The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  ‘I see,’ she laughed, ‘a judge. Much more important than a Minister of Culture.’ All the same she had to get away for a moment on her own. ‘They’ll be calling our flight soon,’ she said, ‘I’ll just make use of the lavatory. I do like their signs. Whatever it says looks much prettier than “Ladies”.’

  ‘It’ll be very unhygienic,’ he said. ‘You’d much better wait.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘The one on the plane’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta.’

  Almost immediately their flight number was called. ‘Will passengers in transit proceed first to the barrier please. Passengers in transit first, please.’ That was their call. Meg hastened to move before Bill could call her back. He was inclined to fuss unnecessarily about aeroplane and train times.

  As she left Bill, she noticed that the eminent personage, followed only by the fat young secretary, had moved straight towards the restaurant exit without regard for any precedence of passengers in transit. And Bill had stood aside for him. His admiration for the man would almost certainly have been increased by this disregard for official instructions. Such complete certainty somehow always increased Bill’s admiration for people out of all proportion.

  As she reached the entrance to the ‘Ladies’, Bill’s voice sounded, calling her back. She turned for a second and signalled that there was no need to fuss. The party of earnest young men, she noticed, had broken up. The shirt-sleeved customs official had run up to the eminent personage’s secretary and engaged him in some lengthy explanation. They were gesticulating wildly. The eminent personage stood alone at the door, his back turned to all the fuss. Bill, nearby, looked ominously impatient. She opened the door of the ‘Ladies’ violently to show that she was hurrying.

  The place was as dirty as Bill had predicted. The humidity, heavy enough outside, seemed to seep from the pores of the cracked whitewashed walls as in some underground grotto. Up above where the ceiling cast shadows, lizards, inert and intent, lay flattened against the moist wall surface. Nevertheless, oppressive, almost disgusting though the narrow, high-ceilinged washroom was to her, its privacy and its gloom had given her the moments she needed to retire into herself, to accept the full impact of Bill’s preoccupation. Their childlessness had hung ominously over them for so many years, then struck in full guilt at her, and finally through his patient gentleness receded, so that for many years now she had accepted it as much or as little as she did the disparity in their ages. He could not help growing old ahead of her; she could not help being barren. If they did not accept these things they would destroy themselves. And now in the undercurrents of the last few days, in the lightening of the daily routine or in the fictitious sense of a new life that their long holiday suggested, Bill had unmistakably shown that his acceptance was hardly, painfully made. Her short moment of retiral had strengthened Meg to face his sorrow, to wonder how much and again how little she could do in these heaven-sent months of intimacy to ease it. It was not, she decided, only as wife that she must give herself up entirely to his renewal, but as daughter.

  The single tap of the water basin had a loose washer. As she turned it on there was a grumbling and groaning that startled her out of her reverie. And then almost immediately came the high, clipped Badai voice in its American-English accent calling the final notice of their flight. Startled into eager haste, she turned to the handbag she had placed on a wooden ledge to find her Cologne-soaked tissue pads. In too eager haste, for the bag fell from the ledge, scattering its contents in all the dark squalid corners beneath the basin. She could not see and, to the touch of her finger ends, numbed by the intense humidity, she might have been scrabbling among spiders instead of handkerchief and tissues. Everything seemed soft to her deadened senses. She felt hysteria mounting, then happily her lipstick holder gleamed in the darkness. Methodically she found each object, washed or dusted it, and replaced it in her bag. Then quickly but deliberately she cleaned her face with the tissue pads, peered into the dirty looking-glass, re-did her mouth. Even a lizard suddenly darting across the wall in pursuit of a fly could not disturb her now. She was freshened, ready to see things in perspective, yet not evading her sense that a crisis in their lives had come upon her unawares and that she must deal with it. She was not as Bill had put it ‘rattled’.

  Above the loud noise of aeroplane propellers, she thought for a moment that she could hear him calling to her and noted how frayed his nerves must be that his impatience could so outweigh his sense of decorum. She heard cries and shouts and hoped that Singapore would not be too noisy. She prepared her phrase to meet Bill’s impatience – ‘Well, I’m late, darling, but not too late. So I don’t intend to apologize.’ She swung open the door and walked almost into the arms of Miss Vines.

