The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  ‘Any shock always makes me ravenous,’ Mrs Marriot’s boyish grin was the best she could do in apology,

  Meg let out a hysterical giggle and then felt suddenly released from them – despite all their kindness, they were indifferent, as remote from her as she from them; the isolation she needed was not really threatened.

  A more unexpected threat awaited her when they reached the Marriots’ long, low white house. Reporters were already on the spot.

  ‘Mrs Eliot has nothing to say to you fellows,’ Mr Marriot told them and added something in Badai. Meg wondered vaguely if his Scots accent still came through, and if he had found the equivalent of ‘fellows’ in this strange, singing language. ‘Helen’ll take you up to your room,’ he told her. ‘I’ll have these chaps in for a whisky. If you can’t satisfy their curiosity it’s always as well to quench their thirst.’ He winked at Meg.

  ‘We should like to have a photograph of Mrs Eliot, please,’ one of the little men asked, smiling at her. Mistily she returned the smile and apparently roused Mr Marriot’s fears.

  ‘Now don’t let yourself get involved, Mrs Eliot,’ he said. ‘You chaps’ll have no photograph tonight. But you can all have a wee drop of Scotch to get your insides as wet as your outsides.’ His Scots act was clearly familiar and popular, for there was a wave of giggling and immediate acquiescence in his plan.

  Going up the broad wooden staircase from the large, circular hallway to the bedrooms, Meg, deadened though all her senses were, was struck by the beauty of the house.

  ‘You have a very lovely house,’ she said.

  ‘You have to have something in this place,’ Helen Marriot told her. ‘Don’t let Jimmie’s talking get on your nerves. Tell me if it’s too much and I’ll keep him quiet. But he’ll be a power of strength with newspapers and officials and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘He’s a very kind man.’

  Helen Marriot turned on the landing and faced her.

  ‘Oh! He’s a pet,’ she said. ‘But there’s no need to let him worry you.’ Perhaps it was Meg’s blank look that made her add, ‘Or maybe I’ll be the one to get on your nerves. I do on a lot of people’s.’

  Along the pale lemon wood of the corridor walls hung reproductions of Dufy. Helen Marriot’s white crinoline dress and vivid red hair seemed to repeat their decorative, rather chichi effect of splashes of bright colour. Meg longed for the darkness to descend and blot out all this irrelevance.

  In the large bedroom the lemon-coloured wood was varied with panels of some lighter, almost white wood. The familiarity of receiving a guest seemed to banish the occasion from Helen Marriot’s mind. She flitted about the room, indicating cupboards, a shelf of bedside books, an ivory box of cigarettes; she went into the attached bathroom and turned on taps to demonstrate showers, showed bath salts and fan apparatus. Meg followed her round automatically, saying every now and again, ‘Thank you.’ She had found it now as the word that would suffice to hold the world at bay in the coming weeks. Helen suddenly went to the door and clapped her hands. Even at that moment the improbability of people really summoning their servants in this way made Meg want to laugh. A moment later a pretty, high-cheekboned Badai girl appeared with Meg’s suitcases and – Meg suddenly saw – Bill’s. Immediately she felt a desperate need to get Bill’s things away from the cat-faced creature. The very existence of these Badais who had killed Bill seemed revolting to her; she must get the girl out of the room lest she should open the cases and touch any of Bill’s clothes.

  She tried to find some way of effecting this tactfully but she was too tired to invent.

  ‘I don’t want her to touch the clothes, please.’

  She had said it and was horrified. So, clearly, was Mrs Marriot, though she tried to mask her embarrassment and disgust. She spoke very gently to the girl, who bowed, smiled and left.

  ‘They’re very wonderful people, the Badais, Mrs Eliot. A race of natural aristocrats we think.’ Meg’s tragedy clearly could not excuse her from all censure. ‘You must remember,’ Helen Marriot went on, ‘that for Aung Ma you’re surrounded by a halo of heroism. She’ll do anything for you. She worships old Prek Namh.’

