The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  Meg stared in amazement. ‘I do think, considering everything, that I might be spared hysteria,’ she said. She frowned. ‘Treated her in what way anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘The Badais are not fools,’ Mrs Marriot said. ‘And if they’re hypersensitive, it’s because they’ve known what some Europeans can be like. Only in a minority, of course. The Dutch, on the whole, were splendid. But in any case that’s all over. There’s no room for colour prejudice now. With Communism at the door we can’t afford the least sign of it.’

  Meg lit a cigarette before she spoke. She noticed with annoyance that her hands trembled. ‘Mrs Marriot, please try to understand. I have no colour prejudice of any kind. If I said the wrong thing last night I was hardly in the state to know what I was saying. I remember nothing. But if you want me to be in love with these people, I can’t. I don’t want anything to do with them that I can avoid. Them or their country. I just want to get away from the place where this ghastly thing has happened.’

  Helen Marriot got up and, with her back to Meg, straightened the pink and scarlet gerbera in the bowl on the dressing table. Without turning round, she said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mrs Eliot. I’ve behaved abominably. I’ve shown less than no understanding. But this … this business needs such careful handling. The least thing might be interpreted in the wrong way and then Jimmie will get the blame.’ She paused and when Meg made no comment, she added, ‘It wouldn’t be the first time, but it might be the last.’

  ‘Look, Mrs Marriot,’ Meg said, ‘I’m sure we’re both perfectly nice people. At least let’s hope so. Circumstances are against our showing it to each other. But it doesn’t matter. As you said yourself in your very understanding words to me last night in the car, “You needn’t remember or even think of us again.” And that goes for you too. I see from what you say that life here isn’t easy for you. Ordinarily I should ask you more about that,’ she smiled, ‘I’m thought to be a very sympathetic person. But at the moment I simply haven’t room for anyone else’s troubles. But I don’t want to be a cause of worry to anyone. The sooner I can go the better. It would be such a help if you would stop treating me like a child or a lunatic. If you would answer my question, when does the doctor say I can leave?’

  ‘He spoke of a week.’ Helen Marriot made it sound like a year; and it echoed so in Meg’s mind.

  ‘A week!’ she exclaimed; then she thought, why does it seem like eternity when I have all my life to be alone and only a week to be here with Bill; but she quickly corrected the thought – Bill was with her wherever she went.

  Helen Marriot went to the window and looked out. ‘I can’t get them to use the sprinklers with any common sense,’ she said and went straight on, ‘If you had someone to accompany you, you might be able to travel sooner.’

  ‘Maybe. But as there is no one we must only hope that the doctor is over cautious.’

  Helen did not turn round. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘although …’

  But Meg’s voice sharp, shrilly angry interrupted her. ‘Mrs Marriot, you’ve sent for my brother. It’s utterly indefensible. You both of you know exactly what I said about his cable. It’s unnecessary and unfair on him. He’s a very busy man and he can’t afford it. Well,’ she paused, ‘we’ll just have to send another cable cancelling whatever silly thing you’ve said.’

  Helen Marriot turned round. She summoned all the anger that guilt had brought to her. ‘Now, look here …’ she began.

  But Meg would hear nothing. ‘There’s no more to be said about it,’ she cried. ‘You’ve certainly succeeded in bringing my position home to me as early as you could. And I suppose I should thank you for it. I used to tell Bill that he was arrogant sometimes. Now that he’s not here to cope for me, I understand only too well… But I don’t propose to treat you to my feelings. One thing is clear: there are a number of things I must get straight with you. Will you please ask your husband to come up here?’ And when Helen Marriot stood for a moment in hesitation, she added, ‘You’ve said that he may be blamed if things are misinterpreted. I must tell you that my blame has to be considered and if you insist on disregarding me I shall see when I get back to England that it counts.’

  Both women were sweating now with the intense heat and with anger. Meg thought, at any rate she looks a little less cool now in her green cotton dress; a commonplace woman with commonplace taste – red hair and green dresses. She thought, too, I’ve gone beyond the point of no return with her, and I’m very glad.

  ‘Please hand me that writing paper and my fountain pen before you go,’ she said.

