A Glass of Blessings

  Keith smiled but said nothing.

  I had wanted so much to see where Piers lived, and was disappointed that Keith should have tidied away the more obvious personal touches. The room was, of course, full of books; but I have rather ceased to regard books as being very personal things - everybody one knows has them and they are really rather obvious. It was no doubt significant that Mary Beamish should have the novels of Miss Goudge while Piers had those of Miss Compton-Burnett, but I should have been able to guess that for myself without actually seeing. I suppose I really had hoped for the pyjamas on the unmade bed and the shaving things on the mantelpiece, though perhaps, as Piers had said, I could not really have stood the sight of them.

  Keith came back from the kitchen with the teapot and kettle, but he had evidently made most of his preparations in advance. There was a check tablecloth on a low table, and plates of sandwiches and biscuits and a pink and white gateau arranged on plastic doilies. Each plate had a paper table napkin laid across it. It was not at all like Mr Bason's tea, but I had the feeling that it had been even more anxiously prepared and that I must therefore eat more than I wanted - which was really nothing - and praise it judiciously or even extravagantly. It was quite obvious that I was going to find it impossible to dislike Keith.

  After we had finished tea I was taken on a tour of the flat.

  'Of course the flat is furnished,' Keith explained, 'so we can't really have exactly what we want, but I got this contemporary print for my divan cover - do you like it, Mrs Forsyth?'

  I said that I did, though it was not particularly distinguished. His room was painfully neat and unlived in, as if everything had been arranged for effect. There were only two books on the table by the divan, a French grammar and a paperbacked novel with a lurid cover. A trailing plant of a kind which had lately become fashionable stood on another table, its pot in a white painted metal cover. A print of Van Gogh's irises in a light oak frame hung on one wall.

  "You're much tidier than Piers,' I said. 'And I think your room has a nice view, hasn't it?' I went over to the window hopefully.

  'Yes, it is rather nice, isn't it, Mrs Forsyth?' said Keith in a pleased tone. 'You can even see trees in the distance.'

  'It's amazing how one can in London, isn't it?' I said.

  'Yes,' said Piers, 'even in the worst parts of London there is always a distant glimpse of some trees or Battersea power station or the top of Westminster Cathedral.'

  'I expect Mrs Forsyth sees many trees where she lives,' said Keith wistfully.

  'Why don't you call her Wilmet?' Piers suggested. 'I'm sure she wouldn't mind?'

  'No, of course I shouldn't,' I said, rather embarrassed.

  'I expect your home is very nice, Wilmet,' said Keith.

  'You must come and have tea one day,' I found myself saying, as I suspected I was meant to.

  'Thank you, Wilmet,' said Keith with quiet satisfaction. 'I should like that.'

  He stood on the doorstep and waved as Piers and I went out of the house. I was surprised that he should be so friendly towards me, but then it occurred to me that he had no reason to be otherwise. It was a situation I had not met before, and I did not know what to say to Piers as we walked along the hot noisy street.

  We were silent for a while, then I said rather stiffly, 'So that is the person with whom you live.'

  'Yes. He's obviously taken a great fancy to you,' Piers smiled, 'do you like him?'

  'He seems a nice boy,' I said, 'but rather unexpected.'

  'In what way unexpected?'

  'You said you lived with a colleague from the press. I suppose I'd imagined a different sort of person.'

  'You always said that I lived with a colleague. But aren't we all colleagues, in a sense, in this grim business of getting through life as best we can?'

  I said nothing, so he went on, 'My dear girl, what's the matter? Do you think I've been deceiving you, or something absurd like that?'

  'No, of course I don't,' I said indignantly. But of course, in a way, he had deceived me. 'It would have been more friendly if you'd told me, though,' I added.

  'Well, now you and Keith have met I'm sure you'll like each other. You really will have to ask him to tea, you know. He's dying to see your home, as he calls it.'

  I noticed that there was no malice in this last remark.

  'Of course I shall,' I said. 'Where did you meet him, if I may be so inquisitive?'

