The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (55 page)

He said, ‘Oh, it isn’t important.’

‘I’m afraid it is. That’s one of the prices one pays for the gentleness and peace of this house. Things that are only misdemeanours appear crimes.’

‘I think that’s unfair. Nobody’s suggested it’s a crime.’

‘No, I’m sorry, David. I’m only trying to excuse myself by
attacking
first.’

‘Well, there’s no need. It was annoying that you insisted on this party and then failed to do anything to entertain people. It’s also a bit odd that you should want to talk to that ghastly man for so long.’

‘Yes, he is pretty frightful, isn’t he? Bill always said he was. But he’s very interesting, David. He was a poorer lawyer than Bill. Bill always said so. And he himself admitted it this evening. Not much poorer, you know. A clever man, but just not first class. But he’s been more of a success.’

‘A success? Meg, do you really mind about that?’

‘Mind? No. Well, only in this way – that he’s happier than Bill was After all, Bill aimed at being a success and I did so for him. And we slipped up. Oh, I know Bill
was
successful, but I also know, we all do, that it couldn’t have lasted. He was too desperate. That man said Bill didn’t care enough. I suppose he meant care about making a career.’

‘But Grant-Pritchard’s happiness is only self-satisfaction, and
satisfaction
of greed for power at that. Anyway, I should think his
happiness
, as you call it, is only skin deep. Look at the abominable way he treats his wife.’

‘Does he? I didn’t notice. He’s pretty thick-skinned, David, so that if his happiness
is
only skin deep …’ She left it in mid-air and after a moment’s silence. ‘We came quite to like each other, I think. Not
really
like, of course, for me at any rate, because he’s so awful; but when you’ve been very rude to someone … I don’t know why he didn’t walk away, and perhaps I liked him because he didn’t. I expect nobody, no
woman
anyway, who was a stranger, had been rude to him before, and that took his breath away long enough to make him stay and listen.’

‘What on earth did you say to him, then?’ David asked. He wanted to hear no more about it all; yet he could see that she expected the question.

‘Well, he came up and condoled about Bill. That was all right, he had to. But then he started in an awful flowery way to talk about Bill’s heroism in this drab age. I remembered how Bill had despised him and I saw him sitting there, successful and purring, and Bill was dead. I was very angry. I said, “You know very well that you despise Bill for having got killed in such a chance way. You don’t think it heroism, nor was it. But if it had been,
you
wouldn’t have been capable of recognizing it!” To give him his due, he admitted the insincerity.
He was very rude back. He said, “I imagine Bill Eliot must have been starved of love to have thrown his life away like that.” It was quite
untrue
, but it was a fair retort to my rudeness. He was very frank all the time. Maybe he felt able to be so with me since I don’t “matter” in his sense of the word. A sort of indulgence of honesty. Or maybe it’s simply a line he shoots, I don’t know. Some of it sounded terribly phoney, For example, he said that one has only a right to be ruthless in life if you’ve really understood the person whom you’re sacrificing. To the point of love, he said. I think he knew that I thought it
repulsive
, but he’s a man who must make a violent impression. I told him that it was melodramatic nonsense. But he obviously has a lot of
personal
ethics like that which he half believes in. It was the same when he talked about his attack on the Trade Unions. Oh yes, we talked about that. He admitted that he’d made himself spokesman largely to please the industrialists and also to make his mark in his party, but he also thinks that it’s a rallying point for what he calls the responsible elements in the country. “A sense of responsibility, and particularly a sense of something to fight for, is the only thing that can save the
intelligent
middle classes in this country,” he said, “and an intelligent middle class is the only future a country like England has in the modern world.”’

David said, ‘He sounds a rather nasty sort of tough windbag. They go together, I think, more often than is supposed. But you must have met up-and-coming men of all parties again and again in London.’

‘I suppose so.
He
certainly came to Lord North Street once or twice. But most people who came to the house, whether I liked them or not, were just part of the setting for my life with Bill. It was only obviously unhappy people I thought of looking into.’

‘I must say I should prefer to look into people like Grant-Pritchard in novels. I’m sure Michael Grant-Pritchard can be found in many a modern novel without meeting him.’

‘Probably, but I like to do both. I couldn’t be interested in novels if I wasn’t interested in the real people.’

‘A narrow conception of the art of the novel,’ David said dryly, ‘that would receive short shrift from any good modern critic’ Then, as disposing of the Grant-Pritchards, he added, ‘Well, I’m glad that I concentrated on
Mrs
Grant-Pritchard, She’s quite nice and she has good ideas about her garden. I’m going to help her to restore it to its original form.’

