by Angus Wilson
‘If they think I have any intention of putting myself out for anyone,’ she was saying, ‘they’ve got another guess coming. I’ve had my fill of helping others and you may as well know it.’
As she went up the stairs Meg determined to think no more about it all. It’s not my world and that’s that, she decided, but there’s no point in being censorious. Then she asked herself why she was always so anxious these days not to appear priggish. It’s as though I were an old virgin afraid of turning sour, she thought. I’m not going to pretend. I don’t like a lot of public promiscuity; the middle-aged ones at any rate are ugly and squalid. She must have spoken the last thoughts aloud for a little, jolly, grey-haired Lesbian said, ‘Well! Thank you.’ Instead of apologizing or explaining, Meg found herself excusing her argument. ‘I dare say it’s all right at any age so long as they’re really enjoying it.’ The little Lesbian said in a slightly bitter tone, ‘How very big-hearted of you.’ Meg, thinking that she must be much drunker than she’d supposed, found herself at last outside in the street.
It was only then that she remembered Tom. The altruistic reasons she had found for getting him to accompany her now seemed more threadbare than ever. She wondered why she had pretended to herself without any evidence that Tom would find a more valuable set of friends by going to Poll’s party. I suppose, she thought, I wanted to be of help – for ‘be of help’ read ‘hand out patronage’, she amended. ‘You’ve got an awful lot to learn about yourself, my girl,’ she said aloud. ‘You’re so used to knowing the “right person” that you can’t believe you haven’t always got the answer to everyone’s needs.’ But still that was that. She could only hope that he had enjoyed himself, was doing so now, would do so, because really after his kiss she couldn’t suppose that he was absolutely sex shy, at any rate when he was filled up with drink. She set off to look for a taxi. Even now she found herself deciding that Tom probably never went much further than ‘pawing about’. People who boast a lot of their sexual prowess are never … She asked herself on what experience she based this long-held view – on her own behaviour, on Bill’s, on the behaviour of people they knew. People of good taste are silent about their sex life. She saw it high up on a building in Piccadilly Circus flashing in and out in green and orange. What a lot of utterly tasteless prejudices of ‘good taste’ I’ve collected over the years, she thought; I have got a lot to learn. In any case Tom was no model of good taste. Good luck to him! She was reminded of a rather sinister, fat classical master at David’s school. ‘I hope he enjoys himself to the full,’ she said, smacking her lips in imitation of the master’s manner. And come to that, she thought, I enjoyed myself; if I couldn’t take the ‘wildness’, well that’s my affair – in any case it’s not surprising if drink makes me a little hysterical at the moment, nothing to worry about. In my own way I enjoyed myself. I shouldn’t want that particular way very often, but there are hundreds of other ways. I shall enjoy them all to the full, she said, smacking her lips again and giggling. I must be very drunk, she thought. But whatever else, it was a comfort to know that all the ‘learning about herself’ that lay ahead of her wasn’t going to be an entirely miserable experience; a greater comfort.
A motor horn sounded loudly; someone was hooting at her. Another of the things she’d been warned about years ago. Really, it seemed that life was almost too like a nice girl’s guess.
It was only Tom. ‘What the hell are you doing capering off like that without me?’ he called. Meg thought, dear God, he’s aggressively drunk; he looks so pathetic when he’s trying to look tough, that absurd little beard! I must treat it all very seriously. We don’t want a scene.
She said, ‘I thought you were having fun, Tom, I didn’t want …’
He flung open the car door. ‘Get in,’ he said, cutting her short. She thought, his manners really are appalling.
She said sharply, ‘I never asked you to …’
‘Get in,’ he shouted.
She thought it best to obey. Seated next to him, she said, ‘I hope you didn’t hate it all too much. Poll’s collected a rather terrible crew round her. But I thought it was quite fun. At least …’
Tom said, ‘Shut up.’ She looked at him in amazement; then she realized that the drink had made him not angry but randy. Dear God, she thought, some girl’s turned him down and he’s too drunk to remember who I am. Automatically her voice took on a maternal note. ‘Tom, dear,’ she said, ‘watch your driving, won’t you.’ He immediately swerved across the road and, when she gave a scream, swerved again. He righted the car.