  'Why - at my French class.'

  'I see - that accounts for the French grammar by the bed, then.'

  'Yes - imagine it, Wilmet. The pathos of anyone not knowing French - I mean, not at all!'

  'It does seem strange,' I admitted. 'So he was one of your pupils! Of course I had no idea ...'

  'No, why should you have?'

  'But Piers, why did you choose him of all people? I shouldn't have thought you had anything in common.'

  'This having things in common,' said Piers impatiently, 'how overrated it is! Long dreary intellectual conversations, capping each other's obscure quotations - it's so exhausting. It's much more agreeable to come home to some different remarks from the ones one's been hearing all day.'

  'I'm sure you get those,' I said spitefully. 'What does Keith do for a living, anyway?'

  'Various things. At the moment he's working in a coffee bar in the evenings, and he sometimes gets modelling jobs.'

  'Good heavens!' I suppose I must have been unable to keep the note of horror out of my voice, for Piers said sharply, 'Well, hasn't it ever occurred to you that somebody must pose for those photographs of handsome young men you see in knitting patterns and women's magazines?'

  'Yes, but not people one actually knows.'

  'Not people you know, you mean, but there are others in the world - in fact quite a few million people outside the narrow select little circle that makes up Wilmet's world.'

  I had a dreadful feeling that I might be going to cry, but even that seemed impossible in the hot garish street with the Saturday evening shopping crowds and trolley buses swirling around us.

  Piers looked at me curiously. 'I'm sorry,' he said more gently. 'Perhaps I've gone too far. After all I didn't really mean to imply that you're to blame for what you are. Some people are less capable of loving their fellow human beings than others,' he went on in an almost academic way, 'it isn't necessarily their fault.'

  'You're being horrid,' I protested.

  'But I often am - you should know that by now.' He was smiling most charmingly as he spoke, which increased the confusion of my feelings still further. Perhaps I had never really known him, or - what was worse - myself. That anyone could doubt my capacity to love! But strangely enough my immediate thought was that I could not bear to go home by bus. I must get a taxi.

  'This will take you most of the way,' said Piers, as a bus approached the stop.

  'I think I'd rather find a taxi.'

  'Dear Wilmet, so deliciously in character! Don't ever try to make yourself any different.'

  He waved to a passing taxi. They were no doubt easier to get here than in the better districts, I reflected.

  'I've just remembered that Mary Beamish is coming back from the convent today,' I said, trying to pull myself together. 'She's coming to stay with us for a while and I must be home before she arrives.'

  'Whatever will you say to her?' Piers asked. 'Do you often have this kind of experience?'

  'No,' I said, 'it will make two new experiences in one day.'

  'I hope they will both have been equally interesting and rewarding,' said Piers. 'Well, all experience is said to be that, isn't it?'

  I got into the taxi and we waved good-bye. I could now imagine Piers going back to the house, climbing the stairs, perhaps sitting down heavily in an armchair, letting out an exaggerated sigh, while Keith's flat little voice began discussing me, criticizing my clothes and manner. I felt battered and somehow rather foolish, very different from the carefree girl who had set out across the park to meet Piers. But I was not a girl. I wa
s a married woman, and if I felt wretched it was no more than I deserved for having let my thoughts stray to another man. And the ironical thing was that it was Keith, that rather absurd little figure, who had brought about the change I thought I had noticed in Piers and which I had attributed to my own charms and loving care!

  I lay back in the taxi and lit a cigarette. Into my temporarily blank mind there came a sudden picture of Father Bode, toothy and eager, talking about hiring a coach for the parish retreat. It was obscurely comforting to let my mind dwell on such things, and I suppose I must have been unconsciously preparing myself to meet Mary, covering up the humiliation and disappointment to be looked at later when I had more time.

  I had hoped to be back before she arrived, but as soon as I opened the front door I knew that she had forestalled me. A suitcase and a brown canvas bag stood in the hall. I wondered irrelevantly that she should have so much luggage.

