by Angus Wilson
As she drank her cup of tea she knew that she must find the company of someone she knew. She was aware that her feelings about Poll and Viola were exaggerated. Viola might perhaps show some embarrassment if she went there, but it would only be the shame of a kind-hearted woman who felt that she had behaved badly. Poll would probably be pleased to see her. Yet she could not get away from the belief that they had judged her and found her wanting. They had dictated the terms on which she could regain their respect, and she had refused them. They had asked her to conform to their patterns as the price for their intimacy. On any other terms she suspected that intimacy would now be impossible, until at any rate she was established enough to dictate her own. Yet it was a sense of intimacy that she so desperately needed. She could make no new intimacies while she was still on this station platform waiting to change trains. She had not realized how completely identity seemed governed by milieu and, without any identity card to offer, she found no means of approach. She was too old, she thought, and the thought angered her, to manage a stateless existence.
In desperation she went to the nearest telephone box and rang two of their Lord North Street friends. At the first house there was no reply. At the second house the foreign maid said that they were away in Austria, ski-ing; they would be back next week, the weather had proved unfavourable. Meg said, ‘Of course, all this rain.’ She didn’t leave her name. There were so many more she could have tried, but her courage failed her. She was disgusted to discover herself shy from pride.
It was only then that she asked herself why she did not ring Jill, why indeed she had seen her so seldom. She knew at once the answer – that Jill, in her embittered isolation, represented the life she feared to fall into. It was an answer that, in its lack of charity and facile condemnation, at once challenged her. She dialled Jill’s number, almost hoping that this was one of the rare Sundays when Jill’s son-in-law allowed her to go down there for the day. Jill answered. Yes, she was in. No, she was not going out; she seldom did on very wet Sundays. No, she was doing nothing. Yes, Meg could come round. She had nothing to say, but no doubt after such a long interval Meg had lots to tell. No? Well, in that case, she would advise Meg to bring a book. She had only a little fish in the flat, but if Meg had got used to tins now she was on her own, they could eat their evening meal together. She usually listened to the serial of The Modern Comedy on the wireless on Sunday evenings, but if Meg found Galsworthy too middlebrow she was quite happy to miss this evening’s episode.
Meg went back to the hotel and got her shorthand notes. When she arrived at Jill’s small flat in the mews behind Westminster Cathedral, she found her dripping oil into egg yolks.
‘I don’t expect you’ve quite sunk to my level of food yet,’ she said, ‘so I thought I would make a mayonnaise, if you can bring yourself to eat tinned lobster.’
Meg took a chance and roared with laughter. To her pleased surprise Jill laughed in return.
The evening from start to finish was a great success. They enjoyed their food. Jill made excellent coffee afterwards and even produced a bottle of brandy. ‘I expect you think I only have it here in case of illness,’ she said, ‘but actually I don’t. I always buy brandy whenever I can afford it because I like it so much. Sometimes I even have wine.’ She giggled with pleasure at her own high spirits in a way that took Meg back many years into the past. They had hardly been listening to The Modern Comedy for five minutes before Jill turned it off. ‘I can tell you the end if you want to know,’ she said. ‘It’s very surprising. Old Soames gets killed by a picture falling on his head. And his daughter feels awful about it because she’d been so hard.’ At that she laughed a great deal more and poured out another glass of brandy for each of them. They laughed so much over stories from their girlhood, and Jill so excelled in her old dead pan manner of telling them, that Meg forgot even to mention her recent difficulties. Jill never asked Meg how she was getting on; she was enjoying herself too much. They might never have been hard-luck widows.
She returned there several times that week. There was never a repetition of the gaiety of that evening: the food was sparse and poor, Jill, if not exactly gloomy, was perseveringly flat. Nevertheless Meg was deeply touched by the effort her friend had made to relax on that first visit; it suggested an affection and a loneliness that answered her own emotional needs. She discovered too that Jill was one of the rare people who could sit in a small room and neither vocally nor silently distract another’s concentration. Meg found the task of memorizing easier than she had yet known while Jill sat at the other side of the gas stove reading the newest volume of travel, autobiography, or war memoirs. The department store at which she worked allowed its employees a cut rate subscription to its circulating library.
