The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

by Angus Wilson

  ‘Oh, Gordon’s death. One thing and another. We’re losing our cellist.’ He didn’t want to talk about it. Only two days before he had received Mary Gardner’s letter of resignation – she was extremely sorry but she didn’t see her way to playing any more with Else.

  Meg said, ‘Oh! Well, I look forward to it in the autumn. Anyhow you might let me sit in, when you and Else practise, without looking so unhappy.’

  ‘It wasn’t that, Meg. Else gets nervous and she’s not a good player to start with.’

  ‘I rather thought not.’

  His desire for her sympathy was stronger than his instinct not to involve Meg in the Else-Mary Gardner fracas. He said, ‘As a matter of fact that’s why the cellist is leaving us. She quite rightly feels that she’s too good to play with Else.’

  ‘But can’t you get someone better than Else for second violinist?’

  ‘I think we could but …’

  She looked at him in amazement. ‘But this is something you care about, David.’

  He was determined not to retract. ‘You must see the kitchen,’ he said. ‘It’s the best room in the place and beautifully set out. These gargantuan Regency meals.’ He strode ahead.

  Later in one of the bedrooms he drew her attention to two Meissen jugs. ‘They’re good, aren’t they?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘quite lovely.’ But she hardly looked at them.

  In the next room there were Chelsea figures. ‘David, I’m sorry.’ she said, ‘I’d like to go. I can’t bear looking at the porcelain. I didn’t realize how much I minded selling my collection.’

  They soon recovered their gaiety on the pier. They went to Madame Nora, the fortune teller, and David asked if her parrot was psychic; he carried on such a straight-faced absurd conversation about the bird’s powers that Meg had to go out in a fit of giggles. They put pennies into innumerable slot machines; Meg was fascinated by the peep show of girls undressing. ‘This one must be nineteen-twenty-two,’ she said. ‘I can tell by the drawers.’ She spent a long time going from one to another until an elderly man in a macintosh began to follow her and pinched her thigh. Laughing wildly, she made David take her on the dodge’em cars. He proved a poor driver and when she took over she was little better; they were bumped into breathlessness. When they got off, the gipsy-looking, tattooed-chested proprietor said to David, ‘I’ll take you round next time,’ and winked. It was part proposition, part send up.

  David was not sure whether Meg had heard, but at tea, under the noise of a selection from The Boy Friend, she said, ‘Do I take notice of your conquests, David, or not?’

  He had often, when they were young, imagined her broaching the subject of his sexual interests and had hoped so much that, if it must happen, she would not choose the wrong words. Now he only wondered how he could convey to her, so that she would believe it, that he had for so many years had no sexual life at all. If he could convince her of this unlikely truth, she would perhaps henceforth leave the subject alone.

  He said, ‘The answer is that you don’t, Meg. And in any case you won’t have to. That man was sending me up – making fun of me. And even if he hadn’t been – well, that kind of thing happens almost never now, I’m glad to say.’

  She asked, ‘Why glad to say? I’m always pleased at passes. Well, not perhaps pinches from men in macintoshes. But from handsome gipsies, dear God!’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Don’t look so prim,’ she said. And then, ‘I’m afraid I’ve offended you, my dear. I’m not trying to pry, you know. But after all these years it’s ridiculous for me not to be able to mention it.’

  ‘There’s nothing to mention. I don’t have a sex life.’

  ‘Sex life! What an expression!’ She began to laugh, then her face softened; she put her hand on his arm. ‘I’m sorry, David. I’ve been incredibly tactless. I’m a bit out of my depth. Of course, I know exactly what you feel. I never wanted anyone else when Bill was alive and I don’t suppose now that I ever shall.’

  He said, ‘I never had sexual relations with Gordon after the first few months that we knew each other.’

  She said, ‘David! My dear, why ever not?’

  ‘Gordon was a Christian, Meg. It was a mortal sin for him.’

