The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  ‘Oh, David, listen, please,’ she said, as she read it. ‘She writes to ask if you can spare me from here. The recovery, she says, is good, but not so good that she can do all herself. She writes, “I suppose I must admit that old age has at last put me out of work, but I believe, Else, that if I had another pair of hands and another pair of feet I could still keep at it. And there is so much to do here. The man who’s organizing the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign is a fool. I suppose David would think it very selfish if I asked you to come and be my extra hands and feet.’” She was so excited that the letter shook in her hands, then she pulled herself together and assumed a severe, judicial look. ‘I suppose that I ought to do what she asks,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose you ought too, Else.’ David could hardly keep from smiling. He could tell without looking at Meg that she had written and that she was now putting on a special face that he knew from their youth, a face of triumph. There seemed no sense in reproving her when Else, all happiness, had gone from the room. He only said, ‘All right. You know best.’ Nevertheless he was troubled by the divergence in their views of ends and means.

  In the weeks after Else’s departure, however, there seemed to be no divergence between them. October was bright with sunshine. The nursery, all dahlias and michaelmas daisies, looked gaily garish with that ordered, commercial colourfulness which, hardly beautiful, yet banished the natural melancholy of the season by its obvious show; banished a little, too, the remembrance of the year before, of the first alarms of Gordon’s illness and, David judged from Meg’s ease, of Srem Panh also. Working together was such a constant delight. Meg was full of ideas for this and that, ready to argue for them, and when they proved impracticable to relinquish them with laughter. David, in fact, seemed to hear nothing but laughter or voices rising and falling, shouting each other down in discussion or argument that was yet never angry – his own, Meg’s, Tim’s, Climbers’, Mrs B.’s, even Collihole’s; they were all brought in and they all loved it. Meg seemed to be able to live within their world and yet in a way outside it. There was a morning when Climbers asked them to look at her dahlia display set out at the entrance of the nursery to enable visitors to make their choice without touring the garden. He knew from experience what to expect – jars of dahlias set out in groups of pompoms, collarettes, cactus, and so on, all ranged within their groups from giant to dwarf, and by a colour range adapted crudely from the spectrum so that purples faded genteelly into mauves and orange destroyed both scarlet and saffron; the whole display was set out against a back-cloth of sky-blue velvet somewhat torn. Meg took one look at the display and said in a sort of Beatrice Lillie voice, ‘But lovely, Climbers!’ and then burst into peals of laughter.

  Miraculously Climbers was not at all offended, they all laughed together and the whole display was changed under Meg’s direction. Climbers’ only protest was to say, ‘Of course, blue used to be the colour, you know, Mrs Eliot,’ and even then she giggled at her own remark.

  Later, David was even more delighted when Meg said, laughing, ‘Don’t imagine that you’ll sell more because they look better on display. You’ll probably sell less.’ He had thought exactly the same thing.

  Yet, for all the laughter and talk, Meg managed the house and the nursery correspondence quickly and well. David’s only fear was that, when the order season was over, she would find too little to occupy her energies. He also wondered now and again what she made of the comparatively small amount of work that really demanded his attention. On occasion, too, when he was left alone to meditate, he was disturbed to reflect how short a while ago he had supposed her entirely alien to the way of life he was seeking. She was not different from what she had been. Yet he did not feel that she had deflected him from his course in anything that was essential; he remained as resolute, he hoped, in his love of life and in his withdrawal from it, he accepted the minute progress and the constant failures of his self mastery, and he still sought strength to do better. Above all, he still felt an inner quietude that never, he hoped, allowed him smugly to forget the wind that howled in the desert world outside. If he was strengthened in his progress by the conviction that he had given some sense of peace to her, he did not allow himself to speculate on what the nature of her peace was, or to seek to mould it to his own. But that she had found some peace, he was convinced, and that it should be expressed in such a life of gusts and energy did not make him sceptical, for in this she recalled to him always Gordon,

  Nor could he consider her liveliness to be a less hopeful expression of a growing inner strength because unlike Gordon’s it was not founded on religious belief; to have done so would have made nonsense of his own agnostic discipline. He could only decide that sorrow, defeat, an acute sense of personal loss – personal experience, in short, of man’s universal tragic predicament – had given her a new grace, a new sweetness that yet still expressed themselves through her old high spirits and energy. He felt, above all, though they never talked of it, that she had known, as he had, absolute despair and had not allowed it to turn to hatred.

