The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  It was ridiculous, she thought; he was less than Bill’s age and he spoke to her as though she was a small girl.

  ‘I hope it won’t be too gorgeous,’ she said. ‘I imagine everything there to be in bright, eye-aching colours enough as it is.’

  ‘So you think the Orient may be a bit of a sell, what?’ He shouted this separated interrogative ‘what’ at intervals in his conversation, under the impression, she supposed, that he gave the effect of some portly Regency Admiral on the quarter deck.

  If it was shyness, as no doubt she ought to think it was, she could only hope to reduce his affectation by answering on as simple a level as possible.

  ‘The East isn’t really the part I’m looking forward to,’ she said. ‘All the disease and the dirt and the teeming millions.’ She spoke with an edge of irony, to set such a narrow Western point of view at a proper distance from herself. It annoyed her then when he ignored this separation.

  ‘I don’t imagine they see themselves like that.’

  ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘I know perfectly well that they’re taking over tomorrow.’ He did not answer and she asked almost angrily, ‘Well, is that what you meant?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said doubtfully and he looked away from her, seeking an escape from the conversation, but finding none, he added, ‘Yes, I suppose I did. But knowing’s one thing, feeling’s quite another. I imagine you’ll feel it all when you’re there. What?’

  ‘You exaggerate my powers of comprehension. I’m far from the sort of person who apprehends history in a flash; not even a few weeks in Singapore will be able to do that for me.’

  He laughed. ‘Good,’ he said and, although she could not be quite sure of what he was commending, she felt that he was accepting her a little for the first time.

  ‘But as to having a point of view,’ she said, ‘how can I? I don’t understand anything about them, and won’t in such a short visit. As for regretting that our day is over, whatever would be the good of that?’

  He made no comment and she felt the need to increase his sympathy at cost to herself.

  ‘Bill,’ she remarked, ‘thinks my compassion will be strained.’

  ‘By the teeming millions?’ he asked and they shared for the first time a smile of affection for Bill; but he withdrew from any further intimacy.

  ‘It’ll do Bill the world of good. To take the holiday in Australia and America, don’t you know?’

  ‘If I can keep him from rushing back for some brief,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, for the Lord’s sake, do,’ he urged her.

  She felt forced to admit to herself that he too might have been close enough to Bill to share in ‘intuitive communications’. ‘Have you been thinking that he was ill?’ she asked curiously; and his genuine surprise restored her self-esteem.

  ‘Ill?’ he asked. ‘No. Has he been?’

  ‘He thought he was,’ she said.

  ‘Oh! Probably. He’s thoroughly overworked. What?’ This time he threw his interrogative at her as though he would do her violence.

  ‘But he couldn’t live without his work,’ she cried, ‘that’s the trouble. I sometimes think he’s in love with those damned courts.’ As she spoke she asked herself why she was over-playing; and decided that she must assert to this waxy-faced man her closeness to Bill, even at the cost of appearing jealous.

  ‘Every love affair can get a bit stale,’ he said, ‘what?’

  She saw finally that she disliked him and his pretentious, knowing way of talking. ‘Do you mean that you think Bill isn’t any good at his job now?’ she asked. She took his smile to imply pleasure at making her angry.

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ he cried. ‘That’s part of the trouble. A less brilliant man wouldn’t have stayed the pace.’

  ‘I just don’t believe it. Bill adores his job. You should have heard him defending justice this evening.’

  ‘Defending? Why? Don’t you like justice?’

  ‘Oh! I’m a sentimentalist. I should have thought that was all too apparent. My heart’s always being wrung.’ Really, she thought, anyone who is watching us must think we both have some nervous tic – all these smiles and gestures of frivolity to cover our hostility.

  But immediately Donald spoke with a sudden uncovered fierceness. ‘And you don’t know whether Bill’s is?’ he asked. ‘Justice isn’t all Jehovah and thunderbolts, you know. It’s righting the wrongs of the innocent.’

  She answered now with a deliberate drawl to annoy.

  ‘It must be absolutely ghastly in the criminal courts,’ she said. ‘I never rejoiced so much as the day that Bill gave it up for civil cases. Except when we were left the money for this house,’ she added.

