The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  And now having already constructed her story word for word in her mind, she started off again so quickly that Tom, who with difficulty pierced through a cloud of anxious self-absorption to hear any conversation, followed only with jolts and bumps.

  ‘Neither David nor I were stupid,’ she said. ‘I don’t know that Mother was really, but she had let her intelligence slide for the sake of the conventions she loved. And anyway she felt that being plucky was more appropriate, more correct for people of our class and time than being clever. She saw our bookishness as a sort of betrayal. And, of course, we were frightfully priggish at that age.’

  Tom put on a face of humorous self-defence when he heard the word, but Meg was so concerned with her story that she hardly noticed it.

  ‘David got all the university scholarships. It’s easier for a man. But even so he was cleverer than me. Very clever, in fact, in his academic way. Just before the war he was elected to a junior fellowship at Magdalen. But when he came back he gave it all up and took the nursery garden that he runs down in Sussex.’

  ‘I don’t want to cultivate gardens,’ Tom said. ‘I want to cultivate myself. I suppose that’s what you’d call the priggishness of youth.’

  She couldn’t quite let him get away with that. ‘David and I were seventeen when we said that sort of thing,’ she told him. ‘You’re – what is it, Tom? Twenty-four?’ Conscious of the maternal, patronizing element in her remark, she tried to impart a more intimate note to her voice. ‘I’m on your side,’ she said. ‘You know that. Neither Bill nor I were annoyed because you threw up the export job Bill found for you. I was only annoyed that you preferred to think we were. It was such a poor compliment to our friendship. If you want to go from job to job – selling vintage cars, serving in bookshops, all these other things – well and good. As long as you don’t sponge on Viola, I’m with you.’

  Below his beard his thin neck reddened. ‘Of course you know that I am sponging,’ he said defiantly.

  ‘Well, it’s disgraceful,’ she cried, but there seemed nothing more to say about it.

  She had wanted to tell him how David had chosen another path to hers; to suggest that if a man wanted to ‘find himself’ it might mean, as for David, isolation and hard manual work. But really there seemed no relation between the two cases – and anyhow to put David’s decision in that light was complete falsification, for it omitted all mention of pacifism and of Gordon Paget. The truth was, she supposed, that she was anxious to clear her own conscience of the charge of narrow-mindedness, to show that she knew that there were other ways of living than the one she had chosen.

  And her own way of living, of course, was what she really wanted to discuss, or rather expound – the life she and Bill had made, and why it had been worth making. Heaven knew why she would wish to extol it from the housetops and to poor Tom Pirie of all people, except that there was a strange feeling of judgement in the air, a sort of stocktaking. She saw for a moment her mother opening a long envelope at the breakfast table and heard her saying, ‘Well, Meg, all very nice as usual. They place so much importance on success in exams nowadays, don’t they? I wonder if that’s quite right for girls. But then schoolmistresses live so much out of the world.’ And what world do you live in? she had always wanted to cry, where success doesn’t count? She had not felt that particular anger for many years. Viola Pirie was probably quite right – good-bye parties were all fudge. It was not as if they were going to the moon anyway.

  She would have been well content to let the silence last until, her own remembered anger dissipated, she could leave Tom and make a very overdue round of her guests. Looking down, however, she saw that his long, thin and oddly hairy hands were trembling. For a moment she thought that his nervousness could not sustain a silence; then she remembered where this conversation had left him. She was not prepared to take back what she had said of his sponging; but she could at least ease his close hugged guilt, dissipate a little of that surrounding mist of gloom which she felt must make him ‘wet’ even to the touch.

  ‘How did you find my suggestion for the start of the second act?’ she asked. It was pandering to drug addiction where the real need was more like analysis; but at least the drug had the effect of benzedrine.

  Tom’s voice in reply sounded more buoyant than it had the whole evening – the wobbling, reedy note had gone from it. ‘You were right,’ he said, ‘it does make the development more intelligible simply by making it more gradual. But I reject all your rules for neat play-making, you know.’

  ‘This was nothing to do with rules,’ she said. ‘It’s simply that no woman, certainly not your woman,’ she ought to have remembered his heroine’s name, ‘who’s supposed to be sensitive, would fail to detect a real unhappiness in the man she loved. Women are not all sensitive, and a lot of them are fools, but they’re given a second sight when they’re really in love.’

