The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (21 page)

David, recognizing the Grimm quotation as a half sign, laughed too.

‘There are some things about Meg,’ Gordon said, ‘that I must say before you go.’

‘I know them. First I must urge her to accept any money from you that she may need. Second I must urge her to come down here if she wishes.’

‘Oh yes, you know them, dear David, but do you feel them? The money wouldn’t amount to more than a temporary help but that may be everything at the moment. You seem so set on seeing her as too independent to take it. It’s a sort of family snobbery, David. All right, the Parkers are very independent. But now may not be the moment to show it. And as to her coming down here. She may hate the idea of it, hate the place and us even, after she’s got over the shock; but at the moment she surely needs a gesture of love.’ He looked at David, his face screwed up into a puzzled frown.

David waited for him to go on. The whole breathing space of
happiness
had vanished in
these last moments. All his anxiety and his anger had returned; and, above all, the awful knowledge that he couldn’t communicate with Gordon at a time when he so longed to be close to him.

If Gordon had meant to pursue the subject, he changed his tack. Lying back on the pillows, his voice croaking a little with exhaustion, he said, ‘I’ve thought about them both a lot the last day or two. I don’t know that under any circumstances I could be a close friend of Meg’s. I won’t say her ambitions are too conventional but they’re not my conventions. But I’ve always liked her. She’s got such energy to skim over things.’

‘She’s not an entirely stupid woman,’ David said ironically. He hated to hear what he felt to be patronage coming from Gordon. ‘She knew a lot of unhappiness when she was young.’

Gordon laughed. ‘Misery doesn’t always make for good sense even
in your sad pagan world. But, seriously, you’re quite right, of course. I’ve no doubt she’s known the abysses beneath the surface even as she skimmed. But if she couldn’t … Well, sometimes it’s wise to go on skimming for a long time in life until you know how to dive. And I admire those who skim gracefully. Of course, she’s fallen with a bump now. But heavens, we all need charity.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘it’s because, as you know, I always found Bill so attractive. Always? We met about three times and could hardly find a shaky plank over the enormous gulf. He was tedious, of course, but he seemed so reliable and sad. If I were her … to have him throw away his life …’

‘I don’t really think you can say that in saving someone’s life one
throws
one’s own away. I admit that the choice seems a bit random. This Badai minister what’s-his-name. But then Bill’s whole life seems to have been a bit random.’ David frowned it all away.

‘Oh, of course, it’s a heroic deed. And one must admire it. But for Meg, it seems to me, there must be an awful sense of not having counted enough or, rather, not having made life count enough for him, that it could all happen so suddenly and apparently senselessly. Oh! I don’t know. But if I were you, I shouldn’t say anything about the heroism.’

‘I shan’t,’ David said. He realized that he had hardly thought out what he would say. ‘You seem to think …’

‘I know,’ Gordon said, ‘that you’ll be good and kind as always. David, you must go now.’

‘Yes,’ said David, ‘I’ll phone tonight about …’

‘About everything. Yes,’ Gordon declared. He turned again to fondle the cat. But as David was opening the door, he said suddenly, ‘I can’t leave it like this, David. It’s silly. Look, I want to help you. And it will help you in the end if you do all you can to help Meg. Listen. I’ve considered every possibility. I’m a lover of life in my own way so it hasn’t been easy. But with prayer and thought I’m not only reconciled to dying now, but I’m truly happy for it to come if it shall come. That doesn’t mean that I regret my life – far from it; or that I’m any the less fond of you. Please think about that and about why you should be happy to hear it. I think it could help you.’

*

Meg Eliot, shivering slightly from many concurrent causes, looked from Donald’s window on to the sharply sunlit Bloomsbury street. Passing taxi, hospital nurses brightly chattering as they went on duty,
dim greenglassed window front that gave a glimpse of a poky
cobbler’s
shop, eighteenth-century doorway, all swam in front of her. Pressing her hand on the windowsill, she steadied herself. Beneath the rush of a hundred jostling thoughts and emotions sounded a continuo – I can’t bear this cold, I must get some suitable clothes out of store.

