The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  They had enlarged their scheme to take in evidence from periodicals and from diaries and memoirs. Even the additional number of books they could get from the London Library by making Meg a country member would not now suffice, and they scoured Sussex, Kent, and Hampshire for booksellers with sets of periodicals. These days spent in book-hunting became a pleasant activity in themselves. They drove through cloud-menaced downland, across marshes swept with rain, and along gale-blown sea fronts, remarking only with a mock eighteenth-century phrase or two which they now often exchanged, on the grandeur of nature in her ruder aspects and more horrid moods. They ran from the car to the shelter of hotels and ate bad luncheons amid strange, washed-up people and laughed delightedly over both.

  A part of each morning for Meg was spent in making lists of desiderata for second-hand booksellers, and in checking booksellers’ catalogues. The bibliography was clearly going to be fun. David’s quiet self, looking on, approved it all – Meg’s pleasure, his own. Now and again a crisis in the weather-battered nursery called him out and he went, always with one eye on Meg for her approval; but Tim was clearly in full control and the interruptions were few.

  David had now agreed with Mary Gardner and the Wing Commander that they should postpone the resumption of practising together until they had fully considered on various local candidates for the place of second violinist; to practise regularly with anyone and then finally to choose someone else would provoke embarrassment. Mary Gardner, indeed, was not satisfied with any of the violinists who offered themselves and declared her intention of looking beyond their immediate acquaintance during the summer. David agreed to do the same. As to ‘musical appreciation – a speciality’, this had now reduced itself to one evening a week of record playing – a relief from reading and a chance to lessen Climbers’ loneliness. He and Meg were, therefore, able to give themselves up entirely to the novels. David read and took occasional notes; Meg read and prepared an ever-extending bibliography.

  David could not remember such a time of relaxation and he saw from Meg’s fresh, smooth face in the mornings, and the disappearance of the hungry look in her eyes, that she knew this peace in her nighttime solitude as well as in their day-time communion. They were both a little startled when those around them commented on the departure of so disastrous a May and on the better auguries of June’s first week of blazing sunshine.

  A mild winter followed by a wet May had, however, brought every kind of pest and blight upon the vegetable world. A violent quarrel broke out between Tim and Collihole at the loss of a number of rose bushes from blackspot. Tim insisted that Collihole, intent on the graftings that were in any case blind avenue work already carried out elsewhere, had neglected elementary precautions. Collihole, furious, said that he was blamed for the inevitable effects of weather. Tim insisted on a complete reorganization of the rose culture. Collihole came in fury and appealed to David; he would give notice if … Tim, consulted, declared that the man’s departure was long overdue. It seemed to David that he must intervene; if he explained the changes Tim wished for, carefully and with great care for Collihole’s pride, he would accept them and stay. Meg asked, ‘Why, David? Is it fair to Tim? Surely if the man’s as foolish as that, he should go.’

  David replied with an attack on such root and branch attitudes to human beings. ‘Collihole has bees in his bonnet. We’ve probably indulged him to let them buzz too much. But he’s done excellent work for us.’ He tried to meet her a little. ‘Gordon and I ran things on paternalistic lines, Meg. Perhaps we were wrong, but you can’t mould people to that pattern and then throw them overboard because they conform to it.’

  She did what he could not remember happening since they had been adolescents; she rubbed the back of her hand against his cheek. She said, ‘I don’t want to hurt you, David, you know.’

  He cried, ‘Hurt! My dear Meg, I truly believe that it’s you who saved me from a hopeless bitterness after Gordon’s death. But let me do this my own way.’

  She answered very softly, ‘Of course. Of course.’

