Authors: Barbara Pym
Excellent Women (19 page)
‘This friend with the flat in Kensington.’
‘Oh, I’m not sure. She is a civil servant of some kind, I believe. I think she has quite a good job.’
‘I suppose Mrs. Jubb knows what has happened?’
‘Oh, I imagine she will have gathered that something is wrong. I suppose everybody will know tomorrow, but these things can hardly be concealed.’
‘Are you going to put an announcement in
The Times?’
‘Oh, does one do that?’ asked Julian vaguely. ‘I should hardly have thought it was necessary.’
‘Well, it might save embarrassment, and there is nothing dishonourable about it, I mean nothing to be ashamed of,’ I said. ‘It is much better to have found out now rather than later.’
‘Yes, that’s what people say, isn’t it? I suppose one must bear the humiliation of having made a mistake. I obviously had no idea of her true character. You see, I thought her such a fine person.’
She was certainly very pretty, I thought, but I did not say it. I could not add to the burden of his humiliation by pointing out that he may have been taken in, like so many men before him, by a pretty face.
‘Of course it was mostly my fault,’ Julian went on. ‘I can see that now.’
‘Well, I imagine there are always faults on both sides, though one person may be more to blame than the other. But I’m sure you need not reproach yourself for anything you did.’
‘Thank you, Mildred,’ he said, with a faint smile. ‘You are very kind. I don’t know what we’d do without you.’
‘Perhaps clergymen shouldn’t marry,’ I said, realising that Julian was now a free man again and that we ladies of the parish need no longer think of ourselves as the rejected ones. But the thought did not, at that moment, arouse any very great enthusiasm in me. Perhaps I should feel differently in the morning when I was less tired.
‘Some seem to manage it very successfully,’ said Julian rather sadly.
I could think of nothing to say beyond suggesting that he could always have another try, but this did not seem to be quite the moment to say it.
‘I know the kind of person I should like to marry,’ he went on, ‘and I thought I had found her. But perhaps I looked too far and there might have been somebody nearer at hand.’
I stared into the electric fire and wished it had been a coal one, though the functional glowing bar was probably more suitable for this kind of an occasion.
‘I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,’ said Julian softly.
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
I continued to myself, feeling that the quotation had gone wrong somewhere and that it was not really quite what Julian had intended.
‘That’s Keats, isn’t it?’ I asked rather bluntly. ‘I always think
Nor What Soft Incense
would be a splendid title for a novel. Perhaps about a village where there were two rival churches, one High and one Low. I wonder if it has ever been used?’
Julian laughed and the slight embarrassment which I had felt between us was dispelled. He stood up and began to make preparations for going. He put on his speckled mackintosh, but seemed to forget about the ping-pong bats on the kitchen table, nor did I like to remind him. I went to bed immediately after he had gone, but I did not sleep very well. In my dreams Allegra Gray came to my house with a pile of suitcases, Rocky stood by the electric fire and asked me to marry him, but when I looked up I saw that it was Julian in his speckled mackintosh. I woke up feeling ashamed and disappointed and made a resolution that I would take Winifred her breakfast in bed.
T
HERE
was a kind of suppressed excitement about Mrs. Morris’s manner next morning and she went about her work smiling and almost nodding to herself, occasionally glancing at me and then at Winifred with an expression of triumph on her face. I could see that she was longing to get Winifred out of the way and when, after we had drunk our mid-morning cup of tea, Winifred asked if I would mind if she went over to the vicarage to see if Julian was all right, I was almost as eager as Mrs. Morris to see her go.
‘ Well,
Miss Lathbury,
now
what’ve you got to say?’
She stood with her back to the sink, her hands on her hips. I felt unequal to the note of challenge in her voice, as if I were about to perform before a critical audience and was certain that I should not fulfil expectations.
‘It’s all been so sudden,’ I said feebly. ‘I hardly know what to say.’
‘Ah, but that’s how it goes. Getting engaged and breaking it
off.
One minute it is and the next it isn’t.’
I had to agree that this was certainly so.
‘I hardly know what really happened,’ I said.
‘Oh, well, if that’s it,’ she said comfortably, ‘I’ve had it all from Mrs. Jubb. She heard every word.’
