Excellent Women

‘When one door shuts another door opens,’ remarked Miss Statham.

  ‘Yes, of course. Perhaps a door will open for Father Malory.’

  At that moment a door did open, but it was only a group of lads headed by Teddy Lemon coming out of the hall. When they saw that we were washing up they withdrew hastily, with some scuffling and giggling.

  ‘Perhaps he will throw himself into the boys’ club,’ suggested Sister Blatt. ‘After all, it is a splendid thing to work among young people.’

  I found myself beginning to laugh, I cannot think why, and turned the conversation to Sister Blatt’s friend, who was to share the vicarage flat with her.

  ‘I wonder if Father Malory will get engaged to her?’ said Miss Statham in a sardonic tone.

  ‘Oh, no, my friend isn’t at all the type to attract a man,’ said Sister Blatt with rough good humour. ‘There won’t be any nonsense of that kind.’

  ‘Well, well, then everything will be as it was before Mrs. Gray came, then.’

  ‘Nothing can ever be really the same when time has passed,’ I said, more to myself than to them, ‘even if it appears to be from the outside. And didn’t I tell you, the Napiers are leaving? So there will be new people in my house and things won’t be at all the same.’

  ‘Oh, I wonder who they will be?’ asked Miss Statham eagerly.

  ‘I don’t know yet. Somehow I think they will be women who will come to our church.’

  ‘Then there might be danger there,’ said Sister Blatt in a satisfied tone. ‘I shall have to keep my eye on Father Malory.’

  ‘That’s right, Sister,’ said Mr. Mallett, overhearing the tail-end of our conversation. ‘Where would we be, I’d like to know, if you ladies didn’t keep an eye on us?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  It was easier saying goodbye to Rocky the second time. He and Helena seemed almost sorry to be going and were very nice to me. They asked me down to their flat the evening before they were to go and Rocky opened a bottle of wine. Seeing them together, gay, frivolous and argumentative, made me feel smug and dull, as if meeting them had really made no difference to me at all.

  ‘You must look after poor Everard Bone,’ said Helena. ‘Oh, how he needs the love of a good woman!’

  ‘I’m glad you are not claiming that your love was that, darling,’ said Rocky flippantly. ‘Personally, I can’t imagine anything I should like less than the love of a good woman. It would be like—oh—something very cosy and stifling and unglamorous, a large grey blanket—perhaps an Army blanket.’

  ‘Or like a white rabbit thrust suddenly into your arms,’ I suggested, feeling the glow of wine in me.

  ‘Oh, but a white rabbit might be rather charming.’

  ‘Yes, at first. But after a while you wouldn’t know what to do with it,’ I said more soberly, remembering that I had had this conversation about white rabbits with Everard Bone.

  ‘Poor Mildred, it’s really rather too bad to suggest that the love of a good woman is dull when we know that she is so very good,’ said Helena.

  ‘And not at all dull,’ said Rocky in his expected manner. ‘But Mildred is already pledged to the vicar, and after his unfortunate experience you must surely agree that he has first claim.’

  ‘Oh, he’s surrounded by good women,’ I said.

  ‘I think he’s nice,’ said Helena, ‘but it always seems to be his boys’ club night, so one would never get taken out for a drink.’

  ‘He and I had a drink together once,’ said Rocky. ‘We had a long talk about Italy.

  Because it is the day of Palms,

  Carry a palm for me,

  Carry a palm in Santa Chiara,

  And I will watch the sea. . . .’

  He began pacing round the room, touching the bare walls and looking out of the uncurtained windows. ‘I wonder who will be sitting in this room a month from tonight?’ he mused. ‘I wonder if they will feel any kind of atmosphere? Should we carve our names in some secret place? One longs to have a bit of immortality somewhere.’

  ‘You were going to give a memorial stained-glass window to the church,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Yes, but that’s rather an expensive way of doing it. Besides, I feel it would be such a very hideous window.’

  ‘Well, then you said you would give some money to buy incense.’

  ‘Good heavens, so I did.’ He took out his wallet and handed me a pound note which I put away quickly in my bag.

