Excellent Women (6 page)

I crept quietly up to my flat and began to prepare supper. The house seemed to be empty. Saturday night… perhaps it was right that it should be and I sitting alone eating a very small chop. After I had washed up I would listen to Saturday Night Theatre and do my knitting. I wondered where the Napiers were, if they were out together, or if Helena was with Everard Bone.
My son is at a meeting of the Prehistoric Society
… I began to laugh, bending over the frying-pan. There was certainly nothing romantic about
him,
but was he perhaps just a little splendid?

D
URING
the next few weeks the weather improved and suddenly it was almost spring. The time came round for my annual luncheon with William Caldicote, the brother of my friend Dora. This was always something of a ceremonial occasion and dated from the days when Dora, and perhaps even William himself, had hoped that ‘something might come of it’. But as the years had passed our relationship had settled down into a comfortable dull thing. I do not remember when it was that I first began to realise that William was not the kind of man to marry, and that I myself did not mind in the very least. It now seemed so natural that if we were in a taxi together he should express the emotion that it was a relief to sit down rather than that it was pleasant to be alone with me. His care for his food and drink, too, was something I accepted and even found rather endearing, especially as I benefited from it myself. I could always be sure of a good meal with William.

He worked in a Ministry somewhere near Whitehall and was now a rather grey-looking man in the late thirties, with surprisingly bright beady eyes. We always met in the restaurant, one in Soho where he was known, and as I hurried towards it—for I was a little late—I began thinking that William wasn’t really the most suitable person to be having luncheon with on this fresh spring day. Surely a splendid romantic person was the obvious companion? The blue sky full of billowing white clouds, the thrilling little breezes, the gay hats of some of the women I met, the mimosa on the barrows—all made me feel disinclined for William’s company, his preoccupation with his health and his food and his spiteful old-maidish delight in gossip.

He was in a fussy mood today, I could see, as he went rather petulantly through the menu. The liver would probably be overdone, the duck not enough done, the weather had been too mild for the celery to be good—it seemed as if there was really nothing we could eat. I sat patiently while William and the waiter consulted in angry whispers. A bottle of wine was brought. William took it up and studied the label suspiciously. I watched apprehensively as he tasted it, for he was one of those men to whom the formality really meant something and he was quite likely to send the bottle back and demand another. But as he tasted, he relaxed. It was all right, or perhaps not that, but it would do.

‘A tolerable wine, Mildred,’ he said, ‘unpretentious, but I think you will like it.’

‘Unpretentious, just like me,’ I said stupidly, touching the feather in my brown hat.

‘We really should have a tolerable wine today. Spring seems to be almost with us,’ he observed in a dry tone.

‘Nuits St. Georges,’ I read from the label. ‘How exciting that sounds! Does it mean the Nights of St. George? It conjures up the most wonderful pictures, armour and white horses and dragons, flames too, perhaps a great procession by torchlight.’

He looked at me doubtfully for a moment and then, seeing that I had not yet tasted my wine, began to explain that Nuits St. Georges was a place where there were vineyards, but that not every bottle bearing the name on its label was to be taken as being of the first quality. ‘It might,’ he said seriously, ‘be an
ordinaire.
Always remember that.
A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Mildred.’

‘Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring,’
I went on, pleased at being able to finish the quotation. ‘But I’m afraid I shall never have the chance to drink deep so I must remain ignorant.’

‘Ah, Pope at Twickenham,’ sighed William. ‘And now Popesgrove is a telephone exchange. It makes one feel very sad.’ He paused for a moment and then began to eat with great enjoyment.

It was certainly an excellent luncheon and what we were having did not appear to be on the menu. After we had been eating for some time and had satisfied our first brutish hunger, he began to ask me about myself, what I had been doing since the last time we met, whether there had been any interesting cases before my committee.

‘How I should love to do work of that kind,’ he said, ‘I feel that I almost have a natural gift for it. You see, I would understand so well what these unfortunate gentlepeople had lost. The great house in Belgrave Square with the servants bringing up trays from the basement, the Edwardian country house parties with visiting foreign royalties, the villa at Nice or Bordighera for the winter months …’

‘Oh, but the people we have to deal with aren’t usually as grand as that,’ I said, marvelling at William’s understanding, when he and Dora, the children of a doctor, had been brought up in a Birmingham suburb. ‘They are gentlepeople, of course, but more like us, daughters of clergymen or professional people, who may have been comfortably off but never really wealthy.’

