Quartet in Autumn

by Barbara Pym

The chaplain, on his way to visit Miss Ivory, was told that he was too late.

‘Living alone sometimes makes people not bother about meals,’ said Edwin, almost as if solitude was a state that none of them had experience of.

The only trouble was that there might possibly have been a lack of liaison, that Miss Ivory might be said to have fallen through the net, that dreaded phrase . . .

it was a long time since he had shed tears.

and hoped that it would be possible to get away quickly now that she had done her social duty.

She had noticed somebody of indeterminate sex, with straggling, tow-coloured hair, wearing a kaftan. ‘Yes, wearing a bead necklace, that’s him.’

Norman something a little less than the kind of man one might expect to treat one to a lunch.

He did not much look forward to the prospect but things like this had to be done and one couldn’t expect always to enjoy doing one’s Christian duty.

Oeufs Florentine, Letty’s choice, sounded frivolous and unfeeling, on a par with wearing something in ‘French navy’ to the funeral.

That was how he put it to himself and how, shocked into his usual flippancy, he had discussed with Edwin the astonishing news that Marcia had left her house to him.

She thought he hadn’t seen her, but he had, and after that he hadn’t gone to the museum again, just trotted off to the library.

Surely he couldn’t be expected to cope with all her mess, it was a woman’s job.

Rather a pointless thing to say, she realized, as it might appear that she hadn’t been all that successful.

What she really wanted was a young couple of about the same age as herself and Nigel, perhaps with children, so that they could do mutual baby-sitting when she and Nigel decided to start a family.

but most of the space was taken up with rows of milk bottles stacked on shelves; there must have been over a hundred of them.

At the funeral he had got the impression that she was a bit lonely, even living with Mrs Pope.

LETTY HAD AN old-fashioned respect for the clergy which seemed outmoded in the seventies, when it was continually being brought home to her that in many ways they were just like other men, or even more so.

There was something shocking in the idea of two women competing for the love of a clergyman with the lure of food and wine, but the whole pattern slotted into place.

‘Why, don’t you see . . .’ Marjorie began to explain and then of course Letty did see. Now that there was to be no marriage the plans for Letty’s retirement could be carried out as before, just as if nothing had happened to change them. She would (naturally) be moving into the country to join Marjorie as soon as arrangements could be made.

In the thirties people did get married in a way that they seemed not to now, or at least not to the same extent, he qualified.

Mrs Thatcher,’

!