The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  ‘No, Bill,’ she cried. ‘Please be fair. It isn’t just adolescent egotism. I’ve come to terms years ago with the vast spaces of the sky and all that. At least as far as I’m able, which isn’t probably much. But this is different. I literally have been down there for what seems hours now. I’m terrified of it but I can’t take my eyes off it.’

  He said again, ‘You’re overtired.’

  And she answered quite angrily, ‘I’ve been that before now, as you know. Even made myself ill with it. And don’t tell me it’s agoraphobia because I’ve known that too and it isn’t.’

  ‘Well, hardly in an aeroplane,’ he said and smiled, but she looked at him and his tone altered. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘these things change or can do so. Even something as apparently primeval as that desert. In fifty, a hundred years new technical processes may have altered the whole of that.’

  ‘Then I should have come hereafter,’ she said.

  He took her hand and began to talk to her about the desert lands. She could hardly believe that he could know so much – geographical, geological, metereological facts. Relentlessly, and, as she knew, in purposely boring detail, he ground the whole desert down into facts and figures as dry and dead as itself.

  ‘How do you know all this?’ she said after some time. ‘I believe you’re making a lot of it up.’ From her voice he could tell that she was eased and he allowed himself to say, ‘Well, does it matter if some of it is a little improvised?’ and to his relief, she laughed contentedly.

  ‘I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before,’ she said. ‘I feel in a way ashamed.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t see why you should be, darling. As I said you’re very overtired’ – he met her objection to this in advance – ‘and it may well be more than that. A really strange experience. After all, things happen to one for the first time when one isn’t necessarily very young.’

  She laughed again. ‘I don’t think we need dwell on that aspect of it,’ she said.

  ‘We needn’t dwell on any aspect of it,’ he answered, and, agreeing, she went off to wash. When she returned she found that she could slip with ease into poor Mr Tulliver’s financial disaster.

  She was only brought back many pages later when she heard Mrs Fairclough’s voice addressing Bill in a half-whisper. ‘Perfect love,’ she was saying, ‘casteth out fear.’ Meg peered round her book to see an old, freckled hand heavy with rings pressing Bill’s arm; she could only glimpse too that he was returning the old woman’s deep, sincere look.

  She knew now how he behaved in such tight corners: sincere embarrassment, polite but insincere ‘sincerity’. Almost her own level, though the sincere embarrassment put him a little above her and this was exactly as she would wish it. Under the table she put her hand on his knee and his hand came down and pressed hers. She tried to return to Mr Tulliver, but Bill, caught in the path of Mrs Fairclough’s eccentricity, made her tremble with suppressed giggles. At last, bent over her book, she was forced into open laughter until the tears ran down her cheeks. Mrs Fairclough, who clearly revered laughter as God’s image, although herself more given to sweet smiling, said, ‘That must be quite a wonderful book, dear, to bring such happiness,’ and she peered at the title. Luckily she did not distinguish George Eliot from Artemus Ward or Jo Miller. Meg feared Bill’s renewed embarrassment, but instead he pressed her hand more tightly and she could feel his body shaking slightly with laughter that he was just, but only just, able to suppress. Miss Vine’s voice, however, came to relieve them with safety belts, and cigarettes to be extinguished, and a stay of an hour at Karachi airport ‘during which luncheon …’

  *

  With less than two hours to go before their destination, they dined in the airport restaurant at Srem Panh. By good luck it transpired that Srem Panh itself was Mrs Fairclough’s destination, so there had been no need to atone for their giggles by asking her to dine with them. In this last lap of their journey Meg had lost all her fatigue and depression, she felt now that she would welcome many more days of suspended, immune existence. Bill, on the other hand, seemed irritable at this further delay; perhaps the cramp imposed upon his body in the aeroplane was beginning to exhaust him, perhaps he was tired of the diet of deadened foods in hygienic coverings; certainly the meals at airports had proved regularly so bad as to suggest that they were sampling the various national cuisines only at the station buffet level. Meg guessed that he had come, too, to hate being shepherded by efficient young women, for he ostentatiously ignored the smiling, moon-faced Badai girl’s attempts to place them at the same table as some other Europeans. She walked away with a self-conscious, jaunty swagger. As they sat down at a table for two in the corner, he said, ‘I hope all these Asian girls aren’t going to look like cinema usherettes.’

