The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  And in truth she had to admit that he did all he could to be nice. He sat with her on the sofa and told her of Bill’s conduct of many of his cases. His admiration for Bill was complete and sincere. As the stories progressed Meg listened fascinatedly; to hear anything of Bill that she did not know was to increase the living part of her, to add, if only secondhand, to the stock of memories which she was building up as a counterweight to the dead routine life that was to be hers in the future. But as Donald ended one of the stories, she suddenly felt a distaste for hearing any more. She did not want to know things about Bill from other people, things in which she had not participated, especially not from Donald. She sought some means of bringing the conversation to an end; but she felt that she could not do so without a gesture of friendliness in response to his, something that did not commit her to seeing him again soon or often.

  She said, ‘One thing I didn’t mention, Donald, about my affairs, if you’ll forgive my bringing them up. Mr Marriot, the consul at Srem Panh, started to talk to me about compensation from the Badai government. I shut him up. At the time I couldn’t bear to hear about it. As though there could be any compensation for what had happened! I still feel that, but I do realize that I oughtn’t to refuse any money I can get. I don’t think I could bear to handle the thing myself. Do you think you could do it for me? I expect the Foreign Office have gone ahead even though I said not to do so. I don’t want it if there’s to be any publicity or fuss. But I know you’ll handle it tactfully.’

  He seemed a little surprised, she thought, although he promised to do all he could. The subject of the compensation had occurred to her quite without premeditation; it seemed a polite means of disengagement. If, as she now saw, it marked him off as a business adviser rather than a friend, she could only welcome the chance result.

  She got up and began to circulate among Viola’s friends. She found that the deadness she had sensed at the beginning of the party had gone – thanks perhaps to Donald – but, benefiting by it, she was soon amusing and entertaining them at the top of her form; a good deal less noisily, she could not help reflecting, than Donald. After the guests had left Viola Pirie said, ‘You’re wonderful with people, Meg. Thank you. I thought it was going to be very sticky.’

  Meg wondered at her own motives. Had it merely been pique at finding herself for a moment a wallflower? Had she wanted to put Donald’s nose out of joint? Or was the desire to be ‘good socially’ – the desire that she had placed at the head of that list of follies with which she had spoiled Bill’s happiness – so naturally strong in her? The lightheaded frivolity which she had felt during the evening was not routed by these questions, she could not answer them and she didn’t care. Instead she found herself giggling at something Tom said.

  ‘That Cynthia Robertson’s a bit nympho,’ he announced in worldly tones. Meg had to go out of the room, it struck her as so funny that he should want to lessen the value of his conquest by attributing it to nymphomania. She could hear Viola saying, ‘Now, Tom, you really shouldn’t. You’ve shocked Meg’; and she could only laugh the more.

  The next day Viola said, ‘You’ve got a wonderful friend in Donald Templeton, Meg.’

  Even this did not really annoy her. She said only, ‘He was Bill’s friend.’

  On the Sunday evening she returned to her room. The visit had not proved as irksome as she had feared; although when Viola said, ‘I shall have to let that room soon, Meg. Why don’t you come here as my lodger? You can see now how independent you would be,’ she thought, ‘Not for more than three days, thank you.’ She looked at the dead anonymity of her own bed-sitting room with considerable relief.

  About a week later Meg caught a very bad cold. She hardly knew how to get through the afternoon classes. This was a time in any case when, after absorbing the first shorthand lessons very rapidly, she seemed suddenly to have fallen behind the younger students. She longed for a memory that was not so over-stuffed with the irrelevant minutiae of forty-three years. Miss Dacres, the shorthand teacher, drew her aside in the passage and told her not to worry. ‘There always comes a period of mental blockage,’ she said, ‘after the first week or two. If you’ve started to learn when you’re older, I mean.’ The intention was kindly but Meg was only the more depressed. She had obviously shown her anxiety which she had no wish to do; and to be comforted by ‘teacher’ – especially when ‘teacher’ was ten years younger than herself – annoyed her.

