The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  ‘Don’t you think,’ Donald asked, ‘that you’re seeing the picture too plainly now. Looking back at it, I mean, what? Bill gambled the money away because he was overworked. He drank, smoked, and so on only moderately, and he needed some other kicks to relieve the strain. After all, he knew that he could always earn as much as he wanted and more. And of course, he was going ahead. Probably would have become a judge, what? Accidents happen. Yes, but we don’t live by them. We’d be fools if we did. Don’t think I’m saying you shouldn’t think of blame. At times like this we’re bound to think of everything. But you blame yourself because you think someone might blame him. If they do, they’re fools. He couldn’t know he was going to die. In any case they don’t. They think him a hero for as long as they think at all.’

  ‘Hero!’ she said angrily.

  ‘No.’ Donald’s loud voice had for a moment a note of annoyance. ‘Don’t object to that. He did a brave thing. We’d all much rather he hadn’t. But don’t refuse him the praise he deserves.’

  To David’s surprise, Meg, who at the airport had at first refused to see Donald, went over and sat on the sofa beside him.

  ‘Donald,’ she said, ‘I believe that you see it all exactly as I see it. I have got somehow to live with that picture. If I can talk to you about it, it will help me. I don’t suppose that we shall see each other again. No, I’m being dramatic – let’s say, not often. We have nothing in common except that you were really fond of Bill. I know that is a lot, but it’s a memory now. You have no need to live on memories. I don’t intend to. But if I’m to live with this picture, I must estimate its truth, get it into focus. You can help me to do that. Please, if only because Bill would have wanted you to help me, let me say what I believe was true. David must make what he can of it.’

  Donald said nothing and she took his silence for assent.

  ‘I drove Bill and I fed on him at the same time. Yes, I know,’ she said as she saw Donald frown, ‘that’s an exaggerated statement. Bill loved me and he could count on my love and in a way on my support. And there are a hundred other things which only I can know and which, thank God! count on the credit side for me. But broadly it’s true. I married Bill because I loved him, but also because he could offer me a way of living that, for a thousand reasons David knows, I wanted, well, I suppose one could say wanted obsessively. I thought Bill wanted the same life, and so up to a point he did. I respected and admired him, thought him brilliant. And he was. And, of course, he was ten years older than me. It was easy, all right, natural if you like, for me to repose on that and I did. I felt that if I gave him my love and trust he could do all that he wanted in life.’

  ‘I don’t see that you could have done much more, what?’

  ‘You know, Donald, that I could and that I didn’t. I was for ever priding myself on trusting, on not interfering, but it was just an excuse to accept what I wanted. You told me on that evening, at that awful party, that Bill’s life had gone dead when he gave up criminal law. All right, you didn’t tell me, you tried to tell me and I wouldn’t listen. I see now that when the decision was made, he tried to tell me the same thing himself. When I asked him, “Is it what you want?” he said, “I think it’s the right decision if we’re to live as we want to.” And I happily accepted “we”, because it was what I wanted. I didn’t count the price Bill paid. And then there were all sorts of people to tell me how wonderful it was for Bill to give up those sordid criminal cases, how much more “our sort of world” his new life would be. Our sort of world! The sort of dead crowd that you saw at that wretched party, Donald. Bill was bored and stifled in it.’

  Donald had to boom in excess to silence her excited flow.

  ‘Oh come,’ he said, ‘you’re forgetting the reality of what you felt then in your determination to paint this picture. Your friends weren’t all fools or knaves or walking corpses.’

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘You’re quite right. We had a lot of pleasure. Many of the people we knew were happy, good, intelligent people. But what they wanted wasn’t what Bill wanted. Nor even what I wanted. I only kept going because of my outside interests.’

  ‘Well?’ Donald cried, ‘Lady Pirie’s been telling me a good deal of what you do for Aid to the Elderly. That’s useful, what?’

  David, searching his heart, found something that he and Gordon had always commended. ‘You’ve taught yourself to really know something about ceramics,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think I’m happy to have sold Bill for a Nymphenburg harlequin or a Meissen magpie,’ she said, ‘or for the comfort of old Mrs Bloggs for that matter? Besides, most of that I could have done without making a mess of Bill’s life. When I think of the way that I patted myself on the back for not fussing Bill about his gambling; and all the time I knew that something was wrong, that he was getting obsessed by it, absurdly elated or depressed by this or that horse winning or losing, getting feverish about the stop press of the evening paper or the Stock Exchange page of The Times. I told myself that it was all on a par with his evening bridge, though I knew it wasn’t. Happily married people need to live separate lives!’

