man,’ she said. ‘I took a liking to him—what I saw, that is.’

‘Oh, he’s not at all the kind of person I like,’ I said quickly. ‘And he doesn’t like me either, which does make a difference, you know.’

Mrs. Bonner nodded mysteriously over her card-index. She was a great reader of fiction and I could imagine what she was thinking.

I was punctual at the restaurant and I had been waiting nearly ten minutes before Mrs. Gray arrived.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she smiled, and I heard myself murmuring politely that I had arrived too early, as if it were really my fault that she was late.

‘Where do you usually have lunch?’ she asked. ‘Or perhaps you go home to lunch as you only work in the mornings?’

‘Yes, I do sometimes—otherwise I go to Lyons or somewhere like that.’

‘Oh, dear, Lyons—I don’t think I could!
Far
too many people.’ She shuddered and began looking at the menu. ‘I think we should like a drink, don’t you? Shall we have some sherry?’

We drank our sherry and made rather stilted conversation about parish matters. When the food came Mrs. Gray ate very little, pushing it round her plate with her fork and then leaving it, which made me feel brutish, for I was hungry and had eaten everything.

‘I’m like the young ladies in
Crome Yellow,’
she said, ‘although it isn’t so easy nowadays to go home and eat an enormous meal secretly. What was it they had? A huge ham, I know, but I don’t remember the other things.’

I did not really know what she was talking about and could only ask if she would like to order something else.

‘Oh, no, I’m afraid I have a very small appetite naturally. And then things haven’t been too easy, you know.’ She looked at me with a penetrating gaze that seemed to invite confidences.

It made me feel stiff and awkward as if I wanted to withdraw into my shell. But I felt that I had to say something, though I could produce nothing better than ‘No, I suppose they haven’t.’

At that moment the waiter came with some fruit salad.

‘I don’t suppose you have had an altogether easy life, either,’ Mrs. Gray continued.

‘Oh, well,’ I found myself saying in a brisk robust tone, ‘who has, if it comes to that?’ It began to seem a little absurd, two women in their early thirties, eating a good meal on a fine summer day and discussing the easiness or otherwise of their lives.

‘I haven’t been married, so perhaps that’s one source of happiness or unhappiness removed straight away.’

Mrs. Gray smiled. ‘Ah, yes, it isn’t always an unmixed blessing.’

‘One sees so many broken marriages,’ I began and then had to be honest with myself and add up the number of which I had a personal knowledge. I could not think of a single one, unless I counted the Napiers’ rather unstable arrangement, and I hoped that Mrs. Gray would not take me up on the point.

‘Yes, I suppose you would see a good deal of that sort of thing in your work,’ she agreed.

‘In my work?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘But I work for the Care of Aged Gentlewomen.’

‘Oh’, she smiled, ‘I had an idea it was fallen women or something like that, though I suppose even a gentlewoman can fall. But now I come to think of it, Julian did tell me where you worked.’

She said the name casually but it was obvious that she had been waiting to bring it into the conversation. I imagined them talking about me and wondered what they had said.

‘Julian has asked me to marry him,’ she went on quickly. ‘I wanted you to be the first to know.’

‘Oh, but I think I
did
know, I mean I guessed,’ I said rather quickly and brightly. ‘I’m so glad.’

‘You’re glad? Oh, what a relief!’ She laughed and lit another cigarette.

‘Well, it seems a very good thing for both of you and I wish you every happiness,’ I mumbled, not feeling capable of explaining any further a gladness I did not really feel.

‘That really is sweet of you. I was so afraid … oh, but I know you’re not that kind of person.’

‘What were you afraid of?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that you’d disapprove… .’

‘A clergyman’s widow?’ I smiled. ‘How could I possibly disapprove?’

She smiled too. It seemed wrong that we should be smiling about her being a clergyman’s widow.

‘You and Julian will be admirably suited to each other,’ I said more seriously.

‘I think you’re marvellous,’ she said. ‘And you really don’t mind?’

‘Mind?’ I said, laughing, but then I stopped laughing because I suddenly realised what it was that she was trying to say. She was trying to tell me how glad and relieved she was that I didn’t mind too much when I must surely have wanted to marry Julian myself.

‘Oh, no, of course I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘We have always been good friends, but there’s never been any question of anything else, anything more than friendship.’

‘Julian thought perhaps…’ She hesitated.

