Civil to Strangers and Other Writings by Barbara Pym
It was interesting to observe the few other women present on this occasion, to speculate on who they might be – not just the wives of Fellows, she was sure of that (they would no doubt be sitting at home watching television) – and whether they were persons of distinction. One, at the high table on the Rector’s right, wearing an MA gown over her black dress, looked like a female academic, the kind of person one might have difficulty in making conversation with. She was sitting next to a grey-haired man with a rather nice face. He reminded her of somebody she had once known a long time ago, but was it, could it possibly be, the same person? She must ask George or look at the table plan.
‘You can bring yourself to eat deer?’ Ned was saying.
‘Do you know who that man is, next to the woman on the Rector’s right?’ It was just possible that Ned, being Eng. Lit., might know.
‘Oh, I think it’s one of those grey English dons from one of the other colleges or even a red-brick university.’
A red-brick university. She knew he had not ended up here at Oxford, though she had not followed his career all these years, and they had been a good many, over thirty, since she had last seen him. Gervase Harding, the name came back to her. It had seemed a romantic name in those days …
Strawberries in wine, served in tall glasses with whipped cream on the top, was the next course, and with it a delicate white wine, Vouvray perhaps, one of the few wines whose name she knew and which she remembered having drunk on holiday in the Loire.
‘Strawberries,’ said Ned, with evident enjoyment. ‘Would they be grown locally?’
She didn’t knew and her concentration was divided now, for she was thinking about Gervase, stealing surreptitious glances, remembering. Words from one of the numbers of a popular musical of a few years ago came to her, something about seeing somebody across a crowded room on an enchanted evening: something like that, hadn’t it been? But that song had been about meeting somebody for the first time, surely, not being suddenly confronted by a person one had known forty years ago, now both old and grey?
‘What are you smiling at?’ Ned’s gnat-like voice broke in.
‘Only that I’ve seen somebody I used to know a long time ago, and his hair, which used to be fair, is now quite grey or white – hard to tell exactly at this distance.’
‘“His golden locks Time hath to silver turn’d,”’ Ned quoted mockingly. ‘Do you know that poem?’
‘Peele, isn’t it, or one of those minor Elizabethans.’ She did remember.
‘And there’s a line about his helmet now making a hive for bees. Would that apply, too?’
‘I hardly know – not having kept pace with his career, whatever it may have been … ’
They now rose from the table and left the hall for the tables to be cleared and rearranged for dessert. She found herself in a chilly passageway and drew her fragile Indian-gauze stole more closely round her shoulders. A thin, meagre-looking clergyman was by her, not as easy to talk to as the young American had been.
‘What happens now?’ she asked. There was a stack of bicycles in a corner, which seemed an unusual note.
‘Happens?’ The clergyman was evidently unaware of anything out of the ordinary.
‘These bicycles.’
‘Oh, those. I expect they belong to the domestics.’
Certainly there was a clatter of crockery and the sound of voices, ‘rough’ voices almost, so they must have been near the kitchens. She was looking out for Gervase, but there was no sign of him. Through the open window a few people could be seen walking about in the still evening air. All in the April evening, she thought, remembering another tag. It was a song – something the clergyman might know, she felt – but he was unresponsive when she asked him, and looked at her as if she were mad. Elderly women quoting poetry was something to be avoided, to run a mile from. Would it be possible to approach Gervase before the evening was out, to have a few words with him? She had not prepared herself for anything like this, and now began to think what she would say to him, how she would greet him after all this time.
‘This is the new quadrangle you can see from the window,’ the clergyman said, as if making amends for his failure over the April evening. ‘There’s been a good deal of controversy about it.’
She looked out at the stark buildings, blending unhappily with the ancient mellow stones of the earlier work. They reminded her of something a child might construct from his box of bricks. In the centre there was a piece of modern sculpture – hardly a statue – which seemed to resemble the lower half of a torso, as far as she could make out in the dim light.