  Meg looked around her and thought everything more anonymous and beautiful than she had dared to hope for. There was nothing, absolutely nothing in this large glass-fronted room that could touch her. The posters on the walls told of places she knew nothing of; the signs over the doors (if one ignored the English translations, and she felt that she could) were in letters she had never seen before; the chatter, that fought against the aeroplane roar without, seemed to be in a multitude of languages no one had ever told her of; the people (save for a few Mrs Faircloughs, whom in her present mood she could forget) seemed to be so many beautiful dolls, pretty girls with meaningless smiles, handsome amber men whose enormous eyes said no more to her than would the eyes of cats. Here and there was an absurdity – a young woman (Chinese? perhaps not) in what seemed to be an incongruous and cheap violet ball dress and high-heeled emerald green shoes; a fat, dark brown man with a red fez; a long, thin man (Badai probably, from his amber likeness to the waiters) surrounded importantly by young amber secretaries; some sadder, more European-seeming young amber men guzzling a dish she could not identify, no doubt to assuage their grief – she could look at all these as she would at anteaters or the manatee in the zoo, exotics to whose meaning she possessed no clue.

  Great waxen red and pink lilies with huge yellow stamens decorated the room – if she had once known their name at some florist’s she had now comfortably forgotten it; even the insects whose crushed bodies formed patterns upon the glass window were creatures she could never identify. Only the large pool of red and blue water lilies outside the restaurant could conceivably be said to be familiar, and then only because in the arc lights they looked like part of an improbable travel film. The country, Badai, the town, Srem Panh, were only names to her; she would never visit there; nothing that happened there could ever concern her. In Singapore, no doubt, and more still in Australia and America there would be impingements; but at this moment she had found a vacuum of peace in place and time.

  Not so Bill, who wiped his face, took off his seersucker coat, and then, seeing the great sweat patches on his shirt, put it on again. She could not understand how the mood of happiness they had found on the aeroplane could have left him so easily. The humidity, of course, was beyond even what she had expected, but even so it was cut by the strange, Edwardian-looking electric fans, and outside there were cool pools of rainwater on the terrace and huge dark clouds on the horizon to promise more rain. She set herself, like a child with a tired grown-up, to ask him questions about Badai; but she determined to let the answers drift away in the heat, leaving her calm island untouched.

  ‘The airports,’ she said, ‘are so deceptive. Like London Airport. So uniform. One has no idea of what lies beyond,’ she corrected herself, ‘or hardly any,’ for really to pretend that this enchanting place bore any likeness to London Airport was too absurd. But he clearly did not find it so. ‘Beastly places,’ he said, ‘and filthy food,’ as he allowed the jellied cold soup to liquify in his spoon. ‘Not that we’re missing anything in not seeing Srem Panh, I imagine, apart from the company of that Middle West lady Messiah. It’s almost entirely a modern town. The pride of the Badais since they found their wonderful, new freedom from the Dutch. Some mode
rn blocks, I expect, and a grand hotel. Even the older Dutch quarter is largely art nouveau. After all it’s a small country; prosperous enough under Dutch rule but never the big affair that French Indo-China was for the French, or Burma or Malaya for us, I believe that there’s some wonderful mountain and jungle scenery up country but the people have always been a subject race-when it wasn’t the Dutch it was Burmese or Siamese rule. Now, of course, they’re an advanced democratic nation, and we have to join in the charade in case they turn to the Communists; but Communism’s bound to come sooner or later. I wouldn’t invest a penny in anything in south-east Asia …’

  Dutch, democratic independent nation, Communist, Meg let them all flow over her; they had nothing to do with this peaceful backwater into which she had now glided, among the lilies. She felt that she had only to let her hand fall to her side to feel the cool, hardly moving water around her, as she had done so often in punts with David at Oxford. And in any case even had she attended, these questions were outside her range, outside anyone’s range, except the experts who ran the world, and they, when you met them, hardly knew what they were doing. But Bill, who became impatient at the least amateur politics from anyone else, was happy now, explaining realistically just where they should cut their losses to Communism and where to hold on. His voice, indeed, sounded full and contented enough for her to venture a quiet, a slow puncture.

