An Unsuitable Attachment (3 page)

Wherever did she find that, Daisy wondered, that symbol of Empire. What rare objects, what richness, the attic of a vicarage must hold! Probably not many in this neighbourhood or, for that matter, in any other would have a Union Jack on their clothes line. Of course one didn't say Empire now, but Commonwealth—common weal, weal and woe . . . Daisy's thoughts wandered inconsequentially. Then she saw Sophia go over to the statue of the Virgin Mary. Was she about to make some obeisance to it? Daisy leaned forward, at once horrified and fascinated. But no, she was removing the blue drapery, and now, with that gone, what had seemed to be a popish image turned out to be merely a tree stump with a blue cloth spread over it to dry. The shape and folds of the cloth had suggested a draped figure.

Sophia now picked up Faustina again and went back into the house with her. She makes too much of that cat, Daisy thought, for a young woman that is. It was a pity she had no children . . .

Somewhere downstairs a clock struck a quarter to nine. Daisy left her position in the window and hurried down to get ready for the morning surgery. This was likely to be crowded, for her brother had a large number of patients, many of whom came in taxis and private cars from the more fashionable districts farther afield. Going into the big general waiting room, Daisy no longer noticed the many photographs of grateful animals and their owners which decorated the walls, most of them signed with fulsome messages indicating every degree of gratitude. Some who went to the surgery thought that Daisy looked like an animal herself, moving sometimes like a slow marmalade cat, other times like a bustling sheep dog—for she was a woman of moods—and seeming to combine the best and worst qualities of each. She was sandy-haired and rather fat and usually wore blue or grey tweeds, though with the passage of years she had become comfortably indifferent to dress.

She went over to the round table in the middle of the room, moved
The Field
and
Country Life
into slightly different positions, concealed the one ashtray to discourage smoking, and went down the passage to see if her brother was ready. This passage or corridor was carpeted in moss green, now faded and stained in places from water and the urine of nervous animals, so that it looked more like some natural substance, moss or close-cut turf, than man-made carpet. At the end of the passage was a stained-glass window with a design of tulips, and on the left the door leading to the surgery.

Edwin Pettigrew was, like his sister, of sandy colouring, a kindly-looking man more interested in animals than in human beings, though he was an expert at calming and reassuring the agitated and often hysterical women who brought their animals to see him. He had not been able to deal so skilfully with his own wife, however, that relationship needing more of himself than he could spare from the animals, and she had left him many years ago.

'All ready, Daisy?' he asked, looking over the top of his spectacles.

A loud cry was heard coming from somewhere underneath them.

'They want their breakfast,' said Daisy. 'I must go to them.' She descended to the basement where the boarding cats were housed and began to prepare their breakfast. Cries rose on all sides of her as she filled the dishes, but she worked on steadily oblivious, like some eccentric female St Francis, brooding a little about the image seen in the vicarage garden, which, although it had turned out to be only an old cloth flung over a tree stump, was an indication of the way things might go. Not that she had anything against the vicar personally, though it had been hard to forgive his refusal of her request for an 'Animals' Sunday' to which people might bring their pets to be blessed. She glanced round at the cats to see how much food would be needed. Their cries rose louder and more urgent now in their primitive longing for meat. They were great and splendid creatures, perhaps hardly in need of any blessing from man or God, she thought defiantly, and it was wonderful to be able to satisfy their hunger with raw meat, a real privilege. One did not get the same feeling opening tins of cat food, admirable though it was in many ways.

Now they were all feeding, and she stood back, watching them with love. Then she moved over to the basement window and contemplated the pairs of legs striding along the pavement to work. One pair—those of Ianthe Broome—interested her particularly. They wore ladylike stockings with seams, in a colour described in Marshall's hosiery sale as 'medium beige', and ended in brown court shoes of good leather with a sensible heel. Daisy wondered where the canon's daughter was going.

