by Angus Wilson
Two nights before Evelyn was due, the telephone rang in Jill’s bedroom. When Jill returned to the sitting room, she was holding her handkerchief to her mouth. She stood in the doorway for a moment. She seemed to be suffering from a choking fit. Meg got up from her chair, ‘Jill, dear, whatever …?’ but the look of real fury in Jill’s eyes cut off her question. Jill, still holding up her handkerchief, turned and went out of the room. Meg heard her retching In the bathroom. She thought, what on earth can have happened? Perhaps it wasn’t fury, perhaps something’s happened to Evelyn or to the baby. When Jill came back, she said nothing, but picked up the Life of the Princess Lieven and went on reading. Only half an hour later did she look up and say:
‘They’re not coming. The little beast’s ordered her to be there to wait on his sister.’ She went to her desk, and taking out the two tickets that she had bought for the ballet, she tore them into pieces.
Meg said, ‘Jill, my dear, you mustn’t let yourself get so upset by it.’
Jill said, ‘Please, shut up.’
She went back to her book. It was not until much later when she was filling the hot-water bottles that she said anything more that evening.
‘I’m sorry this should have happened while you were here, Meg.’
Meg wanted to answer that nothing had happened, but she only said, ‘It’s a tremendous shame, Jill. Perhaps Evelyn’ll manage to get up one day soon instead.’
Jill put the kettle down on the gas ring and stared at her for a moment. ‘Oh, don’t be a fool, Meg,’ she said.
Meg’s rather stupid consolatory remark turned out in fact to have been a justifiable hope. Only a few days later Evelyn rang to say that Leonard must attend a London dinner of the firm. He had suggested that he should drive her up to spend the evening with her mother.
‘Of course that’s Evelyn’s story. She’s frightfully loyal,’ Jill said. She made it sound like a British Communist’s loyalty to the Kremlin. ‘She obviously had to bully him to agree to it. And even then his highness won’t allow her to bring the baby. In his wonderful knowledge of babies he has decreed that it would be unsettling for her. He means, I suppose, that it would unsettle him if she cried on the way home. They’ve got some engaged couple of all things to sit in.’
It amazed Meg how like some old-fashioned servant Jill had sounded once she spoke on this subject, with her ‘his highness’ and her suggestion that the baby-sitters were certain in their concupiscence to allow the baby to burn to death unnoticed.
Meg said, ‘Well, it would be rather late, Jill.’
To her surprise Jill announced, ‘French children sit up until very late hours and it does them no harm.’
‘But the baby’s a bit young and she isn’t French.’
‘Trust the little beast for that. He’s already informed me that speaking French is no asset these days. It was so like him to think of such things as “assets”.’
Meg remembered that for all their true blue, naval background, Andrew had been a proficient linguist and Jill prided herself on her fluency in French.
Jill added, ‘Of course, Evelyn’s French has been absolutely wasted.’
‘There’s one snag,’ she said later. ‘I shall have to see him. He’s calling for Evelyn here. If he gets back before we’ve returned from the theatre he’ll just have to wait. I’m not going to have Evelyn miss a chance of a show, though I shan’t be able to get tickets for the ballet again, I’m sure. Those others were pure luck.’
She got, in fact, two seats for the new version of Charlie’s Aunt. ‘It’s a ridiculous show to go to without a man,’ she said, ‘but that’s the little beast’s fault. I couldn’t get anything else.’
Later again she said, ‘I suppose I’ll have to get some whisky in for him.’
‘But you’ve got that bottle of brandy, Jill.’
‘Oh no, dear. After all he is a man of a sort. And it will be about nightcap time.’
Once Jill spoke of family arrangements, Meg realized that some folk-lore reigned that was quite mysterious to her.
Meg had not seen Evelyn for many years. She had turned into a replica of her father – fresh-faced, blonde, already at twenty-five putting on weight. Whereas Andrew had looked comfortable and jolly, his daughter seemed blowsy. She treated her mother with the easy-going, chaffing manner that Andrew had used with strangers, but she was very concerned that Meg should give great attention to Leonard when he arrived. She said, ‘You can’t think how these dinners tire him, poor pet,’ and ‘Be sweet to him if he looks glum, Mrs Eliot. It’s so appalling that he should have to go to these silly things. But being good at your job isn’t apparently enough. There’s all this having to suck up to the chairman which Leonard hates.’
Jill cleverly combined a wink and a look of extreme sadness at this statement. She whispered to Meg as she left, ‘I should give him the evening paper.’
Leonard, in fact, it seemed, did dislike the dinner. He arrived at the flat much earlier than Meg had expected – shortly after ten. He was as good-looking as his photograph had suggested; although Meg knew that his dark wavy hair and his flash of white teeth would only have confirmed Jill in her estimate of his commonness. It was a judgement, she also knew, that she might have made herself, but without Jill’s hostility. After all the criticism that had been made of him, she was determined to show that she could get the best out of him. It was not easy at first. His babyish face wore a sulky look: he was prepared to be in a pet at the prospect of a long wait for Evelyn’s return. He said, ‘Oh, Lord! Really!’ He had a slight twang in his voice that must have assisted Jill’s dislike of him.