‘He thought that I loved him?’ I exclaimed, in rather too loud a voice, I am afraid, for I noticed a woman at a nearby table making an amused comment to her companion. ‘But what made him think that?’

‘Oh, well, I suppose there would have been nothing extraordinary in it if you had,’ said Mrs. Gray slightly on the defensive.

‘You mean it would be quite the usual thing? Yes, I suppose it might very well have been.’

How stupid I had been not to see it like that, for it had not occurred to me that anyone might think I was in love with Julian. But there it was, the old obvious situation, presentable unmarried clergyman and woman interested in good works—had everyone seen it like that? Julian himself? Winifred? Sister Blatt? Mr. Mallett and Mr. Conybeare? Of course, I thought, trying to be completely honest with myself, there had been a time when I first met him when I had wondered whether there might ever be anything between us, but I had so soon realised that it was impossible that I had never given it another thought.

‘Oh, I hope you weren’t worrying about that,’ I said in a hearty sort of way to cover my confusion.

‘No, not
worrying
exactly. I’m afraid people in love are rather selfish and perhaps don’t consider other people’s feelings as much as they ought.’

Certainly not when they fall in love with other people’s husbands and wives,’ I said.

Mrs. Gray laughed. ‘There you are,’ she said, ‘one
does
see these broken marriages.’

‘Winifred will be delighted at your news,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes, dear Winifred,’ Mrs. Gray sighed. ‘There’s a bit of a problem there.

‘A problem? How?’

‘Well, where is she going to live when we’re married, poor soul?’

‘Oh, I’m sure Julian would want her to stay at the vicarage. They are devoted to each other. She could have the flat you’ve been living in,’ I suggested, becoming practical.

‘Poor dear, she
is
rather irritating, though. But I know you’re very fond of her.’

Fond of her? Yes, of course I was, but I could see only too well that she might be a very irritating person to live with.

‘That’s why I was wondering,’ Mrs. Gray began and then hesitated. ‘No, perhaps I couldn’t ask it, really.’

‘You mean you think that she might live with me?’ I blurted out.

‘Yes, don’t you think it would be a splendid idea? You get on well, and she’s so fond of you. Besides, you haven’t any other ties, have you?’

The room seemed suddenly very hot and I saw Mrs. Gray’s face rather too close to mine, her eyes wide open and penetrating, her teeth small and pointed, her skin a smooth apricot colour.

‘I don’t think I could do that,’ I said, gathering up my bag and gloves, for I felt trapped and longed to get away.

‘Oh, do think about it, Mildred. There’s a dear. I know you are one.’

‘No, I’m not,’ I said ungraciously, for nobody really likes to be called a dear. There is something so very faint and dull about it.

The waiter was hovering near us with a bill, which Mrs. Gray picked up quickly from the table. I fumbled in my purse and handed her some silver, but she closed my hand firmly on it and I was forced to put it back.

‘The very least I can do is to pay for your lunch,’ she said.

‘Does Julian know this? About Winifred, I mean?’ I asked.

‘Heavens, no. I think it’s much better to keep men in the dark about one’s plans, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I said uncertainly, feeling myself at a disadvantage in never having been in the position to keep a man in the dark about anything.

‘I’m sure you and Winifred would get on
frightfully
well together,’ said Mrs. Gray persuasively.

‘She could live with Father Greatorex,’ I suggested frivolously.

‘Poor dears; I can just imagine them together. I wonder if there
could
be anything in that, or would it be quite impossible? What do women
do
if they don’t marry,’ she mused, as if she had no idea what it could be, having been married once herself and being about to marry again.

‘Oh, they stay at home with an aged parent and do the flowers, or they used to, but now perhaps they have jobs and careers and live in bed-sitting-rooms or hostels. And then of course they become indispensable in the parish and some of them even go into religious communities.’

‘Oh, dear, you make it sound rather dreary.’ Mrs. Gray looked almost guilty. ‘I suppose you have to get back to your work now?’ she suggested, as if there were some connection, as indeed there may well have been, between me and dreariness.

‘Yes,’ I lied, ‘I have to go back there for a while. Thank you very much for my lunch.’

‘Oh, it was a pleasure. We must do it again some time.’

I walked away in the direction of my office and, when I had seen Mrs. Gray get on to a bus, went into a shop. I had a feeling that I must escape and longed to be lost in a crowd of busy women shopping, which was why I followed blindly the crowd that surged in through the swinging doors of a large store. Some were hurrying, making for this or that department or counter, but others like myself seemed bewildered and aimless, pushed and buffeted as we stood not knowing which way to turn.