  She gave up in the middle of a shivery walk by the Serpentine that evening; it was dark, with a cold east wind too harsh to permit even a gentle melancholy. How anyone could be invited to easeful death by that black, freezing water is beyond me, she thought; at any rate, I’m no suicide.

  The melancholy chill of her room gave quite other thoughts. She made herself a cup of tea but it seemed thick and bitter in her mouth. She took three Disprins and went to bed. The blankets were inadequate, the water bottle burned her feet and then, as she lay awake so long, turned toad cold to her feet. ‘Cold as paddocks’ – she repeated the phrase, which had always before had an archaic charm but it failed to exorcise her thoughts. Lonely old women in their hundreds went through her mind – old women smiling inanely from frightened, timid eyes; old women leering crazily from clownish painted faces; old women smiling and nodding, with cracked shoes and skirts done up with safety pins; square faced, bobbed haired old fighters for women’s rights reduced to depressive silence; and bird eyed, gaunt old socialite women (Meg Eliots these) chattering their manic nonsense.

  The disgust that this fever of self pity aroused in her gave no assuagement, for the circle revolved endlessly in her mind. She tried to think of all the useful, cheerful, self-dependent old women who had conquered poverty and loneliness, but they could find no place in the crushing ranks of the defeated old women that crowded into her memory. She tried to efface the particular in the general and a voice, clear, detached, a little pompous – the voice of the BBC Question Master – gave the answer. ‘The panel have been set the following problem. You are in charge of a lifeboat. A liner is sinking. There are only two more places that can be offered. You must make the agonizing choice of saving these two from among a number. The possible candidates are a young girl engaged to be married, her fiancé a brilliant young atomic scientist, a famous ballerina, a mother and her fourteen-year-old son, an elderly woman once famous as a beauty and a society hostess, a surgeon, a stevedore … Well,’ the voice continued almost cheerfully, ‘I think the panel have little difficulty in their first elimination. The elderly woman after all has had her life, she has no one who depends on her, she is not frankly going to be of much use to the world …’ Commissars scratched out the names of old women from the lists of those worthy of bread tickets, even humanitarians averted their eyes from old Jewesses packed into cattle trucks, steeling themselves to think rather of the children and of the active.

  Meg fought the hysteria desperately. I am forty-three, I am strong, I am not stupid or cowardly, I have humour and experience on my side, a new life can begin for me. Barren, spoilt, ignorant of the world around you – a world that has no place or use for you. It is my intention (and I’m fully aware that the whole of this dialogue is absurd and humourless) but it is my intention to learn about this world (if the whole business about my not knowing it isn’t itself a hysterical mystique born of a chance tragic happening) to learn about it and make myself useful. But, as her will seemed to be conquering her hysteria, the dialogue changed. You pity yourself because you think you have a right to a better life; it’s worse for you because you weren’t expecting it, it’s unfair because you didn’t know it was coming; all the old women who haunt you have been comfortable, rich, beautiful, spoilt, that’s all you pity in them. The voice seemed to jeer, to mimic her mother’s voice – I don’t care what you say, it’s worse for women who had been brought up as ladies. She answered, declaring all her hatred of her mother’s view, protesting all she had done for the old working women in Aid to the Elderly. I’m luck
y, she said, I know it – at least I’ve had something, they’ve always been poor. But the voice said, You do think it’s worse, it is worse, isn’t it? It’s degrading. It’s a hateful world that has no place for you.

  On the superficial level of her mind she tried to ignore the whole, sordid hysteric struggle, told herself that it was the fever, lay on this side and on that, turned the pillow over, tucked up her legs, stretched them; and at last fell into a sleep where the dialogue assumed more active nightmare forms.