  It was almost now the longest day of the year and David thought perhaps the happiest evening of his life. It had been a difficult day. The heat was intense. Nothing in the nursery seemed quite unimpaired by ravages of one kind or another. Collihole had been excessively obtuse, almost playing the simple gardener to test how far David would bear with him. Tim, too, was sulking like a tough little boy. It seemed to David that unconsciously they were playing in rivalry upon his sexual feelings. The women, also, had hardly been more helpful. Climbers ran to and fro, gruffly urging Tim’s rights and Collihole’s hurt feelings, in a desperate effort to show that she shared in David’s divided emotions. Eileen rang up and, in an extra matter-of-fact voice that suggested hysteria, informed David that perhaps he didn’t realize that Tim regarded this as the test of how much he was valued, and perhaps also he didn’t realize that, for all his hearty manner, Tim’s self-confidence hung by a thread. Mrs Boniface announced that new brooms swept clean but they soon wore out; she would not have credited, she said, the affection that an ordinary chap like Collihole could command in the nursery and in the village. There was no doubt that the quarrel had produced strong emotions among all the nursery staff, but David suspected that not a little of the passion was born of the sudden intense heat and the strain of the damage done by the rains. He made it his aim to pacify, listen, sympathize, encourage, and yet to remain withdrawn. He had, he believed, that day made much progress; there was beneath the appearance of intransigence and caballing a new spirit of respect for each other’s virtues in both Tim and Collihole.

  By evening, however, he was utterly exhausted. It was then that Meg’s comforts seemed dearest to him. Not most important but very valuable were the material comforts she offered: a good and cooling gin fizz in the private garden, dinner of cold duck and orange salad, preceded by a pâté made from the giblets, and followed by fresh strawberry shortcake. After the meal they sat in the morning room, because here, with windows and doors open, came the scent of the climbing pelargonia from the Victorian greenhouse on the one side and the scent of the tobacco plants from the window beds on the other. They drank iced hock and soda. They listened with Climbers, tranquil and entranced, to his favourite recording of Trovatore with Milanov as Leonora. When Climbers left they still had an hour or two to give to their reading.

  He was deep in the second volume of Godwin’s St Leon. The book, as he read, seemed to speak particularly to him. Godwin’s sense of the corruption caused by ambition, by self-assertion and, above all, by the use of absolute power for high moral ends, was his own article of faith. As he read the passages that told of St Leon’s tranquil, simple home in the Alpine sweetness, he found tears in his eyes as he expected the coming of that offer of the philosopher’s stone that would corrupt St Leon, bringing power and ruin in its wake. If only St Leon could accept the inevitable destructive forces of nature – the hailstones that reduced simple peasants to beggars overnight – and not seek the power to master the universe; if he could learn to ride the storm instead of fighting it …

  Meg, perhaps less deeply absorbed in checking The New Monthly Magazine book advertisements for obscure and forgotten novels of the seventeen-eighties, said suddenly, ‘I wonder if this theme will provide a whole book, David?’

  Absorbed in St Leon, he said abstractedly, ‘Perhaps hardly that. But I shouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t make quite a fascinating article.’ She made no comment. As he read on in St Leon he found himself in greater opposition to Godwin, though no less admiring. Godwin’s ultimate pessimism about man’s fate irritated him. It was born, of course, of a Calvinist upbringing – there was always a vengeful God withholding grace in the background, and suffering in having to withhold it, he thought with disgust, A masochistic God must produce a masochistic creature, no doubt. Then he thought how much he shared of Godwin’s masochistic pessimism; but I don’t go with it that far all the same, he decided. Perhaps if women in Godwin’s books –
St Leon’s wife, for example – had been less sweetly simple, had had more of Meg’s vitality and surprisingness, there would have been a less self-punishing determinism about the novels.

  He said, ‘Reading Godwin, Meg, makes me wish that abridgements were not impossibilities. It’s true that a few people knew Caleb Williams; but the importance of his other novels for the world today is so striking.’

  She said, ‘I didn’t find much in Fleetwood that threw light on our theme.’

  He said, ‘No, you’re quite right. I was just thinking his failure to depict anything like a sexual relationship is central to the weakness of his books. It’s a reflection, I’m afraid, of his own private life – an escape from the too rending memory of Mary Woolstonecraft. It makes him a minor novelist. But within his obsessive limits, he’s great.’

  She said, ‘Yes, I don’t know what we can do with him, do you?’