It was a strange setting, Meg knew, in which to find peace – this small room with its almost improvised furniture – the odd cheap chair or two, the divan intended for Evelyn if ever ‘the little beast’ should allow her to stay the night, the leather cushions, the now fest fading, carefully nurtured azalea – a Christmas present from Evelyn – and, on the mantelpiece, desk, and table, photographs of Andrew in uniform, of naval groups at Gib and Malta and Alex, pictures of Evelyn in every stage of youth, one photo of the baby. Meg rather maliciously picked on the dark young man who appeared at Evelyn’s side in one photograph.
‘Is that Leonard?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Jill said, ‘wearing his usual self-satisfied smirk.’
It was her only reference to her son-in-law. Meg thought that he was very good-looking.
She fished rather warily for Jill’s opinion of her decision to take the secretarial course.
‘It seems a very good idea,’ Jill said. ‘After all it’s a way of getting a job. You’re lucky to have had the money to pay for it.’
One evening Meg told her of the difficulties with Poll. Jill said, ‘Weren’t they rich trade? That sort of people always have to pretend to more than they’ve known in life. They don’t feel happy unless they’re the trout among minnows. She’s lucky to have a trust to break. But still it’s her life and if she enjoys it … She must be a fool to suggest your doing nothing all day when you haven’t any money.’
About Tom Pirie she was more final. ‘What a very unpleasant young man,’ she said. ‘It does rather serve you right, Meg. I must say I’ve never believed that “being taken out of oneself” helps in the slightest unless it’s with people one cares to be with. I suppose I ought to be glad that Evelyn didn’t marry anyone like that. The “little beast’s” far too keen on his precious career to behave badly in that sort of way. Of course, I never meet the young men of today, but judging from those that come into the shop they all seem to be wasters or what used to be called bounders. So I suppose Evelyn had to marry one or the other.’
Her indignation was reserved for Lady Pirie. ‘I don’t see how you could ever forgive her, Meg. Hasn’t she any idea of what your feelings for Bill were? I think if anyone had urged me to marry again so soon after Andrew’s death I should have smacked her face. Of course, most of those Colonial service people are quite impossible anyway. You should have heard what people in the services had to say about them. I suppose Templeton never realized what she was up to. Otherwise as Bill’s friend he must have been furious. Anyway why should she think that after years of being a bachelor he should want to saddle himself with a widow without any money. No offence to you, Meg. But it isn’t very likely, is it?’
Meg found no offence to take. There was something comforting about Jill’s tactlessly frank and low estimate of her position. She expected nothing and yet also she made no interference. It was the same in all things. Jill had always had good sense, but the acceptance of the natural prejudices and conventions of her family, which was largely an emotional need, had prevented her from ever developing her intelligence. She was brought up a sailor’s daughter and had married a sailor. She thought as they did, but she was quite clever enough to know that other people thought differently and, as lo
ng as they didn’t threaten her family affections, she left them to it. So now she knew that Meg always read novels’, while she, like Andrew and her father before that, read memoirs and biographies. But she did not, as they would have done, think that hers was the superior act; she knew, in fact, that Meg was more ‘highbrow’ – ‘Very nice for her’, she would have said, but we have our own ways’.
In politics, perhaps, it was a slightly more strained situation: once they had both, from different positions, been ‘anti-Munich’, now Jill’s conservatism under stress of post-war social change had taken on a more diehard hue, but she had always regarded Meg’s more liberal views as the luxury of a wealthy woman and she was prepared silently to wait for penury to bring her better sense. In any case they didn’t talk a lot and when they did they were held together by a common sense of the ridiculous that ironed out their differences. Jill’s laughter had a slightly more bitter note than Meg’s, but her comments were accordingly rather more pungent. There was between them a girlhood tie that had slipped loose as they travelled such different paths in life but that had never been broken by any disagreement about the people they loved; and that, for Jill at any rate, was the only kind of disagreement that counted. She thought it odd, however, that Meg should have lost touch so completely with David, when in their youth they had been so close.
