The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (26 page)

It was in the course of disposing of the porcelain indeed, that she met an unexpected setback, the more wounding because she had made no advance to ‘deserve’ it.

Miss Gorres had proved kind, kinder than Meg had any right to expect, or indeed, than duty to Mr Sczekely should have allowed.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we could, of course, find a customer for your
collection.
Very easily.’ She paused and, offering Meg a cigarette, she went on, ‘But you realize, I am sure, that your collection is not quite of the kind that will be valued
as
a collection.’ She looked at Meg for a moment as though she were an object. ‘Mrs Eliot, let us have a glass of sherry,’ she said.

I’m being shown, Meg thought, that I’m valued even though I am no longer a potential customer. She dwelt on the thought as Miss Gorres dived about in the cupboard, because in the look she had been given there was a strange and less welcome suggestion that she was an all too familiar object of pity.

‘Yes,’ Miss Gorres said, when their sherries were poured out, ‘Your collection is a very – I think I shall say – pleasing one. There is no
object
there that personally I do not like. I envy you your collection, Mrs Eliot. But it is composed of objects of very different values. Some will
fetch a good price from any serious collector. Others are charming but they are your own choice, it may be difficult perhaps to find the other person who will regard them so highly. In a big collection, of course, this is usually so too, but there the number of pieces that are – shall I say? – of idiosyncratic taste will be balanced by the number of very valuable pieces. That is in a big collection. Of course, I know that you will say the collector’s taste is of the essence of the collection. True, of course, historically and, perhaps, with one or two very
outstanding
living collectors.’ She paused and raised her glass in what Meg imagined was her idea of a ‘gallant’ toast. ‘Mrs Eliot, if I advise you something, will you be very discreet?’

Meg, annoyed by all this mystification, said rather briskly, ‘I can’t say until I’ve heard it, Miss Gorres.’

Miss Gorres smiled approvingly. ‘You are quite right, of course. A confidence is a matter of trust on both sides. Well, I trust you. Take your collection to one of the big sale rooms. There each object will have more chance of getting its true price. All the dealers will be
bidding
; and don’t believe all these stories about dealers’ rings. I will help you. But you see that I am being very naughty.’ She gave a look of coy
gaminerie
that Meg would never have supposed likely. ‘Mr Sczekely would not be pleased.’

There was something in the way it was done that had not pleased Meg either; but she reflected that no kindnesses came unmixed and this was, she felt sure, a true kindness. She accepted Miss Gorres’ offer.

‘You won’t regret it,’ Miss Gorres said. ‘You know, Mrs Eliot, I see so many mistakes made, but, of course, it is not my job to prevent people making them. You are exceptional. It has all reminded me so much of what I experienced twenty years ago now. I came very early to England, almost immediately after Hitler rose to power. I was already an assistant in the Stadtsgalerie at Bremen and so I had not much trouble in getting work here. But then in the following year or so came many of my friends; some of them who had been more – I shall say – gods than friends – private collectors, benefactors of the Gallery and so on. A few of them managed to bring their collections with them – the lucky ones who came out early. Among them also there were people who had delightful small collections like yours and they could not believe that they were not going to make fortunes by selling their collections as collections. It was natural really. But I am afraid they had not your good sense, Mrs Eliot, they would not listen
to advice. Oh, it was extraordinary really. Many of them, formerly rich people, thought they could at once become experts – private dealers or curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They had no idea of the limitations of their knowledge, that they must know so much besides ceramics or tapestries or ivories or whatever they had collected, and so much more about even those things than they did. And, of course, above all they could never see that to buy for one’s own pleasure is not always the same as to buy and sell for others.’ She smiled. ‘I don’t think you will have much difficulty in
your
troubles, Mrs Eliot, if you are always so ready to take good advice as you are this afternoon. I propose your health. Good luck!’ She drained the last of her sherry.

