The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (17 page)

‘I have been thinking of you so much, my dear,’ Mrs Fairclough said, ‘and I’ve been working for you. Once when I woke in the night I declared the truth about this whole business. Error can seem so real in those hours of darkness. It came to me then that I should find you in peace and sunlight. The peace that passeth all understanding.’ She smiled and smiled. ‘“Still, still with thee when purple morning
breaketh
, when the tired waketh and the shadows flee.” That’s from one of our hymns, dear.’ Then suddenly the glitter went out of her large blue eyes, and the faintly lipsticked mouth ceased straining with little powder-caked lines and wrinkles. She looked quite serious.

‘It seemed to me,’ she said, ‘that you would like a visit from someone who had seen you with him. Someone who could tell you that even in that little time she had seen with what a deep love he cherished you. He saw you afraid, and his love was enough to banish that fear. Love like that can’t die just because he has put off this life, and put on
the life immortal. You know all this, of course, but I thought that as there was no one else here who had seen you together, you would like to hear it from me. Was I right?’

Meg felt that, even if she could not accept all that Mrs Fairclough had said, she could honestly say, ‘Yes. Thank you very much. You have helped me a lot.’

Whether it was that she had now said all that she had come to say, or whether that she had eaten everything Aung Ma had brought to them, except for a large mango that would have shamed even
someone
less dainty and fragrant than this baby blue, shellpink old lady, Mrs Fairclough now sat in rather embarrassed silence.

‘I’m afraid,’ Meg said, ‘that I wasn’t very friendly on the
aeroplane
.’

Mrs Fairclough’s blue ribboned picture hat shook a little
involuntarily
.

‘Oh, I didn’t feel that at all. An old woman travelling on her own is glad to feel such great love as you and your husband gave to one another. You seemed so rich in love, my dear, that you couldn’t help spilling it over on to others.’ The sweet smile she had resumed seemed, in her nervousness, embarrassingly insincere.

When she got up to leave, her legs below her short skirt were so matchstick-thin that Meg was overwhelmed with pity. She felt that she must show her some affection.

‘Could I tell you something in confidence, Mrs Fairclough?’ and when the old woman had sat down again, she told her of her wish to help the young men on trial. ‘They say it’s no use,’ she said, ‘and I feel so powerless.’

‘Blessed are the merciful,’ Mrs Fairclough announced, ‘for they shall obtain mercy. All things are possible if we believe. Mrs Eddy tells us in
Science
and
Health
…’

But Meg could not let it all run away like that. She wanted to prove the old lady as fine as she now believed her to be.

‘Would you help me?’ she asked. ‘It wouldn’t be fair to go over the Marriots’ heads to the Embassy or the Minister or the police. But this is the man who is defending them.’ She had copied the name from the reports. ‘Would you try to find him and tell him that I would like to see him? Perhaps
he
could make use of my support.’

Mrs Fairclough seemed a little bewildered, but she assured Meg that she would arrange it. She, too, had something to give Meg before she
left. It was a reprint of one of Mrs Eddy’s hymns in red and black lettering on a card with scalloped edges.

Meg read. When Mrs Fairclough had gone, Meg was alarmed to find tears coming to her eyes. She felt less embarrassed when they merged into hysterical laughter.

*

The pleasure of Mrs Fairclough’s visit kept Meg elated for some time afterwards. To have talked to someone who had spoken to Bill, however absurd the encounter, released her from isolated fear. To have talked to someone from outside, to have enjoyed a ridiculous person, did more; it made her feel that she was not entirely cut off from the woman she
had
been, the woman who liked people and laughed at them. Looking back, she felt that she had hardly been
herself
, had hardly been on top of the world, fulfilled and mocking, since before that wretched send-off party that had so strangely presaged the miseries to come. And then too Mrs Fairclough would set in
motion her plea for these wretched men, would allow her conscience to work as it always had done, commanding right where it saw that right should be done.

All the same her conscience told her that the appeal to the defence lawyer differed in no way from any other appeal as far as the Marriots were concerned. She had simply wriggled out of her impossible
promise
to them. She found it necessary to tell them what she had done.