  ‘That won’t make you remembered,’ said Helena; ‘it will go up in the air and be lost. I suppose we should write something on a window-pane with a diamond ring. Here, Rocky,’ she took a ring from her finger, ‘try with this.’

  ‘When my grave is broke up again

  Some second guest to entertain,’

  chanted Rocky, ‘but perhaps a line of Dante would be better, if I could remember one.’

  ‘I only know “abandon hope all ye who enter here,”’ I said, ‘which doesn’t seem very suitable, and that bit about there being no greater sorrow than to remember happiness in a time of misery.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Rocky clapped his hands together, ‘that’s it!

  Nessun maggior dolore,

  Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

  Nella miseria.’

  ‘It seems an unkind way to greet new arrivals,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘Oh, don’t you believe it—people love to recall happiness in a time of misery. And anyway, they won’t know what it means.’

  ‘Quite a lot of people who were in Italy during the war must have learnt Italian,’ I pointed out.

  ‘But not Dante! The noble Allied Military didn’t get much further than a few scattered imperatives, but they might have got as far as asking if dinner was ready and they probably knew the names of a few wines.’

  ‘Unless they had Italian mistresses,’ said Helena.

  ‘Oh, then they domesticated them and taught them English,’ said Rocky coolly.

  ‘I don’t suppose the new tenants will understand it anyway,’ I mumbled quickly.

  ‘Of course I haven’t the patience to do this really properly,’ said Rocky, looking at what he had written, ‘the lettering isn’t very good, but at least we shall feel we’ve left something to be remembered by.’

  ‘But you don’t need to. People aren’t really forgotten,’ I said, not wanting to be misunderstood but certain that I should be.

  Rocky gave me one of his characteristic looks and smiled.

  ‘What will you do after we’ve gone?’ Helena asked.

  ‘Well, she had a life before we came,’ Rocky reminded her. ‘Very much so—what is known as a full life, with clergymen and jumble sales and church services and good works.’

  ‘I thought that was the kind of life led by women who didn’t have a full life in the accepted sense,’ said Helena.

  ‘Oh, she’ll marry,’ said Rocky confidently. They were talking about me as if I wasn’t there.

  ‘Everard might take her to hear a paper at the Learned Society,’ suggested Helena. ‘That would widen her outlook.’

  ‘Yes, it might,’ I said humbly from my narrowness.

  ‘But then she would get interested in some little tribe somewhere and her life might become even more narrow,’ said Rocky.

  We discussed my future until a late hour, but it was hardly to be expected that we should come to any practical conclusions.

  The next day I saw them off and turned back a little sadly into the quiet empty house, wondering if I should ever see them again. Of course there had been the usual promises to write on both sides and I was invited to visit them whenever I liked.

  It seemed that husbands and wives could part and come together again, and I was glad that it should be so, but what happened after that? It is said that people are refined and ennobled by suffering and one knows that they sometimes are, but would Helena have learned to be neater in the kitchen, or Rocky to share her interest in matrilineal kin-groups? It seemed as if this was at once too little and too much to ex
pect from the experience they had been through, and I felt myself incapable of looking into their future. All I could do was to be prepared to receive Helena if she should ever appear on my doorstep with a suitcase, though perhaps that was Esther Clovis’s privilege.

  In the meantime, I began to think about Everard Bone and even to wish that I might cook his meat for him. I had a wild idea that I might join the Prehistoric Society, if only I knew how to set about it. It would probably be easier to belong to this than to the Learned Society, whose members must surely have some knowledge of or interest in anthropology. But anybody could scrabble about in the earth for bits of pottery or wander about on moors looking for dolmens, or so it seemed to me in my innocence. Then a more practical idea came into my head. I was supposed to keep Everard up-to-date with news about the Napiers; perhaps he did not know that they had become reconciled and left London to live in the country. Why had he not telephoned me? Was it possible that he had gone away, or was lying ill, alone in his flat with nobody to look after him? Here my imaginings began to follow disconcertingly familiar lines. Well, at least I should see him in Lent, I told myself sensibly, at the lunchtime services at St. Ermin’s. I remembered that there was a poem which began Lenten is come with love to town, and with a feeling of shame I hastened to look it up in the Oxford Book of English Verse. But it was one of the very early ones, ‘c. 1300’, and although there was a glossary of unfamiliar words at the bottom of the page, the poem did not really comfort me.