Meg seized on the gesture of dismissal as though it were a last
minute
reprieve. She almost bounded from her chair. But Miss Gorres had not quite finished. ‘I am so glad that we have met not entirely so officially this afternoon. I feel that my indiscretion was not only
helpful
to you but to me. Perhaps we can now meet again as friends. I have myself one or two pieces that I think you will like. This is my telephone number. Please come and have a glass of sherry one evening. Either Finchley Road or Belsize Park stations are in easy walking distance of my flat.’

Meg walked along Bond Street feeling as though she had been caught in some ridiculous attitude in public – that her skirt had come down or that she had fallen through a chair. She did not believe that Miss Gorres had intended to put her in her place – she wished in a way that she could so believe – but she had clearly only been reminiscing. Nevertheless it now seemed, although she had never thought of it
before
, that one of the ideas she had most cherished was that of working with some dealer, collector, or department of ceramics; and also it seemed quite clear that this idea, held in reserve, had been a ludicrous one. She felt unfairly exposed as a pretentious and ignorant fool.

It was only in the bus that another aspect of Miss Gorres came home to Meg. I suppose it was an invitation to see her etchings, she suddenly thought. She wondered how she had been so naïve as not to have ‘placed’ the situation before now. Other women had made advances to her and she had always seen them coming a mile off – seen them with a mixture of amusement and perplexed desire not to hurt. It had never occurred to her to suspect such emotions in Miss Gorres because, of course, as she now saw all too clearly, she had always ‘placed’ her below any real personal contact. Her management of ‘difficult’ Miss
Gorres had been, for herself, that mixture of affability and patronage which she had always hated when her mother had preached it – ‘one has the duty to be unfailingly pleasant to people who serve one, Meg’, and again, ‘everybody is a human being’. But of course being human didn’t mean that they were qualified to associate their personal lives with one’s own. It seemed that she had been all too successful in
making
Miss Gorres feel that she was a human being. She wondered if perhaps she had thrown sex appeal about equally liberally elsewhere in her desire to please. What annoyed her most, however, was her own serious, guilt-struck reaction to the incident. Shall I never react again to anything simply by laughing? she thought.

This crushing rejection of aspirations she had never even declared to herself decided Meg that she must at once set about exploring the field of social work which had been in the front not only of her own but of others’ minds in considering her future employment. She could think of no better, more experienced or more honest adviser here than Mr Darlington. Accordingly she rang him up and asked him to tea at the hotel.

A disgusting tea it was too that they had, as they sat in the huge dusty cretonne covered armchairs in a corner of the dark little lounge. Meg had chosen it in preference to a tea room because although derelict and depressing, it was also quiet. That afternoon, as it
happened
, there was a party of bright, hearty South African schoolmistresses which seemed somehow to have become divided into two so that they shouted to each other across the room. Meg and Mr Darlington were forced to perch on the painfully hard edges of their deep chairs in order to hear one another.

Mr Darlington, no doubt in order to show Meg that his admiration of her was unaffected by her change in fortunes, seemed to find it necessary to praise everything – he preferred tea on the strong side and bread and butter thickly cut; he was delighted to see apricot jam. Meg, finding it unbearable, eventually asked him if he also liked madeira cake that was as dry as the desert sand it resembled. She said it in the tone of the jokes they had formerly shared, but Mr
Darlington
, for whatever reason, refused to meet her.

‘I’m not very particular about food,’ he said rather primly, and then added as though this might have been misunderstood, ‘My wife, luckily for us, is my idea of the perfect cook. Nothing exotic, you know. But always reliable.’

It was a smug little statement, but not, Meg realized, as smug as it
suddenly seemed to her, for as he said it she had immediately thought, I don’t want to know anything about his wife, I don’t really even want to know anything more about him, I simply want his advice on this one thing. I’m being unfair to him, she decided, I’m expecting him to meet me for the first time outside the Association’s offices and for the first time in my changed position in life. It’s no easy assignment with these ghastly colonial women whining so loudly through their teeth. She decided to ask about Aid to the Elderly affairs. This proved altogether better; at any rate, to start with. Mr Darlington twinkled and even giggled in the way that Meg had always found so promising in her past dealings with him. He told a dryly amusing story about a set-to between Mrs Masters and Annie Pratt – one of the toughest of the old women – in which Mrs Masters had been worsted. ‘She said,’ Mr Darlington ended, ‘that she would not have believed anyone could have spoken in such a way who’d been in service in a good part of Eastbourne. She was quite relieved when I pointed out that she’d mixed the files and our Annie had worked all her life in a Bermondsey tannery.’