  Is that Wilmet?' I heard her eager voice say, and soon we were embracing and apologizing - she for being early, I for being late. I was glad to have something to do, to show her her room and sit with her while she unpacked the drab clothes she had worn in the convent - including the dyed black dress with the dye showing up the worn patches, which I should so much have disliked wearing myself.

  'I really shall have to do some shopping,' she said. 'I've no summer things. Will you help me, Wilmet, please?'

  I saw us shopping together, having lunch or tea in a restaurant, perhaps going to the pictures. It gave me the same comfortable feeling as thinking of Father Bode hiring a coach for the parish retreat. I knew that time would pass and that I should feel better.

  After dinner we sat - Sybil, Mary and I - in the drawing- room by the open window, looking out at the trees in the square. I heard again Keith's wistful voice saying, 'I expect Mrs Forsyth sees many trees where she lives'. Rodney had decided to be out; he was rather nervous of meeting Mary, perhaps fearing that his conversational powers would not be up to the situation. It might be, after all, that I with my sheltered life was in some ways more fitted to deal with certain things, for which Rodney's, with public school and university, the war in Italy, and the Civil Service, was inadequate. For there could, I felt, be situations for which even these varied experiences might have failed to equip him.

  As it happened Mary went to bed quite early, and Sybil and I were left alone, feeling that we could hardly discuss her the moment she had left the room. In any case she had seemed to be so very much her old self that there was little we could have said, especially when another more important and interesting subject was on our minds.

  'So you saw Piers's lodgings,' said Sybil, in the tone she used to invite discussion of a topic when no information had yet been offered.

  'Yes, he has quite a nice flat, not properly self-contained but on the top floor, which does make it seem more self-contained,' I found myself saying quickly.

  'And the mysterious colleague - was he there?'

  'Oh yes - we all had tea together.'

  'What is he like?'

  'Younger than I'd expected - rather nice, really.'

  'I suppose he works at the press?'

  'I'm not sure what he does,' I said. For if I had ever thought that Sybil and I might enjoy a good laugh over Keith not knowing French, and posing for photographs of knitting patterns, I now realized that he had aroused in me some kind of - protective or maternal? - instinct which would save him from being turned into an object of ridicule.

  Sybil yawned and rolled up her knitting.

  'Well, it doesn't seem to have been a very exciting afternoon,' she said. 'I suppose I was hoping for some little bit of scandal - very wicked of me, I know, and wickedness is particularly distressing in old people, don't you think? Do you want that knitting book, dear?'

  'I thought I'd look through it and see if there's anything I could make for Rodney. I seem to want to knit when I see other people doing it.'

  I took the book up to my room and put it on the table by my bed. As I sat brushing my hair I caught sight of the little box which Harry had given me at Christmas.

  If you will not when you may

  When you will you shall have nay ...

  I pondered over the words in the light of the new character Piers had given me. How had Harry meant them to be taken? As a rather naughty little joke, or had there been a grain of truth in the words? I put the box into a drawer, not wanting to have to look at it every time I went to my dressing table.

  In bed I turned the pages of the knitting book, looking for Keith. I soon found him, on the opposite page to a rugged looking pipe-smoking man who was wearing a cable stitch sweater which took thirty ounces of double knitting wool. Keith was leaning against a tree, one hand absently playing with a low-hanging branch. He wore a kind of lumber jacket with a shawl collar, knitted crossways in an intricate and rather pleasing stitch, 'For Leisure Hours', the pattern said, 'to fit a 36-38 inch chest. Commence at right cuff by casting on 64 sts. on No. 11 needles...' It seemed as if he might have stood there patiently while some busy woman knitted the jacket on to him. The expression in the dark eyes was sombre and unfathomable, the lips unsmiling. If one ignored the slightly ridiculous setting, it was easy to see how he could become an object of devotion. This thought led me to consider the religious and secular meanings of the word devotion, and how 'devout' did not mean the same as 'devoted'. I was not sure why this was but it seemed suitable that my life should have this confusion in it.