  He looked round the room and finally fixed his eyes on the rather massive jewellery that covered the equally massive bosom of a Park Lane financier’s wife.

  ‘Big Company cases are a bit remote from the human heart,’ he said. ‘That’s all I meant. But still Bill makes a lot of money, what?’

  She would not be put on trial by a sentimental failure, for that’s what he was – jealous of Bill’s greater success; but if there was something he wanted to tell her about Bill, it was her duty to hear it, however little she liked him.

  ‘Donald,’ she said. She had only once or twice before ventured his Christian name and then only to please Bill. ‘Do you really feel that Bill should …?’ But her question had to remain unasked, for Lady Pirie was upon them.

  ‘You’re not tiring yourself too much, Meg, are you?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure we all ought to go.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be very pleased if you all did, Viola.’ Meg hoped that the off hand answer would send her away, but it was clear she had come up to them with some purpose.

  ‘This is Bill’s friend Mr Templeton,’ Meg said. ‘Lady Pirie.’ She suddenly felt exhausted and beckoned to one of the hired waiters for a glass of champagne.

  ‘Meg never looks tired,’ Lady Pirie announced, ‘that’s the trouble. But she’s been bossing us around on the committee all the afternoon.’

  ‘Bossing you for your own good, what?’

  Even Lady Pirie seemed a little surprised by the booming fierceness of this fat little man’s tone.

  ‘Oh, we’re always the better for Meg’s advice,’ she said, and she seemed about to pat Meg’s arm, but finding it bare, ended with a vague gesture of protection.

  ‘What other young woman with all this,’ Lady Pirie waved her arm towards the room, ‘would spend afternoons getting something done for derelict old people.’

  ‘A great number much younger, my dear Viola,’ Meg said, ‘and with a great deal more than all this,’ she imitated Lady Pine’s gesture. There seemed to be an absurd conspiracy, she reflected, to make her out a sort of millionairess.

  ‘Wrung with pity? What?’ Donald’s ejaculation startled Lady Pirie. She looked at him as though he indeed belonged to the past century he affected. ‘Pity! We shouldn’t get very far if we approached our work in that state,’ she said.

  Meg could see that she felt him to be an opponent of Aid to the Elderly, but she was obviously not sure of the grounds of his opposition.

  ‘There’s still room for charity, you know. As long as it’s efficient and not thought of as charity.’

  Donald seemed to feel no wish to oppose this gruff, square lady so he merely smiled.

  ‘How efficient we’ll be when Meg’s away, I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ll do just what you want, Viola,’ Meg said. If she could not get Lady Pirie to go, she would at least prevent her embarrassing maternal praises before Donald’s cold fish eye.

  ‘Mr Templeton pleads in the criminal courts. He has to be stern,’ she added. She too could pat children on the head if she tried.

  It was clear that Lady Pirie had something more important on her mind than Donald’s profession, for she looked impatient. ‘Ah! I daresay some of these wretched cases one reads of are enough to make anyone stern. Although I must say we find in our job that being tough is just a
lazy way of avoiding the problem, don’t we, Meg?’ She looked up for approval at a modern lesson well learned. Meg smiled but Lady Pirie waited for no verbal agreement, she had seen her chance.

  ‘You mustn’t think I meant that Meg was hard when I said she was efficient, Mr Templeton. They don’t go together at all you know, in the work we do. No, she’s a model of practical kindness.’ And now, as though she had prepared sufficient introduction to satisfy social politeness, she said in a lower voice to Meg, ‘Go and be kind to my Tom, dear, will you? He’s afraid that you’re angry because he’s come in those corduroys.’

  Meg realized that she had so taken Tom Pine’s corduroys for granted that she had not noticed their incongruity with the rest of the company’s dress. She believed that half Viola Pirie’s trouble with her son came from treating him as a child, so she said, ‘I’m sure he’s not a bit afraid. Tom always has the courage of his beliefs. But I’d love to talk to him.’

  Lady Pirie smiled happily and, her task done, resumed her social duty.

