The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  To her surprise when she returned to the room Bill seemed to be talking happily with Donald, the American and, of all people, Jill. She set about releasing him from his own good nature, however – making good-byes to those who were prepared to leave and drawing into the atmosphere of their departure those who showed no signs of going. It amused her to hear Bill detach himself from his group, saying, ‘Meg’s pushing people off. It’s just as well, I’m afraid, because she’s given herself no rest before our journey tomorrow.’ He was probably paying her out for not having been on the spot when she was needed. She decided to say nothing about David as the cause of her absence. To Donald, as he put on his coat in the hall, however, she remarked as casually as she could, ‘You see how you impress me. I’ve already decided that Bill has to be coddled. All my guests got rid of before midnight’s finished sounding!’

  He stared at her intently for a second, then, ‘You both of you keep it up a bit too much. What?’ he said.

  Meg had been mistaken in her boast, as she saw on turning back into the drawing room. Jill stood in the corner of the room looking into the china cabinet. It was odd enough that Jill should bother with the Meissen or the Nymphenburg, it was odder still to Meg when she saw that Jill was smiling at her own reflection. And yet she had every reason to smile, for she had lost her grey grimness and, in her dress of silver and pink brocade – heaven knew how old and now almost fancy dress – she was for a moment the rather deadly beautiful, but quite perfectly beautiful person who had set such an impossible standard in their youth. She turned as Meg moved and came towards her.

  ‘You’re quite flushed, Meg,’ she said. ‘What is it with? Triumph, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, Jill,’ Meg felt she could not stand it. ‘Don’t go on, for God’s sake. It’s been a ghastly evening, as you know.’

  To her amazement, tears appeared at Jill’s lashes. ‘Meg, my dear. I was quite awful this afternoon. I had no right to speak to you like that. You know the reason. I said it quite honestly – jealousy. But I had no right to be jealous. None at all. Look at all the pleasure you give to people. To me. I’ve had a wonderful evening. That man Anderson knew the Barkers and the Crossthwaites. All the people that were our friends when Andrew was stationed at Malta.’

  It was at once so absurd and so touching that Meg could find no answer; but she had no need, for as Bill came back into the room, Jill went up to him.

  ‘Have a lovely holiday, Bill,’ she said. ‘You spoil Meg. But go on doing so, she has a right to it.’

  Bill looked at her quizzically. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘I shall do my best.’

  ‘What’s she bellyaching about now?’ he asked, when Jill had gone. ‘What the hell’s it got to do with her?’

  Meg said, ‘No, Bill. She wasn’t being critical. She was being sentimental about me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s a change. I’m glad though, because she was rather nice this evening. What’s put her in that soft mood?’

  ‘She met someone who’d known people who’d known Andrew.’

  ‘Andrew?’ he asked, turning from the preparation of their whiskies.

  ‘Andrew. Really, Bill. Her husband.’

  ‘Oh! Andrew.’ He paused. ‘It’s a pity, isn’t it?’ he added. ‘Talk about spoiling you. She’s spoilt herself with this hallowed memories stunt. Don’t you do that, Meg, when I die. It suggests such a lot that she should have done when he was alive, and didn’t. Much better take to drink like old Poll.’

  Meg laughed. ‘You know I honestly don’t think, darling, that she was drunk. You can never tell with her now. She keeps up that line of hers so.’

  ‘Well, why not? It amuses a lot of people, I suppose. Young Pirie’d become quite human. He told me just why the job I got him at Carthews stank.’

  She sat swilling her whisky in its glass, letting it slop to the brim but never spill. Then a drop splashed on her dress and it brought her to life again.

  ‘You liked the evening?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. I was a bit worried about your overtiring yourself. But it went very well, I thought. Bessemer played an appalling game of bridge. You can never tell with Americans what their standard’s going to be. But he’s a pleasant and interesting person.’

