The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot Page 4

  So it always was, Meg thought, their long friendship led her automatically to make advances only for Jill to cut them short when she felt them an intrusion. It was all very well for Jill to show that she had kept honesty and intelligence intact beneath her trivial grumblings and platitudes, but to be left holding the advances that had been forced from you – and they were forced by Jill’s silent demand for commiseration – made the friendship seem so one-sided. Time and the instinctive sympathies bred of it made her prefer Jill to all her friends – to Viola Pirie or to Poll even – but instinct could after all prove a deceptive bore.

  Meg moved away to a counter to ask for the pills, and Jill, with her usual informality, turned to leave the shop with no further good-byes. So erect and dowdy and ungiving she seemed that Meg felt immediately how impossible it was for her ever to have any but a lonely ‘plucky’ life. And, after all, wasn’t Jill’s failure to give what her friends asked from her exactly the root of that independence which, however charmless, they all so applauded?

  At once Meg called after her. ‘Oh, Jill, we’re having a few people in this evening. Just good-bye to old friends. Do come. About nine. I should be happy to see you.’ And, fearing that her late invitation might only wound, she added, ‘And Bill, too, will be so glad.’

  When Jill did not even smile at the rider about Bill but said quite simply, ‘Thank you, Meg, I should like that very much,’ Meg felt for a moment that were Bill there to hear he would be glad that she had given the invitation, but the feeling was quickly gone. He would not be glad. He wanted no friendships for her that were centrifugal to her relationship with him. Such friends as he had who were not joint friends but nominally ‘his own’ – legal colleagues, poker or racing associates, a few limpetlike old school or university friends – he made nothing of, or, at any rate, no more than his social distractions demanded. And any surplus affection that such friends seemed to expect of him he warded off with easy chaffing generosity and ‘a helping hand in time of trouble’. She needed her friends no more than he did his, for it was not as if she was without a balance to his absorption in his profession as some wives would have been. Social work, porcelain, books, etc. were not just fill ups for her, they were objects of real absorption. And, as the eighteenth-century red brick of Lord North Street came in sight through the windscreen, she added to them the house – for that was at the centre of all the life she had made for herself.

  No, their need for friends was different only in kind. He complained of her friends as lame ducks, yet he saw all his own cronies as nice enough but faintly pathetic. It was a measure of their happiness together that they were bound to feel that most people had lost the main thing in life – except for the few happy couples they knew whose mutual absorption, as great as their own, kept them at a sensible and respected distance of intimacy. The difficulty was, she decided, as she brought the car to a halt, that Bill controlled his pity, either respected others too much or was too indifferent to them – she never really knew which – to release emotional demands that he could not satisfy. Whereas she … Oh well, she allowed, even encouraged, her lame ducks to overrun the limits of her sympathy, to get themselves invited to parties when Bill didn’t wish to see them. At least, she decided as she set her Yale key firmly in the front door lock, she would pay them the respect of not thinking of them as lame ducks. And when she came back in six months’ time …

  Once inside the hall, however, Meg’s thoughts ceased abruptly. They had been there fifteen years now, and though, in her determination to live consciously and fully, she fought a continuous battle against the grey ennui of habit, the house with its long familiarity had inevitably imposed certain rituals upon her. So now, as always when coming in, she called brightly, ‘Hello’. It was a greeting originally designed for old Mary at the time of the buzz bombs when they had bought the house so cheaply. It had kept the old thing’s terror at bay; and, to be truthful, probably her own. But now there were no buzz bombs to provoke chumminess, and no old Mary to cry, ‘Oh, thank goodness, you’re back, Madam. Did you hear that one go over half an hour ago?’ Only Bettina now answered or rather appeared from the kitchen bursting with smiles. With her and with Gino all communications seemed to be smiles, for their English did not increase and Meg’s conscientious determination to improve her Italian had led only to her speaking the few phrases she needed with a convincingly native rapidity but had not materially added to her vocabulary. It was an easy relationship, but for Meg a source of dissatisfaction. She had voiced it to Bill.