  Meg, oddly it seemed to him, was the only one of them all now and again to recall Else in conversation. She asked questions about her background, her views on this or that, whether she had ever had a lover or even been in love. ‘She was an interesting person,’ she said. ‘Circumstances were against my getting to know her. I don’t know that a year ago I could have accepted that, but I’ve learnt so much about the limitations imposed by time and place.’ She was quick, however, to point out to David that he could now build up a good quartet. ‘You must write to that Mrs Thing the cellist at once, David,’ she said, and kept him up to it.

  Mary Gardner replied that she was now playing with a quartet in Lewes, but she was not entirely happy with them and, after certain promised performances in the Christmas season, she would be glad to start with David again; meanwhile they could look out for a new second violinist,

  Meg immediately began to urge him to practise regularly again. But in the weeks that followed, he did not play the violin often. Meg’s encouragement of him led her to speak of her own interest in music He discovered at once such a mixture of real feeling and of technical ignorance; of prejudices, some of which agreed pleasingly with his own, others of which he longed to demolish. In no time he found himself explaining, by illustration from records and at the piano, some of the difficulties she found, introducing her to some of the pleasures he most regretted that she had been denied. Successive evenings were passed in this way until Meg, perhaps feeling that they could no longer regard each occasion as arising independently, began to refer ironically to ‘musical appreciation, a speciality’. Irony for both of them, as they openly agreed, was the high-road to acceptance and now they began to plan a short course.

  ‘It’ll help to keep you going until Mrs Thing’s ready with her cello. You need some sort of compulsion, you know, David. As for me well, at least I shall have some idea of what I’m listening to. And then I shall be less ashamed to listen.’

  David was not so happy, indeed at first appalled, when Meg announced that Climbers would like to be in on it. ‘She’s tone deaf, Meg dear,’ he said. But Meg insisted. ‘You’ve no right to condemn people in that way. In any case, we need someone from outside, otherwise we shall skip the parts that bore us. And,’ she added laughing, ‘we don’t want our life to get too cosily brother and sister. It wouldn’t be quite decent.’

  Climbers, as David expected, embarrassed them the first two evenings by her own embarrassed gratitude, but Meg, by attacking her fiercely, brought out an independence that David had never suspected. Climbers’ presence, indeed, seemed only to bring him closer to Meg. Gradually, too, he found that teaching the slower witted, if it had not the same excitement as feeding a ready intelligence, had its own satisfactory triumphs.

  When he told this to Meg, she said, ‘Well, there you are, David, you wouldn’t go on with being a teacher.’

  ‘A teacher?’ The word had no association with his past.
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  ‘Fellow or whatever is was.’

  ‘Oh, there was no teaching about that, Meg. It was purely a research fellowship.’

  ‘Research on what? I could never see, David, what you could research about Richardson. I never got through Grandison. But I’ve read all Clarissa, believe it or not. And, of course, Pamela. Clarissa’s very exciting once you get used to the pace. But I mean there they are. There isn’t much more to say, is there?’

  He told her of the later novels of sensibility, of the Continental analyses of virtue and of seduction, of the epistolary form in France and Germany.

  She said, ‘But most of that must be well known, isn’t it?’

  ‘There are details to be filled in,’ he answered, laughing. ‘That was the trouble, Meg. I was collecting the crumbs more untidy scholars had dropped on the floor.’

  She said, ‘Yes, I do see. Well, anyway,’ she announced, ‘I’ve seen Richardson’s bones and I’m sure you haven’t. Yes, truly I have. He was buried in one of those bombed churches. Bill and I had to go round them with some American friends. And the sexton showed us Richardson’s coffin which had burst open. So you see.’

