The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  In fact Poll’s little mid-nineteenth-century artisan’s house was packed so tightly with people that there was really no question of being shy about anything or anybody. Meg saw nobody that she knew, but there was at any rate no danger of her appearing isolated because she was too securely wedged, It was one of those parties, she decided, where one could keep fighting one’s way around the little house, listening to various conversations and always seeming to be about to join somebody else. Most of the young people – and there were a good number of them – looked like Tom’s ‘friends’; in fact many of them were, and Tom was soon introducing her to a small group.

  One of the two young men smiled at her; the other scowled, and the girl said, ‘Do you live near Guildford?’

  Meg said, ‘No. I don’t, actually.’

  The girl said, ‘Oh, I thought I’d seen you there.’

  Meg was pleased that someone had taken notice of her existence. She thought that perhaps a scatty sort of conversation would give an Ionesco note that they would like. She said quite untruthfully:

  ‘I had an aunt who lived there, but she left because of the badgers.’

  The scowling young man roared with laughter, but unfortunately not at Meg’s crazy wit. He said, ‘Ha! ha! An aunt!’ He made it clear that the comic thing was to hear someone speak of an aunt.

  They now ignored her. ‘John says that she threw a lot of money down the loo and went on crying,’ the girl said.

  Tom asked, ‘Is John still working on that play about the nuns?’

  The scowling man said, ‘Yes. But that hadn’t anything to do with it,’ For some reason they all laughed, but not, Meg thought, at Tom,

  ‘They got this grandmother up to London,’ the girl said. ‘It was exactly what you’d expect that Mrs Freeman to do. I can’t think why Ann always went on about her so. She’s an awful creature. She’s just the kind of person to send for the grandmother.’

  ‘She’s the one who’s always in a dressing gown, isn’t she? I thought she was just the landlady.’ The smiling young man spoke. He was fair and anaemic.

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ the girl said. ‘Ann makes up stories about people being different. Just because they did the pools together! Well anyhow the grandmother’s put her in this place.’

  ‘But isn’t she very rich?’ the pale young man asked.

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference,’ the scowling young man said, ‘she’d be only the more keen to get her own back on Ann.’

  Tom asked, ‘Can we write to her?’

  ‘You could,’ the girl answered, ‘but I don’t think it would be much use. Most of the time they’re giving her fits.’

  ‘It could be quite interesting if she wrote it all down as soon as the fits were over,’ the scowling young man told them, ‘there’s a moment just as consciousness returns when formal patterns emerge without any associative values.’

  Tom looked impressed. ‘I don’t suppose Ann’ll create much from it,’ he said.

  ‘Well I shouldn’t,’ said the girl, ‘if they’d been giving me fits. Anyway they wouldn’t let her have anything sharp like a pencil.’

  The pale young man said, ‘I don’t think any of us are very interested in all that abnormal vision stuff, Ralph.’ He smiled at Meg again.

  Now she thought was her chance. It was only a question of hitting the right note in order to get on with them. She knew that two strong vodkas were working within her – it was now or never. Frivolous but basically serious was surely the key.

  ‘I must say I agree,’ she said. ‘All this Huxley mescalin stuff seems to me a terrible bore. Three quarters of what they say they see, one could guess at in advance.’ She was pleased to join in opposing the scowling man. Gathering confidence, she said, ‘The terrible thing about all breakdowns, and madness for that matter, is how frightfully comic it is to the outsider.’ Their faces appeared very blank. She decided on another tack. ‘All the same I hope they don’t give your friend E.C.T. If it’s a very expensive place they probably wont. But at the hospitals they do. They have to, really, because of the great number of cases.’

  The pale young man asked, ‘Can I get you another drink?’

  Meg was brought up with a jolt. ‘Oh, thank you,’ she said, giving him her glass, but she felt an urge to carry on. ‘While there are so few trained psycho-analysts,’ she said, ‘and analysis takes so much time and money, they’re bound to use short cuts. But nevertheless E.C.T. is a disgusting business and it isn’t anything but a short term measure. It simply gets people back to work.’

  ‘I say, Simon hasn’t brought that drink for your friend,’ the scowling man said, ‘you go and get her one, Tom. There’s masses of drink,’ he explained to Meg.