  ‘I reject your woman’s intuitive knowledge, too,’ he said, ‘along with all the other neat rules for explaining life. But,’ he looked at her very earnestly, ‘I do thank you very much for your interest, especially as I’m sure you must think the whole thing a bit of a fraud.’

  If one had plumped for benzedrine, then one could not withdraw the supply, so she said, ‘Why should you think that? I’m not the person to be bothered with it if it didn’t interest me. I’ve always been fascinated by the theatre.’ One general truth to one particular lie; there seemed to be rules for insincerity as for everything else.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said, ‘I suppose it’s because I’ve started so many things and scrapped them. I can’t expect others to have the faith in my ability to write that I have.’

  ‘Oh, I think you could be a writer,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think I want to be. I just want to write one good play – not one that succeeds, you know –’

  ‘Oh, no, for heaven’s sake. Not that. That would be terrible,’ she cried. If her sarcasm sounded roguish it was in order to avoid showing anger.

  But he said solemnly, ‘Mind you, I’m pretty sure it will be a success if I can do it at all. But to have written one good thing, that’s all I care about. I should have proved something about myself and I should be quite happy if I never wrote again.’

  She stifled her first impulse to dismiss what he said as posturing and considered carefully. ‘I don’t believe it ever works out like that,’ she said. ‘Do you see that woman over there? The one with the emerald green dress?’

  ‘The one with the bathroom hair style?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she cried. ‘Poor Poll! She stuck about ten years ago as far as her appearance is concerned. And in other ways too. She’s an old friend of mine. We were at the Slade together just before the war. Oh, yes, I’ve had my ambitions. I went there just after I married; but I hadn’t got anything really, not even talent, so I stopped after a year. But Poll was good. She got so far as having an exhibition and quite a little réclame. And then it petered out. I don’t know why. Perhaps because she had enough means not to go on when it became really difficult, perhaps because there wasn’t anything more there.’

  ‘Poor woman,’ Tom said, ‘she looks like an angry clown.’

  ‘You will write,’ Meg cried, ‘or rather, you know something about people. It’s always coming out in things you say. Proving that she could paint didn’t make her happy.’ Whether because Meg’s compliment had put him on his mettle or whether from genuine curiosity, Tom stared fixedly at Poll with his huge, sad eyes.

  ‘I’ll take you over to introduce you,’ Meg began. She could prevent him staring and be free of him in one move. But it was too late.

  Poll abruptly left the man she had been talking to for so long. She walked towards them so carefully that Meg feared she was drunk; it was impossible to tell because her tight skirt might equally have been the cause. In any case, Poll always drank so much and showed so few signs of it that there was no cause for disquietude – or rather, would not have been in the old days, but people sai
d nowadays that the extra drink or two made her quarrelsome.

  ‘You’ll know me when you see me next time,’ she said to Tom, and to Meg, ‘You were whispering about me with the beard. That wasn’t very nice.’

  Meg said, ‘This is Tom Pirie, Poll. Mrs Robson.’

  ‘Clever you,’ Poll interjected.

  ‘We’ve been discussing what’s going to happen to Tom,’ Meg announced.

  ‘What is going to happen to you?’ Poll asked.

  ‘Nothing, really.’

  ‘Well, that isn’t very interesting, is it?’ Poll declared. There was a moment’s silence, then she added, ‘But still you’ve got a beard. That might be a help. I thought at first it was a submarine one. But you’re too young for that. Just after the war my house was filled with submarine beards. And duffle coats. But I don’t allow duffle coats any more. They’re always dirty and they smell. Meg doesn’t have them here anyway. Everything’s much too posh. By the way, Meg, I shouldn’t have thought you would have had bottom-pinchers here. That man I’ve been talking to is rather a dish, but I’m sure he’s a bottom-pincher. But then,’ she came back to it in a low voice, ‘I didn’t think you’d whisper about me with beards.’ Her blue eyes had such a fixed, staring look that Meg really could not tell whether she was angry or not.

  She said, ‘Tom thinks everybody here’s rather glossy.’

