The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (3 page)

Clearly Lady Pirie felt the impropriety of this remark to Mr
Darlington
, but she only underlined it.

‘We’re not all rolling in money like you, Meg,’ she announced.

Meg Eliot suggested the vulgarity she felt in the rebuke by slightly protruding the lower lip of her large sensual mouth.

‘Oh, Bill and I don’t
roll
,’ she said. ‘Far from it. No, I think the phrase for us is “spend as we get it”. But if you mean should I like to be poor, the answer is no. I should loathe it.’

She smiled, even giggled at Mr Darlington. To Lady Pirie’s evident annoyance he giggled with evident pleasure in return. He opened the door for them and watched them pass down the long stone corridor of the office building. He had hardly turned back into the disordered committee room, however, when Meg Eliot’s head appeared round the door.

‘Don’t take any notice of her moods,’ she said. ‘She’s always like that when she’s got her Widow Twankey hat on.’ She saw him laugh and was off again, delighted to have done the right thing.

Meg’s pleasure at the good relationship she had made with Mr Darlington swelled into a vague general sense of well-being with the world as she ran down the broad stairs. The quick, light clicking of her high heels against the stone echoed gaily through the building, seeming indeed an echo of her light, gay, easy relationship with all the many different kinds of people she touched upon in her busy life. She was struck by her self-satisfaction and wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, and yet her ever ready self-mockery only made her more content. This she acknowledged by permitting the laughter.

Pushing open the heavy door by its iron bar she came out into the drabness of Uxbridge Road, glaringly dusty in the bright August
sunshine
. She imagined herself, tall and graceful, as exotic as a flamingo against the dirty yellow London brick houses and the smut-coated
privet hedges. But not exotic really, or rather no stranger here than anywhere else with her ‘interesting’ irregular shaped face, large brown eyes, and thick, greying straw-yellow hair. At once ‘outside’ and ‘at home’ anywhere. Laughing at her vanity, she crossed the road to where Viola Pirie was dressing down a group of children who were playing around the Humber.

‘You children have got to realize,’ she was saying, ‘that you
must
not touch what doesn’t belong to you. You’ve got plenty of things of your own nowadays. How would you like it if I came into your house and scratched your precious tele?’

Meg smiled, for the children’s politeness and their awe of what was peculiar were clearly hardly sufficient to keep them from laughing in Viola’s face.

‘If you brats have written anything on my car!’ she cried, still laughing. She surveyed the black surface rapidly. ‘Not even a bad word,’ she said and gave the tallest girl sixpence.

As she manoeuvred the Humber through the crowded traffic of Shepherd’s Bush, she set herself to mollify Viola Pirie who was making bulldog snorts beside her.

‘It’s the fault of these cars,’ Meg said, ‘they have such huge, squat, shiny behinds that it’s a constant temptation to write bad words on them. I feel it myself sometimes.’

But Lady Pirie seemed determined to be stern. She said nothing for some minutes, then. ‘You trade on my being so fond of you, Meg. It really isn’t good enough, my dear.’

‘Oh, Viola, a few street children!’

‘You know I’m not talking about the children. You’re going well on the way to ruining a very good secretary in
Mr Darlington. And he won’t be the first.’

‘Really, Viola. I don’t think you’ve any right to imply such things. And Mr Darlington a respectable married man.’ Meg spoke in
imitated
cockney. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I don’t seem to fancy gentlemen who smoke pipes.’

‘No, Meg,’ Lady Pirie said, ‘I’m not going to laugh whatever Mr Darlington may do. You owe the committee some loyalty. And don’t try to look serious when I say that, because you don’t feel it.’

‘Well, you were so awful to the poor man. I had to go back and say something. And you always are in a temper for some reason when you’re wearing that Widow Twankey hat. It’s psychosomatic.’

‘So you
didn’t
leave anything behind. Really!’ Lady Pine’s square,
grey face set in shocked maternal lines, then she saw reflected in the windscreen for a moment the green quills bobbing up and down above her russet felt cap.

‘It is rather awful, isn’t it?’ she said, ‘but I always get so fussed in shops.’

She laughed heartily on a deep, cracked note. She was silent, then at the traffic lights when they started again, she said: ‘You’re free to laugh at
me
as much as you like. You know that. But do you think it’s fair to that man to undermine his respect for the committee?’