I strolled through a grove of dress materials and found myself at a counter piled with jars of face-cream and lipsticks. I suddenly remembered Allegra Gray’s smooth apricot-coloured face rather too close to mine and wondered what it was that she used to get such a striking effect. There was a mirror on the counter and I caught sight of my own face, colourless and worried-looking, the eyes large and rather frightened, the lips too pale. I did not feel that I could ever acquire a smooth apricot complexion but I could at least buy a new lipstick, I thought, consulting the shade-card. The colours had such peculiar names but at last I chose one that seemed right and began to turn over a pile of lipsticks in a bowl in an effort to find it. But the colour I had chosen was either very elusive or not there at all, and the girl behind the counter, who had been watching my scrabblings in a disinterested way, said at last, ‘What shade was it you wanted, dear?’

I was a little annoyed at being called ‘dear’, though it was perhaps more friendly than ‘madam’, suggesting as it did that I lacked the years and poise to merit the more dignified title.

‘It’s called Hawaiian Fire,’ I mumbled, feeling rather foolish, for it had not occurred to me that I should have to say it out loud.

‘Oh, Hawaiian Fire. It’s rather an orange red, dear,’ she said doubtfully, scrutinising my face. ‘I shouldn’t have thought it was quite your colour. Still, I think I’ve got one here.’ She took a box from behind the counter and began to look in it.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter really,’ I said quickly. ‘Perhaps another colour would be better. What would you recommend?’

‘Well, dear, I don’t know, really.’ She looked at me blankly, as if no shade could really do anything for me. ‘Jungle Red is very popular—or Sea Coral, that’s a pretty shade, quite pale, you know.’

‘Thank you, but I think I will have Hawaiian Fire,’ I said obstinately, savouring the ludicrous words and the full depths of my shame.

I hurried away and found myself on an escalator. Hawaiian Fire, indeed! Nothing more unsuitable could possibly be imagined. I began to smile and only just stopped myself from laughing out loud by suddenly remembering Mrs. Gray and the engagement and the worry about poor Winifred. This made me proceed very soberly, floor by floor, stepping on and off the escalators until I reached the top floor where the Ladies’ Room was.

Inside it was a sobering sight indeed and one to put us all in mind of the futility of material things and of our own mortality.
All flesh is but as grass…
I thought, watching the women working at their faces with savage concentration, opening their mouths wide, biting and licking their lips, stabbing at their noses and chins with powder-puffs. Some, who had abandoned the struggle to keep up, sat in chairs, their bodies slumped down, their hands resting on their parcels. One woman lay on a couch, her hat and shoes off, her eyes closed. I tiptoed past her with my penny in my hand.

Later I went into the restaurant to have tea, where the women, with an occasional man looking strangely out of place, seemed braced up, their faces newly done, their spirits revived by tea. Many had the satisfaction of having done a good day’s shopping and would have something to gloat over when they got home. I had only my Hawaiian Fire and something not very interesting for supper.

O
N
my way home, I was just passing the vicarage when Julian Malory came out.

‘Congratulations,’ I said, ‘I’ve just heard your news.’

‘Thank you, Mildred, I wanted you to be among the first to know.’

I felt that the ‘among’ spoilt it a little and imagined a crowd of us, all excellent women connected with the church, hearing the news.

‘I had lunch with Mrs. Gray,’ I explained.

‘Ah, yes.’ He paused and then said, ‘I thought it would be better, easier, more suitable, that is, if you heard the news from her.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘Well, for one thing I thought it would be nice if you got to know each other better, became friends, you know.’

‘Yes, men do seem to like the women they know to become friends,’ I remarked, but then it occurred to me that of course it is usually their old and new loves whom they wish to force into friendship. I even remembered Bernard Hatherley, the lay-reader bank clerk, saying about the girl he had met on holiday in Torquay, ‘You would like her so much—I hope you’ll become friends.’ But as I had been at home in my village and she had been in Torquay the acquaintance had never prospered.

Well, yes, naturally one likes everybody one is fond of to like each other,’ said Julian rather feebly.

‘Yes, of course,’ I agreed, feeling that I could hardly do otherwise. ‘I expect Winifred is very pleased, isn’t she?’

