The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (52 page)

Else went to her bed early. Putting aside Sir Harry Johnston’s amateurish and therefore obscure remarks on East African Flora, he said, ‘What do you intend to do now, Meg?’ As soon as he had asked it, he knew that, in evading the subject of their relationship, he had asked a question that on all grounds he believed should not be his business.

‘I don’t know, David. Should I intend to do something?’

‘You had the idea so firmly in your head before you were ill.’

‘Oh, yes. I haven’t lost it. But for the moment, judging by my failure with Fred Rogerson, I’m not ready to go ahead with it.’

‘But Meg dear.’ He knew that his voice sounded like a
well-adjusted
parent’s in dealing with a child’s lies. ‘That just isn’t true. Fred Rogerson was very anxious to have you back.’

‘Not anxious enough to go without my services in the
evenings
.’

‘But Meg, you can’t always hope to impose your will …’

‘I don’t expect to. He’s quite right to insist on what he wants. I said so at the time. But if I’d been really good, he’d have taken me on my own terms.’

He thought to say that practice alone would give her such a power; yet the idea of someone he loved wanting the power to dictate her own terms seemed so repellent that he decided again that she must be more mentally ill than appeared. Indeed, looking at her she
suddenly
seemed to him tired, the skin round her eyes drawn and lined. He said, ‘I do see that evening work was too much to ask of you so soon.’

She said quite simply, ‘I was losing contact with
you
, David. I can’t do that. I depend on you for the sense of peace you’ve given me. There are no more nightmares now. Bill is with me as he used to be. I’ve lost all that pressing need to atone for my guilt towards him. And the guilt I felt towards Mother. You’ve freed me from all that, David. I never realized how it preyed on me.’ She sighed deeply. ‘It’s a wretched dilemma,’ she said, ‘I need you and anything else I do takes me away. My interest is easily stimulated. I was fascinated by that school and Fred Rogerson’s set up. But it was pulling me away from here. I thought perhaps that just to work the routine hours would be a compromise, but Fred Rogerson wouldn’t have it and he was probably quite right. Even for me. It’s all or nothing, you know, if you do anything well. But for the moment I need what
you
can give me, David, most of all. Am I in your way?’

‘No, of course not, Meg; It’s only that Else and Eileen …’

‘Oh, that,’ Meg cried. ‘I’m afraid I don’t care, David. They pushed me into the job. It’s nothing to do with them. Besides, they were only annoyed because it had been their idea and it didn’t work. But I’ll manage with them, David. Don’t worry.’

There was much he wanted to say, but after all, he thought, they had intruded abominably, and he remained silent.

She said, ‘I wish I could think you liked having me here.’

He said, ‘I do, Meg, you know that.’ He thought, she ought not to press me like this.

‘I think you do,’ she said. ‘It isn’t the money, is it, David? Gordon left you well off, I thought.’

‘Oh yes,’ he answered, ‘Gordon didn’t get the family business. God knows what he’d have done with it.’ As he said it and laughed, a wave of his love for Gordon swept through him and enfolded Meg,
because
now he could talk to her about Gordon. ‘But he was the old man’s favourite of the two sons. He left him quite rich. And Gordon was very careful.’ He laughed again, thinking of Gordon’s foibles and how much he had loved them.

She said, ‘Well, so are you, David. You must have been a pair of cheeseparers.’ Her voice was affectionate. ‘Not like my poor Bill,’ she added, ‘or me. Well then,’ she said, ‘it’s all right for the
moment
.’ She sounded like a condemned woman reprieved. She got up and poured out her whisky. ‘I shall go to bed. I’m horribly tired.’ At the door she turned to him. ‘We said that we would be quite honest with each other, David. You do honestly want me to stay?’

Her eyes, begging, trying to hide their anxiety for fear of
displeasing
, were their mother’s. I let
her
down, David thought, for ‘
principles
’. Not again. ‘Yes, Meg, quite honestly,’ he said. His voice sounded in his ears like a stage performance of sincerity. It was not altogether fair, he thought, because in so many ways he
did
desperately
want her to stay. But she must have been listening to the words alone, for she broke into a delighted smile and was gone to her room.