‘Oh, dear, I do hope she wasn’t listening at the door.’
‘Listening at the door? Goodness, you could hear it all over the house. Mrs. Gray, that is, not a word out of the vicar. Only a sort of muttering, she said. Oh, it was terrible!’
I was glad that Julian had preserved his dignity, as, indeed, I knew he would, even with the ping-pong bats in his hand.
‘She said she’d had quite enough being married to one clergyman, and something about them not knowing how to treat women and no wonder.’ Mrs. Morris paused, a little puzzled. ‘I don’t know what it was no wonder about, Mrs. Jubb didn’t say. And then she went on about Miss Winifred, oh, it was shocking the things she said.’
‘What kind of things?’ I found myself asking.
‘Oh, well, Mrs. Jubb didn’t say exactly or maybe she didn’t hear but she said it sounded something terrible. Not
bad
words, you know,’ said Mrs. Morris, lowering her tone and looking at me a little fearfully, ‘if you see what I mean. Not the kind of things with bad swear words, but dreadful things. And then Mrs. Gray ran screaming upstairs to her flat and
he
went out of the house very quickly. And then
she
came running down again with a case packed and went away somewhere, Mrs. Jubb didn’t seem to know where.’ Mrs. Morris looked at me hopefully to supply this missing information.
‘To a friend in Kensington, I believe,’ I said, thinking that although I shouldn’t be talking like this to Mrs. Morris, it was better that she should know some of the truth.
‘Kensington, well,’
said Mrs. Morris, sounding more Welsh than usual in her excitement. ‘And when Mr. Malory, Father Malory, I should say, got back he looked
terrible,
Mrs. Jubb said. I should think he’d been walking the streets, distracted,’ said Mrs. Morris, adding something of her own. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t been down by the river.’
I could hardly believe that sitting quietly by my electric fire could have given Julian such a terrible appearance, unless, of course, he had not gone straight home when he left me. ‘He was here with Miss Malory and me,’ I said.
‘Oh, he knew who to turn to,’ said Mrs. Morris, beaming. ‘Didn’t I tell you, Miss Lathbury? He knew who his true friend was, the poor soul. A pity he didn’t see it before. But a thing often happens like that, some terrible calamity and we get some kind of a revelation. Like St. Paul, isn’t it?’
‘Well, perhaps, not quite …’ I began, but I was unable to stem the flow of her Welsh eloquence.
‘The scales fell from his eyes and he saw her for what she really was and you for what you really was, and oh, the difference! To think he’d been so blind all this time,
groping
in darkness…’
‘I hardly think …’
‘Not knowing black from white, but a lot of men is like that. And a clergyman’s just the same as other men, isn’t he, only he wears his collar back to front, that’s all, really, isn’t it?’
I did not think it worth pointing out that there were perhaps more subtle differences between clergymen and others than the wearing of the collar back to front.
‘Well, look at us, this won’t get the work done, will it, Miss Lathbury?’ she said suddenly, seizing the wet mop and swilling it vigorously in the bucket. ‘But I’m not surprised at this. I saw it coming.’
I was not quite clear as to what it was that Mrs. Morris had seen coming, but I decided that we had talked enough about it. Was I then to marry Julian? Was that what she had seen coming? Would he propose to me, after a decent interval, of course, and should we make a match of it and delight the parish? It sounded ideal, but somehow morning had not brought any more enthusiasm than the night before. I still thought of myself as one of the rejected ones and I could not believe that he loved me any more than I loved him. Of course I liked and admired him, perhaps I even respected and esteemed him, as Everard Bone did Esther Clovis. But was that enough? In any case, it was indecent, wicked, almost, to be thinking of such things now. There must surely be some practical help I could give. What was to happen to Mrs. Gray’s furniture and possessions? Was a go-between needed, or a letter-writer? Letter-writing reminded me of the unfinished letter to Rocky Napier which was still lying on my desk.
Gritting my teeth, as it were, I determined to get it out of the way, and sat down there and then and did it. I hardly knew what I wrote and spent no time on subtleties. I told him the news about Julian and Mrs. Gray and made that an excuse for my careless writing.