  He answered, laughing at the utilitarian implications of the phrase he used, ‘No, we shan’t get anything out of him.’

  He went back to his reading. It was only some time later that he was conscious of her closing a volume with a snap of the cover.

  ‘July, seventeen-eighty-seven finished, David,’ she said. ‘I’ll make a note of that for you.’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  He heard the hiss of a syphon and, reaching his arm over the back of his chair, he sought her hand to say good-night. But her voice came from the doorway. ‘Good-night, David,’ she said. ‘Don’t stay up too late, you may have a hard day ahead of you.’

  For a moment his mind went to Collihole and Tim. ‘Oh, Lord, so I may,’ he replied, but he heard the contentment in his own sigh. The door had shut and she was gone to bed.

  He read on, needing to see with horror St Leon fall to temptation before he could leave the book. When he got up from his chair the clock told half past one. He was conscious of the chatter and succeeding high trills of the nightingales in the copse at the garden’s end. As a rule the bird song was monotonous and tedious to his ear, but this evening it seemed to carry him away in pleasure over into the wood and on through to the forest. He thought, as he stood by the open window, of Meg perhaps awake in her room, listening with joy to the same song. It was then that he decided that this was the happiest evening of his life. He rejected the obsessive self-punishing voice that said it would soon be the only real kind of pleasure that man can know – nostalgic memory. He said firmly to himself, ‘It’s only one of a long chain of such evenings to come.’

  When Meg came down to breakfast the next morning, she was wearing a hat. David took in no details of its shape, no details of her suit – except that the colour which fuzzed and swam before his eyes was a sort of sickly biscuit. Immediately he saw the hat, he thought, I have known this for some time, she’s going. And yet this knowledge was only a voice among many in his consciousness, and all the others fused together from various memories to tell him that he had never thought of her leaving, that there was no reason why she should leave, that she was not, in fact, leaving, that there was nothing strange about her appearance save the hat. His vision steadied, ceased to revolve before him, and what came foremost to his now clear gaze was her eyes – they seemed not birdlike and bright as usual, but round like a lemur’s, staring in a sort of dotty surprise. She said, ‘David, I’m going this morning.’

  His mouth filled with bile and his stomach heaved nervously. He heard himself saying, like someone fencing on the stage, ‘I thought the Tunbridge Wells trip was tomorrow.’

  She said slowly, ‘I’m going from Andredaswood, David.’

  He spoke pleadingly, again hearing himself as though on the stage, ‘Look, if you’ll give me two days to settle the Collihole business, I’ll come with you if you’d like that. We could take the Gothic novels to the Rhineland. That would be rather amusing.’

  She sat down as though exhausted already with the scene to come. ‘You know that I mean that I’m going from here for ever.’

  The stagey, dramatic note of that last word made him giggle, and at the sound, she turned away as though she could not bear to see how much she would hurt him. She said, ‘David, you must have seen how I’ve felt in this last week. I must go to London, get a job, live on my own. For my own sake, and for yours.’

  The sane part of his mind insisted to David that he had known, and yet he could remember nothing but the conviction that she would stay, that their happiness was complete and final. He felt that the voice was trying to rob him of the right to feel badly treated. He said, ‘It’s that bloody man Grant-Pritchard who’s got at you.’

  ‘Oh, David, whatever sort of fantastic picture of our relationship have you built up? I haven’t thought of the man again. Oh, that’s not true. I’ve often thought of the implications of his existence and of people like him. I wrote to him, too, and got my money and a thumping good reference. But as for his influencing me! Really! Oh, please don’t make it difficult for me by refusing to understand. I’ve behaved badly enough.’

  ‘Meg,’ he said, ‘you’ve not behaved badly to me at all. You’ve made all the difference to my life. I’ve told you so. I think, if you ask me, not that you’re behaving badly now, but just crazily. I don’t speak only about the happiness you’ve given me, but about your own happiness here. You’ve said how happy you are; and even if you hadn’t said so, I’ve seen it for myself.’

