The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (7 page)

‘Oh – you mentioned partings,’ he said, ‘as the fly in your
ointment
of our holiday.’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean anyone in particular,’ she cried, ‘only leaving my regular life behind – the committee, the galleries, the theatres, and
so on. It’s just my love of tramlines. Once I’ve left them I shall adore it all.’

He smiled at her a little paternally. ‘I think you will,’ he said. ‘But it might be different if we were leaving
people
behind as well.’

At first she was a little scornfully amused, thinking that he was
jealous
even of her threadbare tie with David, since he himself had no one at all in the world; but it then occurred to her that he was still brooding over her tactlessly sudden mention of childbirth. She sought for something that could please him out of his brooding thoughts but she could find nothing less trivial than, ‘I’ve cancelled my order for the Nymphenburg figures.’

‘Good girl,’ he said, but his pleasure seemed tepid compared with the ardour he had shown in asking her to forgo the purchase.

It was not until a few moments before the first guest arrived, as they stood, tall, elegant, ready to please yet united to defend, that Bill suggested, ‘I should have thought it was your mother’s
unreliability
that was the trouble, if any. The constant moving from one place to another and the absurd enterprises that were bound to fail.’

Meg dismissed it instantly. ‘Oh, no. That was only financial worry. Sordid if you like, but not that awful emotional chasm that Mummy faced or tried to. The person you loved simply not there. Think of it!’ She shuddered and he put his arm round her waist. ‘Oh, no,’ she
repeated
, ‘the tea-room and the bookshop and the curio came much later. When we were almost growing up and quite able to cope. Father had finally disappeared by then and I had David to go to.’

He was about to say something when the bell rang and he turned to opening a bottle of champagne – he would allow no one else to obscure his skill in such tasks.

*

At a little before eleven Meg felt free to stand apart from the party for a few minutes and observe. This time of withdrawal was perhaps the highest solemnity of the entertainment ritual for her – then, and, if Bill was in the mood, the inquest afterwards. Despite all her
experience
now as a hostess, she was still remained keyed up – as they said every good actress must – until this moment. It came then as a relaxation; but also as the time of judgement. She was very critical – the verdict was so nearly always ‘success but’ or ‘success although’. Tonight it was very nearly plain ‘success’. The lame ducks were less of a problem than she had expected, although poor Tom Pirie,
anaemic
and bearded, clearly needed watching. But then the lame ducks
were closer to her affections than the other guests and she inevitably expected to be more on edge about them. Bill’s ease had set the scene in the first quarter of an hour, until her own nervous tension was
sufficiently
relaxed to allow him to take three cronies into the small room for bridge. He would emerge only to dissolve it all with equal ease.

The word ‘cronies’ echoed in. her head uncomfortably. It was not a word that she would ever
say.
It suggested a pseudo-Dickensian old lawyer and his friends. Bill was the least Dickensian person in
existence
, and not old. And he had no close friends. Perhaps she felt that his bridge playing marked the difference in their ages; if so it was very foolish indeed, lots of young people played cards. She turned from such unpleasing reflections about Bill’s age impatiently. What was more absurd was this snobbish idea that there were things she didn’t say! This too she rejected angrily. She was unashamed that they lived in a certain style. To be so would be the snobbery.

Suddenly she realized that she was standing there ‘feeling like a
successful
hostess’. But if she was more self-conscious in this role than at other times it was a matter for amusement rather than for sharp self-censure. It was a part she had always so wished to play. She had hated the muddled, shabby gentility of the occasional parries her mother had given in the intervals of a plucky inefficient struggle to live. She had always made excuses, had been late at the secretarial college, or had hidden upstairs in her bedroom with a book – a book probably in which the part her mother muffed was played so splendidly by
Glencora
Palliser or Oriane de Guermantes or Clarissa Dalloway. It was not surprising, when at last she was able to assume the role herself, that her sense of it should have been a shade literary, a touch
self-conscious
.