‘Oh, yes, although she did once say that she hoped—I wonder if I can say what she hoped?’ Julian looked embarrassed, as if he had said more than he meant to.

‘You mean …’ I did not quite like to go any further.

‘Ah, Mildred, you understand. Dear Mildred, it would have been a fine thing if it could have been.’

I pondered on the obscurity of this sentence and gazed into my basket, which contained a packet of soap powder, a piece of cod, a pound of peas, a small wholemeal loaf and the Hawaiian Fire lipstick.

‘It’s so splendid of you to understand like this. I know it must have been a shock to you, though I dare say you weren’t entirely unprepared. Still, it must have been a shock, a blow almost, I might say,’ he laboured on, heavy and humourless, not at all like his usual self. Did love always make men like this? I wondered.

‘I was never in love with you, if that’s what you mean, I said, thinking it was time to be blunt. ‘I never expected that you would marry me.’

‘Dear Mildred,’ he smiled, ‘you are not the kind of person to expect things as your right even though they may be.

The bell began to ring for Evensong. I saw Miss Enders and Miss Statham hurrying into church.

‘I’m sure you’ll be very happy,’ I said, my consciousness of the urgent bell and hurrying figures making me feel that the conversation should come to an end.

But Julian did not appear to be in any hurry to go.

‘Thank you, Mildred, it means a great deal to me, your good wishes, I should say. Allegra is a very sweet person and she has had a hard life.’;

I murmured that yes, I supposed she had.

‘The fatherless and widow,’ said Julian in what seemed a rather fatuous way.

‘Is she fatherless too?’

‘Yes, she is an orphan,’ he said solemnly.

‘Well, of course, a lot of people over thirty are orphans. I am myself,’ I said briskly. ‘In fact I was an orphan in my twenties. But I
hope
I shan’t ever be a widow. I’d better hurry up if I’m going to be even that.’

‘And I had better hurry into Evensong,’ said Julian, for the bell had now stopped. ‘Are you coming or do you feel it would upset you?’

‘Upset me?’ I saw that it was no use trying to convince Julian that I was not heartbroken at the news of his engagement. ‘No, I don’t think it will upset me.’ Perhaps the consciousness that I was already an orphan and not likely to be a widow was enough cause for melancholy, I thought, as I put my basket down on the pew beside me.

We were the usual little weekday congregation, though Mrs. Gray was not with us. It seemed almost as if the service might be a kind of consolation for the rejected ones, although I did not imagine that Miss Enders or Miss Statham or Sister Blatt had ever been in the running.

After the service I went home and cooked my fish. Cod seemed a suitable dish for a rejected one and I ate it humbly without any kind of sauce or relish. I began trying to imagine what it would have been like if Julian had wanted to marry me and was absorbed in these speculations when there was a knock at the door and Rocky came in.

‘I’m all alone,’ he said, ‘and hoping that you will offer me some coffee.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘do come in and talk to me.’

‘Helena has gone to a memorial service, or rather, the equivalent of one.’

‘Can there be such a thing?’

‘I gather so. You remember the President of the Learned Society where they read their paper? Well, he died suddenly last week and this is in commemoration of him.’

‘Oh, dear, how sad.’ I was really sorry to think that the benevolent-looking old man with crumbs in his beard was no more.

‘He dropped down dead in the library—the kind of way everybody says they’d like to go.’

‘But so suddenly, with no time for amendment of life …’ I said. ‘What form will the service take?’

‘Oh, I gather it’s a sort of solemn meeting. Fellow anthropologists and others will read out tributes to him. One feels that they ought to sing Rationalist hymns as he was so strong in the movement.’

‘But do they have hymns?’

‘I think they may very well have done in the early days. Most of them had a conventional Victorian childhood and probably felt the need for something to replace the Sunday services they were rejecting.’

‘Poor old man,’ I murmured. And of course the old lady knitting and dozing in the basket chair would now be a widow, I thought, which led me on to remember Julian’s engagement. ‘I’ve heard a piece of news today,’ I said. ‘Julian Malory is to marry Mrs. Gray.’

‘The fascinating widow whose hand he was holding in the park?’ asked Rocky. ‘Poor Mildred, this is a sad day for you.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous!’ I said indignantly. ‘I didn’t care for him at all in that way. I never expected that he would marry me.’

