The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (40 page)

Mrs Paget must have felt this time that the silence was a healing one for she closed her eyes.

*

Renewed loneliness cast a sinister bogey shadow before Meg. What she had dreaded on leaving Viola Pirie’s was a return to nights of melancholy and of macabre dreams. That way seemed the short road to some sort of breakdown. It was essential, too, that she should be able to work in the evenings, for although she felt satisfied with her progress, the final test was now only two months ahead, and she had a gnawing fear that if she were beset again by neurotic distraction her memory would lose its grip on the complicated network of symbols she had so laboriously assimilated. The Garsington was becoming tedious to her. She had begun to dislike the faces of the young women and of the teachers, to know too well the patterns made by dust or cracks on the classroom walls, to detest the sardine sandwiches and the
tomato-filled bridge rolls. It had served its purpose well; Miss
Corrigan
had spoken the truth when she said that the course was
concentrated
, hard, and effective. But Meg had chosen to work there as anonymously as possible. She still thought that she had been right to do so; to have made friends with any of the girls or the teachers would have been a distraction the work could not allow to her, and a
meaningless
distraction since she would never see them again. On the whole everyone was pleasant to her. Nevertheless her own attitude of polite withdrawal had inevitably left her in isolation, and now that she had returned to evening solitude as well, she would have been glad of some greater social warmth during the day. She began to long for her first job, her first real committal to some new personal
relationships.

Meanwhile to avoid a recurrence of the nightmare life of the Gloucester Road room or of the Victoria hotel, she decided to spend more money than she could really afford in order to live in a hotel that offered at least comfort. She saw it as a temporary expedient until she was through the last weeks of the course and the early difficulties of her first job.

She chose a large hotel in the borderland between Kensington and Knightsbridge. Her room was small but comfortable in its faded pseudo-Louis Quinze furnishing, unchanged, she imagined, since the nineteen-twenties. The food was quite good. There was a lift, and porter service. The décor in the public rooms was rather more
depressing
, because newer and pretending to something more chic than the dowdy, once de luxe bedrooms. The lounges and dining room and the hall had all been redecorated after the war in the deadest of gold and white Regency. The management, as though to atone for this glacial, sad decoration, employed an ex-R.A.F. type and his wife to give colour to the rooms with flower arrangements. To Meg’s eyes these splashes of bright tulips or cinerarias seemed never to be in place for more than a few hours before the busy couple were replacing them with other tulips or cinerarias of a different bright shade. She
wondered
if they worked at piece rates. More permanent splashes of colour were provided by the smart hats of the chic old women who lived in the hotel and by tacit agreement always occupied their same chosen chairs. Meg was surprised to find that there were so many rich middle-class old women still in existence. She reflected that, if Bill had died in his sixties and left her rich, she might have been one of them. It was a comforting thought, at least, to know that she had avoided
that. Beside the macaw-bright old women the parties of Australians and Americans, who stood disconsolately in macintoshes about the hall waiting for hired cars, seemed very sober. It wasn’t, she thought, a place that she could like, but it would do.

Loneliness, nevertheless, caught up with her after the first week, not in its old nightmare, hysteric form, but in a strange restlessness. After dinner she would sit in the faded blue satin chair in her room trying to concentrate on tomorrow’s lesson. She would stare at herself in the oval mirror, or wonder why the ovals of satin on the wall had faded to a different shade to that of the chairs. Then she would go down to the bar and drink a whisky and soda she didn’t want. She would sit in one of the lounges and turn over the pages of
Country
Life
or
Queen.
She would concentrate on the stories of antique-buying American tourists, or on the old ladies discussing hairdressers or bridge or psychic experiences. Once or twice she even started
conversations
with other lonely residents, but as soon as she saw that the barriers had been broken down she wanted desperately to go away. She would go into the television room and immediately what she saw and heard from the screen weighed upon her like lead. She would go out to the cinema and become physically uncomfortable, simply from a sense of the futility of cinema-going.

