A Glass of Blessings

  I began to feel a little drowsy - I may even actually have closed my eyes - but really it was better to keep them open, for only by resting them on the beauty of Keith's face could I forget that he was really rather a bore. Yet the recognition of this fact was a kind of solace, for it made him much less alarming and glamorous, and seemed to bring Piers's world nearer to my own, where people seldom looked like Keith but were often as boring.

  'And then you decided to learn French?' I heard myself saying.

  'Yes, and that was how I met Piers. Then I had a row with my landlady. At least it wasn't me, really. There were two other boys sharing the flat with me - they were in the ballet, but resting at the time - Tony and Ray their names were. Well, one night we had a party and Tony threw an ornament out of the window. Actually it was a big blue and gold vase with a picture of a Grecian lady on it - you know how excitable stage people are,' he added primly. 'Anyway, the landlady thought it was me that did it though I was always very quiet, but I didn't trouble to vindicate myself because I knew that Piers was on his own and had a spare room - he'd had some domestic upset too - so I went there. And Wilmet - the mess in that place!' He lowered his voice confidentially. That woman in the basement was supposed to keep it clean, but she never went near. You remember that big table in Piers's room?'

  'Vaguely,' I said.

  'Well, I wrote my name in the dust on that'

  'Fancy that' I said cosily.

  'There was plenty for me to do there. I really don't know how Piers ever managed without me. Do you know, the kitchen was so full of empty bottles you could hardly open the door properly?'

  'Really?'

  'Yes! And he never used to make his bed. Some days he didn't even cover it up. And he wasn't getting proper food, either Do you know, Wilmet -' the dark eyes looked so seriously into mine that I wondered what horror was going to be revealed next - 'he hadn't even got a teapot!'

  'Goodness! How did he make tea, then?'

  'He didn't - he never made tea! Just fancy!'

  'Well, one doesn't really associate Piers with drinking tea,' I said.

  'He drinks it now,' said Keith, in such a governessy tone that I began to feel almost sorry for Piers.

  'I expect you've been very good for him,' I said. 'I always think there's something pathetic about undomesticated men living on their own, and Piers is rather difficult to help.'

  'Oh, he's a difficult person altogether,' said Keith, with understandable complacency. 'But you mustn't take too much notice of what he says, Wilmet. He can be very unkind sometimes, but he doesn't really mean it.'

  I was extremely embarrassed, and a little annoyed, too, for this could only mean that Piers had told Keith what he had said to me in our last conversation.

  'I never mind what he says,' I said quickly, anxious to keep my end up.

  'I'm glad to hear it, Wilmet, because really it was a nasty thing to say.'

  'Did you know what he said?' I asked.

  'Did I know?' Keith seemed surprised. 'But of course. Piers doesn't really think you're unlovable, you know, and I certainly don't.'

  I was too astonished to point out that Piers hadn't exactly said that, or even to make any other kind of comment, but perhaps astonishment was not a bad note on which to end our tea party, for Keith had now risen to his feet and was saying that he really must be going because he liked to be in when Piers got home from the press.

  'Wilmet, I have enjoyed myself,' he said, fingering the curtains and turning them back to see if they were lined. I saw him give a little nod of approval when he discovered that they were.

  'I do hope you will come to my coffee bar one evening, if you ever go to such places.'

  'Yes, I should be interested to see it. What's its name?'

  'It's quite near you, really - nearly at Marble Arch. It's called the Cenerentola.'

  'La Cenerentola!' I exclaimed. 'What a strange coincidence.'

  'Why - do you know it?'

  'No, but it's the same name as the villa which our vicar is retiring to in Italy.'

  'Oh well, we have Italian décor,' said Keith.

  I remembered thinking what a beautiful acolyte he would make, so I asked him if he ever went to church.

  'No, Wilmet, I'm afraid I never do,' he said. 'Church services are so old-fashioned, aren't they? As a matter of fact, I once knew a boy who went to church. He used to wear a vestment - he looked ever so nice.'