Without turning round, she said, ‘Before we discuss the practical implications of what you’ve told me, David, before we start saying what I can do and what I can’t do, I want you to understand that the blame, the whole blame for this lies on me.’

David, his thoughts upon some specialist, some surgeon perhaps, God knew, anyway someone unknown and loathsome who within a few hours would be pronouncing upon the examination, knowing abominably, before Gordon knew, Gordon’s fate, forced himself to attend to what his sister said. Sister – loving, loved, claiming, fighting against the claims of poor, inadequate-to-claim Mother, fighting
perhaps
unknowingly – and if unknown to her, how could
he
tell? – fighting for Father, vanished and so without defending voice – sister, if only momentarily and in fragments, stood before him. And married sister, in her own world husband-centred? self-centred? he could not judge – finding no contact with him in his world, self-effaced? Gordon-centred? self-centred? – he would not judge – married sister also stood before him, but now only momentarily and in fragments too, obliterated almost by a student’s shot. And, hey presto, now, summoned to life by the same shot, this widow, her loss marked only by drawn, tired lines at the corners of her large, lively eyes and of her small, too small, birdlike mouth – but seeing her so seldom, how could he tell if these were lines of loss or marriage lines? – but loss certainly shown in her too bright, too constant, capable, determined talk.

Well, if the chatter meant fright, as well it could, he must do all to support her in meeting that fright, or rather in concealing it until she was free to meet it in the long fight – months? years? – ahead of her. He could at least check the flow that she might later regret.

He said, ‘Dear Meg, all that you were for Bill and he for you is yours and his. And damn anybody else.’

Meg, hearing his voice, thought, he has his own life; if we had time we could be again perhaps as we were, but we have no time and if I ask anything now I shall get charity. There must be no more
delaying
false comforts; I must keep the distance.

She said, ‘Yes, I know I’m talking too much, David. But I’m bound
to at the moment. In any case I always have done. You’ve forgotten in your quiet world what a chatter I keep up. Besides,’ she said, ‘I say this to Donald. He’s known all along that I was to blame. I realize that now. What I don’t understand, Donald, is why you didn’t tell me?’

She looked at him sitting there in his elegant, rather fussy,
Victoriana
strewed, bachelor flat of his. He was still a fat, doctored cat, but he was not purring. He had an instinctive tact, she thought, which David, because of the family tie between us, and because of his
tortured
rectitude, can’t manage.

‘Don’t you think,’ Donald asked, ‘that you’re seeing the picture too plainly now. Looking back at it, I mean, what? Bill gambled the money away because he was overworked. He drank, smoked, and so on only moderately, and he needed some other kicks to relieve the strain. After all, he knew that he could always earn as much as he wanted and more. And of course, he was going ahead. Probably would have become a judge, what? Accidents happen. Yes, but we don’t live by them. We’d be fools if we did. Don’t think I’m saying you shouldn’t think of blame. At times like this we’re bound to think of everything. But you blame yourself because you think someone might blame
him
. If they do, they’re fools. He couldn’t know he was going to die. In any case they don’t. They think him a hero for as long as they think at all.’

‘Hero!’ she said angrily.

‘No.’ Donald’s loud voice had for a moment a note of annoyance. ‘Don’t object to that. He did a brave thing. We’d all much rather he hadn’t. But don’t refuse him the praise he deserves.’

To David’s surprise, Meg, who at the airport had at first refused to see Donald, went over and sat on the sofa beside him.

‘Donald,’ she said, ‘I believe that you see it all exactly as I see it. I have got somehow to live with that picture. If I can talk to you about it, it will help me. I don’t suppose that we shall see each other again. No, I’m being dramatic – let’s say, not often. We have nothing in common except that you were really fond of Bill. I know that is a lot, but it’s a memory now.
You
have no need to live on memories. I don’t intend to. But if I’m to live with this picture, I must estimate its truth, get it into focus. You can help me to do that. Please, if only because Bill would have wanted you to help me, let me say what I believe was true. David must make what he can of it.’

Donald said nothing and she took his silence for assent.