Meg controlled her rising annoyance, trying deliberately to remember that Viola’s lecturing manner was a direct measure of her affection.

‘And you’re the person who’s always fussing about the importance of a sense of humour for social work,’ she said. ‘The number of times that I’ve heard you ask those wretched applicants for home visiting jobs whether they can see a joke! Well, Mr Darlington can, and that’s why I like him.’

‘You like him to see
your
jokes,’ Lady Pirie said gruffly. ‘You don’t consider that his job depends on getting on with the rest of the
committee
.’

Meg accelerated to pass two other cars, leaving barely sufficient time to avoid the oncoming traffic. The driver of one car hooted at her and she hooted back.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ she called out. In fact, she was trying to deflect her anger from Viola Pirie. Even so when she spoke it was in a drawling voice intended to provoke.

‘Oh, I think Darlington’s capable of fussing the committee when it’s required.’

Lady Pirie seemed absorbed in the flower barrows at Notting Hill Gate.

‘He understands us all much better than you think.’

Lady Pirie turned and looked at her. ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘He
understands
even less about the sort of people we are than I had thought. Look at this afternoon! The way he rushed in with his uncalled for tact when you and I had got a little sharp with each other. The cheek of it! Anyone even a little sensitive would know that when people are such old friends as you and I are …’ Her voice tailed away. Her grey, wrinkled neck had turned pink. ‘People like that have no shades of behaviour. For them a quarrel’s a quarrel.’

Ordinarily Meg would have reacted strongly to ‘people like that’,
but now she was aware only of compassion for Viola’s loneliness; and as an older, more familiar pity, it clouded and obscured her feelings for Mr Darlington’s dismal daily round.

She sought for an expression that was part of her regular
communication
with Viola Pirie. ‘Oh, dear God!’ she said – an oath that Viola always found peculiarly absurd and endearing when Meg used it – ‘Dear God! I’m not proposing a friendship with him, Viola. I think he’s frightfully efficient at the job. I agree with most of his ideas about the work, even though like all those trained people he’s a bit solemn and absurd about it at times. And I like to protect him from all you old reactionaries on the committee. That’s all.’

Lady Pirie even smiled a little now.

‘Oh, he’s excellent,’ she said, ‘and a nice person too. But he needs a bit of criticism to sharpen his wits on. So much of the work is routine.’

‘Yes,’ said Meg, ‘and imagine how dreary his home life must be. He lives in North London, he told me. Merton or somewhere.’

‘Kenton,’ Lady Pirie corrected, ‘Merton’s in
South
London. I don’t know why you should think it must be dreary,’ she went on, ‘I always think of his house as rather bright – each wall with a different coloured wallpaper, with those modern designs, you know.’

Meg was not in the imaginative habit of following the people she met back to their homes, so she made no comment.

‘Not that I know much about how anybody lives nowadays.’ Lady Pirie was quite mollified now. ‘You’re the one who goes about, Meg, and knows what life’s like today, not me.’

They were in sight of the dismal converted mid-Victorian house in which Lady Pirie had her flat; looking at it, Meg could not bring herself to say, ‘Well, yes, darling, that is so.’ The teasing somehow seemed too cruel outside that decaying, genteel jail.

‘You’ll come early tonight, won’t you, Viola?’ she asked, as Lady Pirie got out.

‘Of course. I’m looking forward to it. Though I still think you’re very naughty to tire yourself like that.’ Viola Pirie paused a moment and then added, ‘You’ll forgive Tom if he doesn’t come, won’t you?’

Meg said quickly, ‘But of course. We know how he hates parties.’

‘Oh, he probably will,’ Viola rushed to get it in. ‘You and Bill are such favourites.’

‘Well, don’t force the poor darling to come.’ Meg pressed the starter and was gone.

As she made her slow way along Oxford Street, Meg contrasted her last errand with the next – Aid for the Elderly and Sczekely’s. Few people were lucky enough to have such a range of interests. What would Mr Darlington make of a Meissen dish, or Miss Gorres of Sczekely’s of modern methods in social case work? Detecting once more a note of cosy self-satisfaction in her thoughts, Meg applied the salt of irony – the Old and the Antique, that sort of journalistic phraseology was the price one paid for being under-educated, being brought up as a nice upper-middle-class girl.