‘Frightened?’ he asked. ‘Good, I like that’
She wondered what fantastic picture of himself he had built up out of what ghastly ‘tough’ novels. She did not know whether to be more alarmed by the thought that he was completely drunk in charge of the car or by the growing doubt that he was not so drunk as all that. After all, he seemed in complete control of the steering, and, if so, he must be perfectly conscious of all the nonsense he was spouting at her. Spouting, indeed, was the right word, for every time he spoke, he showered her with spittle; but that proved nothing, he always spat when he spoke. She could cope with him, she felt sure, once they were back at the flat; she would have to do it soothingly because she wouldn’t wish Viola to be brought on the scene; but then nor would he, unless he was much drunker than she now believed. It was in the car that she felt so powerless; she had a dread of motor smashes that the absence of traffic at that hour hardly reassured. He might try to give her one of those unpleasant bristly kisses, but it would not be difficult to avoid him so long as he continued to drive. If he put his arm round her shoulder, she would let well alone – ignore it and talk.
In fact, he put his hand up her skirt. She grasped his wrist firmly; for a moment she thought he was going to tighten his hold on her thigh, but then his fingers relaxed and he allowed her to remove his hand. She forced herself to keep silent, knowing that anything she said in her surprise and anger would sound, at any rate to her own ears, ridiculous. They drove on for a few minutes in silence. She was shivering with the suppression of her feelings. She found a cigarette. He took his lighter from his waistcoat pocket and flicking it with his left hand, gave her a light.
Then suddenly he braked and stopped the car and, turning towards her, began to pull her to him. His grasp was stronger than she could have expected; she had to exert her full force to push him away.
‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ he said. ‘You know you want it.’ His voice had taken on an artificial, virile, insolent note, yet she knew as he said it that he believed it to be true. With his hands on her shoulder blades he began to bend her back on to the seat. With difficulty she took her cigarette from her lips and deliberately brushed its lighted end against his hand.
He let out a sort of puppy’s yelp. ‘You cow,’ he said, but he still held her with the other arm. She edged towards the car door. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘I’ve said the wrong thing. I forget you’re still so much the blasted lady. All right. I want it. Is that better?’
Fumbling for the door handle behind her, she could still register relief that he was in fact very drunk. She pushed his mouth away with her right hand, feeling his saliva on her fingers, and with the left at last twisted the door handle downwards. As the door swung open, he seemed to give up the struggle. He was, she thanked God, not drunk enough to start the car again as she was getting out.
He leaned drunkenly through the open door. ‘All right,’ he said. Sleep seemed to be overtaking him, for he could hardly get the words out and his eyelids kept closing involuntarily. ‘All right. I’m sorry. I’ve behaved bloody badly. Please get in. If you’ve got to put me in the dirt with Mother, I shan’t blame you.’
She said, ‘Tom, you’re too drunk to drive, and too drunk to talk to. Let me take the wheel.’ For a moment she thought he was about to become angry again, but he fell across on to the passenger’s seat. ‘It’s all yours,’ he said. He was asleep in a minute.
Meg did not
herself find driving all that easy – houses and lamp-posts seemed so unsteady that night. She crept along slowly and her heart pounded violently when a policeman appeared in one of the deserted Kensington streets. Bill had always driven when they returned from cocktail parties. A man and a woman were quarrelling outside High Street Kensington tube station. Their raised voices woke Tom. He smiled strangely – with self-satisfaction and ironically, she thought. Then he spoke. ‘You don’t know what you’ve missed,’ he said. ‘You’re so bloody tightened up. Always have been. Married to an old man. You’ve never had a proper screwing.’ Outside the dismal block of flats she left him sleeping in the car. I hope he gets run in, she thought, a spell of prison would do him no harm. She would not touch him now if it were needed to save him from death.
