Quartet in Autumn

by Barbara Pym

Now he had all the freedom that loneliness brings – he could go to church as often as he liked, attend meetings that went on all evening, store stuff for jumble sales in the back room and leave it there for months. He could go to the pub or the vicarage and stay there till all hours.

The room itself was quite pleasant, sparsely furnished, which was a good thing, and there was a basin with hot and cold water, as Edwin had said. Letty felt like a governess in a Victorian novel arriving at a new post, but there would be no children here and no prospect of a romantic attachment to the widower master of the house or a handsome son of the family. Her own particular situation had hardly existed in the past, for now it was the unattached working woman, the single ‘business lady’ of the advertisements, who was most likely to arrive in the house of strangers. Letty had often found herself doing this, arranging her clothes in the drawers and wardrobe provided and putting out her personal possessions, the things that might give some clue as to what sort of person she was. There were her books – anthologies of poetry, though nothing later than Poems of Today. Second Series – her current library book; her transistor radio, a bowl of hyacinths nearly in flower, her knitting in a flowered cretonne bag. There were no photographs, not even of her friend Marjorie or of her old home, her parents, a cat or a dog.

The (acting) deputy assistant director, who had been commanded to make the presentation speech, wasn’t quite sure what it was that Miss Crowe and Miss Ivory did or had done during their working lives. The activities of their department seemed to be shrouded in mystery – something to do with records or filing, it was thought, nobody knew for certain, but it was evidently ‘women’s work’, the kind of thing that could easily be replaced by a computer. The most significant thing about it was that nobody was replacing them, indeed the whole department was being phased out and only being kept on until the men working in it reached retirement age. Yet under the influence of a quick swig of sherry, even this unpromising material could be used to good effect.

Ageing, slightly mad and on the threshold of retirement, it was an uneasy combination and it was no wonder that people shied away from her or made only the most perfunctory remarks. It was difficult to imagine what her retirement would be like – impossible and rather gruesome to speculate on it.

work, or what passed for work, had to be done