  ‘You’d find it difficult to believe, Mr Templeton,’ she said in her usual loud brusque tones, as Meg moved away, ‘that our hostess of this evening was the same person as the efficient young woman …’

  Meg was glad to escape from Donald Templeton’s eye as he listened. Besides, she reflected, it was only because Viola Pirie had felt so critical in the afternoon that she thought it necessary to be so praising in the evening; for all her honest gruffness she was a strangely up and down woman; no wonder that Tom Pirie fought with her as he did.

  Meg thought of Bill’s charge that Tom Pirie was dirty-minded as she advanced towards him. He did have what her mother would have called a very peculiar look in his eye. But it was impossible to associate anyone as feeble with sex. I feel sure, she thought, that he’s never gone farther than pathetic masturbation fancies. She put the thought from her with disgust.

  ‘Well,’ he said as Meg sat down on the sofa beside him, ‘you’ve got the establishment here tonight all right, haven’t you?’ His voice was solemn and funereal, making his beard seem to belong more to the ghost of Hamlet’s father than to a young man in revolt.

  It annoyed her that if he must try to keep up with his generation, he should get it all wrong.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘none of these people have anything to do with ruling the country. A few of them have a financial pull, I suppose, but that’s their limit.’

  ‘The money bags are the ruin of this country,’ he said. He might have been one of his mother’s ex-colonial friends instead of an angry young man. His ideas were in a sickening muddle.

  ‘They seem to make you feel very superior,’ Meg said and she looked at his glass of beer. It annoyed her that he alone had insisted on beer.

  He disregarded her comment. ‘It’s the bottom, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What do you get out of it?’

  She was hard put to it not to dry him up by being playful, but she had determined long ago on helping him, because of Viola and because of what she herself had felt at his age – keeping a lifeline to her youth had somehow become very important since she had turned forty.

  ‘Partly pure pleasure. But not much, I agree,’ she said. ‘Partly it’s something I can do well. Partly they’re a lot of them important to Bill’s career.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘spending money to make money. Is it chargeable to expenses?’

  Heaven knew, she thought, what absurd imaginings of brutal virility were going through his head when he spoke to her like that; and the folly of it was that if he shaved off that beard and dressed only a little more carefully he would be very attractive no doubt to some girl (although she’d have to be rather soulful to take those mournful dark eyes).

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I don’t do the income tax returns. Would you like me to ask Bill?’ The introduction of Bill’s name, even in so facetious a context, made Tom look as though he’d been ‘threatened with the headmaster’, so she went on hurriedly. ‘A lot of them are old friends you know, like your mother.’

  ‘You won’t make much money out of her.’

  ‘We’re going away for six months. And so we asked our friends to a party. Does that satisfy you?’ She put it to him simply.

  He gazed round at the thirty or so guests. ‘Friends!’ he said, ‘you must be big hearted.’

  ‘What a sentimentalist you are!’ she cried. ‘Friend’s a perfectly good conventional word covering a great number of people who don’t touch one’s heart deeply. Will you feel happier if I say “The Gang” is here?’

  When he laughed, as now, he gave a high giggle even more out of keeping with his beard than was his hollow voice. ‘All right, you win,’ he said. ‘Anyway, who are they?’

  ‘Well, that’s Alice Ripley, and that’s a man called Turner who’s head of some sort of big trust, and those are the Pargiters, they run that gallery off Brook Street …’

  ‘Oh! Blimey,’ he said, ‘not the names.’

  Although the ‘blimey’ was an affectation there was a certain genuine youthfulness about his response that made Meg feel she was getting somewhere with him.

  ‘Just the general lines of business will be enough,’ he added. She had to laugh as she categorized, for his face showed how satisfied he was that the answer was as he expected.

  ‘Architects, lots of lawyers, of course, some business men …’

  ‘But cultivated,’ he interjected.

  ‘I hope so,’ she said, ‘a civil servant or two, a couple of painters and their wives.’

  ‘All at the top or on the way there,’ he announced with naïve triumph, ‘and what a glossy finish it’s given them.’

