The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  It was quite another aspect that dominated David’s mind; and he felt that it should be impressed upon the young man.

  ‘That must depend, Tim, on the result of Gordon’s examination at the hospital. He goes over to Brighton today, you know. In any case I doubt if he’ll be well enough to have strangers about.’

  Tim looked perplexed, but the hearty note returned to his voice. ‘Oh, don’t let the doctors get you down. They’re always pessimistic. Most of them get a rake-off from the undertakers.’ He laughed loudly.

  David stared for a moment at a corner of the room where two tulip bulbs decaying into powdery dust were enmeshed in a dirt-hung spider’s web. ‘I think this room ought to be cleared out,’ he said. ‘I may have to stop in London with my sister for a little, I can’t say. If so, I don’t want Gordon to be worried with business. Try to trouble him as little as you can. But tactfully, won’t you?’

  Any impatience or distaste that Tim’s obtuseness over personal matters, his insufficient appreciation of Gordon, had aroused in David was soon banished when they discussed the practical affairs of the nursery. He was so knowledgeable, so competent, and, though fully aware of it, so modest. Gordon had been mistrustful of the value of a horticultural diploma, he tended to despise all formal education; but some buried loyalty in David to the academic life he had renounced was appeased by the obvious advantages Tim’s training had brought to the place, even in the few months he had been with them.

  Yet it was more than a good, up-to-date training, David reflected; Tim, for all his hearty naïve exterior, had a high I.Q. and his intelligence was applied to the job to the full. For Gordon and himself, running the nursery had been the sealing of a bond of their life together; making a success of it was the disciplining of their dilettante interests, an external pattern for their inner lives without which they might have succumbed to a corrosive, anarchic existence. Yet it was always and however pleasantly a discipline, a renunciation of over indulgence in music or in books, or even, as Gordon admitted for himself, of an exaggerated selfish engrossment in the life of the spirit. Theirs was the achievement; but, David reluctantly admitted to himself, Tim’s was the efficiency. He was amused and a little irritated at his reluctance.

  Only perhaps in relation to the rest of the staff was Tim’s easy naïveté at a disadvantage; he was hardly to be blamed, for the choice of Climbers and, indeed, of one or two of the others was hardly orthodox. As Tim said, ‘The trouble is, David, that I feel you and Gordon are on a kind of personal footing with them which is bound to make me resented.’

  ‘It’s a matter of time …’ David began, but Tim, having reached the subject informally, at an unexpected moment, felt freer than he had ever done when they had met to ‘discuss the staff’.

  ‘I’m not so sure, you know,’ he said. ‘With old Bob and Collihole probably. But with someone like Climbers, I don’t know. You see she’s the sort of person I’ve never had to deal with. I don’t know what you call them – distressed gentlewomen or whatever it is. They aren’t in my line. She’s bound to resent me.’

  ‘Whatever Climbers’ feelings,’ David said, ‘they won’t have anything to do with any stereotype of her being a gentlewoman. She has the great virtue of having entirely personal emotions.’

  But Tim did not take it. ‘Well, I think she feels pretty personally about me,’ he said. ‘And she gets so worked up about some of the others. Annie, for example, is the sort of wench I can deal with any time. She’s not a bad girl but she’s a bit of a lazy bitch and you have to tell her so sometimes. But Climbers rushes in as though I was acting like the king of Soho or some other brute like that. Honestly I think she’s a bit psycho at times.’

  ‘She’s a very hard worker and a very good gardener,’ David said, trying by the note of fair pleading in his voice to avoid a priggish rebuke.

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s perfectly true. I wouldn’t have believed it when I came. But all the same, David, I think you and Gordon should have had the courage to get rid of her.’

  David tried to consider the suggestion dispassionately.

  ‘When she’s a good worker, wouldn’t that be a bit unjust?’ It sounded so housemasterish that he saw at once he must stick to the whole truth. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘she’s not young and she’s poor.’

  ‘All right then,’ Tim said. ‘Let her be in charge, at any rate, nominally. I could make it work.’