‘I don’t think they expected you to be back so early.’
He looked at his watch. ‘In another ten minutes it will be the time at which Evelyn should have expected me. You tell me now that this ridiculous theatre won’t be over until half an hour after that. Heaven knows how long they’ll take to get back!’
Meg thought, oh, dear, it does look as though Jill may be right. She decided to take a chance.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you seem to be ready to take it all out on me. So there’s no need to feel deprived, is there?’ She laughed.
For a moment she feared that he would not accept it. Then he smiled. She thought, his smile has great charm. She imagined how Evelyn, brought up on Jill’s rigid view of the right sort of man – old-fashioned even for the middle classes of her generation – must have felt liberated by a man who was so little ashamed of his showy good looks. And of his cocky, common sexiness, too, she thought.
He didn’t apologize, but said, ‘We’d better talk about something else.’
She smiled. ‘Oh, I’m not expecting talk,’ she said, ‘that’s outside my duties. I’ve given you a whisky. I understood you would read.’
Now he laughed. ‘I can see you’re a friend of Mrs S.’s.’ he said, but he did not imply that this ruled her out. He said, ‘I want to talk.’
‘Oh, well in that case …’ Meg said. She paused. ‘You’d better tell me why your dinner was a failure.’
He looked suddenly suspicious. ‘It wasn’t a failure at all,’ he said. ‘As a matter of fact I got in exactly the word I wanted. But it wasn’t easy. That sort of thing’s something I’ve had to learn. It takes it out of me. Evelyn knows that and she knows how to put me right again. Besides I wanted to tell her that I’d brought it off.’
Meg said, ‘She’s very accommodating.’
‘Yes, why shouldn’t she be? It’s our future. I understood from Evelyn,’ he said, ‘that you were pretty ambitious for your husband.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘too much, I think.’
‘Well, Evelyn can’t be too ambitious for my future. Besides she knows how to do it. I only ask for her to be there when I need her.’
Meg, thinking of Bill, knew that she must push away from this rocky shoal. She said, ‘Well since she’s not here you’d better tell me all about this evening’s success.’ She thought that in her fright she had put the sugge
stion too badly, no one can take off from an order like that. But Leonard Robbins could. He embarked on the whole politics of his career. He talked and she questioned for nearly half an hour. She found his certainty and determination extremely refreshing. She liked his intelligence and was amazed at his self-knowledge: she was even more pleased when now and again, she thought she had detected their limitations. She tried to accept his cocksureness because she could detect the swamps of self-doubt over which it had been constructed. If only he had a little humour, she thought, he would be a really rewarding companion. But above all she felt a sudden elation at hearing so much of a life that seemed to be moving forward. She saw herself connected for a moment with the world from which she felt so cut off. Fearing that she was making too much of the occasion, she told herself that her pleasure really came from having put herself over him.
The thought must have been communicated, for he stopped and said, ‘You’ve got the trick all right, haven’t you? I suppose I’ve successfully revealed myself as the cad or whatever the word is that you expected.’
She asked, ‘Why should you think that?’
‘I have some idea of what people are like.’
‘Well, in this case you’re wrong. Shall I tell you what you’ve made me feel? That you think you can do the job better than anyone else. And you tell yourself that, you know, because you want to have it anyway.’
He looked at her quizzically. ‘You mean that I ought to be certain. Does that ever happen in real life? No, of course, I’m not sure that I’d be better than anybody else. But I’d be as good and I want it more than the others. It’s not just a question of power, you know. I enjoy the work. I want to have a happy life.’
‘And the others who may or may not be so competent?’
‘They probably want some other things in life quite as much. At least, I hope so,’ he looked a bit contemptuous. ‘In any case all this about the ruthless young scientist! It’s a bit corny, isn’t it? I’m not so young, you know, that I don’t know the answer to that. I’m perfectly aware that if you destroy others you’ll probably destroy yourself.’
There was a smugness in the statement that annoyed her. She said, ‘You’ve destroyed Jill all right.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I see what all this is about. She’s destroyed herself,’ he said casually. ‘Do you know,’ he asked after a pause, ‘what Evelyn was like when I met her? I know you don’t as a matter of fect. And, that being so, it shocks me a bit that you step in so merrily. She was utterly unhappy and she isn’t now. She was expected to spend her life worshipping her father’s memory. And Mrs S., who expected it, had never let her really know the man she was supposed to worship. Not that he could have been worth much to let it happen.’
Meg said, ‘I think you don’t understand what a naval officer’s life is like. He was away a large part of the time.’
Leonard disregarded her. He spoke very deliberately; if there was any anger it seemed to be directed against her for needing to be told rather than against Jill of whom he was speaking. ‘She did everything she could to stop the marriage. Some pretty dirty tricks too. She said, of course, that I wasn’t what he would have liked; but she wanted to keep Evelyn for herself as a kind of doormat.’
Meg said, ‘I should have thought you would have admired anyone for fighting so hard for what they wanted.’
He considered for a moment. ‘That’s sentimental nonsense,’ he said.
‘Well,’ Meg said, ‘and you won. Surely you can afford to be a bit magnanimous. You’ve told me yourself how confident you are of the success of your marriage.’