‘It’s good to encourage modern artists,’ she ventured, with an attempt at a charitable approach which she felt the clergyman might expect. But he evidently did not expect it, and said briefly that he thought the work hideous. On this note the crowd began to move into the hall again and she became separated from him.
‘All right?’ George was at her side, solicitous for his guest.
‘Yes, fine, thank you. I’ve seen somebody I used to know.’
‘Really? Perhaps I can bring you together again.’
‘I don’t think you’d know him – he’s a guest here, I think.’ She spoke Gervase’s name, but met with no response.
‘You’re sitting on the Rector’s right for dessert,’ George said. ‘You may not find him very easy to talk to,’ he added, on a warning note. ‘And on your other side … ’
Of course it was not Gervase on her other side; that would have been too much to expect, too much like a romantic novel, though fiction now tended to be rather more realistic than life, she felt. The young man on her other side was so very young, with his fresh cheeks and soft fair hair, that he might have been chosen in piquant contrast. It would be many years before time turned his golden locks to silver. A brief polite enquiry on her part brought forth the information that he was a junior Fellow, newly appointed, and that his subject was computers. She was at a loss for a moment and then made some fatuous remark about computers threatening to rule our lives, an observation he treated with the polite contempt it deserved. In the silence that followed he turned to his other neighbour and she found herself invited to take port with the Rector. Or take something else, a golden liquid whose name she didn’t catch in an elegant eighteenth-century decanter …. would she prefer that? No, she would take port; that was surely more correct, the kind of thing one ought to drink on this kind of evening. And now the Rector indicated a huge golden pineapple and invited her to partake of that (‘partake’ was the word that came into her mind), and there was no need to be daunted, because it was already cut into slices, all neatly put together again to make the whole fruit. So she took a slice of pineapple and the Rector asked her where she lived.
‘I live near a forest,’ she said, using the same bit of talk she had brought out for the young American, Ned.
‘Ah, the Wychwood forest?’ said the Rector, and he smiled a kind of secret smile.
‘You know it?’ she asked.
‘I did know it, once, many years ago.’
It seemed to be that kind of evening, with its reminiscences of old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago. But of course she could hardly quote that, either to the Rector or to the young computer expert on her other side. So she let the Rector’s observation fall, as perhaps it was meant to, without comment, while she cut the rind off her slice of pineapple. Having successfully dealt with this, she looked down into the body of the hall to see if she could find Gervase again. And now she saw that he was sitting at the table just below hers. He was much nearer than before and she was able to observe him more closely. He had taken port and, like her, a slice of pineapple. There was something pleasing in the idea of their choice being the same – ‘Great minds think alike’, that old childish joke. There was no doubt that he was still a good-looking man and people would probably say that he had worn better than she had, if there was ever a question of comparison, which there obviously never would be. He had married, of
‘Memory plays such curious tricks.’ The Rector’s voice came to her, as if echoing her thoughts. So he was still on about the Wychwood forest, she realized, and had perhaps been disappointed by her lack of response.
‘Yes,’ she had to agree, ‘it certainly does.’ Now she cast about in her mind for an example, something to embellish that bald statement. ‘All that wonderful weather of long ago, summer and springs!’ she said.
‘I think of the forest as being always covered in bluebells, and a little later sheets of wild garlic. Is it still?’
‘Well, at the right time of year,’ she said cautiously. ‘In a few weeks from now it will be just like that.’
Now she looked away and down the hall again to where Gervase was sitting, and it seemed to her that he looked in her direction, that their eyes met. If he had indeed recognized her, they were now coming nearer to a meeting. Well, hardly that – there had been nothing romantically Byronic about their last meeting. Things had just fizzled out, so either he would remember her or he would not. She must be prepared for a blank look of non-recognition – men were expert at that.
