The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  Life, on the whole, would have been quite tolerable if she had not ached so much for Bill’s presence. All her distress and guilt about their life together had now fallen away, to be replaced by a simple, but almost continual physical aching to hear his voice or to feel his arms round her again. She thought of Jill’s declaration that Andrew was always with her; she could only believe now that such feelings were deceptions, or that those who claimed them asked less than she did. Bill was somewhere in her mind always; and memories of all kinds, happy, sad, and sad-happy, were often so intense that in them she lived with him again. But he was not with her, she knew now that he never again would be and no memories could compensate for that. She wondered at times if she could have reconciled herself more easily if the tearing apart had not been so sudden. She no longer believed that such time would have allowed her to atone for anything; but at least she might have grown used to the idea of losing him. David’s letters, that came now each week instead of telephone calls, showed such resignation to the loss of his friend; and although she could not find it possible to compare his attachment to Gordon to her own love for Bill, she knew that he was deeply attached and she had to envy and admire his powers of resignation.

  Then suddenly there came a letter from David that blew her out of her self-centred bolt-hole. His resignation had broken down before Gordon’s suffering. It was an incoherent letter of anger that zigzagged across the writing paper like random flashes of lightning. He accused his own carefully built up detachment of being only a self-induced blindness to the Evil that governed the Universe. He railed against the childish conceit that had let him suppose his own will and reason to be meaningful in the logic of nightmare. ‘God forgive me for prating about humanism, pretending that pain and evil could be reduced to a pigmy human stature.’ He equally fiercely attacked the monstrous Christianity that forbade Gordon the right to suicide, and the wicked idea of a good God and His gift of an Immortal Soul that added the humiliation of patience to Gordon’s suffering. ‘When I was in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in Libya I was praised, heaven help me, for my detachment in face of the worst cases, before hopeless, screaming, dying men. A stoic dignity! What right has anyone to dignity in such circumstances! It’s digusting even to consider such a triviality.’

  A letter followed almost immediately asking her not to read ‘the stupid letter I sent this morning. I have no excuse to offer but the strain of seeing someone I love dearly in agony and of having nothing to give him but the decency of silence.’

  She was shocked by the unexpected hysteria of the first letter; and then moved to tears. The fact that its cry had gone out to her only as a name to write to, without any real personal contact, made her ashamed of how little she had let herself become for him. All she could do, she thought, was to try to satisfy the piteous demand for love that underlay this letter. She wrote without reference to what he had said, recalling incidents of their past together, of all that she had received from him when she was a girl, evoking as far as she was able the atmosphere of their childhood. I have never said all this before, she thought, because I’ve feared to be insincere. It seemed to her now that this sincerity she made so much of in herself and in others – David, Jill, Viola, Poll – was a gagging of their love. Do I mean it? Do they need it was a better question. At least let me seek for the words, she decided, and with them I may discover my emotions.

  In this mood she sought a more positive relationship with the Piries. The result with Viola was oddly unexpected; she interpreted Meg’s greater interest in the affairs of the household, her questions about Sir Herbert and the Island social life, her concern for Tom’s future, simply as a sign that the first shock of Bill’s death was over, that Meg was ready for a return to life. Little dinner parties were arranged, Sunday luncheons and Saturday tea parties were held. It was a mark of Viola’s unselfishness that her sole reaction to Meg’s concern for her was a demonstration of her own concern for Meg, or was it possibly too a mark of her reticence? Meg could not tell. She only knew that this rather futile social round was not what she had sought.

  It would not have been irksome, however, if Viola had not decided to kill two birds with one stone and succour Donald Templeton’s loneliness at the same time as Meg’s. This was too much. Meg had carefully conducted all her own financial business – getting Mrs Copeman to leave, selling the house, selling the porcelain – expressly to avoid being beholden to Donald as executor; and, she thought, she had done the job pretty well. Donald, however, whether from professional pique or from masculine vanity, professed the view that she had been cheated, and Viola accepted his opinion obediently. They clucked away together about the profits she had missed. When he was not clucking, Donald made constant efforts to entertain her, urged on, Meg imagined, by Viola.

  She was prepared to believe now that her distaste for him was due to jealousy of his friendship with Bill, that it had always been so. She could not feel any jealousy, could not remember ever having done so, but she snatched at any motive to explain her wish not to be with him that was deep seated enough not to be easily eradicated. If she declared her feeling to be simply dislike, as she half suspected it was, she would feel the need to conquer it. If it were a complicated jealousy, she could believe that too late to cure. She had, after all, involved herself further than she felt true to her feelings by asking him to deal with the compensation. To go further still in order not to hurt his or Viola’s feelings would only involve her eventually in more ruthless behaviour. The compensation, he reported he was keeping an eye on, but it seemed luckily that there was little he could do; the Foreign Office had it in hand and they, in turn, waited on a Badai government anxious not to aggravate a current wave of anti-Western sentiment. The menacing world, here at least, had saved her from having to be too grateful to Donald; she would be wrong to put herself in a similar position again.