‘A pity, I mean that you don’t get the grander kind, because the greater the fall the more poignant the tragedy.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ I remembered reading something of the kind at school when we had been studying Shakespeare’s tragedies. ‘But we do have some very tragic cases,’ I said, ‘and I’m afraid there is nothing at all dramatic about them, poor souls.’

‘Ah, yes.’ He became serious, but then seemed to brighten up. Tell me about the new people who have come to live in your house.’

I began to describe the Napiers, rather hesitantly, for I did not want to make too much of their disagreements as I knew that William with his love of gossip and scandal would seize eagerly on any scrap. Not that it really mattered, I supposed, and as I went on talking I must have become less cautious for I found myself, rather to my dismay, insisting that
he
was much too nice for
her.

‘But, my dear, that’s so often the way,’ said William, ‘one should never be surprised at it. All these delightful men married to such monsters, such fiends.’

‘Oh, Mrs. Napier isn’t like that,’ I protested, ‘it’s just that he is exceptionally nice.’

I suppose it must have been the Nuits St. Georges or the spring day or the intimate atmosphere of the restaurant, but I heard myself to my horror, murmuring something about Rocky Napier being just the kind of person I should have liked for myself.

There was a marked silence after I had said this, during which I looked round the restaurant with detachment, noticing a waiter concocting some dish over a flame at a side table, a man leaning across to touch the hand of the girl sitting opposite him, and I suddenly felt irritated with William for being so grey and fussy and Dora’s brother whom I had known for years.

But my dear Mildred,
you
mustn’t marry,’ he was saying indignantly. ‘Life is disturbing enough as it is without these alarming suggestions. I always think of you as being so very balanced and sensible, such an excellent woman. I do hope you’re
not
thinking of getting married?’

He stared across the table at me, his eyes and mouth round and serious with alarm. I began to laugh to break the unnatural tension which had arisen, and also at Dora’s idea, which I believe she still cherished, that William and I might marry one day.

‘Oh, no, of course not!’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry if I alarmed you. Why, I don’t know anyone suitable, to begin with.’

What about the vicar?’ asked William suspiciously.

‘Father Malory? Oh, he doesn’t believe in marriage for the clergy, and in any case he isn’t really the kind of person I should want to marry,’ I reassured him.

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ said William. ‘We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life. Let other people get married by all means, the more the merrier.’ He lifted the bottle, judged the amount left in it and refilled his own glass but not mine. ‘Let Dora marry if she likes. She hasn’t your talent for observation.’

I suppose I should have felt pleased at this little compliment but I was somehow irritated. In any case, it was not much of a compliment, making me out to be an unpleasant inhuman sort of person. Was that how I appeared to others? I wondered.

‘What news have you of Dora?’ I asked, to change the subject. ‘I’m afraid I owe her a letter.’

‘Oh, a lot of news.’ He spread out his hands with an expansive gesture and leaned back in his chair. ‘Much seems to happen in that little world. And yet I suppose a girls’ school has as much happening in it as most worlds and the undercurrents are more deadly.’

‘Oh? Anything in particular?’

William leaned forward and his small beady eyes gleamed with delight.
‘Unpleasantness,’
he whispered dramatically.

‘Oh, dear, what about?’ I asked, but I was not surprised, for there seemed to be so much of it at Dora’s schools. I had at times found myself wondering disloyally whether she did not perhaps invite it.

‘Something about the girls wearing hats in chapel, or not wearing hats—it doesn’t really matter which. Oh, the infinite variety and complication of that little world! The greater things, birth, death and copulation are just passed by as if they were nothing.’

‘Well, they don’t really have things like that in a girls’ school, at least not often,’ I said, my thoughts going back to an occasion in my own schooldays when a mistress had died and her coffin had been placed in the chapel, ‘and then only death.’

‘Oh, not the other things!’ said William, now in high good humour. ‘But supposing they did!’

I stirred my coffee, feeling embarrassed, particularly as his voice had a penetrating quality.

