With knobbly hands, shoulders bowed under the burden of arthritis, the little old woman tested the hasp of the front door and then turned to me, the last remaining guest from her tea party of that week. ‘Well, that’s someone who knows how to behave well,’ she said of the female guest who had just left.
The little old woman also knew how to behave well, invariably writing me a stiffly formal Collins on the morning after I had taken her out to the theatre or dinner. But her way of behaving well was totally different from that of her female guest.
If Ivy Compton-Burnett seemed unnaturally starched, as though she had to brace herself for the task of good behaviour that she set herself on these occasions, her guest, Sybille Bedford was totally relaxed. She had said something obliquely complimentary but undeserved about the cake, bought that morning by Ivy from the Apple Blossom Tea Room; she had breathed ‘Oh, lovely!’ as she stooped over the wilting begonias in a vase on a desk; she had discussed with obvious sincerity the merits of our hostess’s just published Manservant and Maidservant — ‘For me it’s the best thing you’ve ever done.’
On occasion Sybille could be critical, sharp, even dismissive. But unlike her contemporary Olivia Manning, who had long since acquired a reputation for deliberately upsetting other people, Sybille never did so. Not beautiful, not glamorous, not particularly well turned-out, she nonetheless radiated charm. In her own way, so different from Ivy’s, she rarely failed to behave well.
Now, when I recollect that good behaviour, what arises first in my mind is a journey that she and I made together by train to a PEN Congress in Lyons. There was some sort of strike of French porters in Paris, so that it was left to us delegates to hump our own often cumbrous luggage.
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