Free The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym Page A

time.
    ‘I like your dress,’ he said, ‘very fashionable.’
    She glanced at him suspiciously. ‘But the colour doesn’t suit me.’
    ‘No?’ Of course it didn’t, or she needed different make-up or something. Leonora always knew what suited her, almost boringly so. James would have liked to advise a woman what to wear but didn’t know where to start with Phoebe.
    She wandered round the room, seeming ill at ease.
    ‘This is nice,’ she said, picking up a gilded wooden figure from a Spanish church. ‘Can I borrow this?’
    ‘My uncle will probably want to have it in the shop,’ he lied, knowing that Leonora wanted to keep it for him.
    ‘Oh. Couldn’t I choose the things I’d like to have now?’
    ‘Well, it’s a bit complicated. You won’t mind going to get them out of the furniture depository, will you? You’ll rather enjoy it, I should think,’ he added, imagining her in those gaunt surroundings.
    ‘How do you expect me to enjoy anything when you won’t be here?’
    ‘Oh, Phoebe, I’m not going to be away all that long,’ said James, wishing she wouldn’t be so intense.
    ‘Is that woman who lives below going to pack up your things?’
    James did not answer.
    ‘It’s so sad to think of your flat being empty and you far away,’ she persisted.
    ‘The flat would have been empty anyway because the lease runs out,’ said James sensibly, ‘and I want to find another when I get back.’
    ‘Where will you go till you do?’
    ‘To my uncle’s – he has plenty of room.’
    ‘You won’t have to live over the shop?’ she asked, suddenly in a joking mood. ‘Or with Miss Caton?’
    ‘No, I won’t.’
    Phoebe had taken up the photograph of James’s mother and was examining it. ‘I can’t believe this is really your mother – she looks so young.’
    ‘Well, she was – comparatively.’
    ‘That black lipstick and matching nail varnish and those rows of pearls – it all looks remoter now than the Victorian age. Poor girl, she never lived to see you grown up.’
    ‘I think it’s time we went and had something to eat,’ said James, fearing, not for the first time, the power of Phoebe’s imagination. ‘Where shall we go?’
    ‘Oh, anywhere – you decide.’
    The restaurant James chose was one of the many Italian trattorie, small and crowded with tables rather too close together, and decorated with strings of Chianti bottles. The young waiters darted about, responding with charming politeness to the halting holiday Italian some of the diners felt obliged to practise on them. The hot summer evening was made even hotter by the flames heating up various dishes which also gave a spurious air of distinction to the restaurant, as if exotic concoctions were being created at the tables when it was often no more than a portion of frozen peas being warmed up.
    James picked up the menu. ‘What do you feel like?’ he asked.
    ‘Nothing, really,’ she said unhelpfully.
    ‘That isn’t much good,’ he said, running his eye down the list of Italian specialities.
    ‘I meant that it was enough just to be with you.*
    ‘Thank you,’ he said gracefully, wishing that he had thought of saying it.
    ‘I can’t expect you to share the feeling,’ she burst out in her frank way. ‘AH I really want is a glass of water and a roll – it’s that sort of day.’
    James, looking back over his day, decided that the end of it at least could be improved and that he deserved rather more than that. Afterwards they went for a walk, strolling hand-in-hand down Kensington Church Street, looking in the windows of the antique shops. In one he pointed out to her a pair of vases he admired and would like to possess.
    ‘Perhaps I could give them to you,’ she said.
    ‘They cost rather a lot of money,’ he said, laughing. ‘I went in and asked.’
    ‘I suppose somebody could afford to give them to you,’ she said. ‘Your uncle, perhaps?’
    ‘No doubt – but he doesn’t value me quite as highly as that. And