  The Marriots were with her again before she had finished writing the cable to David. ‘Quite able to return alone. Hope to be back within week.’ She paused. ‘Will cable you time arrival plane for you to meet. Love Meg,’ she finished. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘what your interference has landed me in. I have to make sure now of not hurting my brother’s feelings.’

  She dispatched Mrs Marriot with the cable. ‘Please don’t bring that nurse up here until I’ve finished talking to your husband,’ she said. She felt a little alarmed at the unwonted dictatorial note in her voice.

  Mr Marriot was clearly more than a little alarmed. She tried to soften her tone.

  ‘Do sit down, Mr Marriot,’ she said, ‘so that we can talk comfortably. I’m quite myself again.’ What did it mean? She could never be what she had been and had no idea what she would be. ‘And there are a number of things I must ask you. Things you’ve had to take responsibility about that really should have been mine. For instance, Bill’s funeral.’

  ‘Well, Mrs Eliot,’ he began, ‘we’re not in England, you know, and …’

  ‘And so the funeral has to be immediate. Mr Marriot, I’m not an unreasonable woman. I think you had no right to send for my brother against my expressed wishes and I said so. However, that’s all settled now. But in arranging Bill’s funeral I’m sure you were trying to save me distress. I’m grateful to you.’ All that remained of Bill traded to repair the breaches in a goodwill for which she did not care twopence. But, of course, that was not all, or indeed, anything that remained of Bill. She said rather primly, ‘My husband never made anything of funerals. Nor do I. When is it to be?’

  Relieved, Jim Marriot became almost garrulous. ‘Well, the arrangements are made for tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t find any record that your husband was a Roman Catholic, so the service is to be held at St Saviour’s, the Anglican church here. And the burial’ll be at the Protestant cemetery attached to the Dutch Calvinist church. I shall attend, of course, and the Government’s sending a representative. The Minister of Education would like to have attended himself, I think, but we’re anxious to avoid demonstrations of any kind. I hope I’ve persuaded the newspapers to keep their reporters away. So that if Doctor Maung could see his way to allowing you …’ His voice drifted away in face of Meg’s inattention.

  ‘Mr Marriot,’ she said, ‘I stopped your wife last night when you started to tell me how Bill died. I expect you thought that rather strange.’ He mumbled dissent which she smiled away. ‘Possibly that’s what started you off thinking that I wasn’t responsible for my actions. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t go into the reasons.’

  He bowed his head reverently before the privacy of her grief. Noticing a large bald patch on the crown of his head, she felt embarrassed at the obeisance. She thought, my God, can I only stand up for myself by bullying. The old cracked barking of dowagers, impertinence disguised as the wit of old age, lorgnette snubs gave their horrid warning. Immediately she began to give him her reasons. ‘You see it’s Bill living that I have to hold on to if I’m to keep sane. He was a man of such energy and gentleness and goodness to me. Whatever happened at the end is only a tiny speck of his life.’ She stopped, disgusted at her incoherence, horrified that once again she was trading Bill for adjustment to this meaningless environment. ‘I ought to have been there,’ she said. Trading herself, she became calmer. ‘Anyway, please tell me now exactly wha
t happened.’

  Jimmie told the story with painfully slow deliberation. Meg tried to control her impatience by considering the importance that he clearly placed now on satisfying her. There was something unsatisfactory about the Marriots’ position and probably the handling of this sudden emergency was vital to his career. Listening to the Edinburgh accent, more genteel than ever in slow, hesitating speech, she found the delivery an almost unbearable additional agony. Again and again he reminded her. ‘Of course I’m telling all this at secondhand’; again and again he qualified, ‘We may get rather a different picture from some other eye-witness who’s not yet come forward’; again and again he said as though in consolation, ‘but I think we can say that the total picture is a very consistent one.’ Even so, from his hesitating, dead narration and her blurred, buried memory of the airport scene, the grotesque, wicked fact of Bill’s death was forced into a shape which the authorities recognized as a regrettable incident, some vile meaningless people as disaster avoided, others equally vile and meaningless as righteous assassination freakishly prevented, the newspapers as a front page story, and, Mr Marriot asserted it again and again, all but the fanatics (‘probably Communist paid but that’s being played down’) as Bill’s incredible, remarkable heroism.