  ‘I simply can’t believe they find life as easy as they seem to,’ she had said. ‘They’re like two merry peasants.’ And when he characteristically had mocked the banality of her views as he urged her to accept it – ‘Well, that’s what Italians are meant to be like isn’t it? I shouldn’t worry. They save you a great deal of trouble’ – she had felt quite angry that his solicitude for her comfort should often so easily leave out of account consideration of her interests.

  ‘But I don’t want merry peasants about the house,’ she had cried. And it was quite true; all her childhood there had been the vagaries of the servants’ characters, her fuller comprehensions of them than her mother’s or David’s, and in the less affluent years of her early married life old Mary and Nanny and the succession of chars had always been central to her observation of people. And now there were these two efficient smiling dumplings.

  She could not restrain her irritation as she gave the few orders that she knew would already have been anticipated. At such moments her rarely shown annoyance made her less like an exotic crane in flight, more like some greedy, pecking stork. In the distortion of the Empire mirror above the marquetry table she caught a glimpse of a long-nosed Pinocchio’s face, dark eyes that were sharp rather than lively, lines formed by laughter that now seemed simply drawn and tired,

  ‘I’ve had a terrible day, Bettina,’ she cried. ‘All my lame ducks in one afternoon.’ If she hadn’t said it then, it would have been said later to Bill. In breaking her promise only to Bettina’s smiling incomprehension she had, after all, made no betrayal of her friends. She turned from the mirror and from Bettina’s smoothness and ran up the stairs. Of late she had glimpsed such odious obverses too often to forget them easily. She had seen them first in Bill in moments of repose and now in herself at the rare times when she could find no way of enveloping life as she needed. What could you call them, she thought, but obverses – the other side of the medal you got for making some account of life? For it was this that was so frightening: that exactly those weapons one had used for victory seemed now to be turned against one, and since age was the enemy who could doubt that the puə would be defeat? The off hand, easy indolence with which Bill had smoothed out the tearing, breaking grind of the hard work that had given him his success showed at these times as a drink-flushed, petulant, sensual coarseness, signalling red for thrombosis. And her own constant, hard-working eagerness to fill life with use and pleasure, to banish the spectre of her sex, class, and age – hypochondriac ennui – stared back at her as hungry, lean exhaustion and signalled red for nervous headaches, breakdown – all the boring paraphernalia of the sort of unfilled life she had so successfully avoided. Tails I win, heads you lose. It simply wasn’t fair.

  Meg pulled herself up sharply as she was about to light one cigarette from another, replaced the fresh one in the mother-of-pearl and ebony box, crushed out the used stub. When depression followed elation so closely, she knew that she must not deny her exhaustion for a moment longer. She might, of course, have guessed that she was overtired when she had invited Jill like that and risked annoying the one person who really mattered in her life. Poor Bill! He too was often so tired now at the end of the day. She felt sure that the sudden fears that now attacked her visited him yet more fiercely. He looked sometimes possessed with more than the haggard anxiety of a difficult brief or an exhausting day in court; his blue eyes were glazed and his wide mouth loosely open with what seemed to her something very l
ike plain fright.

  This too would not do. She recited carefully to herself their personal beatitudes; and blessings they were indeed – good health, energy, a proper income, a decent social conscience, wide interests, humour shared, sufficient humour indeed to accept large parts of life unshared, and, through it all, complete happiness together. It was simply superstitious fear of hubris that threatened to gnaw through such a fabric; and for atavistic, puritan superstition there was no cure like the months of wonderful new interests, the days of lazy ease that now lay ahead of them. Meanwhile, however, it was clear that the fabric was not strong enough to withstand the gnawing, and she turned about the room for some distracting task.