  She put the milk jug down on the table so abruptly that milk spilt on her dress. Wiping the skirt, she looked down and said, ‘But surely he couldn’t expect you to remain faithful …’

  ‘I didn’t want anyone else,’ he interrupted, and as she was about to speak, he said, ‘No, he wasn’t to blame, Meg. Not at all. He thought I was crazy not to have other affairs, although in the end he accepted it. He had them himself. He was naturally very promiscuous. That was in a way easier, from the religious point of view, than any permanent relationship. But long before I’d met him I’d known that for me it didn’t work. It was too much of an act of personal assertion, too much of a piece of personal defiance …’ His voice tailed away.

  She said, ‘Oh, those bloody laws, you mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that and so much else. I sometimes think that even if I’d loved women, I wouldn’t have been equal to it.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ she said. Then after a pause, ‘Well, I know so little about it. Probably for people like yourself the emotional is always more important than the physical.’

  He didn’t know whether she said it as a sop to her own feelings, or to his, or whether in fact she believed it.

  Smiling, she said, ‘I’m afraid I always liked sex with Bill, David. Loved it very much,’ she added.

  He said with complete sincerity, ‘I’m very glad, Meg.’

  For the rest of the day, as Gordon would have said, Meg ‘lived it up’. But although David could feel that she was driving herself to make the day a success, it did not alter the fact that he enjoyed himself hugely. Only once or twice he was disturbed to see her looking at him with a maternal sadness. He thought, however, we’ve come through so many difficulties in the past weeks, she’ll succeed in accepting this about me also. As long as we leave well alone.

  *

  There were others, however, he soon discovered who did not think that it was well and who, therefore, had decided most firmly not to leave it alone. Only two days after their trip to Brighton, David received a telephone call from Eileen Rattray.

  ‘The gods are on our side,’ she said.

  It was so much a phrase that came uneasily from her that he knew at once that she must have prepared it carefully. He felt an immediate hostility, a need to be on his guard.

  ‘Oh!’ he said, ‘which gods?’ Certainly, he thought, his gods and Eileen’s were not the same.

  It was the sort of whimsical conversation that he knew her to be unaccustomed to; but clearly she was anxious to adapt herself. She made a noise that, over the telephone at any rate, was insufficiently like a laugh to serve even for politeness.

  ‘In this case, the Rogersons,’ she said, and continued rapidly enough to prevent interruption, ‘Miss Snaith’s overwhelmed with work and Fred Rogerson’s got permission from the Education Committee to take on another secretary for his own personal correspondence. For the rest of the term at any rate. And once the job’s created, you know how these things are, it could become a sort of permanency.’ She came to a pause, evidently waiting for his whoop of joy, but he felt immediately angry at the intrusion. He said only, ‘Oh, I’m so glad. He’s obviously badly overworked.’ Though really, he thought, it’s this Miss Snaith who’s getting the relief, but as I’ve never heard of her before I can’t comment on that. His annoyance lent him some of Meg’s frivolity. He said, ‘I don’t know Miss Snaith, but it’s nice for her, too.’

  Eileen Rattray must have sensed his hostility, for she said in an aggressively honest voice, ‘You’ll make a great mistake, David, if you don’t encourage your sister to acquire some interest outside herself pretty soon.’ She must have felt that this was a doubtful tone. She went on persuasively. ‘You said it yourself, David. And I ought t
o have known you were right. After all, you’re with her all the time. Anyhow I said I’d keep a watch out and I have. I can tell you now, I was more worried at the party than I let on. Convalescence, you know, can produce its own neurosis. People are more awake to that nowadays than they were a few years back.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘get them on their feet. Yes, I read about that in the paper.’ But this irony was a self-indulgent evasion. ‘It’s really a question for Meg and the Rogersons,’ he said, and, hearing her about to speak, he added, ‘Oh, the doctor’s all in favour, I’m pretty sure.’

  He allowed her to take in his disapproval of this lobbying. Then he said, ‘Ah! Of course, Meg’s had no experience. I suppose Fred Rogerson realizes that.’

  ‘Oh, yes. After all it’s only for six weeks as a start. And they like each other. It’s ideal, really.’