  ‘Oh does he? What does that mean?’ Poll asked.

  Tom decided to assert himself. ‘I meant successful but not knowing anything worth knowing,’ he said savagely.

  Poll looked for a moment at his spittle that had settled on the sleeve of his coat, then, ‘You’re quite wrong,’ she said, ‘Meg knows an awful lot. And what she doesn’t know Bill tells her. He’s in with all the high ups.’

  Tom, it was clear, could make nothing of her and he looked even more uncomfortable when, as though she was confiding a tremendous secret to him, she said, ‘Do you know that they knew when the war was coming? Yes, they did. Meg left the Slade even before that old Chamberlain went to Munich and she joined the Red Cross.’

  ‘It was one part patriotism,’ Meg said, ‘three parts good sense.’

  ‘Well, anyway, it meant you had a good war. I didn’t. I had no idea it was coming and in the end they sent me to the country just because I’d been taught languages properly as a girl. It was awful. We had to listen to the wireless all day. But I know when the next war’s coming,’ she announced, ‘that bottom-pinching man told me. But I shouldn’t think anyone would have a good war next time, would you?’ She gave a loud laugh that blared through the babble of conversation.

  Meg thought, whenever Poll laughs it’s at something frightening or depressing, and she makes the noise others use to greet a coarseness that touches their fancy.

  ‘I wish you weren’t going away, Meg.’ Poll sounded truly for a moment as though she were being abandoned on a desert island; then resuming her customary dead-pan manner she said, ‘I shan’t have anyone to borrow money from when those damned people don’t send my cheques in time. Do you borrow from Meg?’ she asked Tom.

  That Tom had once done so was not a matter of great embarrassment to him, but his lack of embarrassment embarrassed Meg greatly, so she deflected wildly. ‘Look at Jill talking to that boring architect. She looks as though she were sharing the funeral baked meats.’

  Poll looked round for a moment. ‘That Stokes woman of yours? But she always looks like grim death. I can’t see why you mentioned her, Meg. I can’t borrow any money from her. She hasn’t got any, has she? If I knew all these high ups I wouldn’t ask people like the Stokes woman and me and the bear here at all.’ She gave Tom a questioning look to see how he reacted to her talk, and finding that he was still puzzled, she suddenly took his hand. ‘I think I like the beard, Meg,’ she announced.

  This softening into whimsy embarrassed Tom, but he smiled a little nervously. Meg, however, was suddenly concerned for herself. Innuendo, direct attack, or friendly teasing, she had had enough of any sort of criticism for today. True, except for Donald, they would not voice it if they did not like her; true that for all of them it was a kindly office to let them ease their pinched feelings; but if there was a place to kick off tight shoes, it was not under her dinner table; and in any case they should all, even Tom, have provided themselves with shoes of the right size years ago. Had she not been tired she would not have let it go on for so long; but if she did not exert herself now, her fatigue would turn into anger, and then all her patience would have been wasted.

  She sought for a tone that would at once be light and final. ‘My guests can’t live by bread alone, Poll,’ she said. ‘They expect me to provide a circus too.’ But Poll met the emotion before she replied to the words.

  ‘You’re all right, Meg,’ she said. ‘It’s bliss to see someone who’s got what they want. I’m willing to jump through any number of hoops for you, darling. If the beard’s been saying you aren’t any good, he’s wrong.’

  ‘Oh,’ Tom said, ‘I’ve been behaving like a bear and Meg’s been good enough not to bait me. Even to entertain her guests.’

  ‘Yes. Well, we won’t go on with Meg’s little whatever it’s called about the circus,’ Poll told him. ‘I’d have pushed too, you know,’ she said, parodying whatever was wistful in her tone, ‘if I’d had a husband like Bill. But if I’d pushed any of mine they’d have fallen flat on their faces.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think I should do that,’ Tom said, ‘if I married a wife like Meg, that is.’

  Meg wondered what sympathy he had found with Poll that he could say such a thing without spluttering.

  ‘All the same,’ he added, ‘it must be a bit of a strain to be kept on the move.’