  ‘No,’ David cried, ‘you have the qualifications, you must have the job. Look, Tim, you won’t get anywhere by veering from side to side. People have to accept unpleasant things, and they will if the things are just. But you have to approach them equably, from a distance and with love.’ He measured the words slowly, but, on seeing Tim’s face at the sound of the last word, he laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t think she expects that sort of love from you,’ he said.

  Tim, too, roared with laughter. ‘Well, it’s just as well,’ he said, ‘because then I should resign.’ They parted on a note of easy facetiousness.

  David, as always, knocked on Gordon’s door before going in. They had decided from the moment of taking Andredaswood that there would be no ease of living there unless each surrounded their close friendship with a total and conventional regard for the other’s privacy.

  The deep voice that told David to come in contrasted oddly with the tiny body sitting up in the large crimson canopied bed, even more perhaps with the little, drawn face, greyish yellow against the piled up white pillows. He seemed, now more than ever, all bony Roman nose and large brown eyes; but the eyes, like the thick copper-tinted brown hair, lacked lustre. David found that Gordon’s changed appearance distressed him every day afresh, not only for the threat it carried but more still just from hatred of the physical change itself. The surface of his conscience made him ashamed of this purely physical reaction, but his deeper feelings told him he should be proud to feel it.

  Gordon was tickling the stomach of a small tortoise-shell cat rolled over in play, its back legs kicking against the hardly touched breakfast tray.

  ‘She’s an abominably randy cat,’ he said.

  It had taken David years to habituate himself to Gordon’s animal loving, and more years still to accept his easy delight in his pets’ sexual powers. He felt glad to tease him by saying, ‘What’s abominable about it?’ The first remark of the day, so difficult for him now, had been made.

  ‘Nothing except that we should never have let poor Oliver be cut. It’s still one of the worst sins on my conscience. Now this poor thing’s got to go out for her fun.’ Oliver, the fat neuter ginger cat, sat on the windowsill, snoring faintly. ‘I don’t suppose,’ Gordon said, ‘that he even has a wet dream now.’

  Apart from the cats, there was a clove pug asleep in a royal blue velvet lined basket, a borzoi stretched on the hearthrug, and a pink and grey Australian cockatoo climbing with beak and claws over the roof of its ornate Victorian cage. David’s sense of hygiene had not found it easy to accept this menagerie that slept in Gordon’s room. But Gordon had insisted. ‘I won’t allow them to go into your room,’ he said and he had trained them to keep out of it. ‘Though why you should worry I don’t know,’ he had declared. ‘My animals don’t smell.’ He was quite right, they didn’t. The room was entirely clean, which again was surprising considering that it was filled like a junk shop with a jumble of pleasing, valuable antique furniture and hideous, worthless bric-à-brac. This incoherent taste, too, had for long worried David, but Gordon was equally firm. ‘I like tatt,’ he had said.

  ‘I slept well,’ Gordon announced with a slightly mocking smile. David had agreed not to discuss his health, but he, in return, had promised always to declare if the auguries were good. David felt it a mark of their friendship’s achievement that when Gordon said they were so, he could be sure there was no deception intended to allay his fears.

  ‘Oughtn’t you to be gone already?’ Gordon went on.

  ‘There’ve been a lot of delays,’ David said. ‘Else got up to make me a picnic breakf
ast. The leaves have turned in Ashdown Forest.’

  ‘Oh, hell. That’s what comes of confusing God with his creatures. Well, she won’t get far with her conversions if she tries to make them at breakfast time. Leaves turned indeed!’

  ‘I don’t mind as much as that, you know,’ David said. ‘Then there was Climbers fussing.’

  ‘About what?’ Gordon asked with a mock imperiousness.

  ‘Oh! Things.’