  He was glad that his own estimation of the research work he had given up was so confirmed by her frivolity. When, after the war, he had refused to return to the University, he had thought with guilt how much Meg would have given to have had that career when she was a girl. Of course, by that time she had been married and the point was in all senses academic; all the same, her acceptance now seemed to absolve him from all those advantages that as a boy he had enjoyed over her – advantages which their mother had seen as the natural order, and Meg, then, as a monstrous system. She had said that he had removed past guilts for her; now she was doing the same for him.

  That Meg herself was conscious of no longer feeling the jealousy of her youth was apparent to him a few evenings later. He had been discussing questions of rhythm in music with them, and Climbers, as she made one of those many half exits from the room which inevitably preceded her final departure for home (if her bed-sitting room at old Mrs Turner’s could be called that), said, ‘I suppose you don’t approve of jazz, David?’ He wondered if such irrelevance meant that she had misunderstood all he had been saying that evening, and again what, in Climbers’ strange, unrelated world, ‘jazz’ meant. He said, ‘I don’t think about it much.’

  Meg said, ‘Bill and I used to go dancing a lot at one time. But I suppose that isn’t jazz. Is that a word that’s used now, anyway?’

  But Climbers had a different motive, ‘It’s only,’ she said, ‘that I think it’s rather bad of Eileen telling Tim he’s got to give up that jazz band of his.’

  Meg said, ‘But, Climbers, are you sure? It’s absolutely monstrous!’

  David said, ‘But they’ve always had such a live-and-let-live attitude!’

  For some reason Climbers seemed to think that this phrase had a salacious overtone, for she let out a loud guffaw and then blushed scarlet. ‘Oh, I know,’ she said, ‘and Eileen’s frightfully good, really. But I suppose she does get left an awful lot on her own. And they aren’t just tiny babies any more. But in any case I’m always willing to sit in. But I suppose that’s just it, now that she can go out more, she wants Tim to go with her. Anyway, she’s awfully against jazz.’ She made the word seem more and more mysterious every time that she used it. ‘And then she says it makes Tim neglect his work. That’s what I think is so frightfully unfair. Nobody works harder than Tim, I’m sure.’ The transference from Eileen to Tim was clearly quite complete. ‘And I wondered if you would say something, David, because Tim cares about the jazz so much. But, of course if you’re against it …’

  ‘I’m neither for or against it, Climbers,’ David said. Then, realizing how pompous this sounded, he said, ‘Well, yes, I suppose I am against it as I am against Siberian wallflowers or mice. It never occurs to me to encourage them. But I certainly shouldn’t discourage Tim from doing something that gives him pleasure. On the other hand, I shan’t interfere between him and Eileen. If he wants to play in the jazz band very much he’ll get his way. No, not even that, because Tim’s a good and unselfish person. But certainly I won’t interfere.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that, David. And I expect you’re right. But it does seem a shame. What do you think, Mrs Eliot?’

  Meg said slowly, ‘Well, if it does interfere with his work … But no, of course it’s – disgraceful. I wish Eileen wouldn’t keep on turning out worse than I thought her. But David’s quite right. He couldn’t interfere. Nor should you, Climbers. Take my word for it. I’ve done such a lot of interfering for people’s good, and it’s been disastrous. I should be just the same now if it weren’t for David. I’m a natural Emma, but luckily David’s Knightly and Mr Woodhouse rolled into one,’ She laughed with surprise when she had said it.

  After Climbers’ final departure, Meg said, ‘It used to be Maggie Tulliver, you know. But there was as much rivalry in my love for you, David, then, as in Maggie’s for Tom. And now you’re Knightly and Mr Woodhouse. I hope it’s not too Freudian.’

  They both laughed. Afterwards it occurred to him as strange that he should feel so unworried at her assertion of dependence on him. Yet if Emma depended on Knightly and on her father, they, after all, remained with their own lives of masculine privacy uninvaded. Whereas in the past, in their youth, he had felt all the time that assertion of Meg’s to control, to prove that he was not necessarily her superior because he was the boy, to use her control of him as a signal of victory – the most cruel that there could be – to wave in the face of their mother. Amusedly, he thought, in any case there’s an irony implicit in what she said and she knows it – Knightly was a prig and Mr Woodhouse a vegetable. He was well aware that there was something of both in him. As long, it seemed to him, as there was that degree of detachment in her ‘dependence’ on him, their happy relationship was surely also free from danger.

