The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (31 page)

It was just as well, for the party threatened to be a sad, tepid little
affair. Most of the guests were friends of Viola’s, people whom she had known in the colonial days; people of Sir Herbert’s age, retired now and doing odd jobs to make ends meet. They knew that the world was not interested in what they
had
done, and
they
were not much interested in what they were doing now. Much of the
conversation
was about the old days in the Islands. A retired admiral talked to Meg a little about the coaching work he now did at a well-known crammers’; Viola brought up a rather silly widow of a planter who was considered to be rather dashing because she did film-extra work and modelling; a fat man talked to her about hypnotism as a cure for smoking. It was a measure of their dimness that they all considered Viola with her downright manner a ‘tremendous character’. Almost everyone was twenty years older than Meg and forty years older than Tom. One old woman had brought her granddaughters. The elder of these, a rather pretty blonde of about twenty with a hard,
aggressive
manner, engaged Tom in argument. ‘I think that’s a pretty poisonous point of view,’ she said loudly, and again later, ‘Well, it’s lucky some of us have a slightly less feeble attitude to things.’

It was obvious, however, rather to Meg’s surprise, that the girl was very attracted by Tom. She kept edging towards him as she was
talking
and her hard laugh had a sexy, edgy note. Her sister, a tall, rather fat girl with dark hair, whose cheeks burned more crimson as the evening went on, only giggled. Once she turned to Meg and said with pride, ‘They’re at it again. Vanessa’s on the warpath this
evening
.’ Meg hoped for a moment that the remark had a double meaning; but it wasn’t so. Tom was clearly very pleased with himself.

The only event that disturbed Meg’s apathy was the sudden arrival of Donald Templeton. He recalled too closely the Lord North Street party. She also thought it embarrassing that since nobody else was in evening dress he should have chosen to come in a dinner jacket with a crimson, embroidered silk waistcoat. His ebullient manner seemed far less tinged with nervousness than at any time she had known him. She could hear his laugh braying out heartily over the little room and always a second later the laughter of the person he was talking to. He laughs at his own jokes, she thought, I’ve noticed that before but, of course, that’s one of the things I don’t care for; all the same the others were following up with genuine laughter. Indeed he was clearly a great success. He seemed to be giving them a sort of cultural travel guide.

‘Stay at the small hotel on the hill,’ he was drawling, ‘and ask for
the
truite
gelée.
Don’t let them persuade you into having any of their vintage wines. What? The local red is a very good simple table wine. The church is passable Romanesque, but nothing more. You’ll have seen quite enough Romanesque by then anyway. But take a look at the crypt. Don’t be put off by the old chap that shows you round. And don’t listen to a word he says either. You
read
French, I suppose. Well, for once there’s a good local guide. There’s a small
libraire
where you can buy it. Just opposite the Café de l’Univers, as I
remember
. Most of the cafés there stake this universal claim, what? The point of the crypt is the Carolingian stone carvings. They’re not beautiful, of course, but you won’t see anything else like them, what?’ He seemed almost to be shouting in anger now against some imagined opposition. ‘And go out to Rémy les Asiles,’ he cried. ‘It’s five miles of very bad road but there’s a fourteenth-century Tree of Jesse – a very well preserved bit of painting – that’s not to be sneered at. You’re going in July? Well, get them to give you a thing they make with fresh raspberries and a very decent local sweet white wine to go with it. Don’t fuss with the crayfish, you’ll get them better and cheaper farther south. What?’

Amid this dogmatic, assertive speech, unfamiliar to Meg, the
interrogatives
seemed more affectedly irrelevant than ever. And what a wine and food carry on! she thought. She realized suddenly that the party had formed into two groups – one around Donald and a smaller one around Tom. She was left alone. For a moment she was annoyed. Then her old social sense returned to her. This shut-off, quizzing
attitude
was too like some embittered old maid compensating with ‘Jane Austen sense of humour’. In any case, why should she sneer at Donald? She liked European travel, food, wine, buildings as much as another. To call the voicing of that taste ‘wine and food snobbery’ was simply to fear committal. And as to his patronizing the company, there was no evidence that they felt it to be condescension. It was only a measure, really, of her own estimation of them; Donald was less intolerant, that was all. She was about to make herself join his circle, when Viola Pirie touched Donald’s arm and indicated her isolation with a glance. She had paid the price then, Donald was to be ‘nice’ to her.