The weekend proved a horror of claustrophobia. Rain made it
impossible
for her to walk in the streets. At last after luncheon on Sunday she got on a bus and took a ticket to its terminal point at Acton, but as soon as they reached a part of London unfamiliar to her she was reminded that long bus journeys had been her favourite treat at the age of ten. The regression seemed intolerable. She got down and went into a very dirty café, so old-fashioned that it had plates of coconut tarts in the window.

As she drank her cup of tea she knew that she must find the
company
of someone she knew. She was aware that her feelings about Poll and Viola were exaggerated. Viola might perhaps show some
embarrassment
if she went there, but it would only be the shame of a kind-hearted woman who felt that she had behaved badly. Poll would probably be pleased to see her. Yet she could not get away from the belief that they had judged her and found her wanting. They had dictated the terms on which she could regain their respect, and she had refused them. They had asked her to conform to their patterns as the price for their intimacy. On any other terms she suspected that
intimacy
would now be impossible, until at any rate she was established
enough to dictate her own. Yet it was a sense of intimacy that she so desperately needed. She could make no new intimacies while she was still on this station platform waiting to change trains. She had not realized how completely identity seemed governed by milieu and, without any identity card to offer, she found no means of approach. She was too old, she thought, and the thought angered her, to manage a stateless existence.

In desperation she went to the nearest telephone box and rang two of their Lord North Street friends. At the first house there was no reply. At the second house the foreign maid said that they were away in Austria, ski-ing; they would be back next week, the weather had proved unfavourable. Meg said, ‘Of course, all this rain.’ She didn’t leave her name. There were so many more she could have tried, but her courage failed her. She was disgusted to discover herself shy from pride.

It was only then that she asked herself why she did not ring Jill, why indeed she had seen her so seldom. She knew at once the answer – that Jill, in her embittered isolation, represented the life she feared to fall into. It was an answer that, in its lack of charity and facile
condemnation
, at once challenged her. She dialled Jill’s number, almost hoping that this was one of the rare Sundays when Jill’s son-in-law allowed her to go down there for the day. Jill answered. Yes, she was in. No, she was not going out; she seldom did on very wet Sundays. No, she was doing nothing. Yes, Meg could come round. She had nothing to say, but no doubt after such a long interval Meg had lots to tell. No? Well, in that case, she would advise Meg to bring a book. She had only a little fish in the flat, but if Meg had got used to tins now she was on her own, they could eat their evening meal together. She usually listened to the serial of
The
Modern
Comedy
on the wireless on Sunday evenings, but if Meg found Galsworthy too middlebrow she was quite happy to miss this evening’s episode.

Meg went back to the hotel and got her shorthand notes. When she arrived at Jill’s small flat in the mews behind Westminster Cathedral, she found her dripping oil into egg yolks.

‘I don’t expect you’ve quite sunk to my level of food yet,’ she said, ‘so I thought I would make a mayonnaise, if you can bring yourself to eat tinned lobster.’

Meg took a chance and roared with laughter. To her pleased
surprise
Jill laughed in return.

The evening from start to finish was a great success. They enjoyed
their food. Jill made excellent coffee afterwards and even produced a bottle of brandy. ‘I expect you think I only have it here in case of
illness
,’ she said, ‘but actually I don’t. I always buy brandy whenever I can afford it because I like it so much. Sometimes I even have wine.’ She giggled with pleasure at her own high spirits in a way that took Meg back many years into the past. They had hardly been listening to
The
Modern
Comedy
for five minutes before Jill turned it off. ‘I can tell you the end if you want to know,’ she said. ‘It’s very surprising. Old Soames gets killed by a picture falling on his head. And his daughter feels awful about it because she’d been so hard.’ At that she laughed a great deal more and poured out another glass of brandy for each of them. They laughed so much over stories from their girlhood, and Jill so excelled in her old dead pan manner of telling them, that Meg
forgot
even to mention her recent difficulties. Jill never asked Meg how she was getting on; she was enjoying herself too much. They might never have been hard-luck widows.

