A Glass of Blessings (4 page)

‘I always do this on Saturdays,’ said Rowena. ‘It’s so nice to be able to relax for a minute.’

‘What do the husbands do?’ I asked, for very few of them seemed to be drinking coffee.

‘Oh, they potter about doing the more manly shopping—going to the ironmonger, ordering things for the garden and that kind of thing, then they assemble in one of the pubs.’

‘Men seem to do that in London, too,’ I said. ‘Winter Saturday mornings one sees the duffle coat and the paraffin can—carrying paraffin does seem to be quite a manly job, doesn’t it.’

‘We’d better not stay here too long,’ said Rowena, and began looking anxiously round for the children. ‘There’s lunch to eat and then the party to get ready for. Would you like to go in and have a gin with Harry, while I wait in the car with the children?’

I found Harry at the bar with some rather unattractive- looking men and one or two women, all of whom were laughing at some joke. It occurred to me that these were probably the people I should be meeting at the party, and I began to look forward to it with rather modified feelings. It was some time before Harry seemed disposed to leave, and by the time we were outside in the fresh air I found that the two drinks I had so quickly tossed off had made me a little hazy and unsteady.

Harry took my arm. ‘Pity we have to hurry back,’ he said. ‘I wanted to show you the church.’

‘The church?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Yes, you always liked things like that,’ he mumbled.

‘Some other time, perhaps,’ I said in a rather stupid party voice. I tried to remember if I had ever known what the church was like—Victorian gothic with much brass, or cool austere eighteenth century with fine wall tablets? It seemed so unlike Harry to suggest going into a church.

He began to hum ‘We plough the fields and scatter’, and got into the driving seat. The children began to scuffle and fight among themselves, fractious at being kept waiting for their lunch.

‘I’m longing to see what you’ve brought to wear,’ said Rowena later, when we were cutting up things to go on bits of toast and little biscuits. ‘Your clothes are always so elegant.’

‘It’s a sort of mole-coloured velvet dress,’ I said, ‘and I shall wear my Victorian garnet necklace and earrings with it.’

‘How lovely it will be to see somebody not in black! We all wear it here for parties—like a kind of uniform, just with different jewellery and little touches, you know. I suppose it’s because we get so few opportunities to wear it, and women always think black suits them, don’t they? Or they heard some man once say that it did.’       ‘

‘Yes—an old love, or one of those rather mythical men who pronounce on such matters, a Frenchman or a Viennese.’

Rowena laughed. ‘I wonder if I have time to put on some nail varnish? It might do something for my hands.’ She held them out and glanced down at them a little sadly.

I hate coloured nail varnish myself, though I could not but agree that Rowena’s hands did need something. Even though she had a reasonable amount of domestic help they looked stained and rough, the nails uncared for, hardly even clean. But suddenly, from studying them with critical detachment, I found myself remembering her hands as they had been when we were young and gay Wren officers in Italy. The hand that Rocky Napier had once held on the balcony of the admiral’s villa had been soft and smooth, delicately pink-tipped, like those in Laurence Hope’s
Indian Love Lyrics
which my mother used to sing in Amy Woodforde Finden’s settings. My eyes filled with tears, both at the memory of the song and of Rowena’s hands as they used to be. Perhaps it was the contrast of the rough little hands with the elegant black dress that so moved me, and the feeling that they had done so many more worthwhile things than my own which were still as soft and smooth as they had ever been.

‘Leave them as they are,’ I said rather brusquely. ‘They look perfectly all right. Besides, the nail varnish wouldn’t really have time to dry now and might get smudged.’

‘Yes, you’re right. Doing one’s nails can be such an anxiety, can’t it?’

Later, when the guests had begun to arrive, nearly all the women in black as Rowena had prophesied, I found myself looking at their hands and liking better those that seemed a little careworn, however cunningly they might have been camouflaged with bright nail varnish and jewelled eternity rings. The only ring I wore myself was my engagement ring, an eighteenth-century setting of rose diamonds, so much prettier than a modern one.

The conversation was inclined to be heavy going, even though the drink was strong and Harry was good about replenishing glasses. The guests were nearly all married couples; and although husbands seemed to enjoy a conversation away from wives, one was often interrupted in such a conversation by the appearance of the wife, usually with some bright domestic remark that made one feel unwanted and shut out of the dreary cosiness of their lives.

