The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  ‘You will be hurt, David. You must be, by something I shall say. But perhaps with all that is hurting you now, it will not be much to add. Yours is a more cruel part than Gordon’s because you have not his faith. This makes your duty to give him strength, yes, even out of your weakness, a very hard one.’

  Her honesty was clearly to be complete; David hoped that he could bear it.

  ‘I believe that I can help you almost not at all,’ she said, ‘but if I can, you must tell me. Will you please tell me now if there are things …’

  But that, of course, was exactly what David knew he must not do. Any things he told her now would be distorted. He admired her, was grateful to her, very fond of her after ten or so years; but at the moment he resented her; and she, if her love for Gordon was as deep as it seemed, was deceiving herself if she did not resent him too.

  ‘There really isn’t time now,’ he said. But she would have none of such feebleness.

  ‘No, David,’ she said, ‘there is tension between us and that makes it harder for him. No matter what it costs us, we must discuss it.’

  But time was in fact on his side. Voices came from the lobby by the back door.

  ‘Aren’t they lovely? Not that I’d pick dahlias. I don’t think they’re a house flower really. I prefer the delicate shades like the Michaelmas,’ Mrs Boniface was saying. David thought, she’ll be as much refined cockney at fifty-five as she is now at thirty; Sussex will never change her.

  ‘Climbers’s’ voice came in a hoarse whisper, like an actress playing a schoolboy over the radio. As though she had a set of plums in her mouth instead of a cluster of projecting teeth. ‘I thought a bit of a riot of colour in the house would cheer him up when he gets back from this ghastly hospital trip. And I shan’t have a moment to cut flowers today, Mrs B. Tim Rattray’s jolly good, but he doesn’t know the ropes, so everything will fall on me.’

  ‘I came over early just to give Mr Parker a bite of something before he goes off to meet that poor Mrs Eliot.’

  It embarrassed David to hear all this devotion, which he and Gordon had somehow gathered to themselves, declared aloud. Perhaps Else noticed this for she smiled.

  ‘Why are we women such fools?’ she asked.

  And David said, ‘I don’t know. Why do men put up with it?’ It had come to him that if Gordon died, he would only feel free outside in the Nursery. In the house he would be delivered up to this monstrous regiment. He was disgusted with himself for the egotism of his thoughts.

  ‘Climbers’ Lake’s face peered around the kitchen door. In her surprise at seeing them, she looked more than usually crazy. Her thick black hair was tied in a piece of old purple silk, her array of protruding teeth seemed unconnected with her wide grin, her nose was as red as her withered apple cheeks. Below her whiskered chin she held an enormous bunch of cactus dahlias as though her head had come to rest in a colony of starfish.

  ‘Good Lord,’ she said. ‘Everybody’s up with the blinking lark.’ She might have been commenting on a ‘lark’ in the dormitory.

  ‘Now, Climbers, don’t drop any earwigs from those dahlias,’ Else said. She treated Miss Lake kindly, but as though she were in fact as mentally deficient as her features suggested.

  And now Mrs Boniface had joined them, her contribution to the harrowing times a chin up, ‘cigarette and cuppa’ jollity. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I shan’t let Arthur know about this. He’s grumbled enough already. Me getting him and the kids up before it was light. But when I told him I’d got to give Mr Parker a bite of breakfast before he went off to meet Mrs Eliot, he piped down all right. He’d do anything for Mrs Eliot since he’s seen her picture in the papers. You tell her from me, Mr Parker, that she’s breaking up my home.’

  ‘I think,’ Else said, ‘that Mrs Eliot will not want to be reminded of the newspapers.’

  ‘Now don’t you come the duchess over us, Miss Bode,’ Mrs Boniface laughed, ‘just because we like to read the Daily Mirror doesn’t mean we’re morbid.’

  And Else softened. ‘No, dear Mrs B, you are very good to everyone.’ David remembered when Else had been mistrustful of the Bonifaces. ‘Peasants’ came into the many categories of those whom Hitler Germany had shown to be ‘not good people’. But, thanks to his own and Gordon’s persuasions, Bode and Boniface now met in friendship.

