A Glass of Blessings

  'Why, that would be delightful,' I said. 'It would make' a better-balanced party. But what about his family ties?'

  'Well yes, there is his sister of course. They have always stayed at a small private hotel in Minehead and gone for long walks over Exmoor. They've been going there for the past ten years or so, and Arnold feels he would like a change. Apparently a friend of Dorothy's - that's his sister's name - always joins them and they take a packed lunch out every day, wet or fine. Arnold says he is rather tired of it.'

  'I should think ten years of packed lunches would become rather a bore after a while,' said Rodney.

  'They, are very good packed lunches,' said Sybil, 'but Dorothy is rather a dreary little woman. I think that's the trouble.'

  'And the friend?' I asked. 'Professor Root evidently hasn't felt drawn to her romantically.'

  'Evidently not,' said Sybil. 'Perhaps Exmoor is not conducive to romance.'

  'No,' said Rodney. 'Sitting on mackintoshes, eating packed lunches over the years, and then tramping home again through the rain - one can see how he would yearn after Portugal.'

  Sometime later I went up to look over Mary's room and to give it a few little touches - a plant on the table in the window, lavender soap in the washbasin, some new magazines, as well as a careful selection of books by the bed. While I did these things I was thinking that there was now only very little time left in which I could make my expedition to find out where Piers lived, for it was hardly the kind of jaunt on which I could expect, or indeed wish, Mary to accompany me. I should have to pretend to Sybil that I was going shopping or to the cinema. Not that she ever asked outright, but I knew I should feel self- conscious and obliged to make some sort of excuse. It seemed a pity that I should have to lie, almost as if I were doing something wrong.

  When I came downstairs I saw that there was a letter on the hall table. It looked almost beautiful - a blue rectangle against the polished mahogany, like some long expected letter for which one had hardly dared to hope. It was addressed to me - Wilmet Forsyth, without any Mrs - in a small neat hand, the kind of writing a clergyman might have.

  When I opened it, I saw at once that it was from Piers. And now I realized that I had seen the handwriting before, only much bigger and in white chalk on the blackboard at the Portuguese classes. He began 'Dear Wilmet' and asked me to meet him in the park to go for a walk and have tea with him. I turned over the page eagerly to see how he would end. To my surprise I saw that he had got round what might have been a difficulty or embarrassment by using the - for him - improbable and ridiculous ending 'Yours in haste'. I almost laughed out loud, so incongruous did it seem.

  I could not truthfully say that I was in haste myself, though I wrote back quickly enough. After a little thought I used the harmless conventional ending, 'with love', for it gave me a perverse kind of pleasure to think that love could be no more than a harmless and conventional thing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  'Perhaps you will see Piers's lodgings,' said Sybil, when I told her of the invitation, so much more respectable than my secret expedition would have been.

  'Lodgings' sounded old-fashioned and sordid, and for a moment I felt as if it were wrong to be looking forward to the afternoon so much.

  'He's asked me to have tea with him, but I suppose we may go to some public place,' I said.

  'It's a pity the Derry Roof Gardens aren't open on Saturday afternoons,' said Sybil drily, 'but I expect you'd enjoy a tea he had prepared himself better than anything else. Women like to see men doing domestic things, especially if they are not done very well - if the tea is too weak or too strong, or the toast burnt.'

  'I don't suppose Piers is very domesticated,' I said happily, imagining the sort of tea we might have. Perhaps not toast, as it was a hot day, but roughly cut bread and butter and sickly bought cakes. 'It won't be like having tea with Mr Bason.'

  'I should think not indeed,' Sybil laughed. 'Well, you look very nice and I hope you will enjoy yourself. Give Piers my kindest regards and tell him that I have composed six sentences showing - I hope correctly - the use of the personal infinitive.'

  If it had seemed odd, and it had a little, for Sybil to send me off to Piers with her blessing, I was now reminded that to her he was after all our Portuguese teacher and the brother of my best friend. She could not know the delicious walking-on-air feeling that pervaded me as I hurried across the park, hardly able to bear being even the prudent few minutes late.

