The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  About a week later, however, Meg returned to the hotel to find an envelope containing a Yale key and a covering letter. ‘My dear Meg, I felt so ashamed of my last grouchy note, written when rheumatism’s first twinge was gnawing at me and when the first mention of Christmas cards this year made me think how much I hate working in the stationery department. And now I hear from nosey gossips that you have been left badly of. You know how I bore everybody about being poor, so that I can’t pretend that there’s anything to like about the condition; but you’ll do better than me at it I dare say. As with everything else today people seem to think that one’s financial affairs are a common concern. I think such nosiness is quite detestable and I’m not going to add to it. This note is merely to say that, of course, I’m always glad to see you if you feel the need to unburden, although I warn you – as if warning were needed – that I’m not a very gay companion. But still we have a lot of the past in common which can be a help. I shall not be a bit surprised if you want to be left alone, but I did think that sitting in that wretched hotel might really be too unpleasant, and as my flat is so near I enclose a key. If you want to be on your own in the day just go there whenever you like and make a cup of tea or what you will. It’s hardly palatial but the sitting room gets the morning sun when there is any. Just to show I’m not altruistic, I would say that if you could look in on a Tuesday morning when my woman comes, it would be very kind. It’s so impossible to check if she does anywhere near a full two hours since I’m always out at work. Her name’s Mrs Beazley.’

  To this Meg also replied that she was not seeing anyone at the moment but that when she did Jill would be among the first; nor would her job hunting allow her much time to sit in the flat, nevertheless she would keep the key just in case; and certainly she would try to look in on one Tuesday morning.

  So there they were, she thought, her three best friends; or, at any rate, those who looked like being her three only friends. She remembered what she had asked David – are my friends to be chosen for being kind and sensible? Well, the three lame ducks were kind, and their kindness seemed less intrusive than that of other friends. Sensible? It was such a loose word. She supposed that, in fact, they were not very sensible, or, at any rate, less intelligent, less cultivated than a great number of others she knew. There was about all three of them that mixture of sentimentalism and selfishness – if one counted poor Viola’s devotion to Tom as a kind of selfishness – which on general principle she had always disliked. But there it was – no general principle could apply. All her other friends belonged to the circumstances she had left behind; Viola, Poll, and Jill beckoned her to the circumstances to which she was now called. What, however, endeared them to her was the tact of their beckoning. They made no urgent canvass of her to join their particular sort of distress; they did not even so much as remark on her demotion to their gentlewomanly ranks. She could find no trace of covert satisfaction and, if any trace of patronage, certainly a great deal less than she merited. She realized that in her present mood of self-recrimination she was in danger of extending the poor estimation she had of herself to others; and she was grateful to all three of them for demonstrating to her the falseness of such a view. They had simply shown her that they were fond of her for herself; and this, without changing at all from the very ordinary women they had always been. Their demonstration of unaltered affection tempered her self-dislike with a sense of having not failed with them at any rate so completely as she had supposed; it warmed her enough to admit to herself how nearly she had frozen; and it gave her the knowledge that she need not be entirely alone, without in any way obstructing the solitary path she had decided to take. She would not see them now, but she would see them in the future; and she was glad of it.

  Certainly she found need of remembering it during those weeks in the hotel Although she had found so little in common with David, although so little had remained to either of them of what they shared in the past that she felt some embarrassment in his presence, there had been in compensation, even in the few hours they were together, moments of some sort of empathy, some kind of vanishing of time’s changes, that had given her a physical relief from the strain and anxiety and misery that she felt. The assuagement had been enough to make her hope for David’s presence again in the future – if, she thought, they could have sat together silently in a cinema, it would have calmed her. But two days after his visit to London he telephoned to her to say that Gordon was to have an operation. Three days later he telephoned again to say that the operation had been successful, but there was apparent even to Meg, so certain that she was no longer attuned to his overtones, a note in his voice that suggested a formula prepared for the general public. For a moment she felt hurt at being treated as an outsider, but when she reflected how little she had tried to extend her understanding to her brother’s life, she felt that she could only atone for it now by making easy his desire to remain a stranger. Andredaswood was hardly yet a place for visitors, he said, but would she like him to come up to London? She answered that she was too busy by day and too tired in the evenings, and he accepted her formula with evident relief. His telephone calls, his suggestions of a visit, her refusal, and his relief at it became now only a twice weekly ritual, sufficient to satisfy convention. It left her, however, without one of the solaces, always it was true only potentially effective, on which she had depended. In the blur of misery through which she still saw life, she had to meet chagrins and shocks entirely alone.

  They were numerous. Some came unexpectedly, suddenly and uninvited. Others, although she felt them as acutely, she knew that she had half expected all along. Yet others, too, proved more vexatious because she had preferred to forget their existence. And all these day-time mundane troubles had to be met with an energy depleted by her fight against the melancholy of the evening, the fears and despairs of the night, which in their turn gained upon her more easily because of the days’ exhaustions.

