The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Darlington replied. ‘It would have been. If he’d done anything about it. But, of course, they’re members of the same club. It wouldn’t have done at all to worry a fellow-member with some wretched old pensioner’s grievance. Most out of place.’

  Meg looked at him in surprise, ‘Oh, I think you’re wrong, I don’t know about men’s clubs, of course. But I don’t think they’re like that at all. I’m sure Bill, my husband, wouldn’t have hesitated to raise a point of that sort with anyone he knew at his club.’

  ‘I expect your husband had more guts than Purdyke.’

  ‘Poor old Mr Purdyke. He’s a cautious old man but once he’s said he’d do a thing, I should have thought…’

  ‘Well, he hasn’t done this,’ Mr Darlington broke in savagely. Meg thought, I hadn’t realized that he took these things quite so seriously; or, perhaps, she reflected, I no longer feel so strongly about the Association.

  She was about to lead the conversation on to her own needs, but Mr Darlington spoke now with real anger. ‘Poor old Mr Purdyke,’ he copied her, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Eliot, but it’s depressing to see how you all gang up together. It’s exactly what the members of the committee said when I talked to them about it. Even Lady Pirie. I certainly didn’t think you would. But after all, you’ve no interest in the matter now. I must say I’d love to get it across to the rest of them that about the only useful function they can perform is to pull strings to get things done. After all they’re “influential people”. That’s why they were elected, presumably.’

  Meg reflected that despite all the criticism of the committee’s work that she had shared with Mr Darlington, she had not seen this as its sole function. ‘I see,’ she said, ‘you don’t rate the work we do very highly.’

  He looked for a moment embarrassed. ‘I rate the work you did very highly,’ he said. ‘You kept the rest of them from interfering and messing things up.’

  Meg laughed. ‘Rather a negative function,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t imagine a more useful one. They can only be kept down by snobbery. Good heavens!’ he cried, ‘you don’t want a lot of voluntary, untrained idiots mixing themselves up with the actual work, however good their intentions.’

  Meg was about to say sharply, ‘Well, you’ve quite lost your shyness, haven’t you,’ but she stopped herself in time. ‘I’ve often been surprised that you took a job with a voluntary body, Mr Darlington,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure I should feel happier with a Home Office or local government appointment.’

  He locked at her with amusement. ‘You sound like my father,’ he said. ‘I can’t see what on earth difference it makes whether a thing’s a private charity or not. Except that for some large-scale things it works better under the Government. But as to who you’re working for – I suppose Home Office inspectors and so on are better, they’re trained; but it’s like Trade Union officials, they become remote from the real work. As to local councils, why should they be better than a voluntary committee? In any case so long as we have voluntary charities they’d better have properly trained employees.’

  Meg said, ‘Although I worked for the Aid to the Elderly, I must say I’ve always thought it should be a government service or at least ran by the local councils.’

  He said indifferently, ‘You may be right. I’m not political.’

  The moment to raise her own affairs seemed to have come, not because the conversation had been naturally led to it but because without some fresh topic it threatened to cease altogether.

  ‘And what did you feel about our telephone conversation?’ she asked. ‘Do you think I would make a competent trained social worker?’

  There was a tension in the second’s pause that followed which made Meg ask quickly, ‘Do you think I’d ever get through the training course?’

  The flicker of relief in Mr Darlington’s eye showed her that she had been tactful – if tact were relevant.

  ‘Oh certainly. My only fear is that you’d find it too elementary. But if you’ve never dabbled in the social sciences, I think you’d find it interesting. It sets one to reading more. I enjoyed it enormously, but then I’d never taken a proper university degree.’

  ‘Nor have I,’ Meg said.

  He seemed somehow surprised and a little disappointed. ‘Oh, in that case I think you’d enjoy it considerably and, of course, you’d pass with ease.’

  ‘Good. And after? What about a job?’