***

Ianthe always hurried past the vet's house, fearful of seeing or hearing something dreadful. The basement cattery seemed to her a sinister place, though she knew that the animals were most lovingly tended by Miss Pettigrew. They had got into conversation one evening when Ianthe was coming back from the library where she worked, and it had reassured her —coming as a stranger to this rather doubtful neighbourhood—to meet somebody whom her mother would have described as a 'gentlewoman'.

Ianthe was the only child of elderly parents, who seemed to be a whole generation removed from those of her contemporaries. When her father died it had been necessary for her to do some kind of work and the training in librarianship had seemed the most suitable. Working among books was, on the face of it, a ladylike occupation, Mrs Broome had thought, and one that would bring her daughter into contact with a refined, intellectual type of person. She had never seen Ianthe handing out books to the ill-mannered grubby students and cranks of all ages who frequented the library of political and sociological books where she worked.

On the crowded train a man gave up his seat to Ianthe and she accepted it gracefully. She expected courtesy from men and often received it. It was as if they realized that she was not for the rough and tumble of this world, like the aggressive women with shaggy hair styles who pushed their way through life thrusting their hard shopping baskets at defenceless men. The man who had offered the seat had seen Ianthe as a tall fragile-looking woman in a pretty blue hat that matched her eyes. He might also have noticed that her dark hair was touched with grey and that although she was not exactly smart there was a kind of elegance about her. She saw herself perhaps as an Elizabeth Bowen heroine—for one did not openly identify oneself with Jane Austen's heroines—and
To The North
was her favourite novel. Even her little house was somehow in keeping with this picture, although it was definitely not St John's Wood and there was no delicate wrought iron balcony with steps leading down to the green garden. Yet her small garden
was
green, if only because of much rain and leaves rather than flowers, and there was a little mossy stone cherub left behind by the previous owner. It was so much more congenial than the flat near Victoria—unsuitably dominated by Westminster Cathedral—where she had lived with her mother. Ianthe arrived at the library five minutes before she need have done. Mervyn Cantrell, the librarian, was unpacking his lunch. He was a tall thin irritable-looking man in his early forties, who had the idea that he could not 'take' restaurant food, at least of the kind served in the restaurants where the rest of the staff had their midday meal—luncheon was hardly the word for it—and therefore always brought a packed meal with him. Today it was cold fish mayonnaise with lettuce and french dressing in a little bottle, brown rolls, and a special goatsmilk cheese obtainable only at one particular shop in Soho.

'Good morning, Miss Broome,' he said, for they were not always 'Ianthe' and 'Mervyn' to each other and the early morning was usually a very formal time, 'I hope you're getting settled into your new house.'

'Yes, thank you—my furniture seems to fit in very well.'

'You've got some nice things, haven't you.' There was a tinge of envy in his tone, for his humdrum childhood home in Croydon had not provided him with the kind of 'things' his taste now craved.

'Well, family things, you know—but one gets attached to them.' Mervyn had visited the flat once for tea on a Sunday afternoon when her mother was still alive, but the occasion had not been very successful. Mrs Broome had not thought much of Croydon as was evident from her patronizing manner.

'I remember you had a lovely Pembroke table—I coveted
that
.' He laughed, not very mirthfully. 'And those dining-room chairs—Hepplewhite, aren't they?'

'Yes, I believe so,' said Ianthe uncertainly. She found the conversation embarrassing and wondered if the time had come when she could no longer avoid asking him to come and see her new house.

'Surely you must know if they are,' he said testily.

'You must come and see for yourself when I've got things a bit tidier,' she said, trying not to be irritated. Poor Mervyn, she knew that she ought to feel sorry for him, living with his disagreeable old mother—at least, this was how she appeared in Ianthe's imagination—disappointed at not having got a job in one of the University libraries, unable to find staff accurate enough to appreciate the niceties of setting out a bibliographical entry correctly, with it seemed few friends of either sex, unable to eat restaurant food—really, the list seemed endless when one thought about it.

'I shall be sorting out some of the applications for Miss Grimes's job this morning,' Mervyn said. 'She's really getting past her work and it'll be a relief when she goes. What we need is a younger person.'

Ianthe sighed, perhaps foreseeing the day when both of them would be replaced by younger persons.