  ‘Are you improvising the jungle as well as the desert?’ she asked.

  To her relief, he laughed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘or hardly.’ He began to praise the fruit salad. ‘You’ll get a lot of this papaya,’ he said. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s delicious,’ she told him, ‘all the food’s delicious.’

  Everything now was delicious. She could feel that he was sharing her view of it all, if only at second-hand, in pleasure at her happiness. She was cautious enough, however, to refuse coffee; if that were as poor as she feared it might be there would be no holding him to the idyllic illusion. They walked together to the long glass front of the room and stood watching a Constellation leave on its flight to Colombo. She realized how fully anonymity would be kind to them in the days ahead, once the tedious chores of Singapore were over; kind especially perhaps in relaxing him; for she felt his arm around her waist, even pressing her to him. They stood so for some minutes and she stroked the hand that was placed on her hip. With the Constellation gone, the airfield stretched flat and yellow before them far over to the scrubby bush circling its edges, black outlines only in the moonlight. It might have been Putney Heath or Wimbledon Common, although it was difficult to imagine the circumstances which would have taken them to those places and certainly, had they gone there, his arm would not, as now, have been round her waist. That above all was the sign of how wonderfully it was Srem Panh airfield. They stood there together for five minutes or more, saying nothing; then ‘Kew Gardens,’ she announced, ‘and Versailles.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I was thinking that. Red and blue water lilies. We chose conventional places for our courting.’

  She took up the slight irony he gave to the last word. ‘You may have thought you were courting, Bill,’ she said. ‘I was under the impression that we were “walking out together”. Besides they were far too crowded to be conventional.’ She added with mock wistfulness, ‘You’d never put your arm around me at Kew Gardens now.’

  But he accepted it on the serious level. ‘Wouldn’t I?’ he said. ‘Perhaps not. Things have to change you know.’ He turned her round and led her to a nearby table littered with crumbled bread and half empty wine glasses.

  ‘This isn’t a very nice table to sit at, Bill,’ she commented, but he answered only, ‘We’ve stood for long enough.’

  Smiling, the amber waiter proffered a menu. Bill gestured him away. Meg thought, he doesn’t realize what overtones of colonialism his manner may have for these people. She said, ‘We only want to sit here, thank you.’

  But if the waiter understood English, it was certainly not hers. Having retired at Bill’s gesture, he now advanced again at her words. She was driven into smiles and signs to express a satisfied appetite. Bill said, ‘What on earth’s all this pantomime for?’

  Annoyed, she said, ‘I don’t like sitting with all this mess about me.’

  At the next table the tall distinguished Badai stopped for a moment in his discussion of the portfolio of papers on his table and spoke to one of his secretaries, who in turn addressed the waiter. In a moment Meg’s wishes were met and their table had been cleared. At the cost, however, of the waiter’s composure. He leaned against the wall, whispering and giggling in a high falsetto with the two boys who assisted him. Meg smiled and bowed to the official party in recognition of their assistance. This for some reason only seemed to increase the whisperingg and giggling of the waiter. Bill frowned at them but his expressions did not command as they did in England. The distinguished official turned slightly in his chair and the waiters were silent.

  ‘I wonder what he is,’ Meg said. ‘I should think a member of the government, shouldn’t you? Perhaps the Minister for Culture.’

  ‘Is there one?’ Bill asked, looking at her indulgently.

  ‘Oh, I should think so. There always is in foreign countries. He looks cultivated and sensitive. He wouldn’t be the Minister for Transport or Agriculture or anything routine like that. He’s probably rather lost among his colleagues. That’s why he looks a little sad and lonely.’

  ‘And his secretaries?’ Bill asked, ‘Let’s hear about their private lives.’