  I felt it was hardly worth the trouble to point out that it was only priests who wore vestments. Unless, of course, the friend had been a priest, which seemed unlikely.

  'Of course he was a Catholic,' Keith went on, 'very devout.'

  I have often noticed that it is only Roman Catholics who are spoken of as very devout, just as it seems to be only Romans who are lapsed, but again it seemed useless to argue the point.

  'You see, Wilmet, I don't believe in God,' said Keith simply. 'Good-bye and thank you for a lovely tea. I hope we'll meet again soon.'

  'Give my love to Piers,' I said; for now I could send it in the casual meaningless way one did to all and sundry, when it no longer mattered.

  Keith tripped away across the square while Sybil and Professor Root approached the house with more measured steps.

  'Who was that beautiful young man who didn't believe in God?' asked Sybil.

  'Did you hear him say that?'

  'Yes. We wondered if you had been having a little evangelizing tea party, and were sorry that you had apparently been unsuccessful,' said Professor Root.

  'Actually he is a friend of Piers's,' I said.

  'Ah,' said Sybil, in a meaningful tone.

  I changed the subject, but when we were having dinner she brought it up again.

  'Wilmet has been entertaining a friend of Piers's to tea,' she said.

  'Really?' said Rodney, in a not very interested tone.

  'Yes. I see now the clue to Piers's lack of success in this world. I believe that he has loved not wisely but too well.'

  'Mother, that's such a hackneyed quotation, and it really tells one nothing. I suppose we've all of us done that in our time, if you come to think of it.'

  I looked at Rodney in surprise. He so seldom indulged in these generalizations about love. I saw that he had gone a little pink.

  'Noddy, I think you misunderstand me,' said Sybil.

  'Anyway,' I said, 'I should have thought that Piers's inability to make a success of his life springs from all sorts of causes - he's so lazy, for one thing. I believe that Keith has been very good for him, even making him drink tea. And has he been so unsuccessful? Not really, you know.'

  'At least he has taught us a little Portuguese,' said Sybil. 'I wonder how we shall get on with our speaking.'

  'Are we all going to Portugal?' asked Rodney.

  'That's really what I wanted to talk about,' said Sybil, laying down her knife and fork, and glancing over towards Professor Root. He bent lower over his lobster mayonnaise and, like Rodney earlier, seemed to grow a little pink in the face. Or was it my imagination that both men seemed slightly embarrassed this evening?

  'Arnold, will you speak?' she asked. 'Or shall I?'

  'We have a piece of news,' said Professor Root, raising his head. 'A joyful one, as far as we are concerned, and we hope you will find it agreeable too. I am happy to tell you that Sybil has consented to be my wife.'

  I can hardly describe how I felt on hearing this news. My first feeling was that I must have heard wrongly, my second that it was some outrageous joke. Sybil to be Professor Root's wife! But she was Rodney's mother and my mother-in-law - how could she ever be anything else?

  'Wilmet is overcome,' said Sybil kindly. 'Perhaps she is also astonished and a little shocked to hear that two old people have decided to marry.'

  'It's such a surprise,' I stammered.

  'Yes, my dear, I thought it would be,' said Professor Root. 'But for many years I have had the deepest regard for your mother-in-law. Of late it has become so deep that, we both felt -' he pau
sed and made an expansive gesture with his lobster pick.

  'But of course it's lovely news,' I said, pulling myself together. 'Nothing could have pleased me better.'

  'After all, I might have brought disgrace on us all by marrying a man half my age,' said Sybil. The kind of thing that gets headlines in the lower daily papers.'

  'Really, Mother, I can't imagine that you have ever had the opportunity of doing that' said Rodney, smiling indulgently.

  Sybil smiled mysteriously, for which I did not blame her. 'Arnold is eighteen months younger than I am, as it happens,' she said. 'I am sixty-nine and he is only sixty-seven. But we have the seventies before us, and perhaps even the eighties.'