  ‘Oh, no difficulty there. They’re crying out for people in all branches – work for the aged, hospital almoner, probation officer, problem families, factory welfare work. I should think you could take your choice.’ He concluded with a finality that suggested the end of the topic; but Meg wanted to know more. ‘Do you think I’d be good at it?’ she asked.

  ‘I should think so. How can I judge a thing like that?’

  She was now far from content. ‘Mr Darlington,’ she said. ‘This is very important to me, you know. It’s the whole of my future life. Please be honest with me. You’ve got some reservation, haven’t you?’

  He asked her permission to smoke his pipe. She found all the preliminary packing and lighting quite intolerable. He’s all right, she thought, but I couldn’t stand him about me for long. At last, ‘Quite frankly, I am a bit doubtful, Mrs Eliot,’ he said. ‘How would you fancy, for example, being in my place or perhaps, more to the point, Miss Rank’s vis-à-vis the committee?’

  ‘I thought you believed that I managed the committee very well.’

  ‘Now, Mrs Eliot, you’re not answering my question quite honestly this time, are you?’

  ‘I suppose all employers can be difficult, ‘she said, ‘but I’m not the sort of person to put on airs, you know. I don’t want to be a “lady” graciously taking on a job. Is that what you’re frightened of?’

  He seemed surprised. ‘Oh! Class,’ he said, ‘I don’t think that’s very important. We have people of all classes who are social workers. I doubt if such a thing’s noticed much in England now if you haven’t got the money to back it up. No, I was thinking of personality. I think, you see, that you expect results, and quick ones. And, of course, you’ve always been in the position to get them.’ He blushed. ‘I’m being very rude,’ he said. ‘I’d better stop.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Meg conceded. ‘Please go on.’

  ‘Well, in our work, you often don’t get results at all, or the wrong ones, and certainly they don’t come quickly. You’ve probably got too much imagination, too quick a mind. You’d get impatient and lose interest. I’m thinking, you see,’ he went on, ‘not only for committees and colleagues but of the people you’d have to deal with in your case work. Old people, factory workers, delinquents, whatever it was. I think they’d interest you enormously. You’d get on with a lot of them well, understand them and like them better than most of your colleagues. And those you didn’t like I’m sure you’d take even more trouble with. But that isn’t really the point. It’s impossible to talk about it except in platitudes. You see what you’d be there for is to help them to help themselves. And I don’t believe you’d do it. You’d carry them along with you, charm all their troubles away, make them feel they were interesting and that they were liked, but when the time came for them to stand on their own feet they’d be just where they started or almost so. And then you’d be annoyed.’

  ‘I see,’ Meg said. She hoped that she did not show her annoyance now. ‘Charm’s my trouble, in fact.’ His own charm, she thought, was rapidly vanishing; he seemed like a schoolboy trying not to sneak on the others.

  Now he squared his shoulders and clearly took the offensive. ‘You remember how dull much of the work of the committee is?’ he asked. She could hardly, recalling her all too apparent boredom on certain afternoons, deny it. She said nothing. ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘the committee get the pick of things. Three quarters of our work is simple, dead routine.’

  ‘I’ve got a sense of humour, you know,’ she said. ‘You’ll admit that. Surely it he
lps. You must know, for you’ve got such a good one yourself.’

  ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘I’ve been able to live up to you there. It’s interesting to have such different personalities on the committee, but it’s not always easy to adapt oneself to everybody.’

  For a moment she could say nothing. It was not only her ‘special’ relationship with Mr Darlington that seemed to have been hit for six, it was the whole sacred nature of ‘humour’ – the purest, most truthful of all human characteristics, her touchstone of whether a relationship was real. She said, not caring about the obvious irony in her voice, ‘Oh, I think you’re very adaptable.’

  But if he knew her intention, he ignored it. ‘Well, that’s what I mean. You have to be in social work. Adaptable to weeks of dreary routine and ready to adapt yourself to the sudden flap, or the odd unexpected interesting situation that suddenly comes up.’ He smiled at her and she felt that he was asking to be forgiven for disappointing her hopes. He looked at his watch. ‘I must fly,’ he said, ‘or I’ll have to adapt myself to some very black looks from my wife.’

