There’s an essay by Jonathan Lethem in which he says
that every summer he goes on holiday, taking a Barbara
Pym novel with him. He says it doesn’t matter which
novel because he can never remember whether he’s read
it or not, and in any case they’re all pretty much the
same. This may sound like a complaint or a criticism but
in fact he’s a big fan of Barbara Pym, as am I, and I know
just what he means.
The other day I started reading, in fact rereading, Pym’s A Glass of Blessings. To be fair to myself I did remember certain aspects of the plot and I saw that I’d dog-eared a page or two here and there so I must have read at least some of it.
The martini makes an honorable appearance, just as it does in Pym’s earlier Jane and Prudence, 1953, in which Prudence consoles herself by eating alone in a good restaurant ‘A dry Martini and then a little smoked salmon; she felt she could manage that.’ Pym capitalizes Martini.
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| I don't believe Pym's heroine looks even remotely like this. |
Early in A Glass of Blessings, 1958, the heroine/narrator Wilmet Forsyth’s husband Rodney, known as Noddy (yes really), brings home a work colleague from the Ministry and busies himself making drinks.
‘I think I’ll have a dry Martini,’ says Wilmet.
‘Gin always gives me a dry mouth,’ says Sybil, who is Wilmet’s mother in law.
‘You sure you wouldn’t prefer a gin and lime, dear?’ says Rodney to Wilmet, his ‘hand hesitating on the Noilly Prat bottle.’
‘No, I’d rather have French please,’ says Wilmet.
Some interesting nomenclature there. Gin and lime is presumably a synonym for gimlet, French apparently a synonym for a martini or is it just for vermouth?
Later at some church social Wilmet observes ‘I myself seemed to belong to two very clearly defined circles - the Martini drinkers and the tea drinkers though I was only just beginning to be initiated into the latter.’
What a world in which Martini drinking precedes and supersedes tea drinking. That’s my world, actually.
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