She caught a look in young Tom Pirie’s eye that suggested a
disgusted
rejection of the ‘gracious living’ around him – and no wonder, she thought, if she was playing Glencora Palliser, Oriane, and Mrs Dalloway all at the same time. Nevertheless if he wanted to be an angry young man he really should look less damp and dismal – and to suppose that a beard was going to help him! Vexed by his naïveté out of her abstraction, she reminded herself that a hostess exists only in fulfilling her hospitable functions. She saw Donald Templeton isolated in a corner. Over all the years of her marriage she had never succeeded in unbuttoning the urbane, slightly prim guise that Bill’s nearest approach to a friend always presented to her; it was unlikely that she would ever succeed now. Yet on this last night before their
long absence it would be not nice, but fitting, and therefore
satisfactory
, to go through the motions of trying once again to reach him. If by a wave of a hand, she thought, she could ever have transformed his sleek, waxy face and his plump body into something, well
something
less like a doctored tomcat, she would have been friends with him long ago.

For Bill, of course, a man’s outward appearance hardily existed; men either shared his interests, in which case they were useful as friends, or they didn’t. Donald had the best legal brain he knew and that was all there was to it. But she couldn’t feel like that. Men shouldn’t seem like doctored toms. Donald adopted the affectations of an eighteenth-century gentleman, but he was far more like an
Edwardian
drawing room tenor. She cut short the access of malice by going across to him.

‘Well? Well?’ he asked, thrusting his face a little too closely at her, ‘so you’re going to hold the gorgeous East in fee?’

It was ridiculous, she thought; he was less than Bill’s age and he spoke to her as though she was a small girl.

‘I hope it won’t be too gorgeous,’ she said. ‘I imagine everything there to be in bright, eye-aching colours enough as it is.’

‘So you think the Orient may be a bit of a sell, what?’ He shouted this separated interrogative ‘what’ at intervals in his conversation, under the impression, she supposed, that he gave the effect of some portly Regency Admiral on the quarter deck.

If it was shyness, as no doubt she ought to think it was, she could only hope to reduce his affectation by answering on as simple a level as possible.

‘The East isn’t really the part I’m looking forward to,’ she said. ‘All the disease and the dirt and the teeming millions.’ She spoke with an edge of irony, to set such a narrow Western point of view at a proper distance from herself. It annoyed her then when he ignored this separation.

‘I don’t imagine they see themselves like that.’

‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘I know perfectly well that they’re taking over
tomorrow
.’ He did not answer and she asked almost angrily, ‘Well, is that what you meant?’

‘Yes,’ he said doubtfully and he looked away from her, seeking an escape from the conversation, but finding none, he added, ‘Yes, I suppose I did. But knowing’s one thing, feeling’s quite another. I imagine you’ll
feel
it all when you’re there. What?’

‘You exaggerate my powers of comprehension. I’m far from the sort of person who apprehends history in a flash; not even a few weeks in Singapore will be able to do that for me.’

He laughed. ‘Good,’ he said and, although she could not be quite sure of what he was commending, she felt that he was accepting her a little for the first time.

‘But as to having a point of view,’ she said, ‘how can I? I don’t understand anything about
them
, and won’t in such a short visit. As for regretting that
our
day is over, whatever would be the good of that?’

He made no comment and she felt the need to increase his sympathy at cost to herself.

‘Bill,’ she remarked, ‘thinks my
compassion
will be strained.’

‘By the teeming millions?’ he asked and they shared for the first time a smile of affection for Bill; but he withdrew from any further intimacy.

‘It’ll do Bill the world of good. To take the holiday in Australia and America, don’t you know?’

‘If I can keep him from rushing back for some brief,’ she said.

‘Oh, for the Lord’s sake, do,’ he urged her.

She felt forced to admit to herself that he too might have been close enough to Bill to share in ‘intuitive communications’. ‘Have you been thinking that he was ill?’ she asked curiously; and his genuine surprise restored her self-esteem.

‘Ill?’ he asked. ‘No. Has he been?’

‘He thought he was,’ she said.

‘Oh! Probably. He’s thoroughly overworked. What?’ This time he threw his interrogative at her as though he would do her violence.

‘But he couldn’t live without his work,’ she cried, ‘that’s the trouble. I sometimes think he’s in love with those damned courts.’ As she spoke she asked herself why she was over-playing; and decided that she must assert to this waxy-faced man her closeness to Bill, even at the cost of appearing jealous.