  The stewardess pushed her back through the door into the ill-lit cellarlike room. Even in the gloom her eyes looked out from her rather stupid, regulation-made-up face with a parodied solemnity that hardly concealed her feverish excitement.

  ‘Mrs Eliot,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you should go back into the restaurant yet. There’s something I have to tell you.’

  Meg’s first thought was that she was confronted by a lunatic; she had felt in the plane that the girl was neurotic and unsatisfied; horrors lay so very little below the awful dead monotony of the suburban mind. Then she knew.

  ‘It’s Bill,’ she cried, ‘he’s ill.’

  Miss Vines tried hard to reach some communication of individual compassion, but it was so difficult – there were so many passengers in her life. She put her hand on Meg’s arm, but it was shaken off.

  ‘Don’t be absurd, you silly girl,’ Meg said, ‘I must go out to him.’

  When Miss Vines did speak, she sounded as though she were delivering the keyline in a play. ‘He’s very ill, I’m afraid. He’s been shot.’

  The strangeness hardly reached Meg at that moment, she thought only, she’s using the conventional words to tell me that he’s dead. She followed Miss Vines out into the restaurant with a slow, numbed walk. The chattering, excited crowd divided at Miss Vines’ words to let them pass through. She saw in a blur out of the corner of her eye the pale student being dragged away by two uniformed men. He was without his glasses, blood was pouring from where his nose was smashed flatter than ever against his amber cheeks.

  Meg had a sudden vision of the whole scene as part of some film – this must be how it was on the sets. For a moment she felt a violent anger against them all for making a cardboard scene out of Bill’s life and her own. But then the unimportance of anything overcame her so completely; she thought, now I’m supposed for some reason to act with dignity, since there’s no point in any action any more.

  A second later she saw Bill’s face, chalk white, and saw his blue lips moving. She turned on Miss Vines almost as though she would strike her.

  ‘You told me he was dead,’ she cried. Those precious seconds when Bill needed her, wasted by this wicked girl’s stupidity! She knelt on the tiled floor by Bill’s head.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘can you see me? It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.’ And as though to echo her, Bill’s voice came very slowly and in a whisper she could hardly hear.

  ‘We’ll keep going,’ he said. But his eyes seemed quite dull and staring.

  Her body trembled in a convulsive effort to restrain any tears or cry. A woman’s voice behind her said, ‘Ah! la pauvre dame!’ And then a tall man was bending over Bill, cutting away his shirt and trousers from his stomach. Holding Bill’s hand, stroking his arm, Meg looked up. ‘Are you the doctor?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t these fools get a doctor?’

  ‘Je suis médecin, Madame,’ the tall man said. He had a purple birthmark on his neck. ‘Calmez-vous. Votre mari ne souffre pas beaucoup. Il a subi une très grave choc.’

  Were they all mad suddenly that they had begun to talk to her in French?

  ‘Je vais lui faire une piqûre de morphine,’ the tall man said and, rolling up Bill’s sleeve, he plunged the needle into the
crook of his arm. Bill’s face, so flabby now in its paper whiteness, twitched for a second. The tall man stood up. ‘Il ne faut donc pas faire trop grande attention à ce qu’il dira,’ he said.

  Meg strove to give meaning to his words. Perhaps he was telling her that Bill would be out of his mind. Well, if so, she would make a life for him somehow, anything so long as he still had a life to make. Always these foreground actors playing some absurd role, and out of the line of Meg’s vision this crowd of absurd extras dressed as Chinese, Badai, Americans, Indians, and God knows what. She would not allow them to obtrude upon the reality of herself and Bill.

  ‘The ambulance is on its way, Mrs Eliot,’ Miss Vines said timidly. ‘I have to go now.’ And to echo her words came again the ridiculous clipped American Badai voice.

  ‘Passengers for B.O.A.C. Flight Number five-nine-three please.’

  Meg did not look at her. Let them do their role of ‘The play must go on’; she was intent on Bill, stroking his hand, mopping the sweat from his forehead with a Cologne pad.

  ‘This is Mr Dykes,’ Miss Vines said, ‘our Srem Panh representative. He’ll look after you, Mrs Eliot.’

