The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym Page B

watched with a smile playing about his lips, as if he expected to have extracts from the letter read out to him.
    ‘Well?’ he asked, as James folded up the letter and put it back into the envelope.
    ‘Nothing, really,’ James mumbled.
    ‘Come now, Jimmie, there must have been something in that letter to make you fold it up and put it away so quickly. You should’ve seen the look on your face . . Ned’s thin gnat-like voice went on teasing and probing. He was small and neat, with smooth fair hair and blue eyes, appearing much younger than his twenty-nine years, until a closer look at his face revealed that life had, after all, left its mark.
    They were in a hotel in Lisbon where they were spending some time before returning to London. Their room was cramped and sunless, yet stuffy in the hot afternoon, with no view but a long deep plunge into a well on to which the kitchen quarters opened. The clatter of dishes and bursts of unintelligible shouting could be heard as the hotel servants washed up or prepared some meal of the past or future.
    James lay on one of the beds where he had been reading Leonora’s letter. He was staring at the wall which was covered in a kind of striped paper, like the inside of an old-fashioned suitcase. One might almost be in a suitcase here, with the heat and the general feeling of constriction which Ned’s presence and his whining American voice gave. Closing his eyes, James tried to imagine Leonora’s cool green-walled room with the trailing plants and some delicious drink by his side. Her letter, with all its news of her doings, had brought her vividly before him. She had been going to Tosca with Humphrey on the day she wrote and would be wearing her black lace dress. And she had been scanning the papers and estate agents’ windows to see if she could find him a suitable flat. (‘After all, you won’t want to be stuck with Humphrey for ever!’) By the time he got back she hoped to have a list of suitable places for him to look at – wouldn’t it be fun? Of course it would be, but James had rather wanted to do his own flat-hunting…
    ‘Was it from Phoebe, that letter?’ Ned went on relentlessly.
    Phoebe. How remote Phoebe seemed now, as if she had never been. James felt a slight pang of conscience about her, for he had sent her only a few perfunctory postcards and not answered her last two letters. Ned thought it a waste of time to bother with letters when one was travelling, though he himself did write twice a week to his mother in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
    ‘No, it was from Leonora,’ James answered rather shortly.
    ‘Leonora, your elegant friend …’
    ‘Yes, you must meet her when you come to London,’ said James, trying to imagine the occasion and relieved that the meeting need not take place for a while, since Ned was staying with friends in Oxford before coming to work in the British Museum. He had a sabbatical year from the small respectable New England college where he was an assistant professor of English, during which time he hoped to complete his doctoral thesis.
    ‘We’d have such a lot in common, I feel,’ Ned went on in his most guileless manner. ‘I just love elegant English ladies. Does she wear wide-brimmed hats and long narrow shoes?’
    ‘She dresses very well,’ said James, on the defensive. Indeed, Leonora’s letter had included a description of some of the new autumn clothes she was having made – a lilac-coloured tweed coat and dress and ‘yet another little black number, rather filmy and floating and suitable for feeling emotional in’, as she put it. It was impossible to imagine Phoebe describing her clothes. Her last letter had been very different from Leonora’s civilised account of life – a raw outpouring of feelings, full of references to things he wanted to forget, and running through it all the unspoken reproaches that made him feel so guilty. What an uncomfortable sort of girl Phoebe was and how badly he had behaved towards