  To begin with she was forced to realize that the shreds of the old life would not slough off the more quickly simply because she was resolved, and truly resolved, to begin the new life with intelligent realism. The delays of lawyers and probate authorities were not charmed away by her admirable courage. She saw clearly that one of the results of being ‘sheltered’ as she had been by Bill was to lead her to suppose that she had only her own moral struggle to fight, that if she could satisfy herself all else would come to her. Her failure, her abject failure, to present a petition on behalf of Bill’s assassin had been a lesson in limitation; but as with all the lessons of Badai, it had told her only that there was a wide world outside her realm which knew her not. To learn the same lesson in England was more distressing. She could not get the estate ‘cleared’ the quicker by any discipline of self, nor sell the house, nor even secure accommodation to Mrs Copeman’s taste which would give her an empty house to sell. She could only dispose of the china and that not as quickly as she could be rid of the circle of friends who had made up the Lord North Street social life.

  It was in the course of disposing of the porcelain indeed, that she met an unexpected setback, the more wounding because she had made no advance to ‘deserve’ it.

  Miss Gorres had proved kind, kinder than Meg had any right to expect, or indeed, than duty to Mr Sczekely should have allowed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we could, of course, find a customer for your collection. Very easily.’ She paused and, offering Meg a cigarette, she went on, ‘But you realize, I am sure, that your collection is not quite of the kind that will be valued as a collection.’ She looked at Meg for a moment as though she were an object. ‘Mrs Eliot, let us have a glass of sherry,’ she said.

  I’m being shown, Meg thought, that I’m valued even though I am no longer a potential customer. She dwelt on the thought as Miss Gorres dived about in the cupboard, because in the look she had been given there was a strange and less welcome suggestion that she was an all too familiar object of pity.

  ‘Yes,’ Miss Gorres said,
when their sherries were poured out, ‘Your collection is a very – I think I shall say – pleasing one. There is no object there that personally I do not like. I envy you your collection, Mrs Eliot. But it is composed of objects of very different values. Some will fetch a good price from any serious collector. Others are charming but they are your own choice, it may be difficult perhaps to find the other person who will regard them so highly. In a big collection, of course, this is usually so too, but there the number of pieces that are – shall I say? – of idiosyncratic taste will be balanced by the number of very valuable pieces. That is in a big collection. Of course, I know that you will say the collector’s taste is of the essence of the collection. True, of course, historically and, perhaps, with one or two very outstanding living collectors.’ She paused and raised her glass in what Meg imagined was her idea of a ‘gallant’ toast. ‘Mrs Eliot, if I advise you something, will you be very discreet?’

  Meg, annoyed by all this mystification, said rather briskly, ‘I can’t say until I’ve heard it, Miss Gorres.’

  Miss Gorres smiled approvingly. ‘You are quite right, of course. A confidence is a matter of trust on both sides. Well, I trust you. Take your collection to one of the big sale rooms. There each object will have more chance of getting its true price. All the dealers will be bidding; and don’t believe all these stories about dealers’ rings. I will help you. But you see that I am being very naughty.’ She gave a look of coy gaminerie that Meg would never have supposed likely. ‘Mr Sczekely would not be pleased.’

  There was something in the way it was done that had not pleased Meg either; but she reflected that no kindnesses came unmixed and this was, she felt sure, a true kindness. She accepted Miss Gorres’ offer.

  ‘You won’t regret it,’ Miss Gorres said. ‘You know, Mrs Eliot, I see so many mistakes made, but, of course, it is not my job to prevent people making them. You are exceptional. It has all reminded me so much of what I experienced twenty years ago now. I came very early to England, almost immediately after Hitler rose to power. I was already an assistant in the Stadtsgalerie at Bremen and so I had not much trouble in getting work here. But then in the following year or so came many of my friends; some of them who had been more – I shall say – gods than friends – private collectors, benefactors of the Gallery and so on. A few of them managed to bring their collections with them – the lucky ones who came out early. Among them also there were people who had delightful small collections like yours and they could not believe that they were not going to make fortunes by selling their collections as collections. It was natural really. But I am afraid they had not your good sense, Mrs Eliot, they would not listen to advice. Oh, it was extraordinary really. Many of them, formerly rich people, thought they could at once become experts – private dealers or curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They had no idea of the limitations of their knowledge, that they must know so much besides ceramics or tapestries or ivories or whatever they had collected, and so much more about even those things than they did. And, of course, above all they could never see that to buy for one’s own pleasure is not always the same as to buy and sell for others.’ She smiled. ‘I don’t think you will have much difficulty in your troubles, Mrs Eliot, if you are always so ready to take good advice as you are this afternoon. I propose your health. Good luck!’ She drained the last of her sherry.