  Deowes donketh the dounes,

  Deores with huere derne rounes

  Domes forte deme;

  I read; that would teach me not to be so foolish.

  Some days later I was walking near the premises of the Learned Society; in other words, I was doing what I had so often done in the days of Bernard Hatherley. The walk along Victoria Parade in the gathering twilight, the approach to ‘Loch Lomond’, the quick glance up at the lace-curtained window, the hope or fear that a hand might draw the curtain aside or a shadowy form be seen hovering behind it . . . is there no end to the humiliations we subject ourselves to? Of course, I told myself, there was no reason why I shouldn’t be walking past the premises of the Learned Society, it was on the way to a dozen places. So I did not bow my head in shame as I approached the building but even looked up to see a bearded man step out on to the balcony, and Everard Bone and Esther Clovis coming out of the front door.

  Esther Clovis . . . hair like a dog, but a very capable person, respected and esteemed by Everard Bone, and, moreover, one who could make an index and correct proofs. I felt quite a shock at seeing them together, especially when I noticed Everard taking her arm. Of course they were crossing the road and any man with reasonably good manners might be expected to take a woman’s arm in those circumstances, I reasoned within myself, but I still felt very low. I decided that I would go and have lunch in the great cafeteria where I sometimes went with Mrs. Bonner. It would encourage a suitable frame of mind, put me in mind of my own mortality and of that of all of us here below, if I could mediate on that line of patient people moving with their trays.

  ‘Mildred! Didn’t you see me?’

  Everard sounded a little annoyed, as if he had had to hurry to catch me up.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d seen me,’ I said, startled. ‘Besides, you had somebody with you.’

  ‘Only Esther Clovis.’

  ‘She’s a very capable person. What have you done with her?’

  ‘Done with her? I happened to come out with her and she was meeting a friend for lunch. Are you going to have lunch? We may as well have it together.’

  ‘Yes; I was gong to,’ I said, and told him where I had thought of going.

  ‘Oh, we can’t go there,’ he said impatiently, so of course we went to a restaurant of his choice near the premises of the Learned Society.

  Naturally the meal did not come up to my expectations, though the food was very good. I found myself wondering how I could have wanted so much to see him again, and I was embarrassed at the remembrance of my imaginings of him, alone and ill in his flat with nobody to look after him. Nothing more unlikely could possibly be imagined.

  The conversation did not go very well and I began telling him about the people with their trays in the great cafeteria and suggesting that it would have done us more good to go there to be put in mind of our own mortality.

  ‘But I’m daily being put in mind of it,’ he protested. ‘One has only to sit in the library of the Learned Society to realise that one’s own end can’t be so very far off.’

  After that things went a little better. I told him about the Napiers and he invited me to go to dinner with him at his flat. I promised that I would cook the meat and I felt better for having done so, for it seemed like a kind of atonement, a burden in a way and yet perhaps because of being a burden, a pleasure.

  Just as we were leaving the restaurant two men came and sat down at a table near us. I did not need to be told who they were.

  ‘Apfelbaum and Tyrell Todd,’ said Everard in a low voice. ‘I dare say you remember who they are.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you and Helena met them once at one o’clock in the morning and you were all so surprised. I often think of that—it makes me laugh.’

  ‘Well, nothing came of it,’ said Everard rather stiffly. ‘I suppose it was amusing, really. I expect they will be more interested to see me with somebody they don’t know. You must come and hear Todd talking about pygmies some time.’

  ‘Thank you—I should like that very much,’ I said.