And in truth she had to admit that he did all he could to be nice. He sat with her on the sofa and told her of Bill’s conduct of many of his cases. His admiration for Bill was complete and sincere. As the stories progressed Meg listened fascinatedly; to hear anything of Bill
that she did not know was to increase the living part of her, to add, if only secondhand, to the stock of memories which she was building up as a counterweight to the dead routine life that was to be hers in the future. But as Donald ended one of the stories, she suddenly felt a
distaste
for hearing any more. She did not want to know things about Bill from other people, things in which she had not participated, especially not from Donald. She sought some means of bringing the conversation to an end; but she felt that she could not do so without a gesture of friendliness in response to his, something that did not commit her to seeing him again soon or often.

She said, ‘One thing I didn’t mention, Donald, about my affairs, if you’ll forgive my bringing them up. Mr Marriot, the consul at Srem Panh, started to talk to me about compensation from the Badai government. I shut him up. At the time I couldn’t bear to hear about it. As though there could be any compensation for what had
happened
! I still feel that, but I do realize that I oughtn’t to refuse any money I can get. I don’t think I could bear to handle the thing myself. Do you think you could do it for me? I expect the Foreign Office have gone ahead even though I said not to do so. I
don
’
t
want it if there’s to be any publicity or fuss. But I know you’ll handle it tactfully.’

He seemed a little surprised, she thought, although he promised to do all he could. The subject of the compensation had occurred to her quite without premeditation; it seemed a polite means of disengagement. If, as she now saw, it marked him off as a business adviser rather than a friend, she could only welcome the chance result.

She got up and began to circulate among Viola’s friends. She found that the deadness she had sensed at the beginning of the party had gone – thanks perhaps to Donald – but, benefiting by it, she was soon amusing and entertaining them at the top of her form; a good deal less noisily, she could not help reflecting, than Donald. After the guests had left Viola Pirie said, ‘You’re wonderful with people, Meg. Thank you. I thought it was going to be very sticky.’

Meg wondered at her own motives. Had it merely been pique at finding herself for a moment a wallflower? Had she wanted to put Donald’s nose out of joint? Or was the desire to be ‘good socially’ – the desire that she had placed at the head of that list of follies with which she had spoiled Bill’s happiness – so naturally strong in her? The lightheaded frivolity which she had felt during the evening was not routed by these questions, she could not answer them and she didn’t care. Instead she found herself giggling at something Tom said.

‘That Cynthia Robertson’s a bit nympho,’ he announced in worldly tones. Meg had to go out of the room, it struck her as so funny that he should want to lessen the value of his conquest by attributing it to nymphomania. She could hear Viola saying, ‘Now, Tom, you really shouldn’t. You’ve shocked Meg’; and she could only laugh the more.

The next day Viola said, ‘You’ve got a wonderful friend in Donald Templeton, Meg.’

Even this did not really annoy her. She said only, ‘He was Bill’s friend.’

On the Sunday evening she returned to her room. The visit had not proved as irksome as she had feared; although when Viola said, ‘I shall have to let that room soon, Meg. Why don’t you come here as my lodger? You can see now how independent you would be,’ she thought, ‘Not for more than three days, thank you.’ She looked at the dead anonymity of her own bed-sitting room with considerable relief.

About a week later Meg caught a very bad cold. She hardly knew how to get through the afternoon classes. This was a time in any case when, after absorbing the first shorthand lessons very rapidly, she seemed suddenly to have fallen behind the younger students. She longed for a memory that was not so over-stuffed with the irrelevant minutiae of forty-three years. Miss Dacres, the shorthand teacher, drew her aside in the passage and told her not to worry. ‘There always comes a period of mental blockage,’ she said, ‘after the first week or two. If you’ve started to learn when you’re older, I mean.’ The
intention
was kindly but Meg was only the more depressed. She had
obviously
shown her anxiety which she had no wish to do; and to be comforted by ‘teacher’ – especially when ‘teacher’ was ten years younger than herself – annoyed her.

She gave up in the middle of a shivery walk by the Serpentine that evening; it was dark, with a cold east wind too harsh to permit even a gentle melancholy. How anyone could be invited to easeful death by that black, freezing water is beyond me, she thought; at any rate, I’m no suicide.