‘I used to envy you having a brother,’ she said. ‘Rex and Jack were all right but they were only cousins. I always liked David. And for all his being so clever he seemed so sensible. I was awfully upset when all that pacifist business happened. I felt so sorry for your mother.’
‘Yes. So did David. I think that was one of the troubles. He thought that I ought to make it up to Mother for her disappointment over him. He never would admit that nothing I did mattered to her. “Marrying well”, as she would have called it, was about the best thing I could do for her. But when I did, it didn’t really give her much pleasure. Not that David and I quarrelled about it. We’ve never quarrelled over anything. It’s just that he so obviously didn’t want to have much to do with us. And I must admit that once I saw that, I didn’t try very hard. I had all I needed in Bill.’
Jill said, ‘Yes, of course. And, after all, you stuck to him during the war. You were right, of course. But not every sister would have done it.’
‘I shouldn’t care for the sort of sister who didn’t. Not that it made much difference to him. At first perhaps, with all those tribunals. But after he’d met Gordon Paget nobody else counted for him. I never really liked the man. Not just because he was so odd, but I don’t care for people who go about influencing. And in the end they had such an extraordinary ménage down there – a lot of cranky women! Funnily enough when Bill and Gordon Paget met they got on like a house on fire. But I think Bill was a bit embarrassed by it. I’m afraid David’s going to be very lost now that Gordon’s dead.’
Jill said, ‘I think all men feel very deeply about their friends. Andrew felt it dreadfully when Neville Easton was killed. It was one of the only things I could do absolutely nothing about. It’s something quite apart from their feelings for us, I think. We’ve just got to accept it.’
Meg said, ‘David’s never had any feelings for women.’
Jill said, with no difference in her tone, ‘Oh! I see. Well, I suppose that’s something we have to accept too. The papers are always telling us so nowadays. I can’t see it matters very much anyway now that the whole world’s gone to pot.’
‘I wish I could think that it had made David happier. However, Gordon’s left him all his money, so he’ll be quite well off.’
‘Oh,’ Jill said. ‘Then that does make your chances of seeing much of him pretty impossible. It’s the greatest barrier of all when one’s poor.’
Meg thought that this, like so many of the beliefs of her friends, was something that she could not judge without more experience. She said only, ‘I don’t imagine David will live very grandly. He seems anxious to immerse himself even more in that nursery now that he’s alone.’ She began to study her notes. She did not particularly want to talk about David and in any case the conversation had run to the limit they usually allowed for talk over their after dinner coffee.
Yet Jill left Alan Moorehead’s Gallipoli lying unopened. After a few minutes’ silence she said, ‘Isn’t it a bit grand of you, Meg, living at the Rodin? What do you pay?’ When she was told, she said, ‘Good heavens! and you don’t even have dinner more than three times a week. That can’t go on.’
‘It’s only temporary,’ Meg said, ‘I really couldn’t face a bed-sitting room or a boarding house until I’m settled.’
‘I know. You haven’t learnt to be alone yet, have you? It’ll come. But meanwhile you certainly mustn’t spend all that money. I think, you know, that you’d better come here, at any rate until you’ve got a job fixed up. The divan’s very comfortable. You’ll save money. You can pay me for your food. I’m used to being alone but I won’t say it isn’t pleasant to have you here for a while. It wouldn’t do as a permanent arrangement and, of course, if by some extraordinary chance his lordship allows Evelyn to bring the baby here for a night I’ll have to turf you out. But it only happens once in a blue moon, so you needn’t worry too much about that.’
