The Question of Keith: A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

 A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

published 1958

If you read my previous posts on this book (mourning and – yesterday -  Wilmet’s dresses) and you know A Glass of Blessings well, you might be thinking ‘is she not going to mention Keith?’ – but now, you see, he needed his own post. Keith is a wondrous creation, a young man that we might feel we know. Wilmet almost sighs as she says

It was quite obvious that I was going to find it impossible to dislike Keith.

All of us, Wilmet, all of us.

He has just served up 'a pink and white gateau arranged on plastic doilies'. 

My favourite line comes at the end of the return event, when he has visited Wilmet’s upmarket suburban house for tea.

‘Wilmet, I have enjoyed myself,’ he said, fingering the curtains and turning them back to see if they were lined. I saw him give a little nod of approval when he discovered that they were.

Wilmet becomes bound to Keith for no good reason at all. She and her husband Roddy visit him at the coffee bar where he works, near Marble Arch. She questions him about religion:

I remembered thinking what a beautiful acolyte he would make, so I asked him if he ever went to church. ‘No, Wilmet, I’m afraid I never do,’ he said. ‘Church services are so old-fashioned, aren’t they? As a matter of fact, I once knew a boy who went to church. He used to wear a vestment – he looked ever so nice.’ I felt it was hardly worth the trouble to point out that it was only priests who wore vestments. Unless, of course, the friend had been a priest, which seemed unlikely.

The book has many a mysterious religious question in it.

I loved the pompous man who is horrified that his sister is thinking of becoming a nun:

‘What on earth will people say?’ he groaned… ‘We have never had anything like it in our family before,’ said Gerald, seeming to draw himself up to his full height.

[Wilmet replies:] ‘Perhaps not. But is it as bad as having a murder in the family, or even a divorce?’

And the Church of South India keeps cropping up:

‘We are hoping to go very thoroughly into the South India business this autumn.’ … Have the study groups on South India started yet?...[A vicar] considered that the attitude of the Anglican Church towards the Church of South India no longer entitled it to be regarded as a part of the Catholic Church.

Meanwhile, Wilmet stalks Keith’s career as a male model, finding him in her knitting pattern collection:

In bed I turned the pages of the knitting book, looking for Keith. I soon found him, on the opposite page to a rugged looking pipe-smoking man who was wearing a cable stitch sweater which took thirty ounces of double knitting wool. Keith was leaning against a tree, one hand absently playing with a low-hanging branch. He wore a kind of lumber jacket with a shawl collar, knitted crossways in an intricate and rather pleasing stitch.

Pictures from Free vintage knitting patterns,  natch.

So tied up are Wilmet & Keith that they will turn up to be just glimpsed in a later book of Barbara Pym’s, No Fond Return of Love p 216

Dulcie’s attention was caught by a rather interesting-looking couple, who had come close enough for their conversation to be overheard. They were a tall, elegantly-dressed woman of about thirty-five, with a fur stole draped casually over her darkgrey suit and a frivolous little pink velvet hat, and a younger, smaller man, with dark hair cut in a medieval style, who was rather oddly dressed in tight-fitting blue jeans and an orange heavy-knitted cardigan. He had a flat, rather common little voice, which kept up a non-stop flow of conversation.

‘But, Wilmet,’ they heard him say, ‘how do they keep them clean? Those yellow curtains must be ever so dusty if they’re never taken down. That guide said the brocade was over a hundred years old. I call it disgusting.’

Keith really does have a life of his own.

He wears at various times a tangerine shirt and jeans, and a tartan shirt. The picture plainly shows James Dean in a reddish jacket, but I thought Keith would be quite taken with it.

Wilmet’s outfit is pretty much pictured in yesterday’s entry…