The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  All sorts of malice filled David’s mind as he felt her success underlining the transience of Gordon’s hold on their loyalties; but he couldn’t sustain the mood – she so patently wanted only to enjoy herself and to see that they did so too. She tried to bring him in and he resisted. At once she let it go and started a cross talk with Mrs B. which only came to an end because they were both giggling so much. Then as suddenly she was sitting quietly by Else’s side.

  ‘Those friends of yours, the Rogersons,’ he could hear her ask, ‘when am I going to see them again?’

  ‘You find them especially funny?’ Else spoke in a tone suitable for reproving an over excited child, but, David thought, there’s a note which suggests that patience may soon be exhausted and love withdrawn.

  ‘Funny? I suppose so. Yes. As most people are. But I found them extremely interesting, I think I should like them. I don’t believe in making up my mind too quickly. But nor, I should imagine, do they!’

  It was exactly the right note, David thought; and yet, looking at her as she talked to Else, he could see a new note of independence. She had chosen to appease Else, but with none of the absolute and mechanical acquiescence of the last weeks. She was genuinely interested in the Rogersons, and if that could help Else to accept the rest of her behaviour, she was prepared to stress it.

  ‘They are really Eileen Rattray’s friends,’ Else said. She was used to more mollifying than this before she was prepared to abandon her moods.

  Meg said, ‘Oh, come, Else. Surely you’re not going to discourage me from knowing them. They would do me so much good.’ Her voice carried a slight note of open mocking.

  David wondered for a moment if she was a little drunk; but she was not, only elated, and even the elation seemed under control.

  Else said, ‘I don’t now whether they will have time to do you good. They are very busy people.’

  ‘Well, I’ll do them good, then. There’s nothing that relaxes busy people so much as a drone to entertain them.’

  ‘And you like being a drone?’

  David, turning to listen to Mr Boniface’s electrician cousin on the way the Americans in their war films conveniently forget who in the hour of isolation … could only vaguely hear Meg’s reply, but though the words were fragmentary, the tone told that she was replying with friendliness. ‘Letting things roll over me… David’s influence perhaps – so much to learn if you’ve been spoilt.’ Then she gave a laugh. ‘Besides, drones have to work very hard in order to please.’ She was charm-pleading a little now.

  ‘It’s lucky to have such convenient theories,’ Else said, but she laughed and put her hand on Meg’s arm. She’s been won over, David thought.

  Then surprisingly Meg said, ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Her drawl was a direct rejection. ‘I shall have to get Eileen Rattray to take me to the Rogersons’, I can see. They have such a high opinion of her usefulness.’ She paused. ‘The Rogersons and Eileen,’ she said, ‘they fascinate me. They’re part of the England I don’t know. I don’t imagine I’m going to find it all that easy to adapt myself. But I dare say if you can, Else … After all, I have some common roots.’

  It was, David thought, an unkind and bad piece of pettishness; yet somewhere in the tone there were echoes that made him feel loving, protective towards her, even as he disapproved. ‘No, I never made the Italian landings,’ he said. Meg was coming towards him now. And something tired and puzzled in her pouting look recalled suddenly their mother when she felt that the ‘world was really too difficult’. He knew then what had softened his annoyance with Meg.

  She stood smiling for a few minutes while Mr Boniface’s cousin described fighting near Padua with the Eighth Army. ‘Of course, there was precious little resistance by then and the locals were all out to show they were on our side. I liked them myself,’ he told Meg as though she was notoriously chauvinistic. ‘But not the priests. You’ve only got to see some of the poverty to make your mind up about that. Everything goes to la chiesa, you know. I learnt a bit of the language. The superstition’s appalling. In my opinion that’s why they were no good at all as soldiers.’ He offered the views judicially. ‘They never would have been in it at all, you know, if the Germans hadn’t forced them.’

  When he had moved away, Meg said, ‘Dear God! What tact! Talking to you, David, about army life.’ There was an edge to her voice that was intended to provoke. He tried to speak lightly, but he knew that he was irritated.