  Only once in those last months of the year did Meg behave in a way that irritated David. The occasion was annoying enough, for it was entirely of her own making. Suddenly it seemed that Meg had decided that it was an absurdity to burden themselves with two parties in the New Year; one of them must be held in the fortnight before Christmas. Useless for David to urge that the pressure of winter deliveries was even further swelled then by the supplying of Christmas potted plants; she merely said, ‘There may be a rush, David, but there’s nothing in this nursery you can’t delegate.’

  It was the first time she had mentioned David’s own work. She was, he could see, watching his reaction with a quizzical smile that was ready to vanish at any sign of resentment. For a moment he did resent it. He had fashioned his own life, he had only his own conscience to satisfy; for Meg to walk in halfway through the performance and judge the line of the play was inadmissible criticism. Yet if he was really satisfied with the amount of Martha tasks that he contributed to life, he surely ought not to mind others judging it with a certain mockery. It should be enough for him that Gordon, who had known the breaking work of those first five years of the nursery should have approved his acceptance of the lightened load of these last years, should indeed have left him enough money to continue to accept it. He and Gordon had always detested worship of work as one of the most assertive and corroding of human passions. But for this very reason Gordon would have found any bullfrog swelling of resentment at Meg’s amusement peculiarly ridiculous. So now he laughed.

  ‘Do you remember,’ he asked, ‘how Mother delighted to find that things would just cover a sixpence? I suppose my labours would hardly cover that.’

  ‘Oh, no, David, you do quite enough work to cover half-a-crown. But you’ve still enough time to give a party. Anyway, two parties spread out like that are far less exhausting than two in the same week. And people will expect it just before Christmas. Anyone would think that I hadn’t proved a success at the summer party. I shall be able to run the whole affair this time with Mrs B. You’ll hardly know a thing about i
t until it’s over.’ She piled up the reasons.

  David felt disturbed lest beneath her easy happiness at Andredaswood there might be some pressing boredom. He asked, ‘Is life proving distressingly dull for you here, Meg?’

  She said, ‘Oh, David, don’t make such a thing about it. No. I just would like to show myself off a bit. I’m bound to be a backslider now and again.’

  They laughed. And so the party was given.

  Meg was as good as her word; the arrangements were excellent. On the morning of the party day, Mary Gardner rang up and asked did David mind if she brought the Grant-Pritchards, she thought it would be good business anyway for David to meet them. Not at all, David said, but who would they be? Michael Grant-Pritchard! Mary exclaimed, but surely David had heard of him; he was that M.P. who’d been so strong in pressing the Government about the Trade Union danger. David said that the Trade Union danger had not threatened Andredaswood closely so far … There was an agreed irony in any conversation he held with Mary Gardner that did not concern music. No doubt, he said, Mary’s husband had felt it more seriously, Mary laughed but then spoke in her serious, responsible voice. People who didn’t live in the clouds had reason to know how dangerous all these restrictive practices and things were. Anyway Michael Grant-Pritchard, who was a brilliant lawyer, was one of the coming men and the sooner David knew about him the better, especially as he was buying ‘Oblongs’ now that the Phipsons were going to live near Cape Town. David would certainly like Frederica Grant-Pritchard, she was so very quiet; in any case he must, for she had all sorts of ideas about the garden at ‘Oblongs’. The garden at ‘Oblongs’, David said, was a creation of Miss Jekyll’s, and while he was not wholly in accord with Miss Jekyll’s horticultural aesthetic, she had been one of our great gardeners; the Phipsons had already done enough to ruin her creation by their neglect, he did not propose to assist Mrs Grant-Pritchard in completing the ruin of a great garden by her ideas, whatever they might be. But Mary Gardner only replied with one of the principal articles of her creed. ‘My dear David,’ she said, ‘money is money.’