‘Of course Miss Protheroe is rather difficult to get on with,’ I ventured. ‘I’ve only met her once, but she seemed to me the kind of person I shouldn’t like to have to work with myself.’

‘But poor Dora is so irritating, too,’ said William. ‘I can never bear her for more than a week-end.’

We were standing outside on the pavement. After the warm rosy gloom of the restaurant, the fresh spring air was like another bottle of wine. There was a barrow full of spring flowers just opposite.

‘Oh, look, mimosa!’ I exclaimed, though not with any hope that William would buy me any. ‘I must have some.’

‘It always reminds me of cafes in seaside towns, all dried-up and rattling with the bottles of sauces on the table,’ said William, standing by while I bought a bunch.

‘Yes, I know the fluffiness doesn’t last long, but it’s so lovely while it does.’

‘You seem unlike yourself today,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘I hope it wasn’t the Nuits St. Georges.’

‘You know I’m not used to wine, particularly in the middle of the day,’ I said, ‘but it’s rather pleasant to be unlike oneself occasionally.’

‘I don’t agree. They’ve moved me to a new office and I don’t like it at all. Different pigeons come to the windows.’

‘I’ve never been in your office,’ I said boldly, ‘may I come back with you and see it?’

‘Oh, the prison, you mean, with its stone walls and iron bars, which the poet tells us do
not
a prison make. Yes, you may come if you like.’

We walked into Trafalgar Square and then into an anonymous-looking entrance in a back street somewhere beyond it.

Grey-looking men like William, some even greyer, were hurrying in. He greeted one or two of them; they seemed to have double-barrelled names like Calverley-Hibbert and Radcliffe-Forde, but they did not look any the less grey for all that.

‘Here we are!’ William flung open a door with his name on it and I went in. Two elderly grey men were sitting at a table, one with a bag of sweets which he hastily put away into a drawer, the other with a card-index which he naturally did not attempt to conceal. William did not acknowledge them in any way nor did they take any notice of him. He sat down at an enormous desk in the centre of the room, which had two telephones on it and a line of wire baskets, importantly labelled and stacked with files. I had no very clear idea of what it was that he did.

‘This is a nice room,’ I said, going to the window, ‘and what a lovely desk you have.’ I felt embarrassed at the presence of the grey men and did not quite know what to say. But suddenly a rattling sound, as if a trolley was being wheeled along the corridor, was heard and the two men leaped up, each carrying a china mug.

‘Oh, excuse me,’ said William, leaping up too and taking a china mug from a drawer in his desk, ‘I think I hear the tea.’

He did not offer to get me any, nor did I feel I really wanted any as it was barely three o’clock. I wondered why the grey men, who were obviously of a lower grade or status than William, had not fetched his tea for him, but perhaps there was a rigid etiquette in these matters. Also, knowing William’s fussiness, it was quite likely that he would insist on fetching his own tea. I began to wonder whether important-sounding people like Calverley-Hibbert and Radcliffe-Forde were also at this moment hurrying along corridors with mugs. Perhaps even the Minister himself was joining in the general scramble. I went on standing by the window and looked out at the view which was of another office building, perhaps the same Ministry, where there were rows of uncurtained windows and the activities of the rooms were exposed as if it was a doll’s house. Grey men sat at desks, their hands moving among files; some sipped tea, one read a newspaper, another manipulated a typewriter with the uncertain touch of two fingers. A girl leaned from a window, another combed her hair, a third typed with expert speed. A young man embraced a girl in a rough playful way and she pulled his hair while the other occupants of the room looked on encouragingly … I watched, fascinated, and was deep in contemplation when William and his underlings came back with their steaming mugs.

‘Is that another Ministry across there?’ I asked.

‘Ah, yes, the Ministry of Desire,’ said William solemnly.

I protested, laughing.

‘They always look so far away, so not-of-this-world, those wonderful people,’ he explained. ‘But perhaps we seem like that to them. They may call
us
the Ministry of Desire.’

At that moment a clock struck a quarter past three. William jumped up, and picking up a paper bag from one of the wire trays, walked over to the window and flung it open. There was a whirring of wings and a crowd of pigeons swooped down on to the flat piece of roof outside the window. Some hopped up on to the sill and one even came into the room and perched on William’s shoulder. He took two rolls from the paper bag and began to crumble them and throw the pieces among the birds.