The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (16 page)

‘You’ve both been immensely kind to me,’ she said.

‘We haven’t. We’ve been absolutely bloody.’ Helen had returned to her manner of last night.

‘Well,’ said Meg. ‘Whatever. The least I can do is not to be a nuisance. Be honest with me. What is it you’re frightened I might do?’

The question alone seemed enough to alarm Mr Marriot. He looked at his wife as though her face might tell him what labyrinths lay concealed in Meg’s words. Then, unprovided with an answer, he said, ‘We’re just concerned to help you all we can, Mrs Eliot, that’s all.’

But Helen Marriot gave an answer. ‘Quite honestly,’ she said, ‘Jimmie simply can’t afford to bungle this affair. And by bungling I mean letting the authorities have the slightest excuse for saying he has.’ She came behind her husband and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Left to himself, of course, he’d do the job perfectly as he always would. But he won’t be, and we need all the help we can get. The British
must
not be involved an inch further than we can avoid. You don’t
know the politics of it all, Mrs Eliot, but our great aim is not to be identified with any of the parties too much. Though we’re a hundred per cent anti-communist. The less that gets into the papers, either here or in England, the better. The first sensation’s over and we’ve got through pretty well but …’

‘In other words,’ Meg said, ‘you don’t want me to shoot my big mouth off. Please don’t worry. I promise not to. If I could bring Bill back …’

She could not understand what had made her use the absurd and unsuitable Americanism, but it was a happy choice. Relieved by her promise, Jimmie Marriot seemed in a transport of delight about the phrase.

‘Did you hear that, Helen?’ he asked. ‘“Shoot my big mouth off.” Well, I knew Americanization had gone pretty far at home but I had no idea it had caught up with people like you, Mrs Eliot.’ He laughed so much that at last the two women were laughing also at his
absurdity
.

*

Jimmie Marriot’s pleasure at her Americanism heralded the whole tenor of Meg’s conversation with them in her days there – days that stretched from Dr Maung’s original week to nearer a fortnight. The Marriots seemed drawn by love-fear to England which they had not visited for so long, to which they yet might be returned empty any day. Americanization, rock’n’roll, Teddy boys, angry young men, new towns, housing estates, television, these formed the substance of all their talk and questions of home. Meg tried to answer as well as she could, but really she wanted to tell them that her life was not lived in the pages of the popular newspapers. Bill and she had been most actively engaged in living, yet nothing of what the Marriots so fearfully sought to find had touched them even tangentially. Once when they had been talking about football pools and their effect on the
nation
, she felt suddenly as though the world at home was as remote and dangerous as this unknown Asian world that had struck out at her so cruelly.

In the main, however, she was left alone. She lay, giving herself up to happy memories. She had to fill her head with echoes of Bill’s voice so that she could endure the years to come; and, above all, with Bill’s voice, confident, happy, and triumphant to drown the plaintive note of Bill’s voice lost, empty, careless of life. But the plaintive note grew louder.

At first she found some relief by fussing each visitor to the room – Aung Ma who brought fresh limes and ice; Helen Marriot who brought Chinese dishes of prawns and bamboo shoots and sharks’ fins that, far from tempting, revolted her; Jimmie Marriot bearing, with ostentatious confidence in her goodwill, copies of the depositions – with constant demands that the venetian blinds be more securely closed to shut out every ray of the powerful sun. The heat was
unbearable
, she said. But the sun’s rays were not the voice that ripped her conscience.

Then it became the room itself which refused her tranquillity. The lemon-coloured wood, the jade green cushions; the scarlet bedcover; all these changed from a pleasant scheme doing credit to Helen
Marriot’s
taste; she could not endure such artiness, could not get well amid a pathetic pretension symbolized by the Utrillo reproduction. There were no reproductions in Lord North Street. Saying it to herself, she realized that she had lost her sense of humour but could find no energy to revive it.

Dr Maung was persuaded to let her be helped downstairs each day, and she lay on the veranda in a bamboo chaise-longue with daffodil yellow cushions. There she lost herself, for long moments, even letting Bill’s memory slip away, in a mass of strange sounds and colours – the glaring crimson of the bougainvillea, the softer, complex blues and browns and greens of the orchids, the neat and highly gaudy beds of gerbera and portulaca, the whirring of the fans, the fainter sound of the water sprinkler. Then she would be wakened from this half-sleep by chance movements – a spray of water shooting suddenly higher into the air; the gibbon increasing the pace of his monotonous swinging; and she would turn a concentrated attention upon the deposition.

