A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym Page B

their traces in the woods,’ said Daphne eagerly. ‘Did you know that a fox’s dung is grey and pointed at both ends?’
    Nobody did know and there was a brief silence. It seemed difficult to follow such a stunning piece of information.
    ‘How fascinating!’ said Adam at last. ‘That’s something I did not know. I must look out for it when I next take a walk in the woods.’
    ‘Do you often?’ Tom asked, for it was difficult to imagine,
    ‘When the spirit moves me – and in my job one must take exercise.’
    ‘Well, next time you do you might keep a look-out for the remains of the deserted medieval village,’ said Tom. ‘Heaps of stones, even the foundations of buildings.’
    ‘Oh, I prefer to let the past remain hidden,’ said Adam, laughing. ‘No good can come of all this delving.’
    ‘I’m not sure that I agree with you,’ said Beatrix, and Isobel now remembered that the last time she was in the woods she had  noticed a scattering of stones at some point. Could Tom explain what might be the possible significance of that?
    ‘Somebody has evidently been scattering stones,’ said Adam. He was bored by local history and despised Tom’s researches into the subject. The short and simple annals of the poor were, in his opinion, of minimal interest – those boring and limited occupations listed in the census returns where practically everybody was an agricultural labourer.
    ‘I’m going to get a dog,’ Daphne said suddenly. ‘They’re so clever the way they can nose out things.’
    ‘Even the remains of a deserted medieval village?’ Emma asked.
    ‘They do train dogs to detect drugs, don’t they?’ said Daphne, on the defensive. ‘I have heard that.’
    ‘Yes, man’s best friend has his uses,’ Adam agreed.
    ‘Shall we move from the table for our coffee?’ Emma suggested. If they were going to talk about dogs it might be as well to have a change of scene, but at least the conversation had moved away from Adam’s coy references to Emma’s visitor. It was not until the guests had gone home and Emma was washing up with her mother – Isobel having gone to bed – that the subject was brought up again.
    ‘So Graham Pettifer was here,’ Beatrix said. The flat statement, an oblique reference rather than a direct question, was her usual way of extracting information, Emma knew. She admitted that Graham had indeed been here and added, ‘He’s been here twice, as a matter of fact.’
    Beatrix pondered this without comment. She knew better than to press Emma farther. During the silence some plates were dried and put away, then Emma said, ‘He’s having trouble with Claudia – I suppose that’s why he came here.’ She was not going to reveal that she had written to him after seeing him on television. After all, her mother had known Claudia as a student.
    ‘Of course, he has been in Africa,’ said Beatrix, ‘at one of those new universities – at least they seem new to us. I can’t imagine that Claudia would much care for that . You never met her, did you?’ Beatrix smiled, remembering Claudia at college. ‘A pretty, frivolous young woman.’ It had been after Emma’s brief affair with Graham that he had married Claudia Jenks, such a complete contrast to Emma that it might almost have been on the rebound, except that Beatrix knew it hadn’t been that. In some ways – and here she must have been influenced by her studies of the Victorian novel – Beatrix felt that it would be more ‘satisfactory’ if Emma got married now. On the whole people tended not to marry in these days, but Emma was getting past the age for that and there was danger of her settling down into an old-fashioned spinster. Danger? Remembering other spinsters of her acquaintance –Isobel, Miss Lee and Miss Grundy, to name only three – ‘danger’ seemed perhaps not the right word. Yet Beatrix did not like to think of herself as a conventional match-making mother, and despised herself for asking Emma, ‘And