  May has always seemed to me, as indeed it has to poets, the most romantic of all the months. There are so many days when the air really is like wine - a delicate white wine, perhaps Vouvray drunk on the banks of the Loire. This afternoon had about it something of the quality of that day when Piers and I had walked through the Temple and seen the cat crouching among the tulips and the new leaves covering up the old sad fruits on the fig tree.

  I was wearing a dress of deep coral-coloured poplin, very simple, with a pair of coral and silver earrings, and a bracelet to match. I always like myself in deep clear colours, and I felt at my best now and wondered if people were looking at me as I passed them. They seemed to be mostly lovers absorbed in each other, and I did not mind this, but when a drab-looking woman in a tweed skirt and crumpled pink blouse looked up from her sandwich and New Statesman, I felt suddenly embarrassed and was reminded of poor Miss Limpsett in Piers's office. What could her life have held? What future was there for her and the woman in the crumpled pink blouse?

  I was glad when I reached our meeting place and saw Piers standing with his back to me, apparently absorbed in a border of lupins. I wanted to rush up to him with some silly extravagant gesture, like covering his eyes with my hands; and my hands were outstretched, waiting to be taken in his, when I called his name and he turned round to face me.

  'I hope I'm not late,' I said, discarding as one does the other more exciting openings I had prepared.

  'Not very,' he said, evading my outstretched hands without seeming to do so in any obvious way. 'You look very charming. That colour suits you.'

  I had hoped he would say this, but I was pleased when the words actually came. We stood for a few moments looking at the lupins.

  'How I should love to get right in among them and smell their warm peppery smell!' I said exuberantly. 'I do so adore it!'

  'My dear, it isn't quite you, this enthusiasm,' said Piers. 'You must be cool and dignified, and behave perfectly in character - not plunging in among lupins.'

  'Oh.' I was a little cast down. 'Is that how I am - cool and dignified? I don't mind being thought elegant, of course - but cool and dignified. It doesn't sound very lovable.'

  'Lovable? Is that how you want to be?' He sounded surprised.

  'I should have thought everyone did on this sort of an afternoon,' I said, rather at a loss. It was evident that his mood did not quite match mine, and that I should have to - as women nearly always must — damp down my own exuberant happiness until we were more nearly in sympathy.

  'Wilmet, what's the matter with you? You're talking like one of the cheaper women's magazines.' Piers's tone was rather petulant.

  Love is the cheapest of all emotions, I thought; or such a universal one that it makes one talk like a cheap magazine. What, indeed, was the matter with me?

  'I shouldn't have thought you'd know much about those,' I said.

  'We don't read them at the press, certainly, but one sees them somehow. Have we been long enough at these lupins? Shall we walk on?'

  'Yes,' I said, for I could think of nothing else to say.

  'Poor girl,' he said teasingly, after we had been walking in silence for some time. 'Don't mind my ill-humour. You said yourself that I was a moody person.'

  'All people are strange,' I said crossly. Then I began telling him about Mr Bason and the Fabergé egg. The story seemed to amuse him, and by the time we had walked across the park to the end of the Bayswater Road he was in a much better temper and I was feeling almost happy again.

  'Imagine tha
t scene in the choir vestry!' he exclaimed. 'Taking the egg out of the pocket of his cassock and tossing it into the air. How I should love to have seen that! Now, Wilmet, what would you like to do next? Go to the pictures, have a nice sit down in a deckchair, or what?'

  'I should like to see where you live,' I said firmly.

  'All right. Tea at home then. But don't expect too much. We must get a bus to Shepherd's Bush, first of all.'

  'Goodness - is it a very long way then?'

  'You would think it a long way - certainly too far to go by taxi.'

  'I always like a long bus ride,' I said. 'Do you remember Father Lester who was at Rowena's cocktail party? He'd been at a church in Shepherd's Bush. He and his wife spoke so nostalgically of it.'

  'It's rather that kind of place, though it's a nostalgie de la boue, really.'

  'I suppose theirs wouldn't be that,' I said. 'I do hope they have settled down better now.'