  'And you can go to Portugal for your honeymoon. Obviously you won't want Rodney and me to accompany you,' I said lightly, for I did not want to dwell too much on the honeymoon aspect, feeling that it might embarrass them. I imagined them going about quietly together looking at buildings, and in the evenings drinking wine in the open air and talking about the kind of abstract subjects they usually discussed when Professor Root came to the house.

  'No, we shall let you have Portugal to yourselves this year,' said Rodney in a relieved tone. 'Wilmet and I will go to Cornwall. James and Hilary Cash go to a very good hotel near Penzance - I must get the address from James.'

  My heart rather sank but I said nothing. 'When is the wedding to be?' I asked brightly.

  'We thought some time in August. In a registrar's office, of course, with a quiet family luncheon afterwards,' said Sybil. 'It will be a rather sober affair, as is fitting.'

  'I hope we need not take that too literally,' said Professor Root 'The sobriety, I mean.'

  'Oh no, we'll make it a jolly party,' said Rodney rather stiffly.

  Sybil caught my eye and we began to laugh. I suddenly realized how much I should miss her if she let the house and went to live with Professor Root. But she would never do that - obviously we should all live here together. The only difference would be that Professor Root would be here always, instead of just rather often. But even as I was thinking these thoughts Rodney was saying something about changes and asking where they were going to live.

  'I shall go on living here, of course,' said Sybil, 'in my own house. Arnold has been living at his club lately, as you know, and could not take a wife there. He will come here to me.'

  'Not quite the usual thing, perhaps, but by no means unknown. Matrilocal or uxorilocal residence, they call it,' said Professor Root drily, 'where the husband goes to the wife's village - in certain tribes which follow the system of matriliny, that is.'

  'In that case -' Rodney began.

  'Yes, Noddy, I shall be turning you out. You and Wilmet will buy a house of your own: I think Wilmet will enjoy that.'

  Rodney looked so dismayed that I couldn't help teasing him and saying lightly, 'Darling, is it so very dreadful, the prospect of living alone in a house with me?' But really I was a little dismayed myself. It had never occurred to me that Sybil and Professor Root would want the house to themselves.

  Later that evening, when we were alone, Rodney began to talk in a rather gloomy way about Wembley, Ealing, Walton- on-Thames, Beckenham and other outlying parts of London. He dwelt in turn upon the horrors of the Central Line, the impossibility of getting to Waterloo or Charing Cross in the rush hour, the inaccessibility of London Bridge or Cannon Street from the Ministry.

  'That Mother should do this,' he said. 'It's a most unnatural thing.'

  'But you can't blame her,' I said. 'And after all it seems rather appropriate that Sybil should act in this way. I've always seen her as being rather like a character in Greek tragedy, doing some unnatural thing.'

  For my part I had no intention of moving to any of the places Rodney had been talking about. I saw us settled in a nice little house or flat still within easy reach of St Luke's and the clergy house.

  Chapter Twenty

  Mary had been anxious that I should go and see her at the retreat house as soon as she was settled there, and I was really glad to get away from the preparations for Sybil's wedding and Rodney's agonized speculations as to where we were going to live. The only thing settled was that we should go for a holiday in August, staying at the hotel in Cornwall which James and Hilary Cash had recommended. It seemed that Rodney had been extremely fortunate in getting accommodation there - only the mention of James's name had made it possible - and I foresaw that we should be carrying with us a burden of gratitude, having to exclaim continually about how lucky we had been.

  I did not expect to see many clergy or obvious looking re-treatants on the bus, as I was going in the middle of the week and the retreats were usually held at weekends.

  'There is a party of clergy coming on Saturday,' Mary said, when she met me at the bus stop in the village. 'Last weekend we had women - my first experience from the domestic side.'

  'Were they troublesome?' I asked.

  'Yes, one or two of them were a little. One had brought a Primus stove with her to make tea in her room, and it flared up and burnt the curtains; another left old bits of bread and cake in a drawer - so messy.'