She could not, however, help congratulating herself on her ability to cope with people as she trod the cushiony grey carpet that lined the passage to the showroom at Sczekely’s. Most people found Miss Gorres difficult and abrupt; she conducted her business by successful bullying. But Meg, with her instinctive response to mood and shape of speech, had early adopted a casual yet direct manner with this chic and ageing refugee
gamine
that exactly fitted her shy, aggressive
behaviour
. Since she was a regular patroness at Sczekely’s this adaptation had been no more than a convenience, had sprung in fact from her habitual desire to please; but today it promised to be of practical use.

She still found it strange that Bill should have asked her to cancel her purchase of the Nymphenburg figures. Two hundred pounds was not the sort of sum that he normally questioned; however, questioned he had, and Meg had been in a way pleased to have him deny her something; not only as a novelty, but as an expression of their relative positions in their devoted marriage. She loved Bill as much as
anything
for his conventional masculinity – or rather for the amalgam of qualities, sexual, emotional, and intellectual, which were implied in that term. His success had become for her a symbol of this masculine strength. She cherished his success and the way he used it – a way both generous and self-willed. A generosity that for her found expression in the allowance, growing as his success grew, that he automatically made to her; a self-will that showed itself in his unspoken demand that she should never inquire into the state of their finances, other than to know that he had been entrusted with this or this lucrative case.

It was an archaic position for a wife that most of her friends would have found intolerable, but, since it enabled her to lead the life she so exactly wanted, Meg had come to feel it almost an emancipation from
the conventional feminine freedoms, certainly an advance over the starved lives that so many of her friends gained from their
independent
, mutually sharing marriages. When, then, Bill had said: ‘Cancel the order for that bit of Nymphenburg nonsense, lovey, will you? This trip round the world, you know, means refusing a number of rather big cases,’ she had been delighted to accept the request as an order. She had only wished that it had been more peremptory,
unaccompanied
by any reason.

So now she approached without concern the desk where Miss Gorres sat in a haze of cigarette smoke, once boyish but now a
wrinkling
monkey-boy.

‘I’ve decided not to have the two pieces I ordered, Miss Gorres,’ she said.

Miss Gorres’ large brown eyes expressed only a perfunctory
surprise
; Meg’s decision, they suggested, was so unlikely to be realized that surprise was hardly called for.

‘The figures have been sent to you, Mrs Eliot,’ she said patiently, ‘and I believe your cheque has been paid into the bank.’

‘I want to send them back,’ Meg announced, ‘and if you’ve paid in the cheque, you can refund the money to me.’

‘I don’t think,’ said Miss Gorres, ‘that there was any question of the objects being returned when you bought them.’ Her accent became sterner and more foreign. ‘I don’t think Mr Sczekely will agree to it.’

‘Oh,’ said Meg, ‘as to that, I’ll talk to him if you like.’

‘Those pieces are not everybody’s taste, you know,’ Miss Gorres observed.

Meg said nothing, and after a moment’s silence, Miss Gorres
remarked
casually: ‘We could try to find another buyer for you, if you like.’ She began to sharpen a pencil.

Meg looked round at the room.

‘I can’t think why you show all this inferior late Chinese stuff,’ she said. ‘I’m leaving England for several months tomorrow morning so if you have my cheque, perhaps you’d return it to me now, otherwise you can make a refund. I’ll arrange for the figures to be ready if you’ll send someone to my house for them.’

For a moment Miss Gorres seemed on the point of arguing, then she asked, ‘Shall I tell them to destroy the cheque?’

‘Yes. That will do,’ Meg answered. ‘Maybe when I get back if they’re still unsold …’

‘Oh, they won’t be,’ Miss Gorres said.

‘No,’ Meg picked on it, ‘I didn’t suppose for a moment that they would be.’ And she laughed.

Miss Gorres accepted the friendly malice in the same spirit.

‘You’re giving us a lot of nuisance, Mrs Eliot,’ she said, ‘but so few people know as you do what they want and want what they should, so we must be indulgent for once.’

‘Yes.’ Meg took the compliment flatly. ‘And then, of course, I buy a lot of objects from you.’