It was several days before I saw Mrs. Napier again, although I heard her going in and out and there seemed to be voices coming from her room every evening. I had an idea that I might ask her in to coffee sometime but hesitated about it because I did not quite know how to convey the impression that it was not, of course, to become a regular thing. I wanted to appear civil rather than friendly. One day a new roll of toilet paper of a rather inferior brand appeared in the lavatory, and I also noticed that an attempt had been made to clean the bath. It was not as well done as I should have liked to see it; people do not always realise that cleaning a bath properly can be quite hard work.
‘I suppose she did it,’ said Mrs. Morris, my ‘woman’, who came twice a week. ‘She doesn’t look as if she could clean anything.’
Mrs. Morris was a Welshwoman who had come to London as a girl but still retained her native accent. I marvelled as always at her secret knowledge, when, as far as I knew, she had not yet set eyes on Mrs. Napier.
‘Kettle’s boiling, miss,’ she said, and I knew that it must be eleven o’clock, for she made this remark so regularly that I should have thought something was wrong if she had forgotten.
‘Oh, good, then let’s have our tea,’ I said, making the response expected of me. I waited for Mrs. Morris to say, ‘There’s a drop of milk in this jug,’ as she always did on discovering the remains of yesterday’s milk, and then we were ready for our tea.
‘I was cleaning at the vicarage yesterday, those rooms they’re going to let,’ said Mrs. Morris. ‘Miss Malory was saying how she wanted you to go there.’
‘Yes, I know, but I think it’s really better for me to stay here,’ I said.
‘Yes, indeed, Miss Lathbury. It wouldn’t be right at all for you to live at the vicarage.’
‘Well, Father Malory and Miss Malory are my friends.’
‘Yes, but it wouldn’t be right. If Miss Malory was to go away now . . .’
‘You think it wouldn’t be quite respectable?’ I asked.
‘Respectable?’ Mrs. Morris stiffened, and straightened the dark felt hat she always wore. ‘That isn’t for me to say, Miss Lathbury. But it isn’t natural for a man not to be married.’
‘Clergymen don’t always want to,’ I explained, ‘or they think it better they shouldn’t.’
‘Strong passions, isn’t it,’ she muttered obscurely. ‘Eating meat, you know, it says that in the Bible. Not that we get much of it now. If he was a real Father like Father Bogart,’ she went on, naming the priest of the Roman Catholic Church in our district, ‘you could understand it.’
‘But Mrs. Morris, you’re a regular churchwoman. I thought you liked Father Malory.’
‘Oh, yes, I’ve nothing against him really, but it isn’t right.’ She finished her tea and went over to the sink. ‘I’ll just wash up these things.’
I watched her stiff uncompromising back which hardly seemed to bend even though the sink was a low one.
‘Has something upset you?’ I asked. ‘Something about Father Malory?’
‘Oh, miss,’ she turned to face me, her hands red and dripping from the hot water. ‘It’s that old black thing he wears on his head in church.’
‘You mean his biretta?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘I don’t know what he calls it. Like a little hat, it is.’
‘But you’ve been going to St. Mary’s for years,’ I said. ‘You must have got used to it by now.’
‘Well, it was my sister Gladys and her husband, been staying with us they have. I took them to church Sunday evening and they didn’t like it at all, nor the incense, said it was Roman Catholic or something and we’d all be kissing the Pope’s toe before you could say knife.’
She sat down with the drying-cloth in her hands. She looked so worried that I had to stop myself smiling.
‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘Evan and I have always been to St. Mary’s because it’s near, but it isn’t like the church I went to as a girl, where Mr. Lewis was vicar. He didn’t have incense or wear that old black hat.’
‘No, I don’t suppose he did,’ I agreed, for I knew the seaside town she came from and I remembered the ‘English’ church, unusual among so many chapels, with the Ten Commandments in Welsh and in English on either side of the altar and a special service on Sunday morning for the visitors. I did not remember that they had expected or received ‘Catholic privileges.’