  ‘Well, the little one with the long flat head like an Egyptian mummified cat is eaten up with jealousy of the Minister. He’s probably got a wife who nags him for not rising higher. And the young one with the fat smiling face like a bursting apricot is the Minister’s favourite. He’s a yes-man, but not without his own ideas. He’s got a young wife or perhaps … do they have more than one wife? I suppose being Moslems, they do.’

  ‘If they were Moslems they might,’ Bill said. ‘But Badai happens to be a Buddhist country. You’re like Sherlock Holmes put down among the Hottentots. As a matter of fact, all this woman’s intuition is just a lot of Sherlock Holmesing. You go by the standard thing that you know. “He wore flannels where a suit was called for, my dear Watson. He spoke like a repertory actor. And he drank a third pint of beer when he didn’t want it. Obviously a modern parson of a rather old-fashioned kind. The thing’s elementary.” All that Holmesing won’t do here away from the familiar U and non-U of the Home Counties. You have to fall back on describing them as being like cats or apricots.’

  A sharpness in his tone perplexed her, she said as lightly as she could, ‘Bill, I believe you’re indulging in what Viola Pirie calls “only half-teasing”. I don’t know why my descriptions should annoy you so, after all their faces are like that. Cats or apricots. Anyway you’re always summing up witnesses. How do you do it?’

  ‘Not in that sort of way at all,’ he said. ‘I’ve no idea what that man’s job is. But he’s got authority. You can tell that by the tone of his voice even in this jangling language. And by the set of his head. He’s arrogant, I should think, by the way his eyes are half closed when people talk to him and by the curl of his mouth. And quite right too. Why shouldn’t he be? He’s earned the right to it, I expect. And look now, how he’s closed that brief case and brought the discussion to an end right in the middle of the fat fellow’s argument. It’s obvious he doesn’t care a damn. He’s made up his mind and he’ll stand by his own risks. Excellent man.’

  ‘I don’t find any of that the faintest bit convincing,’ Meg said, laughing. ‘You’ve just substituted John Buchan for Sherlock Holmes.’

  But Bill had no concern for criticism. ‘If I thought that man was typical of them,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t believe that the outlook for Asia was at all gloomy. But the trouble is men of his calibre are probably only a handful. It’s the material they’ve got to work on that’s so hopeless. That sort of thing for example.’ He indic
ated the table of sad young men in continental style suits, lace edged handkerchiefs and fountain pens prominent in their breast pockets. The food they had guzzled seemed literally to have assuaged their sorrow, for they were talking now in earnest, high, edgy voices. ‘Student politics,’ Bill said, ‘at the age of thirty or so. And one of the customs men off duty with them too. That’s a bad sign when your N.C.O.s are mixed up in that sort of thing.’

  ‘N.C.O.s! Really, darling!’ she cried. ‘What is this Colonel Blimp act? In the first place you’ve no right to say they’re talking politics. They’re probably talking about sex. And anyway why do you say they’re thirty? They look about eighteen.’

  ‘That’s the trouble. Most Asiatics look eighteen when they’re forty. Half-fledged with half-baked ideas! And always getting rattled about something. Look at the state of excitement they’re in.’

  She protested fiercely now, even though she mixed her protest with laughter.

  ‘No, Bill, really. You sound like Tom Pirie’s idea of the older generation.’

  He looked a little sheepish. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s very hot for talking. The sweat’s pouring down me. I don’t know how you keep so cool. Anyhow I’m afraid I am a bit out of sympathy with youth. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been if we’d had …’ he stopped and added quickly, ‘well, anyhow, for better or for worse I am. As I say, I can’t stick the half-fledged and the half-baked; and I hate people who get rattled. In court. Anywhere. It brings all the bully out in me.’ He paused as though surprised at hearing his own words, then he said, ‘No, put my money on the old boy in authority. He’s probably a High Court Judge.’

  She had been given time to recover now. When his unfinished sentence hit her, she had been on the point of stroking his hand or bursting into tears – some sort of underlining at any rate that would have made it impossible to turn back. Now it had been half said and the moment of saying, thank God, had been the best that there could be, for she would have all these months of intimacy ahead quietly and gradually to lay bare his wound and heal it so far as it ever could be healed.