Barbara Pym

Jane And Prudence

Laura Dobie

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.

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.

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.

'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.

'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.’

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

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.

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.

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

‘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.

Jane And Prudence quotes

Join the club