by Angus Wilson
*
It was only ten days later that a letter arrived. ‘I’ve taken a job with two psycho-analysts – husband and wife, a very roly-poly, chuckling gemütlich middle-aged German and a funny, slightly common, intelligent, good-looking English wife who wears jeans. She’s years younger than him, she seems almost a girl. It will be interesting to see the witchdoctoring and voodoo from behind the scenes. And I’ve found a room near Regent’s Park that really isn’t at all bad, with a sort of Victorian landlady that I would not have believed existed. She’s a Baptist and never goes further than Baker Street or Swiss Cottage. She talked about having crossed the water five or six years ago to see a sister in Kennington! And all this is a little street behind that expense account world of Abbey Road.’ There were four pages of interesting things she had seen or heard.
David’s nursery seemed to envelop him into a mist where every sound or sight in Andredaswood came with the shock of an object walked into blindly.
No letter came then for many weeks. David’s loneliness, his unhappiness grew into unbearable tensions and insomnia. He spent much of his energy fighting a wish to hate and to blame her. One afternoon he heard Tim singing, ‘I’m a little boy that’s lost in a wood, misunderstood. Won’t you be good and watch, watch over me,’ his eyes filled with tears. It was a turning point. Such nauseating self-pity drove him at any rate to a determined course of self-control, so that gradually the unhappiness became a numbed pain. He remembered Gordon more and more, though Meg not less, yet he felt that Meg had perhaps only filled in the void that Gordon had left.
In this mood, he began to think again of ‘Africa’; he wrote to the publisher. They had found as yet no substitute author and he agreed to resume work on the book. He could not really tell whether this was because Gordon’s memory pulled him to it, or whether it was to escape from the misery that he felt in reading the Gothic novels without Meg beside him. He involved himself again completely in the nursery affairs. Tim was inevitably disappointed, and Eileen angry, but, it seemed, she found it easier to blame it all on Meg. Indeed the feeling they all had that Meg had treated him badly – and his obvious misery confirmed it – made his return to the nursery easier. When he mentioned that Meg was working for a psychiatrist, Climbers said, ‘I should think that might do her a lot of good, shouldn’t you, David?’ and Tim said quite simply, ‘I miss her.’
He received another long letter from Meg at Christmas. She was leaving the psychiatrists, she said, but on very good terms. ‘It’s been quite fascinating. They’re inclined to be godlike in their attitude to everybody, but it’s understandable really if you saw the ghastly wrecks they’ve helped. They have eighty per cent success! They’ve been very kind to me and I’ve met a lot of fascinating people through them. But I can’t accept their attitude to their two children; and as my motivation is all too obvious, and anyway, they’re hardly likely to listen to me, we discussed it all and agreed it was better that I should leave. They’ve given me a wonderful reference. I’m going to work with Helen Rampton, the Labour M.P. I thought a woman out for a career would be interesting. She seems an edgy, unsatisfied sort of woman with a strange and pleasing directness. I think we shall get on well together. She’s involved these days with what she calls “the old people scandal”; I seem to be back with “Aid to the Elderly” but from a rather more interesting vantage point. Funnily enough I got the job through some friends of Bill’s who used often to come to Lord North Street. I never knew them well, but I’ve seen a good deal of some of our nicer friends of those days.’
Then suddenly the writing changed. ‘David, I should dearly love to come to Andredaswood for Christmas, but I just can’t. I’m not free yet nor, I suspect, are you.’ There was a postscript. ‘I haven’t been able to keep away from ceramics. David, there’s a quite perfect very small object, what they call a chamber candlestick – Bow with a blue underglaze. Would you buy it for three hundred and fifty pounds? Why should you? It’s only that I should love to buy again and I should like to think of it at Andredaswood.’
David agreed. When it arrived, he thought it quite lovely. He hoped its presence might draw Meg down there again. Else Bode, who had returned to take over the housekeeping, thought it ‘unreal’. Mrs Paget, who had now come to live at Andredaswood so that Else could look after her, wondered what Gordon would say about the expenditure of so much money on a candlestick. A second stroke had left her still mobile, but with her mind impaired.
In the early spring, David got a letter from Hong Kong. Meg had gone there as secretary to a Labour delegation examining the social services of the Crown Colonies. ‘I can’t tell you how interesting work with Helen Rampton has been. She’s a desperately sad woman in many ways; she hasn’t got quite what’s required ever to become a minister, and she knows it. Yet it hasn’t made her ungenerous. She’s been extraordinarily kind to me. This trip, of course, has been a lifetime’s chance. I was terrified of what would happen when we went to Srem Panh, because I miss Bill so dreadfully still, and always shall. But we only stopped at the airport and it meant nothing. Nothing at all. My memories now of Bill are happy ones. And what I didn’t do for him I shall have always to suffer for. Something that could have been upsetting but in the end was only comic happened at Nairobi. An old American woman got on the plane for Colombo. She was that old globe-trotting Christian Scientist I told you about that was on the plane to Srem Panh with Bill and me. I thought she hadn’t recognized me but she had. As we got off she said with such an archness it was almost obscene, “Love’s a great healer, dear.” I suppose she thought that I’d married again, but as I was sitting next to Ronald Shuffler, the Trade Union man, who’s seventy-five and fifteen stone, it wasn’t very flattering.’
Towards the end of the letter she wrote, ‘As a matter of fact, I think I shall make a change when I get back. I know the political chatter now. I should like to see something of the industrial side of things. Old Shuffler suggested that I got a job as secretary to a personnel officer at some big works in the London area. It seems a good idea. At any rate in a few years at least, the modern world won’t be able to take me by surprise so easily again.’
There came other letters from Meg in her new job during the summer and autumn months. David was always aware that in the back of his mind he knew that she would return; and being so aware, he ceased to feel the possibility as a very real one.
About the Author
One of Britain’s most distinguished novelists, Sir Angus Wilson was born in 1913. Educated at Westminster and Merton College, Oxford he joined the British Museum as a cataloguer before being called up for service in 1941. His literary career began with a collection of short stories published in 1949. These were followed by other short-story collections, novels and plays.
Co-founder with Malcolm Bradbury of the MA programme in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, Wilson was appointed professor in 1967. Chair of many literary panels, including the Booker prize, and campaigner for homosexual equality he was knighted in 1980. He died in 1991.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Angus Wilson, 1958
The right of Angus Wilson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978�
�0–571–28684–3