It was only after she had read all these that the amity established with the Marriots was, if not broken, at any rate badly cracked. She found in them no word to support her hysterically held belief that Bill had died by chance. He had moved to protect, all of them said it; some even declared that he had ‘flung himself’. Out of her reading, however, came an appeal that broke through her egotism, that
restored
in some part her normal concern with others.

‘Mr Marriot,’ she said, as he came out, smiling, to his daily moment of full bonhomie – the shaking of the evening cocktails. ‘Mr Marriot, when is the trial of these young men?’

‘It began yesterday,’ he said, as his face clouded at this banishment
of the routine evening talk of scholarship-filled Oxford and
Cambridge
, or England without domestic servants.

‘I should have been told,’ she said.

‘Now, there’s no need to worry yourself about it. I sent your
deposition
in and the authorities expressed the greatest appreciation of your cooperation.’

She felt the coming battle and said irritably, ‘I hope the authorities aren’t as foolish as you report them. There was no cooperation. I had nothing to say.’

Mr Marriot’s face showed glum and sulky. He gave her the mixed gin and passion-fruit juice in silence.

‘I hope they
aren’t
as foolish,’ Meg repeated, ‘for the sake of these young men on trial. What’s going to happen to them?’ Jimmie
Marriot
assumed an expression of careful deliberation as though his visitor were asking him some nice point of Badai custom.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘capital punishment is not so generally favoured here as it is in Western Europe. On first consideration I should say that the influence of Buddhism had a good deal to do with that, but you’d need a legal expert to trace all the factors …’

‘Mr Marriot,’ she interrupted, speaking each word clearly with an accompanying nod of her head as though she were addressing a
provoking
child, ‘I’m not asking you that. I’m asking you what will
happen
to the young man who shot Bill.’

Helen Marriot came out on to the veranda at that moment. Perhaps because she had not followed the conversation from the first, she did not divine Meg’s feelings as her husband had done. ‘I think there’s no doubt that he’ll be hanged, Mrs Eliot,’ she said in assurance.

Meg stared at her. Everything about her was so small and trim – her little thin face with its turned up nose and small white teeth that showed a fraction above her protruding lower lip; her tiny well manicured hands, her neat little feet. And so clean and bright in her peacock green silk cocktail dress. It made her words seem doubly obscene. You beastly, arty, little hop o’ my thumb, Meg thought.

‘Do you suppose I’m clamouring for a man to die?’ she asked, but she strove to be honest even in her distaste. ‘Oh, of course, one side of me wants it. No, not even one side, just a primitive instinct to hurt and torture the person who took Bill from me. But what should I be like if I let that sort of thing take hold of me? Far from bringing Bill back I should lose him for ever.’ She paused to control her anger, then
more slowly she said, ‘I can’t remember the time when I wasn’t against capital punishment. This is the test of my sincerity.’

Helen Marriot said, ‘I see. Well, we don’t think like that.’ Then she asked, ‘And your husband, what were his views?’

‘My husband and I didn’t think the same on every subject,’ Meg answered. ‘Ours wasn’t that stultifying sort of love.’ She turned to Mr Marriot, ‘I want to make a plea for clemency,’ she said. ‘Surely coming from the widow and from a foreigner it would have a telling effect?’

Helen Marriot put her glass down on the long, low table
impatiently
. ‘Coming from a woman, and a widow at that, it would have no effect whatsoever,’ she said. ‘Coming from an Englishwoman it might have quite ghastly consequences.’ The note of rising anger in his wife’s voice brought Jimmie Marriot to life.

‘I understand what you feel, Mrs Eliot,’ he said. ‘Helen said “we” but it isn’t strictly true. I have very pacific feelings too. I hate all cruelty and however you look at it there are some very distasteful emotions involved in hanging a man. But in this case, it’s no good. Whatever we feel they’ll hang the fellow. Not because he killed your husband, Mrs Eliot, but because he tried to kill Prek Namh. And
because
they think he’s connected with the Communists.’