  ‘Fussing about her seniority. Poor old war horse! I’ll have a good get together with her this evening. “Sing away my little tart, if it’s going to ease your heart”.’ Gordon had six or seven quotations, of which this line of Blok’s was one, that he used often and only with the vaguest relevance. ‘Does Climbers ever sing, do you think? Oh, yes, she does. She came with me once to Christmas mass and bawled to the faithful to assemble round her. Perhaps that was why I never urged her to come again.’ He grimaced with self-disgust. ‘I suppose it’s because I’m a whole-hogger. I can understand your position. Although of course it’s only real shilly shallying disguised as intellect, no doubt. But this sort of once a year at Christmas business, it’s like Else and God in the trees, it seems to me such nonsense. But, of course, its spiritual pride on my part. I should have watered Climbers’ mustard seed. How difficult biblical similes are, it makes Climbers’ faith a sort of mustard and cress grown on flannel. However, one always pays. Now I have to sit by and see an old woman I respect and like hurt like a child.’

  ‘Would she be any less hurt if she were a regular church-going Anglican?’ David asked. Strangely to him, he only felt eased from his anxiety about Gordon when, as now, he was entirely involved with him, giving questions and answers in a pattern fixed over years.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gordon with certainty, ‘she would. You mould all unbelievers, or half believers for that matter, in your own high fashion. Oh, I grant the height of it, David. For heaven’s sake, I couldn’t clothe myself in a self-made iron corset. As you do. But it’s personal.’

  ‘And faith?’ David asked, ‘is that uniform?’

  ‘No. But it’s one and indivisible. And that’s good enough.’

  ‘I see you all,’ David cried, ‘floating on a cloud at one high level.’ He saw quite clearly the degree to which the image touched upon all that he feared, but in Gordon’s presence he could accept the temptation.

  ‘No. There are bumps. But at its lowest we’re sustained and that does help.’ Gordon seemed happily intent on the argument, until David was about to answer, when he turned his head away and began to play with the cat. ‘Oh Lord!’ he said, ‘I’ve had more than enough of this nice green stuff.’ And he laughed.

  David, recognizing the Grimm quotation as a half sign, laughed too.

  ‘There are some things about Meg,’ Gordon said, ‘that I must say before you go.’

  ‘I know them. First I must urge her to accept any money from you that she may need. Second I must urge her to come down here if she wishes.’

  ‘Oh yes, you know them, dear David, but do you feel them? The money wouldn’t amount to more than a temporary help but that may be everything at the moment. You seem so set on seeing her as too independent to take it. It’s a sort of family snobbery, David. All right, the Parkers are very independent. But now may not be the moment to show it. And as to her coming down here. She may hate the idea of it, hate the place and us even, after she’s got over the shock; but at the moment she surely needs a gesture of love.’ He looked at David, his face screwed up into a puzzled frown.

  David waited for him to go on. The whole breathing space of happiness had vanished in these last moments. All his anxiety and his anger had returned; and, above all, the awful knowledge that he couldn’t communicate with Gordon at a time when he so longed to be close to him.

  If Gordon had meant to pursue the subject, he changed his tack. Lying back on the pillows, his voice croaking a little with exhaustion, he said, ‘I’ve thought about them both a lot the last day or two. I don’t know that under any circumstances I could be a close friend of Meg’s. I won’t say her ambitions are too conventional but they’re not my conventions. But I’ve always liked her. She’s got such energy to skim over things.’

  ‘She’s not an entirely stupid woman,’ David said ironically. He hated to hear what he felt to be patronage coming from Gordon. ‘She knew a lot of unhappiness when she was young.’

  Gordon laughed. ‘Misery doesn’t always make for good sense even in your sad pagan world. But, seriously, you’re quite right, of course. I’ve no doubt she’s known the abysses beneath the surface even as she skimmed. But if she couldn’t … Well, sometimes it’s wise to go on skimming for a long time in life until you know how to dive. And I admire those who skim gracefully. Of course, she’s fallen with a bump now. But heavens, we all need charity.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘it’s because, as you know, I always found Bill so attractive. Always? We met about three times and could hardly find a shaky plank over the enormous gulf. He was tedious, of course, but he seemed so reliable and sad. If I were her … to have him throw away his life …’

  ‘I don’t really think you can say that in saving someone’s life one throws one’s own away. I admit that the choice seems a bit random. This Badai minister what’s-his-name. But then Bill’s whole life seems to have been a bit random.’ David frowned it all away.