  ‘I don’t know how much consolation it is to you, Mrs Eliot, but your husband showed a very high courage indeed’; and ‘One thing stands out. Mr Eliot acted quickly, heroically, and without thought for himself.’ The phrase stood before her – idiotic, brutal, impenetrable. All the other blurred figures had leapt into life at the command of words even as dead as these Mr Marriot employed. The thin distinguished Badai’s courtesy to passing foreigners veiled Prek Namh, Minister of Education – ‘one of the cleverest men in this country, Mrs Eliot, and perhaps the only man of real integrity in the Government, though you mustn’t quote me as saying just that.’ But what did his integrity concern Bill or herself? In any case, a target for a bullet that didn’t reach him. Probably a brutal, tyrannical man, a hypocritical Claudio. She had to beat back a hysterical fury as she thought of him living and Bill dead. And out of a pack of earnest, chattering bespectacled students there emerged Bill’s murderer.

  ‘There seems to have been some grievance about a University grant. University education has assumed absurd proportions in the minds of many young Badais today, Mrs Eliot. But as I said before there’s probably something political behind it. They’ll no doubt find out all they want to know. It’s a very efficient intelligence system, though I doubt if it’ll come out at the trial. You’d best forget anything I’ve said about that side of it.’

  A lost scholarship, a hysterical student, for these Bill had died. She felt only an utter and hopeless depression when she thought of the man who had killed him, but for the man who was saved she felt an utter loathing. It was as though the argument that she and Bill had indulged to pass the time had been carried on into a melodramatic play that was yet no play: Bill to be shot by the young man he had censured, to die for the man he had approved. The actors – Prek Namh, the student, the customs man accomplice, the hired crowd of catfaces and extravagantly exotic supers, the idiot chorus provided by Miss Vines’ jolly gentility, the small part players – a travelling French doctor (‘a brilliant man apparently, Mrs Eliot’ – all the doctors who had let Bill die were brilliant it seemed) these were real enough; but Bill’s ‘heroism’ remained so incredible and so cruel that she had to twist the sheets in her fingers to prevent herself from crying out against it. How could he have lost his life – their life of happiness together – for all this remote, Oppenheim unreality? Even to consider it seemed to threaten an earthquake that would bring the whole structure of their past toppling down around her; and their past was all she had to live for. What these unseeing fools called heroism must have been some ghastly accident.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Marriot,’ she said. ‘You’ve made it all as clear as you can. But as you say you weren’t there.’ She had a peculiar bitterness towards those who shared in the guilt of absence from the scene. ‘I imagine,’ she went on, ‘that, as in most foreign countries, the law here demands written depositions from witnesses before the trial starts. I should like to see copies of those, please, before I leave.’ When he hesitated, she added, ‘Being the wife of a barrister of international reputation, I couldn’t help picking up some legal information, you know.’

  The humorous tone which she gave to her last remark, far from lessening Jimmie Marriot’s anxiety, seemed only to increase his sense that he had failed.

  ‘I must tell you, Mrs Eliot,’ he said, ‘that my instructions are to keep British commitment in the affair down to the minimum.’ When she shook her head, he added, ‘I’ll do what I can. I don’t know how far the police authorities will let such documents out of their hands.’

  Meg laughed. ‘I only want them as far as here,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they’ll agree to that if you ask them.’ He looked so sad that she added, ‘I’m very glad that you will be at Bill’s funeral. Neither he nor I are believers, but the last thing we should want is anything ostentatiously unconventional. Perhaps before I leave we could discuss the stone for his grave. Something as simple as possible.’ She decided on heartlessness as the best deception to ward off their pity.

  If he seemed a little surprised at her tone, he was clearly relieved at the information it conveyed. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you’ll not be wanting Mr Tomlin to call on you.’

  ‘Mr Tomlin?’ There seemed no end to these invading oddities.

  ‘The rector of St Saviour’s.’

  ‘Heavens no!’ Meg cried. ‘How very kind of him though. Do please thank him from me.’ She heard with satisfaction the routine social note in her voice.

  A moment later Helen Marriot reappeared. ‘I’ve cancelled the nurse,’ she said in the voice of a gruff, sulky schoolboy. ‘I hope that’ll satisfy you.’