  It was now that her own energy and Bettina’s competence seemed such mixed blessings. The packing had been completed two days before and the house made ready for the Copemans. There was little to do in any case, since Mrs Copeman thought everything ‘quite beautiful’ – especially the Louis XV buhl table and the Palladian secretaire; and, as she also thought Gino and Bettina ‘quite wonderful people’ and expressed her intention of leaving all the arrangements to them, there seemed nothing that Meg herself could do except to make the same act of trust. They had never before let the house, but then they had never before thought of being away for so long. No doubt Bill’s determination to find their American tenants so perfect, though intended simply to allay her qualms, was also a completely sensible one. Certainly the Copemans were perfect in one thing, their agreement to do without the porcelain collection. Mrs Copeman, having inquired if any pieces were Sèvres and having found that they were not, had been quite definite in her views,

  ‘Well, they’re certainly quite beautiful,’ she had said. ‘Trent and I don’t care too much for things that can’t be used as they were made to be, Mrs Eliot.’

  Meg had said to Bill, ‘I don’t know whether she thought I was going to say she could use the Meissen plates or the Nymphenburg jug. And anyway what does she think the Derby Chinoiserie figures were meant to be used for?’

  So the porcelain was to be stored. And Meg certainly felt that leaving the house was going to be the easier for it. She ought now, if friends’ felicitations were any guide, to be giving herself up to wondrous imaginings of the six months ahead of her. Anticipation, they said, was the greater part of pleasure. But, of course, they were wrong. How could she, leaving Europe for the first time, suddenly imagine what she had never before thought of? She could delve up fragments of travel films ill attended to, and season them with the cautious reservation that the reality would probably prove far more commonplace, but such imaginings were hardly likely to be wondrous and would certainly not allay the pain in her stomach that always came when she contemplated the unknown. For this was it, of course – the cause and centre of all her recent unfamiliar depressions – simply what she had known so intensely in girlhood and adolescence, but had experienced decreasingly as the years passed, what, in their teens, she and David had christened ‘The Horror in Between’. Every visit to the seaside, every return home had been a horror to them, a dreaded anticipation of what might lie at the other end. It was only in her twenties that she had been able to concentrate on books or scenery when travelling in trains, and, even later, as the destination approached, particularly on the return home, her mind would become clogged with a cotton wool of fright, and her stomach would heave in revolt against the inevitable.

  She had decided later that it stemmed from a child’s sense of the insecurity of her home, and from her father’s sudden disappearance from the scene. She had declared it hysteria communicated by her mother. She had sometimes carried it further, to an equation with fear of death. But, of course, with Bill she was without these fears. With him, for all the aeroplane stoppings and startings of their coming journey, there could be no ‘Horror in Between’.

  Meanwhile until he returned to the house she was alone. There was nothing for it but to seek the escape she and David had found in the past. Emma, The Mill on the Floss, The Small House at Allington, The Portrait of a Lady lay together with the hand luggage. They were the basic necessities of the voyage, not on any account to be anticipated; there were rules of the game even in stressful times. She went to the bookcase and took down Daisy Miller, an old standby, familiar enough to take quick effect, short enough to anaesthetize only for the ugly hour or so until Bill’s return, easily shaken off, leaving no after effects. Drawing her long legs up under her into the armchair, with cigarettes and matches on the table beside her, she felt herself suddenly the gawky, leggy girl of her past, who had obliterated dreary hotel bedrooms and hideous furnished flats with the subtleties of Daisy’s innocence pitted against the guiles of Rome. It seemed absurd that there should be no David there also, very much the elder brother, legs stretched out, in the other armchair to match her absorption with an equal engrossment in the sad futilities of Emma Bovary’s debts.

