Excellent Women by Barbara Pym Page A

too awful.’
    I hurried upstairs feeling lighthearted and pleased. I was a little amused to think that my having seen Everard Bone at the Lent service should have made me into a nice person to have living above them. For Helena’s sake, if not for my own, I ought perhaps to make some friendly overture if he were there next week. I could make it a Lent resolution to try to like him. I began imagining the process, what I should say and how he would respond. Some comment on the preacher or the weather, or a friendly enquiry about the progress of his work would be an obvious beginning.
    I stood by the window, leaning on my desk, staring absent-mindedly at my favourite view of the church through the bare trees. The sight of Sister Blatt, splendid on her high old-fashioned bicycle like a ship in full sail, filled me with pleasure. Then Julian Malory came along in his black cloak, talking and laughing with a woman I had not seen before. She was tall and rather nicely dressed but I could not see her face. It suddenly occurred to me that she must be Mrs. Gray, who was coming to live in the flat at the vicarage. I watched them out of sight and then went into the kitchen and started to wash some stockings. I had a feeling, although I could not have said why, that she was not quite what we had expected. A clergyman’s widow … she has such sad eyes… . Perhaps we had not imagined her laughing with Julian, I could not put it more definitely than that.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    I WAS formally introduced to Mrs. Gray at the jumble sale on the following Saturday afternoon. She was behind one of the stalls with Winifred, who was looking very pleased and animated, rather reminding me of a child who has asked ‘Will you be friends with me?’ and has been accepted.
    Mrs. Gray was, as I had supposed from my first brief glimpse of her, good-looking and nicely dressed, rather too nicely dressed for a clergyman’s widow, I felt, remembering many such whom I had met before. Her quiet manner suggested self-sufficiency rather than shyness and there was something secret about her smile, as if she saw and thought more than she would ever reveal.
    ‘You will have to tell me what to do,’ she said, addressing Winifred and me, ‘though I suppose jumble sales are the same the world over.’
    ‘Oh, we get a tough crowd,’ said Winifred gaily. ‘This isn’t a very nice part, you know, not like Belgravia. I’m afraid a lot of the people who come to our sales never put their noses inside the church.’
    ‘Do you think they have jumble sales in Belgravia?’ asked Mrs. Gray; ‘that hadn’t occurred to me.’
    ‘I believe St. Ermin’s has one occasionally,’ I said.
    ‘One likes to think of Cabinet Ministers’ wives attending them,’ said Mrs. Gray, with what seemed to me a rather affected little laugh.
    Winifred laughed immoderately and began rearranging the things on the stall. She and Mrs. Gray were in charge of the odds-and-ends or white elephant stall. The stuffed birds made a magnificent centre-piece, surrounded by books, china ornaments, pictures and photograph frames, some with the photographs still in them. Winifred had removed the Edwardian lady and the young clergyman, but others had escaped her and now seemed to stare out almost with indignation from their elaborate tarnished settings, an ugly woman with a strained expression—perhaps a governess—a group of bearded gentlemen in cricket clothes, a wayward-looking child with cropped hair.
    ‘Oh, look,’ I heard Winifred exclaiming, ‘those poor things! I thought I’d taken them all out.’
    ‘Never mind,’ Mrs. Gray said in a soothing tone as if she were speaking to a child, ‘I think the people who buy the frames don’t really notice the photographs in them. I remember in my husband’s parish …’
    So her husband had had a parish, I thought. Somehow I had imagined him an Army chaplain killed in the war. Perhaps he had been elderly, then? After this I could hear no more, for