To her surprise, they took it very calmly.

Helen Marriot said, ‘I’m afraid you’re very naïve, you know. What makes you think a stranger like that will take all that trouble? And even if she did, I don’t think their lawyer would do more than thank her profusely and forget about it. The pleas of widows are hardly likely to help his case here. If, that is, he’s putting up a serious case at all in view of the Government’s attitude.’

Jimmie Marriot toned it down a little. ‘Helen’s got a powerful imagination,’ he said. ‘We don’t
know
what’ll happen. All the same the views of strangers and especially of women don’t carry a lot of weight. But you’ve done as your conscience bade you, Mrs Eliot. Please don’t think I’ve any hard feelings.’

Meg found it difficult to speak to them for the next few days. No word came from Mrs Fairclough or from the lawyer, and at the beginning
of the second week there Aung Ma told her with a gentle smile, ‘These bad men are hanged.’ She had become devoted to Meg and tried hard to master new English words in order to speak to her.

At first Meg was so utterly disgusted with herself for not having battled more fiercely to save them that she felt a physical disgust with her own body. It seemed monstrous to be living when she had run away from Bill and he had died; when she had run away from her conscience and these men had hanged. Yet by the evening a strange lassitude had come over her. Always in her life she had got what she wanted, trying only to see that what she wanted did not defy her
conscience
. Fighting against her mother’s feeble plaintive will, and later backed by Bill’s strength and affection, she had gained her points in life. She had kept her will within bounds, never listening to the courtiers’ voices of hysteria that had bade her defy the great ocean of things beyond her control. Even when war, that ocean that had engulfed so many citadels, threatened their happy life, Bill, with foresight, had propelled her into Red Cross work; and, though he had been absent on military service for some months, it had not been long before he was back with her, working in the legal branch of Admiralty in Whitehall. They had both been immensely useful at their jobs so that conscience and will had kept in pace.

As she thought of the war, the memory of their only casualty made her shudder for a moment, as though her mother’s shadow had cast a chill misery over her. Poor, pluckily battling, bewildered Mother, washed up with a dozen or so other lost impoverished old ladies and buried with them beneath the rubble of a private hotel in Bath. A Baedeker raid, and poor Mother had found so little time or place in life for works of art. Meg forced the image of her mother out of her mind – it had troubled her peace increasingly in this last year, when mysteriously, despite all their secure happiness, the roaring of the ocean without had sounded again and again in her ears and not even Bill’s presence had been able to still it. And now, Bill had gone and she would have to face it alone. She would have to circumscribe her will most deviously if she were not to meet defeat. Yet if defeat was so easy to take as her failure over these men … She pulled herself up in disgust – an acceptance of the hanging of two wretched youths was a petty sort of triumph over her will. But disgust could not keep back the tranquillity that took possession. The last act of the airport tragedy was over. Perhaps, she thought, vengeance was what she had really
wanted despite her life-long principles. She was too drowsy and
peaceful
to pursue the thought.

As her last days in Badai came upon her she felt an increasing
distaste
for leaving. The Marriots too seemed easier, less intrusive since the hanging was over and done. They left her largely alone. She sat at her bedroom window idly watching the tropical rain beating down in great pools on the gravel drive. Or, when the sun shone fiercely, in the shade of the veranda, pretending to read the air mail letters of
condolence
, but the very names of the senders reminded her that a whole world of doing and coping awaited her, and she left them unread. She wanted to bring neither Maggie Tulliver’s Warwickshire nor Emma’s Surrey to life. She was able now to walk with a stick, and early, before breakfast, she went round the garden, finding an
immediacy
of pleasure that she could hardly recall in her past life. She had often ‘admired’ flowers, but it was a perfunctory action compared to the detailed intensity with which she looked at the orchids Helen
Marriot
had grown over old tree stumps. ‘I only wish you could see the cassias and the jacarandas in flower, Mrs Eliot,’ Jimmie Marriot said, and she longed to say, ‘I’ll stay just for that.’ When she praised the frangipanis, Helen Marriot laughed.

‘My dear, they’re a disgusting, withered sight now. I ought to have the dead blooms cut off but I never remember. They were rather heaven though a week or two before you came.’