  She saw her brother so seldom now, thought of him only rarely, so that his voice came to her imagination as it was in his most self-conscious, whimsical adolescence. ‘My sister,’ she could hear him saying, ‘inclines to the native tongue. My taste is more for the French. But then what English lady can happily support the improprieties that our neighbours across the Channel permit themselves in their so-called polite literature?’ This parodying of early Victorian speech had, thank God, like all David’s other affectations, lasted only a short while, but it came back to Meg now as clearly as if he were speaking in the room; and she found herself longing for a talk, a real gossip with him. Preferring not to dwell on the history of the distant though friendly relations that had grown up between them in the last years, she plunged headlong into Daisy Miller.

  Some time later she was conscious of that muffled banging of the front door that meant that Bill had come home. He had never learned not to bang doors, yet he always remembered at the last minute, just in time to turn the knob and prevent the loudest reverberations. She did not go down to him. He liked to rush at the evening paper, to the stop press with his precious racing results; and then to read the letters that had come by the afternoon post. They were mostly bills or from bookmakers, anyway; she had seen them when she came in. He had got increasingly tetchy recently if anyone fussed him during this ritual. He took his racing so seriously nowadays, so differently from the time when a day at Kempton Park or Ascot had been a social occasion for them both. All his racing was by post nowadays. Silly ass, she thought with loving impatience. She could not stand people turning pleasures into fusses. He was just as keen on his bridge, but that had remained a game. Now he would bring with him an air of distraction simply because some wretched horse hadn’t won. And the evening paper would be all muddled and unreadable.

  She could just hear him move across the hall. He moved so deliberately, and yet, considering the extra weight the years had added to his tall, thickset body, surprisingly lightly. Really, she thought, at fifty-five, he’s amazingly young, despite his flushed face and the way his hair is receding. One would take him for either a very mature young man or else an oddly youthful looking man for one who could accept such a position in life so easily. That was what she loved most – that look of a young man who’d succeeded gracefully. What at once stood out was that he had reached ‘such a position’, that he took it easily, and that he probably knew the advantages to be gained from appearing so to take it. And, of course, he did know them. He had always given people the impression of never acting without deliberation. She wished that so much consciousness of his own actions had not weighed upon him so greatly. It was this that made him look a little sad.

  She could hear him talking with Gino and Bettina, giving last-minute orders about the drink probably. He seemed to be talking to them longer than usual this evening. He was always charming to them, but he had told her recently that Bettina was becoming a little too keen on him. He hated any involvement with people. Very well, she had laughed at him, ease up on the charm.

  For some days now she had not heard his clear, very En
glish Italian. They always understood him so much better than her. ‘You try to be too Italian, darling,’ he told her. But now he seemed to be having a full length conversation. Of course, they would not see Bettina and Gino again for six months.

  Suddenly she could hear him striding the stairs two at a time. He was standing in the doorway watching her, but she pretended to be absorbed in her book. It was an absurd pretence, she knew; but she also knew that he liked to find her so. Treading carefully on the rugs only, he came behind her, bent over and kissed her mouth.

  ‘Startled?’ he asked, his hands on her shoulders.

  ‘No,’ she said. She laid Daisy Miller on the table, but did not uncurl in her chair. ‘I expected it.’ She did note with surprise, however, that the evening paper was in his pocket and that it had not been touched.

  ‘And I suppose the anticipation spoiled your reading,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing really could spoil Daisy Miller,’ she answered, ‘not even you.’ She pressed his hand.

  ‘Is that the girl who didn’t know that her parents were adulterous?’

  ‘No,’ said Meg, ‘that was Maisie. Though it’s a poor and vulgar description of the book.’

  ‘Maisie, Daisy,’ he remarked. ‘Pretty poor and vulgar names. Did you cut your committee?’

  ‘No. Certainly not. How could you think it of me?’

  As her words came more quickly in mock indignation, her fingers moved more slowly rubbing his cheek.

  ‘I thought it didn’t end until six,’ he announced.

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘you always do. But they still end at four.’

  ‘I get it all wrong, don’t I?’

  ‘Yes, darling. But don’t worry. You don’t read the women’s journals; if you did you’d know that every woman expects her husband to get it wrong but she still loves him to take an interest.’