  'It will be hard going for them there,' said Piers. 'I think that in some ways religion in the country is harder going than in town. Has it ever occurred to you that it's really the country words that rhyme with God in our language?'

  'Yes, I suppose they do - clod, sod and trod - what heavy words they are!'

  'How hymn writers have struggled with them, poor things - it's a wonder all hymns aren't harvest hymns or for the burial of the dead. Those are really the only kind that the rhymes would fit.'

  'This must be Shepherd's Bush Green,' I said. 'Do we get out here?'

  'No, we must go on a little way and then walk.'

  'Will your colleague be at home this afternoon?' I asked, as we stood on an island amid a swirl of trolley buses.

  'My colleague?'

  'The person you share the flat with.'

  'Oh, of course. Yes, it's quite likely he'll be doing the weekend shopping at this very minute.'

  We walked along a street full of cheap garish looking dress shops, their windows crammed with blouses and skirts in crude colours, and butchers' and greengrocers' smelling sickly in the heat. When we came to a grocer's, Piers went into the doorway and looked inside.

  'Yes, there he is,' he said.

  We went into the shop. I had imagined that I would immediately recognize the colleague when I saw him, but although there were several people at the counter none of them seemed quite right. There were two men and three women, two elderly and the other young and flashily dressed with dyed golden hair and long earrings. Surely, I wondered in horror, it couldn't be her! But no, Piers had said 'he', so it must be one of the nondescript looking men.

  'Oh there you are - I thought we'd probably find you here.' Piers had gone over into a corner where a small dark young man wearing black jeans and a blue tartan shirt, whom I had not noticed before, was peering into some biscuit tins.

  'Wilmet, this is Keith - I don't think you've met before,' said Piers in a rather jolly tone which did not seem quite natural to him.

  Keith gave a stiff little bow and looked at me warily. He was about twenty-five years old, with a neat-featured rather appealing face and sombre brown eyes. His hair was cropped very short in the fashionable style of the moment. I noticed that it glistened like the wet fur of an animal.

  'No, we haven't actually met, but I've heard a lot about you, Mrs Forsyth,' he said politely.

  'I think we've spoken on the telephone, haven't we?' I said, recognizing the flat, rather common little voice as the one which had answered me the evening I had tried to ring up Piers. I could not reciprocate by saying that I had heard a lot about him, when I had heard nothing whatsoever. Indeed, I was so taken aback and confused by the encounter that I did not know what to say or even what to think. I stood rather awkwardly, my hand mechanically stroking a large black and white cat which was asleep on a sack of lentils. So this was the colleague.

  Keith turned to Piers with some question about bacon.

  'What do you think, Wilmet?' asked Piers. 'Which is the best kind of bacon?'

  'I don't know,' I said, unable to give my attention to bacon. 'It depends what you like.'

  'These two gentlemen will never make up their minds,' said the motherly looking woman behind the counter. 'I have to help them choose every time. Now, what's the matter with that, dear?' she said to Keith. 'Is it too fat for your liking?'

  'We like it more striped, as it were,' said Piers.

  'Striped! Isn't that sweet - did you ever!' She turned to me. 'You mean streaky, dear - that's what we call it. Let me cut you some off here - this is nice.' She thrust a side of bacon towards us and then placed it in the machine.

  It began to go backwards and forwards with a swishing noise, while the three of us stood in silence watching it. There was an air of unreality about the whole scene - Keith, with his absurd clothes, and bristly hair like a hedgehog or porcupine, was almost a comic figure. And yet I felt sad, too, as if something had come to an end. The sadness, however, was underneath, and my most conscious feeling as I waited for somebody to break the silence was one of indignation.

  'Have we finished yet?' Piers asked rather impatiently.

  'I think we need custard powder,' said Keith.

  'Custard powder?' exclaimed Piers in horror. 'Good God, whatever do we want custard powder for?'

  'To make custard,' said Keith flatly.

  'You mean you want to make custard with it. Well, all right then, as long as you don't expect me to eat it.'