  She woke in the night once, crying; and then in the morning, with the fever gone, but sneezing and streaming from the eyes. The anonymity of her room now told against her. The house was one of five converted into bed-sitters – there was no resident proprietress, even the housekeeper lived two houses away. The maid did not appear until eleven; she was Latvian and not very bright, but she promised to phone to Miss Corrigan and to make some few purchases for Meg. Instead of the sponge cakes and grapes that Meg had asked for she brought macaroons and some very shiny, red, soft Australian apples; she had understood ‘eggs’, but what she might have said to Miss Corrigan Meg dreaded to think. She made some tea for Meg, and then, suddenly darting across to the bed where Meg was eyeing the macaroons doubtfully, she thrust one of them into the cup of tea and held it out. ‘This is good,’ she said. The episode restored Meg’s spirits a little, but she spent a miserable day between the bed and the electric fire that roasted her feet and left her body a target for the numerous draughts.

  The next day she went to the Garsington and braved the doubtful looks of the others at her anti-social sneezing and coughing. That evening she rang up Viola Pirie and asked if she could rent the bed-sitting room. Whether it was her weaker, hysteric side that had broken down at the first real discomfort or whether it was her stronger, rational side that had recognized the end of one phase and the need to embark on another, she really could not tell. She had reached the limit of self-examination where the answers seemed to be no more than arbitrary choice. She only knew that she feared to be alone any longer.

  The first weeks at Viola Pirie’s passed easily, soothingly. The pattern of Viola Pirie’s life unfolded before her but it impinged on her own very little. Viola’s days were spent, it seemed, in a continuous, exhausting round of benevolent activity. There was no end to the charities, private or public, in which she was involved. She was also an ardent Conservative party worker and concerned in some parish activity for St Mary Abbots which Meg never really comprehended. None of her daily work, however, was allowed to delay by a minute her return home to prepare and cook dinner for Tom and Meg. When Meg asked to help with the washing-up, she demurred. ‘You must stay and talk to Tom,’ she said, but Tom was busy with his novel, so in the end she agreed.

  In the first three weeks Tom returned rather late. He was now in partnership it seemed, with a friend who was opening a combined paint and carpentry shop to assist the ‘do it yourself’ householder.

  ‘The point,’ Tom explained, ‘about all this do it yourself stuff is that nobody has the faintest idea how to go about it. And we shall advise as well as sell the materials.’

  Meg’s friends had not included a lot of people who ‘did it themselves’, even so she had an idea that this sort of shop was not entirely new. However, Tom spoke of it as a money spinning novel scheme; Viola was delighted; who was she to question it? After a week or so the partnership seemed to peter out and Tom found that the novel required all his time.

  ‘I’m not,’ he said, ‘giving the thing a chance to live. Once I’ve got this thing off my chest, I shall look out for a real job. Anything I do while my mind’s on the book I do half cock and I’m not prepared to work like that. Of course it may be a best seller,’ he added, ‘although one can’t count on it, because the first book’s always a gamble.’

  Meg suggested that the gamble was rather a wild one. Viola looked worried. But Tom told them of a friend of his, with capital behind him, who was setting up in publishing simply to give new writers a market. ‘And he’s not the sort of man to throw money away. He may tell us that he’s doing it for art but if he publishes anything it’ll have every chance of being a money spinner. As good a chance as any first book can, which is all I ask.’ His mother’s anxiety seemed to vanish at this news. Meg thought it best to say nothing more at the time, but later she voiced her doubts to Viola when they were alone.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think we can say too much about it,’ Viola said. ‘These young men have their own ways of doing things, haven’t they?’

  Tom, it seemed to Meg, had his own way of doing nothing. She had not minded his giving no hand to the washing-up when he was working in the day, but now it annoyed her. Once again she decided not to provoke a direct battle, but one evening after dinner as they were arguing about emigration – when Tom felt depressed, Meg noticed, he always spoke of emigrating, ‘all the cream of my generation have had it here’ – she told him that he must follow her into the kitchen if he wanted to talk to her. Viola looked bewildered at Tom’s appearance there, but Meg handed him a plate.

  ‘You can dry that while you’re talking,’ she said.