‘All the more reason then why I should protest. I must ask you to forward my pleas to the right quarters.’ She was beginning to weep now.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Eliot, I can’t undertake to do that. We must not be concerned any further in this business.’

Helen Marriot came over and sat on a cushion beside the
chaise-longue
. ‘You gave your promise, you know,’ she said. ‘You can’t go back on it.’

‘I don’t know,’ Meg said, ‘I’ll have to think it over. Women aren’t quite helpless, you know.’ As soon as she had said it she was furious with herself.

Helen Marriot patted Meg’s hand. ‘Poor Mrs Eliot,’ she said; and Jimmie Marriot said, ‘Yes, that’s right, think it over. But it’s true enough that you can’t help the fellow, if they’ve made up their minds.’

‘Which they have,’ Helen said, ‘and it would be very
embarrassing
.’

Aung Ma was bowing to announce dinner. With stick in one hand and the other holding Jimmie Marriot’s arm for balance, Meg went
in to a dinner of stringy chicken, okra, and potatoes, which she did not want.

*

The next morning as Meg was seated again on the veranda beneath a striped umbrella canopy, watching a large yellow and black bird flying in and out of a bottle-shaped nest, a Badai came up the drive pedalling a bicycle rickshaw in which sat Mrs Fairclough. She paid off the man with many smiles and advanced towards Meg – a harmony of blues. Her dress was bright cornflower blue linen, her large panama hat was draped with forget-me-not ribbon, she wore a turquoise necklace and turquoise ear-rings, her blue eyes smiled, brave but sad. It’s hardly worth her while blueing her hair, Meg thought, if she’s going to provide it with such competition.

she murmured. But it wasn’t really fair because Mrs Fairclough wasn’t fat and, after all,
she
knew her, although only slightly. She began to smile and then, remembering Bill’s embarrassment and his subsequent happy suppressed giggles, she felt very pleased to see the old lady, if also horribly tempted to laugh in her face.

‘I’m so very glad, dear,’ Mrs Fairclough announced, ‘that you’ve found the peace of this lovely garden.’

Meg thanked her for being so glad, asked her to sit down and
offered
her refreshment. To her surprise Mrs Fairclough specified the refreshment she required, ‘A pot of coffee, dear. I always think it’s so much better when it’s stood in a pot. And a glass of iced water. You can’t live long in Italy without knowing that coffee gets lonely
without
iced water.’ She added that she was not particular about the food. ‘Biscuits, sandwiches, or whatever they’ve got.’ Meg reflected that rich old ladies who lived in hotels probably got used to commanding in this way; it was only fortunate that the Marriots were out. With  Aung Ma she now had such a complicated relationship of mutual smiles to efface the past that she was quite reconciled to clapping her hands and giving orders.

Until the refreshment was served, Mrs Fairclough confined herself to talk of the garden’s beauty interspersed with little jokes like the one about the coffee and the iced water, and with examples of the quaint, human goodness of simple people – peasants or natives – in the many countries she had visited.

‘If only,’ she said, ‘the wise of the world could learn from that,’ and ‘Only a little coloured boy no more than knee high but what a mighty truth he proclaimed, bless him, without knowing it.’

Meg was reminded of a childhood book,
Peeps
at
Many
Lands
. When Aung Ma had served a lavish display of home-made cakes, fruit, and sandwiches, Mrs Fairclough set to with relish and she threw aside pleasantries for a more serious tone, though still smiling forth a radiant harmony. She put her hand on Meg’s bandaged knee, and when Meg grimaced in anticipation of pain, she gave her a full,
personal
, and intimate smile.

‘I am with you always even unto the end,’ she said. ‘Truth denies sickness, sin, and death. They are not lost, they are only gone before. Hold on to that thought, dear; we are children of God, children of light and the light knows no darkness.’

Meg could not think how to answer but there was no need, for Mrs Fairclough kept right on talking, though often, with all her eating and drinking, it was not entirely easy to hear what she said. ‘Truth is real and eternal,’ she told Meg, ‘matter is unreal and temporal.’

Meg speculated how far the old woman was consciously aware of the discrepancy between her doctrine and her greed, but she could find no answer. The truth was that far from resenting the intrusive visit, she found pleasure in the presence of someone who was so pleased with life; particularly someone whose happiness was enough tarnished with self-satisfaction to allow of ridicule with a clear conscience.