by Angus Wilson
Frederica Grant-Pritchard proved to be a rather big woman in her late thirties. She seemed, at first, shy and undistinguished, likely to be a bore. Her shyness was, however, a quality that predisposed David in her favour, and when it turned out that her ‘ideas’ were simply a desire to restore the garden at ‘Oblongs’ to Miss Jekyll’s original design he was quite won over. She had taken great trouble to read all Miss Jekyll’s books, and, if David found it rather strange at this time to meet someone from a sophisticated world who seemed unaware that herbaceous borders and wild gardens and iris walks were not the perfection of gardening, he was only too ready to sink his criticism before such genuine, if naïve, enthusiasm. Looking at her swelling white neck and bosom, her rather prominent blue eyes, fresh complexion and red hair, he thought sadly that had she lived in the age of Rubens, she would have been a great beauty. To have discovered this made him feel that somehow she was his own creation, whose shyness and ordinariness must be warmed and cherished by him. He would have talked to her for much longer, but that to be noticed by the host was clearly an ordeal for her.
‘All your other guests,’ she said, and then blushed for fear she had seemed to remind him of his social duty. They were fully agreed, however, that he was to assist her professionally in her garden scheme. ‘I expect I shall be here quite a lot,’ she said. ‘Michael doesn’t find me much help in London. So we bought this house.’
Her husband’s constituency, it seemed, was in North London so that what with his constituency and with the House, he was not likely to be much at ‘Oblongs’. Frederica Grant-Pritchard seemed quite relieved at this – ‘He might get bored,’ she said – and David, looking at her husband, felt no distress.
Michael Grant-Pritchard looked all that David had expected – tall, dark, with greying side hair, too charming, too distinguished, and a great deal too assured. What or whether he was all that could be deduced from his appearance, David had no intention of finding out; he instinctively kept away from such embodiments of self-assertion as notable people must inevitably be. Mr Grant-Pritchard made only one contribution to his wife’s plans for the garden. ‘Don’t let her exclude roses altogether, will you? I’m simple enough to think that a garden’s not a garden at all unless it has roses. The old-fashioned sort, you know, that have got some scent.’
The belief that modern roses lacked scent was one of the common delusions that David found most tedious, so he merely smiled in answer to this affability. He had no doubt, anyway, that left to his uninstructed taste, Michael Grant-Pritchard would prefer roses of the largest size and of the most vulgarly ‘delicate’ shade regardless of their scent.
Even if David had wished to improve his knowledge of Michael Grant-Pritchard, he would not have found it easy. Meg and the distinguished visitor talked to one another throughout almost the entire party. David, Mary Gardner, Tim, even Climbers, brought up various people to be introduced to Michael Grant-Pritchard; they were one and all politely but firmly shaken off. Frederica, with an awful sudden brightness, produced, David thought, not only by shyness but by a real fear of her husband, said, in the manner of a totally different woman, a bright, domineering middle-class wife, ‘Now, Michael, that’s quite enough, you know. You’re monopolizing Mrs Eliot.’
‘Frederica,’ he said to Meg, ‘always observes things at parties. And this time, darling, your observation’s quite correct.’
David, overhearing this, wondered that Meg should continue talking to someone who was so crudely bullying to his wife. True, Meg, hearing only this inept intervention of Frederica Grant-Pritchard’s, might well have presumed her to be a silly, tactless women but even so … He was annoyed enough to say directly to Meg, ‘I think the party wants a little supervision,’ but she looked round the room and answered quite simply, ‘Oh, I don’t think so, David. They all look quite happy.’
It wasn’t even true. There was no doubt that Michael Grant-Pritchard had offended the greater number of his new neighbours by ignoring them, and Meg had quite lost the good opinion she had won in the summer. Climbers, like a scout on the losing side in a battle, kept bringing reports of people who were leaving ‘rather hurt’ by Mrs Eliot’s failure to talk to them. Eileen and the Rogersons were disgusted that she should make such a fuss of a man whose politics stank. Even Tim said, ‘I didn’t know Mrs E. had parliamentary aspirations. She’s certainly got him thinking she’s the best.’
