The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  As her last days in Badai came upon her she felt an increasing distaste for leaving. The Marriots too seemed easier, less intrusive since the hanging was over and done. They left her largely alone. She sat at her bedroom window idly watching the tropical rain beating down in great pools on the gravel drive. Or, when the sun shone fiercely, in the shade of the veranda, pretending to read the air mail letters of condolence, but the very names of the senders reminded her that a whole world of doing and coping awaited her, and she left them unread. She wanted to bring neither Maggie Tulliver’s Warwickshire nor Emma’s Surrey to life. She was able now to walk with a stick, and early, before breakfast, she went round the garden, finding an immediacy of pleasure that she could hardly recall in her past life. She had often ‘admired’ flowers, but it was a perfunctory action compared to the detailed intensity with which she looked at the orchids Helen Marriot had grown over old tree stumps. ‘I only wish you could see the cassias and the jacarandas in flower, Mrs Eliot,’ Jimmie Marriot said, and she longed to say, ‘I’ll stay just for that.’ When she praised the frangipanis, Helen Marriot laughed.

  ‘My dear, they’re a disgusting, withered sight now. I ought to have the dead blooms cut off but I never remember. They were rather heaven though a week or two before you came.’

  If she stayed a year she would see them in full flower, and really there was nothing to prevent her being here where Bill was. Nothing except the conviction that to escape so would make nonsense of her existence. She had made one escape from her mother’s world into the life that she, or she with Bill, had planned; to turn back on it now would be to deny herself and Bill. Even David had seen this, for he had written:

  ‘I have taken you at your word and left you to make your own way home. We may be in need of each other more in the coming years, so that it seems to me essential that I should not begin badly by interfering where you tell me you don’t need me. But don’t, Meg, delay your return, if you take my advice. Sorting out is bound to be painful and the sooner it is over the better.’

  So back to the problems she must go. Even Mrs Copeman had seen this, kindly offering to leave Lord North Street as soon as they found somewhere else. And indeed, she would want the house, for whatever provision Bill had made, she was bound to need some new resource – perhaps to let off the top floor as a flat, although she revolted at the thought. She could only then relax in this new tranquillity, the wonderful lethargy induced by the overpowering heat, wet or shine, and husband her energies for the horrible lonely return.

  Helen Marriot wanted to take her on drives round Srem Panh, ‘though God knows there’s little enough to see. One temple that’s rather heavenly’, but she preferred to remain in the Consulate, for she feared that any excursion might reawaken the first day’s horror of Badai. She read willingly enough, however, in an absurd little guide book – ‘Srem Panh has no past to boast of. It is not one of those towns the mere approach to which recalls their ancient glories and grandeurs. Our step does not slacken into reverent pace, nor is our fancy fevered with the glorious pageants of the past, nor are we fired with poetic fervours beyond bearing.’ A dull, ugly little town really; a week ago she would have found extra horror that Bill had died there; but now its blank past seemed only to increase its anonymity for her, for Bill. He would lie there in a place that had no claim on history, no claim on them either of past or of future.

  The Marriots perhaps ventured a small claim on her, but it was not serious. One afternoon Helen Marriot, lying sewing in another chaise-longue, had filled in some of the gaps in the story of her marriage. But it was all so much what their emotional undertones had already told Meg – Helen’s grander social background, her marriage on a rebound from a broken up first marriage, her admiration for Jimmie’s goodness and knowledge, her protectiveness of his insufficiencies in his career – that it was a twice told tale.

  ‘I’ve had to push poor Jimmie,’ Helen said, ‘so that I sometimes feel I must appear as a ghastly shrew to other people. But he understands; and we’d neither of us wish for a moment different from what it has been.’

  And Meg said, ‘Bill did any pushing that was wanted. But he knew I was there if he needed me. And heavens, yes, every minute was what it should have been.’