  ‘Happiness?’ She queried the word. ‘Of course I’ve been happy here. I could go on being happy for some time if I gave no thought to what it meant. I’m to blame. I came here and fed on the calm you gave me and refused to give it up. But I was ill, David, you must grant me that. What I don’t understand is how you can confuse the real living peace that was in you, for all your unhappiness, all your tight discipline and self-repression, with the vegetable ease, the creeping lethargy that’s gradually paralysing you now that you’re what you call happy.’

  He shook his head, and she said, ‘No, you’re quite right. Now that you are happy. Oh, I’m not against happiness. Dear God, no. But how long will this last? This compromise, for that’s what it is, David. You give me calm, I give you happiness. You pretend to change things to the way that I want them for you. Yes, it is for you, as it was for Bill. That’s the way I destroy people, I suppose. And I pretend that I accept your pretence. I’ve tried to fool myself because I’ve wanted to be with you so much, but last night it came home to me too forcibly. You’ve given up the frets, the irksome things that pressed upon you – that Africa book; Else; probably you’ll gradually give up the nursery. But you won’t start the quartet again – why? Because it’s more cosy sitting with me reading all the books we read when we were young; and if I like to believe that out of it something constructive will come, a book worth writing, well, I’ll gradually learn that it won’t. Oh, you may not think that consciously; but that’s how it’s going. And it’s all my fault. I’ve just misunderstood. All the things I’ve tried to relieve you of – the nursery work that had no interest for you, playing in a poor quartet because of a woman you had nothing in common with, working on a book you despised. Yes, and no doubt living with a man you loved whom you never touched. All this self-denial and self-discipline which seemed futile to me was what made you apart, withdrawn – what gave you that calm that saved me when I was lost. And now slowly but surely the calm is turning into plain self-indulgent apathy, the irksome disciplines into pleasing triviality. And you just don’t notice it, David, that’s what I can’t understand. I’ve tried not to, but the sentimental, cosy futility of last night decided me.’

  He said slowly, ‘You only decided this last night! I see, Meg, you’ll go away for a while, but you’ll come back.’

  She made no answer, and he went on, asking, ‘Where will you go? You know how it was before.’

  She said, ‘Oh God, David, do you think I want to go back to that loneliness. But I can face it now, and that’s because of the help you’ve given me. Surely that I can take on loneliness again shows you how important I think
it is for us to break this up.’

  He said, ‘Meg, I haven’t made many plans for myself in my life, but don’t you see how horribly lonely I am going to be?’

  She answered slowly, ‘Indeed I do, David. It’s an agony to me to think that you will be so and to believe that if I wanted to, I could change it. Your loneliness is your strength, David. And anyhow, what does it mean? You will be alone. I will be alone. Were we any less so really when Bill and Gordon were alive? No, that’s casuistry. But all the same, for you, David, I know that loneliness and self-denial have made you somebody of strength, and I will not destroy it. Nor, David – let me be honest – will I destroy myself. You feel that apart, cut off from the world, you can live a life that, by not harming, helps the world. I’ve wanted to persuade myself into it because it soothed me; but for me the only way I can feel of use is to keep my curiosity, to be with people – yes, even awful people like Michael Grant-Pritchard. It’s no denial of your truth, but for me the only sense is to assert one’s faith in people by living among them. I’m quite a silly person, David, really.’

  She looked at him wearily. ‘I can’t produce more than platitudes, David, but don’t let’s hurt ourselves more than we need; we’re only such very unimportant specks among millions. I love this place, David, and you more than I could have believed. When time’s passed a bit, I’ll come for a visit. But don’t expect letters, I don’t write. But I’ll let you know that all’s well.’

  He said, ‘This is only a sudden impulse, Meg. You’ll come back.’

  She was silent, then she said very lightly, ‘I’ve flown in this, that, and the other direction, David, so that it’s very reasonable you should think so.’ She had made preparation enough, however, for a taxi to come, and for her luggage to be sent on after her. She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Don’t come to the station,’ she said and was gone.