The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  He laughed. ‘I don’t think I care for you as every woman,’ he said. ‘I wish though you had cut it. You’ll be tired out by the time we get on the plane. Committees! Parties!’

  ‘That’s what Viola Pirie said, darling.’

  ‘Oh,’ he left it. ‘Has that son of hers got a job yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I didn’t ask. She apologized for his probably not coming this evening.’

  ‘Probably. That sounds theatening.’

  ‘We’re favourites of his, Viola says.’

  Bill made a grimace of distaste.

  ‘It’s probably true, you know,’ Meg told him.

  ‘Oh, I daresay there are worse cases than Tom Pirie,’ Bill admitted. ‘If he’d only shave off that beard. And be a little less grubby. Grubby-minded, too, I suspect. All the same, I can’t find him any more jobs. Poor old thing, she must have a life of it. But I still don’t know how you put up with her.’

  ‘Oh! She’s the least of worries,’ Meg cried, then as she saw him frown, she jumped up from her chair. ‘I’m not feeling the faintest bit tired,’ she said and kissed him. ‘And your day?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, winding things up at the office,’ he said, ‘whatever that may mean.’

  ‘I don’t think barristers say it, Bill, only business men. Whatever it means you look well on it. Something especially good has happened. What is it?’

  He smiled. ‘We don’t go round the world every day, you know.’

  ‘H’m,’ she considered it, ‘it’s hit you all of a sudden in that case. You haven’t shown any special excitement in the last weeks.’

  ‘I probably didn’t believe it until today.’

  ‘I’ve believed it for a long time,’ she told him and added quickly, ‘Oh! I shall love every minute of it once we’ve started. I hate partings, that’s all. We must go and dress.’

  From Bill’s boxlike dressing room across the large bedroom to the open-doored bathroom where Meg lay soaking, the talk went on. Shouting to each other in the morning and evening dressing hours had become over the years their most satisfactory, intimate form of conversation.

  ‘There is another reason,’ Bill called.

  ‘I knew there was. What is it? Did you win a lot today? I saw it was Lingfield. You’re always lucky there.’

  There was a pause and Bill’s voice came rather crossly. ‘Nothing to do with racing. Anyway I never win at Lingfield.’

  ‘Oh! Well there you are, I get things wrong too.’ After a few minutes’ silence she called, ‘Well? What is it? You must tell me now.’

  ‘I went to the doctor’s.’

  ‘Yes?’ She failed to sound casual.

  ‘I said that those T.A.B. inoculations were far more unpleasant than he’d warned us.’

  ‘Oh, Bill, don’t.’

  ‘I’ve told you it’s good news,’ he said, laughing.

  She wondered suddenly how much he savoured her anxiety over him.

  ‘All right, then, darling, why can’t you tell me straight away?’

  ‘It seems a bit fatuous, that’s why. The truth is I’ve been suffering from a sort of phobia about thrombosis for quite a while now. Putting on weight, high blood pressure, so many people we’ve known and so on.’

  ‘Well?’ She had come to the door of the bathroom now, water dripping from her body.

  ‘Very well,’ he called, invisible to her, ‘nothing to worry about at all. Blood pressure quite normal. I was relieved because of the heat in the East.’

  In her relief she considered for a moment going across to him as she was, wet and naked, but she turned back and plunged into her bath again.

  ‘Oh, I should have spoken to you,’ she cried, ‘I could have discussed it and made you go to Loundes before. You need never have had all this anxiety. It’s all your fault, Bill, for making me ashamed of hunches and intuitions. All these weeks I’ve been worrying about you and for just the same reason. I might have known that on anything so important we should be thinking the same. Any two people so close to one another are bound to.’

  ‘Hunches only work for horses,’ he shouted to her. She laughed but she said, ‘You sound as though you’d hate us to have any intuitive communication.’

  ‘Intuitive communication? Mind-reading the Victorians called it.’

  ‘Well, would you hate it if I could read your mind?’

  ‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘the social impossibility if such a thing became general. If Jill Stokes, for instance, could read what I was thinking.’