  She could see that Helen’s avowal scratched no deeper below the surface than her own; nor did either of them intend more. It was simply a conventional outline for a woman’s heart to heart, serving as an apology for past dislike, a signal that all claims their consciences might make of unseemly treatment could now be cancelled.

  At the last even the sight of the airport-Meg’s last dread in Badai – was managed without too great a shock of memories by the Marriots’ careful timing – avoiding the restaurant and arriving by special permission only a minute or two before the plane left. The presence of one or two photographers so long after the newspaper fuss had died down – or so Jimmie Marriot had told her, for she would read none of it herself – reminded Meg of how much peace and decency she owed to his watchdog guardianship in the first days after Bill’s death.

  ‘You’ve been so much kinder to me than I’ve realized,’ she said, ‘so much kinder than I’ve deserved.’

  Jimmie Marriot said, ‘It’s been a privilege to help you. I only wish you had known us at a happier time.’

  And Helen cried, ‘Don’t worry, she will. We shall descend on you, Mrs Eliot, when they ship us back to England.’

  ‘I shall expect you to keep to that,’ Meg said. But of course she didn’t and they wouldn’t. She could wave to them as the aeroplane began to taxi along to the runway, and smile with real friendliness, because they were no longer in her life. It was an unknown England that now filled her with terror. As the plane took off from the ground, she had to grip the arm-rests in order not to scream out, ‘I can’t leave him behind. I can’t. I don’t know what to do without him.’

  BOOK TWO

  JOBS FOR JOB

  DAVID PARKER, making as little noise as his very thorough morning ritual of washing and gargling allowed, heard a faint creaking and rustling in the corridor outside his room. Else, it appeared, had also decided that she must be up first on this ‘important day’. If his own stirrings had the same power to penetrate the consciousness as hers, they must, in their anxiety to disturb no one, have successfully woken Gordon from his fitful sleep. David had felt sure that not even Else would stake a claim on half past five, still dark and cold for early October. Now he pictured her, looking more than ever flat and emaciated in her tightly girdled grey woollen dressing gown (schoolboy style), with her pepper and salt bun straggling a little – for even Else’s neatness would be daunted by this early hour. Her lips would be bluish and her well-shaped nose red; she would probably be carrying her old sand-coloured Jaeger slippers until she had arrived downstairs, for Gordon had once said that they flapped.

  Years of self-discipline had made anger a rare temptation for David, so that even irritation with another human being’s actions was a cause of concern to his conscience. Yet irritation he did feel at her forestalling of his well-laid plans to get away from the house that morning without the distracting jars of human contacts. He had no right to be irritated, he told himself, every duty not to be so. Else denied herself all comforts, poor thing, as it was, except lying in bed until Mrs Boniface had made breakfast. To give up that small luxury was surely no pleasure to her: only her kindness could have led her to it. She was no doubt already cutting him sandwiches for his journey. Her love for him and for Gordon was the one strong emotion in a self-effacement that, however admirable, came perilously near to negation; he should be glad to receive it, even when as now it irked him, if it gave warmth to her bleak life.

  Nevertheless another thought pressed hard upon him: she, he, all of them perhaps – for he anticipated others upon the scene in the next hour – had determined to be up the first simply out of the superstitious feeling that by so doing they would have mastery of the day, power over its fateful happenings. It was, of
course, pure superstition. Of the two plays that were being enacted that day, the one depended not on them, not even upon the doctors, but upon certain mysterious organic changes in Gordon’s body; while the other, the horribly irrelevant second feature, which would keep him from Gordon’s side where he longed to be, depended upon the extraordinary chaos of a dead man’s finances and the reactions of Meg, almost after all these years a stranger, to her changed fortune.