They rose from the table for the final grace. The dinner was over, but the evening was not yet at an end. George was by her side again. They would go into a common room for coffee and liqueurs, brandy or whisky, whatever she felt like. Ned, the young American, came up to her. She could feel his curiosity as he asked, ‘Have you met up with your friend?’
‘Not yet.’ That sounded as if it was only a matter of time before the meeting with Gervase, and that was by no means certain.
Now the atmosphere of the evening was subtly different, and not all that subtly, either, she thought. A group of younger Fellows were crowding round the table, helping themselves to drinks. It was like a mass of young animals, tomcats in their prime. She noticed the young computer expert among them, less inhibited now. Many of the older Fellows had left after the dinner, returning decorously to tall North Oxford houses where wives waited grimly. Yet there would have been nothing for them to be grim about, unless it was the superior food and drink and possibly higher level of conversation.
George was offering her brandy or whisky, but she would drink nothing more. Instead, she took a crystallized fruit from an exquisitely arranged box – a beautiful apricot glistening with sugar.
At this point, just as she was about to bite into the apricot, she heard George’s voice saying, ‘I believe you two know each other,’ and Gervase was standing at her side.
So it had not been a romantic glance of mutual recognition, she realized, meeting his response of polite surprise when George introduced them. Her name did not appear to mean anything to him. She would have to fill in the details, explain that they had met all those years ago when they had both read English at Oxford. She was about to embark on this with mechanical politeness, in the way that nice women so often find themselves doing, but then she suddenly thought, Why should I? Perhaps she had been given courage and independence by the drink, though ‘drink’ was a crude way of describing the measured succession of civilized and appropriate wines with which her glass had been filled. Anyway, something had got into her, made her remain silently smiling at George’s introductory words, ‘I believe you two know each other’; so, taking pity on Gervase’s air of puzzlement, she said at last, ‘Used to know,’ and let him make what he would of it.
‘Then I’ll leave you to talk over old times,’ George said, moving away.
‘“Old times,”’ Gervase repeated, obviously trying to gain time. She imagined him casting about in his memory, thrashing around, trying to remember what these ‘old times’ could have been. It was strange the way she had found herself getting nearer to him as the evening went on – first the distant glimpse, then the closer view at dessert, and now so close that she was looking up into his face, noticing the lines and the golden locks turned to silver but still, she could see now, with some gold in them.
‘This wasn’t here in those days,’ he said, indicating the new quadrangle through the open door. ‘Would you like to stroll outside? It’s such a warm evening.’
Not as warm as all that, she thought, drawing her Indian stole more closely round her shoulders, but of course men’s clothes were thicker and warmer.
‘Do you like this new style of architecture?’ she asked formally. ‘It seems not to go very well with the rest.’
‘No, I don’t like it in this setting. It reminds me too much of my own university, built in a less gracious age.’
‘I suppose one must move with the times, even in Oxford,’ she said. Can you think of nothing better to say? she asked herself. They were now standing by the modern statue, seeming to contemplate, even study, it. Some intelligent comment was called for here. ‘I suppose the texture of the stone is the most satisfying thing about this,’ she said, placing her hand on it.
He sighed. ‘In my university this would have been defaced, I’m afraid – the form is rather asking for it, isn’t it?’
She looked at the lumpish mass again doubtfully, and saw that it was possible to give it a certain interpretation; if one’s mind worked that way, she amended, and perhaps the minds of provincial students in the 1970s did work that way. It was not a conversation that could usefully be extended or continued, but he was obviously hoping that in the course of it she might give him a clue about the old times they were supposed to be recalling. And now she began to relent; she decided to throw him a crumb.
‘Do you remember Professor Ransome’s lectures?’ she asked. ‘Wasn’t it at one of those we first met?’
‘Of course, that was it!’ he said gratefully, though she might have been any one of several other girls he could have met at those lectures, she thought. Some detail was needed, some convincing detail – something she had worn, perhaps, but a man could hardly be expected to remember something like that.