  Meg sat down on the large bed with its scarlet cotton cover. Helen, getting no reply, said, ‘Prek Namh the minister.’ And then almost irritably, ‘You mustn’t believe all these stories about the Badais being Communist. Your husband’s already a national hero to most of them, the man who gave his life for the minister.’

  Meg thought, they’ll try to make me accept this monstrous wickedness whatever it is. What have all their hero-worship and their filthy politics to do with us? They’ve killed Bill and they can’t get out of it. And I wasn’t there. I went away. She tried desperately to remember why she had gone to the lavatory, but every incident of the night seemed lost in a haze of memories of all her married years. She knew only that for whatever reason she had left him then, she had done so deliberately. ‘I wasn’t with him when they shot at him,’ she said dully, ‘I’d gone to the lavatory. I left him alone.’ She ended on a cry of despair.

  Helen Marriot came over and sat on the bed beside Meg. She took Meg’s hands and held them tightly. ‘Oh, my poor dear,’ she said, ‘my poor dear.’ Then slowly and deliberately as though she were repeating a spell to exorcise witches she said, ‘Prek Namh is the Minister for Education. Probably the most brilliant man they’ve got. Jimmie thinks so and, although he seems a frightful ass in many ways, Jimmie knows Badai affairs better than anyone, far better than our people at the Embassy. Prek was here from the capital to open the new college. We saw him only this morning. This student or so-called student had some kind of a grudge or so he says. But Jimmie says it’s political. So you see, my dear, that your husband’s bravery …’

  Meg had removed her hands from Helen’s clasp and she now got up. ‘I don’t want to hear about it all now please. Later, of course, I will. But now I must be alone to think about Bill.’

  Helen Marriot gazed in surprise for a moment, then she said, ‘Of course. What bloody awful bad luck life can serve up.’ But Meg had had enough of her intimacy, she began ostentatiously to unpack. ‘Look,’ Helen Marriot said, taking a packet from her white evening bag, ‘these are the sleeping pills Doctor Maung said you were to take. And there’s iced water in this Thermos by the bed.’

  Meg looked at the pills. ‘I never take those scarlet ones,’ she said, ‘they’re called seconal and they simply send me off to sleep and I’m awake two hours later. I’ve got my own anyway.’

  Helen Marriot stopped by the door. ‘Mrs Eliot,’ she said, ‘please take these. We are responsible to Doctor Maung. And I think you should try to help us a little.’

  Meg realized that this was her tone for combating hysteria. Perhaps I am hysterical, she thought; probably. She said, ‘Of course, if you think I should.’

  To her surprise, Helen Marriot waited. ‘I should like to see you take them,’ she announced. ‘Two, Doctor Maung said.’ Meg swallowed the pills as quickly as she could; anything to get the woman out of the room. ‘Good night,’ Helen Marriot said. ‘No one will disturb you tomorrow until you call.’

  Stretching out her arms to relieve her exhaustion in the double bed, Meg found only space, void. Her loss hit her suddenly with no soft padding of strange circumstances or of the need to cope. It was the first direct blow. Bill was lost to her; and she was lost to loneliness, back where she had started, lying alone in some country hotel room – at Crowborough was it? where her mother had failed to sell hand-made children’s toys – with David away at Oxford. At least she had then been wanted, however much she had fought to keep her mother’s inarticulate emotions away from her. She drew in her arms, curled up her legs, lay cat-like, in revulsion even at the memory. Sick at her own egotism, she tried to concentrate on Bill, to suffuse herself with remembrance and love of him. Striving to efface herself, she fell into a heavy sleep.

  Everywhere a great rocky plateau stretched – grey, pinkish brown, lightening to a lemon
yellow, paling to a deathly chalk white. She walked, almost floated over the sand and rocks, terrified yet exulting. Only her mother’s voice nagged the solitude. ‘To be deserted that’s the shameful thing. I’d be far better dead.’ The little mouth, lipstick caked in the ridges of the lips, was trembling, and her eyes were imploring and ashamed to implore. She must turn her back on it. Bill would take her away from it. He was there with her. She could not see him, but he was behind her, his arm round her shoulders stroking her breast, the fingers of his other hand tickling her palm. Palm trees all around and the sand stretching down to the blue sea. ‘It’s the ancients’ purple,’ he said. And she knew somehow that he was telling her that they were to be at their happiest, to be at Cagnes on holiday. ‘I can go a long way.’ He meant that he could walk upon the water. And she knew that it was true if they were together. ‘With me you can go anywhere,’ she told him. The sun was so warm and they were so happy and sure. No woman need be a desert it seemed. Only the sun and the sea.