She slept as soon as she was in bed and woke at half past five with choking indigestion. She had gone to bed raging against Tom, she woke still angry with him, but her rage was turned against herself. She looked back on the past weeks with acute embarrassment; she saw herself going about with him from café to pub, acting the gracious, amusing, understanding surrogate mother, but regarded no doubt by his friends as his rather elderly next lay – no wonder that they had been embarrassed by her presence. Who knew what mission tales of releasing her from sex starvation Tom had been preaching while she had been playing the woman of the world aunt? She should have guessed at his feelings weeks ago, when first her reduced status had encouraged him to drop the odd dirty word at her, to give her what she now realized were lecherous looks. Instead with her ‘friendly understanding’ she had been encouraging the wretched – no, not wretched, her folly didn’t excuse him – the filthy little brute. Bill had always said he was that – ‘he’ll get himself into trouble some time, expose himself or something’. But as Bill’s voice echoed in her ears, she knew that he had been as wrong as she about Tom. Tom was neither a pathetic child nor a delinquent one; or rather he was both, but he was also, she felt sure now, a young man, who for all his inadequacy in other things, got plenty of sex of the kind he wanted. Yet even that she didn’t really know; perhaps his outbreak had been the drunken release of years of repression. Whatever it was, she saw clearly now where she stood in his fantasy – the grand lady who’d been knocked off her pedestal, and it would be no comfort if some psycho-analyst were to tell her that she was only standing in for his mother in the great degradation scene.
Almost more revolting to her than the squalid, dirty dreams he’d presumably always had about her was the idea that she had ever encouraged them by appearing so untouchable, like some Victorian grande dame. Nevertheless what he had said of Bill was unforgivable; absurd, untrue, cheap, but still unforgivable. If somehow she could have managed the whole affair better, an him off from the moment he made the first pass in the car, it would never have been said, she need never have heard it; and it was no excuse for her ineptitude to say that she was not used to such scenes; at her age she should have the instinctive power to put an impertinent boy in his place. Now – and the frustration of it increased her fury – she would have to find some way of tolerating his presence for a week or so until she could find a plausible excuse to give to Viola for leaving the flat.
She set off for work angry, tired, and with a headache that racked her with every step she took. In the dictation class, taken by Miss Corrigan herself, she made four stupid mistakes, and, rattled by her sudden failure, asked two questions that suggested ignorance about things she knew perfectly well. Miss Corrigan said with a little laugh, ‘Not your bright day, Mrs Eliot.’ Some of the girls giggled a bit spitefully; but Meg thought, I can’t blame them if they dislike me, I’ve never really bothered with them; but then, I’m not here for that, I’m here to become an efficient secretary.
At the end of the afternoon’s work Meg felt quite unable to face a return to the flat. She had heard Tom’s voice, before she left that morning, grumbling at his mother when his breakfast tray was taken in to him, so that there seemed no hope of his having been arrested, or, if that was too monstrous a wish, none that he had been too shame-faced to return home. Even if he were to be out this evening, she had no relish for dining alone with Viola. She almost regretted that some little dinner party – an ex-Colonial servant and his wife, or even Donald – had not been arranged, but Viola had begun to lose heart before Meg’s lack of enthusiasm. She rang up and said that she would be out to dinner.
At first she had included Poll in her anger. Now she felt that this was unfair; although she wouldn’t care to be involved very often with Poll’s set as she now knew it, she had enjoyed herself and it was her own fault that Tom had been there at all. She decided to ring Poll up and thank her. As soon as she was in the telephone box she realized that she wanted to tell Poll about her trouble with Tom.
When Meg declared that she had so much enjoyed the party, Poll said in her flattest, most conventional tones, ‘Did you? I’m so glad.’ Then she added, ‘I think everyone did. It was a very good party.’
It was difficult to tell from Poll’s voice whether she was in a bad temper; perhaps she was still angry over their previous telephone conversation, or perhaps she was piqued because Tom had only kissed her on the lips. Meg said very enthusiastically, ‘Well, I certainly thought so.’