  She thought that she had been talking too much, but, as nobody-said anything, she went on. ‘That’s why they use E.C.T. in Soviet Russia. Wherever things are on a large scale.’ She heard her voice fading out and decided that she must pep up her remarks. ‘All the same I do think, however necessary it is, it’s up to everybody to emphasize that it’s only a pis aller.’ She realized that by her vigorous tone she was appearing as an obsessed victim of shock treatment. Her audience seemed most embarrassed. ‘Not that I’ve ever had it myself,’ she said, giggling to lighten the atmosphere. Nobody giggled back.

  The girl said very sternly, ‘Well, I don’t suppose they give it unless they have to.’

  The scowling young man said, ‘Neurosis is the least interesting form of evasion.’

  Suddenly Meg saw the whole situation as very funny. ‘What’s the most interesting?’ she asked.

  The young man didn’t reply, but the girl laughed and said, ‘Good.’ She gave Meg a friendly smile.

  ‘Well, I have enjoyed this talk,’ Meg said. This time the young man smiled. ‘And now I’ll go and have another one somewhere else,’ she added. The young man said, ‘Good,’ but his tone was not rude.

  He added, ‘Tom and Simon have no manners,’ and again he smiled at her.

  Meg fought her way to one of the tables of drink, feeling that she had been at the same time excluded and accepted. She thought all the people looked a bit scruffy and fifth rate but very nice. Poll came over to her and said, ‘I shouldn’t think you’d like this party very much. But let me tell you here and now that I love everybody here.’ She was glassy eyed and redder in the face than even her Dutch Doll rouge allowed for. She seemed still to be angry about the telephone conversation. She looked at Meg’s black cocktail dress. ‘Well, anyway, you’ve come dressed for slumming,’ she said.

  Poll was wearing the only evening dress in sight – a low-waisted beige-pink muslin dress, short and backless. Meg’s mood of elation was not pierced by this rudeness. Poll was too old and plump for this return to the twenties, she thought. She said, ‘Poll, the drink’s lovely. It’s all lovely.’

  She found herself shouting it at Poll’s receding back and a skeleton thin, knocked about looking, middle-aged woman with dirty black hair, absurd false eyelashes and little broken veins in her cheeks turned upon her in surprise.

  ‘You must be one of the happy ones of life,’ she said. ‘I wish I was.’ Then she told Meg at great length about her lover. ‘He has two locks on the flat,’ she said, ‘mortice and Yale. And he gives me no keys. So I can’t get in. I never know when he’s going to get back – sometimes three, sometimes four. I used to just stand about in the passage, but then the porter got rude. I told Charles, “You’re lucky that I’ve not been run in. That would look good for your precious reputation.” But he never listens. So now I just go to parties and stay on and on.’

  Meg said, ‘He sounds like a sadist.’

  ‘Oh yes, and a bore to boot.’

  Meg had assumed an expression of sympathy, although she could not help feeling that the whole party had been staged especially for her as a comic show; at the ‘to boot’ however, she suppressed a hoot of laughter and spluttered her drink on the woman’s dress. It seemed to make no difference.

  ‘He w
ouldn’t treat me like it if we were married,’ the woman went on. ‘And I’ve given him a child. Surely that’s an act of trust. The poor little thing’s locked up all the time. His wife’s a Roman Catholic so there’s no chance of divorce. And I say that’s the one little bit of luck I have had. Think if I was tied to him for life!’

  It all seemed so sad and illogical that Meg could think of nothing to say. Luckily Poll came up and said to the woman, ‘Are you talking to Meg Eliot? She’s one of my oldest friends and an absolute darling.’ To Meg she said, ‘You must forgive me, darling, I was at the rude stage. I knew it all right though. Doctors and people say you don’t know the stage you’re in, but I always do.’ Then she took the woman away.

  Meg wandered from room to room having dotty conversations with various people. She thought they were all rather ghastly – most of them seemed to be pub or club pickups of Poll’s, or people these pickups had brought along with them – and when she thought of Poll and the amusing, intelligent world she had once lived in she felt rather sad. But most of the time she also thought that the people were rather enchanting as well as ghastly – at any rate for the purpose of a party – because she felt so elated and everything made her laugh so much. She knew that she was a little drunk but after a while everybody else seemed more drunk than she was. Only one conversation threatened to upset the evening. A fat, pink-haired woman, who appeared to be the manageress of Poll’s local launderette, recognized her as Bill’s widow.