  He had written to her that they might need each other in the years to come, because when he wrote the letter of condolence he was so deeply oppressed by the realization that Gordon too might have followed Bill into oblivion before many months were gone. Now he wished that he had not written it. He hoped that she would have no need of him. He was determined that if he lost Gordon, he would need neither her nor anyone else. All the same superstition persisted: himself, Else, in some degree many others who worked and lived at Andredaswood, all indeed who had come under Gordon’s extraordinary influence, seemed at times of crisis to vie for mastery and power. Some years ago he would have speculated whether this meant that in their search for peace of spirit, their fight for disciplined living, they had suppressed too deeply some inherent need; but now he was strong enough to dismiss such ideas. Gordon laughingly would ascribe them to the Devil; Else would seek to repair some gap in her unity with the world of creatures; himself, more agnostic, accepted the impulsive cynical thought as a destructive element inherent in the human psyche, a quirk to be ignored in the struggle for integration. He smiled at the inadequacy of the terms; he had known too long the limits of his metaphysics to allow speculation to encumber the immediate and supreme demand of moral activity.

  Suddenly the morning bird chorus started up from the nearby copse. He looked at his watch – ten minutes to six. He pictured Else, pouring the boiled coffee into the Thermos, listening intently, drawing a strength purged of any sentimental sweetness from this creature signal of a new day begun. There had been a time when he had envied her the certainty of her symbols, however inadequate her pantheism; but now he was secure enough in his own path merely to note other roads with sympathy and to maintain his own way.

  He hesitated for a moment whether he should put on a suit out of deference to Meg’s conventionality – for as likely as not the shock of her experience would only have accentuated her narrow sophisticated way of life, as snails draw into their shells when touched. His physical distaste for the constriction of tics, the weight of coats, was too strong. He put on his usual corduroy trousers, open necked khaki shirt, and old wine-coloured pullover, ran a comb through his thick, prematurely grey hair, wiry as steel wool, and was ready for the world, even for Else Bode’s stolen march.

  Through the kitchen window the sun was rising over the distant South Downs, gold and pink, lurid yet soft and hazy, in a combination peculiarly repulsive to his taste.

  ‘I can’t say I care for dawns,’ he said. Else Bode looked first to the window, then at him, and smiled. The light gave a sweet, rose pink glow to her thin, white face. David looked away.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, as dismissing a child’s nonsense, ‘you remember bad art too well, David. We have to look at things as they are, not trailing memories that spoil our vision.’

  Her English was fluent, but her accent markedly German and in some way governessy. She smiled with approval as she noted his clothes. She thinks I’ve dressed to put Meg in her place, David thought. He wished he had worn the suit. And yet it was natural that Else, who knew his sister only casually as a superficial smart woman, should resent the intrusion of Meg’s tragedy into the anxiety of Gordon’s illness. After all I resent it myself, he thought. He would have made no comment, but Else carried her approach further by a small squeeze of his arm. It drove him to protest, though he tried to soften any priggishness in his rebuke with a teasing smile.

  ‘Yes, Else,’ he said, ‘I didn’t dress up for the occasion. But don’t let’s make too much of it. However I approach it, today will be difficult. The manner of approach won’t make that much difference.’

  ‘No. It must be a bad time, of course. But it’s good that you are going to be yourself. It will be easier for Mrs Eliot to be herself too. Maybe then you can reach her in order to help her.’

  Her clear; sapphire blue eyes looked sweet and sad, her long mouth in smiling drew the wrinkled, white papery skin tight across her cheekbones. Mater dolorosa, David thought, fourteenth-century, in wood; then he remembered the challenge to charity that times of stress offered. He had, after all, settled long ago for the lump of sugary hardness in Else’s wholesome cake. The impingement of personalities could of all things diminish that surplus of inner strength he would need today if he was to fortify Meg, to give her the conviction of his being all hers in her distress, when in fact he would be more than ever all Gordon’s.

  ‘Mayonnaise, Else?’ he said, looking at the sandwich filling. ‘You’re indulging yourself again by spoiling me.’ He had intended at all cost to eat breakfast at leisure in some roadside hotel.