  After all, she thought, it would have been so easy for him to say what she wanted to hear; only real kindness could have made him go through such an ordeal of shyness. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said, ‘You’ve been very honest with me. You’re probably right in what you say. I’ll have to think it over.’

  Nevertheless as she watched his neat, stocky figure disappear through the hotel, swing doors, she reflected that people’s honesty looked like being a most inconvenient part of her new life.

  Try as she would, Meg could not get past Mr Darlington’s advice. It had been so definite, so without any personal motive. She tried to believe that he was actuated by spite, that she was his whipping boy for the sins of the committee; but it was just not so, and to start believing such things for convenience, she realized, opened a dangerous floodgate for a lonely, bewildered middle-aged woman. She could believe, indeed she must, that he had no such particular liking for her as she had supposed; but in that case his view was only the more disinterested – a mixture of general benevolence, bent ever so slightly towards her because of their particular association, and of concern for the good of his profession. A prig, then, she might call him, and an insincere man in his professional relations; to do so would not decrease his competence at his job which was the test of the value of his advice. Nor were priggishness and insincerity charges she felt happy to throw around lest they rebounded and hit her. He was colder, more calculating than she had supposed, but that hardly impaired his judgement. And in any case he only calculated with the committee not with the old people. Her own position had changed and no doubt from that changed position she would now see different facets of the world she knew. Only the three old faithfuls seemed no different, but it was hardly fair to Mr Darlington to expect him to preserve faith with her as they had. She must, she decided, adopt a rule – she would see the friends of her married life no more, but remember it as a charming one; she would forget Miss Gorres’ disturbing ‘pass’ and remember her as that friendly, helpful little German woman at Sczekely’s; Mr Darlington should remain the surprisingly lively, humorous, intelligent secretary she had got on so well with. If there was patronage in it, that was better than rancour.

  Nevertheless to take Mr Darlington’s advice meant the suppression of her own esteem of herself, her own will. This might be excellent as a general discipline, wise on this occasion, but she feared for her future if she was not to be her own guide. And, more important, she realized that she had pinned too much on the idea of social work; she found no other idea to fall back on.

  Her little bedroom at the hotel was ugly – the more hideous for having been recently redecorated with a standard ‘contemporary’ wallpaper. All over the walls floated gay little blue and pink café tables, around them a few Vermouth and Pernod bottles and the word ‘Montmartre’ in pretty childish script. The design was no doubt carefully chosen to enchant cross-Channel travellers; it had no message for Meg. In the first weeks she had sought every excuse to be away from the room; but now suddenly the wallpaper, the pink, bevel-edged, modernistic mirror, and the furniture of shaded pink and silver began to give her a sense of anonymity. They were so remote from anything she knew or cared for that she felt free, safe, and hidden. She was free to fight her way back through the tangled, wounding branches of guilt and self-recrimination to the inner recesses of the past where she and Bill were still in unity. She was safe from the present desert of the London streets where, no longer Mrs Eliot of Lord North Street pausing in her busy purpose to enjoy the human variety around her, she felt herself only unknown; a creature without place or purpose; ageing female of the past, everything to be despised. Above all she was still hidden from the future that sought to prise her out of the last fragments of her protective shell and expose her for whatever absurd and ill adapted creature she was henceforth to be labelled.

  *

  ‘I suppose the fascination of gardening lies a lot in the way one can plan for the future. Especially in such an insecure world. I open my morning paper and read of some fresh new horror the scientists have devised and then I plan some change in the garden that won’t be fully realized for at least five or six years. It’s illogical, of course, but it’s some comfort. Don’t you think so, Mr Parker?’