  David said firmly, ‘My dear Meg, everybody, happy or not, married or not, who is worth anything, has to cultivate his own garden.’

  Donald, looking dismayed at the intervention, said, ‘I still think that Bill gambled because he worked too hard. And again I say, he couldn’t, you know, have told that he wouldn’t live.’

  Meg looked at them in turn with a certain contempt. ‘His own garden! David,’ she cried, ‘it must have been a bleak, windswept sort of garden that forced him into this. Overworked, Donald! Overworked at what he didn’t care to do in order to maintain things as I wanted them. And,’ she added, ‘as to his not knowing that he was going to die, there’s an irony to that. I told you that night of the party that he’d just seen Doctor Loundes and learned that his blood pressure was normal. He’d thought he’d got thrombosis, Donald.’

  ‘So he might have had; pressure of work and boredom combined. But it can also be imagination. Bad nerves, what? His nerves were in a shocking state; anyone with less self control would have shown it.’

  ‘He thought that he might be dangerously ill, Donald. And as you say he might have been. I thought, like you, that he was simply neurotic about his health; that last day in London, something – going abroad perhaps – made him go to Bobby Loundes in desperation. And he was all right. That was the first evening for months when I didn’t see him rush to the racing results. I believe he’d have given up gambling altogether if he’d lived …’

  ‘Resolved to give it up, what?’ Donald interrupted.

  Meg knew that out of concern for her he was deliberately trying to lower the intensity of her emotions; but she still resented the remark and ignored it ‘Out of a sense that he had time to put things straight. And between us we would have done so. But in those months before, when he thought he was dying, he was concerned with only one thing, to recoup what he’d lost. He didn’t think he had time to do it by work. He wouldn’t even see the doctor for fear he had too little time to do it at all. That’s why he speculated so crazily then, and gambled to forget the failure of his speculations. He was desperate to pay off the mortgage. Oh! now I know how much he must have hated the house, not only because he felt guilty knowing that it wasn’t really ours, but because the whole way of living it implied was the root of the trouble. All he was thinking about was not leaving me in the lurch. Me! the person who had started him on the whole thing because of the demands I made on him. He never thought of himself. So don’t blame him.’ She paused and then turned to Donald; fiercely she asked, ‘Well, am I right?’

  But again it was David who answered. He was himself surprised at the statement that so imperatively presented itself to him.

  ‘Meg,’ he said, ‘Bill loved you very much and so he thought only of you. But it isn’t what happened in the last months that worries you, is it? He wasn’t himself then. He thought he was dying. It’s before that time th
at you believe things had already gone wrong. May it not have been a more simple thing that lay behind it, simply that Bill wanted children?’

  Meg, surprised too, registered in passing her brother’s apparently compulsive need to raise the subject.

  ‘Oh! that,’ she said. ‘Yes, that he felt terribly. And there I was blind again. When I learnt that I couldn’t have a child, he was wonderful to me. And when I got over it – early Vincennes cups and old Mrs Bloggs, you know – I took it for granted that we both had. But he hadn’t. I learnt that only when we went on this trip.’ Suddenly she began to cry desperately. ‘I was going to do all I could,’ she said, ‘to help him to accept it.’ Her words were hardly intelligible from the convulsions of her sobbing.

  ‘Look,’ Donald said, ‘this isn’t helping you, you know, is it, what?’

  David said nothing.

  After two or three minutes Meg recovered herself.

  ‘How funny men are,’ she said, ‘I’m not more unhappy because I cry. That’s how I feel all the time, only I try not to show it. You understand that, don’t you, David? But I suppose it’s more embarrassing for you when it appears on the surface, Donald.’ She paused and turned to her brother. ‘But you’re wrong about my not having a child being the cause. It’s kind of you to try to take the blame from me, David; if it was that, certainly I wouldn’t feel guilty. Sad, yes, but not guilty. I can’t blame myself for what I couldn’t help. No, it’s what I’ve told Donald that I have to live with. And I still ask you, Donald, is it the true picture? Am I right?’