  ‘Well then, I suggest Fred Rogerson speaks to Meg. Or if you’re acting as his agent, you could.’

  ‘I imagine she’s bound to find a lot of excuses. It’s not her fault. She’s been ill and she’s unwilling to face the fact that she’s well again. It’s a fairly usual pattern but it mustn’t be allowed to get fixed. Couldn’t you prepare the ground?’

  ‘No,’ David answered. ‘I couldn’t, Eileen. You may be right in what you say. For myself, I’m not so sure as I was. I think Meg knows where she’s going, but she’s taking a rest. In any case, I’m the last person to question her decisions. But you put it to her. It would be kind of you to do so.’

  ‘I was only trying to be kind in the first place, David.’

  ‘But, of course. And I’m grateful to you.’

  He wondered, when she had rung off, whether he had behaved badly; on the whole, he thought not. Meg will be able to deal with her, he decided, and for reasons he did not wish to examine too closely, he knew that by ‘deal with’ he meant ‘refuse’.

  Eileen Rattray, however, was only the advance guard. The main attack took place that evening.

  Over the years David and Gordon had discovered the habit of communal silence. At first an artificial approach to inner quietude, a protest against random talk, aimless reading, or music played to fill up stillness, their silence had become a real reservoir of strength, even, they felt, a communication that was something more than personal. That it was more they had come especially to believe, because Else, in so many other ways a distracting and devitalizing person, had the power, when she sat with them in their silences, of contributing a positive sense of peace and order. It seemed, moreover, to come from some source deeper than her everyday, clamant, sentimental egotism. In this silence, when the intelligent and the unselfconscious were often ‘all at sea’, Else, so absurd, so driven by uncertainty into pretension, was absolutely without thought of her surroundings, of others or of herself, entirely still from a core of unselfness that her egotism had never been able to dissolve.

  For Meg, David had been all too aware, these times of silence that came so naturally to him and to Else, were an agony. Her desperate attempts to disregard them, to avoid laughter, to join with them, had been one of the aspects of her early adjustment to the house that had most distressed him, perhaps above all her attempts to join with them which had so underlined her neurotic desire to please. In the last fortnight, however, he had noticed a change. She could genuinely disregard their silence, reading without covert glances, or moving, if she needed, without elaborate hushedness. On occasion even he noted that she also sat still and silent, and her face, when she did so, seemed to him truly relieved of the strain that had marked her, even in her gaiety, right back to their childhood. It gave him great happiness to think that he might have brought her some true peace if only for a half hour or so. He truly felt, as he had told her, that his disciplines were not to be preached, but if he had communicated some part of the inner quiet that, despite all his moral anxieties and all the tension of his repressed desires, lay within him, the severe limits he had imposed upon his life seemed to be vindicated. To reach one person and to still them seemed to him more than he had hoped for in so hopeless a world.

  This evening Meg sat silent. She had found for herself, as he believed people must, a naturally relaxed posture. Her dark eyes had stopped their constant, restless moving, she apparently even found no need for her endless jerky cigarette smoking. She was truly, he believed, at peace.

  It was Else who broke the silence; and immediately David realized how strong her hostility must have become; how great the misery of her jealousy, that she should be driven to destroy what was certainly her greatest and perhaps now her only bond with him.

  She said, ‘Meg.’ He saw Meg look up startled and also tense against Else’s unaccustomed use of her Christian name. ‘Meg, I think that David is not being fair to you. No, David, please! I wish to speak quite freely to Meg about this. Eileen Rattray has told him today of some interesting work near here that is offered to you. And he has refused to speak to you about it.’

  David said, as calmly as he was able, ‘Else, this is all very foolish, you know.’

  But Meg wanted him to be silent. ‘But now you can tell me about it, Else,’ she said.

  David could only guess at what anger she felt, for her tone to Else was entirely friendly. Only a flickering smile and a very slightly puzzled frown suggested that she didn’t understand why such tension had gathered around the subject of a prospective job for her. Once again David could not believe that she did not know why.

