The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  The first movement went remarkably well. Even Mary Gardner gave Else a smile at the end of it. Only when Gordon with great difficulty raised himself to his feet, and Climbers, with gasps and growls that expressed her overgrown child’s alarm, handed him his stick and with Eileen Rattray’s aid helped him from the room, did he realize that all could not necessarily be accounted well because Else had got through her part without disaster. Gordon had turned his face to them for a moment, tears were streaming down his cheeks and his body was trembling like a mouse caught in a corner. It was with the greatest difficulty that Else was persuaded to carry on to the end of the quartet; but she had only been upstairs a few moments before she returned again, her long grey cheeks unwontedly red, her eyes refusing to face the company. She drew David aside.

  ‘Oh, it is terrible, David. It is dreadful to see him so weak like a baby. I wish I had never agreed to play.’

  It was Eileen Rattray who brought the evening to a close. She came down to the drawing room and told them to go. With her genteel discreet make-up, soft wavy black hair and rather silly, round brown eyes, she seemed appropriately the nurse-in-charge. ‘I honestly think we’d better all push off, David,’ she said. ‘Gordon just isn’t up to visitors, you know.’

  Had it been only that Gordon, so austere and undemonstrative in his love of music, had been reduced to maudlin tears by a very inadequate performance of a work he knew well, it would have been easy, though sad, to accept it as one of the indignities of a mind and body weakened by pain and stress; but it was what had happened the next day that had been so difficult to think of as coming from the Gordon he knew, yet also impossible not to see as springing from some habitually encouraged wilfulness. Gordon at that time – only a week or so ago – did not leave his bed until after luncheon; now he scarcely left it at all.

  At eleven o’clock Mrs Boniface had brought a note from him. ‘My dear David,’ it read, ‘I’m afraid there can be no more music of any kind until after I am dead. I cannot risk a repetition of the shaming exhibition I gave last night. Also I cannot tolerate the idea of music going on without my being there. I’m sorry but there it is.’

  His own first thought had been: rather than that this sort of thing should happen again, let him die soon. He particularly felt the selfishness of destroying Else’s morale. And, although he had rebuked himself again and again for the selfishness and cruelty of such a thought, he knew that his reaction had been a healthy one. In the play of Gordon’s death, by which the whole repertoire of their life together was then being judged, the only uncertain actor was the dying man. Every further day of play the ungrateful role might prove too much for his endurance, might lead to increasingly selfish hugging of the last pathetic rays of limelight.

  The spluttering of the name in the oil stove suddenly grew louder, breaking into David’s reverie. The office was in any case fiendishly draughty. It was all very well to refuse oneself remembrance of the past years as too sweetly false; indulgence of the vinegary bitterness that the last few weeks had left was even more senseless and perverse. There had been failures, but on the whole Gordon was dying true to his life; and they, his disciples, the household of Andredaswood, had not entirely failed to support him as he would surely want.

  Attention to the future was the only sane course. He must see Climbers about the Christmas orders for cinerarias and poinsettias; he must go over the proof of the spring catalogue with Tim; and – surely this was a triumph? – he could now see them together without undertones of hostility. Then he must pass an hour with Else, letting her talk – of her first sight of Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin, of her visit to the Bruderhof settlement near Lindau (‘such good, good people, though quite childlike’), of her work with the Basque refugees at the Cadbury settlement in Birmingham, of Gordon’s mother and Gordon, and of Gordon again; talk was her only relief. And then, when Father Hill had left the sick-room at six precisely, his weekly visit of comfort concluded, David must read aloud to Gordon from Prancing Nigger or Valmouth, for only Firbank was tolerated now. A fixed routine, in fact, of people and places; only so could he hold himself apart, and, his soul not invaded, have the energy to endure to Gordon’s end and beyond.