‘Every love affair can get a bit stale,’ he said, ‘what?’

She saw finally that she disliked him and his pretentious, knowing way of talking. ‘Do you mean that you think Bill isn’t any good at his job now?’ she asked. She took his smile to imply pleasure at making her angry.

‘Good heavens, no,’ he cried. ‘That’s part of the trouble. A less brilliant man wouldn’t have stayed the pace.’

‘I just don’t believe it. Bill adores his job. You should have heard him defending justice this evening.’

‘Defending? Why? Don’t you like justice?’

‘Oh! I’m a sentimentalist. I should have thought that was all too apparent. My heart’s always being wrung.’ Really, she thought,
anyone
who is watching us must think we both have some nervous tic – all these smiles and gestures of frivolity to cover our hostility.

But immediately Donald spoke with a sudden uncovered
fierceness
. ‘And you don’t know whether Bill’s is?’ he asked. ‘Justice isn’t all Jehovah and thunderbolts, you know. It’s righting the wrongs of the innocent.’

She answered now with a deliberate drawl to annoy.

‘It must be absolutely ghastly in the
criminal
courts,’ she said. ‘I never rejoiced so much as the day that Bill gave it up for civil cases. Except when we were left the money for this house,’ she added.

He looked round the room and finally fixed his eyes on the rather massive jewellery that covered the equally massive bosom of a Park Lane financier’s wife.

‘Big Company cases are a bit remote from the human heart,’ he said. ‘That’s all I meant. But still Bill makes a lot of money, what?’

She would not be put on trial by a sentimental failure, for that’s what he was – jealous of Bill’s greater success; but if there was
something
he wanted to tell her about Bill, it was her duty to hear it,
however
little she liked him.

‘Donald,’ she said. She had only once or twice before ventured his Christian name and then only to please Bill. ‘Do you really feel that Bill should …?’ But her question had to remain unasked, for Lady Pirie was upon them.

‘You’re not tiring yourself too much, Meg, are you?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure we all ought to go.’

‘I shouldn’t be very pleased if you all did, Viola.’ Meg hoped that the off hand answer would send her away, but it was clear she had come up to them with some purpose.

‘This is Bill’s friend Mr Templeton,’ Meg said. ‘Lady Pirie.’ She suddenly felt exhausted and beckoned to one of the hired waiters for a glass of champagne.

‘Meg never looks tired,’ Lady Pirie announced, ‘that’s the trouble. But she’s been bossing us around on the committee all the afternoon.’

‘Bossing you for your own good, what?’

Even Lady Pirie seemed a little surprised by the booming fierceness of this fat little man’s tone.

‘Oh, we’re always the better for Meg’s advice,’ she said, and she seemed about to pat Meg’s arm, but finding it bare, ended with a vague gesture of protection.

‘What other young woman with all this,’ Lady Pirie waved her arm towards the room, ‘would spend afternoons getting something done for derelict old people.’

‘A great number much younger, my dear Viola,’ Meg said, ‘and with a great deal more than all this,’ she imitated Lady Pine’s gesture. There seemed to be an absurd conspiracy, she reflected, to make her out a sort of millionairess.

‘Wrung with pity? What?’ Donald’s ejaculation startled Lady Pirie. She looked at him as though he indeed belonged to the past century he affected. ‘Pity! We shouldn’t get very far if we approached our work in that state,’ she said.

Meg could see that she felt him to be an opponent of Aid to the Elderly, but she was obviously not sure of the grounds of his
opposition
.

‘There’s still room for charity, you know. As long as it’s efficient and not thought of as charity.’

Donald seemed to feel no wish to oppose this gruff, square lady so he merely smiled.

‘How efficient we’ll be when Meg’s away, I don’t know.’

‘You’ll do just what you want, Viola,’ Meg said. If she could not get Lady Pirie to go, she would at least prevent her embarrassing maternal praises before Donald’s cold fish eye.

‘Mr Templeton pleads in the criminal courts. He has to be stern,’ she added. She too could pat children on the head if she tried.