  I went home rather slowly, imagining myself having dinner with Everard at his flat; then I saw myself at the Learned Society, listening to Tyrell Todd talking about pygmies. I was just getting up to put an extraordinarily intelligent and provocative question to the speaker, when I realised that I was nearly home and that there was a furniture van outside the door. As I approached it I was able to take note of some of its contents which were lying forlornly in the road. There were some oak chairs and a gate-legged table, an embroidered fine-screen and a carved chest, the kind of ‘good’ rather uninteresting things that people of one’s own kind might be expected to have. I guessed that the owners were probably a couple of women like Dora and myself, perhaps, though I had no means of knowing if they were older or younger.

  I walked quietly up the stairs, not wanting to meet them yet, but I was just passing what I shall always think of as the Napiers’ kitchen when a sharp but cultured woman’s voice called out, ‘Is that Miss Lathbury?’

  I stood transfixed on the stairs and before I had time to answer a small grey-haired woman, holding a tea-caddy in her hand, put her head out of the door.

  ‘I’m Charlotte Boniface,’ she announced. ‘My friend Mabel Edgar and I are just moving in—as you can see.’ She gave a little laugh.

  Another pair of women, I thought with resignation, feeling a little depressed that my prophecy had come true, but telling myself that after all they were the easiest kind of people to have in the house.

  ‘Edgar!’ called Miss Boniface into the other room. ‘Come and meet Miss Lathbury, who lives in the flat above us.’

  A tall grey-haired woman holding a hammer in her hand came out and smiled in a mild shy sort of way.

  ‘Come in and have a cup of tea with us, Miss Lathbury,’ said Miss Boniface.

  I went into the sitting-room which had a carpet on the floor and a few pieces of furniture spread about in an uncertain way. Miss Edgar was standing on a step-ladder hanging pictures, dark-looking reproductions of Italian Old Masters.

  ‘Do excuse me,’ she said. ‘I always have to hang the pictures because Bony can’t reach. These walls don’t seem to be very good, the plaster crumbles when you knock nails in.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ I said conventionally, feeling relieved that there was nothing I could do about it. ‘I hope you will like this flat.’

  ‘Oh, it will be wonderful to have a home at last, to have our own things around us,’ said Miss Edgar. ‘And I think we sh
all be happy here. We have found an omen,’ she lowered her voice almost to a whisper and pointed in the direction of the window.

  I saw Rocky’s lines from Dante scratched on the glass.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Our Beloved Dante,’ said Miss Boniface reverently. ‘Could anything be happier? Those wonderful lines.’ And she quoted them with a rather better accent than Rocky had managed.

  ‘Whoever engraved them has made a small mistake,’ said Miss Edgar. ‘He or she has written Nessun maggiore dolore—it should of course be Nessun maggior dolore, without the final ‘e’, you see. Still, perhaps this person was thinking of Lago di Maggiore, no doubt it was the memory of a happy time spent there. It would be interesting to know how the lines came to be engraved on the window—there must be a story behind it.’

  I decided that I could not reveal the circumstances and the conversation turned to other things. I learned that Miss Boniface and Miss Edgar had lived in Italy for many years and were now eking out their small private incomes by teaching Italian and doing translations. They fired questions at me, speaking sometimes individually and sometimes, or so it seemed, in unison. I told them of a laundry, a grocer and a butcher where they might register, and we went on to discuss the bathroom arrangements in some detail. They were much more businesslike than the Napiers had been and insisted that we should have a rota for cleaning the bath.

  ‘All right,’ I said; ‘shall I do it one week and you the next?’

  ‘Oh, no, there are two of us. We shall do two weeks and you will do one, and so on.’

  The question of the toilet-paper was not openly discussed as it had been with Helena, but I noticed later that a new roll had appeared, hung in a distinctive place. It seemed as if Miss Boniface and Miss Edgar were going to be very pleasant and co-operative, a real asset to the parish, in fact.

  ‘And where is the nearest Catholic Church?’ asked Miss Edgar.

  ‘Oh, very near, not two minutes’ walk away,’ I said. ‘Father Malory and his sister are friends of mine. He was engaged to be married, but it was broken off,’ I added chattily.