  ‘Dear Meg,’ he said, ‘I rather pride myself on the fact that they know that I was an objector and that they don’t care. Perhaps they don’t,’ he added, ‘as much as you do.’

  There was a moment’s silence, then he said, ‘In any case your own tact can desert you.’

  She looked up at him angrily. ‘I can’t stand people who paw me,’ she said. Tears came into her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have managed Else better. I did so mean to be of help to you today.’

  Her race, tired and anxious again, recalled their mother’s. He thought, now I’ve seen the likeness once, I shall see it all the time. And, of course, it was there – petulance, provocation, pathos – mother’s three p’s that had always produced their response in him. I must watch out, he thought. Nevertheless he said soothingly, ‘You have helped, Meg, enormously. You’ve been a terriffic success. I’m tired. That’s all it is. I ought to have warned you about the kitchen party. But they’ll be gone soon.’

  She looked round the room. ‘Oh, my dear, it’s flat.’

  ‘Let it be flat They’ll go home the sooner.’

  ‘No, David, don’t. I can’t bear to end on failure. I have such a fight to hold depression back these days. Help me to make it all end with a bang.’

  He felt annoyed that he had not guessed her feelings before, that she had been forced to explain them. He said sharply, ‘Don’t you want to ask Eileen Rattray to take you to see the Rogersons? You told Else you would do so.’

  ‘Oh, don’t David,’ she said. ‘Please let’s make it end well.’ And off she plunged to entertain the audience with a grand finale. She drew him in to make a duet of it. Together they brought the house down. Deliberately, he could see, she reverted to old patterns, to those times when, in moods of sudden closeness, they had set out to liven up some living-dead party of their mother’s. They ‘did’ Aunt Lily and her dogs, and the day the coach party arrived drunk at mother’s tea room, and the time that mother sent the funeral wreath to the bride, and, rather daringly, Uncle Eustace’s ‘little bit of fluff’. Then she began to guy her own girlhood and to draw him in – she made him ‘do’ David with Miss Murray her headmistress, and David winning the chamber pot at the fête, and David in mother’s tableaux vivants as ‘When did you last see your Father?’ (rich in ironic memories, this last, for both of them) – but if she teased him a bit maliciously, it was with such caressing malice that the ragging was more like a flirtation than a ‘send up’. There won’t be a dry eye in the house soon, he thought, seeking to detach himself. Yet he knew that he was pleased and happy.

  Sure enough, Climbers came up to him as she was leaving. ‘I say, Mrs Eliot was terrific tonight, wasn’t she? Anyone could tell you were brother and sister just from the way you can both make people laugh. All the same, you’re the real wit, David. She’s more of a comedian really.’

  Tim said, ‘Best evening we’ve had for years, David.’ But Eileen said, ‘It was fun enough for us, but I was a bit worried about your sister. Of course, she’s bound to be up and down like that. All one can do is to flatten out the bumps as much as possible. I doubt if this sort of thing helps much, though, David. However, when I told the Rogersons she was a depressive, they couldn’t believe it; and they’re very sensible. They liked her.’

  It was all he could do, David thought, to like Eileen sometimes.

  Yet only Else really distressed him, leaving him with guts troubled and anxious for the future. She said, smiling, ‘We’ve been like children this evening. That is quite good for once.’
r />   He answered, ‘I’m happy to see Meg throw her depression off so completely.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Children can do that.’ Then she looked at him sadly, ‘I don’t think you are a child, David. For you, tragedy and some small mishap are not the same thing. I hope you won’t try to make them so. We can hurt ourselves so much by pretending, like children, that we don’t feel.’

  It was a mercy, David thought, that Meg was not by at that moment. She looked at once so elated and so exhausted. When they were left alone, she said, ‘David, please take me out for the day tomorrow.’

  He said, ‘My dear, Collihole’s exhibiting roses in ten days’ time. You don’t realize that I run this place as a business.’