The atmosphere seemed so ‘right’; Mr Darlington so level-headed and lively that Meg felt convinced she would get sound and
encouraging
advice from him. She was about to plunge, when the harmony seemed disturbed once more in a more subtle way. Meg had asked whether Mr Purdyke had finally succeeded in getting satisfaction from the hospital where it was clear enough that one of their protégés – an old ex-sea captain – had been disgracefully neglected. ‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘that you were quite right in
urging that since Mr P. knew the head house surgeon a private complaint would be far more
effective
than a formal protest from the committee.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Darlington replied. ‘It would have been.
If
he’d done anything about it. But, of course, they’re members of the same club. It wouldn’t have done at all to worry a fellow-member with some wretched old pensioner’s grievance. Most out of place.’

Meg looked at him in surprise, ‘Oh, I think you’re wrong, I don’t know about men’s clubs, of course. But I don’t think they’re like that at all. I’m sure Bill, my husband, wouldn’t have hesitated to raise a point of that sort with anyone he knew at his club.’

‘I expect your husband had more guts than Purdyke.’

‘Poor old Mr Purdyke. He’s a cautious old man but once he’s said he’d do a thing, I should have thought…’

‘Well, he hasn’t done this,’ Mr Darlington broke in savagely. Meg
thought, I hadn’t realized that he took these things quite so seriously; or, perhaps, she reflected, I no longer feel so strongly about the Association.

She was about to lead the conversation on to her own needs, but Mr Darlington spoke now with real anger. ‘Poor old Mr
Purdyke
,’ he copied her, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Eliot, but it’s depressing to see how you all gang up together. It’s exactly what the members of the committee said when I talked to them about it. Even Lady Pirie. I certainly didn’t think you would. But after all, you’ve no interest in the matter now. I must say I’d love to get it across to the
rest
of them that about the only useful function they can perform is to pull strings to get things done. After all they’re “influential people”. That’s why they were elected, presumably.’

Meg reflected that despite all the criticism of the committee’s work that she had shared with Mr Darlington, she had not seen this as its sole function. ‘I see,’ she said, ‘you don’t rate the work we do very highly.’

He looked for a moment embarrassed. ‘I rate the work
you
did
very
highly,’ he said. ‘You kept the rest of them from interfering and messing things up.’

Meg laughed. ‘Rather a negative function,’ she said.

‘I can’t imagine a more useful one. They can only be kept down by snobbery. Good heavens!’ he cried, ‘you don’t want a lot of
voluntary
, untrained idiots mixing themselves up with the actual work, however good their intentions.’

Meg was about to say sharply, ‘Well, you’ve quite lost your
shyness
, haven’t you,’ but she stopped herself in time. ‘I’ve often been surprised that you took a job with a voluntary body, Mr Darlington,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure I should feel happier with a Home Office or local government appointment.’

He locked at her with amusement. ‘You sound like my father,’ he said. ‘I can’t see what on earth difference it makes whether a thing’s a private charity or not. Except that for some large-scale things it works better under the Government. But as to who you’re working for – I suppose Home Office inspectors and so on are better, they’re trained; but it’s like Trade Union officials, they become remote from the real work. As to local councils, why should they be better than a
voluntary
committee? In any case so long as we have
voluntary
charities they’d better have properly trained employees.’

Meg said, ‘Although I worked for the Aid to the Elderly, I must
say I’ve always thought it should be a government service or at least ran by the local councils.’

He said indifferently, ‘You may be right. I’m not political.’