Quartet in Autumn Read Online Free PDF Page A

Marjorie and her fiancé Brian in the country cottage they had bought for £300. There was a friend of Brian's there too, intended for Letty, a handsome but dull young man called Stephen. On the Saturday evening they went to the pub and sat in the quiet musty saloon bar with its mahogany furniture and stuffed fish. It felt damp as if nobody ever used it, as indeed nobody did except timid visitors like themselves. They all had beer, though the girls didn't like it much and it seemed to have no noticeable 'effect' on them, except to make them wonder whether there was a ladies' cloakroom in such a primitive place. On the other side, in the public bar, there was light and colour and noise, but they, the four young people, were outside it all. On Sunday they went to Matins at the village church. There were bird-droppings on the altar and the vicar appealed for donations towards the repair of the roof. In 1970 the church was closed as redundant and the building was eventually pulled down as being of no architectural or historical interest. In Letty's dream she was lying in the long grass with Stephen, or somebody vaguely like him, in that hot summer of 1935. He was very near to her, but nothing happened. She did not know what had become of Stephen but Marjorie was a widow now, as alone as Letty in her bedsitter. All gone, that time, those people ... Letty woke up and lay for some time meditating on the strangeness of life, slipping away like this.
     

Three
    M ARCIA ENTERED HER house, that house which, in the estate agents' language, was on its way to becoming a 'twenty - thousand semi'. Houses in that road were already reaching nearly that figure but Marcia's house was not quite like the others. From the outside it looked ordinary enough, with stained-glass panels in the front door, two large bow windows and a smaller window over the porch. The outside paint was a conventional dark green and cream, now in need of re-doing, and the net curtains at the windows could have done with a wash, some thought. But Miss Ivory went out to work and she was not the sort of person you could offer to help. Her neighbours in the more fashionably done - up houses on either side were newcomers. They sometimes passed the time of day with her but Marcia had not been into their houses nor they into hers.
    Inside, the house was dark with brown-painted doors kept mysteriously closed. Dust lay everywhere. Marcia went straight through to the kitchen where she deposited her shopping bag on the newspaper-covered table. She knew that she ought to start getting a meal. The almoner, or medical social worker as they called it now, at the hospital had said how important it was for the working woman to have a good meal when she came home in the evening, but all Marcia did was to fill the kettle for a cup of tea. Her energies had already been spent that morning preparing her lunch to eat in the office. She could not think of any other kind of food now though she might have a biscuit with her tea 'Biscuits keep you going,' they used to say in the war, but she had never had a big appetite. She had always been thin and since being in hospital she had become even thinner. Her clothes hung loosely on her but she didn't really care how she looked, not like Letty who was always buying new things and worried if she couldn't get a cardigan in the exact shade to match something.
    Suddenly a bell rang, shrill and peremptory. Marcia was as if frozen into her chair. She never had visitors and nobody ever called. Who could it be, and in the evening? The bell rang again and she got up and went into the front room where from a side window she could see who was standing on the doorstep.
    It was a young woman, swinging a bunch of car keys in her hand. Marcia could see a small blue car parked on the opposite side of the road. Reluctantly she opened the door.
    'Ah, Miss Ivory, isn't it? I'm Janice Brabner.'
    She had a rather pink, open face. Young women nowadays didn't seem to bother