Yet there was no element of flirtation in Meg’s manner with Michael Grant-Pritchard; nor, David had to admit, in his to her, though it was easy to imagine the sickening sort of womanizer he was. There was a good deal of gaiety and laughter in their conversation, it was true, spotlit perhaps the more as the rest of the party fell into an increasingly deadened sense of being unnoticed; but, in the main, they seemed to be discussing solemnly, or rather, Meg almost greedily asking questions and putting up objections as he held forth. Once or twice, indeed, they seemed to be in violent disagreement. Meg’s voice rose above the subdued chatter, saying, ‘I think that’s a lot of high-flown talk to keep your conscience quiet’; and he later suddenly boomed in a tone hardly decorated even with politeness, ‘I’m afraid you simply don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Suddenly, as the party was almost ended, they seemed tacitly to agree to break up their conversation and mingle with the other guests. For the remaining ten minutes Michael Grant-Pritchard gave an exhibition of his charm working at full pressure, and Meg, too, was at the top of her social form. With a certain pleasure, David noted that they were both too late to repair the effect they had created.
He was as puzzled about Michael Grant-Pritchard’s motives for behaving so ‘badly’ as he was about Meg’s, but a good deal less concerned. He supposed, perhaps, that the man for some reason was in a bad temper with his wife, to whom he had certainly caused acute embarrassment. Then, too, these were not his constituents, nor indeed people who particularly ‘mattered’; perhaps he had bought ‘Oblongs’ with the intention of working off the contempt and dislike for human beings that his careerism normally forbade him to express. It was said that ambitious, successful people never failed in charm even with the dustman, for fear of offending potentially useful people; but David reflected that this might well be a groundless platitude; he knew nothing about the psychology of careerism and cared less. Probably, he thought, Meg had seemed the only mondaine person present, although really this was not true. It was impossible to say what the man’s motives had been. He had known Bill in the course of business, it seemed, but they had not been close colleagues; and Michael Grant-Pritchard was certainly not likely to be governed by sentiment or by any compassion for Meg’s tragic loss of her husband. It was really most likely that he had used Meg as a weapon in some complicated marital battle. As he left, he had said to her, ‘I shall hold you to your promise,’ and although Frederica Grant-Pritchard did not look particularly distressed at this, she was no doubt intended to be inflamed into some fire of jealousy. David felt that he had seldom met a man that he disliked so much, and he hoped never to have to consider him again.
Meg’s motives he had to consider. She continued to be entertaining and charming on the adjournment to the kitchen, but only Mrs Boniface, unaware of the party’s failure, responded. The others were listless and resentful. It seemed that Meg realized that she had gone too far to recover them, for suddenly, with no more than a perfunctory smile, she left the kitchen.
After what he judged a decent interval of five minutes, he followed her into the drawing room. She was crouched in front of the huge fireplace, trying, with puffs of the bellows, to hold in glow the wood that yet obstinately paled into white ash. She stopped as soon as he came in. All the glasses and dishes and ashtrays had been removed, but the room still wore a desolate battlefield air. He said, ‘There’s no point in keeping the fire alive. We can’t sit in here. Let’s go to the morning room. We can have the electric fire there.’
She answered, ‘We’d better not sit together, David. I feel so gui
lty that I shall probably say something unkind.’
He said, ‘Oh, it isn’t important.’
‘I’m afraid it is. That’s one of the prices one pays for the gentleness and peace of this house. Things that are only misdemeanours appear crimes.’
‘I think that’s unfair. Nobody’s suggested it’s a crime.’
‘No, I’m sorry, David. I’m only trying to excuse myself by attacking first.’
‘Well, there’s no need. It was annoying that you insisted on this party and then failed to do anything to entertain people. It’s also a bit odd that you should want to talk to that ghastly man for so long.’