'A young
man
, I think,' he went on, holding up a letter. 'This one sounds quite promising, but of course I must see him first—one can't always tell from the application,' he added primly.

'No, he might be
quite
unsuitable,' Ianthe agreed, half hoping that he would be. She would have preferred a woman of her own age and background. She did not like men very much, except for the clergy, and found younger women rather alarming. Miss Grimes, with whom she had worked for several years, was hardly the most congenial of companions but at least she was familiar.

This morning she was dusting books in the reading room, which was so far empty of readers.

'And how's his nibs this morning?' she grunted in her slightly Cockney voice. It was this voice and expressions like 'his nibs' which jarred on Ianthe. Indeed, Miss Grimes was sometimes altogether jarring. She was a squat, dusty-looking woman on the threshold of sixty, who had been taken on in the library during the war and whom Mervyn had tried unsuccessfully to dislodge ever since he had become librarian. But now the passage of the years was doing it for him. 'Time like an ever-rolling stream', Mervyn had said, 'bears even Miss Grimes away.' But Ianthe did not like jokes about hymns.

'I'll help you with the books,' she said.

'It's not your day, is it, dear?'

'No, but they've got to be done, and Shirley's making the tea.' Ianthe had not told her mother that she sometimes had to dust the books in the library.

Later when she was drinking her tea Mervyn came into the room with a card in his hand.

Ianthe realized from his triumphant expression that he had caught her out in a mistake and waited with resignation to hear what it was.

'Government in Zazzau,'
he declared. 'The place of publication is London,
not
Oxford. It was published
by
the Oxford University Press
for
the International African Institute—do you see?' From behind his back he now produced the book itself, open at the title page.

'Of course—how stupid of me. I'm so sorry, I'm afraid I do make mistakes sometimes.'

'But there is no need to make
that
kind of mistake,' he said rather obscurely and left the room with a springy step.

So Ianthe's day passed, punctuated by cups of tea and a lunch of welsh rarebit and trifle at a café run by gentlewomen. It was not much different from other days. At five minutes to five, Shirley, the typist who had been helping Ianthe to file some cards, covered up her typewriter, put on the black imitation leather coat she had just bought, and hurried away singing. Ianthe herself stayed until nearly six o'clock to avoid the rush-hour crowds. She was still not completely used to the journey northwards to the small empty house, when for so long she had gone southwards to the big flat near Westminster Cathedral, where her mother had waited, eager to hear every detail of her day.

As she walked from the Underground to St Basil's Terrace Ianthe noticed that curtains had appeared in the windows of the house nearly opposite to hers where the new arrival had moved in. Perhaps they might become friends, she thought doubtfully, or at least neighbours, passing the time of day if they met in the road.

It was sad coming back alone to an empty house, Ianthe thought, but how much worse if it had been a single furnished room, like poor Miss Grimes. Ianthe had always wanted a house of her own and as soon as she had shut the door behind her she forgot the lonely home-coming in the pleasure she still felt at seeing her furniture and possessions in their new setting. Here were the Hepplewhite chairs and the Pembroke table, coveted by Mervyn Cantrell, portraits of her grandparents and of her father in cope and biretta, the corner cupboard with the lustre jugs collected by her mother, the old silky Bokhara rugs on the polished parquet floor of the sitting room, the familiar books in the white-painted bookshelves, and the china ornaments she remembered from childhood.

Ianthe was not the type to pour herself a glass of sherry or gin as soon as she got home after a day's work, nor yet to make a cup of tea. One did not make tea at half-past six in the evening like the 'working classes', as her mother would have called them. Instead she set about cooking herself a suitable supper in the almost too perfect little kitchen. The grill was heated for a chop, tomatoes were cut up, and a small packet of frozen peas tipped out of its wrapping into a saucepan. 'We have come to this,' her mother used to say, 'eating frozen vegetables like
Americans.'
She had been deeply conscious of her position as a canon's widow. Frozen vegetables were, somehow, a lowering of standards, but they were quick and convenient and really fresher than anything one could get in the London shops.