Barbara Pym

Jane And Prudence

Laura Dobie

Jane wanted to agree and to offer him the broken dwarf, perhaps for Constance's grave, as a kind of comment the futility of earthly love, but instead she said gently, “You make Jessie happy. That will be the right thing for you once.”

Prue could have this kind of life if she wanted it; one couldn't go on having romantic love affairs indefinitely. One had to settle down sooner or later into the comfortable spinster or the contented or bored wife.

There was a certain consolation in the crowds of fashionably dressed women, especially as Prudence felt that she could equal and even excel some of them. Had they too suffered in love? she wondered. Were some of them sufering even at this moment? Or had they passed through suffering to something worse, the blankness and boredom of indifference? It was imposible to tell from their smooth, well-groomed faces, and Prudence wondered whether she too looked as indifferent. Or might somebody ask, 'Who is that interesting-looking young woman, with the traces of tears on her cheeks, eating smoked salmon?"

…Prue hadn't really been in love with Fabian. Indeed, it was obvious that at times she found him both boring and irritating. But wasn’t that what so many marriages were - finding a person boring and irritating and yet loving him? Who could imagine a man who was never boring or irritating?

Prudence had as yet no photograph of Fabian and she felt that it would somehow have been in bad taste to flaunt him there at the vicarage, when he was to be seen in the flesh, walking about the village. So the table held only the roses, a book of poems that Fabian had given her and a novel of the kind that Prudence enjoyed, well written and tortuous, with a good dash of culture and the inevitable unhappy or indefinite ending, which was so like life.

How much could she remember without the book? A line came into her head. Not one of all those ravenous hours, but the devours.. . If only she were one of these busy, useful women, who were always knitting or sewing. Then perhaps it wouldn't matter about the ravenous hours. She sat for a long time among the faded ink of her notebooks, brooding, until Nicholas came in with their Ovaltine on a tray and it was time to go to bed.

"Typing a man's thesis, correcting proofs, putting sheets sides-to-middle, bringing up children, balancing the house- keeping budget - all these things are nothing, really' said Jane in a sad, thoughtful tone. 'Or they would be nothing to a man like Fabian Driver. Therefore it is just as well that Prudence is an attractive young woman.’

But once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

There was a pause. It's like being at a cocktail party without anything to drink, thought Prudence. 

‘Would you like a sandwich?’ she asked, offering a dejected-looking plate.

She had a natural distrust of good-looking men, though they seemed to offer a challenge which she was never unwilling to accept.

‘I always think one should have brandy in the house,’ said Mrs Crampton.

‘Does she mean in the house or in the House?’ said Miss Morrow to Jane.

‘I suppose we should wait to be introduced,’ said Jane, looking over to where Edward Lyall and his mother were waiting, as if to receive presentations. ‘It's a pity they're standing right in front of the refreshments, though. We could at least have made a start on those.’

Whatever did Prue see in him? she wondered, conscious as she asked herself of the futility of her question. Arthur Grampian and his wife Lucy - one mustn't forget his wife Lucy, though it was obvious that that Prue did. But this insignificant-looking little man... Oh, but it was splendid the things women were doing for men all the time, thought Jane. Making them feel, perhaps sometimes by no more than a casual glance, that they were loved and admired and desired when they were worthy of none of these things - enabling them to preen themselves and puff out their plumage like birds and bask in the sunshine of love, real or imagined, it didn't matter which. And yet Prudence's love didn't seem to have had any very noticeable effect on Arthur Grampian…

"After all,' Jane had said, 'I don't really feel so very much of a mother, having only one child, and you know how bad I am at presiding at meetings. It would be far more suitable if somebody like Miss Doggett were to do it, though I suppose spinsters aren't eligible, really.’

‘We didn't touch on his war career, either, said Nicholas. ‘That would have been a topic of conversation. 

‘I don't think he served with any particular distinction.’

‘I meant his triumphs with women,’ Jane explained. 'He might have had those, but I suppose they were hardly suitable topics of conversation for a vicarage tea party.’ Even the water-tank in the church hall was more in keeping.

‘Tea not ready yet?’ he said, in the way men do, not pausing to consider that some woman may at that very moment be pouring the water into the pot.

Indeed, it was now almost a year since he had thought of anybody but himself.

She had calmed down by the time she arrived at her flat. As if it mattered what Geoffrey Manifold thought bout her! He was a dull young man who kept his private tin of Nescafé locked in a drawer. It was impertinent of him to him to ask her what she had been reading. She wished now that she hadn't told him.

Disliking humanity in geneal, she was one of those excessively tenderhearted people who are greatly moved by the troubles of complete strangers, in which she sometimes imagined herself playing a noble part. The man sitting at her table, who had at first appeared to be a bore or even a menace, was now proved to be an object of interest. There was both nobility and pathos about him.

Her fine brain, which was now puzzling over a misplaced footnote, could not be expected to function under such stupidly rigid conditions.

'A casserole of hearts,’ murmured Jane in confusion, thinking of the grave and the infidelities. Did he eat his victims, then? 

'My nephew the butcher had hearts and liver this week, madam, but I didn't know if you liked hearts. Not everybody does.’

'And do you like cooking and looking after yourself asked Jane in a brighter tone.

‘One manages, said Fabian; one has to, of course.’

The use of the third person seemed to add pathos, whic was perhaps just what he intended, Jane thought.

Dr Grampian was some kind of an economist or historian, she believed. He wrote the kind of books that nobody could be expected to read.

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.

So witty and sharply observed, yet also so tender and sad in places, too.

Jane And Prudence

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