‘Darling, the coke
did
come after all, just as you were getting the car out.’ Or, ‘I do hope Ingrid has managed to cope with putting the children to bed. Do you think we should just ring up to make sure, darling?’

The husbands usually murmured rather sheepish replies, but really they were more like bears than sheep, I thought—performing bears, who might rove round the room but only within the limits of their chains. A sharp tweak would soon bring them to heel again. In another way they reminded me of the dark blundering badgers which we had seen on the television the night before.

At one point Rowena led me over to a corner to meet the new vicar and his wife. He was a tall worried looking man, quite young but prematurely bald. His wife was about my own age, neatly dressed in green, with a pleasant ready smile and anxious grey eyes. I noticed that she was nervously twisting an empty glass in her hands.

‘Do let me get you another drink,’ I offered. ‘I’m staying in the house so can count myself as a kind of hostess.’

‘No, thank you very much,’ she said. ‘I don’t drink really, but it seems so unfriendly to come to a party and not have anything, so I did have
one.’

‘I think Harry was going to put out some soft drinks. I’m sure I could find you something.’

‘Well, that would be nice. I
am
rather thirsty,’ she said simply.

I went over to the table where the drinks were and came back with a glass of orange squash.

There was a rather awkward silence, the vicar just standing, his wife sipping her drink.

‘I hope to be coming to your church tomorrow,’ I said brightly. ‘How do you like being in the country?’

‘Well, it’s very different,’ said the vicar. ‘We were in London before.’

‘Yes, near Shepherd’s Bush,’ added his wife eagerly.

‘What a contrast!’ I exclaimed. ‘Though of course there is the green there—I mean Shepherd’s Bush Green itself.’

They both laughed rather nervously.

‘We are just about to have a new assistant priest at the church I go to,’ I said, babbling on rather since they did not venture any further remarks, ‘with a rather promising name—Marius Lovejoy Ran some. I looked him up in Crockford.’

‘Oh yes? I think I have met him—third in theology at Oxford; Ely Theological College; Curate at St Mark’s, Wapping; then St Gabriel’s, North Kensington,’ recited the vicar in rather Crockfordian style.

I wondered if he himself had got a better class in theology. ‘What is he like?’ I asked.

‘An excellent fellow,’ said the vicar dutifully, and looking at his gentle face I realized that he would probably have said the same about anybody. ‘Which church do you go to?’ he asked.

I had almost expected him to say worship at, and was relieved that he did not. I told him where I went.

‘Ah, St Luke’s. You would get full Catholic privileges
there’
he said rather wistfully.

We talked for a little, though in a guarded manner, about Father Thames, and had just reached another conversational pause when I heard the front doorbell ring.

Seeing that Rowena and Harry were both busy I went out into the hall intending to answer it, but found that Giuseppina, the Italian maid, was already there. She opened the door, then looked back at me appealingly.

‘That’s all right, Giuseppina,’ I said quickly, ‘I will take this gentleman in,’ for I could see that Piers was standing on the doorstep holding a branch of laurel leaves in his hand. I had the impression that he was rather drunk.

‘Wilmet, what a lovely surprise!’ He held the branch of laurel towards me and bowed.

‘Piers,’ I said feebly.

He continued to stand on the doorstep without moving. His eyes were glittering strangely like glass or water with the light on it, and his fair hair was dishevelled. I was somehow reminded of the Ancient Mariner. I took his hand and led him into the hall.

‘Rowena said you might be coming.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid I didn’t let her know. And now after spending an hour at the local to make me strong enough to face Harry, I find the drive full of Jaguars.’

‘Jaguars?’

‘Yes—cars, you know. Very unnerving to find oneself hemmed in by all those Jaguars and not a 279 among them.’

‘Is that the number you’re looking for at present?’ I asked.

‘Yes, have been for a week now. But
why
all the Jags?’

‘We’re having a cocktail party.’

‘So that’s it. Lead me to it then.’ Piers started to walk rather slowly and carefully in the direction of the voices and clinking glasses.

