The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (32 page)

The next day she went to the Garsington and braved the doubtful looks of the others at her anti-social sneezing and coughing. That evening she rang up Viola Pirie and asked if she could rent the
bed-sitting
room. Whether it was her weaker, hysteric side that had broken down at the first real discomfort or whether it was her stronger, rational side that had recognized the end of one phase and the need to embark on another, she really could not tell. She had reached the limit of self-examination where the answers seemed to be
no more than arbitrary choice. She only knew that she feared to be alone any longer.

The first weeks at Viola Pirie’s passed easily, soothingly. The
pattern
of Viola Pirie’s life unfolded before her but it impinged on her own very little. Viola’s days were spent, it seemed, in a continuous, exhausting round of benevolent activity. There was no end to the charities, private or public, in which she was involved. She was also an ardent Conservative party worker and concerned in some parish activity for St Mary Abbots which Meg never really comprehended. None of her daily work, however, was allowed to delay by a minute her return home to prepare and cook dinner for Tom and Meg. When Meg asked to help with the washing-up, she demurred. ‘You must stay and talk to Tom,’ she said, but Tom was busy with his novel, so in the end she agreed.

In the first three weeks Tom returned rather late. He was now in partnership it seemed, with a friend who was opening a combined paint and carpentry shop to assist the ‘do it yourself’ householder.

‘The point,’ Tom explained, ‘about all this do it yourself stuff is that nobody has the faintest idea how to go about it. And we shall advise as well as sell the materials.’

Meg’s friends had not included a lot of people who ‘did it
themselves
’, even so she had an idea that this sort of shop was not entirely new. However, Tom spoke of it as a money spinning novel scheme; Viola was delighted; who was she to question it? After a week or so the partnership seemed to peter out and Tom found that the novel required all his time.

‘I’m not,’ he said, ‘giving the thing a chance to live. Once I’ve got this thing off my chest, I shall look out for a
real
job. Anything I do while my mind’s on the book I do half cock and I’m not prepared to work like that. Of course it may be a best seller,’ he added, ‘although one can’t count on it, because the first book’s always a gamble.’

Meg suggested that the gamble was rather a wild one. Viola looked worried. But Tom told them of a friend of his, with capital behind him, who was setting up in publishing simply to give new writers a market. ‘And he’s not the sort of man to throw money away. He may tell us that he’s doing it for art but if he publishes anything it’ll have every chance of being a money spinner. As good a chance as any first book can, which is all I ask.’ His mother’s anxiety seemed to vanish at this news. Meg thought it best to say nothing more at the time, but later she voiced her doubts to Viola when they were alone.

‘Oh, I don’t think we can say too much about it,’ Viola said. ‘These young men have their own ways of doing things, haven’t they?’

Tom, it seemed to Meg, had his own way of doing nothing. She had not minded his giving no hand to the washing-up when he was working in the day, but now it annoyed her. Once again she decided not to provoke a direct battle, but one evening after dinner as they were arguing about emigration – when Tom felt depressed, Meg noticed, he always spoke of emigrating, ‘all the cream of my
generation
have had it here’ – she told him that he must follow her into the kitchen if he wanted to talk to her. Viola looked bewildered at Tom’s appearance there, but Meg handed him a plate.

‘You can dry that while you’re talking,’ she said.

Soon he was happily stacking plates and glasses, explaining all the while that it was exactly this sort of thing that made life impossible for people who wanted to get anywhere. The next night Viola Pirie said, ‘You two stop here and talk, Tom isn’t to wash up.’

Meg protested, ‘Dear God, Viola,’ she said, ‘he’s got a pair of hands.’

But the expression that Viola so liked to hear from Meg caused no amusement this time.

‘I’m sorry, Meg,’ she said, ‘I don’t like to see men doing women’s work.’ She was both determined and angry.

The same pattern of relationship emerged when Meg suggested cooking some of the meals. At first she thought that Viola’s refusal stemmed from pride in her own good but plain cooking; but when one evening, in her enforced absence at a Mothers’ Union outing to a musical comedy – ‘there’s no way of getting out of it without
offence
’ – Meg cooked a risotto and Tom enjoyed it, everything was changed. Viola would have handed over the cooking entirely, if Meg had not been firm. From then on they cooked on alternate nights. Viola’s devotion to Tom seemed curiously without jealousy. She did not mind his preferences for Meg’s dishes – a preference simply due to boredom with his mother’s repertoire – indeed she went into
pantomimes
of delight at everything Meg served, partly to encourage her to do more, partly out of pure pleasure at Tom’s satisfaction.

This spoiling of her son, Meg soon saw, was only an exaggeration of Viola’s general high regard for men. Despite the genuine humility that made her take on everyone’s cares without regard for herself, she was, as Meg knew from Aid to the Elderly, very decided in her views and often quite ruthless in getting her own way. The women she
worked with she regarded as fools and did not hesitate to tell them so. Some few were excepted because they were younger and had a full life. ‘It was so splendid of them to take on committee work.’ Meg with her Lord North Street life, had been one of these. It was not a matter of snobbery, however, for there was for example young Mrs Martin. ‘She looks after a husband and four children, Meg,
and
runs a sweet shop. I wasn’t going to have all the old tabbies bossing her around just because she isn’t what they call “our class”. I think
somebody
like that is absolutely splendid. I
always
vote with her at
meetings
.’ To a few women, then, she gave way. To only a very few men she did not – men like Mr Purdyke, who acquiesced too much and so earned the title ‘an old woman’, or subordinates like Mr Darlington who could only be ‘given their heads’ to a limited extent; but from Sir Oliver Lacey, the chairman of the Child Care Committee, or from Colonel Randolph, the Youth Club governor, or, for that matter, from Mr Marcus, the tailor who was on the Prisoners’ Aid
Committee
, she accepted anything they chose to tell her. ‘Men know what they’re talking about, you see,’ she said. It was, Meg felt, a sad
mischance
that Viola should have a son who so evidently contradicted this rule.

The tension between mother and son was too endemic ever to break out fiercely, though the restraining influence of Meg’s presence upon their bickering grew less as time passed, especially upon Tom’s. Yet, for Meg, life in the little flat remained quiet and restful: they made no demands upon her support except in assuring her that her presence was helpful, they never intruded upon her privacy, and if Tom did not make any practical additions to his mother’s care for their visitor’s comfort he eased her sense of loneliness by his evident admiration for her.

She was still putting most of her life into her work and had caught up again in her classes as Miss Dacres had predicted, but she found that, freed from the depression of the bed-sitting room life, she could read or go out on a few evenings in the week without falling behind in the lessons. She started on a re-reading of Proust; she saw Poll a few times and found the fun she got out of her company worth the squalor of her King’s Road flat and the hangover she inevitably
suffered
the next day; she dined a few times with Jill and appreciated Viola’s virtues the more.

They were both, she found, a little jealous of her living at the Piries’. Poll said, ‘I shouldn’t think it would last, should you?’ Jill asked every
detail of the Pirie budgeting. ‘Lady Pirie can’t really live on her
pension
,’ she said with a little laugh at Meg’s ignorance of the current cost of living. ‘People seldom tell one all their means. Of course, she’s
doing
quite well out of you. But you’re probably wise to put comfort before economy while you’re still doing this course.’

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.