Poll didn’t reply to this. Despite this lack of encouragement, Meg felt a desperate need to talk about the Tom situation and Poll seemed the only person she could discuss it with. She said, ‘I’d like to come over to see you, Poll.’
‘Yes, you must. When-will you?’
‘Now, if I may.’
‘Oh!’ There was a pause. ‘I haven’t got another party and there isn’t any food,’ Poll said dampingly,
‘You must come out with me. We can go to some little place in the King’s Road.’
‘You do make things sound unattractive, Meg. Anyway I’ll take you. After all I owe you some money and now the trust is broken I expect I’d better pay you. Only such a lot of people are borrowing from me now. Perhaps I could pay you back by taking you to lots of “little places”.’
‘Yes, do,’ Meg said impatiently. ‘I’ll come round straight away.’
Sitting in the bus, Meg thought that she was making a mistake in going to Poll’s. She’s obviously in a stinking temper, she thought, and even if she isn’t, I’m not sure it’s a good thing to tell her about Tom. She realized that it was the first time that anything unpleasant had happened to her without Bill being there to comfort her. The odd thought came to her – ‘except, of course, his death’. She pushed the thought away angrily. Anyway Tom’s behaviour would have been embarrassing to report to Bill, he would have flown into such a rage. Yet however unwise it was to tell Poll, she knew that she would do so; she needed so much to confide in someone, I ought not to be going there, she thought. But it was too late.
Poll opened the door, holding a large glass of tomato juice in her other hand. Meg had somehow expected her to show the effects of the night before – to have pouches under her eyes or to be wearing a dirty housecoat or dressing gown. In fact she was dressed and made up exactly as usual; her face showed no sign of fatigue or hangover. Surprise added to Meg’s nervousness. She said, hearing herself sound foolish, ‘Tomato juice! What a good idea!’
‘I don’t think it would be, if it was,’ Poll said. ‘It’s a Bloody Mary.’
Then to her horror, Meg heard herself say, ‘The hair of the dog?’
She couldn’t think how the awful phrase had come into her head. Poll ignored it.
If she showed no effects from the night before, the house looked like Hangover Hall. Empty glasses and full ashtrays were everywhere, even on the stairs. A small space had been cleaned around the sitting room fire like an animal’s nest in the undergrowth. They sat down and Meg tried not to think that vodka would further upset her digestion.
Poll said, ‘You haven’t said anything about the mess the house is in. It isn’t always like this, you know. Mrs Taylor couldn’t come in today because her mother’s il
l.’
Disastrously Meg said, ‘How like chars.’
‘Is it? Well it isn’t like Mrs Taylor, Nor like her mother. She’s never ill. She’s a wonderful old woman. She walks all the way over Albert Bridge to bring me cakes she’s made.’ Poll made it sound very feudal.
Meg felt too flattened to say anything more. Perhaps Poll noticed it, for she suddenly brightened up and began a long and very lively inquest on the party. Meg could scarcely recognize the people she had met the night before as she heard about them. She had found them funny because they had been incongruously assembled and because, since they were all a bit drunk, their remarks had been absurdly inconsequential. Poll missed none of this absurdity. As they recounted the various conversations, she reiterated an expression that recalled to Meg their old art school days. ‘Wasn’t she a scream?’ she cried. ‘Or didn’t that make you scream? It did me.’ But she attributed other positive virtues to her guests that Meg had not found, and, as the adjectives she used were as vague as they were emphatic, it was difficult to tell exactly what these virtues were; but there was a definite implication of active merits where Meg had found only incidental entertainment.
When Meg told her of the launderette manageress’s embarrassing remarks about Bill’s death, she said, ‘Oh, Alma! She’s too extraordinary, isn’t she? Of course having a face like that helps her to be so amusing.’ Of the Indian student she said, ‘I can’t think what goes on in his head, can you? But he does it all to the manner born.’ The red-faced, cissy man, it seemed, was called Hilary. ‘He’s one of the regulars at the Antigua, I was angry that he didn’t bring his friend. He’s marvellous anyway, of course, but he’s a hundred per cent funnier when his friend’s there.’