The melancholy chill of her room gave quite other thoughts. She made herself a cup of tea but it seemed thick and bitter in her mouth. She took three Disprins and went to bed. The blankets were
inadequate
, the water bottle burned her feet and then, as she lay awake so long, turned toad cold to her feet. ‘Cold as paddocks’ – she repeated the phrase, which had always before had an archaic charm but it
failed to exorcise her thoughts. Lonely old women in their hundreds went through her mind – old women smiling inanely from
frightened
, timid eyes; old women leering crazily from clownish painted faces; old women smiling and nodding, with cracked shoes and skirts done up with safety pins; square faced, bobbed haired old fighters for women’s rights reduced to depressive silence; and bird eyed, gaunt old socialite women (Meg Eliots these) chattering their manic nonsense.

The disgust that this fever of self pity aroused in her gave no
assuagement
, for the circle revolved endlessly in her mind. She tried to think of all the useful, cheerful, self-dependent old women who had conquered poverty and loneliness, but they could find no place in the crushing ranks of the defeated old women that crowded into her memory. She tried to efface the particular in the general and a voice, clear, detached, a little pompous – the voice of the BBC Question Master – gave the answer. ‘The panel have been set the following problem. You are in charge of a lifeboat. A liner is sinking. There are only two more places that can be offered. You must make the
agonizing
choice of saving these two from among a number. The possible candidates are a young girl engaged to be married, her fiancé a brilliant young atomic scientist, a famous ballerina, a mother and her fourteen-year-old son, an elderly woman once famous as a beauty and a society hostess, a surgeon, a stevedore … Well,’ the voice continued almost cheerfully, ‘I think the panel have little difficulty in their first
elimination
. The elderly woman after all has had her life, she has no one who depends on her, she is not frankly going to be of much use to the world …’ Commissars scratched out the names of old women from the lists of those worthy of bread tickets, even humanitarians averted their eyes from old Jewesses packed into cattle trucks, steeling themselves to think rather of the children and of the active.

Meg fought the hysteria desperately. I am forty-three, I am strong, I am not stupid or cowardly, I have humour and experience on my side, a new life can begin for me. Barren, spoilt, ignorant of the world around you – a world that has no place or use for you. It is my
intention
(and I’m fully aware that the whole of this dialogue is absurd and humourless) but it is my intention to learn about this world (if the whole business about my not knowing it isn’t itself a hysterical
mystique
born of a chance tragic happening) to learn about it and make myself useful. But, as her will seemed to be conquering her hysteria, the dialogue changed. You pity yourself because you think you have a
right
to a better life; it’s worse for you because you weren’t expecting
it, it’s unfair because you didn’t know it was coming; all the old women who haunt you have been comfortable, rich, beautiful, spoilt, that’s all you pity in them. The voice seemed to jeer, to mimic her mother’s voice – I don’t care what you say, it’s worse for women who had been brought up as ladies. She answered, declaring all her hatred of her mother’s view, protesting all she had done for the old working women in Aid to the Elderly. I’m lucky, she said, I know it – at least I’ve had something, they’ve always been poor. But the voice said, You
do
think it’s worse, it
is
worse, isn’t it? It’s degrading. It’s a
hateful
world that has no place for you.

On the superficial level of her mind she tried to ignore the whole, sordid hysteric struggle, told herself that it was the fever, lay on this side and on that, turned the pillow over, tucked up her legs, stretched them; and at last fell into a sleep where the dialogue assumed more active nightmare forms.

She woke in the night once, crying; and then in the morning, with the fever gone, but sneezing and streaming from the eyes. The
anonymity
of her room now told against her. The house was one of five converted into bed-sitters – there was no resident proprietress, even the housekeeper lived two houses away. The maid did not appear until eleven; she was Latvian and not very bright, but she promised to phone to Miss Corrigan and to make some few purchases for Meg. Instead of the sponge cakes and grapes that Meg had asked for she brought macaroons and some very shiny, red, soft Australian apples; she had understood ‘eggs’, but what she might have said to Miss Corrigan Meg dreaded to think. She made some tea for Meg, and then, suddenly darting across to the bed where Meg was eyeing the macaroons doubtfully, she thrust one of them into the cup of tea and held it out. ‘This is good,’ she said. The episode restored Meg’s spirits a little, but she spent a miserable day between the bed and the electric fire that roasted her feet and left her body a target for the numerous draughts.