If she stayed a year she would see them in full flower, and really there was nothing to prevent her being here where Bill was. Nothing except the conviction that to escape so would make nonsense of her existence. She had made one escape from her mother’s world into the life that she, or she with Bill, had planned; to turn back on it now would be to deny herself and Bill. Even David had seen this, for he had written:

‘I have taken you at your word and left you to make your own way home. We may be in need of each other more in the coming years, so that it seems to me essential that I should not begin badly by interfering where you tell me you don’t need me. But don’t, Meg, delay your return, if you take my advice. Sorting out is bound to be painful and the sooner it is over the better.’

So back to the problems she must go. Even Mrs Copeman had seen this, kindly offering to leave Lord North Street as soon as they found somewhere else. And indeed, she would want the house, for whatever provision Bill had made, she was bound to need some new
resource – perhaps to let off the top floor as a flat, although she
revolted
at the thought. She could only then relax in this new
tranquillity
, the wonderful lethargy induced by the overpowering heat, wet or shine, and husband her energies for the horrible lonely return.

Helen Marriot wanted to take her on drives round Srem Panh, ‘though God knows there’s little enough to see. One temple that’s rather heavenly’, but she preferred to remain in the Consulate, for she feared that any excursion might reawaken the first day’s horror of Badai. She read willingly enough, however, in an absurd little guide book – ‘Srem Panh has no past to boast of. It is not one of those towns the mere approach to which recalls their ancient glories and grandeurs. Our step does not slacken into reverent pace, nor is our fancy fevered with the glorious pageants of the past, nor are we fired with poetic fervours beyond bearing.’ A dull, ugly little town really; a week ago she would have found extra horror that Bill had died there; but now its blank past seemed only to increase its anonymity for her, for Bill. He would lie there in a place that had no claim on history, no claim on them either of past or of future.

The Marriots perhaps ventured a small claim on her, but it was not serious. One afternoon Helen Marriot, lying sewing in another
chaise-longue
, had filled in some of the gaps in the story of her marriage. But it was all so much what their emotional undertones had already told Meg – Helen’s grander social background, her marriage on a rebound from a broken up first marriage, her admiration for Jimmie’s
goodness
and knowledge, her protectiveness of his insufficiencies in his career – that it was a twice told tale.

‘I’ve had to push poor Jimmie,’ Helen said, ‘so that I sometimes feel I must appear as a ghastly shrew to other people. But he
understands
; and we’d neither of us wish for a moment different from what it has been.’

And Meg said, ‘Bill did any pushing that was wanted. But he knew I was there if he needed me. And heavens, yes, every minute was what it should have been.’

She could see that Helen’s avowal scratched no deeper below the surface than her own; nor did either of them intend more. It was simply a conventional outline for a woman’s heart to heart, serving as an apology for past dislike, a signal that all claims their consciences might make of unseemly treatment could now be cancelled.

At the last even the sight of the airport-Meg’s last dread in Badai – was managed without too great a shock of memories by the Marriots’
careful timing – avoiding the restaurant and arriving by special
permission
only a minute or two before the plane left. The presence of one or two photographers so long after the newspaper fuss had died down – or so Jimmie Marriot had told her, for she would read none of it herself – reminded Meg of how much peace and decency she owed to his watchdog guardianship in the first days after Bill’s death.

‘You’ve been so much kinder to me than I’ve realized,’ she said, ‘so much kinder than I’ve deserved.’

Jimmie Marriot said, ‘It’s been a privilege to help you. I only wish you had known us at a happier time.’

And Helen cried, ‘Don’t worry, she will. We shall descend on you, Mrs Eliot, when they ship us back to England.’

‘I shall expect you to keep to that,’ Meg said. But of course she didn’t and they wouldn’t. She could wave to them as the aeroplane began to taxi along to the runway, and smile with real friendliness, because they were no longer in her life. It was an unknown England that now filled her with terror. As the plane took off from the ground, she had to grip the arm-rests in order not to scream out, ‘I can’t leave him behind. I can’t. I don’t know what to do without him.’