  ‘I would have given you breakfast before you left,’ she said, ‘but the leaves in Ashdown are already turning. Eat your breakfast quietly in the forest. The autumn trees will give meaning to your sadness. I used to go sometimes in the autumn, you know, David, to spend a holiday with my grandmother by the Bodensee. I was always complaining that the lake looked so sad. And I was sad too. Do you know what is the awful, meaningless sadness of seventeen years old? My grandmother was an Anthroposophist. There is much so stupid in the Steiner teaching, but also so much good. She used to say to me “Mingle your sorrow with the sadness of the season.” She was right. Our sorrow is good when the season is in tune with it. I have not forgotten the lesson.’

  ‘I have no time to enjoy the sorrows of autumn today,’ he answered; and then because he always feared to treat Else with insufficient seriousness, he added, ‘No, no, your grandmother was quite right. As a general proposition, I agree: the mood may be mellowed by its setting. But today I need the sharp edge of distress to keep me on the alert, not a sweet, sad soporific.’

  ‘All the same your sister will have to find some road from despair to acceptance.’

  David’s bony, equine face, almost tapir-like with its long nose, wrinkled into innumerable lines as he frowned, partly from annoyance at Else’s interference, partly in conjecturing Meg’s state of mind.

  ‘Perhaps she has done so already,’ he said brusquely, ‘I’m not speculating until I’ve seen her. She has great resources of courage.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I think so, David. To say that she did not need you. That was very brave. Poor woman! She must have wanted all her resources with this terrible publicity,’ Else said primly.

  David gave her a sharp glance. She had stressed her horror at the news aspect of Bill’s death so often that he had begun to wonder what needs had been suppressed by her passion for an anonymous private life. She should have been an actress. And why not? He rebuked himself. Not everyone felt the same distaste for histrionics as himself. And if it were true, her exclusion from the part she should have played in life was only an additional cause for compassion and admiration.

  ‘Don’t let’s distress ourselves too much about the publicity,’ he said. ‘From what she wrote in her letter the consul seems to have protected Meg very well. And we coped, which is all we can ask. After all the newspaper reporters have to live.’

  ‘Do you think so? I remember the German newspaper men in thirty-three, you know. No, I don’t find it easy to kill … what do you call those enemies of yours? Wireworm and leather jackets. But newspaper men, that’s different.’ Then, worried lest her exaggeration should be taken as a serious exception to her pacifism, she said, ‘Except those good men who write the holy words for my bible up in Manchester.’ She had learned to mock herself with painful discipline in her years of refuge in England. She did so somewhat crudely. But now she could laugh to take the conversation away from Meg; and David with the identical aim joined in the laughter. Immediately,
however, she put her finger to her lips. ‘Sssh,’ she said. They were both still, remembering Gordon asleep upstairs. He had slept in the last months so little and so lightly.

  ‘What time are you due at the hospital?’ David asked. In his state of tension over Gordon’s illness he constantly forgot these details as soon as he was told them.

  ‘A quarter to midday.’ Else’s voice sounded patient. ‘Doctor Blackett says that we may expect the results of the X-ray in two days. I think that is quite good.’

  David recalled with irritation that it was he who had given her this information. He limited his annoyance to saying, ‘It isn’t an X-ray, you know.’ He did not say what it was. He had tried in the last weeks of anxiety about Gordon to confine his conversations with Else to practical details. If, in the worst event, she and he had to find a basis for living together without Gordon, any intimacy brought about by their present stress might only be a hindrance to a tolerable, mutually independent relationship. His fears that she did not feel the same need for caution seemed realized, for she turned towards him and said:

  ‘David, I am sure that Gordon has already won his battle. And we are still full of fears. Our fears cannot help him. Shall we talk a little about it while he is not here?’

  David saw no hope of evasion; even to give his reasons for avoiding intimacy would lead them straight into the heart of it.

  ‘Else,’ he said, ‘don’t you think that we would be wise …’

  She looked so defiant at his warning tone. ‘There is no wisdom more important than love,’ she said.

  He resigned himself at least to meeting her demands upon his sympathy, although, to his distaste, he knew that out of prudence he would not be wholly frank with her.