Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym Page A

of him loosening the collar of her fur coat.
    The hymns chosen were 'He who would valiant be', and another with modern words that might seem to have been specially written so as not to offend the most militant agnostic or atheist, set to a tune that nobody seemed to know. There was a reading from Ecclesiastes and a short eulogy, delivered by a younger colleague of the deceased, quietly triumphant in the prime of life. Edwin had seen this person once or twice at the office, so he felt that his presence at the service was justified. After all, he was representing Norman, Letty and Marcia, and that was entirely fitting.
    As he filed out with the congregation, Edwin noticed that some of them, instead of going out through the church door, seemed to be slipping into a half open side door into a kind of vestry. Not everyone was doing this, so it looked as if those who did were in some way favoured and Edwin soon saw why this was. Inside the vestry he glimpsed a table on which were ranged glasses of a drink that looked like sherry (it would hardly have been whisky, he felt). It was easy for Edwin to insinuate himself among the slippers-in and nobody questioned him; he looked very much the kind of person who had the right to be there, tall, grey and sombre.
    Taking a glass of sherry — there was a choice of medium or dry, sweet evidently not having been considered appropriate to the occasion — Edwin looked around him, storing up impressions to tell them back in the office. His own observations took in the usual paraphernalia of the Anglican church that made this vestry much like any other of his experience — flower vases and candlesticks, an untidy pile of hymn books with the covers torn and no doubt pages missing inside, and a discarded crucifix of elaborate design, probably condemned by the brass ladies as impossible to clean. A crisp-looking terylene surplice was suspended from a hook on a cleaner's wire hanger and there were red cassocks and a few dusty old black ones hanging on a rail. But these details would probably not interest Norman, Letty and Marcia. They would want to know who was at the service and how they were behaving, what they were saying and doing.
    'Well, at least we've given him some kind of a send-off,' said an elderly man at Edwin's side, 'and I think he'd like to think of us here drinking sherry.' He put down his empty glass and took another.
    'People always say that,' said a woman who had joined them. 'And it's certainly convenient to suppose that anything we do is what they would have liked. But Matthew never entered a church in his life, so perhaps the drinking would be all he'd approve of.'
    'I expect he was baptized and attended church when he was young,' Edwin observed, but the others moved away from him, making him feel that he had gone too far, not only by this observation but by attending the service at all. Yet he was undeniably a member of the staff, even if only a humble one, and had as much right as anyone to be paying his tribute to a man he had never known personally.
    Edwin drained his glass and put it down carefully on the table. He noticed that it had been covered with a white cloth and wondered idly if it was of ecclesiastical significance. He decided not to help himself to another glass although he could easily have done so. It might not be fitting. Also a thing like that 'might get back' — you never knew.
    Now the problem of lunch presented itself. Edwin had a sandwich in the office but he was not quite ready to face the others, so decided to go to a coffee house in Southampton Row, where he sat brooding in a curtained alcove, drinking strong Brazilian coffee.
    A pair of lovers sat opposite him but he did not notice them He was thinking about his own funeral — he would hardly rate a 'Memorial Service' — a proper Requiem, of course, with orange candles and incense and all the proper ceremonial details. He wondered if Father G. would outlive him and what hymns he would choose ... A