‘Yes, he is pretty frightful, isn’t he? Bill always said he was. But he’s very interesting, David. He was a poorer lawyer than Bill. Bill always said so. And he himself admitted it this evening. Not much poorer, you know. A clever man, but just not first class. But he’s been more of a success.’
‘A success? Meg, do you really mind about that?’
‘Mind? No. Well, only in this way – that he’s happier than Bill was After all, Bill aimed at being a success and I did so for him. And we slipped up. Oh, I know Bill was successful, but I also know, we all do, that it couldn’t have lasted. He was too desperate. That man said Bill didn’t care enough. I suppose he meant care about making a career.’
‘But Grant-Pritchard’s happiness is only self-satisfaction, and satisfaction of greed for power at that. Anyway, I should think his happiness, as you call it, is only skin deep. Look at the abominable way he treats his wife.’
‘Does he? I didn’t notice. He’s pretty thick-skinned, David, so that if his happiness is only skin deep …’ She left it in mid-air and after a moment’s silence. ‘We came quite to like each other, I think. Not really like, of course, for me at any rate, because he’s so awful; but when you’ve been very rude to someone … I don’t know why he didn’t walk away, and perhaps I liked him because he didn’t. I expect nobody, no woman anyway, who was a stranger, had been rude to him before, and that took his breath away long enough to make him stay and listen.’
‘What on earth did you say to him, then?’ David asked. He wanted to hear no more about it all; yet he could see that she expected the question.
‘Well, he came up and condoled about Bill. That was all right, he had to. But then he started in an awful flowery way to talk about Bill’s heroism in this drab age. I remembered how Bill had despised him and I saw him sitting there, successful and purring, and Bill was dead. I was very angry. I said, “You know very well that you despise Bill for having got killed in such a chance way. You don’t think it heroism, nor was it. But if it had been, you wouldn’t have been capable of recognizing it!” To give him his due, he admitted the insincerity. He was very rude back. He said, “I imagine Bill Eliot must have been starved of love to have thrown his life away like that.” It was quite untrue, but it was a fair retort to my rudeness. He was very frank all the time. Maybe he felt able to be so with me since I don’t “matter” in his sense of the word. A sort of indulgence of honesty. Or maybe it’s simply a line he shoots, I don’t know. Some of it sounded terribly phoney, For example, he said that one has only a right to be ruthless in life if you’ve really understood the person whom you’re sacrificing. To the point of love, he said. I think he knew that I thought it repulsive, but he’s a man who must make a violent impression. I told him that it was melodramatic nonsense. But he obviously has a lot of personal ethics like that which he half believes in. It was the same when he talked about his attack on the Trade Unions. Oh yes, we talked about that. He admitted that he’d made himself spokesman largely to please the industrialists and also to make his mark in his party, but he also thinks that it’s a rallying point for what he calls the responsible elements in the country. “A sense of responsibility, and particularly a sense of something to fight for, is the only thing that can save the intelligent middle classes in this country,” he said, “and an intelligent middle class is the only future a country like England has in the modern world.”’
David said, ‘He sounds a rather nasty sort of tough windbag. They go together, I think, more often than is supposed. But you must have met up-and-coming men of all parties again and again in London.’
‘I suppose so. He certainly came to Lord North Street once or twice. But most people who came to the house, whether I liked them or not, were just part of the setting for my life with Bill. It was only obviously unhappy people I thought of looking into.’
‘I must say I should prefer to look into people like Grant-Pritchard in novels. I’m sure Michael Grant-Pritchard can be found in many a modern novel without meeting him.’
‘Probably, but I like to do both. I couldn’t be interested in novels if I wasn’t interested in the real people.’
‘A narrow conception of the art of the novel,’ David said dryly, ‘that would receive short shrift from any good modern critic’ Then, as disposing of the Grant-Pritchards, he added, ‘Well, I’m glad that I concentrated on Mrs Grant-Pritchard, She’s quite nice and she has good ideas about her garden. I’m going to help her to restore it to its original form.’