  She decided to accept the evasion. ‘She always knows you dislike her, Bill. You’re so much more polite to her than to anyone else.’

  ‘I could remedy that.’

  She laughed and said quickly, ‘Well, don’t start tonight, darling.’ She paused, ready with a glow of self-defence, but he only said, ‘Oh, she’s coming tonight, is she?’

  Her defence, nevertheless, was too ready not to be given. ‘Well, I couldn’t do anything else, darling. I met her at the chemist’s and she was so grumpy and pathetic.’

  He made no answer, but a minute later she saw him in the bathroom doorway looking at her as she dried. He turned away.

  ‘I wish you had a smaller store of pity,’ he said, so peremptorily that she drew her towel around her tightly for a moment. They had argued the question so often that she had to ask, ‘Bill, why suddenly now and so fiercely?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps because you’ll be so miserable in Malaya, and in Asia generally, if you’re going to let pity ride you.’

  She instinctively withdrew to the particular. ‘I can’t imagine it all, you know. Not even tomorrow night.’

  ‘Oh, a hotel bedroom like most others, but with electric fans. And scorpions,’ he added.

  ‘My father chastised you with rods, I will chastise you with scorpions,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rehoboam. In the Bible.’

  ‘I don’t know the Old Testament.’

  She laughed to herself with pleasure and affection for him; it was what he always said, as though he were a devout practitioner of New Testament Christianity instead of a mild agnostic of fierce agnostic parents.

  Later as she was combing her hair before the dressing table mirror, she said, ‘I think pity’s a sort of insurance with me. We’re so much luckier than others. And anyway it’s a very humble pity. I feel ashamed of having such good luck.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘And anyway all this talk about luck is nonsense. Luck works with cards or horses, and even there it’s mainly intelligence and skill. But otherwise it’s a destructive sort of sentimentalism which shouldn’t be taken into account even in the rare cases where it operates. It’s a destroyer of justice.’

  She began to pencil in her eyebrows. ‘I suppose you must think like that. You couldn’t exist through the miseries of the courts if you didn’t.’

  ‘I’ve always felt like it. Ever since I was a boy.’

  ‘Then perhaps it’s why you chose the law. It seems very arrogant. And yet I know you want people to like you.’

  ‘I don’t care twopence,’ he said, peering fiercely at her over the coils of the black tie he was knotting.

  ‘Oh?’ she questioned.

  ‘I care for the respect of one or two people, yes. One or two of the judges and Donald Templeton. And when Aunt Hester was alive I wanted her to like me, but then she had been very good to me and she was the rich aunt.’

  For a moment she accepted the pseudo-cynical note by which he was trying to drop the subject.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘and you did very well to persuade her to leave us the money for this house.’ But she felt the need to defy his evasion, though she turned and smiled at him to take any sting from her words. ‘And all the charm you use with people?’

  ‘You speak as though I was a confidence trickster,’ he laughed. ‘As to that, I’m not sure that I don’t think that the famous feminine interest in human beings, this intrusion, let’s call i
t no more, let’s say nothing about pity, isn’t worse. You’re bound to be giving blank cheques to all the lonely people and the misfits you come across, and you can’t honour half of them. No, not only you,’ he said, as she turned in protest. ‘Nobody could. There isn’t time if one’s to make anything of one’s life.’

  She shaped in her mouth and then said rather ruefully, ‘I try.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ he came and clasping her arms from behind pressed her to him. ‘I wouldn’t have you any different to what you are.’

  ‘I would,’ she said, then looking at his reflection she added, ‘we’re popular and we’re unpopular. At the same time and with the same people. Only I want to be liked and with no resentment. And you don’t care. That’s all the difference.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. She saw that he was determined now to be rid of the subject. ‘But it doesn’t matter,’ he announced, ‘we stand together against ’em all.’ She rubbed the crown of her head against his chin. ‘Yes, thank goodness. Together.’ Then, getting up to break the mood for him, she said, ‘There won’t be much to eat for dinner. I hope you won’t mind, before the party.’

