The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (12 page)

‘If they were Moslems they might,’ Bill said. ‘But Badai happens
to be a Buddhist country. You’re like Sherlock Holmes put down among the Hottentots. As a matter of fact, all this woman’s intuition is just a lot of Sherlock Holmesing. You go by the standard thing that you know. “He wore flannels where a suit was called for, my dear Watson. He spoke like a repertory actor. And he drank a third pint of beer when he didn’t want it. Obviously a modern parson of a rather old-fashioned kind. The thing’s elementary.” All that Holmesing won’t do here away from the familiar U and non-U of the Home Counties. You have to fall back on describing them as being like cats or apricots.’

A sharpness in his tone perplexed her, she said as lightly as she could, ‘Bill, I believe you’re indulging in what Viola Pirie calls “only half-teasing”. I don’t know why my descriptions should annoy you so, after all their faces
are
like that. Cats or apricots. Anyway
you
’
re
always
summing up witnesses. How do
you
do it?’

‘Not in that sort of way at all,’ he said. ‘I’ve no idea what that man’s job is. But he’s got authority. You can tell that by the tone of his voice even in this jangling language. And by the set of his head. He’s
arrogant
, I should think, by the way his eyes are half closed when people talk to him and by the curl of his mouth. And quite right too. Why shouldn’t he be? He’s earned the right to it, I expect. And look now, how he’s closed that brief case and brought the discussion to an end right in the middle of the fat fellow’s argument. It’s obvious he doesn’t care a damn. He’s made up his mind and he’ll stand by his own risks. Excellent man.’

‘I don’t find any of that the faintest bit convincing,’ Meg said, laughing. ‘You’ve just substituted John Buchan for Sherlock Holmes.’

But Bill had no concern for criticism. ‘If I thought that man was typical of them,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t believe that the outlook for Asia was at all gloomy. But the trouble is men of his calibre are probably only a handful. It’s the material they’ve got to work on that’s so hopeless. That sort of thing for example.’ He indicated the table of sad young men in continental style suits, lace edged handkerchiefs and fountain pens prominent in their breast pockets. The food they had guzzled seemed literally to have assuaged their sorrow, for they were talking now in earnest, high, edgy voices. ‘Student politics,’ Bill said, ‘at the age of thirty or so. And one of the customs men off duty with them too. That’s a bad sign when your N.C.O.s are mixed up in that sort of thing.’

‘N.C.O.s! Really, darling!’ she cried. ‘What is this Colonel Blimp
act? In the first place you’ve no right to say they’re talking politics. They’re probably talking about sex. And anyway why do you say they’re thirty? They look about eighteen.’

‘That’s the trouble. Most Asiatics look eighteen when they’re forty. Half-fledged with half-baked ideas! And always getting rattled about something. Look at the state of excitement they’re in.’

She protested fiercely now, even though she mixed her protest with laughter.

‘No, Bill, really. You sound like Tom Pirie’s idea of the older generation.’

He looked a little sheepish. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s very hot for talking. The sweat’s pouring down me. I don’t know how you keep so cool. Anyhow I’m afraid I
am
a bit out of sympathy with youth. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been if we’d had …’ he stopped and added quickly, ‘well, anyhow, for better or for worse I am. As I say, I can’t stick the half-fledged and the half-baked; and I hate people who get rattled. In court. Anywhere. It brings all the bully out in me.’ He paused as though surprised at hearing his own words, then he said, ‘No, put my money on the old boy in authority. He’s probably a High Court Judge.’

She had been given time to recover now. When his unfinished
sentence
hit her, she had been on the point of stroking his hand or
bursting
into tears – some sort of underlining at any rate that would have made it impossible to turn back. Now it had been half said and the moment of saying, thank God, had been the best that there could be, for she would have all these months of intimacy ahead quietly and gradually to lay bare his wound and heal it so far as it ever could be healed.

‘I see,’ she laughed, ‘a judge. Much more important than a Minister of Culture.’ All the same she had to get away for a moment on her own. ‘They’ll be calling our flight soon,’ she said, ‘I’ll just make use of the lavatory. I do like their signs. Whatever it says looks much prettier than “Ladies”.’