  What a disgustingly inept time for introductions and strange surnames! Nevertheless Meg made herself smile vaguely in the direction of a silly little reddish moustache and a common accent that said, ‘Your husband acted like a hero, Mrs Eliot. The Minister doesn’t want to intrude but he’s asked me …’

  ‘Please,’ Meg said, ‘I don’t want to hear all this now. I want to be with my husband.’

  ‘Oh, of course, I quite understand’; the common voice was faintly patronizing. ‘We’ve telephoned to the British Consul.’ He said it with pride. These irrelevant emotions in the voices that came to her made her feel, as the words in French had done, that she and Bill were lost among a crowd of lunatics. She dreaded so that this sense of being at the mercy of people with no hold on reality might penetrate poor Bill’s clouding consciousness. She held his hand more tightly.

  ‘I’m looking after you, darling,’ she said. ‘It’s Meg. I’m looking after you, Bill.’

  His words were blurred now; she could only just distinguish them – ‘Can’t afford to go out now,’ he seemed to be saying. The tall man for some extraordinary reason insisted on shaking hands with her. ‘Je regrette mais il faut que je continue mon voyage, Madame,’ he said. ‘Mais vous pouvez me croire, les médecins indigènes sont excellents. Ils feront de leur mieux.’ And a little sallow woman, apparently his wife, for he murmured, ‘Madame, ma femme’, said, ‘Soyez tranquille, chère Madame, le bon Dieu vous gardera.’ It was ludicrous.

  In the ambulance, seated on a small pull-down seat by the side of Bill’s stretcher, she felt thankful for the strange, amber, cat-faced men in white. Where Europeans might have attempted some conventional expression of speech and feature, they gave her decent silence and only the occasional gaze of their large solemn eyes. The anonymous heaven had turned to hell, but even so the anonymity offered its solace.

  Bill’s breathing had become strained and, although he gave no consciousness of pain, it rose now and then to a kind of involuntary groan, most dreadful to her because it seemed to be taking his humanity from him. He muttered occasionally, but though she strained to hear him she could catch no stray word, no more than a faint sighing. Before they reached the hospital he had slipped from druggedness into death, Meg sensed it only from a slight relaxation of the two attendants, but she had been deceived before, deceived out of precious moments when he needed her; death should not find her again so easy, so shamefully easy a believer.

  They came to a halt; the attendants opened the door and a small soft hand took her arm and helped her down. A tiny little Badai nurse craned to hold a huge umbrella over Meg’s head towering above her. The rain thundered and splashed around their ankles as they ran into the doorway. Through the now thin, dreary moonlight Meg could discern long glass-fronted balconies above them. She imagined hundreds of faces – brown, yellow, white – pressed to watch their entry. We’re giving an all-night show at any rate, she thought bitterly. She saw herself and Bill praising this wonderful modern hospital of which the Badais were no doubt so bloody proud.

  They were taking the stretcher in at another door. She turned and ran towards it. ‘Where are they taking him?’ she cried. With the little nurse in pursuit, crying, ‘All right, all right,’ she ran, stumbled, fell into a pool of rainwater, bruising her knee, cutting her hand.

  A man came and lifted her up. ‘Come along this way, Mrs Eliot.’ The voice was refined, Edinburgh. ‘The doctors are with your husband now. There, there,’ he said like any old Scots nanny. ‘Come and sit down a moment.’

  He was a black-haired, flat-chested man with a little moustache and timid green-flecked brown eyes; beneath his transparent macintosh she could see a white dinner jacket.

  ‘I’m Marriot,’ he said. ‘British consul. They’re a wonderful crowd of doctors here, I can tell you.’ He took her into a small waiting room with palm trees in pots.

  ‘Dear me, that’s a nasty little cut on your hand.’ He called to the nurse in Badai. In a moment everything was washings, dressings, an injection. ‘You have to be very careful of cuts here, you know. We’re not in England now.’

  He was so calm and soothing and nannylike that she wanted to hit him; but she simply stared into space and said nothing. And now to add to the nightmare absurdity a little red-haired, coppery-faced, lioness-like woman, with plastic macintosh covering a long white nylon evening dress, came up and touched Mr Marriot on the arm.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the doctor’ll be here in a moment with the report.’