  She managed at first to be pleasant and yet to avoid him at Viola’s little surprise parties, but it grew increasingly more difficult to do so. In his turn he seemed to be surprised at the stream of invitations he was receiving and he gobbled his ‘Whats?’ like a harassed turkey being driven to Christmas slaughter. His respect for Lady Pirie, however, was as great as hers for him and he obeyed her summonses. At last Meg decided to help both herself and him by picking on arguments with him, each time, that were near enough to a quarrel to bring home their relationship even to Viola’s myopia.

  Viola’s only reaction was to treat them as a sort of Beatrice and Benedick. Such rose-coloured obstinacy opened Meg’s eyes: she should have guessed that, with her gruffness and her sentimental heart, her friend was likely to be a Mrs Jennings, a matchmaker. Now she managed to be out whenever she knew that Donald was coming.

  This was the easier because she had decided that if she could help to free the Pirie impasse at all it would be through Tom rather than through his mother. She had few illusions about him, less now that she had lived in their flat. In the past she had thought him a not very bright young man trying to think for himself in reaction against a Philistine background. Twenty-four, she had thought, was late to be so conventional a ‘rebel’ son, but he would come through the phase and settle down as a rather uninspiring, well-meaning young business man with the saving, if commonplace, grace of having once tried to be different. Now she saw that his opinions were secondhand, picked up from the last ‘interesting man’ or ‘rather unusual fellow’ that he’d met at some pub or club or coffee bar; and these unusual and interesting people themselves seemed seldom to pronounce more profoundly than the popular papers reporting the views of the younger generation. His natural intelligence was probably low enough, but it was further befogged and retarded by his emotional immaturity. He was spoilt, selfish – and yet engaging, not by any design, but by nature.

  Remembering her lesson with Mr Darlington, she hesitated to attribute his charm to his sense of humour – in any case he only possessed more humour than one would have expected from him, which did not mean a great deal
. She felt sure that she liked him not only because he admired her – his admiration, though soothing at first, was becoming progressively more annoying. Other people liked him too, although they clearly thought him absurd; it was probably because he was so friendly and, for all his conceit, trusting. She saw little hope of his ever becoming anything positively good; but great danger – especially when, with Viola’s death, all his props had gone – of his becoming something positively bad – a dreary, fifth rate, ‘minor public school type’ crook. If on no other ground – and she had her affection and gratitude to Viola to consider – she ought to do everything she could to help any human being in such a predicament. If she could take over some of his mother’s propping she could perhaps ease him along a little to find some perch, however insecure and at however low a level; and she was, at any rate, an attachment – a mother substitute, if she had to use such terms – without strong emotional strings.

  Well aware of the comic aspect of the psycho-analytic role she was assuming, she felt safe to pursue it so long as she kept the absurdity well in mind, referring to her friendship always to herself as ‘the transference’. The disgust at her own self-absorption, which David’s letter had aroused in her, welcomed any opportunity for an active helpful relationship that demanded some unselfishness.

  She went to the movies with him, to pubs, to his chosen coffee bar and to a terrible little club near South Kensington Station. She met his friends; they were, as he said, ‘a pretty fair mixture of types’. She met duffle coats, jeans, a few absurd Robin Hood caps and very hunting jackets, and some dark suits so slept in and foodstained that they attracted her notice more than the various uniforms with which youth now advertised itself. Tom called them his friends, and indeed they were always very friendly to him; even those whom she judged to be reasonably intelligent, and therefore presumably either amused or bored by him, seemed pleased to see him; nevertheless he was always quick to tell her of each individual or group that he ‘didn’t see much of them now. They’re rather superficial.’ He was continually moving her on. ‘I was getting pretty bored with that lot,’ he would say as they emerged into the street. She was also introduced to numerous girls – coffee bar black jeans, saloon bar plaid jeans, art student black or grey tweedy skirts, and a few grubby smart dresses.

  Tom’s manner with them was diffident and leering. Again he rushed her away from them. ‘God!’ he would say. ‘It’s not their function to talk.’ She supposed that he wished to imply that he slept with all of them, but she decided that his sexual experience was probably small, possibly non-existent.

  She couldn’t say that she liked or disliked his ‘friends’, for she seldom learned more than that they were on the fringe of various occupations – or more truly, though of course that was not necessarily their fault, unemployed. Their jobs ranged in scale of security from publishing and copy-writing, through all the creative arts (writing, painting, dancing, acting) to selling everything secondhand. In fact most of them only nominally followed their profession but were actually working as temporary clerks or temporary shop assistants or temporary post office sorters. Some were students. Others managed not to do anything at all. All of them, male and female, were younger than Tom, but few probably were so naïve. For the rest she knew nothing of them, for apart from a few of the bowler-hatted young men, and the tweed-skirted, bright-scarfed art student girls with ‘nice’ homes, none of them spoke to her further than absolute politeness demanded, and many not as much as that. This age segregation was something so unlike the behaviour of her own generation in their early twenties that she took some time to grasp it. When she did at last see that their ignoring of her was not due to shyness, she tried to feel an intruder.