‘It’ll be very unhygienic,’ he said. ‘You’d much better wait.’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘The one on the plane’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta.’

Almost immediately their flight number was called. ‘Will
passengers
in transit proceed
first
to the barrier please. Passengers in transit
first
,
please.’ That was their call. Meg hastened to move before Bill could call her back. He was inclined to fuss unnecessarily about
aeroplane
and train times.

As she left Bill, she noticed that the eminent personage, followed only by the fat young secretary, had moved straight towards the restaurant exit without regard for any precedence of passengers in transit. And Bill had stood aside for him. His admiration for the man would almost certainly have been increased by this disregard for
official
instructions. Such complete certainty somehow always increased Bill’s admiration for people out of all proportion.

As she reached the entrance to the ‘Ladies’, Bill’s voice sounded, calling her back. She turned for a second and signalled that there was no need to fuss. The party of earnest young men, she noticed, had broken up. The shirt-sleeved customs official had run up to the
eminent
personage’s secretary and engaged him in some lengthy
explanation
. They were gesticulating wildly. The eminent personage stood alone at the door, his back turned to all the fuss. Bill, nearby, looked ominously impatient. She opened the door of the ‘Ladies’ violently to show that she was hurrying.

The place was as dirty as Bill had predicted. The humidity, heavy enough outside, seemed to seep from the pores of the cracked
whitewashed
walls as in some underground grotto. Up above where the ceiling cast shadows, lizards, inert and intent, lay flattened against the moist wall surface. Nevertheless, oppressive, almost disgusting though the narrow, high-ceilinged washroom was to her, its privacy and its gloom had given her the moments she needed to retire into herself, to accept the full impact of Bill’s preoccupation. Their childlessness had hung ominously over them for so many years, then struck in full guilt at her, and finally through his patient gentleness receded, so that for many years now she had accepted it as much or as little as she did the disparity in their ages. He could not help growing old ahead of her; she could not help being barren. If they did not accept these things they would destroy themselves. And now in the undercurrents of the last few days, in the lightening of the daily routine or in the fictitious sense of a new life that their long holiday suggested, Bill had
unmistakably
shown that his acceptance was hardly, painfully made. Her short moment of retiral had strengthened Meg to face his sorrow, to wonder how much and again how little she could do in these
heaven-sent
months of intimacy to ease it. It was not, she decided, only as wife that she must give herself up entirely to his renewal, but as daughter.

The single tap of the water basin had a loose washer. As she turned it on there was a grumbling and groaning that startled her out of her
reverie. And then almost immediately came the high, clipped Badai voice in its American-English accent calling the final notice of their flight. Startled into eager haste, she turned to the handbag she had placed on a wooden ledge to find her Cologne-soaked tissue pads. In too eager haste, for the bag fell from the ledge, scattering its contents in all the dark squalid corners beneath the basin. She could not see and, to the touch of her finger ends, numbed by the intense humidity, she might have been scrabbling among spiders instead of handkerchief and tissues. Everything seemed soft to her deadened senses. She felt hysteria mounting, then happily her lipstick holder gleamed in the darkness. Methodically she found each object, washed or dusted it, and replaced it in her bag. Then quickly but deliberately she cleaned her face with the tissue pads, peered into the dirty looking-glass,
re-did
her mouth. Even a lizard suddenly darting across the wall in
pursuit
of a fly could not disturb her now. She was freshened, ready to see things in perspective, yet not evading her sense that a crisis in their lives had come upon her unawares and that she must deal with it. She was not as Bill had put it ‘rattled’.

Above the loud noise of aeroplane propellers, she thought for a moment that she could hear him calling to her and noted how frayed his nerves must be that his impatience could so outweigh his sense of decorum. She heard cries and shouts and hoped that Singapore would not be too noisy. She prepared her phrase to meet Bill’s impatience – ‘Well, I’m late, darling, but not too late. So I don’t intend to
apologize
.’ She swung open the door and walked almost into the arms of Miss Vines.