  *

  Meg, as November fogs thickened, looked out of her bedroom window and, craning as she would, could not discern the outlines of the Cathedral. Only an occasional drunken Irish voice or the high giggle of some Teddy girl reminded her that, incongruously, her long nights of memory floated, in all their varied scenes of her life with Bill, above the squalors of Vauxhall Bridge Road darkness. Nightmares beset her drugged sleep, waking her suddenly at two or three in the morning, lost in the desert, or taking off in an aeroplane with a burst of gunfire or a cry (some motor car or drunk, no doubt), Bill drowning in the sea below, Bill buried in the sand, Bill falling from the window of the plane. She woke to the reality of her dark, stuffy safety and would lie an hour or two with soothing memories of all their shared happiness; only, as the morning noise grew, to be jolted back into remembrance of her failure to help him. Or, on other nights sleep would wrap her round in a heavy sweetness, dreams ill-defined but reassuring, vague presences at her side in shadowy scenes that soothed her fears. From these, too, she would wake, but now gradually, slowly, to a final terror that he was not with her. She would lie for hours forcing back panic and hysteria until the night porter collecting shoes along the corridor told her that morning’s safety had come. She argued with Bill now, and with herself, even in the day hours when she pottered in her room. Only when the chambermaid, an old ‘character’ with a Lancashire accent, came at eleven or so, saying, ‘I’ll have to make the bed now,’ did she make her way to the lounge with The Woman in White as a barrier against intrusive conversation.

  One morning the old woman remarked, ‘First sign, you know,’ and when Meg looked blank, she repeated in a tone half jocular, half maternal, ‘Talking to yourself. I’ve never heard anyone like it. They say it’s the first sign, you know.’

  Meg, with effort making any communication, said, ‘I must look out, mustn’t I?’

  The old woman answered solemnly, ‘It’s the money worries that are the killers,’ so that Meg was left wondering whether she had been doing sums aloud.

  It was the head waiter, however, who unwittingly brought Meg’s retreat to an end. One morning at breakfast a new young waitress put rolls on Meg’s table. The head waiter came up and said fussily, ‘No, no, Mrs Eliot always has toast.’ He stood for a moment over Meg. ‘We’re getting to know your ways, Madam,’ he said. ‘You can’t think what a relief it is to have a regular in a hotel like this. I’ve been used to country hotels and it’s terrible to see the faces change every morning like they do here.’

  And then after breakfast that very morning the anaemic-looking cashier, who had seemed as genteelly hostile as she was sickly ladylike, said, stamping the week’s receipt, ‘Well, that’s four weeks, isn’t it? Our oldest inhabitant, I think.’

  Meg answered the dismal smile as brightly as she could. ‘Is there a bonus for long residence?’ she asked, and they both laughed.

  When Meg came up to her room she saw it suddenly as a squalid, hideous prison. She heard suddenly her mother’s voice. ‘Well, Margaret dear, I only hope you’re never up against it. We’d all like to sit day-dreaming with our noses in a book, you know, but some of us have to think where the next meal is coming from.’ It was then that she had begun the secretarial course which her marriage had interrupted.

  And now she realized that under all the half sleep of the last weeks she had been forming the resolution to take up such a course again. There were ladylike secretaries, she knew, but she need not be one; nor would she be stamped as the bright, embittered career woman; that was the peril of the unmarried woman, not the widow. The demand for private secretaries was considerable; the pay good; the work, if she chose the right job, would bring her into contact with some part of the world outside that, until she had met it, would continue its desert threat; and she cou
ld change her milieu as she wanted. ‘I’ll nibble up this damned world bit by bit. Nothing can really hit me so hard again as I was hit at Srem Panh; but at least if I haven’t been punished enough yet, I can try not to be caught in ignorance again. I’ll go out to meet it.’

  Then she laughed at herself; Alexander conquering the world, or even Oliver Cromwell leaving his farm to set England’s wrongs to right, was hardly the correct mood for becoming that two-a-penny thing, a competent secretary. All the same, she knew that this, for the moment at any rate, was what she wanted – to be subordinate, but independent, to be ‘in the know’, to work with a man, having his confidence and identifying herself with his work.