‘Of course I’m confident,’ he said. She thought, the trouble is that he’s not quite confident of anything. ‘But if she and Evelyn see each other much, we shall have her with us all the time.’
‘Dear God!’ Meg cried. ‘If you can’t manage to let jill into Evelyn’s life without fear of her swamping you! An utterly lonely and defeated woman!’
‘She has her memories she’s always talking about.’
At this Meg cried out angrily, ‘You forget that you’re talking to a widow.’
She expected him to apologize but he only said in a surprised voice, ‘I thought people only said things like that in books.’
‘Some books reflect reality,’ she said.
‘I don’t read novels,’ he announced. She thought she had let her chance slip away, but the irrelevance allowed him to leave his entrenchment. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that you think I should ask her down for a weekend?’
‘I think you should let Evelyn bring Charmian,’ she said the name and felt even more proud of getting on to terms with a man who could have called his daughter by it. ‘I think you should let Evelyn bring Charmian up to see Jill.’
‘She does,’ he said, ‘sometimes.’
‘How often? When was the last time?’
‘Oh, Christmas or New Year.’
‘It could be more often.’
‘No. I’d rather Mrs S. came to us. Where I can keep an eye on her.’
She was about to say, ‘Have you no certainty of anything?’ but she checked herself in time. ‘Well do that, then,’ she said, ‘but don’t rush at it. I should leave it for a few weeks at any rate. And when she comes down to you, do the job properly.’
He said, ‘I can manage most things if I try.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘even entertaining middle-aged widows.’ Even that was only half true, she thought. But he was pleased. He laughed.
‘Oh, you know the trick,’ he said. ‘You’ve drawn me out. It’s very annoying. Because Evelyn said you were like that. And I’ve let myself fall for it.’
They were both laughing, when the key sounded in the front door.
‘Now behave yourself,’ Meg said, as though to a child. She was pleased to see that he obviously enjoyed being spoken to so.
It proved difficult for her to disguise from Jill the elation that the evening’s conversation had given to her. The preparation of Jill for any overtures from Leonard must be a lengthy business; to start it that evening might well prove a bad beginning. When, then Jill said, ‘His Imperial Highness was in a very gracious mood this evening,’ she merely answered, ‘Whisky can work wonders, dear.’
At the Garsington the girls were beginning those prickly, ‘getting at each other’ sorts of conversations which instantly took Meg back to her school-time examinations. In those days she had been securely immunized against such panic, but now it seized upon her and was all the more tenacious because, at her age, she must not pass it on. She had not been in the habit of talking about the work much with the others, and had almost ceased to listen to their conversations; now their omission of her from their prophecies and forecasts suddenly seemed a deliberate, polite avoidance of announcing her inevitable failure. She found herself listening-in to their talk for portents and for auguries. Time, which had seemed to be mouldering away with the forgotten shavings of pencil-wood in the dusty heat beneath the Garsington’s radiators, suddenly sprinted forward: the Test Day was almost upon her.
The hazards that memory offered to maturity now loomed in front of her, each day a different one: every sound or symbol she had learned, brought, by some trick of shape or assonance or rhyme or accent, an irrelevant image from her long forty years of remembered life; or, telling herself it was a game to relieve the impending tension, she fell into believing it and the lessons trickled through her head pleasingly, soothingly, leaving no trace. What had she to do with games at forty-three? Or, despairing, she remembered that she was no schoolgirl, that she was free, the fees paid, to walk out and forget the whole course, and, exulting, almost rose to do so. Above all, like some village child in a Victorian tale, she looked out of the window, saw the gold and purple of Miss Corrigan’s crocuses, and longed to run pell-mell, helter skelter into the park to play. Anxiety, mourning, her own troubles, the troubles of others – among them Jill’s – she squeezed and crowded away so tightly that they creaked and groaned in a ‘chorus of
f’ almost more distracting than their conscious presence. She could remember nothing as she turned out the lamp by the divan at midnight and, at a quarter past, every lesson of the course began a race round her mind that lasted until dawn.
When Miss Corrigan assured her that, accidents apart, she would pass the test, she believed her so little that she began to wonder if some material accident had been arranged – a faulty wiring of the electric typewriter, a hand crushed in the duplicating machine – that would at once protect her from ignominious failure and the principal from the charge of misleading prediction. Hearing Jill say, ‘It’s nice to see you looking so confident about this silly test, Meg. I think I should be scared stiff if I had to take an exam now,’ she realized that her bearing lagged behind her emotions. She still appeared the confident woman that she had been before Srem Panh, and perhaps would never be again. Most daunting of all was Miss Corrigan’s suggestion that she should choose from a list of vacancies for private secretaries.
‘I think we can almost take your test as a formality, Mrs Eliot,’ she said and she seemed to show no signs of sadistic pleasure or sudden insanity. ‘There are only a few of these which will probably interest you. Most of the first jobs the girls take are naturally less responsible, but now that you have the technical requirements, I don’t think that you’ll lack anything for a first-class job.’ She laughed. ‘Except, of course, getting to know the eccentrics of the boss.’ She made this sound most sinister.