  I went on looking at the patterns, comparing the expressions, and finding that though most were smiling and jolly, the sort of men one could imagine pottering about in the garden at the weekend or playing a round of golf, some were a little shamefaced, as if they hoped nobody they knew would come upon them posing for knitting patterns. None seemed to me to have Keith's air of romantic detachment. Was he thinking of French verbs, dreaming of the day when he could read Baudelaire with ease, I wondered? Or was his mind a blank, in the way that the minds of beautiful people are sometimes said to be? I began to want to know more of his origins and history. I thought he might be a colonial, perhaps a New Zealander; I remembered clever moody passionate girls, like Katherine Mansfield, striving to break away from the narrowness of their environment, almost nineteenth-century Russian in their yearnings, hating the traditional English Christmas in the middle of summer and the sentimental attitude towards the Mother Country. They would come to London and live wretchedly, perhaps starving in an attic, exulting in their freedom, and yet keeping underneath everything their innate primness and respectability. Was Keith like this, or did he just come from Fulham or Brixton or some dreary English provincial town? I supposed that if I kept my promise to ask him to tea I should be able to find out all about him.

  I closed the knitting book and took a sleeping pill. I was just conscious of Rodney coming in very much later, but I did not open my eyes or speak to him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I was glad in the days that followed to have Mary with me. Her companionship was soothing and at the same time a kind of discipline, for there could be no question of discussing Piers or my feelings about him when I was with her. Our conversation was either about her immediate future or, of course, about church matters. She was to take up residence at the retreat house as a kind of housekeeper at the beginning of June. We had quite an interesting time choosing clothes for her - summer dresses that might be regarded as suitable for greeting parties of devout men and women (mostly women, we suspected) arriving to make a retreat.

  'Perhaps it's one's demeanour rather than one's dress that matters,' I suggested, as we walked to church for the Corpus Christi evening service. 'I'm sure you would know how to greet the retreatants, whatever you wore, whereas I should be quite hopeless.'

  'Of course you wouldn't,' said Mary warmly. 'You're always belittling yourself lately.'

  'Meaning that I used not to?'

  'Well, you seem different since I came out of the convent' She hesitated. 'As if - well - you'd bee
n disappointed in some way about something, perhaps lost confidence in yourself a bit. And yet I don't see how that could be.'

  No, she would not see, and I could hardly tell her. It was funny to remember that Harry had once said something rather like it when we had been having lunch together, but he had seen my air of sadness as something appealing. To have Mary notice it made me feel dreary and depressed.

  'Life isn't always all it's cracked up to be,' I said rather frivolously. 'And then sometimes you discover that you aren't as nice as you thought you were - that you're in fact rather a horrid person, and that's humiliating somehow.'

  'What nonsense - that couldn't possibly apply to you!' Mary took my arm in an affectionate gesture. 'And even if it did, I suppose a person would be even nicer if they could make a discovery like that and admit the truth of it.'

  I was glad that at this point we reached the church, for I was beginning to fear that I might go too far in talking about myself.

  'It's very crowded already,' Mary whispered. 'We shall have to go rather near the front.'

  The service had attracted quite a number of strangers, for there was to be a procession with candles, followed by refreshments in the church hall. It had been advertised in the Church Times, with a list of buses, not strictly accurate, which were said to pass the door. It would be Father Thames's last public appearance before leaving for his holiday in Italy, but the preacher was a stranger to me - Father Julian Malory, the vicar of a church in Pimlico - and I supposed that he would draw some of the congregation from his own parish. No doubt it was they who were occupying our usual seats, making us go uncomfortably near the front.

  The church was looking very beautiful, and Mary and I had helped with the decorating of it in the morning. Her presence had made it easy for me to enter the charmed circle of decorators, and I had even been allowed to help to lay down the carpet of leaves and flowers which covered the nave and looked almost as striking as the altar with its many candles embowered in green leaves, lilies and carnations.