Free Excellent Women by Barbara Pym Page A

that William and I might marry one day.
    ‘Oh, no, of course not!’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry if I alarmed you. Why, I don’t know anyone suitable, to begin with.’
    What about the vicar?’ asked William suspiciously.
    ‘Father Malory? Oh, he doesn’t believe in marriage for the clergy, and in any case he isn’t really the kind of person I should want to marry,’ I reassured him.
    ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ said William. ‘We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life. Let other people get married by all means, the more the merrier.’ He lifted the bottle, judged the amount left in it and refilled his own glass but not mine. ‘Let Dora marry if she likes. She hasn’t your talent for observation.’
    I suppose I should have felt pleased at this little compliment but I was somehow irritated. In any case, it was not much of a compliment, making me out to be an unpleasant inhuman sort of person. Was that how I appeared to others? I wondered.
    ‘What news have you of Dora?’ I asked, to change the subject. ‘I’m afraid I owe her a letter.’
    ‘Oh, a lot of news.’ He spread out his hands with an expansive gesture and leaned back in his chair. ‘Much seems to happen in that little world. And yet I suppose a girls’ school has as much happening in it as most worlds and the undercurrents are more deadly.’
    ‘Oh? Anything in particular?’
    William leaned forward and his small beady eyes gleamed with delight. ‘Unpleasantness,’ he whispered dramatically.
    ‘Oh, dear, what about?’ I asked, but I was not surprised, for there seemed to be so much of it at Dora’s schools. I had at times found myself wondering disloyally whether she did not perhaps invite it.
    ‘Something about the girls wearing hats in chapel, or not wearing hats—it doesn’t really matter which. Oh, the infinite variety and complication of that little world! The greater things, birth, death and copulation are just passed by as if they were nothing.’
    ‘Well, they don’t really have things like that in a girls’ school, at least not often,’ I said, my thoughts going back to an occasion in my own schooldays when a mistress had died and her coffin had been placed in the chapel, ‘and then only death.’
    ‘Oh, not the other things!’ said William, now in high good humour. ‘But supposing they did!’
    I stirred my coffee, feeling embarrassed, particularly as his voice had a penetrating quality.
    ‘Of course Miss Protheroe is rather difficult to get on with,’ I ventured. ‘I’ve only met her once, but she seemed to me the kind of person I shouldn’t like to have to work with myself.’
    ‘But poor Dora is so irritating, too,’ said William. ‘I can never bear her for more than a week-end.’
    We were standing outside on the pavement. After the warm rosy gloom of the restaurant, the fresh spring air was like another bottle of wine. There was a barrow full of spring flowers just opposite.
    ‘Oh, look, mimosa!’ I exclaimed, though not with any hope that William would buy me any. ‘I must have some.’
    ‘It always reminds me of cafes in seaside towns, all dried-up and rattling with the bottles of sauces on the table,’ said William, standing by while I bought a bunch.
    ‘Yes, I know the fluffiness doesn’t last long, but it’s so lovely while it does.’
    ‘You seem unlike yourself today,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘I hope it wasn’t the Nuits St. Georges.’
    ‘You know I’m not used to wine, particularly in the middle of the day,’ I said, ‘but it’s rather pleasant to be unlike oneself occasionally.’
    ‘I don’t agree. They’ve moved me to a new office and I don’t like it at all. Different pigeons come to the windows.’
    ‘I’ve never been in your office,’ I said boldly, ‘may I come back with you and see it?’
    ‘Oh, the prison, you mean, with its stone walls and iron bars, which the poet tells us do not a prison make. Yes, you may come if you like.’
    We walked into Trafalgar