  She was surprised to find how much the idea of working with a man mattered to her. ‘She became the boss’s boss,’ she thought. And, why she did not understand, she felt suddenly freed from care of seeing herself as a ridiculous figure. Only, of course, to become qualified at her age would not be easy. She had acquired before her marriage only a measure of proficiency in shorthand. The course, she decided, must be intensive, whole hogging – she would plunge wholly into the cut-off routine of study, drive memories and guilt away by the sheer weight of memorizing – and emerge, she could not tell what, but not, at any rate, the same.

  Finding the right secretarial college did not prove easy. The one she had attended twenty years before turned out to be all too much a general finishing school – talks on modern affairs, little scrap ends of a nice girls’ finishing off about pictures and books and the changing world around us. She had not remembered how incomplete her emancipation from her mother’s vision of her future had then been. Wherever else, she had no place among the almost right type of girls for whom ‘abroad’ was out for cash reasons, and whose homes could not contain too many women doing nothing – girls about to do a job in London for a year or so until … She checked herself; she had not known such rich suburbia still existed, why therefore should she suddenly wax angry about it? She would have to meet many young girls now. She must not allow middle-aged rancour to canalize her unhappiness. The semi-finishing schools were not for her, that was all. Nor, with the desire for self-torment vanishing in her new mood of determination, had she any intention of joining the stifling smells and the mass-personality of the large scale typing schools, to giggle and squeal her way to the slaughter market. At last, however, she found the place she wanted – Garsington Secretarial College.

  The principal, Miss Corrigan, small, white-faced, with bright red hair, reminded Meg of Ellen Wilkinson, who had been one of her heroines in her youth. Miss Corrigan was not at all fiery, however; indeed her deliberate rather cold manner seemed to have chilled her physically. Although her small office, partitioned off from the great drawing room first floor of the large Victorian house in Gloucester Road, was almost furnace hot with two electric fires full on, Miss Corrigan wore two woollen jackets, one pink, one blue, and another of mauve was draped over her shoulders. This regard for comfort at the expense of appearance predisposed Meg in her favour. Miss Corrigan’s practical, direct manner completed the effect.

  ‘You won’t find the shorthand easy at your age, Mrs Eliot. I had much better say that now. And the course is a six months intensive one. It means really hard work. But I can say that, unless you prove to be one of the rare persons who just can’t learn, which is very unlikely, you’ll be fitted to take a really good post at the end.’ There were courses in commercial French and German, but as Meg had a good working knowledge of those languages, she would advise Meg to pick them up if and when she needed them. ‘You’ll need all your energies to memorize the shorthand,’ she said.

  Her interest in Meg’s story was certainly no more than politeness required. ‘Yes I read about it in the papers,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re recovered from the shock. I ask because if your health isn’t up to it I shouldn’t recommend you to waste your money on the fees.’

  As to Meg’s decision not to follow her mother’s course of running her own business, she merely gave a little laugh and said, ‘Well, times have changed haven’t they?’

  Nervousness, perhaps, made Meg elaborate her explanation. ‘I think some of my friends will be surprised that at my age I don’t want to be my own boss. Or, at any rate, go for one of the “refeened” sort of jobs which so many distressed gentlewomen do.’

  Miss Corrigan paid no regard to her ironic tone. ‘Will they?’ she said. ‘Other people’s suggestions are never much help.’ When Meg emphasized her straitened means, she said, ‘We have a canteen which provides a cheap snack lunch. And saves time. You’ll find most of the girls very young,’ she said. ‘They’re a mixed lot in background, but young people today are very sensible. There are one or two older women. Anyhow, I don’t suppose it matters. You won’t be coming here to make friends.’

  And so it started, a life of dictation and the first steps in shorthand, of various model typewriters, of duplicating and book-keeping in the great drawing rooms and the bedrooms that overlooked a garden at the back and the little maids’ bedrooms that overlooked almost nothing. Only the embossed dadoes and the gold and white porcelain bell handles remained functionless to speak of the past Victorian glory. For the rest the rooms with their desks and collapsible chairs were coldly functional, the walls distempered ice blue, the paint white; but every room, unlike Miss Corrigan’s office, had central heating and the lighting was good, Meg ate bridge rolls with cheese or sardines and drank a bowl of tomato soup at lunch time, and made conversation about the morning classes with Miss Corrigan’s ‘mixed’ girls. She found them uninteresting but easy; when she chose to read a book with her snack no one seemed to be offended. All her energies and thoughts, as Miss Corrigan had predicted, were taken up with her work.