‘On the Elizabethans,’ she said. ‘Don’t you always think of the way he used to recite Peele?’
‘Yes.’ Gervase smiled. ‘“His golden locks Time hath to silver turn’d.”’ He glanced at her own grey, neatly-set-for-the-occasion hair. She was startled at his quoting that, to think he seemed almost to be applying it to her as she had applied it to him. ‘I wouldn’t have said that my hair was ever golden,’ she remarked. But now their reminiscences threatened to become too intimate. It was unsuitable and faintly ludicrous for people in their sixties to recall what colour their hair had been forty years ago.
‘I’ve been trying to remember your wife’s name,’ she said, in a louder, more social tone. ‘Something beginning with “M”, wasn’t it? Not Mary or Margaret … ’
‘My wife?’ He seemed startled. Perhaps she was dead and the recollection too painful. ‘But I had no wife. I was never married.’
She looked at him in amazement. It was Gervase; there had been no case of mistaken identity, but in some way her memory had been at fault. He had never married! An abyss seemed to open before her, and their conversation came to a full stop. Standing by an ornamental pool, they suddenly had nothing more to say to each other.
A group approached, others strolling in the warm air – all in the April evening, indeed. Ned was among them, and she heard his unmistakable tones drawing attention to a dead pigeon lying in the water round the statue. ‘It ought to be removed,’ he said. ‘Somebody should take it away – otherwise it will putrefy.’
She wanted to laugh at his choice of the word ‘putrefy’, and would have introduced Gervase to him, but then George came out, looking for his guest, judging that she had probably had enough talking about old times.
‘Are you staying in college?’ he asked Gervase politely. ‘Or can we give y
‘Thank you, but I’m staying here.’
‘Is it comfortable?’ she asked. ‘Tolerable – I only hope there’ll be a bedside light in working order.’
‘Yes, that’s a great thing,’ she agreed.
‘It’s been so nice renewing our acquaintance,’ he said, turning to her.
‘Yes, it has, even if we’ve had to revise our memories a little.’ She smiled, picturing him going back to his northern university, unmarried. Perhaps he had had a mistress, then, but it was too late and she was too tired to speculate further. It would puzzle her in the watches of the night, that name beginning with ‘M’.
They all said good night and George fetched her fur cape. ‘Quite an evening,’ he said. ‘I do hope you enjoyed it.’
When he got back home, his wife, cosily tucked up in bed rather than grimly waiting, would ask him how the evening had gone, what they had eaten, who had been there, and whether his guest had enjoyed herself. He would be able to tell her that she did seem to have done that. She had got on very well with that young American and she had even met an old flame or something – he wasn’t quite sure what.
Finding a Voice: a radio talk
This was recorded on February 8th 1978 for a BBC series and transmitted on BBC Radio 3 on April 4th.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether novelists like to be remembered for what they’ve said or because they’ve said it in their own particular way – in their own distinctive voice. But how do you acquire your own voice or indeed any kind of voice? Does it come about as inevitably as your height or the colour of your eyes or do you develop it deliberately, perhaps in imitation of a writer you admire?
I’ve been trying to write novels, with many ups and downs, over more than forty years. I started as a schoolgirl, when I used to contribute to the school magazine – mostly parodies, conscious even then of other people’s styles. Then in 1929, when I was sixteen, I discovered Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow. I came across this sophisticated masterpiece in the wilds of Shropshire, through that marvellous institution Boots’ Library, now, alas, as much of a period memory as the seven and sixpenny hardback novel. I was a keen reader of all kinds of modern fiction, and more than anything else I read at that time Crome Yellow made me want to be a novelist myself. I don’t suppose for a moment that I appreciated the book’s finer satirical points, but it seemed to me funnier than anything I had read before, and the idea of writing about a group of people in a certain situation – in this case upper-class intellectuals in a country house – immediately attracted me, so I decided that I wanted to write a novel like Crome Yellow.