‘In
that
case, David, I think it’s just as well that I did monopolize
him. I’m sure he only thinks of her as someone to contradict. He’d have undone all her plans and yours into the bargain. Plus, of course, the fact, or so he told me, that she brought him a good deal of money.’

‘Meg, he sounds revolting.’

‘Yes, I’m afraid he is quite unpleasant. He’s almost certainly mean, which is unattractive. He shares his secretary with some other M.P.s, although he could obviously afford one of his own. He asked me if I would go over and do some work for him when he’s moved into this new house.’

‘Was that the promise he mentioned?’

‘Yes. Of course, I’ve no intention of doing so. He simply wants secretarial service on the cheap. He’d be a dreadful bully as an
employer
anyway, I suspect.’

There, with the additional promise from Meg that she would do her best to repair any bad impression made upon the customers of Andredaswood, they left the disastrous party.

David thought for a while that night about Meg’s behaviour. There were many disturbing motives that he could imagine – disturbing, that was, to him – but in the end he decided that it was all due to the sudden appearance on the scene of someone connected with Bill. He had hoped that her torments and regrets about her married life had now faded before the happiness that she had undoubtedly known; that Bill’s memory had finally ceased to fret and to hurt her, had become instead a source of strength. No doubt it was asking too much; guilt or regret inevitably smouldered here and there. Perhaps the little fire that Michael Grant-Pritchard had lit for that hour or so would be the last of it.

Certainly the winter months were a time of great happiness. He felt sometimes amazed that he could so completely share his life with anyone – particularly a woman, particularly, perhaps, his sister Meg – without feeling invaded or exhausted or swallowed up. He felt himself none of these things; she had the extraordinary power, it seemed, of needing someone and yet leaving them whole. Nor did she fret him at all to do this or that. He had felt that she was disturbed lest ‘musical appreciation – a speciality’ might, much though she clearly enjoyed it, be keeping him from playing seriously again. He was not altogether sorry when Mary Gardner’s husband got pleurisy and, on recovery, took Mary off to Madeira; the question of the quartet was postponed until the spring. There was nothing then which he and Meg could not, did not share in that mild, sunny, early spring-like winter.

In February, it was true, she did make a change in his life, but it was one for which he was grateful. One morning a letter came from the publishers asking whether and when ‘Africa’ could be expected. He had contrived a desultory research for the book, but now he must face giving the larger part of his evenings to it. When he mentioned the letter to Meg, he feared that she would urge once again how much of the work in the nursery could be done without his supervision, that he could, in fact, work on ‘Africa’ by day as well Yet now that she was so much involved with the nursery work, so that he could discuss any part of it with her, he was even more reluctant to admit that it did not demand his full attention. Instead she asked, ‘What made you and Gordon write those books?’

‘Money originally,’ he said. ‘When we started the nursery
Gordon’s
father was still alive and it was quite a struggle to keep going.’

‘I see. I don’t mean that I don’t think they deserve their success. But … well
you
wouldn’t read them, would you? They’re nice Christmas books, or books to put in guests’ bedrooms.’

He said, ‘Thank you.’

She said, ‘Well, they are, aren’t they? Gordon’s photographs are first rate, and the illustrations you’ve chosen are pleasing. It’s all
pleas
ing
, and I can imagine a lot of the reading you’ve done for the books must have been fascinating. But, David!’

He explained to her how completely aware he and Gordon had been of the minor, bedside nature of the series, and yet how, for him, anxious to produce nothing that could add to all the personal voices that were leading mankind to boiling point, their very insipidity was their value; they pretended to nothing. At first she could not
understand
at all.

‘Well, nice as they are, David, those sort of elegantly served up pieces of history and geography seem to me as pretentious as books
can
be. And I’m sure a very pretentious sort of people buy them.’

He tried then to explain how that sort of chic was not pretentious as she feared, since it laid no claim to authority, no assertion of
importance
. Anyone might see that the books were at best written to make needed money, at worst as a pleasing hobby.

She said, ‘I see. Yes, yes. I do see.’ Then she announced, ‘David, I’ve been reading your doctoral thesis.’

‘Good God,’ he said, ‘where on earth did you find it?’

‘It was among all those books in Else’s room.’

‘Oh Lord! It must be fabulously boring.’