And so it was arranged. Meg moved in the following week. It proved a regime that allowed her to work without undue depression, without restlessness, and without sudden panics. She managed to improve the food a little and, since March that year was very cold, Jill made no serious attempt to economize with the gas fire. They found, it is true, less to say and there was a monotony of existence which Meg knew would prove intolerable over a long period. On some evenings indeed their remarks were confined to announcing aloud whatever they were doing. ‘I’ll just put the kettle on for the bottles, Meg,’ or ‘One more chapter and I shall go to bed,’ but, Meg reflected, this was at least better than talking to oneself. The little surplus of affection that Jill had to offer after she had concentrated her love so fiercely upon her daughter and her granddaughter was suddenly unfrozen and flowed over Meg. She was solicitous for her health and her comfort, she showed an interest in her progress at the Garsington, sometimes she was lively and amusing as she had been on that first evening. Meg, on her side, felt wanted, which was all that she could ask.
The weekly letter from Evelyn with its Ipswich postmark was the centre of all Jill’s expectancy. Evelyn’s life appeared from the excerpts that were read aloud to be even more circumscribed than her mother’s. It was clear that, like her mother, she too lived in and for her husband. She was tactful enough to say little about him in the letters, confining her news to the baby. However, there was always some item about Leonard’s success. ‘Leonard may be going to the Philadelphia branch for a couple of months in the autumn. It would be tricky because he’d be sent there over the heads of a number of senior men. But we’re keeping our fingers crossed,’ Evelyn wrote. Her mother read out the passage to Meg. ‘I shall keep my fingers crossed too if he goes,’ she said. ‘After all planes can crash and boats can sink.’
Meg could detect no trace of humorous suggestion in Jill’s voice. She must have looked as shocked as she felt, for Jill said, ‘Oh, she’d get over it.’
Meg had expected this even less. To cover her embarrassment, she asked, ‘What does he do exactly, Jill?’
‘Oh, he’s a chemist. One of those brilliant young scientists. He works with a big commercial firm in Ipswich. Don’t ask me what they make. I don’t know and I don’t care. But apparently he’s very good. They wanted him as professor at some university in the north – Manchester or Liverpool or somewhere. I suppose that I ought to be thankful to him for turning it down. It would have taken Evelyn even farther away. Not that he would have cared about that. He was only thinking of the money. Trust him.’
Meg said, ‘My dear Jill, he’s bound to think of his career. If only for Evelyn and the baby’s sake.’
She answered, ‘Do you think that makes it any more tolerable?’
Meg suddenly realized that she had never heard this baby’s name: ‘What’s she called?’ she asked.
Jill pulled a face of disgust. ‘Charmian! The little beast’s choice! I just call her the baby, poor thing. Evelyn says she thinks he and the sister have a lot to talk over and that they’d rather be on their own. I expect the sister mustn’t be worried by the baby’s crying. She’s one of a kind with him, from what I saw at the wedding…. She’s pushed herself up to be some sort of fashion editress. Smart in all the wrong way. I must say that the parents were quite unassuming. He was a builder somewhere in the Midlands.’
Meg told herself as she listened that she must not let all this snobbery influence her against Jill. Andrew and she had always been snobbish, of course, but in a quite unworrying way. Meg could not have believed that hatred could have brought out such vulgarity in anyone. To deflect the unpleasing moment, she said, ‘Which nights, Jill dear? I’ll get a room this morning at that little hotel I was at near the station.’
‘Tuesday and Wednesday,’ Jill said. She gave Meg a smile of affection for accepting her move as so inevitable. Then she said, ‘Meg, it would be quite wonderful if you’d come in one evening and baby-sit. Evelyn never gets to a theatre. If only we could get in to Salad Days! But I expect we’ll find something. I shall have to spend the morning being sweet to that terrible Mr Arkwright, but I must have the two days off.’
Meg watched Jill in the next few days with fascination. It was exactly as though she were being reunited with a lover: she bought new shoes, had her hair done, filled the flat with flowers, she even for some incalculable reason bought a box of Turkish cigarettes. Then toys began to arrive for the baby – a huge and expensive doll, a Jack in the box (‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ Jill cried. ‘I didn’t know you could get them still. I only hope it doesn’t frighten the baby into fits’) and a number of small rattling and swinging things (‘To amuse her while she’s here. They’re all things that can be broken without its mattering’). Jill looked years younger, but she seemed also suddenly extremely shy; Meg only feared that if this shy tension persisted it might lead to some outburst with Evelyn.