  ‘Collihole! Roses!’ she answered, ‘I realize that the others run it for you. Under your direction. And quite right too. Please take me out for the day.’

  ‘But you’re exhausted already.’

  ‘Exhausted, yes, but not depressed. And I believe I can move on now to a quieter happiness. But just for tomorrow I could be so depressed.’

  He said, ‘Very well, Meg. We’ll go quietly somewhere to the Downs.’

  ‘No, no, David. I must slow down gradually. Let’s go to Brighton and quiz people from the terrace of the Metropole. We’ll play Observations.’ When he had finally agreed, she asked, ‘You want to go, David, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes. But let me say things for myself.’ She looked so hurt that he took her hand. ‘You’ve made this awful day quite all right for me,’ he said. He wondered whether Gordon would have giggled or been sad for him; yet he knew that whatever might have been Gordon’s reactions, his own feelings of anxiety were only feeble irritations that hardly disturbed even the surface of his growing pleasure in her regained company.

  *

  David ordered a dry sherry.

  ‘How prim!’ Meg said. ‘I want something absurd to mark an unusual occasion.’

  ‘Unusual? Surely nothing can be usual in this holiday period of your life.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Holiday?’

  ‘Well,’ he corrected, ‘let’s say like the Americans, “intermission”.’

  He had bathed in her chatter as they drove to Brighton, but with the nagging thought that he must speak to her about the future. Now he approached it, aware that he was less concerned to persuade her into any plan than he was to get his lecture over and enjoy the rest of the day unhampered by conscience. However, she ignored his implication.

  ‘I like every day to be rare now. Like American steaks.’

  He thought, her gaiety is forced, she would never phrase-make like that if it were not so. She went through the list of fancy-named cocktails. ‘No,’ she said, ‘they’ll all taste like bath salts.’ She settled for the mildly rare – a White Lady. Looking out through the glass front of the hotel bar she indicated a thin, elegant old Jew, discreetly rich, with sensitive oriental features, tired and worldly. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘the day’s got him for a moment.’

  David looking, saw the old man pause for a second and, letting his family walk ahead, gaze a little bewilderedly nowhere in particular as the mild south-east breeze and the bright sunshine played upon his yellowy parchment, cigar-scented old body on this last day of May. ‘Something,’ David said smiling, ‘of the old wisdom of his people has pushed for a moment through the money bags and the family marriages and the loving purchase of the little Boudin that is yet an investment.’

  ‘No, no,’ Meg cried, ‘the deep wisdom of his people is a much more routine thing that comes to him at solemn family moments, or alone at midnight when he pads upstairs to bed in the great family house … Well, that’s probably gone long ago anyway. But this moment is something deeper. A sudden realization that the whole natural order to things is growing and pushing and decaying and sunning itself all around him all the time and that he has no contact with it.’

  ‘Can the natural order of things sun itself?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean, David. The smallest weeds and insects. And the largest.’

  They were both laughing; it was one of the favourite games of their adolescence – the parodying of stock type novels. And yet he guessed her to share in his feeling that whatever they said today would be important to both of them.

  ‘Even that old man,’ she said, ‘must once have been a small boy for whom caterpillars were monsters and bindweed a jungle. He remembers that.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ David said, ‘I can’t continue that sort of novel. In any case his pantheistic imaginings won’t liberate him from the prison of a rich man’s authority. You share Else’s pathetic fallacy about Nature’s power to heal.’

  ‘Oh, David,’ Meg cried, ‘you’ve forgotten the rules of the game. You’ve drawn a moral conclusion.’

  He had not forgotten the rules of Observations – to invent histories and thoughts for the people they saw, but to make no judgements; but the habit of censuring was too strongly with him now. He said, ‘You broke the rule first, when you said, “Even that old man”. If that wasn’t an implied moral judgement …’

  ‘I suppose I did,’ she said. She pointed to the wife and daughter now richly ensconced in the back of the Bentley, chattering, their made-up faces stupidly discontented, their smart hats nodding. ‘They’ve had no intimations,’ she said, ‘and we need make no comment on the fact.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘their heads are full of the trip to New York, and cousin Myra’s wedding, and the records of My Fair Lady. Fair?’ He smiled happily at her.