When I had posted the letter, I walked towards the shops to buy some things to eat. I was walking back with my string bag full of uninteresting food, when I saw Sister Blatt advancing towards me on her bicycle. She lowered herself carefully off it and blocked the pavement, so that I could not help stopping and talking to her.
‘Well, well,’ she said, waiting for me to begin.
‘Well,’ I repeated, ‘there really seems to be nothing to say. It’s all very upsetting, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry for Father Malory, of course, though I never liked the woman, but good comes out of everything.’
‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ I said uncertainly, for although I believed that it did I thought that it was surely a little soon for any to be apparent yet.
‘I am to have Mrs. Gray’s flat,’ said Sister Blatt triumphantly. ‘A friend of mine from Stoke-on-Trent is coming to work in Pimlico, so near, you see, and we have been wanting to get a place together and now this has happened.’
‘A ram in a thicket, in fact,’ I said, feeling like Mrs. Morris and St. Paul.
‘Exactly.’ Sister Blatt nodded vigorously. ‘Just what I said to Father Malory this morning. I went to the vicarage as soon as I heard the news. You see, I realised that it might be awkward for them being under the same roof, so I put forward my idea as a solution to the difficulty. As it happened, she had gone away.’
‘To a friend in Kensington,’ I murmured.
‘Yes, much the best thing for all concerned. You’re looking tired,’ she said suddenly. ‘Your face is quite grey. You must take care of yourself.’ And with these encouraging words, she swung herself up on to her bicycle and rode majestically away.
I am tired, I said to myself, as I walked upstairs, and my face is quite grey. Nobody must come near me. I would have a rest this afternoon, for Winifred had gone back to the vicarage and was comforting Julian. I felt a little sorry for him, surrounded as he would be by excellent women. But at least he would be safe from people like Mrs. Gray; Sister Blatt would defend him fiercely against all such perils, I knew. Perhaps it might after all be my duty to marry him, if only to save him from being too well protected.
I made myself what seemed an extravagant lunch of two scrambled eggs, preceded by the remains of some soup and followed by cheese, biscuits and an apple. I was glad that I wasn’t a man, or the kind of man who looked upon a meal alone as a good opportunity to cook a small plover, though I should have been glad enough to have somebody else cook it for me. After I had washed up I went gratefully to my bed and lay under the eiderdown with a hot-water-bottle. I had finished my library book, and thought how odd it was that although I had the great novelists and poets well represented on my shelves, none of their works seemed to attract me. It would be a good opportunity to read some of things I was always meaning to read, like
In Memoriam
or
The Brothers Karamazov,
but in the end I was reduced to reading the serial in the parish magazine, and pondering over the illustrations, one of which showed a square-jawed young clergyman in conversation with a pretty young woman, as it might be Julian and Mrs. Gray, except that Julian wasn’t square-jawed. The caption under the picture said, ‘I’m sure Mrs. Goodrich didn’t mean to hurt your feelings about the jumble sale’. I finished the episode with a feeling of dissatisfaction. There was some just cause or impediment which prevented the clergyman from marrying the girl, some mysterious reason why Mrs. Goodrich should have snubbed her at the jumble sale, but we should have to wait until next month before we could know any more about it.
I turned back to the parish news. There was a warning from our treasurer about our financial position. Julian’s letter to his flock was short and uninteresting. The servers had had a very enjoyable day at Southend; all those who had brought gifts and helped to decorate the church for Harvest Festival were thanked; there was to be a working-party to mend the cassocks, ‘commencing on the first Tuesday afternoon in October’. I was distressed that Julian should use the word ‘commence’, but I suppose I must have dropped off to sleep somewhere here, for there was a long gap between the announcement about the cassocks and my next conscious thought, which was that I was thirsty and that it must be teatime.
I was just finishing tea when the telephone rang. I let it ring for quite a long time before I lifted the receiver warily and held it to my ear, wondering whose voice would come out of it and what it would ask me to do. It was a man’s voice, a pleasant voice, but for the moment I could not think whose.
‘Hullo, Mildred. This is Everard.’
I was instantly suspicious. I had hardly even realised that we called each other by our Christian names but I supposed that after all this time we probably did, though I was not conscious of ever having called him Everard.