  The only feature of working at the Garsington which irked Meg was that convenience seemed to demand her living in Kensington – the very centre, she felt, of the genteel penury she was trying to avoid. Determination to leave the hotel, to seek anonymity in a bed-sitting room, had been the starting point of her new mood of determination, but she had hoped to find a characterless district of London, or at least one that had no associations for her. However, she discovered that her picture of Kensington was as out of date as Miss Corrigan’s laconic manner had shown her protest against ‘ladies’ jobs’ to be. It was true that many of the old poor genteel hotel residents were still to be seen in the streets, and even some of the older stratum of rich house-owners, but the whole pattern of the Kensington she detested was now overlaid by such an influx of clerical workers and students and foreigners of every kind that she soon saw that her mother’s world had vanished for ever.

  She took a good sized bed-sitting room in a hideous terra-cotta coloured pseudo-Dutch house in a garden square near Gloucester Road station. The furnishing once again was ‘contemporary’, but characterless and ‘restrained’ in taste; it was a room that at least she would never notice. The two gas rings she resolved never to use for more than breakfast’s tea and boiled egg. She realized with amusement that her picture of a straitened life was extremely vague, but that certain timeworn clichés, such as that ‘you cannot decently sleep and live in a room which smells of cooking’, coincided with her own feelings. These, at any rate, would serve as a guide at first. She found a nearby Italian restaurant, of the old-fashioned kind with paper carnations in vases on the tables, at which she ate each evening rather tough but well cooked escalopes, or fritto misto, and drank very good coffee. The prices of everything – and especially of the bed-sitting room – were a great perplexity to her. At times they seemed monstrously high and at others absurdly modest. With the limits of her small capital still uncertain, she had no guide to what she could afford save the vague knowledge that her old standards could be no guide.

  She had hardly ever, at any rate in her adult life, known a routine of combined difficulty and tedium such as her new life gave her. At first the very novelty held some fascination, but, after a week, she found in herself a power of application to
the daily task that she had not expected. It was not only pride that kept her determined, but an appetite for order so that she now made tables of her days at the beginning of each week and gained an absurd satisfaction from ticking off each lesson in her shorthand book, seeing new groups of sound symbols absorbed from the mysterious mass in front of her, noting the increase in her typing speed. She disciplined all her days to one end; she forswore all reading or cinema going as an unnecessary additional strain on her already fully taxed eyesight; she refused herself an immediate return from the Garsington to her room, when the day ended at four, for fear of having no recreation; she gave herself instead a short repose over tea in some café and then a walk in the park; on Sundays she made herself sleep on until eleven or so in the morning. By natural inclination she liked books and cinemas, disliked walking and lying in bed, but this subordination of all activities to an end eliminated choice and, in so doing, distracted her mind from her indifference to everything.

  In a week or so, too, she found that the regime she had imposed by decision was the one that in any case her body demanded; with the day’s work and the evening’s preparation she was too tired for books or cinemas, longed for half an hour’s fresh air and luxuriated in her Sunday laze. The nightmares became less frequent; her memory was too active upon syllabic symbols to allow for review of the past; the enlarged vision of the moral pattern of her life, that had obsessed her since Bill’s death, faded each day; the gnawing guilt found some satisfaction in the performances of tedious work or was forgotten in concern over an ill-remembered lesson. She no longer felt that, in order to regain unity with Bill, she had to use all her energy to suspend Time’s passage; now it seemed that, if she could subdue herself to a hard discipline, each day that passed would bring nearer that state of ordered quietude in which alone she could hope to purge her memories of waste and decay, and recall the essential past in which she had been at one with him. If at the moment all was confusion within, then only an ordered outer life could give hope for clarity; meanwhile she must stun her imagination and emotions with fatigue.