  ‘What about you, Miss Bode,’ Mrs Boniface cried, ‘getting up to cut sandwiches like that when you love your lie in so! And mayonnaise too. Aren’t you a lucky boy, Mr Parker, with all the girls running after you? You ought to give him your flowers, Miss Lake.’

  David was unsure what ‘gawped’ meant, but that was undoubtedly what Climbers did as she thrust her huge bunch of dahlias into his arms.

  ‘Oh, you look like the blushing bride, David,’ she cried, ‘I wish I had my camera.’ And now it was loud laughter, cigarettes, and cups of tea; and all hands on deck to get Gordon’s breakfast ready, although God knew, he could eat little enough. Oh, they were a happy household, thanks to Gordon and himself, where German crank, cracked English gentlewoman, and cockney good sport could lie down together lion-lamb fashion – loving lambs with lion hearts. So David worked off his spleen. He was not prepared to consider any of his feelings deeply at the moment; too many of them were worthless chunks of buried waste thrown up by the times’ upheaval; they would sink again when it was ended. Nevertheless he must get away from these women; he would give his last instructions to Tim, say good-bye to Gordon, and be off.

  But as soon as he moved to the door, Climbers followed him. ‘I wanted to have a word with you, David,’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to the office,’ he answered. ‘You’d better come with me and tell me what it is, while we’re walking. I mustn’t be late.’

  ‘The office!’ Mrs Boniface cried. ‘You’re going to get the slipper, Miss Lake.’

  Else spoke kindly but firmly. ‘Don’t keep David too long, Climbers,’ she said.

  He walked rapidly down the passage from the kitchen to the hall, leaving the dahlias on the long, low glass table in front of the hall fire; Else could cope with the earwigs. Climbers thumped along briskly at his side in her Wellingtons. Her words came in a breathless torrent.

  ‘I don’t want to open old wounds, David, you know that. And I feel awful speaking about it at a time like this. In any case you and Gordon know best. And as soon as he’s found his feet, I’m sure Tim Rattray will be absolutely super. But he isn’t altogether easy to work with. Of course, I know he’s frightfully good and he’d got all the new methods. I’m going to learn a terrific lot from him myself, I can see that already. Only yesterday he showed me a grafting that was quite new to me. But it isn’t the same as knowing the place, is it? And then some of the girls feel …’

  But they were outside now. It was exactly the kind of day that David loved most – bright sunshine, a cold keen east wind and puffy white clouds driving fast across a pale blue sky. It was the weather that had urged him forth as a boy to take long, solitary walks over the Downs, leaving behind his mother’s mute demand for pity and Meg’s claims for his support in refusing it. Now he felt free to forget all pities for the moment – even the minor pity for poor Climbers’ adjustment to her new subordination.

  He allowed only wisps of her breathy monologue to drift through his consciousness – ‘that silly girl Annie crying – larking with them one minute, shouting at them the next – upset Tom terribly over that staking business – fuchsia gracilis not fuchsia magellanica – I’m sure Colonel Ashley will be frightfully upset.’

  Such a day made him feel so spontaneously free and happy that he could forget everything but the scene before him, each detail of which seemed a matter for pride. How right he had been in refusing the claims of business to bring the nursery up to the front of the house. He had insisted on the small formal garden to replace die Victorian lawn. And so it stood, with its greystone parapets, low boxhedges, tall yews, and baroque figures bought in Franconian junk-shops, on their first holiday the nurse
ry’s success had allowed them, five years ago. And the house itself; about this he and Gordon had fought so many battles with friends and advisers. What did they want with a place so large? They were going into business, not setting up as country gentlemen. But it was the elegance of the house that had made the first years’ slavery tolerable, that had given enough room for privacy and communal living, for the quartet and for writing their book. One had every right to a setting, if that setting made a good life more attainable, if it was tempered by sensible self-denial.