The stewardess pushed her back through the door into the ill-lit cellarlike room. Even in the gloom her eyes looked out from her rather stupid, regulation-made-up face with a parodied solemnity that hardly concealed her feverish excitement.

‘Mrs Eliot,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you should go back into the restaurant yet. There’s something I have to tell you.’

Meg’s first thought was that she was confronted by a lunatic; she had felt in the plane that the girl was neurotic and unsatisfied; horrors lay so very little below the awful dead monotony of the suburban mind. Then she knew.

‘It’s Bill,’ she cried, ‘he’s ill.’

Miss Vines tried hard to reach some communication of individual compassion, but it was so difficult – there were so many passengers in her life. She put her hand on Meg’s arm, but it was shaken off.

‘Don’t be absurd, you silly girl,’ Meg said, ‘I must go out to him.’

When Miss Vines did speak, she sounded as though she were
delivering
the keyline in a play. ‘He’s very ill, I’m afraid. He’s been shot.’

The strangeness hardly reached Meg at that moment, she thought only, she’s using the conventional words to tell me that he’s dead. She followed Miss Vines out into the restaurant with a slow, numbed walk. The chattering, excited crowd divided at Miss Vines’ words to let them pass through. She saw in a blur out of the corner of her eye the pale student being dragged away by two uniformed men. He was without his glasses, blood was pouring from where his nose was smashed flatter than ever against his amber cheeks.

Meg had a sudden vision of the whole scene as part of some film – this must be how it was on the sets. For a moment she felt a violent anger against them all for making a cardboard scene out of Bill’s life and her own. But then the unimportance of anything overcame her so completely; she thought, now I’m supposed for some reason to act with dignity, since there’s no point in any action any more.

A second later she saw Bill’s face, chalk white, and saw his blue lips moving. She turned on Miss Vines almost as though she would strike her.

‘You told me he was dead,’ she cried. Those precious seconds when Bill needed her, wasted by this wicked girl’s stupidity! She knelt on the tiled floor by Bill’s head.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘can you see me? It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.’ And as though to echo her, Bill’s voice came very slowly and in a whisper she could hardly hear.

‘We’ll keep going,’ he said. But his eyes seemed quite dull and staring.

Her body trembled in a convulsive effort to restrain any tears or cry. A woman’s voice behind her said,
‘Ah!
la
pauvre
dame!’
And then a tall man was bending over Bill, cutting away his shirt and trousers from his stomach. Holding Bill’s hand, stroking his arm, Meg looked up. ‘Are you the doctor?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t these fools get a
doctor?
’

‘Je
suis
médecin,
Madame,
’
the tall man said. He had a purple
birthmark
on his neck. ‘
Calmez-vous.
Votre
mari
ne
souffre
pas
beaucoup.
Il
a
subi
une
très
grave
choc.’

Were they all mad suddenly that they had begun to talk to her in French?

‘Je
vais
lui
faire
une
piqûre
de
morphine,
’
the tall man said and, rolling up Bill’s sleeve, he plunged the needle into the crook of his arm. Bill’s face, so flabby now in its paper whiteness, twitched for a second. The tall man stood up.
‘
Il
ne
faut
donc
pas
faire
trop
grande
attention
à
ce
qu’il
dira,’
he said.

Meg strove to give meaning to his words. Perhaps he was telling her that Bill would be out of his mind. Well, if so, she would make a life for him somehow, anything so long as he still had a life to make. Always these foreground actors playing some absurd role, and out of the line of Meg’s vision this crowd of absurd extras dressed as Chinese, Badai, Americans, Indians, and God knows what. She would not
allow
them to obtrude upon the reality of herself and Bill.

‘The ambulance is on its way, Mrs Eliot,’ Miss Vines said timidly. ‘I have to go now.’ And to echo her words came again the ridiculous clipped American Badai voice.

‘Passengers for B.O.A.C. Flight Number five-nine-three please.’

Meg did not look at her. Let them do their role of ‘The play must go on’; she was intent on Bill, stroking his hand, mopping the sweat from his forehead with a Cologne pad.