  Soon he was happily stacking plates and glasses, explaining all the while that it was exactly this sort of thing that made life impossible for people who wanted to get anywhere. The next night Viola Pirie said, ‘You two stop here and talk, Tom isn’t to wash up.’

  Meg protested, ‘Dear God, Viola,’ she said, ‘he’s got a pair of hands.’

  But the expression that Viola so liked to hear from Meg caused no amusement this time.

  ‘I’m sorry, Meg,’ she said, ‘I don’t like to see men doing women’s work.’ She was both determined and angry.

  The same pattern of relationship emerged when Meg suggested cooking some of the meals. At first she thought that Viola’s refusal stemmed from pride in her own good but plain cooking; but when one evening, in her enforced absence at a Mothers’ Union outing to a musical comedy – ‘there’s no way of getting out of it without offence’ – Meg cooked a risotto and Tom enjoyed it, everything was changed. Viola would have handed over the cooking entirely, if Meg had not been firm. From then on they cooked on alternate nights. Viola’s devotion to Tom seemed curiously without jealousy. She did not mind his preferences for Meg’s dishes – a preference simply due to boredom with his mother’s repertoire – indeed she went into pantomimes of delight at everything Meg served, partly to encourage her to do more, partly out of pure pleasure at Tom’s satisfaction.

  This spoiling of her son, Meg soon saw, was only an exaggeration of Viola’s general high regard for men. Despite the genuine humility that made her take on everyone’s cares without regard for herself, she was, as Meg knew from Aid to the Elderly, very decided in her views and often quite ruthless in getting her own way. The women she worked with she regarded as fools and did not hesitate to tell them so. Some few were excepted because they were younger and had a full life. ‘It was so splendid of them to take on committee work.’ Meg with her Lord North Street life, had been one of these. It was not a matter of snobbery, however, for there was for example young Mrs Martin. ‘She looks after a husband and four children, Meg, and runs a sweet shop. I wasn’t going to have all the old tabbies bossing her around just because she isn’t what they call “our class”. I think somebody like that is absolutely splendid. I always vote with her at meetings.’ To a few women, then, she gave way. To only a very few men she did not – men like Mr Purdyke, who acquiesced too much and so earned the title ‘an old woman’, or subordinates like Mr Darlington who could only be ‘given their heads’ to a limited extent; but from Sir Oliver Lacey, the chairman of the Child Care Committee, or from Colonel Randolph, the Youth Club governor, or, for that matter, from Mr Marcus, the tailor who was on the Prisoners’ Aid Committee, she accepted anything they chose to tell her. ‘Men know what they’re talking about, you see,’ she said. It was, Meg felt, a sad mischance that Viola should have a son who so evidently contradicted this rule.

&nb
sp; The tension between mother and son was too endemic ever to break out fiercely, though the restraining influence of Meg’s presence upon their bickering grew less as time passed, especially upon Tom’s. Yet, for Meg, life in the little flat remained quiet and restful: they made no demands upon her support except in assuring her that her presence was helpful, they never intruded upon her privacy, and if Tom did not make any practical additions to his mother’s care for their visitor’s comfort he eased her sense of loneliness by his evident admiration for her.

  She was still putting most of her life into her work and had caught up again in her classes as Miss Dacres had predicted, but she found that, freed from the depression of the bed-sitting room life, she could read or go out on a few evenings in the week without falling behind in the lessons. She started on a re-reading of Proust; she saw Poll a few times and found the fun she got out of her company worth the squalor of her King’s Road flat and the hangover she inevitably suffered the next day; she dined a few times with Jill and appreciated Viola’s virtues the more.

  They were both, she found, a little jealous of her living at the Piries’. Poll said, ‘I shouldn’t think it would last, should you?’ Jill asked every detail of the Pirie budgeting. ‘Lady Pirie can’t really live on her pension,’ she said with a little laugh at Meg’s ignorance of the current cost of living. ‘People seldom tell one all their means. Of course, she’s doing quite well out of you. But you’re probably wise to put comfort before economy while you’re still doing this course.’