‘In that case, David, I think it’s just as well that I did monopolize him. I’m sure he only thinks of her as someone to contradict. He’d have undone all her plans and yours into the bargain. Plus, of course, the fact, or so he told me, that she brought him a good deal of money.’
‘Meg, he sounds revolting.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid he is quite unpleasant. He’s almost certainly mean, which is unattractive. He shares his secretary with some other M.P.s, although he could obviously afford one of his own. He asked me if I would go over and do some work for him when he’s moved into this new house.’
‘Was that the promise he mentioned?’
‘Yes. Of course, I’ve no intention of doing so. He simply wants secretarial service on the cheap. He’d be a dreadful bully as an employer anyway, I suspect.’
There, with the additional promise from Meg that she would do her best to repair any bad impression made upon the customers of Andredaswood, they left the disastrous party.
David thought for a while that night about Meg’s behaviour. There were many disturbing motives that he could imagine – disturbing, that was, to him – but in the end he decided that it was all due to the sudden appearance on the scene of someone connected with Bill. He had hoped that her torments and regrets about her married life had now faded before the happiness that she had undoubtedly known; that Bill’s memory had finally ceased to fret and to hurt her, had become instead a source of strength. No doubt it was asking too much; guilt or regret inevitably smouldered here and there. Perhaps the little fire that Michael Grant-Pritchard had lit for that hour or so would be the last of it.
Certainly the winter months were a time of great happiness. He felt sometimes amazed that he could so completely share his life with anyone – particularly a woman, particularly, perhaps, his sister Meg – without feeling invaded or exhausted or swallowed up. He felt himself none of these things; she had the extraordinary power, it seemed, of needing someone and yet leaving them whole. Nor did she fret him at all to do this or that. He had felt that she was disturbed lest ‘musical appreciation – a speciality’ might, much though she clearly enjoyed it, be keeping him from playing seriously again. He was not altogether sorry when Mary Gardner’s husband got pleurisy and, on recovery, took Mary off to Madeira; the question of the quartet was postponed until the spring. There was nothing then which he and Meg could not, did not share in that mild, sunny, early spring-like winter.
In February, it was true, she did make a change in his life, but it was one for which he was grateful. One morning a letter came from the publishers asking whether and when ‘Africa’ could be expected. He had contrived a desultory research for the book, but now he must face giving the larger part of his evenings to it. When he mentioned the letter to Meg, he feared that she would urge once again how much of the work in the nursery could be done without hi
s supervision, that he could, in fact, work on ‘Africa’ by day as well Yet now that she was so much involved with the nursery work, so that he could discuss any part of it with her, he was even more reluctant to admit that it did not demand his full attention. Instead she asked, ‘What made you and Gordon write those books?’
‘Money originally,’ he said. ‘When we started the nursery Gordon’s father was still alive and it was quite a struggle to keep going.’
‘I see. I don’t mean that I don’t think they deserve their success. But … well you wouldn’t read them, would you? They’re nice Christmas books, or books to put in guests’ bedrooms.’
He said, ‘Thank you.’
She said, ‘Well, they are, aren’t they? Gordon’s photographs are first rate, and the illustrations you’ve chosen are pleasing. It’s all pleasing, and I can imagine a lot of the reading you’ve done for the books must have been fascinating. But, David!’
He explained to her how completely aware he and Gordon had been of the minor, bedside nature of the series, and yet how, for him, anxious to produce nothing that could add to all the personal voices that were leading mankind to boiling point, their very insipidity was their value; they pretended to nothing. At first she could not understand at all.
‘Well, nice as they are, David, those sort of elegantly served up pieces of history and geography seem to me as pretentious as books can be. And I’m sure a very pretentious sort of people buy them.’
He tried then to explain how that sort of chic was not pretentious as she feared, since it laid no claim to authority, no assertion of importance. Anyone might see that the books were at best written to make needed money, at worst as a pleasing hobby.
She said, ‘I see. Yes, yes. I do see.’ Then she announced, ‘David, I’ve been reading your doctoral thesis.’