An Unsuitable Attachment (14 page)

When the flame was burning blue and steady (as it said in the book of instructions) he left the room gladly, shutting the door firmly behind him. His study, with its big untidy desk strewn with folders of notes and the proofs of a book he was correcting, was to him the most congenial room in the house. He worked contentedly for some time and was deep in the intricacies of a genealogy when the telephone rang. It was a colleague, Everard Bone, who with his wife Mildred was to be one of the guests at the dinner party that evening.

'Such a nuisance, Mildred seems to have flu,' he said irritably. 'She thought it would be unwise to come out this evening, so I'm afraid that's that. She sends her apologies, of course.'

'I'm so sorry,' said Rupert, 'but I quite see that she shouldn't come out. I'd been looking forward to seeing you both, and I had wanted to discuss that Unesco thing with you.'

'Oh,
I
shall be coming,' said Everard. 'I only rang to say that Mildred can't.'

'But can you leave her? Will she be all right?' As a bachelor it seemed slightly shocking to Rupert that a colleague, even though an anthropologist, should think nothing of abandoning his wife when she was ill. It smacked a little too much of a primitive society.

'Oh yes, my mother is staying with us—so she'll look after Mildred.'

'That's all right, then—I'll see you this evening.' Rupert had never met Everard's mother, but remembering his own mother and how comforting she had been in his childhood illnesses he was immediately reassured. Now all that remained was to find a suitable woman to replace Mildred.

The other guests were to be two more anthropologists—Gervase Fairfax and his wife Robina—and of course Ianthe Broome. Rupert went over in his mind the unattached women he knew, beginning with Esther Clovis, the formidable secretary of the Foresight Research Centre, and ending with a pretty young typist who worked in the department of the University where he lectured. Then he suddenly remembered Sophia Ainger's sister, the rather odd young woman he had met in Bloomsbury that evening and taken out for a drink. The Pre-Raphaelite beatnik, in other words. She would be suitable, but what was her name and where did she live? And was it likely that she would be free at such short notice? Dare he even ask her? The obvious thing to do was to ring Sophia at the vicarage.

'Penelope?' said Sophia. 'Well, she
might
be free. Though of course,' she added, good sister that, she was, 'she does go out such a lot. And if it's
this
evening, I rather doubt. . . Still, you could try. I'm sure she'd love to come if she could.'

So it was that about half an hour later the telephone rang again at the vicarage. It was Penelope, to tell Sophia that she had suddenly been asked to go to dinner at Rupert Stonebird's that evening, but that she wouldn't have time to go home and change first. She would come to the vicarage and borrow something of Sophia's.

Penelope arrived muffled up in a duffel coat and with her hair wild and untidy.

'And I'm in my old tartan skirt and black sweater,' she lamented. 'You'll have to lend me a dress.'

They went upstairs to Sophia's bedroom.

'There's my new green wool,' said Sophia a little reluctantly, 'but I haven't worn it yet.'

'Oh, not
wool
,' said Penelope in disgust. 'Besides, it's got long sleeves, hasn't it?'

'Well yes, but it's winter dress so it will be quite suitable. I dare say Ianthe Broome will be there and she'll probably be wearing a wool dress.'

'Yes, blue, I shouldn't wonder. Haven't you got anything else?'

'There's my black one—you might do something with that.'

'But it would be down to my ankles! Besides, it's got Faustina's hairs all over it.'

'Yes, she particularly likes to lie on my lap when I'm wearing it,' said Sophia, examining the skirt of the dress. 'It's rather beautiful, really. The hairs are almost woven into the material, like a kind of mohair. I know,' she said suddenly, flinging down the black dress, 'Lady Selvedge's parcel. I told you she'd sent me some cast-offs and they're much too grand for me to wear. I'm sure we could find something for you.'

Halfan hour later Penelope was encased—for it was a fraction too tight for her—in the lamé cocktail dress with the hem roughly tacked up, the sequin trimming torn away from the neck and a string of black beads hanging down below her waist. Sophia thought this looked rather odd and had offered to lend her a string of cultured pearls, but the beads seemed to go with the piled up hair style and the long pointed-toed shoes that Penelope was wearing.

