The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (22 page)

Meg knew that out of concern for her he was deliberately trying to lower the intensity of her emotions; but she still resented the remark and ignored it ‘Out of a sense that he had time to put things straight. And between us we would have done so. But in those months before,
when he thought he was dying, he was concerned with only one thing, to recoup what he’d lost. He didn’t think he had time to do it by work. He wouldn’t even see the doctor for fear he had too little time to do it at all. That’s why he speculated so crazily then, and gambled to forget the failure of his speculations. He was desperate to pay off the
mortgage. Oh! now I know how much he must have hated the house, not only because he felt guilty knowing that it wasn’t really ours, but because the whole way of living it implied was the root of the trouble. All he was thinking about was not leaving me in the lurch. Me! the person who had started him on the whole thing
because
of the demands I made on him. He never thought of himself. So don’t blame him.’ She paused and then turned to Donald; fiercely she asked, ‘Well, am I right?’

But again it was David who answered. He was himself surprised at the statement that so imperatively presented itself to him.

‘Meg,’ he said, ‘Bill loved you very much and so he thought only of you. But it isn’t what happened in the last months that worries you, is
it? He wasn’t himself then. He thought he was dying. It’s
before
that time that you believe things had already gone wrong. May it not have been a more simple thing that lay behind it, simply that Bill wanted children?’

Meg, surprised too, registered in passing her brother’s apparently compulsive need to raise the subject.

‘Oh! that,’ she said. ‘Yes, that he felt terribly. And there I was blind again. When I learnt that I couldn’t have a child, he was wonderful to me. And when I got over it – early Vincennes cups and old Mrs Bloggs, you know – I took it for granted that we both had. But he
hadn’t.
I learnt that only when we went on this trip.’ Suddenly she began to cry desperately. ‘I was going to do all I could,’ she said, ‘to help him to accept it.’ Her words were hardly intelligible from the convulsions of her sobbing.

‘Look,’ Donald said, ‘this isn’t helping
you,
you know, is it, what?’

David said nothing.

After two or three minutes Meg recovered herself.

‘How funny men are,’ she said, ‘I’m not more unhappy because I cry. That’s how I feel all the time, only I try not to show it. You understand that, don’t you, David? But I suppose it’s more
embarrassing
for you when it appears on the surface, Donald.’ She paused and turned to her brother. ‘But you’re wrong about my not having a child being the cause. It’s kind of you to try to take the blame from me,
David; if it was that, certainly I wouldn’t feel guilty. Sad, yes, but not guilty. I can’t blame myself for what I couldn’t help. No, it’s what I’ve told Donald that I have to live with. And I still ask you, Donald, is it the true picture? Am I right?’

Donald got up. ‘I’d like notice of that question,’ he said. ‘I asked my woman to put up a few sandwiches for us and a glass of sherry. I’ll just see what’s been done about that. And then I’ll try to answer you.’

Donald out of the room, David said, ‘He’s like an undergraduate pretending to be a don.’ When even to this Meg answered, ‘He’s a very good man, I believe. I’ve behaved very badly to him,’ David saw that there was no way of stemming her mood and he remained silent.

Donald, returning with a tray, announced, ‘Cold chicken. Rather dull, I’m afraid, what? But the Fino Delicado has its virtues. It’s better than the Amontillado they’re sending over now.’ He handed
sandwiches
and glasses of sherry slowly and deliberately.

Sitting down, he said, ‘You rather reduce Bill to a cypher, don’t you? He had guts, you know, and ability. You say life had gone sour on him, I can’t presume to judge that.’ Meg raised her hand in protest. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘something went wrong. Agreed. Though the how much and the what are more than I shall care to say. We judge actions in court, you know, but few of us, I think, care to judge people. I certainly don’t. But if we were to make that judgement, quite a lot of people would say it was his own fault.’

David sat thinking that Meg found herself closer to Donald than to himself. He was shocked that his only reaction was ‘Well, that lets me out!’ They must, he thought, have been horribly friendless for Bill to dig up as executors only a man whom Meg disliked and a brother-in-law for whom he had no regard. The man certainly had all Bill’s pomposity; perhaps Meg would find the way to his heart. If she had ever found it to Bill’s …

To his surprise, she said, ‘You disappoint me, Donald – for a friend of Bill’s. He was never pompous and especially he was never evasive. I don’t care what “quite a lot of people” would say. I want your opinion.’