  Donald got up. ‘I’d like notice of that question,’ he said. ‘I asked my woman to put up a few sandwiches for us and a glass of sherry. I’ll just see what’s been done about that. And then I’ll try to answer you.’

  Donald out of the room, David said, ‘He’s like an undergraduate pretending to be a don.’ When even to this Meg answered, ‘He’s a very good man, I believe. I’ve behaved very badly to him,’ David saw that there was no way of stemming her mood and he remained silent.

  Donald, returning with a tray, announced, ‘Cold chicken. Rather dull, I’m afraid, what? But the Fino Delicado has its virtues. It’s better than the Amontillado they’re sending over now.’ He handed sandwiches and glasses of sherry slowly and deliberately.

  Sitting down, he said, ‘You rather reduce Bill to a cypher, don’t you? He had guts, you know, and ability. You say life had gone sour on him, I can’t presume to judge that.’ Meg raised her hand in protest. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘something went wrong. Agreed. Though the how much and the what are more than I shall care to say. We judge actions in court, you know, but few of us, I think, care to judge people. I certainly don’t. But if we were to make that judgement, quite a lot of people would say it was his own fault.’

  David sat thinking that Meg found herself closer to Donald than to himself. He was shocked that his only reaction was ‘Well, that lets me out!’ They must, he thought, have been horribly friendless for Bill to dig up as executors only a man whom Meg disliked and a brother-in-law for whom he had no regard. The man certainly had all Bill’s pomposity; perhaps Meg would find the way to his heart. If she had ever found it to Bill’s …

  To his surprise, she said, ‘You disappoint me, Donald – for a friend of Bill’s. He was never pompous and especially he was never evasive. I don’t care what “quite a lot of people” would say. I want your opinion.’

  Watching his sallow face grow a little pink, she thought perhaps I can only get through him by making him angry. I’m sure that Bill must have burst that swollen balloon sometimes.

  He was making a visible effort to accept her words without anger. He said, ‘I was trying perhaps to say that Bill, like most of us, was as he was. A platitude, if you like. But not quite. If there was an emptiness, if the gambling filled it, perhaps it went deeper than anything to do with the life you led, to his giving up criminal pleading, or perhaps it was too deep to be changed. Even someone as close as you were to him could only palliate. If I didn’t say it, you see, it’s because it’s rather impertinent. What?’

  As he spoke, she wondered why she was so bothered to secure his acquiescence in her view. To get close to one of the few people Bill liked? But what she had of Bill was complete, her own, and needed no outside support. More probably it was a desperate search for some coherent line of thought She would, no doubt, make many such cul-de-sac, meaningless pursuits in her present distress. And leave them off as suddenly.

  She said rather flatly, ‘I don’t really believe in determinism of that sort. But even if it’s true, I didn’t palliate enough.’

  Donald was clearly somewhat cast down by her casual reception of his views. He spoke to her now in a more direct tone, which she took to be his search for a greater intimacy. She listened attentively out of politeness only, for she had seen clearly now that her approach to him had been no more than an attempt to make up for the failed contact of the past – an attempt that had no meaning now that Bill was dead. It’s only one of the many things, she thought, that can never now be repaired.

  ‘All I can tell you, Meg,’ he said, ‘is what I know about. And that is that you were sun and moon to Bill. Everything he talked about in some way referred to you. A man doesn’t do that unless his wife’s given him a great deal in life, what?’

  Meg thought, that’s nonsense, Bill would never have forced me upon those who didn’t like me. What sort of a bore is he trying to make Bill out to have been?

  She said, ‘Yes, of course. As I said there are a hundred things that Bill and I had together which only I can know of, and they must be my consolation. Thank you, Donald.’