As far as David could tell, Meg did try her best with Else and Eileen; or, at any rate, she tried very hard.

It was not very difficult to overcome Eileen’s hostility, or, at least, to neutralize it. Her intervention had been a piece of professional pride, the sudden action of a woman who every now and again came to the surface from the sea of her house and children, and, when she did so, suddenly resented being considered only a housewife and mother. Meg apologized. ‘Eileen wasn’t very gracious,’ she said. ‘Usually when people apologize, that’s the end of that. Or so I thought. But she told me rather sharply that if she had her way, she’d set me down to a week’s hard scrubbing of floors. However, she seems all right now.’

And so, of course, David reflected she would be. The fact once established that Meg couldn’t come the gracious lady over her by apologies, she would return to the world of Omo and Crumbly Crust and babies’ nappies. It was a world that David usually revered, but
after Eileen’s recent tiresome behaviour he suffered doubts about its simple virtues. As for himself, she told him once that she had always thought him weak but now she thought him spineless; and, after that, their straight-from-the-shoulder chaffing, uneasy, friendly
relationship
returned to its normal course.

Else was altogether a different problem. It would have required Meg to have tried more than her ‘best’‚ let alone ‘very hard’, to have appeased her. David, guessing at the depths of wounded feelings and the immensity of the isolation she was enduring behind her near silence, made one painful effort to reach and assist her – painful
because
it inevitably disregarded the reticences by which they had, for so many years, successfully converted mutual irritation into mutual affection; painful too, because it seemed one more step away from his general practice of non-attachment.

It was not easy now to gain her attention, and he was driven to make his advances leaning uncomfortably against the airing
cupboard
door while she checked and counted laundry.

‘Else,’ he said, ‘I’ve always thought, considering how we were brought together by chance and with no real interests in common, that we have reason to be proud of the friendship we’ve built up.’

She said, ‘David, we shall need to buy more pillowcases. Shall I get them, or will Mrs Eliot?’

He said, ‘I know you find Meg’s being here a strain. But I don’t really understand why. We have our
own
friendship, but we’ve never pretended it was a deep one. You loved Gordon and so did I. I hoped that you were staying on here because it was the house in which you had been with him, the place where his memory is strongest for you and in which you’ll therefore be most happy.’

She said, ‘Gordon’s memory is always with me, thank you, David.’

‘Of course it is, Else. Only perhaps you and I know what a
remarkable
person he was.’

‘You know that, do you, David?’ There was real spite in her voice as she asked the question, then she apologized. ‘No, I’m sorry. I should not have said that. We should not be having this conversation.’

‘I think we must. Listen, Else, surely if you and I could live in the same house with the person we loved and not be jealous of each other, we can manage now. I don’t like to say it, but it seems a poor
compliment
to Gordon that you should feel so bitter and lonely when he left so much that is permanent.’

‘You are right. You should not like to say it. It is not true. I am practical. I don’t think that a house should be burdened with two mistresses.’

‘But Meg won’t be here forever. You understood so well that I should ask her here when she fell ill. You were so good to her. I can’t turn her away until she’s ready to go. Else, surely you have enough affection for me to understand that she’s my sister; I have a whole past in common with her.’

She threw down a pile of sheets on to the floor. ‘Yes, you have her love. As you had Gordon’s love. And I have nobody. Is that what you want to tell me?’

Rubbing his back against the door handle to bring back sensation to his body, numbed by pressure against the wood, he said, ‘Else, this is impossible. I can’t talk to you if you
will
see it like that. All I can repeat is that Meg won’t be staying here.’

‘No?’

‘No, Not even if I wanted her to do so, I’m afraid. She’s a person who has too much interest in life.’

‘And you think I have no interests? There are other interests than people, you know. People don’t concern me very much, David. I have only to go into the garden or the forest or on to the Downs to fill myself with a power that is much stronger than people.’

He thought, I only wish she’d do it, but he said, ‘Else, will you try to think of this place as your home where you can be at peace?’