She returned there several times that week. There was never a repetition of the gaiety of that evening: the food was sparse and poor, Jill, if not exactly gloomy, was perseveringly flat. Nevertheless Meg was deeply touched by the effort her friend had made to relax on that first visit; it suggested an affection and a loneliness that answered her own emotional needs. She discovered too that Jill was one of the rare people who could sit in a small room and neither vocally nor silently distract another’s concentration. Meg found the task of memorizing easier than she had yet known while Jill sat at the other side of the gas stove reading the newest volume of travel, autobiography, or war memoirs. The department store at which she worked allowed its
employees
a cut rate subscription to its circulating library.

It was a strange setting, Meg knew, in which to find peace – this small room with its almost improvised furniture – the odd cheap chair or two, the divan intended for Evelyn if ever ‘the little beast’ should allow her to stay the night, the leather cushions, the now fest fading, carefully nurtured azalea – a Christmas present from Evelyn – and, on the mantelpiece, desk, and table, photographs of Andrew in uniform, of naval groups at Gib and Malta and Alex, pictures of Evelyn in every stage of youth, one photo of the baby. Meg rather maliciously picked on the dark young man who appeared at Evelyn’s side in one
photograph
.

‘Is that Leonard?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Jill said, ‘wearing his usual self-satisfied smirk.’

It was her only reference to her son-in-law. Meg thought that he was very good-looking.

She fished rather warily for Jill’s opinion of her decision to take the secretarial course.

‘It seems a very good idea,’ Jill said. ‘After all it’s a way of getting a job. You’re lucky to have had the money to pay for it.’

One evening Meg told her of the difficulties with Poll. Jill said, ‘Weren’t they rich trade? That sort of people always have to pretend to more than they’ve known in life. They don’t feel happy unless they’re the trout among minnows. She’s lucky to have a trust to break. But still it’s her life and if she enjoys it … She must be a fool to suggest your doing nothing all day when you haven’t any money.’

About Tom Pirie she was more final. ‘What a very unpleasant young man,’ she said. ‘It does rather serve you right, Meg. I must say I’ve never believed that “being taken out of oneself” helps in the slightest unless it’s with people one cares to be with. I suppose I ought to be glad that Evelyn didn’t marry anyone like
that.
The “little beast’s” far too keen on his precious career to behave badly in that sort of way. Of course, I never meet
the young men of today, but judging from those that come into the shop they all seem to be wasters or what used to be called bounders. So I suppose Evelyn had to marry one or the other.’

Her indignation was reserved for Lady Pirie. ‘I don’t see how you could
ever
forgive her, Meg. Hasn’t she any idea of what your feelings for Bill were? I think if anyone had urged me to marry again so soon after Andrew’s death I should have smacked her face. Of course, most of those Colonial service people are quite impossible anyway. You should have heard what people in the services had to say about them. I suppose Templeton never realized what she was up to. Otherwise as Bill’s friend he must have been furious. Anyway why should she think that after years of being a bachelor he should want to saddle himself with a widow without any money. No offence to you, Meg. But it isn’t very likely, is it?’

Meg found no offence to take. There was something comforting about Jill’s tactlessly frank and low estimate of her position. She
expected
nothing and yet also she made no interference. It was the same in all things. Jill had always had good sense, but the acceptance of the natural prejudices and conventions of her family, which was largely an emotional need, had prevented her from ever developing her
intelligence
. She was brought up a sailor’s daughter and had married a
sailor. She thought as they did, but she was quite clever enough to know that other people thought differently and, as long as they didn’t threaten her family affections, she left them to it. So now she knew that Meg always read novels’, while she, like Andrew and her father before that, read memoirs and biographies. But she did not, as they would have done, think that hers was the superior act; she knew, in fact, that Meg was more ‘highbrow’ – ‘Very nice for her’, she would have said, but we have our own ways’.