  ‘Now there you’re just being silly,’ she said. ‘Glossy’s quite the wrong word.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean vulgar. Not the least little bit,’ he tried to imitate a mincing, ladylike voice, but he was no mimic, ‘but glossy in the most gracious sort of way.’

  ‘Oh! Gracious living!’ she cried. ‘Really, Tom, you live on catchwords. If you mean pretentious, they’re not. And if you mean what you say, well why on earth shouldn’t people lead decorative lives?’ She chose the adjective to show that she had no intention of retreating.

  ‘You judge so much by surfaces,’ she went on. ‘This is the social face. But most of these people are hard-working, married couples absorbed in each other and in their children. That’s why,’ she told him, ‘we haven’t that deep sincerity of friendship that you seem to feel is the only justification for knowing people. You don’t, Tom, when you get to a certain age, if you’ve found any happiness. It’s Bill and me,’ she waved her hand, ‘and Alec and Rosamund Turner and all the other couples. We’re sufficient to ourselves. It doesn’t mean we don’t want to meet. But we are sufficient.’

  ‘Very cosy,’ he said.

  ‘No. Just as happy as we can manage in a not very easy world. Oh! I wouldn’t mind if you were complaining that we had no right to it because of others less fortunate, as I did when I was young. But you don’t care about that. You’re just jealous.’

  ‘Of this?’ he asked contemptuously.

  She smiled and nodded; then, ‘No,’ she cried. ‘I’m wrong. I judge everybody too much by myself. You may be more like my brother. I wish you could meet him. Not that you’d get on together, I expect. Generations are so different.’

  ‘Generations?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t that a catchword?’

  But Meg, serious, was not to be deflected. She allowed herself a moment of feminine silliness to be rid of his intervention.

  ‘Well, there it is. Some catchwords are true and some aren’t,’ she said.

  ‘I only meant that I think I get on with you all right.’ He stuttered as he said it and blushed as he saw that he had spat on her arm.

  ‘Then you probably wouldn’t get on with David,’ she said, thinking how awful it was for him not to be able to be intimate without spitting, and how impossible it was for her to register the one without the other. ‘David and I,’ she said, warmi
ng to her reminiscence, ‘reacted so differently to our background. We had a most impossible one, you know. Genteel penury.’

  ‘It’s my own,’ Tom said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she cried, ‘or rather not nonsense, but how different the same things can be. Your father was a distinguished man and your mother’s not only good but she has such marvellous good sense. My father was often called a very unsatisfactory man by people, or so Mother told us. He was certainly a very unsatisfactory husband and father. So unsatisfactory that in the end he just went away. To get away from the unsatisfactoriness, I suppose, but even that didn’t work very well, because he’d hardly landed in America before he died of pneumonia. And then Mother buckled to – that was always her phrase – and coped. Unfortunately poor dear, unlike your mother, she hadn’t the faintest idea how to cope. She had a little capital. Her father had been the headmaster of a successful private school. She tried her best to improve on it, but always with the rider that she should be known for a lady. I suppose she couldn’t help that, it was her generation. But it was fatal for us. All along the South Coast – teashops in the South Downs without enough winter trade to survive, a curio shop tucked away in a part of Hove that no one went to. David and I loathed every minute of it, her pluckiness and her failures. And there’s the difference between us. For all that, David now lives right on the middle of those ghastly Downs. And I can’t even go down to see him; I hate the memory of it so.’

  She looked up to see the Pargiters ready to depart. ‘I must say good-bye to them, but I’ll come back and finish my story. I think it’s important to you,’ she said, although by now she was not too certain how it affected him, only knew that she had found a ready vacuum to fill with a story she had long wanted to tell.

  She made her good-byes to the Pargiters, spoke here and there, saw that drinks were replenished. She noted with amusement that Poll had found the only faintly disreputable man present and Jill the only completely dead one. Viola Pirie she saw was hard at it with Donald Templeton, telling him of the need for men to help in organized charity; and Donald oddly looked flattered but less smug. Under all this activity her story ran on in her mind. She brought two glasses of champagne to the sofa, ‘No,’ she said authoritatively to Tom, ‘no more beer. You must drink champagne. Everyone needs a change now and again, dearie,’ she added in a cockney accent.