  Meg, discerning the guilt buried in the gaucherie, had a panic vision of continual involvement. Nevertheless, she decided, amity, as long as I can keep it reasonably at bay, will allow me to stay in peace with Bill better than the frets and jars of hostility.

  ‘You’ve both been immensely kind to me,’ she said.

  ‘We haven’t. We’ve been absolutely bloody.’ Helen had returned to her manner of last night.

  ‘Well,’ said Meg. ‘Whatever. The least I can do is not to be a nuisance. Be honest with me. What is it you’re frightened I might do?’

  The question alone seemed enough to alarm Mr Marriot. He looked at his wife as though her face might tell him what labyrinths lay concealed in Meg’s words. Then, unprovided with an answer, he said, ‘We’re just concerned to help you all we can, Mrs Eliot, that’s all.’

  But Helen Marriot gave an answer. ‘Quite honestly,’ she said, ‘Jimmie simply can’t afford to bungle this affair. And by bungling I mean letting the authorities have the slightest excuse for saying he has.’ She came behind her husband and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Left to himself, of course, he’d do the job perfectly as he always would. But he won’t be, and we need all the help we can get. The British must not be involved an inch further than we can avoid. You don’t know the politics of it all, Mrs Eliot, but our great aim is not to be identified with any of the parties too much. Though we’re a hundred per cent anti-communist. The less that gets into the papers, either here or in England, the better. The first sensation’s over and we’ve got through pretty well but …’

  ‘In other words,’ Meg said, ‘you don’t want me to shoot my big mouth off. Please don’t worry. I promise not to. If I could bring Bill back …’

  She could not understand what had made her use the absurd and unsuitable Americanism, but it was a happy choice. Relieved by her promise, Jimmie Marriot seemed in a transport of delight about the phrase.

  ‘Did you hear that, Helen?’ he asked. ‘“Shoot my big mouth off.” Well, I knew Americanization had gone pretty far at home but I had no idea it had caught up with people like you, Mrs Eliot.’
He laughed so much that at last the two women were laughing also at his absurdity.

  *

  Jimmie Marriot’s pleasure at her Americanism heralded the whole tenor of Meg’s conversation with them in her days there – days that stretched from Dr Maung’s original week to nearer a fortnight. The Marriots seemed drawn by love-fear to England which they had not visited for so long, to which they yet might be returned empty any day. Americanization, rock’n’roll, Teddy boys, angry young men, new towns, housing estates, television, these formed the substance of all their talk and questions of home. Meg tried to answer as well as she could, but really she wanted to tell them that her life was not lived in the pages of the popular newspapers. Bill and she had been most actively engaged in living, yet nothing of what the Marriots so fearfully sought to find had touched them even tangentially. Once when they had been talking about football pools and their effect on the nation, she felt suddenly as though the world at home was as remote and dangerous as this unknown Asian world that had struck out at her so cruelly.

  In the main, however, she was left alone. She lay, giving herself up to happy memories. She had to fill her head with echoes of Bill’s voice so that she could endure the years to come; and, above all, with Bill’s voice, confident, happy, and triumphant to drown the plaintive note of Bill’s voice lost, empty, careless of life. But the plaintive note grew louder.

  At first she found some relief by fussing each visitor to the room – Aung Ma who brought fresh limes and ice; Helen Marriot who brought Chinese dishes of prawns and bamboo shoots and sharks’ fins that, far from tempting, revolted her; Jimmie Marriot bearing, with ostentatious confidence in her goodwill, copies of the depositions – with constant demands that the venetian blinds be more securely closed to shut out every ray of the powerful sun. The heat was unbearable, she said. But the sun’s rays were not the voice that ripped her conscience.

  Then it became the room itself which refused her tranquillity. The lemon-coloured wood, the jade green cushions; the scarlet bedcover; all these changed from a pleasant scheme doing credit to Helen Marriot’s taste; she could not endure such artiness, could not get well amid a pathetic pretension symbolized by the Utrillo reproduction. There were no reproductions in Lord North Street. Saying it to herself, she realized that she had lost her sense of humour but could find no energy to revive it.