No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym Read Free Book Online

conference had served some useful purpose after all.

Chapter Five

    LAUREL leaned forward anxiously in the taxi, wondering if the driver was taking her the right way. Then she saw a building that she recognized as the Albert Memorial, and sat back in her seat, relaxed. Now she would be able to take more interest in her surroundings. She wished she were going to live in one of the tall cream-coloured houses facing the park rather than with Aunt Dulcie, but perhaps that would be better than a hostel where you had to be in by half past ten. As far as she could remember, her aunt was a reasonable sort of person and quite young for an aunt, but there was nothing elegant or interesting about her. She wore tweedy clothes and sensible shoes and didn’t ‘make the most of herself’. Laurel’s mother had told her that Dulcie hadn’t bothered since a love affair had ‘gone wrong’.
    Now, standing in the doorway as if she had been watching out for the taxi, which indeed she had, Dulcie seemed to Laurel just like anybody’s fussing aunt. It was a wonder she had been allowed to come from Paddington by herself, a young girl of eighteen who might let herself be spoken to by some strange person who would entice her away to South America, Laurel thought scornfully; only now it would probably be as near home as Bayswater.
    ‘There you are, dear, so punctual!’
    Dulcie ran out and began to help the taxi-man to unstrap the trunk. Laurel got out of the taxi with her small case and a cardboard box containing a roasting fowl and a dozen new-laid eggs which her mother had made her bring. She put them down in the doorway and looked around her.
    The road was full of substantial-looking houses and bushy pollarded trees, now beginning to shed their leaves. An elderly man paused and said good-afternoon to Dulcie with exaggerated, almost foreign, deference. In a garden opposite a woman was tying up chrysanthemum plants, while from the upper window of another house a face peered out from behind net curtains. Really, it was not London at all, thought Laurel, a wave of depression overwhelming her. Of course she had known what it was like from visits to her grandparents when they had been living here, but she had been a child then and the surroundings had had the attraction of novelty. Now she was grown up and had her own idea of living in London – brightly lit streets, Soho restaurants, coffee bars, and walks and talks with people of her own age. Still, that would come later. It might not be a bad thing to stay with her aunt for a little while before she found a place of her own.
    Looking at her niece, Dulcie thought nervously, why, she’s a stranger now, no longer a schoolgirl but a self-contained young woman who must be treated as an equal. She began to wonder what they would find to talk about – their work and the domestic trivia that bound all women, whatever their ages, together’
    ‘I expect you’d like to see your room,’ she said, leading the way upstairs. ‘I’ve given you the one at the back looking over the garden. I thought it would be easier for you to study there. Of course it’s been redecorated.’
    ‘Since Granny died?’ Laurel prompted.
    ‘Well, yes, it was her room. You don’t minde I thought it was the nicest.’
    Laurel remembered it vividly as a child would remember – the figure in the bed (what exactly was the matter with Granny?’) the faint scent of lavender water, the fire burning in the grate even in summer, the family photographs in silver frames, and the Victorian watercolour of Mount Vesuvius. But when Dulcie opened the door, of course it was all changed. The walls were pale turquoise and the paint white; there was a divan bed, an armchair, a desk, and an empty bookcase. There were no pictures on the walls now.
    ‘I thought you’d rather choose your own things,’ Dulcie explained, apologizing for the room’s bareness.
    ‘Yes, of course. But I did love that picture of Vesuvius. What have you