  Here Meg felt it reasonable to snub a little. ‘It would be for anyone without Bill’s stamina. That and his knowing all the time where he’s going.’ She saw what she had accepted and laughed. ‘In any case, I don’t have a chance to push,’ she cried. ‘In fact, I’m always out of breath keeping up with Bill.’

  ‘Our mothers,’ Poll said, ‘would have thought all this talk about pushing very vulgar. Or at least mine would.’

  ‘Our mothers,’ Meg replied, ‘were stupid snobs. Or at least mine was. Tom’s mother is an angel.’

  ‘Well, don’t rub it in,’ Tom said, ‘anyhow she’s always saying what an angel you are.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Poll. ‘Well, we’ve all been saying that for the last ten minutes. Now I’m going to talk about myself.’

  ‘Do that, Poll,’ Meg said, ‘I must go and talk to all these people. Anyway I know the story. But Tom wants to be a writer. You listen to Poll, Tom. Her life’s as good as any book.’

  As she moved away she saw that Poll had relaxed her square little body and was weighing in with relish.

  ‘I’d better begin at the beginning,’ she was saying. ‘Well, my father was an awful old swine really. I can’t find any other word for it. But a very rich one …’

  And Tom sat impressed and on his mettle to be amused as though Grock or some great clown had favoured him with a special interview.

  It surprised Meg to see Bill and his cronies abandoning their game of bridge so early. One, at least, she noted, was no crony at all but a visiting American lawyer. It meant that the party would soon be over, for Bill’s social gifts were used either to settle guests in or to prise them out. She would have gone to his help, for overstaying guests were an annoyance to him that she had always made it her duty to prevent, but Gino came with the news that David was on the telephone. Her absence would delay the guests’ departure and she could detect a very slight over-hearty note in Bill’s voice which gave meaning to the early end of bridge: the American perhaps had not been up to standard. The antithesis of her husband and her brother seemed determined to assert itself this evening. It was absurd that one moment of largely forgotten history should suddenly come alive again. Nevertheless she could not suppress her irritation as, picking up the telephone, she said, ‘Yes, David?’ in a voice wh
ich suggested that his call was one of a series of regular, unnecessary interruptions rather than a recall to past intimacy that he made at the most five or six times a year.

  ‘Only to wish you a pleasant trip.’ His voice, as always over the telephone, disturbed her by its nasal sound. She felt immediately guilty that she had forced him into apology for a call which no doubt he had already deferred as either obtrusively intimate or meaninglessly conventional.

  ‘That’s very sweet of you, David,’ she said, ‘I didn’t expect it, my dear. I knew how busy you must be.’

  ‘Well, we are. I should have come up to see you before you left, but Gordon hasn’t been well.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ she cried. It was more distress that she had not been the first to pronounce Gordon’s name in order to please David. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Some sort of stomach ulcers, we think.’ There was a pause and then he said, ‘Gordon says to tell you that he doesn’t think anything of the kind. He says that between Else fussing with his soma and me with his psyche, all he really wants is a complete rest and he wishes he were travelling with you.’

  She couldn’t really reciprocate the wish, so she said, ‘Tell him I would gladly give him my ticket. An infinity of aeroplanes and hotels fills me with horror at the moment.’ Here there need be no fear of arousing envy in David; indeed he immediately said,

  ‘Yes, awful. But I suppose there will be some things to see that will make up for it. There usually are moments. And you know how I hate foreign travel.’

  His words suddenly gave her a sense of calm, smoothed out the strain that had been mounting all day, so that she cried, ‘Oh, David, do let’s meet more often when I come back.’

  She heard him chuckle. ‘You can’t come to Sussex and I can never get to London. But we’ll contrive, Meg, somehow. Clapham Junction refreshment room perhaps. But we will meet,’ he said it with assurance. She longed to return from abroad the very next day just to set about showing that they could do it. And then the pips sounded and the spell was broken, for he immediately said, ‘There. I must ring off. My good wishes to Bill.’ His calm was no proof against his parsimony. She remembered all his cooperation with Mother over genteel cheeseparing. No wonder he had said ‘contrive’ – it was a key word to David and made all the peace he had found in life seem to her to narrow to a pinhead of petty isolation. She called almost spitefully, ‘And my regards to Miss Bode,’ but he had hung up.