  'Poor Mary! It seems odd that their misdemeanours should be concerned with eating and drinking, though I suppose these things assume greater importance when you're supposed to be mortifying the flesh - the woman with the Primus stove had to have her tea, and the other couldn't exist without her extra bits of food.'

  'There are gas rings in some of the rooms, and I could have given her a kettle, and if anyone wants extra food they've only to ask for it.'

  'Perhaps they'd be ashamed to admit their weakness,' I suggested. 'But fancy having to take a Primus about with one - so awkward! Let's hope the clergy will be better.'

  'There's no reason why they should be,' said Mary, they're only human after all. Marius told me that he once fused all the lights at a retreat by using his electric razor.'

  'The clergy ought not to have such luxuries,' I said sternly. 'But I always imagined that you were one of those people who regard the clergy as being better than other beings.'

  'Me?' Mary seemed surprised and smiled. 'Perhaps I was like that once, but I don't think I am any more. Such surprising things seem to happen.'

  I wanted to pursue the subject further, but we had now reached the house and I felt bound to utter some exclamation of wonder or disbelief. As it happened it was disbelief, for it seemed hardly possible to imagine how this elaborate Victorian gothic building could have got itself put up in an unpretentious little village.

  'It used to be the vicarage,' Mary explained, 'but of course it was too big, so the vicar before last built himself a kind of bungalow. Then the diocese took over the house, first as a home for unmarried mothers and then as a retreat house. Oh, and it was also a boys' prep school at some time, I can't remember exactly when.'

  'It looks right for all the horrors of a school,' I said. 'Do you have enough domestic help?'

  'Oh yes, we have a woman living in besides myself - she does most of the cooking - and women come in from the village to clean, and the sexton stokes the boiler and does the garden.'

  'Do you like it here?' I asked.

  'Yes. It's busy but very peaceful, though I still feel rather useless, as if the life were too pleasant to be a really good one.'

  Mary's remark irritated me because it made me feel guilty myself; but I could understand that after her life of committees and parish work, and the tyranny of her mother, and then her stay in the convent, she might feel like this. Indeed, when I had been at the retreat house a day, I began to feel it myself. I tried to make myself useful but there was very little for me to do. The weather was glorious, but it seemed wanton to be lying in a deckchair in the mornings while Mary was arranging things for the coming retreat, so I took an upright canvas chair, or sat on a hard wooden seat of the kind that looks as if it might have been given in memory of someone. I half expected to see an inscription carved on the back. The only task Mary could find for me was to pick and shell
some peas for lunch, and to put the pods on the compost heap under the apple trees at the bottom of the garden. Here, in a kind of greenish twilight, stood a pile of grass cuttings and garden rubbish, and as I added my pods to it I imagined all this richness decaying in the earth and new life springing out of it. Marvell's lines went jingling through my head.

  My vegetable love should grow

  Vaster than Empires and more slow ...

  There seemed to be a pagan air about this part of the garden, as if Pan - I imagine him with Keith's face - might at any moment come peering through the leaves. The birds were tame and cheeky, and seemed larger than usual; they came bumping and swooping down, peering at me with their bright insolent eyes, their chirpings louder and more piercing than I had ever heard them. I wondered if people who came here for retreats ever penetrated to this part of the garden. I could imagine the unmarried mothers and the schoolboys here, but not those who were striving to have the right kind of thoughts. Then I noticed that beyond the apple trees there was a group of beehives, and I remembered the old saying about telling things to bees. It seemed that they might be regarded as a kind of primitive confessional.

  I went slowly back to the lawn, but to a deckchair now; the hard wooden seat seemed out of keeping with my mood.

  It was not until the evening of my second day there that Mary and I had a real heart to heart talk. We were in her bed-sitting-room after supper, and I had been telling her about Sybil's forthcoming marriage and what an upheaval it was going to make in our lives.

  'Yes,' Mary said, 'marriage does do that, doesn't it? - and death, too, of course.'

  'But not birth.'

  'No - people seem to come more quietly into the world. It isn't until they've really become personalities that they make changes and upheavals.'