  Else was certainly disarmed. ‘I really think it’s a marvellous chance‚’ she said. She told of the Rogersons’ offer. ‘You will be doing something so good. He is such a fine man and badly overworked. He needs an intelligent sympathetic person to work for him. And then he too can help you. He has such great energy.’

  Meg smiled. ‘You think I need energy, Else? Perhaps I do. I don’t feel it myself. I’m rather glad to have a rest from energy.’ Then she said, as it seemed to David without any overtones, ‘I don’t know whether I should take it. Does Eileen think it’s a good idea too?’

  ‘Yes‚’ said Else, ‘everybody does who cares for you, I am sure. There is a time, you know, when someone like you who has been ill must resume her life. And you were so sure that you wished to take up secretarial work. You spent so much time on the course. Too much, perhaps. You made yourself ill. But now I am sure you are ready to begin again. It’s difficult for you, I know, to take this step. That is why David should urge you.’

  ‘I’m not going to urge anything,’ David said. ‘It’s entirely for Meg to decide. I didn’t tell you about it, Meg, because I didn’t want to influence. I thought it was up to Fred Rogerson to tell you himself. Or Eileen since she’s broached it to me.’ He wanted desperately to tell her that she need not consider taking it if she didn’t wish to, but he somehow feared to be responsible for urging her not to. I can’t commit myself to asking for her presence here as a full-time member of the household, he thought, it would be wrong. But he knew that fear was stronger than belief in non-interference as a motive in his withdrawal.

  She said, ‘I see. I wonder what Dr Loder would say.’

  ‘I think,’ Else said, ‘that he would certainly agree.’

  Again Meg said, ‘I see.’ Then she added, ‘Of course doctors always talk more to other people than to their patients; one must expect it.’

  He could detect no note of sarcasm in her voice.

  ‘It would be a job that would allow me to go on living here. I shouldn’t take any other kind.’

  There seemed no threat to Else in her words. She appeared simply to be speaking her thoughts aloud. ‘I don’t think, Else,’ she said, ‘that you should have expected David to urge me. Of course what he said would influence me greatly. As it would you. We are here because of him, and if we push him into disposing of us, he might have to say things that would make us very unhappy.’

  ‘I came here because of Gordon.’

  ‘Yes, of course you did. But Gordon’s dead now.’ Meg’s tone was without any cruelty. S
he seemed simply to be announcing from far away a rather irrelevant fact. ‘But why didn’t Mr Rogerson ask me himself?’

  ‘He wanted the ground to be prepared. He would not have liked to be refused.’

  Meg looked surprised and interested. ‘Dear God! Not like to be refused? Such a fine man. I’m not being sarcastic, Else; I too get the impression of a fine man. But not to want to be refused! That really is interesting, David. It almost persuades me to take the job.’

  David could not look at Else, he was too angry with her. He gave himself to considering the loneliness that must be driving her. I must, he thought, find an acceptance of her; I owe that at least to Gordon.

  Meg broke the silence. ‘You’ve all made it very difficult for me, Else,’ she said, ‘by the way you’ve arranged this. You, Eileen, the doctor, all think I should take a job. I’m bound, you know, to feel against it. But I’m trying not to be influenced by that, but simply to decide whether I want to. I think, on the whole, it’s worth trying. At any rate, if I don’t try it, I might miss something interesting. And I shall be here still. That’s the main thing.’

  Else smiled. ‘If you insist on taking our interest like that, you must do so. The important thing is to help you out of this inertia.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not really mistaking your motives,’ Meg said. ‘I think you’ll be glad to see the back of me during the day. Why shouldn’t you? But I’m sure you also feel that I need to be shaken out of my lethargy. And I’m sure that Eileen thinks everybody should be occupied with a useful task.’

  David thought, My God! She’s travelled a long way since she thought everyone here was so ‘enchanting’; or perhaps she still thinks so, she makes all these statements about them so completely without sarcasm, as though they were facts that she happily accepted. Something disturbingly simple about her whole behaviour made him wonder if she were not a more childlike person than he had always supposed. He said, ‘You do feel that you’re qualified to take on the job, Meg?’