‘I drove Bill and I fed on him at the same time. Yes, I know,’ she
said as she saw Donald frown, ‘that’s an exaggerated statement. Bill loved me and he could count on my love and in a way on my support. And there are a hundred other things which only I can know and which, thank God! count on the credit side for me. But broadly it’s true. I married Bill because I loved him, but also because he could offer me a way of living that, for a thousand reasons David knows, I wanted, well, I suppose one could say wanted obsessively. I thought Bill wanted the same life, and so up to a point he did. I respected and admired him, thought him brilliant. And he was. And, of course, he was ten years older than me. It was easy, all right, natural if you like, for me to repose on that and I did. I felt that if I gave him my love and trust he could do all that he wanted in life.’

‘I don’t see that you could have done much more, what?’

‘You know, Donald, that I could and that I didn’t. I was for ever priding myself on trusting, on not interfering, but it was just an
excuse
to accept what I wanted. You told me on that evening, at that awful party, that Bill’s life had gone dead when he gave up criminal law. All right, you didn’t tell me, you tried to tell me and I wouldn’t listen. I see now that when the decision was made, he tried to tell me the same thing himself. When I asked him, “Is it what you want?” he said, “I think it’s the right decision if we’re to live as we want to.” And I happily accepted “we”, because it was what I wanted. I didn’t count the price Bill paid. And then there were all sorts of people to tell me how wonderful it was for Bill to give up those sordid criminal cases, how much more “our sort of world” his new life would be. Our sort of world! The sort of dead crowd that you saw at that wretched party, Donald. Bill was bored and stifled in it.’

Donald had to boom in excess to silence her excited flow.

‘Oh come,’ he said, ‘you’re forgetting the reality of what you felt then in your determination to paint this picture. Your friends weren’t all fools or knaves or walking corpses.’

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘You’re quite right. We had a lot of pleasure. Many of the people we knew were happy, good, intelligent people. But what they wanted wasn’t what Bill wanted. Nor even what I wanted. I only kept going because of my outside interests.’

‘Well?’ Donald cried, ‘Lady Pirie’s been telling me a good deal of what you do for Aid to the Elderly. That’s useful, what?’

David, searching his heart, found something that he and Gordon had always commended. ‘You’ve taught yourself to really know something about ceramics,’ he said.

‘Do you think I’m happy to have sold Bill for a Nymphenburg harlequin or a Meissen magpie,’ she said, ‘or for the comfort of old Mrs Bloggs for that matter? Besides, most of that I could have done without making a mess of Bill’s life. When I think of the way that I patted myself on the back for not fussing Bill about his gambling; and all the time I knew that something was wrong, that he was
getting
obsessed by it, absurdly elated or depressed by this or that horse winning or losing, getting feverish about the stop press of the evening paper or the Stock Exchange page of
The
Times.
I told myself that it was all on a par with his evening bridge, though I knew it wasn’t. Happily married people need to live separate lives!’

David said firmly, ‘My dear Meg, everybody, happy or not, married or not, who is worth anything, has to cultivate his own garden.’

Donald, looking dismayed at the intervention, said, ‘I still think that Bill gambled because he worked too hard. And again I say, he couldn’t, you know, have told that he wouldn’t live.’

Meg looked at them in turn with a certain contempt. ‘His own garden! David,’ she cried, ‘it must have been a bleak, windswept sort of garden that forced him into this. Overworked, Donald!
Overworked
at what he didn’t care to do in order to maintain things as I wanted them. And,’ she added, ‘as to his not knowing that he was going to die, there’s an irony to that. I told you that night of the party that he’d just seen Doctor Loundes and learned that his blood pressure was normal. He’d thought he’d got thrombosis, Donald.’

‘So he might have had; pressure of work and boredom combined. But it can also be imagination. Bad nerves, what? His nerves were in a shocking state; anyone with less self control would have shown it.’

‘He thought that he might be dangerously ill, Donald. And as you say he might have been. I thought, like you, that he was simply
neurotic
about his health; that last day in London, something – going abroad perhaps – made him go to Bobby Loundes in desperation. And he was all right. That was the first evening for months when I didn’t see him rush to the racing results. I believe he’d have given up
gambling
altogether if he’d lived …’

‘Resolved to give it up, what?’ Donald interrupted.