  She said, speaking each word with deliberation, ‘I am looking forward to the holiday, Bill.’ Then she added, ‘You’re a much nicer person than I am, you know.’

  He came over and kissed her. ‘You must go to bed,’ he told her.

  *

  Sexual satisfaction, adding to her exhaustion, yet lent her a wakeful ease. She felt as though she were floating above the bed in the cool darkness of the room. She shut her eyes. Colours and shapes turned to unwilled scenes and faces from the past – absurdly dominating them, her mother’s with her neck scrawny and yellow against her pearls and her large brown timid eyes. It had always been her mother’s neck and eyes that in her last years had been the focus of Meg’s exasperation in their mute demand for pity. She tried to will the image away, to summon others, but all that came were hideous, distorted versions of the same wretched appeal Bill, in his sleep, moved his arm from under her and turned on his side. She opened her eyes and said, ‘David rang me up, darling. He would have done so before, but Gordon has been ill.’

  He was too far gone in sleep to understand her. ‘That’s all right,’ he mumbled. ‘We’ll keep going.’

  The phrase returned to Meg many times as Bill slept beside her in the aeroplane on the night after they left Paris. A whisky, a glance at the stockmarkets in the air-flown Times, a few pages of The Portrait of a Lady – he had insisted that he had better ‘give all these Maisies and Daisies a second trial’ since she found so much in them – and he had fallen asleep even before the beastly, dormitory-like semi-darkness, which was all that the air company allowed to encourage sleep, had transformed the cabin from two double rows of human beings carefully preserving their privacy and individuality in absorbed, petty occupations into a frightening, passive, ghostlike assemblage of contrasted breathings. It was not alone the irritating pilot light, nor the scrabblings and whispers of Miss Vines, the stewardess, and of Mr C. T. Colman, the steward, nor even the sense of Greece and Turkey and the sea so many thousand feet below them, that kept Meg desperately awake, absurdly fighting the effects of a sleeping pill while pretending to welcome them; it was all these and, above all, a horror of joining this mass of dormant humanity, led into their passivity by her own husband. She pictured him as a Pied Piper and they as rats or children – it didn’t really seem to matter which. He could surrender without a qualm because he was sure of keeping going, sure of arrival and, if not sure of what they would meet there, sure of his capacity to deal with it. But flying through space like this, with the tattered fragments of her normal daily life torn from her by the furious gale of changing time and place, she felt herself without any of the magic protection that being Mrs William Eliot of 102 Lord North Street gave to her, naked to meet the mysterious demands that would be made upon her by this destination that was coming so rapidly towards her through the darkness. She needed all her powers to retain her identity for herself, let alone to preserve or to create a personality to meet a changed, unfamiliar outside world. I’m like the creatures in Looking Glass land, she thought. I have to run twice as fast even to stay where I am.

  At first, as the struggle for and against sleep tore her apart, she welcomed the ridiculous clock changes which brought morning closer and with it the banishment of the breathing zombie orchestra around her. But as the hours passed, she began to feel a strange calm unity with this sleeping world, and then she resented the stupid racing forward of the clock hands. At first her personality had been threatened and now that, in the stillness, she felt some hope of finding it, ‘they’ were trying to shorten the already brief time left to her. It was not indeed unity, she realized, that she was finding among the universal sleep – even Miss Vines and Mr Colman had now lapsed into puppy-like whimpering dreams, appropriate to their youth �
� it was sovereignty. She was Alexander Selkirk. Even dear Bill, mouth half open, was a brute in this context, and the white-haired smiling-eyed American lady opposite certainly a dishevelled old fowl in her hunched up sleep. But if like Alexander Selkirk, far better really than he, for she was feeling at least no need of ‘alarms’ and could rule in this solitary place. Let this monstrous forward putting of the hands of the clock only be prevented, and at last, here high up above she did not really know what – Turkey or perhaps Syria by now? – above this anonymous land, among these surrendered people, she would perhaps have the chance to come to terms with the ‘In Between’, to accept a void and still to remain herself unsurrendered. She felt, as it seemed for the first time in her life, a mysterious mingled calm and elation. But behind the mystery came one of those commonplace convictions of serial repetition, a sense that the experience was not new, had indeed happened to her again and again, though the particular visitations eluded her memory. She tried to thrust the conviction from her, knowing that, in searching her memory, she would dissipate her new found peace.