  Only as they were going downstairs she suddenly asked him, ‘Do you think fear can be communicated in the womb?’

  He stopped dead and held to the banister. She turned and, looking at him, was appalled that she could be so far from him as to have had no inkling of what issues, long dead for her, might still be brought to life in his mind by an idle word. She gave him release in words that came too casually quick to sound convincingly casual even to her own ear.

  ‘I was thinking about Mother,’ she said, ‘and how I’ve always had irrational fears about journeys and homecomings. David had them too as a boy. It might so easily have been prenatal. Homecoming for her so often meant the discovery of some new exploit of Daddy’s – an affair with the governess, even just that he’d gone away with no warning. Do you think that could be the reason?’

  She saw that he could not easily throw off the first associations her question had aroused in him.

  ‘I don’t know, my dear,’ he said, ‘I’m no gynaecologist or prenatal expert.’

  She felt suddenly rebellious at having her communication, however tactless, left on her hands. ‘More likely really,’ she went on, ‘my early childhood. Daddy at the front and Mummy always apprehensive that she’d find a telegram when she got home. She could have communicated the fear to David too even though he was hardly born when the war ended. Don’t you think so?’ Bill did not answer.

  But at dinner he asked her suddenly, ‘Shouldn’t you have invited David up here before we went off?’

  ‘Oh, no darling. I’ve written to him and at this time of the year I imagine the nursery keeps him frightfully busy. Autumn’s the time when all the big orders for next year come in.’

  ‘Well, he’s got Gordon Paget, hasn’t he? To say nothing of Paget’s capital. And that monstrous regiment of women in breeches. He could surely get up for one night.’

  ‘Oh, he would have done, of course, if I’d asked him. But it would have meant asking Gordon too.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘When you’re going away for six months?’

  ‘Well, you know how David is if one doesn’t ask Gordon.’

  ‘It’s so long since we’ve seen him that I forget. In any case we could have stood Gordon for one night. I rather liked him the few times that I met him.’

  She felt so annoyed at this continued implied rebuke of what was, after all, something entirely on her own conscience that she smiled and said, ‘You’re being very broad-minded.’ How much in his turn he disliked her implication was clear to her from his remaining silent. Anxious to appease, she said, ‘It would have meant inviting Else Bode too.’

  He was clearly grateful for this release into more orthodox relationships. ‘Oh well, in that case, of course, you couldn’t. Not the whole caravanserai.’ He laughed happily at Else Bode – a stock joke.

  She felt it now due to him, her annoyance appeased, to express her grievance directly. ‘Why should you think I ought to see David?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh – you mentioned partings,’ he said, ‘as the fly in your ointment of our holiday.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean anyone in particular,’ she cried, ‘only leaving my regular life behind – the committee, the galleries, the theatres, and so on. It’s just my love of tramlines. Once I’ve left them I shall adore it all.’

  He smiled at her a little paternally. ‘I think you will,’ he said. ‘But it might be different if we were leaving people behind as well.’

  At first she was a little scornfully amused, thinking that he was jealous even of her threadbare tie with David, since he himself had no one at all in the world; but it then occurred to her that he was still brooding over her tactlessly sudden mention of childbirth. She sought for something that could please him out of his brooding thoughts but she could find nothing less trivial than, ‘I’ve cancelled my order for the Nymphenburg figures.’

  ‘Good girl,’ he said, but his pleasure seemed tepid compared with the ardour he had shown in asking her to forgo the purchase.

  It was not until a few moments before the first guest arrived, as they stood, tall, elegant, ready to please yet united to defend, that Bill suggested, ‘I should have thought it was your mother’s unreliability that was the trouble, if any. The constant moving from one place to another and the absurd enterprises that were bound to fail.’

  Meg dismissed it instantly. ‘Oh, no. That was only financial worry. Sordid if you like, but not that awful emotional chasm that Mummy faced or tried to. The person you loved simply not there. Think of it!’ She shuddered and he put his arm round her waist. ‘Oh, no,’ she repeated, ‘the tea-room and the bookshop and the curio came much later. When we were almost growing up and quite able to cope. Father had finally disappeared by then and I had David to go to.’