  'He'll eat anything, really,' said Keith to me in a confidential tone, gathering his purchases together into a canvas bag not unlike Mr Bason's. 'I always think custard is nice with stewed fruit, don't you, Mrs Forsyth?'

  His respectful manner and constant use of my name were a little disconcerting, I found.

  'Yes,' I said inadequately, 'I do.'

  We walked along the pavement, Keith and I together with Piers a little in front. Nobody seemed to be saying anything and perhaps conversation is not always necessary; but I felt that there was a kind of awkwardness about our silence, so I said to Keith, 'You're not really at all as I'd imagined you.'

  'Had you imagined me, Mrs Forsyth?' There was a note of eagerness in the flat little voice. 'How did Piers describe me?'

  Perhaps if I had said 'he didn't' he would have been hurt, and it was lucky that Piers broke in rather impatiently before I had time to think of a tactful answer.

  'We cross the road here,' he said, 'and take this turning opposite.'

  We were soon in a street of peeling stuccoed houses, which were not even noble in their shabbiness. I saw that some of them had been painted, while others which had presumably been bombed had had their façades rebuilt in a way which did not harmonize with the rest. There were rather a lot of children running about, and old women in bedroom slippers sunning themselves on ramshackle balconies crowded with plants in pots. Various kinds of music were blaring from the open windows.

  'It's rather continental here, isn't it,' I said. 'It reminds me of Naples, you know.'

  'Thank you,' said Piers. That's really the best one can say about this district, and it's nice of you to say it.'

  'Where do you live, Mrs Forsyth?' asked Keith.

  I told him.

  He paused a moment in what seemed a respectful silence, then said seriously, 'I should think rents are very high there.'

  'Wilmet doesn't have to bother about dreary things like that,' said Piers.

  'No - I mean, the house belongs to my husband's mother, so I've never had to.'

  'I wish we could get a nice place, somewhere in a cleaner district,' said Keith. 'I have to wash the paint every week here. I just use plain soda and water - detergents make it go yellow. Do you find that, Mrs Forsyth?'

  'Well, I don't know,' I said, ashamed of my ignorance.

  'Keith, you must realize that Wilmet wouldn't know about dreary things like that,' said Piers. 'I don't suppose she's ever washed paint in her life.'

  'No, I haven't,' I said crossly, 'except perhaps when I was first in the Wrens. But am I any the worse for th
at? I could do it if I had to.'

  'But do remember about not using detergents,' said Keith.

  'Well, here we are,' said Piers, with a note of relief in his tone.

  We had stopped outside one of the newly painted houses. It had a flight of steps up to the front door and three bells, two of which had cards by them. One had HALIBURTON written in block capitals, the other a Polish name of daunting complexity on a printed visiting card.

  'I suppose yours is the top bell, as it has no card on it,' I said.

  'Yes, we've got the top flat,' said Keith chattily. Two rooms with kitchenette, and we share the bathroom with Mr Sienkiewicz.'

  'No relation to the author of Quo Vadis, as far as we know, but the name is comforting in a way,' said Piers.

  We entered the hall and began to walk upstairs. I remembered how I had imagined the narrow hall with prams and bicycles and the smell of stale cooking or even other things, but there was a kind of deadness about this house on this fine Saturday afternoon. People were either out or behind closed doors, and I had the feeling that I ought to walk on tiptoe up the stairs, carpeted in maroon with a white squiggle pattern. And yet the silence was somehow unlike that of the clergy house, though I could not have said exactly why.

  At last we reached the top floor.

  'Where are we to have tea?' Piers asked. 'My room is the obvious one, but I think I may have forgotten to make my bed, and I don't think Wilmet could stand the sight of that.'

  'I shouldn't mind,' I said, for I had been preparing myself for the unmade bed - perhaps littered with galley proofs - for the bottle of gin, the unwashed glasses and cups, and the un- emptied ashtrays.

  'I tidied and cleaned your room while you were out,' said Keith primly. 'And I've laid tea in there.'

  'Good heavens!' Piers flung open a door. 'It's hardly recognizable. Flowers, too.' He glanced over to the bookcase where some blue irises were arranged in a cut glass vase. 'Did you do all this?'