No Fond Return of Love (1961)

I’ve grown used to the inclusion of fine details and minutiae, the seemingly unimportant detritus that turns out to be very important in Barbara Pym’s world, this being my fifth Barbara Pym book. They just add to the pleasure of being among the indexers, excellent women, clergy and available men who always turn up. Jumble sales, bed-sits, you know, a world where ”life’s problems are often eased by hot milky drinks.” And I will continue to lap up all that she wrote with great pleasure.

Dulcie Mainwaring is a young woman getting over a romantic break-up when she meets fellow researcher Viola Dace at a summer conference where one of the presenters keels over at the podium. That presenter, Aylwin Forbes, is a former love interest of Viola’s and as Dulcie gets to know him, she finds him more and more charming and alluring. She also becomes somewhat obsessed with researching the details of his life and while she stops short of stalking, she does go to great lengths to discover the details of his background and family history.

I’ve come to expect Pym to bring back characters from previous novels and she doesn’t disappoint this time around but I had one of those “OMG moments” when Wilmet, Piers and Keith make an appearance, having been last seen in A Glass of Blessings. But my copy of the book got a good spray of coffee as I snorted through Viola’s description of the characters as being “like characters in a novel.” Oh Ms. Pym, you make me laugh.

I am so happy to have found this author, who makes me laugh while at the same time showing shrewd understanding of the human heart. Her prose is honed to perfection and in the end, when the investigative schemes are untangled we find that love is returned after all. ( )

“There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.”
How could a novel with such an opening sentence not be anything but wonderful? I already had an idea that No Fond Return of Love, (along with Jane and Prudence) – was my favourite Pym, I’m now convinced of it.
Shortly after her engagement is broken off, Dulcie Mainwaring attends a conference at a girl’s boarding school in Derbyshire. Clustered together are a strange group of scholars, indexers and proof readers. Dulcie is given a room next to Viola Dace, who has been holding a bit of a torch for Aylwin Forbes, who will speaking during the weekend, and for whom she has previously done some indexing work. Aylwin becomes something of a fascinating figure for both women, but increasingly for Dulcie. Once the conference is over, and everyone back home, Aylwin a handsome scholar separated from his wife becomes the focus for Dulcie’s fantasies and fairly thorough investigations. Dulcie is living alone in a large house she once shared with her parents, she is soon joined by her eighteen year old niece Laurel, and not long after that, Viola Dace – in need of a temporary home also moves in. Dulcie begins to indulge in what today we would not hesitate to call fairly intensive stalking. With the help of various directories and who’s who – Dulcie tracks down, Aylwin’s mother-in-law, and Anglican priest brother. Viola rather aids and abets Dulcie – the two of them discussing the Forbes family at length, neither of them thinking it in the least odd for Dulcie to visit her Aunt and Uncle so that she has an excuse to go home via Aylwin’s brother’s church.
Meanwhile Dulcie’s niece Laurel has started a tentative relationship with the boy next door – while longing to move out of Dulcie’s house and into a bedsitter – where she can lead a bachelor girl kind of life and eat in coffee bars. It is while she is in the midst of this transition that she first comes to the notice of Aylwin Forbes himself, despite his being older than her father. Thus the scene is set for a fabulous comedy of manners, and unrequited love.
Part of Barbara Pym’s genius lays in the minutely observed everyday situations of her upper middle class characters, we may never have lived their lives, yet somehow they are peculiarly recognisable. There is a delicious dry humour to Pym’s writing that is comforting and subtly profound. Her dialogue and interactions between characters is, as ever spot on, some of the scene just brilliantly acute. The awkwardness of a hotel dining room, the worry of whether a cauliflower cheese will stretch, avoiding someone at a station, Barbara Pym portrays all these curious little things with absolute perfection.
“Sitting aimlessly in bedrooms- often on the bed itself- is another characteristic feature of the English holidays. The meal was over and it was only twenty five past seven. 'The evening stretches before us,' Viola said gloomily.”

I love the way Pym manages to expose those wicked little thoughts we all have from time to time. I think many readers have found that there is very much more to Miss Pym than meets the eye.
Of course one of the things regular readers of Pym’s novel adore – is how she drops characters from other novels into the story, here we glimpse characters from A Glass of Blessings. ( )

Dulcie Mainwaring and Viola Dace become friends of a sort at conference for editors and indexers. They look into the background and family connections of handsome lecturer Aylwin Forbes.

I would like Dulcie's life, though I suppose her investigations would be a lot easier and a lot less fun in the days of Google. Nice little snippets to bring us up to date with Wilmet and her social circle and Deidre and the anthropologists ( )

Another review here on Goodreads calls Dulcie Mainwaring a stalker. There's a fair way between nosey parker, the restrained obsession with which Miss Mainwaring carries out her research into - her indexing of - Aylwin Forbes life, and stalker, which implies an ill intent.

Pym's failing is that she rarely shows her male characters' attractiveness. Most women in the book find Aylwin attractive but while he's described as handsome his character is sorely wanting. He's shallow, self-centred and dull. I imagine that if he did discover the extent of Dulcie's interest he would consider it only his due if perhaps a sign of her feminine instability.

Pym is not generally known for the depth of her heroes, but for the restrained and delightfully, wickedly funny responses of her heroines to their quiet, middle-class lives and the anthropologists, librarians, curates and vicars that share them. ( )

A Review of “No Fond Return of Love.”
By
Barbara Pym

Oh that I was so long in finding this author. What would have been my impression at twenty? Thirty? Forty?
Now at nearly fifty, I find Barbara Pym. I think most of my review regarding her books start with the same lament.
The woman can turn on a dime. She is amazing. We can move in a few words from scene to scene and not get lost. Her humor is rapier sharp and as often with anything that sharp, you don’t know you’ve been sliced to bleeding at first.
Men, I do believe suffer in character more than women in Ms Pym’s book – though I’ll confess right here – I look for it. I look for the ridiculous in a situation and Ms Pym always delivers . Later, as I re read the novels, later I may see more of her wit rise up among women – but right now – I smile, relax, enjoy, her ability to characterize men. Men seem to be the unwitting prey – but somehow deserving of capture.
Dulcie Mainwarning, educated, hurt romantically suddenly finds herself surrounded by a needy woman who needs a place to live and a young vivacious niece, learning to live in London.
The dinner party, the careful planning and the sudden realization she would rather be eating alone.
The insatiable curiosity regarding Aylwin Forbes, then his estranged wife, his brother (equally handsome and besot with weeping spinsters) and Aylwin’s mother – the culminated meeting of all at a hotel by the sea suddenly put me in the feel of a Shakespearean comedy, with twins and misunderstandings and overheard conversations.
The novel is a subtle turn after subtle turn of raised eye brows, low whistles and manipulating maiden aunts who marry in the end.
And it works – the whole thing works in the end.

“Perhaps all love had something of the ridiculous in it.”
“I might eventually enter the community – take my vows, you know,’ Bertram. “I should have to see how things went. But the guest house is very comfortable – I’ve stayed there before, of course – good food, central heating, no women…” He smiled at his sister and niece. ( )