  He was about to say something when the bell rang and he turned to opening a bottle of champagne – he would allow no one else to obscure his skill in such tasks.

  *

  At a little before eleven Meg felt free to stand apart from the party for a few minutes and observe. This time of withdrawal was perhaps the highest solemnity of the entertainment ritual for her – then, and, if Bill was in the mood, the inquest afterwards. Despite all her experience now as a hostess, she was still remained keyed up – as they said every good actress must – until this moment. It came then as a relaxation; but also as the time of judgement. She was very critical – the verdict was so nearly always ‘success but’ or ‘success although’. Tonight it was very nearly plain ‘success’. The lame ducks were less of a problem than she had expected, although poor Tom Pirie, anaemic and bearded, clearly needed watching. But then the lame ducks were closer to her affections than the other guests and she inevitably expected to be more on edge about them. Bill’s ease had set the scene in the first quarter of an hour, until her own nervous tension was sufficiently relaxed to allow him to take three cronies into the small room for bridge. He would emerge only to dissolve it all with equal ease.

  The word ‘cronies’ echoed in. her head uncomfortably. It was not a word that she would ever say. It suggested a pseudo-Dickensian old lawyer and his friends. Bill was the least Dickensian person in existence, and not old. And he had no close friends. Perhaps she felt that his bridge playing marked the difference in their ages; if so it was very foolish indeed, lots of young people played cards. She turned from such unpleasing reflections about Bill’s age impatiently. What was more absurd was this snobbish idea that there were things she didn’t say! This too she rejected angrily. She was unashamed that they lived in a certain style. To be so would be the snobbery.

  Suddenly she realized that she was standing there ‘feeling like a successful hostess’. But if she was more self-conscious in this role than at other times it was a matter for amusement rather than for sharp self-censure. It was a part she had always so wished to play. She had hated the muddled, sh
abby gentility of the occasional parries her mother had given in the intervals of a plucky inefficient struggle to live. She had always made excuses, had been late at the secretarial college, or had hidden upstairs in her bedroom with a book – a book probably in which the part her mother muffed was played so splendidly by Glencora Palliser or Oriane de Guermantes or Clarissa Dalloway. It was not surprising, when at last she was able to assume the role herself, that her sense of it should have been a shade literary, a touch self-conscious.

  She caught a look in young Tom Pirie’s eye that suggested a disgusted rejection of the ‘gracious living’ around him – and no wonder, she thought, if she was playing Glencora Palliser, Oriane, and Mrs Dalloway all at the same time. Nevertheless if he wanted to be an angry young man he really should look less damp and dismal – and to suppose that a beard was going to help him! Vexed by his naïveté out of her abstraction, she reminded herself that a hostess exists only in fulfilling her hospitable functions. She saw Donald Templeton isolated in a corner. Over all the years of her marriage she had never succeeded in unbuttoning the urbane, slightly prim guise that Bill’s nearest approach to a friend always presented to her; it was unlikely that she would ever succeed now. Yet on this last night before their long absence it would be not nice, but fitting, and therefore satisfactory, to go through the motions of trying once again to reach him. If by a wave of a hand, she thought, she could ever have transformed his sleek, waxy face and his plump body into something, well something less like a doctored tomcat, she would have been friends with him long ago.

  For Bill, of course, a man’s outward appearance hardily existed; men either shared his interests, in which case they were useful as friends, or they didn’t. Donald had the best legal brain he knew and that was all there was to it. But she couldn’t feel like that. Men shouldn’t seem like doctored toms. Donald adopted the affectations of an eighteenth-century gentleman, but he was far more like an Edwardian drawing room tenor. She cut short the access of malice by going across to him.

  ‘Well? Well?’ he asked, thrusting his face a little too closely at her, ‘so you’re going to hold the gorgeous East in fee?’