She answered, ‘It is my home, David. Gordon wished it to be.’ She refused him even a smile as she carried a pile of towels – he felt that she had purposely made it an absurdly large pile – to distribute in the bedrooms.

It wasn’t to be her home for long. David never quite straightened out what eventually decided her to leave. He believed that, although Meg did all she could to improve the situation, Mrs Boniface had by then decided finally to transfer her allegiance. Much as he liked Mrs B. he had little doubt that the least attractive motives had swayed her – snobbery, hostility to a foreigner, being on the winning side. He also guessed that once she had made up her mind, she had not made life easy for Else.

Early in October he received a letter from Else sent by post. It was, he thought, a typical manifestation of her hugged isolation.

‘My dear David,’ she wrote, ‘You have been so kind to let me stay at Andredaswood after the first shock of Gordon’s death. Now is the
time for me to leave. There is no sense in haying two women to run the house. And if you love your sister, you will know that she needs occupation. All that she can do here is what I do. I am sure nobody doubts that she will do it better. I am so very grateful for your
friendship
. I shall hope to leave in one or two weeks.’

He managed to see her once more on her own. ‘I’ve said nothing to anyone about your letter,’ he told her. Then deliberately he tried, by recalling events of their life with Gordon, to break down the cold hostility with which she protected her unhappiness. He succeeded only too well, for she burst into tears. Now, he thought, she will surely find it possible to relax into some acceptance. But when she recovered herself, she said, still sobbing, ‘I don’t want to go, David, you know that. If you can send your sister away, I shall stay.’

He answered very coldly. ‘I’m afraid that’s impossible, Else.’ Then, ashamed of his hardness, he said, ‘But where are you going to? You must go to Mrs Paget. She needs you now. And anyway she has always told me that she would be glad to have you there.’

‘No, David,’ she said, ‘I have lived too much in other people’s houses. I think that the worst thing that Hitler did to me was to make me able only to live in other people’s lives. Now I must begin to live on my own.’

He looked at her and thought, she’s not only old, but she’s without relation to anything outside this place. We’ve preserved her in
lovable
eccentricity, Gordon and I, until she couldn’t possibly fend for herself. He said, ‘At least let Mrs Paget know you’re leaving, Else, or let me write to her.’

She said, ‘No, David, please! I must ask you not to do so.’ She was determined. After all, he thought, there are eccentric old women working and living in their isolation in the most incongruous
communities
; and people, even the most conventional, cope with them and are kind to them. Immediately he felt ashamed of his thoughts. Else, for all her absurdity, had devotion, courage, and a sort of
self-sufficiency
– she was no object of patronizing kindness. It’s only I, he thought, who give her these wounds that she so morbidly
nourishes
. Away from here she’ll be all right. Nevertheless, he wished that she were different, so that he might not feel glad to see her go.

He told Meg of Else’s decision that night. She seemed so
unconcerned
that he said angrily, ‘I genuinely believe, Meg, that if you asked her to stay, she would do so.’

She looked away from him and said, ‘I’m sorry, David, I can’t. It
would be an impossible footing for either of us to live on. I can’t see why she was ever here.’

‘Because she was a very old friend of Gordon’s.’ he said. ‘She came as a refugee to the Pagets’ when Gordon was still at the University. She was with them all through the war. When we bought this place and needed a housekeeper, she was the obvious person. She’s been extraordinarily kind to both of us. Does that explain it?’

She said soothingly, ‘Yes, of course. But she belongs to the Pagets really. I expect that now Mrs Paget’s had this stroke, she’ll be glad to have her there. These indomitable old women will never admit to needing anyone, but when it’s arranged for them …’ Her voice had, David thought, that note of worked-up interest that one uses in speaking of friends of friends.

He said, ‘Else refuses to go there. She’s determined to go off on her own, God knows what she’ll do!’

Suddenly Meg’s manner changed. She turned on him, her voice excited, rapid. ‘Oh, no, David,’ she cried, ‘she can’t possibly do that. Poor old thing! She’d be utterly lost. Oh, no, you must write to Mrs Paget and tell her what’s happening.’

‘Else’s forbidden me to do that.’

‘Forbidden? What do you mean?’