‘I was always church,’ said Mrs. Morris proudly. ‘Never been in the chapel, though I did once go to the Ebenezer social, but I don’t want to have anything to do with some old Pope. Kissing his toe, indeed!’ She looked up at me, half laughing, not quite sure if Gladys and her husband had been joking when they said it.
‘There’s a statue in St. Peter’s Church in Rome,’ I explained, ‘and people do kiss the toe. But that’s only Roman Catholics,’ I said in a loud clear voice. ‘Don’t you remember Father Malory explaining about the Pope in his Sunday morning sermons last year?’
‘Oh, Sunday morning, was it?’ she laughed derisively. ‘That’s all very fine, standing up and talking about the Pope. A lot of us could do that. But who’s going to cook the Sunday dinner?’
No answer seemed to be needed or expected to this question, and we laughed together, a couple of women against the whole race of men. Mrs. Morris dried her hands, fumbled in the pocket of her apron and took out a squashed packet of cigarettes. ‘Let’s have a fag, any road,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’ll just tell Gladys what you said, Miss Lathbury, about it being some old statue.’
I did not feel that I had done as well as I might have in my attempt to instruct Mrs. Morris in the differences between the Roman Church and ours, but I did not think that Julian Malory could have done much better.
After she had gone I boiled myself a foreign egg for lunch and was just making some coffee when there was a knock on the kitchen door.
It was Mrs. Napier.
‘I’ve come to ask something rather awkward,’ she said, smiling.
‘Well, come in and have a cup of coffee with me. I was just making some.’
‘Thank you, that would be nice.’
We went into the sitting-room and I switched on the fire. She looked around her with frank interest and curiosity.
‘Rather nice,’ she said. ‘I suppose this is the best from the country rectory?’
‘Most of it,’ I said, ‘and I’ve bought a few things from time to time.’
‘Look,’ she said abruptly, ‘I was wondering if your woman, the one who’s been here this morning, could possibly do for me at all? Perhaps on the mornings when you’re not here?’
‘I daresay she would be glad to have some more work,’ I said, ‘and she’s quite good. She does go to the vicarage occasionally.’
‘Oh, the vicarage.’ Mrs. Napier made a face. ‘Will the vicar call?’
‘I can ask him to, if you like,’ I said seriously. ‘He and his sister are friends of mine.’
‘He isn’t married then? One of those . . . I mean,’ she added apologetically as if she had said something that might offend me, ‘one of the kind who don’t marry?’
‘Well, he isn’t married and as he’s about forty I dare say he won’t now.’ I seemed to have spent so much time lately in talking about the celibacy of the clergy in general and Julian Malory in particular that I was a little tired of the subject.
‘That’s just when they break out,’ laughed Mrs. Napier. ‘I always imagine that clergymen need wives to help them with their parish work, but I suppose most of his congregation are devout elderly women with nothing much to do, so that’s all right. Holy fowl, you know.’
I felt that I did not like Mrs. Napier any more than I had at our first meeting, and she was dropping ash all over my newly brushed carpet.
‘Will your husband be coming back soon?’ I asked, to break the rather awkward silence that had developed.
‘Oh, soon enough,’ she said casually. She stubbed out her cigarette in a little dish that wasn’t meant to be an ash-tray and began walking about the room. ‘I know it sounds awful’, she said, standing by the window, ‘but I’m not really looking forward to his coming very much.’
‘Oh, that’s probably because you haven’t seen him for some time,’ I said, in a bright sensible tone.
‘That doesn’t really make any difference. There’s more to it than that.’
‘But surely it will be all right once he is here and you’ve had a little time together?’ I said, beginning to feel the inadequacy that an unmarried and inexperienced woman must always feel when discussing such things.
‘Perhaps it will. But we’re so different. We met at a party during the war and fell in love in the silly romantic way people did then. You know. . . .’
‘Yes, I suppose people did.’ In my Censorship days I had read that they did and I had sometimes wanted to intervene and tell them to wait a little longer, until they were quite sure.