  Meg seized on the gesture of dismissal as though it were a last minute reprieve. She almost bounded from her chair. But Miss Gorres had not quite finished. ‘I am so glad that we have met not entirely so officially this afternoon. I feel that my indiscretion was not only helpful to you but to me. Perhaps we can now meet again as friends. I have myself one or two pieces that I think you will like. This is my telephone number. Please come and have a glass of sherry one evening. Either Finchley Road or Belsize Park stations are in easy walking distance of my flat.’

  Meg walked along Bond Street feeling as though she had been caught in some ridiculous attitude in public – that her skirt had come down or that she had fallen through a chair. She did not believe that Miss Gorres had intended to put her in her place – she wished in a way that she could so believe – but she had clearly only been reminiscing. Nevertheless it now seemed, although she had never thought of it before, that one of the ideas she had most cherished was that of working with some dealer, collector, or department of ceramics; and also it seemed quite clear that this idea, held in reserve, had been a ludicrous one. She felt unfairly exposed as a pretentious and ignorant fool.

  It was only in the bus that another aspect of Miss Gorres came home to Meg. I suppose it was an invitation to see her etchings, she suddenly thought. She wondered how she had been so naïve as not to have ‘placed’ the situation before now. Other women had made advances to her and she had always seen them coming a mile off – seen them with a mixture of amusement and perplexed desire not to hurt. It had never occurred to her to suspect such emotions in Miss Gorres because, of course, as she now saw all too clearly, she had always ‘placed’ her below any real personal contact. Her management of ‘difficult’ Miss Gorres had been, for herself, that mixture of affability and patronage which she had always hated when her mother had preached it – ‘one has the duty to be unfailingly pleasant to people who serve one, Meg’, and again, ‘everybody is a human being’. But of course being human didn’t mean that they were qualified to associate their personal lives with one’s own. It seemed that she had been all too successful in making Miss Gorres feel that she was a human being. She wondered if perhaps she had thrown sex appeal about equally liberally elsewhere in her desire to please. What annoyed her most, however, was her own serious, guilt-struck reaction to the incident. Shall I never react again to anything simply by laughing? she thought.

  This crushing rejection of aspirations she had never even declared to herself decided Meg that she must at once set about exploring the field of social work which had been in the front not only of her own but of others’ minds in considering her future employment. She could think of no better, more experienced or more honest adviser here than Mr Darlington. Accordingly she rang him up and asked him to tea at the hotel.

  A disgusting tea it was too that they had, as they sat in the huge dusty cretonne covered armchairs in a corner of the dark little lounge. Meg had chosen it in preference to a tea room because although derelict and depressing, it was also quiet. That afternoon, as it happened, there was a party of bright, hearty South African schoolmistresses which seemed somehow to have become divided into two so that they shouted to each other across the room. Meg and Mr Darlington were forced to perch on the painfully hard edges of their deep chairs in order to hear one another.

  Mr Darlington, no doubt in order to show Meg that his admiration of her was unaffected by her change in fortunes, seemed to find it necessary to praise everything – he preferred tea on the strong side and bread and butter thickly cut; he was delighted to see apricot jam. Meg, finding it unbearable, eventually asked him if he also liked madeira cake that was as dry as the desert sand it resembled. She said it in the tone of the jokes they had formerly shared, but Mr Darlington, for whatever reason, refused to meet her.

  ‘I’m not very particular about food,’ he said rather primly, and then added as though this might have been misunderstood, ‘My wife, luckily for us, is my idea of the perfect cook. Nothing exotic, you know. But always reliable.’

  It was a smug little statement, but not, Meg realized, as smug as it suddenly seemed to her, for as he said it she had immediately thought, I don’t want to know anything about his wife, I don’t really even want to know anything more about him, I simply want his advice on this one thing. I’m being unfair to him, she decided, I’m expecting him to meet me for the first time outside the Association’s offices and for the first time in my changed position in life. It’s no easy assignment with these ghastly colonial women whining so loudly through their teeth. She decided to ask about Aid to the Elderly affairs. This proved altogether better; at any
rate, to start with. Mr Darlington twinkled and even giggled in the way that Meg had always found so promising in her past dealings with him. He told a dryly amusing story about a set-to between Mrs Masters and Annie Pratt – one of the toughest of the old women – in which Mrs Masters had been worsted. ‘She said,’ Mr Darlington ended, ‘that she would not have believed anyone could have spoken in such a way who’d been in service in a good part of Eastbourne. She was quite relieved when I pointed out that she’d mixed the files and our Annie had worked all her life in a Bermondsey tannery.’

  The atmosphere seemed so ‘right’; Mr Darlington so level-headed and lively that Meg felt convinced she would get sound and encouraging advice from him. She was about to plunge, when the harmony seemed disturbed once more in a more subtle way. Meg had asked whether Mr Purdyke had finally succeeded in getting satisfaction from the hospital where it was clear enough that one of their protégés – an old ex-sea captain – had been disgracefully neglected. ‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘that you were quite right in urging that since Mr P. knew the head house surgeon a private complaint would be far more effective than a formal protest from the committee.’