  ‘Fair enough,’ she said, ‘though I think we’re out of practice. Boudins and My Fair Lady! they don’t really fit together.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s all right. The women folk lag behind in culture. They always have done.’

  The conversation seemed a happy serial stretching back and back in repeat to his fifteenth year or so – the War, Gordon, the nursery seemed a hardly real intervening time. Later as they sat over their coffee he said, ‘You’ve taken me back too much, Meg. It’s absurd, I’ve been feeling as though the world lay before me. It’s not the time for dreaming about pearls in unopened oysters. If there are pearls, then the more people leave them alone for a century or two the better.’ But he realized as he said it, that this was only what he believed, not what he felt. He felt as though he was about to plan a hundred different lives from which to choose when manhood at last came to him. It was an absurdity, not even true to the youth that Meg had recalled, for his dreams as an adolescent had been most carefully circumscribed.

  Meg said, ‘And I feel more like the chattering ladies. Let the day care for itself. No, that’s not fair to myself. But as though all the burden of putting dreams into practice had been lifted from me.’

  Perhaps, David thought, it was exactly because he, knowing his own feelings, could not use this proffered chance to question or to advise her on her future, that she seemed impelled to meet the criticism that he had not made.

  She said, ‘You must accept my present frivolity, David. I’m resting. My determinations are not scattered and my curiosity hasn’t died on me, they’re simply in abeyance. Meanwhile you must let me drone a bit.’

  When he said nothing, letting his glance drift from the lobsters and chicken piled on the raised cold table to the ornate chandeliers and then to a sad, lipstick-smudged, flat-footed old waitress, she went on a little fiercely, ‘You haven’t altered, David, you still don’t listen when you don’t choose to. But I think you’ve found some sort of peace in this negation you’re seeking. At any rate your view of life’s affected me. It may seem simple frivolity, the way I’m being now, but it is an attempt to get away from imposing myself everywhere. As I did on Bill, as I made such a fool of myself doing with Tom and Jill. You can’t escape all responsibility for my present mood.’

  He said, ‘Meg, the last thing I am, you know, is a hot gospeller. It’s the essence of the way I live that it’s my own. But if you can get something from it, of course, I’m glad.’

  It
didn’t seem entirely to satisfy her. She said, ‘But you do think, don’t you, that we’ve found some link again that exists between us?’

  ‘I don’t know about “again”‚’ he answered. ‘We’ve found a link, certainly, but whether it was there before, I really don’t know.’

  ‘Well, whatever,’ she said, ‘I feel that we can be together much or only a little but always with profit. So long as we’re absolutely honest. That’s why I’ve not hidden my present mood of easy laziness.’

  He would not answer the appeal in her voice for fear of commiting himself to an approbation he might have to withdraw, but, ‘Honesty with each other. Certainly,’ he said, ‘to that at any rate we can commit ourselves. In fact, we must.’

  After luncheon they did all the sights. Only at the Pavilion was there any note of disharmony. Music greeted them from every corner as, with the crowd of sightseers, they made their way amid pink and green chinoiserie wallpapers and beneath great golden dragon chandeliers.

  ‘The Haffner,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it’s a pleasant idea to have this relayed music,’ she remarked.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘Music should be listened to. Not pumped out as a phoney means of invoking the gracious living of the past.’

  His fierceness made her say, laughing, ‘Oh dear, I’ve got it wrong, haven’t I? It’s a pest about music when you’re around, David, It was just the same when we were young. I always liked going to concerts and to opera, but it wasn’t really until I’d married Bill that I could indulge myself. You’d always inhibited me by making me feel that one had no right to enjoy music in ignorance.’

  ‘I never intended to. It’s not even what I think.’

  ‘Well, you must let me listen to the quartet. I heard so much about it at the party yesterday. Why haven’t you met since I came to Andredaswood?’