  She woke so safe and warm, that the blackness of the room seemed fantasy. She waited a second for the heavy clouds to pass over. The rain sounded violent and heavy and very near – these Mediterranean storms. And then she buried her face in the pillow, in terror and despair, biting the linen to hold back her screaming. For hour-long minutes she pressed and stretched herself against the mattress, but its softness gave no firm response to assuage her longing. All his devotion, all his love were gone with his body; and hers was useless, could never now offer itself to efface the tired, lonely look from his eyes, the overstrained, resigned note in his voice. Her knee ached; she pressed it against the wooden edge of the bed, trying to gain absolution through pain. Paradoxically the sharp soreness gradually dominated over grief. At the last her own petty physical wound brought her back from her hysterical grief for him.

  She turned on her back, switched on the bedside lamp, determined to honour him with her whole being – reason as well as emotion. Shadowy trees were outlined through the large window whose mosquito netting made a blurred pattern unfamiliar to her. Even the single sheet was intolerable in this soaking heat. She turned on the electric fan which seemed to add only a breezeless noise to the air that came from the ventilating screen.

  She thought, if Bill gave everything to me, what was my life for? It had no meaning except in him. They had set out together to climb somewhere; but she had been only a rope not a guide, for she had never known their destination or asked it, only judged its approach by his look of certainty, reading his face for portents of success or failure. There was not a single way that she could live for him now; nor die for him. She had never believed that there was anything more than this life for anyone; nor had Bill. Whatever happened she must live as he would have judged fitting. She tried to imagine how he would have met the sudden loss of her presence. At any rate he would have gone on – not because of other people’s judgement, but because there was a pattern that must be kept to. But the pattern for him had the meaning of his work. Her life would be as inert as the large green creature that sat in prayer – mantis, it must be – up by the ceiling above the wardrobe; or the grey lizards in that washroom. Inert, dead lives, only moving when some fly was foolish enough to come near them. Praying mantis. Preying mantis. But she had no prayers – Bill had been all her prayers; and all her prey. The word came to her so easily, was there before she could suppress it. Once again she let the pain from her knee fill her consciousness to drown all thinking.

  How could she tell what he would expect of her now? Only that she must wait, hold herself in readiness to live or to end her life, but not to let him down by listening to easeful thoughts of suicide or by catching at stray hopes and turning them into spiritual certainties. She knew at least that he would loathe all such soft ways. All she could do was to fight to keep a sense of his presence alive about her. For herself. To guide her. But where? In the Utrillo reproduction facing the bed, the sun beat upon white walls, and an empty, still street led nowhere. There was nothing for it but to seek oblivion until she had the mind and strength to see how he would have wanted her to live. She got out of the bed. The pain from her knee shot up her thigh. It was swollen and flabby. She took Dr Loundes’ pills and sought some respite of her life sentence in sleep.

  Through the drug haze that hung around her half-woken consciousness there pierced a bright light, spreading out, forcing her awake to face the sun blazing into the bedroom. Resistant, she let her eyelids droop against its compelling power again and again; each time that her eyes closed she saw Bill’s face, his look, steady, protective, trusting, admiring. She lay back on the pillows. If she could always feel him about her as she did now, she would have the strength to live on. Suicide seemed suddenly an absurdity because he would have been so ashamed of exposing the depths of their love to a world they had always excluded. No fear now either that she would seek to find him in sweet, cheating beliefs of after life, in all the pitiful round of some widow’s churchgoing or medium-frequenting. But she could only keep him with her if she preserved herself as he had loved her, fought the weak fears that for who knew how long would seek to dissolve her personality. She would have his protection as long as she remained what he had respected and loved. And after all, she had won his respect, even if there had been so much in which she had failed, even if it had been in fact a cheat …

  Action alone could fight the inrush of this destructive guilt. She said aloud, ‘I must settle things here and go back.’ Her voice far away, small, surprised her. First, there must be no more of these drugs to weaken her control. Sweat poured down her cheeks. The heat was overpowering. Practical, simple actions would make up her healing routine. For example, she must shut out this vile sun, symbol of this vile tropical country.

