A Spinster's Tale

 

It's raining again. It always rains in the afternoon as it turns into evening. The sky dark, the rain pelting slantways, all so delicious to curl up with a good book in bed and fall asleep after reading few pages. Or better still, with a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Which is apposite, I suppose, because there are plenty of cups of tea in this book. In fact, the heroine (although she does not have any attributes traditionally associated with heroines being neither beautiful nor to the rest of the world, at least, very interesting) Mildred Lathbury is a typical spinster who comforts those in need of comfort, usually with a cup of tea. She catches herself doing it. She wonders at it. She hates dissolving into a cliché.

But one thing that is not clichéd about Mildred, a woman of uncertain age, as Dickens would describe her, is her sense of humour. She quietly observes the world, questions everything and is amused by what takes place. Her reactions (which she mostly keeps hidden) are not what one would expect of a spinster of uncertain age. People expect her to be in love with the vicar (they are such good friends) and feel rejected when he gets engaged to a designing and good-looking (rather than an excellent) woman. 

New neighbours move in and while the wife stereotypes her on sight, the husband (who has made a career of being charming to unattractive and unwanted women) recognises her as being something more than the rather trivial and commonplace spinster she appears to be. For one, she neither twitters nor fusses. For another, she is tidy, resourceful, someone to be relied on. 

The kind of woman who makes up the world and keeps it running with neither acknowledgement  nor applause. A sort of comfortable shoe one is fond of, not the prettiest one, but the one we use most often.

In fact, the husband, who glories in the rather ridiculous name of Rockingham (Rocky, for short) wishes his wife, Helena, (another impossibly romantic name) who never washes the dishes, sets hot saucepans upon his beautiful antique desks and is really, the messiest person alive, would take a leaf or two out of Mildred's book.

Mildred, who makes comforting cups of tea and can contrive a very tasty lunch at a moment's notice when he is in distress. Mildred, who knows how to wash lettuce, and who reads biographies of Cardinal Newman. An excellent woman, the kind who clusters around the vicar in church, doing good works, arranging bazaars and flowers, polishing the brasses when it is her turn. Mildred, who demands little from life, a vicar's daughter who has some "nice" pieces in her flat, from the old Rectory, who lives within her small income, who works with distressed gentlewomen during the day.

I find this book strangely soothing and almost, a guilty pleasure. I think I've read it five times already. This time around, Sheba, jealous of my obvious enjoyment of the book, bit off chunks from one of the corners. I scolded him for that. Now my battered copy looks even more battered.

If you haven't heard of Barbara Pym, well, there's pleasure in store for you yet. It's a quieter pleasure though, as there are no thrills and spills. Only women of an uncertain age, going about with their quiet lives, and the little dramas that maybe you wouldn't consider dramas, to enliven it. 

But who says that stories should only be about beautiful people leading terribly exciting lives? Real drama is quiet, often deeply felt though unobserved.

Maybe it is because I am a spinster myself that I am drawn to books like these. I stumbled across Barbara Pym at the Smokehouse in Fraser's Hill. Someone had left one of her books behind and I took it up and started reading. I wanted to continue but the manager (nice as he was) would not let me take the book home. It had to be there, on the shelf, in what constituted the library, looking quite strange among the discarded books of holidaymakers.

It took me a while to get the first book because I had to order it specially. But then I got it and read it (the discarded book, one of her lesser known ones) and then, I ordered the ones she was better known for, and like that, slowly accumulated quite a library of her books. I have about 10 of her books. I am missing two or three, which I intend to order sometime in the course of this year. I will take out a notebook and mark the books I have, and the ones I don't have and put in an order with Kinokuniya.

Because I love her so much.

I really really do.

And although I have about 50 unread books in heaps around the corners of my house (I really need to get a new bookshelf but Ikea is closed with the Covid) I keep coming back to these.

And that is really saying something.