  For a second Meg looked at him defiantly. She must make up to Bill for her faithlessness, for walking behind Miss Vines slowly, for leaving him alone in those precious moments of consciousness, for accepting his death so easily. Now they would have to tear acceptance out of her. And then suddenly she slumped, exhausted, on the wooden bench. This, she thought, is the first moment of losing Bill, losing the only presence of him that I can understand, oh, pray God that there will come some other presence of him to be with me in these dreadful, dead years ahead.

  ‘There’s no need for the doctor to come,’ she said dully, ‘I know that my husband is dead.’

  ‘Ah, you’ve known it all along.’ Mr Marriot’s genteel voice was full of sad kindness; and Mrs Marriot put her hand on Meg’s arm and stroked it. But Meg could feel their burden lighten, as though she had owned up to stealing the chocolates and they would no longer have the sad, painful, tiring task of keeping the whole school in.

  At their urging she went into the long, high mortuary room in which Bill’s body lay, his eyes closed now, on a hospital bed. Memory and love and a terrible pity fought together in her exhausted mind, and an aching love emerged as master; but even so she kept tight a small part of herself, frozen and separate, for she knew that, if she were ever to find him as he would be with her for the future, she must not hold on to him as he had been. Only she wanted to announce to him that everything that in any way had to do with him – even this corpse so soon to be given over to strangers and then to decay – was the object of her utter love and reverence. She bent down and kissed his lips.

  It was so difficult not to hate the Marriots and their kindness as part of the whole obscene and sudden horror that had come out of nowhere and engulfed her.

  ‘The great thing now is rest,’ Mr Marriot said, as he started up the car. ‘Doctor Maung has given us these tablets. They’ll help you to sleep, Mrs Eliot. You’ll stay with us just as long as you feel the need. If there’s anyone at home you want me to cable to, please tell me. Mind you, they’ll see it all in the newspapers tomorrow.’

  She looked at him through her exhaustion as though he had emerged from the shadows to show her the face of a lunatic.

  ‘Ah, yes, I’m afraid so,’ he said hurriedly. ‘But nobody’ll worry you about it. I’ll see to that.’

  Her attempt at a smile embarrassed
him even further.

  ‘You’ve come at a terrible season,’ he said. ‘The monsoon you know. Hence our appearance. I always think these plastic macintoshes make people look like strips of celluloid.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Meg said, ‘that everything appears to be made of celluloid at the moment.’

  It was a simple and exact statement – the nearest thing she could find to break her silence in the politeness due to him. He took it as a request to meet at a deeper level.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘like a film. Yes, I’m afraid it must all seem very unreal. Or rather not afraid, for the shadow-show we all play in is a poor one at best. And if grief brings us glimpses beyond it, well …’

  At the back of the car Mrs Marriot stirred. ‘Everybody’s bound to seem absolutely unreal,’ she said, ‘unreal and bloody.’ Her voice faintly stirred surprise in Meg – it was not Scotch but a husky strangulated, upperclass contralto. ‘The only thing we can do,’ Mrs Marriot went on, ‘is to keep the other unreal, bloody people away from you. And one good thing is that after this is over, you’ll never see us again. You needn’t hate or like us, you needn’t remember us or even think about us again. We’re just here to keep stupid annoyances away and make things a bit easier.’

  Meg strove to acknowledge this kind realism; but how could she, for the reality was simply that she couldn’t feel them as individuals at all, only as part of the dead weight that had suddenly fallen upon her; their voices were no more than misconceived sound effects that like the thrashing rain added to the unreality of this improvised melodrama. By some fantastic error they had shot into the audience and killed Bill; now they were asking her …

  But her unhappiness broke through the comfort of such metaphors, she could think of nothing but Bill lying dead in that room. A horrible fantasy that he was only drugged, that at this very moment these wicked cat-faced people were using his body to increase their command of Western skills, seized her so strongly that she put her hand to the door. She mastered her hysteria, turned with a desperate smile to Mrs Marriot in the back of the car, and surprised her greedily munching a bar of chocolate.