  She got out of bed. Her knee ached terribly. Her leg would not carry her – her leg or this wretched drug. She supported herself with difficulty by holding on first to the bedside table, then to a chair, then to the dressing table. I shall find myself a useful and decent life to fill out the empty years – no, not empty, for he would be with her. But no drugs, for they made useful life impossible, made the floor rise up at her. Holding on to the window ledge, she looked out at a hazy kaleidoscope of colour – purple, green, and something white moving in the distance. She concentrated all her powers on what she saw, away from thought, away from the pain in her knee. Trees – palm trees – and a great mass of purple flowers – B. they were called B. The name seemed suddenly vital to her. B. G. Begum, Buganda, Bagheer. Exotic words all, but not the word she sought. Tears came to her eyes. The word was not in her power, and if not the word, how life? And then, as suddenly, nothing mattered but the moving white object – creature; yes, it was a creature far away at the end of the garden. A white monkey with a dark face. G. B., B. G. A gibbon that swung from one silvery arm to the other along a wire, a rope across the garden. Swing, swing, stop. Swing, swing, stop. And now back again. Swing. And now round and round, white, all arms, white arms and purple. Roundand round. White, purple, and green. It was the sun. She groped to find the shutter. But rays of pain scorched from her knee: out, over, through her. The floor came up instead and hit her.

  *

  Meg, leaning back on the pillows, gave Helen Marriot the smile which she had adopted to deal with all these tiresome people. They intended kindness and were no doubt doing their best under difficult circumstances, but their absurd behaviour earlier that day, fussing because she’d taken too many sleeping pills by mistake, had shown her that she must get away. As soon as her knee had recovered enough to allow her to be properly mobile, as soon too as she was rested a little, she would assert her authority; meanwhile she could only humour them with a smile.

  ‘I thought the little doctor was very good,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he quite understood all I said, but I suppose they often speak English better than they understand it. When does he think I can leave?’

  Helen Marriot sat down on a cane chaise-longue with jade green shantung cushions. />
  ‘I’m glad you were happy with Dr Maung,’ she said, ‘because your nurse will be a Badai too, you know.’

  The disregard of her question decided Meg that her smile was insufficient. ‘Oh, I don’t think a nurse is necessary,’ she said. ‘I can move about the room for myself already if I hold on to things. But you don’t want me here any longer than is necessary and I don’t want to stay. When does the doctor think I can leave?’

  ‘It’s not a question of your knee. After what’s happened we cannot take the responsibility of leaving you alone. You must see that, Mrs Eliot.’

  Meg contracted her muscles in an effort to control her anger. She must give no sign that could allow them to continue this intolerable treatment of her as though she were a child. She felt bruised from her fall, and exhausted; the last traces of the drug too threatened her with sleep. She managed somehow a voice that gave some indication of her real personality – a voice at once determined, yet casual and easy. ‘I see very well, Mrs Marriot, that you’ve none of you believed a word I said. I’ll repeat. I had no intention whatsoever of trying to take my life. I wanted to sleep and I took too many pills. However, there’s no point in going on about it. You don’t know me and you can’t be expected to understand. The whole situation’s a false one for all of us, and that’s why it must be brought to an end as soon as possible. If you must bring a nurse then you must, though I really can’t see why that girl, Aung Ma or whatever she’s called, can’t do anything that’s needed …’

  ‘Aung Ma is a respected person in this house,’ Helen cried. ‘I don’t intend to have her treated as you treated her last night.’