  She left what she hoped was a decent pause and then said, ‘Poor Donald! And poor David! This is being executors to the widow with a vengeance, isn’t it? But I promise you I’m not so entirely impractical. I’ve understood most, I think, of what you’ve told me of the financial situation. Let’s see if I’ve got it straight. Bill has left debts of four thousand five hundred pounds. You agree that by selling the house now we could pay off the mortgage and Bill’s debts and leave me with about fifteen hundred pounds. It seems an incredible gain on what we paid in nineteen forty-one, but that after all is what I’ve read about rising property values. I’ve tended to think such things had nothing to do with my life, like a lot of other things – Far East politics, for example. But for once reality’s working in my favour. You ask me how much of the furniture I can claim as my own; and I think you suggest that I should claim as much as I can. Bill’s generosity being what it was, I can, in fact, claim quite a lot of it. And, of course, the porcelain. I believe I might add another four to five thousand, possibly a little more, to the fifteen hundred that will remain to me. The additional bookmaker’s debts of Bill’s I shan’t attempt to meet, since you tell me I needn’t. It seems in a way rather dishonest but they’ve had quite enough out of him. And anyway I’ve no intention of being a martyr. My needs are infinitely greater than theirs. It looks as though I shall have more than what Mother would have called enough to meet sudden doctors’ bills. Which reminds me that I shall have to leave Doctor Loundes and get a sensible National Health doctor. Bill agreed with National Health in principle, and I was a great defender of it when any of our more extreme Tory friends attacked it. We compromised by going to Bobby Loundes, who charges rather a lot but is competent as well as being a friend. Well, that’s one of the sort of things that will have to go. Not that it matters because I’m never really ill …’

  She spoke not so much with bitterness, David thought, but as though tired with everything about her old life. It could after all be me preliminary to some real change in her, but the tired note made him doubt whether she had the will power. Disgusted at his own priggishness, he said aloud, ‘My dear Meg, anyone who’s been through what you have is bound to be exhausted.’

  The irrelevant interruption surprised Meg. Suddenly very youthful and laughing, she said, ‘Thank you, David dear. You’re so thoughtful.’

 
; Nevertheless he found it more and more difficult to listen to her. The only contribution that he could make was to press again Gordon’s offer of a loan and try genuinely to make her accept it. But to wait with this on his mind only made him dwell on what was happening to Gordon at that moment and this, since it could help no one, he knew it to be his duty to eschew. It seemed to him that times like these – Meg’s first months of widowhood, and for that matter the days waiting for the doctor’s report on Gordon – times usually denominated ‘critical’, should, in any sensible approach to life, be treated as entirely dormant intervals. Every gesture, every speech was simply a formal measure improvised to fill in time, while the emotions and thoughts rose, sank, and reshaped themselves to fit the new mould that the future offered; a little ballet between the acts not intended for serious attention but simply to cover the noise of scene shifting. That, in fact, society demanded a continuity of real decisions and of meaningful statements at such times seemed to him so contrary to psychological truth that he could give no convinced attention.

  Meg’s voice sounded in his ears – the words, merely what she said because she had to say something, the emotions behind the words – hardness? fear? bravery? What was the sense of estimating them, since it would be some months before Meg emerged as a reshaped person?

  His attention wandered over Donald’s room. The nondescript, heavy, comfortable chairs and hideous frill-shaded standard lamp bore the mark of some dowdily furnished service flat – and indeed, it seemed that a man and wife did in fact ‘do’ for the bachelor tenants. In absurd contrast were the Victorian ‘finds’ – a large papier-mâché model of what looked like St Pancras station, the elaborate wool and beadwork cushions and footstool, wax fruit, a Byronic mandolin with incongruous tartan ribbons. The pictures too bore witness to the man’s heavy assertion of a taste out of touch with his times – for he felt sure that Donald Templeton’s Victoriana were intended as a defiant rather than an amusing gesture: a smooth Etty-like nude, a Martinesque apocalyptic scene with lowering storm clouds and fabulous rainbow, something pre-Raphaelite and medieval, called no doubt ‘The Tryst’, announced the eclectic range of his defiance. But here once again the mood was broken by a large pastel of a woman, snake-necked, vacant-mouthed, large-eyed, the hair making a shell-shape on the forehead in the style of 1915: Templeton’s mother, no doubt, by Lavery? The picture went so well with the service flat furniture and, of course, ultimately with Donald. He was surely, David thought, that rare ‘period’ thing – a bachelor in full right, no homosexual, but the full Edwardian or Great War genuine article; up those stairs should have come frou-frouing skirts or elegant hobbles and panniers to little supper parties with rose coloured lamps and Russian cigarettes. Was all the man’s mannered, Edwardian utterance and clothing then only an attempt to fit himself to the period of his sexual tastes, or …