  ‘I don’t think I shall ever get over that,’ she said. ‘The day I read about it. I felt proud for England when I read what he’d done. Of course, you know the circumstances as well as I do, dear; better probably. I only saw what was in the papers. But one thing I am sure of, and you can say what you like, if that had happened when we were young there’d have been a war about it.’

  Meg tried hard to answer her frivolously, especially as a lot of people had gathered round them. ‘Well, I’m very glad there wasn’t.’

  ‘I don’t know. Might be the best thing there could be. Bring the world to its senses. But you won’t get it with this lot. Anybody could invade England tomorrow and all they’d do is talk. Her husband was a hero,’ she told a bald-headed, red-faced, oldish man who looked like a farmer.

  To Meg’s surprise he spoke in a very cissy, common voice. ‘Oh, really,’ he said. ‘What did he do?’

  The woman was indignant. ‘Gone today, forgotten tomorrow. That’s the world for you. If you don’t remember William Eliot, thousands do. Greater love hath no man,’ she said.

  Meg felt so angry with her that she wanted to hit her. I mustn’t do that, she thought, she’s not wicked, only stupid and a bit drunk. She tried to reassure herself of this as she would have comforted a child.

  ‘You’ve been through a terrible ordeal, Mrs Eliot,’ the woman said. ‘A lonely vigil, the newspapers said.’

  Meg knew that she must stop the woman or she would hit her. She said, ‘Please don’t talk about it. I’m afraid that I shall cry.’

  She had never in fact felt further from tears except those of rage.

  ‘It wouldn’t do you any harm to have a good cry,’ the woman told her. ‘I should find a room upstairs all by yourself. You don’t want all this shouting and noise after what you’ve been through. And have a good cry.’ She seemed to realize that this was hardly practical advice in view of the crowd, for she said almost fiercely, ‘No. Better still, go straight home. That’s right, you go straight home and cry your fill.’

  Meg was surprised to find how little the incident had affected her; as soon as the woman had moved off she felt quite as elated as before. She continued to have a series of ridiculous conversations. An Indian student told her that in Calcutta the liberals were crowded twenty into a room.

  ‘How monstrous,’ she said, ‘I’d no idea the Nehru regime was so tyrannical.’

  It was only after the Indian had got quite angry with her that she realized that he had said ‘labourers’. She refused to recede from the position.

  ‘Economic tyranny’s even worse than political,’ she announced.

  ‘I am afraid,’ he said with alarming coyness, ‘that you are a parlour pink. That is your privilege as a beautiful lady.’

  A beery, tweedy man who said he was a newspaper cameraman, pointed out Poll to her. ‘That’s our hostess,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t think to see her pissed like she is that she’s in Debrett.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ Meg said, ‘her father made buttons. Very successfully,’ she added. She didn’t want to let Poll down.

  ‘Who told you that stuff?’ he asked contemptuously. ‘Everybody knows old Pollyollyoodle. You can see her any night between Oakley Street and World’s End doing her round of the pubs. She’s a duke’s daughter. She may be détraquée, as they say, but she’s strictly U. And she’ll let you know it if she’s in the mood. Pissed or not, she’ll stand no nonsense.’

  Some hours later, as it seemed, Meg found herself with Poll and Tom. Poll put her arms round them both.

  ‘I like the beard,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure that he likes me.’

  Tom in answer embraced her very tightly and gave her a smacking kiss on the lips. Then he kissed Meg. She thought, dear God, Poll’s was on the lips but he’s trying to stick his tongue into my mouth. Only two people besides Bill had kissed her like that since her marriage. She determined to consider none of the implications of this; she only hoped that her distaste for the kiss was not solely caused by the prickly beard. When Poll said, ‘Mmm,’ in a rather thoughtful drawl, Meg for a moment feared that she was going to be angry, but it was all right. ‘I should have liked just the beard and me, but I shouldn’t think he would have liked it, should you?’ Poll said, then squeezing both of their waists she added, ‘I’ll just say I think you’re both adorable people.’ This vaguely benevolent sentiment sounded more like some silly American woman’s than Poll’s. They stood there rather foolishly. Meg thought, Poll’ll have time to get angry if her attention isn’t distracted. As though sent by Providence, a huge gorilla shaped man with long arms and mutton chop side whiskers pushed his way through the crowds towards them.