Watching his sallow face grow a little pink, she thought perhaps I can only get through him by making him angry. I’m sure that Bill must have burst that swollen balloon sometimes.

He was making a visible effort to accept her words without anger. He said, ‘I was trying perhaps to say that Bill, like most of us, was as
he was. A platitude, if you like. But not quite. If there was an
emptiness
, if the gambling filled it, perhaps it went deeper than anything to do with the life you led, to his giving up criminal pleading, or perhaps it was too deep to be changed. Even someone as close as you were to him could only palliate. If I didn’t say it, you see, it’s because it’s rather impertinent. What?’

As he spoke, she wondered why she was so bothered to secure his acquiescence in her view. To get close to one of the few people Bill liked? But what she had of Bill was complete, her own, and needed no outside support. More probably it was a desperate search for some coherent line of thought She would, no doubt, make many such
cul-de-sac
, meaningless pursuits in her present distress. And leave them off as suddenly.

She said rather flatly, ‘I don’t really believe in determinism of that sort. But even if it’s true, I didn’t palliate enough.’

Donald was clearly somewhat cast down by her casual reception of his views. He spoke to her now in a more direct tone, which she took to be his search for a greater intimacy. She listened attentively out of politeness only, for she had seen clearly now that her approach to him had been no more than an attempt to make up for the failed contact of the past – an attempt that had no meaning now that Bill was dead. It’s only one of the many things, she thought, that can never now be repaired.

‘All I can tell you, Meg,’ he said, ‘is what I know about. And that is that you were sun and moon to Bill. Everything he talked about in some way referred to you. A man doesn’t do that unless his wife’s given him a great deal in life, what?’

Meg thought, that’s nonsense, Bill would never have forced me upon those who didn’t like me. What sort of a bore is he trying to make Bill out to have been?

She said, ‘Yes, of course. As I said there are a hundred things that Bill and I had together which only I can know of, and they must be my consolation. Thank you, Donald.’

She left what she hoped was a decent pause and then said, ‘Poor Donald! And poor David! This
is
being executors to the widow with a vengeance, isn’t it? But I promise you I’m not so entirely impractical. I’ve understood most, I think, of what you’ve told me of the financial situation. Let’s see if I’ve got it straight. Bill has left debts of four
thousand
five hundred pounds. You agree that by selling the house now we could pay off the mortgage and Bill’s debts and leave me with
about fifteen hundred pounds. It seems an incredible gain on what we paid in nineteen forty-one, but that after all is what I’ve read about rising property values. I’ve tended to think such things had nothing to do with
my
life, like a lot of other things – Far East politics, for
example
. But for once reality’s working in my favour. You ask me how much of the furniture I can claim as my own; and I think you suggest that I should claim as much as I can. Bill’s generosity being what it was, I can, in fact, claim quite a lot of it. And, of course, the porcelain. I believe I might add another four to five thousand, possibly a little more, to the fifteen hundred that will remain to me. The additional bookmaker’s debts of Bill’s I shan’t attempt to meet, since you tell me I needn’t. It seems in a way rather dishonest but they’ve had quite enough out of him. And anyway I’ve no intention of being a martyr. My needs are infinitely greater than theirs. It looks as though I shall have more than what Mother would have called enough to meet
sudden
doctors’ bills. Which reminds me that I shall have to leave Doctor Loundes and get a sensible National Health doctor. Bill agreed with National Health in principle, and I was a great defender of it when any of our more extreme Tory friends attacked it. We compromised by going to Bobby Loundes, who charges rather a lot but is competent as well as being a friend. Well, that’s one of the sort of things that will have to go. Not that it matters because I’m never really ill …’

She spoke not so much with bitterness, David thought, but as though tired with everything about her old life. It could after all be me preliminary to some real change in her, but the tired note made him doubt whether she had the will power. Disgusted at his own
priggishness
, he said aloud, ‘My dear Meg, anyone who’s been through what you have is bound to be exhausted.’

The irrelevant interruption surprised Meg. Suddenly very youthful and laughing, she said, ‘Thank you, David dear. You’re so
thoughtful
.’

