Free The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym Page B

now I suppose I’d better take you home.’
    ‘I love your old-fashioned manners,’ she said, mocking. ‘You surely don’t mean to come all the way to East Putney?’
    ‘But of course,’ said James, a little daunted, but hailing a taxi none the less. It might have been better to have gone back for his car, but a close embrace in a taxi would make it easier to tell her that this would be their last meeting before he went away. But of course it was not easier and they finished the long ride still with nothing said. At least he had given her a good dinner.
    ‘I’ll ring you,’ he said, uttering that useful goodnight formula.
    He had made the taxi wait, intending to allow himself the luxury of taking it all the way home, and he stayed only long enough to give her a last quick kiss on the doorstep before the door of the quiet suburban house opened and a grey-haired woman, who looked as if she had been waiting for this moment, drew Phoebe inside.
    Frowning a little, as if at something vaguely unsatisfactory, James settled down for the ride back, watching the figures tick up on the clock.
    In bed Leonora held the telephone receiver in her hand and heard James’s number go on ringing. Obviously he was out. She had been obliged to put off her dinner engagement because she had felt she was getting one of her headaches, a sort of migraine she occasionally suffered from. Probably the heat and the prospect of a not very interesting evening had brought it on. Now she longed for James to come and see her, to sit quietly by her bed, perhaps laying a cool hand on her forehead or reading aloud to her in his beautiful voice.
    She put the receiver down, disappointed and a little annoyed. Now that James was going away she felt the need to spend as much time with him as possible. She thought he would have wanted it also, then she remembered that she had had an engagement for this evening and he was not to know that she had put it off. Perhaps he had gone to the cinema, which she disliked anyway, so that was ‘all right’. She lay back again and was nearly asleep when the telephone rang. She snatched up the receiver, but it was only Meg. Evidently she was alone too, Leonora thought, not realising that for an instant she was making an absurd comparison between herself and James and Meg and Colin.
    Meg just wanted an excuse to go on about Colin and what hard work it was for him at the snack bar. She really thought he would have to give it up if things went on like this. Now they were short staffed in the kitchen and he had to cut up raw vegetables – 'you should just see his hands, all stained and brown, it’s really too bad’ – and how was Leonora? she enquired belatedly.
    Leonora did not feel inclined to go into that and brought the conversation to an end. She was awake now and Miss Foxe’s radio, playing something unsuitable, made sleep impossible. What a relief it would be when her lease ran out and she could get rid of her! The thought of it did much to relieve Leonora’s headache and she found herself sufficiently recovered to sit up and re-do her nail varnish. But those brown spots on her own hands – unlike the stains on Colin’s – were surely a sign of age? The headache began to return and she lay down again, the tears trickling slowly down her cheeks.

X

    James left for his tour of Spain and Portugal full of advice and letters of introduction from his uncle and warnings from Leonora as to what he should or should not eat and drink. Once in the plane he not unnaturally experienced a sensation of freedom, almost of escape, at the thought of being on his own for several weeks. Nevertheless, such was his nature, the first thing he did on arriving in Spain was to send postcards to Leonora and Phoebe, telling the former that he had arrived safely and that everything was wonderful but that he missed her, and the latter that everything was wonderful and that he had written to the furniture depository, telling them that she