‘Rockingham is rather good-looking, of course, and everyone thinks him charming and amusing. He has some money of his own and likes to dabble in painting. But you see,’ she turned to me very seriously, ‘he knows nothing about anthropology and cares less.’
I listened in bewildered silence. ‘Why, ought he to?’ I asked stupidly.
‘Well, I did this field trip in Africa when he was away and I met Everard Bone, who was in the Army out there. He’s an anthropologist too. You may have seen him on the stairs.’
‘Oh, yes, I think I have. A tall man with fair hair.’
‘We’ve done a lot of work together, and it does give one a special link with a person, to have done any academic work with him. Rockingham and I just haven’t got that.’
Did she always call him Rockingham? I wondered irrelevantly. It sounded so formal, and yet it was difficult to know how to abbreviate it unless one called him Rocky or used some other name.
‘Surely you and your husband have other things in common, though, perhaps deeper and more lasting than this work?’ I asked, feeling that I must try to take my part in this difficult conversation. I hardly liked to think that she might also have these other things with Everard Bone. Indeed, I did not think that I liked Everard Bone at all, if he was the person I had seen on the stairs. His name, his pointed nose, and the air of priggishness which fair men sometimes have, had set me against him. Also, and here I was ready to admit that I was old-fashioned and knew nothing of the ways of anthropologists, I did not think it quite proper that they should have worked together while Rockingham Napier was serving his country. Here the picture of the Wren officers in their ill-fitting white uniforms obtruded itself, but I resolutely pushed it back. Whatever he may have had to do, he had been serving his country.
‘Of course,’ Mrs. Napier went on, ‘when you’re first in love, everything about the other person seems delightful, especially if it shows the difference between you. Rocky’s very tidy and I’m not.’
So he could be called Rocky now. Somehow it made him seem more human.
‘You should see my bedside table, such a clutter of objects, cigarettes, cosmetics, aspirins, glasses of water, The Golden Bough, a detective story, any object that happens to take my fancy. Rocky used to think that so sweet, but after a while it maddened him, it was just a mess.’
‘I suppose it does get like that,’ I said. ‘One ought to be careful of one’s little ways.’ Dora’s beaded cover on the milk jug, her love of bakelite plates, and all the irritating things I did myself and didn’t know about . . . perhaps even my cookery books by my bed might drive somebody mad. ‘But surely that’s only a detail,’ I said, ‘and it ought not to affect the deeper relationship.’
‘Of course you’ve never been married,’ she said, putting me in my place among the rows of excellent women. ‘Oh, well . . .’ she moved towards the door. ‘I suppose we shall go our own ways. That’s how most marriages turn out and it could be worse.’
‘Oh, but you mustn’t say that,’ I burst out, having all the romantic ideals of the unmarried. ‘I’m sure everything will be all right really.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Thank you for the coffee, anyway, and a sympathetic hearing. I really ought to apologise for talking to you like this, but confession is supposed to be good for the soul.’
I murmured something, but I did not think I had been particularly sympathetic and I certainly had not felt it, for people like the Napiers had not so far come within my range of experience. I was much more at home with Winifred and Julian Malory, Dora Caldicote, and the worthy but uninteresting people whom I met at my work or in connection with the church. Such married couples as I knew appeared to be quite contented, or if they were not they did not talk about their difficulties to comparative strangers. There was certainly no mention of them ‘going their own ways’, and yet how did I really know that they didn’t? This idea raised disquieting thoughts and doubts, so I turned on the wireless to distract me. But it was a women’s programme and they all sounded so married and splendid, their lives so full and yet so well organised, that I felt more than usually spinsterish and useless. Mrs. Napier must be hard up for friends if she could find nobody better than me to confide in, I thought. At last I went downstairs to see if there were any letters. There was nothing for me, but two for Mrs. Napier, from one of which I learned that her Christian name was Helena. It sounded rather old-fashioned and dignified, not at all the kind of name I should have imagined for her. Perhaps it was a good omen for the future that she should have such a name.