Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym Read Free Book Online

with tables? she wondered helplessly. And yet, they were not free to rise up into the air of their own accord, so there might be some connection there.
    They were soon absorbed in the play, for it was about people like themselves, being an adaptation of a well-known stage success. After a while both the sisters realized diat they had heard it before, but neither could remember exactly how it ended. So life seemed to go round in a circle, with tables hurtling through the air.
    Up in her room, which was over the drawing-room, Deirdre could hear the booming of the wireless voices, which prevented her from concentrating on the anthropological book she was trying to read. ‘ A ritual monster called mbusia ‘ she read aloud in a serious tone. This was tough going and one could not afford to let one’s attention wander for an instant; it was disconcerting the way it seemed to want to. She had often wondered why the atmosphere of her own room was so much less conducive to study than that of a library. Perhaps it was because of the bed, which was not a real divan and could not hope to look like anything but a bed, even when it was covered with a folk-weave spread and heaped with cushions. She had always been meaning to get Malcolm to saw off the ends for her, but he was generally too busy with his own odd jobs when he wasn’t at the club. There were a few books in the room and the pictures reflected Deirdre’s changing tastes from adolescence to young womanhood; wild duck flew in over an estuary, seemingly unconscious of the Braque still-life beside them. Most of the furniture had been painted turquoise blue when she was sixteen and had wanted an unusual colour scheme, but the curtains and carpet had become so faded that they would have gone with anything. Deirdre had lost interest in the room now and did not really care or notice how it looked, for somehow it had not fulfilled its promise. The work that was to have been done up here, the poems written, even the little informal parties that were to have been held, had not come to anything after all. As she sat at her desk in the window, her book open before her, Deirdre was conscious only of the booming of the wireless beneath her and Mr. Dulke watching her from his front garden opposite. Or if he was not actually watching her, he was there and she could hear the snip of his shears. Would he never go in to have his supper? Surely it was time for Mrs. Dulke to appear and summon him in? Deirdre looked up from her book and caught his eye. He waved up at her with an almost roguish gesture. He had known her since childhood and was one of the oldest residents in the road. He had lived in the same house for over forty years, as he never tired of telling people—he and Mrs. Dulke, their two sons and three daughters, all grown up and married now. He could remember when the district was little more than a village and there were fields opposite his house. Then more houses had been built and finally the church and the vicarage. There was something depressing, Deirdre felt, in a place that had grown up within living memory. She would have liked to live in the heart of London or deep in the country. There could be no dignity or beauty or even interesting squalor in a place that was no more and no less than a nine-penny bus-ride from Piccadilly Circus.
    At last Mrs. Dulke appeared in the garden opposite, wearing a flowered smock, to summon her husband to his evening meal. They usually had some simple dish, scrambled eggs or macaroni cheese, Mrs. Dulke would explain to anyone who cared to listen; Edgar liked the big meal in the middle of the day, he couldn’t take anything heavy at night.
    Deirdre closed her book, marking the place carefully, for it was not the kind of book which one could pick up casually and remember exactly what point had been reached, and went downstairs to the drawing-room. The play had finished and Rhoda had just made a cup of tea. There was something reassuring about the