Barbara Pym - Jane and Prudence

PERENNIAL LIBRARY

Harper & Row, Publishers, New York

Cambridge, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington London, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney This book was first published in the United Kingdom in 1953. A hardcover edition was published in the United States in 1981 by Elsevier-Dutton Publishing Co., Inc. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Elsevier-Dutton Publishing Co., Inc.

Jane and Prudence. Copyright 1981 by The Estate of Barbara Pym. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Elsevier-Dutton Publishing Co., Inc., 2 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

First perennial library edition published 1984. Reissued in 1987.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pym, Barbara.

Jane and Prudence.

I. Title.

PR6066.Y58J3 1987 813.54 86-46097

ISBN 0-06-097101-0 (pbk.)

87 88 89 90 91 MPC 10 987654321

__________

BARBARA PYM

JANE AND PRUDENCE were walking in the college garden before dinner. Their conversation came in excited little bursts, for Oxford is very lovely in midsummer, and the glimpses of grey towers through the trees and the river at their side moved them to reminiscences of earlier days.

Ah, those delphiniums, sighed Jane. I always used to think Nicholass eyes were just that colour. But I suppose a middle-aged man and he is that now, poor darling I cant have delphinium-blue eyes.

Those white roses always remind me of Laurence, said Prudence, continuing on her own line. Once I remember him coming to call for me and picking me a white rose and Miss Birkinshaw saw him from her window! It was like Beauty and the Beast, she added. Not that Laurence was ugly. I always thought him rather attractive.

But you were certainly Beauty, Prue, said Jane warmly. Oh, those days of wine and roses! They are not long.

And to think that we didnt really appreciate wine, said Prudence. How innocent we were then and how happy!

They walked on without speaking, their silence paying a brief tribute to their lost youth.

Prudence Bates was twenty-nine, an age that is often rather desperate for a woman who has not yet married. Jane Cleveland was forty-one, an age that may bring with it compensations unsuspected by the anxious woman of twenty-nine. If they seemed an unlikely pair to be walking together at a Reunion of Old Students, where the ages of friends seldom have more than a year or two between them, it was because their relationship had been that of tutor and pupil. For two years, when her husband had had a living just outside Oxford, Jane had gone back to her old college to help Miss Birkinshaw with the English students, and it was then that Prudence had become her pupil and remained her friend. Jane had enjoyed those two years, but then they had moved to a suburban parish, and now, she thought, glancing round the table at dinner, here I am back where I started, just another of the many Old Students who have married clergymen. She seemed to see the announcement in the Chronicle under Marriages, Cleveland-Bold, or, rather, Bold-Cleveland, for here the women took precedence; it was their world, the husbands existing only in relation to them: Jane Mowbray Bold to Herbert Nicholas Cleveland. And later, after a suitable interval, To Jane Cleveland (Bold), a daughter (Flora Mowbray).

When she and Nicholas were engaged Jane had taken great pleasure in imagining herself as a clergymans wife, starting with Trollope and working through the Victorian novelists to the present-day gallant, cheerful wives, who ran large houses and families on far too little money and sometimes wrote articles about it in the Church Times. But she had been quickly disillusioned. Nicholass first curacy had been in a town where she had found very little in common with the elderly and middle-aged women who made up the greater part of the congregation. Janes outspokenness and her fantastic turn of mind were not appreciated; other qualities which she did not possess and which seemed impossible to acquire were apparently necessary. And then, as the years passed and she realised that Flora was to be her only child, she was again conscious of failure, for her picture of herself as a clergymans wife had included a large Victorian family like those in the novels of Miss Charlotte M. Yonge.

At least I have had Flora, even though everybody else here has at least two children, she said, speaking her thoughts aloud to anybody who happened to be within earshot.

I havent, said Prudence a little coldly, for she was conscious on these occasions of being still unmarried, though women of twenty-nine or thirty or even older still could and did marry judging by other announcements in the Chronicle. She wished Jane wouldnt say these things in her rather bright, loud voice, the voice of one used to addressing parish meetings. And why couldnt she have made some effort to change for dinner instead of appearing in the baggy-skirted grey flannel suit she had arrived in? Jane was really quite nice-looking, with her large eyes and short, rough, curly hair, but her clothes were terrible. One could hardly blame people for classing all university women as frumps, thought Prudence, looking down the table at the odd garments and odder wearers of them, the eager, unpainted faces, the wispy hair, the dowdy clothes; and yet most of them had married that was the strange and disconcerting thing.

Prudence looks lovely this evening, thought Jane, like somebody in a womans magazine, carefully groomed, and wearing a red dress that sets off her pale skin and dark hair. It was odd, really, that she should not yet have married. One wondered if it was really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, when poor Prudence seemed to have lost so many times. For although she had been, and still was, very much admired, she had got into the way of preferring unsatisfactory love affairs to any others, so that it was becoming almost a bad habit. The latest passion did not sound any more suitable than her previous ones. Something to do with her work, Jane believed, for she had hardly liked to ask for details as yet. The details would assuredly come out later that evening, over what used to be cocoa or Ovaltine in one of their bed sitting-rooms when they were students and would now be rather too many cigarettes without the harmless comfort of the hot drink.

So you have all married clergymen, said Miss Birkinshaw in a clear voice from her end of the table. You, Maisie, and Jane and Elspeth and Sybil and Prudence ..

No, Miss Birkinshaw, said Prudence hastily. I havent married at all.

Of course, I remember now you and Eleanor Hitchens and Mollie Holmes are the only three in your year who didnt marry.

You make it sound dreadfully final, said Jane. Im sure there is hope for them all yet.

Well, Eleanor has her work at the Ministry, and Mollie the Settlement and her dogs, and Prudence, her work, too.. Miss Birkinshaws tone seemed to lose a little of its incisiveness, for she could never remember what it was that Prudence was doing at any given moment. She liked her Old Students to be clearly labelled the clergymens wives, the other wives, and those who had fulfilled themselves in less obvious ways, with novels or social work or a brilliant career in the Civil Service. Perhaps this last could be applied to Prudence? thought Miss Birkinshaw hopefully.

She might have said, and Prudence has her love affairs, thought Jane quickly, for they were surely as much an occupation as anything else.