  ‘Leonard darling!’ Poll cried. She withdrew her arms from Meg and Tom and threw them round the gorilla man’s neck.

  He said, ‘What a bunch of phonies! I adore you, Poll, but when I see the crowd you gather around you I think, you silly old bourgeois cow.’

  Poll said, ‘Whatever I am, I’m not bourgeois. I’d have you know I’ve ridden to hounds. Again and again.’ She put a bare shoulder up to her chin and smiled like a silent film star. ‘I’m a lady to my finger tips,’ she said in a mock refined voice, but Meg thought, she means it, it matters to her.

  The red-faced man with the common, cissy voice, said, ‘Old-fashioned camp,’ by way of sociological comment.

  Poll said, ‘I may be camp but I’m not bourgeois.’ She was quite angry.

  ‘You are,’ said the gorilla man. ‘You’re as middle class as they make them.’ Before she could reply he began kissing her violently.

  Meg wondered whether this was what they meant by Poll’s ‘wild’ parties, or was this one ‘not so wild’? I suppose, she thought, people would say how good it was for me to have such a new experience; but it isn’t really so different from some parties I went to in the thirties, only the people here, if funnier for an hour or two than more intelligent people, would become an awful bore if one saw them often. She was amused to think that Poll’s invitation to her must mark a recognition of her changed status. Is it because I’m poorer? she thought, or because I’m on my own? She wondered too whether it showed an increased affection or less regard. She decided it was time to go home.

  As she made her way to the basement where the coats were strewn on an old double divan bed she saw that some couples were getting down to more than embraces. She wondered for a second that the expression ‘getting down to’ should come into her thoughts, then realized her wish to reduce all this drunken sexual pleasure to
the lowest level. She had often challenged Bill for his contempt for what he called ‘kids’ dirty games’.

  ‘All right,’ she had been used to say, ‘it’s not grown up. We aren’t asked to the children’s parties, so what does it matter? Top people take The Times,’ she had teased him, ‘but we can’t all be top. Someone’s got to buy Reveille.’ She had hated to hear him censorious. But now she thought, I liked his success but I didn’t want the constrained outlook that went with it. Perhaps if I hadn’t driven him so, he would have been more easy going in his attitude to others; perhaps he envied them a life that the blending of all his energies towards success made impossible. She rejected the thought angrily; in whatever else he had been frustrated, his sexual passion, his ease of lovemaking had always woken an answering desire in her.

  Suddenly her longing for him was so intense that she felt that her legs would give way on the staircase; sheer misery made the hall and the people crowded there shiver and scatter before her eyes. She held on to the banister. For a moment or so the thought was with her to stay at the party and get drunk – any oblivion from this loneliness. Then, horrified, she realized that, half-formed in her mind, was the image of some man, any man taking her – if she were drunk enough she could forget that it was not Bill. She ran down the stairs now, buffeting her way through the vague figures in front of her.

  By the time she had found her coat she had recovered from the fright her thoughts had given her. A young couple were strained tightly against one another behind the half open door. In the corner on the floor, propped against a cupboard door, sat a dark, flushed faced man. With his points of hair, his up-slanted dark eyes and his long curling lips, he must once, Meg thought, have been handsome in a rather showy, Mephistophelean way. Now his eyes were bloodshot and a heavy blue jowl had taken the shape from his face. Leaning against his bent up knees was a thin blonde. She, too, Meg saw, must have been noted for the shapely bone structure of her head – one of the many distinguished Dietrichs of the pre-war days. Now her face seemed merely bone with the skin stretched over it. He had unzipped her dress at the back and was feeling around her breasts. Scrabbling old rat, Meg thought. But the woman seemed hardly to notice his hand. She was staring straight ahead with her deadened blue eyes and her little wrinkle-edged mouth was snapping away in talk.