A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym Read Free Book Online

wheeling a shopping basket full of children’s clothes and a few of her own, with a discarded tweed jacket of her husband’s on the top. A garment belonging to the doctor might be thought to possess certain magical properties, as if a touch could heal, and Daphne was suitably grateful. But she knew that Avice had really come to take another look at the rectory, to emphasise how much too big it must be for the rector and his sister, and to contrive in some way to go upstairs and even into the bedrooms, which she had never yet managed to achieve.
    ‘Do you mind if I go to the loo?’ Avice asked bluntly, preparing to mount the staircase,
    ‘Oh, there’s a cloakroom on the left of the front door,’ said Daphne, preparing to thwart her. ‘No need to go upstairs.’
    Avice retired at the same moment as Mrs Dyer came into the room. It was her morning for doing something but she spent a good twenty minutes examining and disparaging the jumble, trying to guess who had sent what. Adam Prince’s jeans evoked a shout of raucous laughter and all the children’s clothes were criticised for some fault in the washing – woollens shrunken or felted, or the colours faded, obviously the wrong washing-powder used, insufficient attention paid to the television commercials – Daphne had heard it all before and made no comment, letting Mrs Dyer drone on until she finally exhausted the subject. Daphne then took some of the boxes of jumble into the drawing-room, a noble, shabbily furnished room, hardly suitable for the sorting of jumble, one might have thought, but nothing in the rectory was above parish work. There might be a good tweed skirt from Mrs G. and Daphne would not be ashamed to give 30p. for this and to wear it in the autumn. It would not occur to Mrs G. that the rector’s sister might one day be seen wearing her discarded clothes, they would look so different. Christabel G. might occasionally notice that Daphne was wearing a rather better skirt than usual, might even remember that she had once had a skirt in a tweed very much like that, but no further connection would be established.
    The clothes in the first box were a disappointing lot – mini, Courtelle, Acrilan and other man-made fibres, nothing ample, long or of pure wool or cotton. Daphne turned to a box of oddments – chipped cups and odd saucers suitable for cat dishes, plastic earrings, an old string of pearls with the pearliness peeling off, a tattered paperback novel whose cover portrayed the bare shoulders of a couple in bed, a bundle of knitting needles, a plastic butter-dish split at one corner, an old prayer-book with no cover and pages missing, a rusty nutmeg grater, a wrist-watch not in working order, a china animal of indeterminate sex lacking an ear, a glass ditto lacking one leg, a cracked handbag mirror, a small transistor radio, a photo-frame with a faded photograph of a person on a beach, a brooch without a pin saying ‘MOTHER’, an empty tin of hair lacquer, a dried-up pot of foundation cream, a red collar for a small dog or even a cat, a fork with the prongs bent, an old soap dish…. Nothing much here, the kind of things that nobody would buy except possibly a child with a few pence to spend, taking a fancy to some unlikely object. Then Daphne’s attention was caught by a picture framed in passe-partout, lying at the bottom of the box. It was a coloured print of a Scottie dog, looking up appealingly at its invisible master and bearing the legend ‘Thy Servant a Dog.’
    Holding the picture in her hands, Daphne stood up and moved over to the window. She was back forty years to the time of her confirmation, when her friend Heather had given her a replica of this very picture. For two girls of fifteen who loved animals it had seemed to them entirely suitable as a present for the occasion, and their headmistress had wisely made no comment. Why had she no dog now ? Daphne wondered, staring bitterly out into the rain. Tom would not have objected to a