Nevertheless he found it more and more difficult to listen to her. The only contribution that he could make was to press again Gordon’s offer of a loan and try genuinely to make her accept it. But to wait with this on his mind only made him dwell on what was happening to Gordon at that moment and this, since it could help no one, he knew it to be his duty to eschew. It seemed to him that times like these – Meg’s first months of widowhood, and for that matter the days waiting for the doctor’s report on Gordon – times usually
denominated
‘critical’, should, in any sensible approach to life, be
treated as entirely dormant intervals. Every gesture, every speech was simply a formal measure improvised to fill in time, while the
emotions
and thoughts rose, sank, and reshaped themselves to fit the new mould that the future offered; a little ballet between the acts not
intended
for serious attention but simply to cover the noise of scene shifting. That, in fact, society demanded a continuity of real decisions and of meaningful statements at such times seemed to him so contrary to psychological truth that he could give no convinced attention.

Meg’s voice sounded in his ears – the words, merely what she said because she had to say something, the emotions behind the words – hardness? fear? bravery? What was the sense of estimating them, since it would be some months before Meg emerged as a reshaped person?

His attention wandered over Donald’s room. The nondescript, heavy, comfortable chairs and hideous frill-shaded standard lamp bore the mark of some dowdily furnished service flat – and indeed, it seemed that a man and wife did in fact ‘do’ for the bachelor tenants. In absurd contrast were the Victorian ‘finds’ – a large papier-mâché model of what looked like St Pancras station, the elaborate wool and beadwork cushions and footstool, wax fruit, a Byronic mandolin with incongruous tartan ribbons. The pictures too bore witness to the man’s heavy assertion of a taste out of touch with his times – for he felt sure that Donald Templeton’s Victoriana were intended as a
defiant
rather than an amusing gesture: a smooth Etty-like nude, a Martinesque apocalyptic scene with lowering storm clouds and
fabulous
rainbow, something pre-Raphaelite and medieval, called no doubt ‘The Tryst’, announced the eclectic range of his defiance. But here once again the mood was broken by a large pastel of a woman, snake-necked, vacant-mouthed, large-eyed, the hair making a
shell-shape
on the forehead in the style of 1915: Templeton’s mother, no doubt, by Lavery? The picture went so well with the service flat furniture and, of course, ultimately with Donald. He was surely, David thought, that rare ‘period’ thing – a bachelor in full right, no homosexual, but the full Edwardian or Great War genuine article; up those stairs should have come frou-frouing skirts or elegant hobbles and panniers to little supper parties with rose coloured lamps and Russian cigarettes. Was all the man’s mannered, Edwardian utterance and clothing then only an attempt to fit himself to the period of his sexual tastes, or …

David determinedly checked the train of thought. He was here to help Meg, and he had long ago decided that these aimless speculations
upon other people’s lives were a dissipation of spirit, if they were not indeed worse, an idle intrusion into human privacy, only a degree better than idle gossip. Donald was less than Hecuba to him, but,
unlike
that queen, he was a private person with rights to privacy. If, David told himself, he were properly occupied at Andredaswood, cultivating his own garden, there would be no occasion for these time-wasting thoughts; however, he had now another, if less
congenial
duty. He concentrated on his sister’s words.

‘I know what you’re both thinking,’ Meg said, ‘that there’s no reason to sell the house. You will lend me the money to meet Bill’s debts and to pay the mortgage interest each year. I’m sorry that I can’t accept the offer. I really mean “sorry” because whenever I’ve offered anything to anybody I’ve been hurt when it wasn’t accepted. It seems like refusing friendship.’

She thought, I really
am
talking too much. I shouldn’t have said that, because, of course, it is exactly true. I can find no reason for friendship with Donald or indeed with David acting for Gordon.

‘I feel very much against the idea of debt at all at the moment. I know you’ll say that’s an unreasonable, emotional reaction which may be purely temporary. All my emotions probably are at the
moment
. But they’re the only ones I’ve got and I’m not clever enough to see beyond them to more durable feelings. And if you mean the debts to be the sort that are really gifts, I couldn’t ever accept those. David could explain that to you, Donald. It’s to do with our mother, although goodness knows I don’t think I’m like her in most ways. But she had what she called a “horror of debt” and a worse “horror of charity”. My father was what’s called a ne’er-do-well.’