  After all, she told herself, her own generation’s determination to ignore age barriers was the first blow in a battle to end the long tyranny of respect for elders. That battle was now over and youth could afford to look down on middle age. In the end, however, she decided that it was a retrograde step. Her generation had treated people as individuals, not bothering about age; these young people were returning to a seclusion as narrow as the ‘secret lives’ of youth in Victorian times.

  She could have forgiven them if they had at least tried her out and found her failing; but they hadn’t even wanted to know what sort of a person she was. She had done nothing outrageous to offend them, she had not, for example, pretended to hold the views of youth, the cardinal sin of the middle aged in her youth – she had just been herself. But they didn’t care about human beings; they only wanted badges, and they weren’t interested because she didn’t wear their badge. It was clearly a mark of Tom’s naïveté that he had taken her into the forbidden zone, but it suggested – for good or for bad, and, after seeing them, she was prepared to say ‘for good’ – that he did not belong there. That, no doubt, was part of his trouble. He could hardly be blamed for not wanting to live in his mother’s moribund world. She remembered his censures on her own social set at the Lord North Street party. They were censures, however parrot-like in his mouth, which she now believed to have much justification. If perhaps she could find some group into which he could fit … but she was hardly in her present life a useful guide.

  Then one evening Poll telephoned. ‘What kind of people say “guess what”?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Americans perhaps.’

  ‘Oh,’ Poll paused doubtfully, then she said. ‘Well I am saying it this evening. I’ve been saying it to masses of people. I tried to say it to you, only your telephone was engaged. I suppose it was that Lady Pirie using it.’ There was a long pause, then Poll said rather crossly, ‘Well. Go on.’

  Meg said, ‘I’m very pleased to hear your voice.’

  ‘That isn’t guessing.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was anything to guess.’

  ‘That’s what “guess what” means.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t realize you were saying it to me. I don’t know. You’ve been burgled.’

  ‘That’s a silly guess. I shouldn’t be phoning lots of people, I should only be phoning the police. Anyway I don’t think you say “burgled” now. That’s a long time ago. Cat burglars! It’s “broken into” now.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you haven’t been broken into.’

  ‘Are you? I’m not sure. It sounds rather nice. Anyway I’ll tell, because I’ve heard all the boring guesses people give now. I’ve broken the trust.’

  ‘Oh, Poll, how wonderful! How did you manage it?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t really do anything. But it seems the trust was only to go on until Teddy’s youngest was twenty-one. And he is. But as I never see them and didn’t know whether he was alive or dead, it was such a surprise that it’s quite as good as if I had broken it. But the main thing was I thought I must have a party, because now that I can touch the capital I’m bound to be absolutely penniless in next to no time. At least I should think so, shouldn’t you, knowing me?’

  ‘Well, I do think it’s very important, Poll, that you should have a clearer idea of what you’re spending. It’s so difficult if one’s been used to a regular allowance, as I know myself.’

  There was a long pause and then Poll said, ‘Well, the party’s any time from ten on.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘No. I mean what day?’

  ‘Now, of course.’ Poll sounded quite angry and rang off.

  Meg was furious to think that her moralizing might have spoilt Poll’s pleasure. She had not expected any invitations for late parties; normally she would have refused them, even Poll’s. They didn’t fit in with her picture of her present life of hard work and regular hours. Not to go now, however, was impossible; it would only seem a continuance of her wretched priggishness over Poll’s expenditure. She had not been to one of Poll’s parties for years, hardly since her marriage. She knew that Poll had kept up with some of their old Art School, United Front friends of the pre-war days; she had heard that Poll’s parties were ‘more wild than ever�
� or ‘much less wild’ or ‘not wild at all’, just as she had been told that Poll was now ‘a complete drunk’ or ‘drinking much less’ or ‘hardly drinking at all’. The few six o’clock parties to which she and Bill had been invited were perfectly ordinary cocktail parties, rather nice ones, with plenty of drink, Poll being very amusing, and one or two ‘lion’ guests – painters or writers – whom she had been interested to meet and liked sometimes more, sometimes less than she had expected. She took it that the late parties were different, largely because she and Bill had never been invited to them. Whatever they were, she thought, there was a good chance that Tom might meet people there who would satisfy his notions of Bohemia, while yet being a little less washed up and half-baked than the usual crowd he mixed with. In any case he and Poll had got on very well at the Lord North Street party.

  He gave a strange little giggle when she asked him to accompany her. At one time she had taken these private laughs and smiles of his as evidence of some personal vision of life, a promise that he might in time emerge as an interesting individual who had been hidden away under a protracted adolescence; now she thought that it was just zany laughter expressing only the emptiness within.

  ‘Sounds like we’re going to get us a good party,’ he said. He affected on occasion a rather feeble American accent and never appeared more feeble than when he did so. Looking at him as he drove the old car, she thought how unlikely it was that any of Poll’s friends would rush to cultivate his acquaintance. She realized that she had only asked him to come with her because she was shy of going there alone. Shyness was an emotion new to her; I haven’t really taken the best precaution against embarrassment, she thought, by bringing a bearded zany as an escort.