'Good luck,' said Sophia, seeing her off on the doorstep. She felt somehow that her sister needed it, for it seemed only too probable that if Rupert was interested in any woman it was Ianthe. Archdeacon's son and canon's daughter—what could be more suitable when one came to think of it. It was true that Penelope was a vicar's sister-in-law, but that was a poorer, meaner thing altogether. Sophia tried to see her sister as a spinster and it was not so very difficult—a rather eccentric spinster not even looking as if she might once have been ennobled by some tragic love affair. There was a precedent for it, too. Her father's eldest sister, the aunt who now had the villa near Ravello where Sophia hoped to spend a few days after the visit to Rome, was in some ways very much like an older version of Penelope.

'Ah, Penelope'—Rupert was pleased to have remembered her name—'how nice to see you. It was good of you to come at such short notice and lucky for me that you had no date for this evening, as you so easily might have done.' He was talking rather too much, he knew, but her appearance in the dress of silver lamé—like some kind of armour remembered from childhood play-acting it looked to his inexperienced eyes—was quite startling and such a contrast to Ianthe's sober blue wool dress.

'No, I wasn't doing anything this evening,' said Penelope too brusquely, 'and one's always glad of a free meal.' Goodness, whatever had made her come out with that! she wondered in horror. It was so much the sort of remark one could only make to a girl friend, but Rupert took it very nicely and said with only slightly forced heartiness, 'Jolly good, and it's an excuse for me to have a better meal than usual, too. Mrs Purry generally turns up trumps,' he added, surprised at the rather strange effect Penelope seemed to be having on his conversation.

'Mrs Purry,' said Penelope, giggling a little. 'What a lovely name!'

'Yes, she's a good soul,' said Rupert, again uncharacteristically. 'Would you like to leave your coat in the spare bedroom? It's the door facing you at the top of the stairs. Ianthe's arranging some flowers on the table.'

So she's here already, thought Penelope, seeing that there was a fur jacket lying on the spare room bed. She fingered it. Moleskin! Did
anybody
have things made of moleskin nowadays? Perhaps this one had belonged to her mother? It was an old lady's fur, somehow. And the silk scarf with it in a faded paisley design looked like something brought back by a missionary aunt from India about thirty years ago. But of course it was real silk, so tiresomely
good
, like all Ianthe's things. And what was
she
doing arranging flowers on the table—wasn't that Mrs Purry's job? No—she was presumably seeing to the food and Rupert didn't look the kind of man who would be good at arranging flowers.

Penelope went over to the long mirror to survey the general effect of her dress. It was certainly tight and the skirt was perhaps a little too short now, but none the worse for that, she told herself stoutly. Since she could not hope—and indeed did not wish—to be at all like Ianthe she could at least provide a complete contrast.

At the bottom of the stairs she met Ianthe coming out of the dining room with some leaves in her hands.

'Hullo, Penelope, I've been doing the flowers,' she said, as if an explanation of her emerging from the dining room with leaves seemed to be called for.

'Yes, so I heard.' Penelope glanced over Ianthe's shoulder through the open door of the dining room. Just a vase of red tulips on the table, she thought. Nothing very remarkable about
that.

'The spring flowers are so lovely now,' Ianthe went on.

'In the shops, I mean.'

'And in the South of France and the Scilly Isles—or so one imagines,' said Penelope.

'Yes, of
course,'
said Ianthe with rather excessive enthusiasm. 'Rupert is with Dr Bone in the drawing room. I must go and dispose of these leaves, there were really too many.'

She's difficult to talk to, Penelope thought, moving towards a room where she could hear voices. Perhaps we shan't ever be jolly good friends. We've really nothing in common, except Rupert.

'Ah, Penelope.' Rupert repeated his earlier greeting and came towards her with a glass jug that looked as if it contained some kind of cocktail. 'I expect you're ready for a drink. Will you risk my dry Martini or would you rather stick to sherry?'

The idea of sticking to sherry sounded so very safe and dull that Penelope naturally chose the Martini. Rupert introduced Dr Everard Bone, who was tall and fair—rather good-looking in an austere way, she decided.

'Everard's wife has flu,' Rupert explained, 'so we owe the pleasure of
your
company this evening to that rather unfortunate occurrence,' he went on, feeling that in some obscure way he was being complimentary neither to Penelope nor the absent Mildred Bone, but not quite seeing how else he could have put it.