  They turned off to the side, behind the yew hedge,’ into the nursery. The display beds, now massed with dahlias and Michaelmas daisies, came into view. Behind these stretched the long herbaceous borders beneath the walls of the former kitchen garden; and, to the side, the glasshouses where the bedding out annuals were beginning life for next spring’s sale. The ‘regular trade’, they called this side of the nursery. It was only by his own insistence that it was there, with its regular profits, for Gordon, with eye trained for the contemporary market, had wanted to specialize only in shrubs. In the end they had compromised and served both sides of the chalk line. Azaleas and rhododendrons for the richer soil of the expense-account, weekend gentry who were their neighbours in the Forest to the north; delphiniums, dahlias, the most ordinary regular annuals for the ‘new poor’ ladies below the chalk line to the south, from cottage gardens in the Downs to sad, windswept gardens without hope in the seaside refuges of the retired. And shrub roses for the more sophisticated – the rich ‘resting’ stage stars, the lady novelists, and the local friends of Glyndebourne. It was a triumph of practicality over self-indulgence, David reflected. And his self mockery did not lessen his approval of the reflection.

  Gordon and he would dearly have loved to have cultivated exotics. With their successful establishment, they had indeed permitted themselves two stove-houses last year, but they were even so to be devoted to the Christmas market for poinsettias. Financial bohemianism or, for that matter, anarchic generosity were not part of the unorthodox quietism they had tried to build up. Financial competence, even success, so long as it did not merge into greed, were external marks of a sane, ordered inner life. For David, despite his agnosticism, Quaker thrift as well as many other Quaker practices seemed a model. While to Gordon, ‘render unto Caesar’ meant exactly a prudent consideration of material resources. It was this attitude that made Bill’s and Meg’s recklessness so abhorrent to David – worldly values were bad enough, but worldly values built on financial sand seemed to him the final folly.

  He looked over to the far corner of the nursery where in the clear light he could still only dimly see the high rhododendron bushes, with their second flowering hardly distinguishable as blobs of pink, red, and white. They had been discussing of late the acquisition of land far over on the other side of the main road. Seven assistants, nobly led by old Climbers, had swelled now to thirty-six, directed, when he and Gordon were not there, by a fully trained specialist, Tim Rattray, B.A. of Reading University Horticultural School. Log Cabin to White House, he thought with amusement. Well, why not? As Gordon had said rather tartly to Else, when she complained periodically that Martha was driving out Mary, ‘Conceit of failure, my dear Else, is one of the Devil’s simplest snares for the godly. What on earth do you suppose God gave us a mind and a pair of hands for if he didn’t want us to use them competently?’ And man without God must strive no less to keep the rules, David thought. But suddenly he remembered that in a year Gordon might not be there, and the little puffy clouds grew monstrous and sadly grey and the sunlight went off the nursery.

  ‘After all,’ Climbers was saying, ‘we have built up a sort of tradition here which newcomers can’t just ignore. I mean Andredaswood is more than just a nursery garden run for a profit. It’s a kind of way of living, isn’t it, David?’

  David felt the full force of parody of his own sentiments. The nursery is exactly what it is, he thought, a well run commercial garden, supplying its customers with value for their money, paying its workers good wages. If there are any ‘ways of living’ they’re in the house; and even there, the virtue, such as it is, is an indwelling thing, a self-mastery, hardly to be communicated, certainly never consciously or else it would vanish.

  ‘Climbers,’ he said, ‘you have your own special value to us. But we asked you to accept Tim’s authority when we engaged him. I know it’s not easy for you but you must do it.’

  ‘Oh, I know, David,’ she said. ‘It’s only that I care so much about the place and, after all, Rattray can’t know our customers as I do. He’s got to learn.’

  ‘Exactly,’ David said. ‘Just as you had to. Remember “what about a nice climber, a real hardy climber?”’ He saw, as she smiled back at him, that she was weeping. He felt disgust at his sentimental humorous appeal to the inept phrase she had used so continually to customers in the first days – the phrase which had given her her nickname.

  ‘You’ve just got to accept it,’ he said. ‘We’ve given you sole charge of the display gardens and of personal interviews with customers because, as you say, by experience you know their needs. But Tim Rattray’s orders go for everything else when Gordon and I are not here. That must be understood.’

  She stood blushing and blubbering like an ugly schoolboy. ‘I think it’s jolly unfair,’ she said and stumped away.

  He felt disgusted with himself for reducing a good, simple woman of fifty-five to such ridiculous pathos. Nevertheless, Tim Rattray was young, skilled, competent, and not ridiculous. From the large hut which served as an office he could hear Tim crooning – ‘I’m a little babe that’s just lost in the wood. Won’t you be good and watch, watch over me?’ He remembered Gordon saying, ‘No, even if poor old Climbers weren’t so goofy, we would have to have a man to work with. Especially for you, David, if I go sudden like.’ And now Gordon might go, though perhaps not sudden like.

