Barbara Pym - Quartet in Autumn (Plume)

Barbara Pym

Quartet in Autumn

First published 1977 by Macmillan London Ltd

This edition published 2004 by Pan Books an imprint of Pan Macmillan Led Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road. London NI 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

ISBN 0 330 32648 I

Copyright Hazel Holt 1977

A QP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

One

THAT DAY THE four of them went to the library, though at different times. The library assistant, if he had noticed them at all, would have seen them as people who belonged together in some way. They each in turn noticed him; with his shoulder-length golden hair. Their disparaging comments on its length, its luxuriance, its general unsuitabilitygiven the job and the circumstanceswere no doubt reflections on the shortcomings of their own hair. Edwin wore his, which was thin, greying and bald on top, in a sort of bobeven older gentlemen are wearing it longer now, his barber had told himand the style was an easy one which Edwin considered not unbecoming to a man in his early sixties. Norman, on the other hand, had always had difficult hair, coarse, bristly and now iron-grey, which in his younger days had refused to lie down flat at the crown and round the parting. Now he did not have to part it and had adopted a medieval or pudding-basin style, rather like the American crew-cut of the forties and fifties. The two womenLetty and Marciahad hair as different from each other as it was possible to imagine in the nineteen seventies, when most women in their sixties had a regular appointment at the hairdresser for the arrangement of their short white, grey or dyed red curls. Letty had faded light brown hair, worn rather too long and in quality as soft and wispy as Edwins was. People sometimes saidthough less often nowhow lucky she was not to have gone grey, but Letty knew that there were white hairs interspersed with the brown and that most people would have had a brightening rinse anyway. Marcias short, stiff, lifeless hair was uncompromisingly dyed a harsh dark brown from a bottle in the bathroom cupboard, which she had used ever since she had noticed the first white hairs some thirty years earlier. If there were now softer and more becoming ways of colouring ones hair, Marcia was unaware of them.

Now, at lunchtime, each went about his or her separate business in the library. Edwin made use of Crockfords Clerical Directory and also had occasion to consult Whos Who and even Who Was Who , for he was engaged in serious research into the antecedents and qualifications of a certain clergyman who had recently been appointed to a living in a parish he sometimes frequented. Norman had not come to the library for any literary purpose, for he was not much of a reader, but it was a good place to sit and a bit nearer than the British Museum which was another of his lunchtime stamping grounds. Marcia too regarded the library as a good, free, warm place not too far from the office, where you could sit for a change of scene in winter. It was also possible to collect leaflets and pamphlets setting out various services available for the elderly in the Borough of Camden. Now that she was in her sixties Marcia took every opportunity to find out what was due to her in the way of free bus travel, reduced and cheap meals, hairdressing and chiropody, although she never made use of the information. The library was also a good place to dispose of unwanted objects which could not in her opinion be classified as rubbish suitable for the dustbin. These included bottles of a certain kind, but not milk bottles which she kept in a shed in her garden, certain boxes and paper bags and various other unclassified articles which could be left in a comer of the library when nobody was looking. One of the library assistants (a woman) had her eye on Marcia, but she was unconscious of this as she deposited a small, battered tartan-patterned cardboard box, which had contained Killikrankie oatcakes, at the back of a convenient space on one of the fiction shelves.

Of the four only Letty used the library for her own pleasure and possible edification. She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction. Gone were the days when she had hopefully filled in her Boots Book Lovers library list from novels reviewed in the Sunday papers, and there had now been a change in her reading habits. Unable to find what she needed in romantic novels, Letty had turned to biographies of which there was no dearth. And because these were true they were really better than fiction. Not perhaps better than Jane Austen or Tolstoy, which she had not read anyway, but certainly more worth while than the works of any modern novelist.

In the same way, Letty, perhaps because she was the only one of the four who really liked reading, was also the only one who regularly had lunch out of the office. The restaurant she usually patronized was called the Rendezvous but it was not much of a place for romantic meetings. People who worked in the nearby offices crowded in between twelve and two, ate their meal as quickly as possible, and then hurried away. The man at Lettys table had been there when she sat down. With a brief hostile glance he handed her the menu, then his coffee had come, he had drunk it, left 5p for the waitress and gone. His place was taken by a woman who began to study the menu carefully. She looked up, perhaps about to venture a comment on price increases, pale, bluish eyes troubled about VAT . Then, discouraged by Lettys lack of response, she lowered her glance, decided on macaroni au gratin with chips and a glass of water. The moment had passed.

Letty picked up her bill and got up from the table. For all her apparent indifference she was not unaware of the situation. Somebody had reached out towards her. They could have spoken and a link might have been forged between two solitary people. But the other woman, satisfying her first pangs of hunger, was now bent rather low over her macaroni au gratin. It was too late for any kind of gesture. Once again Letty had failed to make contact.

Back in the office Edwin, who had a sweet tooth, bit the head off a black jelly baby. There was nothing racist about his action or his choice, it was simply that he preferred the pungent liquorice flavour of the black babies to the more insipid orange, lemon or raspberry of the others. The devouring of the jelly baby formed the last course of his midday meal which he usually ate at his desk among papers and index cards.

When Letty came into the room he offered her the bag of jelly babies but this was only a ritual gesture and he knew that she would refuse. Eating sweets was self-indulgent, and even though she was now in her sixties there was no reason why she should not keep her spare, trim figure.

The other occupants of the room, Norman and Marcia, were also eating their lunch. Norman had a chicken leg and Marcia an untidy sandwich, bulging with lettuce leaves and slippery slices of tomato. On a mat on the floor the electric kettle was pouring out steam. Somebody had put it on for a hot drink and forgotten to switch it off.

Norman wrapped up his bone and placed it neatly in the wastepaper basket. Edwin lowered an Earl Grey tea bag carefully into a mug and filled it with boiling water from the kettle. Then he added a slice of lemon from a small round plastic container.

Marcia opened a tin of instant coffee and made two mugs of the drink for herself and Norman. There was nothing particularly significant about her actionit was just a convenient arrangement they had. They both liked coffee and it was cheaper to buy a large tin and share it between them. Letty, having had her meal out, did not make herself a drink, but went into the cloakroom and fetched a glass of water which she placed on a coloured hand-worked raffia mat on her table. Her place was by the window and she had covered the window sill with pots of trailing plants, the kind that proliferated themselves by throwing out miniature replicas which could be rooted to make new plants. Nature she loved, and next to Nature, Art. Edwin had once quoted, even going on to finish the lines about her having warmed both hands before the fire of lifebut not too close, mind you. Now the fire was sinking, as it was for all of them, but was she, or were any of them, ready to depart?