  It was too late; the act of memory woke other activities more destructive still. Her sense of the ridiculous cams into play – her vision seemed to her now no more than a childish confusion between ‘clock time’ and ‘real time’. But if this confusion was there she knew it was not integral to what she had experienced. Drowsily puzzling over her muddled thoughts, she fell into an unquiet sleep.

  She awoke to a hand shaking her arm and a soft voice lapping over the edges of a fast vanishing, troubled dream. ‘Don’t miss the dawn, dear.’

  It was the old American lady, all freshened with eau de Cologne, her smiling blue eyes full of the hope and beauty that dawns notoriously offered. ‘The dawn over the desert,’ she was explaining. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, but it always remains a miracle.’

  Meg succeeded in parrying this overture to contact at a deeper level by a smile sufficiently sweet to be appropriate, yet sufficiently vague to suggest isolation. She saw that Bill had left his seat and wondered if perhaps he had already been driven to seek refuge in the lavatory by the same ‘spiritual’ onslaught. Now that she was awake he would, of course, deflect it all on to her. For her own escape she determined on a deep concentration upon the world outside. The sunrise she found altogether too ‘striking’ to provide any but secondhand images, but she stared at it as though literally entranced. The thought of Bill’s embarrassment, caught alone and fresh from sleep by sunny smiles and eau de Cologne and beautiful morning thoughts, made it difficult for her not to break her trance with giggles, until she suddenly realized that in all his life apart from her – his professional days, the years before they had met – he must often have encountered the embarrassing or the absurd, yet she had no idea of how he would react if she were not there. She felt suddenly so cut off from him that when he returned, red, smooth, and smelling of after shave lotion, she immediately took his hand and pressed it. And when he frowned slightly but comically towards the American lady and lifted one eyebrow to express the horror of what he had gone through, it was only by herself going off to wash that she prevented herself from kissing him on the spot and so even further embarrassing him.

  It was not until she returned to her seat that the desert seized her. Looking back later in the full grip of its blank sadness, she could hardly believe that a false introduction – the interposition of an unwanted personality-could have prevented her in that first sight from being possessed by it. It was true that the beauty of its subtle range of colours – the endless varieties of brown and grey and white – had been lost to her in the conventional and expectedly ‘startling dawn’, but even so its frightening sadness must have been there. Or perhaps not; the possession was a gradual one; it was only as it went on hour after hour of rock and of meaningless plateaux and of shelves marked by equally meaningless windblown tracks, of great white lakes that deceptively promised water but were only saltpans, that she found herself lost in it, completely and absolutely bereft of all that made sense of her life, forsaken, and ready for annihilation. She had tried every offer of escape. She talked to Bill about Paris – how incredible that Madame Royaut’s mother at their usual little hotel should actually be a hundred years old; how good all the same Carmen could be when as at the Opéra no attempt was made to tone down the vulgarity; how incredible that he should have remembered exactly the bookshop in the Rue Saint-Jacques after all these years. She felt only as though she must be appearing to mock his little surprise visit to Paris by the inattention of her words. She attended to the American lady: how her name was Fairclough; her late husband a hardware millionaire; her widowed years devoted to travel; her favourite corner of favourite England Broadway, Worcestershire, in springtime, so unlike their own noisy Broadway – she was more of a stranger in New York than in London, Rome, or Tokio; her home town, in fact, Denver; her married daughter devoted to the violin, making that instrument indeed add to God’s harmony; her own life wholly changed by Christian Science, particularly by the banishing of a foolish, old, false claim of bronchial asthma.