  As he was about to enter the office, Climbers came running back. Panting, she said, ‘I’ve been absolutely beastly and selfish, David, when you’ve got all these troubles. Of course, it doesn’t matter. You’re not to think about it again. And you’re not on any account to worry Gordon with it. He’d get in a frightful stew.’ Embarrassed, she stumped off. He reflected wryly that Gordon had in fact a far greater acceptance of human sorrow than he had.

  Tim Rattray, seated on a high stool and crouched over the desk top, checking yesterday’s mail orders, seemed to fill the small office. The span of his bent shoulders was vast, his buttocks humped out over the edge of the stool.

  ‘How many of those revolting songs do you know?’ David asked.

  Tim turned and slid to the ground. Standing, he was as tall as he was beefy; blond and fresh-faced, with piggy features and an amiable, squashy smile. ‘The handsome porker’ Gordon had called him after their first interview.

  ‘Haven’t you got any soul? No love of good music? All Baching and Blowing. You’re like Eileen. Before we know where we are the poor bloody infant’s going to be ashamed of his poppa’s pop numbers if momma has her way. Anyhow be your age, David. That number just about started life when you were bursting into flower. Man, don’t you have any twoway memories?’

  It continued to surprise David, even after the four months that Tim had been with them, still to find that so much jolly facetiousness did not irritate him. But so it was. He felt always refreshed by Tim’s presence; and this although he had decided that Tim’s loud voice and even louder laugh betrayed a lack of adjustment somewhere which touched his own paternal feelings. It had taken him some time to find a note that could respond, even reassure, without breaking through to an intimacy that might demand too much of both of them. He had learned from wartime experience that neurotic extroverts needed careful handling. He had settled for his own facetious note in response – everyman’s caricature of the whimsical old scholar. By exaggerating the difference in their ages it gave an easy farcical note to their relationship.

  ‘There was a time when I was young, Tim,�
� he said, ‘and I should impress upon you that when I say young I mean very young, when I used to delight in a popular tune about bananas or rather the lack of bananas. But I’m glad to say that my sister very wisely and properly put an end to that. She pointed out to me that all popular dance music was monotonous in rhythm, utterly uninteresting in melody, and entirely revolting in the sentiments that it sought to express. Her words impressed me deeply, and, although I was only six at the time, I took a solemn oath never to allow any of what you call “numbers” to penetrate my consciousness again. Given the conditions of the world it’s been a hard battle but I’ve won it.’

  Tim gave a roar of laughter, then grimacing with pain, put his hand to his forehead.

  ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘Sorry. But I was out with the outfit last night. We collected quite a few odd beers.’

  David’s smile was washy and perfunctory. He had shared Gordon’s amusement at first over Tim’s Five White Aces, so incongruous with the reputation of their own quartet; but the dance band seemed an increasing bore to him now.

  Whether Tim sensed this or whether he had suddenly identified the sister David had mentioned with Meg Eliot, widow of the newspapers’ five-day hero, he looked self-consciously grave.

  ‘Mrs Eliot arrives today, doesn’t she?’ he said. ‘Eileen asked me to say that if there’s anything she could do – you know, a woman’s hand.’

  David could not easily envisage Eileen Rattray’s up-to-date housing estate mothercraft being particularly serviceable to Meg. ‘Please thank her,’ he said, ‘I’ve no idea what the next step’s going to be. My brother-in-law’s left his affairs in appalling confusion. My sister’s going to be very badly off.’

  Tim looked shocked. ‘Well, I hope there’ll be a thumping great compensation from someone or other,’ he said. ‘A brilliant man like that. You probably don’t realize the feeling there’s been among ordinary people in pubs and places. Even down here. After all Englishmen don’t become heroes every day these days …’ His voice trailed away in embarrassment. He looked a very pink pig. ‘Anyhow if she decides to come to Andredaswood I hope you’ll let her know that everybody will respect her need for privacy.’ He seemed to be offering himself as a watchdog.