At that moment Ianthe came into the room and accepted a glass of sherry. Then the front door bell rang and while Rupert went to answer it a somewhat uneasy conversation started up between the two women and Everard Bone about his wife's flu and the likelihood or not of his catching it from her.

'I particularly
don't
want to get it at the moment,' he said rather irritably. 'We've got this Unesco thing coming on—oh, here are the Fairfaxes,' he declared, as the door opened to admit a tall middle-aged man and an even taller woman, obviously husband and wife, who had grown to look like each other in a rather unfortunate way, their small heads and long stringy bodies seeming as if they must have combined the worst features of each.

'I'm sorry we're late, but these newly fashionable districts are so remote that we had difficulty in finding our way here,' said Gervase Fairfax. His voice had a sarcastic edge to it, once assumed for the benefit or otherwise of his students, and now its permanent tone.

'Gervase would not ask the way, and the street lamps were so few and far between that it was impossible to use our map.'

'And Robina would not take a taxi, even if we had seen one.'

'Well, here you are now, which is the main thing,' said Rupert a little awkwardly, yet determined not to apologize for the remoteness of his house when he remembered the hours he had spent waiting in the rush hour for a Green Line bus to their house at Warlingham or Woldingham or some such rustic name.

'Yes, here we are.' Robina Fairfax's mouth opened in a smile which revealed teeth that could only have been her own, so variously coloured and oddly shaped were they.

She gulped down the Martini offered to her and sat down on the sofa by Penelope, who edged away into her corner, recognizing in Robina Fairfax's shapeless grey woollen dress and strings of painted wooden beads the kind of woman she sometimes met at her landlady's 'evenings'. It seemed almost as if she would have to side with Ianthe against the anthropologists, and this was not at all what she had intended.

But when they were sitting at the oval table in the dining room, eating Mrs Purry's admirable steak and kidney pudding and drinking a full-bodied Burgundy, Penelope found herself next to Rupert, who talked very pleasantly about Italy, remembering that Penelope was shortly to visit Rome with the parish party, and told her of things she ought to see and restaurants where she might eat. He even dropped a hint that he had a conference in Perugia at about the same time and might very well find himself in Rome after it was over.

'Which could be fun,' he added, looking first at Penelope and then at Ianthe.

'We could have given you an introduction to Professor Vanchetti in Rome,' said Gervase Fairfax, who was Penelope's other neighbour, 'but unfortunately he dropped down dead the other day.'

'Oh dear,' Penelope murmured.

'Yes, near St Peter's, just by the obelisk, I believe. In the
Vatican City'
—the sarcastic edge of his voice seemed to sharpen—'so
that
was all right.'

'He had borrowed a book of Gervase's,' said Robina. 'Now I suppose we shall never get it back.'

'It was an expensive book too, though fortunately I hadn't spent any money on it. It was sent to me as a review copy. Of course I haven't written the review—I doubt if I should have had time, my own work takes up too much.' He gave a short laugh.

'You are still working up your field material?' asked Everard Bone politely.

'Certainly! And you too, I imagine?'

'But of course—my wife says that we anthropologists are like a housewife faced with the remains of yesterday's stew and wondering whether it can possibly be eked out to make another meal.'

'You can do that all right with a stew,' said Penelope. 'Add a few more vegetables, some carrots or a tin of peas, and a bouillon cube—or even just water—and serve rather a lot of potatoes with it.'

'But how does it work with an anthropologist's material?' asked Ianthe. 'Surely that's more difficult?'

'Surprisingly, it isn't,' said Everard. 'Many have made only one short field trip and yet they go on using that material in articles and even books for the rest of their lives. Just a few more vegetables or a bouillon cube,' he turned to Penelope, smiling, 'and sometimes a
great
deal too many potatoes.'

'Lentils too,' said Robina, with her toothy laugh. 'I wonder what is the equivalent of lentils in anthropological writing?'

The laughter that greeted this remark was interrupted by her husband protesting that novelists were just as bad, writing the same book over and over again.

'But life can be interpreted in so many different ways,' said Ianthe in her quiet voice. 'Perhaps there the novelist has the advantage and he can let his imagination go where it will.' She saw herself again in John's room in Pimlico, washing up at the sink in the corner. 'Even the most apparently narrow and uneventful life,' she began thoughtfully, then stopped, uncertain of what she was going to say next. What did it mean for
her
—that little episode—what was its significance in the pattern?