‘But you may have hoped?’ said Rocky looking at me. ‘It would be a very natural thing, after all, and I should think you would make him a much better wife than that widow.’

‘She is a clergyman’s widow,’ I reminded him.

‘Oh, then she is used to loving and losing clergymen,’ said Rocky lightly.

‘Widows always do marry again,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘or they very often do. It must be strange to replace somebody like that, though I suppose one doesn’t actually replace them, I mean, not in the way you buy a new teapot when the old one is broken.

‘No, my dear, hardly in that way.’

It must be a different kind of love, neither weaker nor stronger than the first, perhaps not to be compared at all.’

Mildred, the coffee has loosened your tongue,’ said Rocky. ‘I’ve never heard you talk so profoundly. But surely you’ve been in love more than once, haven’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, conscious of my lack of experience and ashamed to bring out the feeble memory of Bernard Hatherley reading the Lessons at Evensong and myself hurrying past his lodgings in the twilight.

‘Once you get into the habit of falling in love you will find that it happens quite often and means less and less,’ said Rocky lightly. He went over to my bookcase and took out a volume of Matthew Arnold which had belonged to my father.

‘Yes! In the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live
ALONE
,’

he read. ‘How I hate his habit of emphasing words with italics! Anyway, there it is.’

‘What a sad poem,’ I said. ‘I don’t know it.’

‘Oh, there’s a lot more.’

‘Father used to be so fond of Matthew Arnold,’ I said, rather hoping that Rocky would not read aloud any more; I found it embarrassing, not quite knowing where to look, ‘and I love
Thyrsis
and
The Scholar Gipsy.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Rocky shut the book and flung it down on the floor. ‘Long tramps over the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills. How one longs for that world. I can imagine your father striding along with a friend. But I don’t think they’d have taken much notice of the poem I read to you. Healthy undergraduates would have no time for such morbid nonsense.’

‘No, perhaps not. And then, of course, my father was a theological student.’

Rocky sighed and began pacing round the room. I suppose it was a compliment to me that he made no effort to hide his moods, but I did not really know how to deal with him.

‘The other day I met somebody who knew you,’ I said brightly, ‘or rather who had known you in Italy. She was a Wren officer.’

‘What was her name?’ he asked with a faint show of interest.

‘Oh, I don’t know. She was tall with greyish eyes and brown hair, not pretty but quite a pleasant face.’

‘Oh, Mildred,’ he looked at me seriously, ‘there were so
many.
I couldn’t possibly recognise her from that description—“not pretty but quite a pleasant face”—most Englishwomen look like that, you know.’

I realised that it was probably how I looked myself and was sad to think that after a year or two he might not remember me either.

‘I think she rather liked you,’ I said tentatively. ‘She may even have been a little in love with you.’

‘But, Mildred, there again,’ said Rocky gently, ‘there were so
many.
I know I can be honest with you.’

‘Poor things,’ I said lightly. ‘Did you throw them any scraps of comfort? They may have been unhappy.’

‘Oh, I’m sure they were,’ he said earnestly, ‘but that was hardly my fault. I was nice to them at the Admiral’s cocktail parties, naturally, that was part of my duty. I’m afraid women take their pleasures very sadly. Few of them know how to run light-hearted flirtations—the nice ones, that is. They cling on to these little bits of romance that may have happened years ago.
Semper Fidelis,
you know.’

I burst out laughing. ‘Why, that’s our old school motto! Dora and I used to have it embroidered on our blazers.’

‘How charming! But of course it has a kind of school flavour about it. Or it might be the title of a Victorian painting of a huge dog of the Landseer variety. But it’s very suitable for a girls school when you consider how faithful nice women tend to be. I can just see you all, running out on to the asphalt playground at break after hot milk or cocoa in the winter or lemonade in the summer.

‘We didn’t have an asphalt playground. Still, I suppose
Semper Fidelis
would remind one of that rather than of a past love,’ I said. ‘I suppose it was too much to expect that you would remember that girl.’

The conversation seemed to come to an end here. Rocky stood by the door and thanked me for the coffee. ‘And your company too,’ he added. ‘You really must come and see our cottage now that the weather is nice. It needs a woman’s hand there and Helena isn’t really interested. Perhaps I should never have married her.’

I stood awkwardly, not knowing what to say, I, who had always prided myself on being able to make suitable conversation on all occasions. Somehow no platitude came, the moment passed and Rocky went down to his own flat.