  But Mrs Fairclough’s story evoked neither sympathy nor amusement from Meg. She was only a distracting insect buzzing in her ear far away in the confines of the desert. Yet Mrs Fairclough was hardly a test of the force of humanity’s pull against the spell of dead nature. Meg recalled with self-mockery how much their circle exclaimed about her passionate curiosity in people and how much she liked the reputation.

  She tried the ‘passionate curiosity’ out on Miss Vines bringing iced orange juice, fried eggs, and marmalade. Twenty-six, she decided, sexually attractive, but a disappointed mouth – could it be a long, dragging affair with a married man, or an innate frigidity that kept men short of proposing marriage? But she felt suddenly dissatisfied with all this feminine instinct for understanding; it was nothing but women’s magazine advice-to-readers stuff. She tried again with Miss Vines, more sociologically: suburban – Bromley perhaps, or Epsom, or no, maybe nearer London Airport – Windsor. Certainly, to use a phrase and, in describing people, a phrase was everything – ‘she had become as neat and cellophane-covered as the forks and knives she dispensed to the passengers’. But the phrase didn’t work – she didn’t care a damn about Miss Vines, who was less than a handful of sand from the desert. And as to the fat, smooth businessman and his young wife, pale skinned and gently attentive, whether they were Siamese, Burmese, Chinese, or any other ‘ese’ she neither knew nor cared. Her eye had to follow these strange grey-brown patterns to the end of their desolation, to where she herself was utterly lost.

  In desperation she turned to her last hope of escape. She opened The Mill on the Floss and began to read of Maggie Tulliver’s visit to Aunt Pullet. The humours of the book she knew by heart, so that they could do no more than revive laughter that echoed back to her childhood. There was no sound there sufficient to break a desert silence; she had not expected it. But Maggie herself, Maggie (Meg), the girl with spirit enough to follow her thoughts and dreams out of the narrow defeated home she had been born in; surely Maggie’s tragedy would work its old spell upon her. She turned the pages rapidly, reading the familiar scenes more quickly to force them into life. It was no good; farmhouses, lawyers’ parlours, fields, woods, and fatal river – Warwickshire seemed lost forever.

  She sat now listlessly, only her eyes fixed feverishly on the wonderful monotony below them – so much more fearful and more beautiful than Chirico and his kind, by imposing on it their stupid child’s nightmares of broken columns, severed arms and piano shapes, had ever warned her.

  Bill laid down The Portrait of a Lady.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s all very well done. But I don’t know that I shall read any more. These high-spirited, upstanding girls like Isobel Archer, out to conquer the world with their youth and gusto, they don’t appeal to me. Perhaps I’m too old for them.’

  At any other time Meg would have been overwhelmed or driven to fight back. Isobel Archer, and Maggi
e Tulliver face down on the table and, in the rack above, among the coats and suitcases, Emma and Lily Dale – all these girls were her, only that, born in a later century, she had avoided their defeats; but their high spirits and their high hopes were hers exactly. Now Bill’s dismissal of Isobel seemed only to underline the desert that cut her off from him, and, if from him, from all humanity. She turned a very wan smile upon him. His anxious solicitude was immediate and almost paternal.

  ‘Meg,’ he said, ‘this travelling’s worn you out.’ He called to the steward for two brandies. ‘You haven’t slept, my dear, that’s the trouble. But we’ll be in Singapore not long after midnight.’

  She drank the brandy slowly and then forced herself to try to bridge the gap. ‘How long does it go on for?’ she asked.

  ‘The desert? Oh, pretty well till we get to Karachi, I think. Why? Does it get you down?’

  She laughed hysterically. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Just that. I’m down there and it’s got me.’

  For a moment she feared that he would laugh, but he said, very seriously, ‘I see. Of course, I’m familiar with it already from the boat but … Do you feel lost in the immensity?’ He could not keep a certain puzzled irony out of his voice as he spoke the cliché.