A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym

Author:Barbara Pym [Pym, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781559212281
Google: yMdTPgAACAAJ
Amazon: 1559212284
Publisher: Moyer Bell
Published: 1980-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

For the beauty of the earth.

For the beauty of the skies,

with its lines about the joy of human love (brother, sister, parent, child), which invariably led on to the contemplation of other, more interesting kinds of love, made Emma realise that Tom needed a wife and Ianthe needed a husband. Could she perhaps bring them together? It might work, but could she not do better for him than Ianthe? He was by no means ‘averse to the company of women’, she thought, pleased at that way of putting it.

On this occasion Emma did stay behind to say goodnight, but she did not mention Ianthe who had just gone, nor did Tom ask after her or enquire where she was. Instead, when there was an akward pause in their conversation, Emma told him about Graham Pettifer coming to live in the cottage in the woods. ‘To work on his book,’ she added, as if his coming could be for any other reason.

‘Oh, that will be pleasant for you,’ said Tom, doing the best he could with a curiously unwelcome piece of news. ‘He will be an asset to our small community,’ he added in a stiff, clerical sort of way, saying the kind of thing that might be expected of him but which meant absolutely nothing, for how could an agnostic academic, and rather a bore at that, possibly add anything to the ‘small community’? Emma was disappointed in him and walked home feeling that Tom and Ianthe might well deserve each other.

When the telephone rang later on it was not Graham with further domestic instructions, but her mother. There was to be the usual old students’ summer evening drinks party at her college, would Emma like to come to it? When she hesitated, Beatrix told her that she believed Claudia Pettifer would be there. Wasn’t Emma at least curious to see her? ‘And wear something nice,’ she added, just as if Emma were a school-girl, incapable of choosing suitable clothes.

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