  ‘Oh, of course, it’s a heroic deed. And one must admire it. But for Meg, it seems to me, there must be an awful sense of not having counted enough or, rather, not having made life count enough for him, that it could all happen so suddenly and apparently senselessly. Oh! I don’t know. But if I were you, I shouldn’t say anything about the heroism.’

  ‘I shan’t,’ David said. He realized that he had hardly thought out what he would say. ‘You seem to think …’

  ‘I know,’ Gordon said, ‘that you’ll be good and kind as always. David, you must go now.’

  ‘Yes,’ said David, ‘I’ll phone tonight about …’

  ‘About everything. Yes,’ Gordon declared. He turned again to fondle the cat. But as David was opening the door, he said suddenly, ‘I can’t leave it like this, David. It’s silly. Look, I want to help you. And it will help you in the end if you do all you can to help Meg. Listen. I’ve considered every possibility. I’m a lover of life in my own way so it hasn’t been easy. But with prayer and thought I’m not only reconciled to dying now, but I’m truly happy for it to come if it shall come. That doesn’t mean that I regret my life – far from it; or that I’m any the less fond of you. Please think about that and about why you should be happy to hear it. I think it could help you.’

  *

  Meg Eliot, shivering slightly from many concurrent causes, looked from Donald’s window on to the sharply sunlit Bloomsbury street. Passing taxi, hospital nurses brightly chattering as they went on duty, dim greenglassed window front that gave a glimpse of a poky cobbler’s shop, eighteenth-century doorway, all swam in front of her. Pressing her hand on the windowsill, she steadied herself. Beneath the rush of a hundred jostling thoughts and emotions sounded a continuo – I can’t bear this cold, I must get some suitable clothes out of store.

  Without turning round, she said, ‘Before we discuss the practical implications of what you’ve told me, David, before we start saying what I can do and what I can’t do, I want you to understand that the blame, the whole blame for this lies on me.’

  David, his thoughts upon some specialist, some surgeon perhaps, God knew, anyway someone unknown and loathsome who within a few hours would be pronouncing upon the examination, knowing abominably, before Gordon knew, Gordon’s fate, forced himself to attend to what his sister said. Sister – loving, loved, claiming, fighting against the claims of poor, inadequate-to-claim Mother, fighting perhaps unknowingly – and if unknown to her, how could he tell? – fighting for Father, vanished and so without defending voice – sister, if only momentarily and in fragments, stood before him. And married sister, in her own wor
ld husband-centred? self-centred? he could not judge – finding no contact with him in his world, self-effaced? Gordon-centred? self-centred? – he would not judge – married sister also stood before him, but now only momentarily and in fragments too, obliterated almost by a student’s shot. And, hey presto, now, summoned to life by the same shot, this widow, her loss marked only by drawn, tired lines at the corners of her large, lively eyes and of her small, too small, birdlike mouth – but seeing her so seldom, how could he tell if these were lines of loss or marriage lines? – but loss certainly shown in her too bright, too constant, capable, determined talk.

  Well, if the chatter meant fright, as well it could, he must do all to support her in meeting that fright, or rather in concealing it until she was free to meet it in the long fight – months? years? – ahead of her. He could at least check the flow that she might later regret.

  He said, ‘Dear Meg, all that you were for Bill and he for you is yours and his. And damn anybody else.’

  Meg, hearing his voice, thought, he has his own life; if we had time we could be again perhaps as we were, but we have no time and if I ask anything now I shall get charity. There must be no more delaying false comforts; I must keep the distance.

  She said, ‘Yes, I know I’m talking too much, David. But I’m bound to at the moment. In any case I always have done. You’ve forgotten in your quiet world what a chatter I keep up. Besides,’ she said, ‘I say this to Donald. He’s known all along that I was to blame. I realize that now. What I don’t understand, Donald, is why you didn’t tell me?’

  She looked at him sitting there in his elegant, rather fussy, Victoriana strewed, bachelor flat of his. He was still a fat, doctored cat, but he was not purring. He had an instinctive tact, she thought, which David, because of the family tie between us, and because of his tortured rectitude, can’t manage.