  David, as always, smiled a sort of agreement. It was an observation that in some form or other seemed to come from so many of their customers after a certain period of trading. David, it suggested, had been discerned to have a mind that could appreciate the deeper aspects of his trade; with such a man business relationships must henceforth bear some of the ornaments of friendship. Since Gordon’s return from hospital, however, David had found that the remark inevitably heralded an inquiry about the invalid’s health. Little Mrs Glaisher, one of the many customers now coming from Crawley New Town, was no exception.

  ‘Is Mr Paget still going on all right?’ she asked.

  David wondered if she would realize the tactless juxtaposition of subjects and blush, but she did not; none of them did. It was true that external appearances were saved by the fiction they had generally reported of Gordon’s ‘successful’ operation; yet he knew that such a fiction could not have long been truly preserved in a country district; he was sure that most of their neighbours and customers must now have heard that Gordon was dying. The fiction of longevity inspired by gardening was always coupled with the fiction of Gordon’s health; he knew that no unkind motive inspired these friendly people, yet the compulsion seemed constant. The embarrassment that the dying caused to the living was clearly not only general but less deeply suppressed than he had supposed. However he was able still to answer, ‘The winter’s not easy for him, of course.’ And then Mrs Glaisher, like all the others, was able to duck sympathetically. She was less easy in her transition remark than some others, it was true.

  ‘The hopes we all place in the spring!’ she said.

  David wondered how anyone could get out of a remark like that, but here she was passing on to the best means of preserving her dahlia tubers and the fungicide she had used to keep her tulip bulbs from mildew, had she chosen the right one? Spring raised such practical problems.

  Nevertheless, he reflected, sitting alone in the little office when she had gone, the idiotic sentimentality about ‘gardening and the future’ was right in its general line. Over the years he had built up a life encompassed by simple immediate duties and recreations – an ordered present; but an ordered present demanded at least the fiction of an immediate future with simple duties and recreations to be planned. Only such a life, he had come to believe, could allow one to cross the shapeless tract of human existence with grace and with gentleness; if the path was a meaningless progress to the grave, then the more necessary to take each step as a deliberate progress to the next; he could see no other way of preserving the fiction of civilization, and nothing to recommend the indulgence of exposing it. Now in this cruel November, prelude to Gordon’s
last few wintry months of life, careful ordering of the future had become more than ever his aim. The present was only a matter of giving the very little to Gordon of all that he would have wished to give, and more still of keeping from Gordon all the things that he and others, in indulgence of their affection, might have imposed. It was as an aid to this discipline of emotions, his own and others’, that planning and attention to the coming year’s duties and routines proved so valuable. If it meant an outrage of his own feelings in dwelling on the time when Gordon would be dead, that must be nothing if in result it assisted Gordon to be free of vexation. Pain, the great enormity, only the doctors could in some measure ease, but added vexation it was his task to remove.

  The one compensation in this crisis of his life was that his way of living proved of value. He had thought once that it was one which, by small example and through long stretches of time, might yet ‘save humanity’ from the grosser absurdities of self destruction; this was a dream he had now rejected. History, after all, offered so many examples of ‘the proper course’, and so few conversions. Perhaps the hope itself had been only one more of the self assertions, ideals, ambitions, and pious interferences which were the weapons by which man was destroying himself. But in the last year or so, he had wondered if, even in his own life, he had applied the rule too rigidly to himself, had dogmatized a means of salvation when all he had found was personal safety. After all, he had no doubt that in the howling wilderness sweet voices sounded, and that their sound was the only thing worth hearing. Selfishness, self assertion, ideals, dreams and so on lay behind those voices. Up to now he had answered this contradiction simply by measuring the magnitude of the voice; Beethoven, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Mozart – what the local W.E.A. man called ‘the big chaps’, in their wide variety of ‘big chapness’ – were the only ones that could defy the discipline of living. The rest of us had the more to make up in self-denial to earn the bounty of those above the rules. But doubts he had had of it all lately, even for the few small self-assertions he had refused himself. Now those doubts were gone. The climax of life – and for him Gordon’s dying was the climax – seemed undeniably to prove him right. He could meet it, he believed, decently for himself and, within the great limitations of human aid, decently for others.