‘Some of it’s boring, yes, though academically excellent, I’m sure. But there are passages that fascinated me. Especially one arising from
Pamela
about the sexual excitement attaching to lower-class people – servants and so on – in the eighteenth century. And the degree to which the subject has to be purified or sentimentalized in novels, at that time even. I should have thought that the nineteenth century would provide even better material.’

‘But of course. It’s one of Thackeray’s chief warnings, and Trollope and Samuel Butler follow him up. And Dickens is obsessed with it from Little Nell to Lizzie Hexham. It’s got two strands – the
deflowering
of virgins and the corrupting of oneself with harlots.’

‘I should love to work those patterns out.’

‘Well, why don’t you?’

‘Oh, David, I haven’t the training for that sort of thing, but if
you
were to work on it, I’d like to help.’

He looked at her gravely. ‘If this is a subtle attempt to get me back to the University, it’s no good, Meg. Firstly, this kind of theme wouldn’t do in the modern literary academic world. It smells far too much of sociology and Freud. Secondly, I’ve been too long out of that world to get back, at my age. Thirdly, I don’t
want
to go back to it.’

She laughed. ‘I can see you might think that was what I was up to, but I’m not, David. Quite honestly, I thought possibly of some articles and eventually, perhaps, a book very little more respectable than your Garden Flowers in their Homes series; but a good deal more interesting to me, and, I believe, to you. But it wouldn’t make any greater assertions than your ‘Africa’ will, if you publish it.’

‘Yes, it would. Assertions literary, sociological and possibly
intellectual
. Very assertive,’ he laughed.

But she did not respond to his laughter. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, and sighed. The sigh sounded so remote from him that he said
immediately
, ‘If you’ll work on it with me, Meg, I’ll certainly consider it. I’ll write to the publishers today to say, “No Africa” and then we can start. After all, it will only mean re-reading a great number of books that I shall be glad to read again. If it works out, then I’ll see about writing some of it up. A good book couldn’t appear for a long while. The time for writing here is inevitably so limited.’

‘Inevitably? There’s no earthly reason, David, why you shouldn’t hand over the nursery to Tim whenever you want. Certainly for as long as you needed to write a book.’

‘Oh yes there is, Meg.’ He tried to make this sound as definite as he could.

She asked, ‘David, why are you so entrenched in your attitude about the nursery? You’re not basically interested in gardening. You went into it because of Gordon.’

He said, ‘That’s not true, Meg. And, even if it were, that would be the first of reasons for my continuing with it.’

There was silence for a moment, then she said, ‘I’m sorry, David. I shouldn’t have said that. I hadn’t truly understood how you felt about it.’

And now they were brought even closer. David suggested that they should start with the minor eighteenth-century novelists – ‘to get over the boring part first’.

Fat little calf-bound volumes of Coventry and Johnstone,
Mackenzie
and Mrs Robinson began to arrive from the London Library. With all the exchange of comment and analysis that passed between him and Meg, these stilted, shallow novels proved enthralling. It was difficult even to fit in ‘music appreciation’ for which Climbers was clamouring – she had suddenly and improbably decided that she wanted to know about the development of Church music (shades of Gordon, David thought). It was often very late when they went to bed.

Yet in the day-time, David worked as he had not done for a year or two. He felt somehow impelled to prove to himself that the
nursery
needed him. He supervised sterilizing of soil and of boxes,
preparation
of houses, seed preparation, temperature regulation for the forcing of annuals. He spent hours with Collihole discussing the
renewal
of grafting stock, methods of layering, and new pest controls. He even poked his nose into Tim’s hybridization experiments and once or twice nearly got it bitten off. He found peculiar delight in the vulgarity of a Homes and Gardens type of display house which Climbers thought would give an up-to-date look to the entrance of the nursery. And all these things he discussed again with Meg. He found pleasure in the affairs of the nursery; he knew that the
enthusiasm
of the pioneer years with Gordon had gone for ever, but this gave the work its proper measure of remoteness. When at last he got to bed in the early hours of the morning, he lay meditating on the mystery of man’s supreme value and of his utter insignificance which demanded in turn the mysterious power to love and to remain apart. He allowed himself to hope that elsewhere people, Robinson
Crusoe-like
, were building up little island cultures of work and pleasure
deliberately kept simple, and of loneliness accepted; little islands that might, if chaos were by some improbable chance not yet come, give human activity a new, slow-burning start. Above all, he tried to fight back to the limit of its critical usefulness his natural rage of irony that, playing around these simple, defenceless ideas, might consume and destroy the truth that he surely believed to be within them.