Was this it? I wondered—Piers’s trouble?
Drink?
I said the word ponderously to myself, giving it a rather dreadful emphasis. The words on the title page of the dictionary rose up before me—sometime, this, formerly the other. I imagined him drunk at a Portuguese university, sprawling in the sun, drunk in the British Museum, perhaps addressing the Elgin marbles.

‘Darling!’
Rowena ran forward, beautiful in her gaiety and the slight air of abandon the party had given her. ‘You’ve
come!’

The brother and sister embraced, then Rowena took him off to meet people.

‘Wilmet, not drinking?’ I found Harry by my side with a full glass. ‘I wish we had a conservatory we could go into.’

‘How Edwardian,’ I said lightly. ‘But you haven’t.’

‘What about having lunch in town with me one day to talk over old times?’ said Harry in a rather muffled voice.

I felt slightly hysterical. Had there been ‘old times’ as far as he and I were concerned, or was Harry just behaving in a conventional caddish way, in keeping with the idea of conservatories and Edwardian goings on? ‘Why, I’d love to,’ I said, recovering my social poise. ‘Hadn’t you better be going round with the drink? I can see some empty glasses.’

‘How sharp those beautiful eyes are,’ he said and moved off bear- or badger-like with the jug of cocktail.

‘What
was that Harry said?’ asked Piers who had come over to me.

‘Oh nothing—just silly party conversation.’

‘It’s terribly hot in here, isn’t it?’

‘Do you feel all right? Your eyes are glittering feverishly like the Ancient Mariner’s,’ I said.

‘Shall I engage you in conversation then?’

‘If you like.’

‘Then let’s sit down somewhere—what about Harry’s den or whatever he calls it?’

We walked, almost tiptoed, across the hall and into the little room which Harry used for the transaction of such business as overflowed from Mincing Lane into his home. Piers pushed some overcoats off the sofa and we sat down among other coats, hats and gloves. The room was dimly lit and a small gas fire popped and hissed with blue and coral flames. I felt the presence of stuffed animals around us. The atmosphere was almost romantic—indeed, a connoisseur of unusual atmospheres would have said that it was. The muffled noise of the party came to us across the hall.

‘How pleasant to find you here, Wilmet. You do stand out among all these rather dreadful people,’ said Piers.

‘Do you find them dreadful? I expect they’re very nice, really.’

‘Of course they’re not, and you know it,’ he said truculently, staring at me so intently that I felt bound to say something.

‘Sybil—that’s my mother-in-law—and I are thinking of coming to your Portuguese classes,’ I began. ‘We want to go to Portugal next summer.’

‘Really? And you think you will try to learn a few useful phrases?’ He laughed sardonically.

‘But you wouldn’t
mind
if we came?’

‘How could I? If you pay the fee you are entitled to come, of course.’ He seemed uninterested in the subject, so rather in desperation I began telling him about Father Thames and his domestic troubles. We talked for quite a long time about these, until I began to feel it was time we went back to the main party, and Piers to be conscious of his empty glass.

‘We must meet more often,’ he said. ‘And I don’t mean at the Portuguese classes.’

‘Of course! You must come to dinner one evening,’ I said rather formally.

‘I didn’t quite mean that,’ he said. ‘I thought we might go for a walk in the park and have tea at a teashop like clandestine lovers.’

I smiled. The evening had been almost too successful, and I had the pleased and comfortable feeling I used to have after parties in Italy when I had been admired and cherished. But now, of course, it was rather different. Still, there could be no harm in having lunch with Harry or walking with Piers in the park. I could show Harry what a good wife Rowena was; and as for Piers, drifting and rootless, perhaps often drunk, it might be that my friendship could be beneficial to him. It seemed an excellent winter programme. Then, for no apparent reason, I remembered my promise to Mary Beamish to join the panel of blood donors. I saw myself lying on a table, blood pouring from a vein in my arm into a bottle which, as soon as it was full, would be snatched away and rushed to hospital to save somebody’s life. There seemed at that moment no limit to what I could do.

The next morning naturally brought with it a feeling of anti-climax. We all got up late, and my announcement that I should like to go to church was received with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

‘But it’s the first Sunday in the month,’ Harry pointed out ‘We never go in the mornings then. The vicar will be having sung Eucharist, there’ll be hardly anyone there and the service will be much longer.’