The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (49 page)

Perhaps, David thought, it was exactly because he, knowing his own feelings, could not use this proffered chance to question or to advise her on her future, that she seemed impelled to meet the
criticism
that he had not made.

She said, ‘You
must
accept my present frivolity, David. I’m resting. My determinations are not scattered and my curiosity hasn’t died on me, they’re simply in abeyance. Meanwhile you must let me drone a bit.’

When he said nothing, letting his glance drift from the lobsters and chicken piled on the raised cold table to the ornate chandeliers and then to a sad, lipstick-smudged, flat-footed old waitress, she went on a little fiercely, ‘You haven’t altered, David, you still don’t listen when you don’t choose to. But I think you’ve found some sort of peace in this negation you’re seeking. At any rate your view of life’s affected me. It may seem simple frivolity, the way I’m being now, but it is an attempt to get away from imposing myself
everywhere
. As I did on Bill, as I made such a fool of myself doing with Tom and Jill. You can’t escape all responsibility for my present mood.’

He said, ‘Meg, the last thing I am, you know, is a hot gospeller. It’s the essence of the way I live that it’s my own. But if you can get something from it, of course, I’m glad.’

It didn’t seem entirely to satisfy her. She said, ‘But you
do
think, don’t you, that we’ve found some link again that exists between us?’

‘I don’t know about “again”‚’ he answered. ‘We’ve found a link, certainly, but whether it was there before, I really don’t know.’

‘Well, whatever,’ she said, ‘I feel that we can be together much or only a little but always with profit. So long as we’re absolutely honest. That’s why I’ve not hidden my present mood of easy laziness.’

He would not answer the appeal in her voice for fear of
commiting
himself to an approbation he might have to withdraw, but, ‘Honesty with each other. Certainly,’ he said, ‘to that at any rate we can commit ourselves. In fact, we must.’

After luncheon they did all the sights. Only at the Pavilion was there any note of disharmony. Music greeted them from every corner as, with the crowd of sightseers, they made their way amid pink and green chinoiserie wallpapers and beneath great golden dragon chandeliers.

‘The Haffner,’ he said.

‘Yes, it’s a pleasant idea to have this relayed music,’ she
remarked
.

‘No, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘Music should be listened to. Not pumped out as a phoney means of invoking the gracious living of the past.’

His fierceness made her say, laughing, ‘Oh dear, I’ve got it wrong, haven’t I? It’s a pest about music when you’re around, David, It was just the same when we were young. I always liked going to concerts and to opera, but it wasn’t really until I’d married Bill that I could
indulge
myself. You’d always inhibited me by making me feel that one had no right to enjoy music in ignorance.’

‘I never intended to. It’s not even what I think.’

‘Well, you must let me listen to the quartet. I heard so much about it at the party yesterday. Why haven’t you met since I came to Andredaswood?’

‘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 to 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.