The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (47 page)

‘The new hat is nice,’ he said.

‘I’m glad you didn’t say what Viola said, “
Silly
but nice”,’ Meg answered. ‘She has some sort of idea that a new hat should advertise a woman’s frivolous side, whatever that may be. Part I suppose of women’s duty to attract men that Viola’s so keen on.’ She laughed.

‘You saw Viola?’

‘Evidently, David darling. I gave her lunch. I asked Tom, but he didn’t come. I’ll get him next time I go up though, I’m determined to lay all those ghosts. I had Poll out to dinner. We laughed so much she upset the wine.’

Else gave him a knowing look that said, Hysteria, Watch out, but he only asked with a malicious giggle, ‘What about Jill?’

‘All right,’ Meg said, ‘I know. I shirked my Waterloo. But I’ll ask her next time. It’s quite all right, David, now, you see, because I can treat
them.
I realize now that all the trouble happened because they were in a position to patronize me. I suppose it’s rather moral sucks to me that I couldn’t take it. But I couldn’t. Oh, it’s so marvellous being down here and spending nothing and then being able to go to
London
and do things properly. You are an angel, David.’

David, seeing Else’s expression change, thought, if the next phase of Meg’s behaviour is to be like this, we’re in for a lot of trouble.

‘We are all very tired, I think,’ Else said, ‘and ready for bed.’

‘I’m not,’ Meg said, ‘but, for goodness’ sake, don’t worry about me.’

After Else had gone, David thought that at least he should suggest to Meg the effect she had produced on Else.

He said, ‘Your mood’s very euphoric.’

‘Euphoric? I don’t think so. Unless that means having had a few drinks.’

Unwilling to produce a hostile reaction, unwilling perhaps to
destroy
her gaiety, he left aside what he had intended to say. He
compromised
by saying, ‘Don’t in helping me about the party, tread too much on the others’ territory. Else and Mrs B. are so used to running this sort of thing here.’ He knew as he said it that, though the speech seemed relevant to what he had intended to tell her, it wasn’t so.

She said, laughing, ‘Oh, don’t fuss about your old party, David. I said I’d help and I shall. But I’m not going to wait or wash up, if that’s what you’re worried about. I like it down here far too much to do those sorts of things.’ She smiled at him and, soon after, fell asleep on the sofa.

In fact, she was of the greatest help when the party took place. She looked her exotic best, and although this reminded David of her precarious nervous balance, it seemed to assure his guests that his sister, at any rate, had her feet securely planted on some good, worldly ground. She talked to everyone, amused them, and made them talk. David could see that though their neighbours and customers had been charmed by Gordon into accepting an eccentric household, they were very pleased to be charmed by Meg without any need to forget their prejudice. He was a little alarmed by some of the remarks he
overheard
her making – ‘No, I don’t know a
thing
about gardening, I’m afraid, but they all work so frightfully hard here that I’m sure it’s good for them to have someone about who just sits all day’; and, ‘Yes, I adore it. I hated it when I lived near here as a girl, but then I was always having to
do
things. What I hadn’t realized was that Sussex was such a wonderful place to be idle in.’ There were those, of course, besides David who were worried by such remarks. It was not, could not be, in view of their active daily lives, their picture of life in Sussex. But Meg got away with it, he could see, even with the women. They felt, he imagined, as he did, the communication of her energetic
pleasure, although on occasion he heard Gordon’s voice in one of his favourite phrases, ‘I say, dear, aren’t you living it up a bit much.’ But how could he say what was ‘much’ for Meg? She seemed fully in control of her mood.

There were, David noticed, two women who perhaps were not entirely with her. Else gave him many little looks of conspiratorial alarm. He heard her once in conversation with someone speak in uncharacteristically sharp tones. ‘Yes, you are quite right. Like a humming bird. What a charming idea! It is unfortunate really that Mr Parker has decided to close down the stove house. Mrs Eliot should have tropical plants for her background.’ Eileen Rattray, too, clearly insisted on a clinical view, for at Meg’s remark to some guests, ‘Heaven knows what delicious things they feed me on here! Lotuses, I think, I’m getting so fat and lazy,’ she said, ‘We must find some rehabilitation exercises for you, Mrs Eliot.’

Even with Else and Eileen however, David was amused to see that, whether by design or by accident, Meg effaced a good deal of the bad impression she had made, by singling out for special attention among the guests, of all improbable people – the Rogersons. Or perhaps not improbable for when Meg declared her wish to know more of the world around her she was surely sincere. And the Rogersons were probably a less known factor to her than all the wealthy stockbrokers, retired service officers, and horsey, doggy old maids, or indeed than the odd stage star or successful country tweed television personality. Again, too, she might well have cultivated them to please him because, as Else had told her, Fred Rogerson was the only other local who had been in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit besides himself and Gordon. She was hardly to know that, despite this bond, he didn’t really much like either Fred or Joan Rogerson. Fred with his quiet, pipe smoking, pacifist Labour assurance had exactly the sort of personality that increasingly impressed him as aggressive in a manner the more dangerous because there was no consciousness; Joan, the hiking, canvassing companion turned wife, had a minority-dedicated heart that not even devotion could mute to her husband’s still, small beat of peace. He knew that the Rogersons thought him off-beat,
unrealistic
, smug; he thought them smug and unrealistic and sincere, and evaded them more than the colonels and stockbrokers whose
unrealistic
, sincere aggression touched nothing in him.

But for Eileen Rattray, who, before the babies came, had taught first aid with Fred as headmaster at the glass and steel Comprehensive
Secondary School, the Rogersons were the nearest thing to sensible, normal people this side of Crawley New Town. She was not with them politically – thought them children playing in a game for
professional
crooks – but hygienically, domestically, artistically, and, above all, socially she was with them body and soul.

Poor Eileen, David thought, she had been so unlucky in the
circumstances
of her life; in an England teeming with her kind, she had first to associate with the pleasant backwardness of Irish Catholic nurses and then with the difficult problem of the Sussex
rentiers
. The Rogersons were her first breath of reality since she had left home. That Meg got on so well with them was clearly a bulls-eye score with Eileen.

With Else, too. In general, the Rogersons, like the Rattrays,
represented
too much the materialism of the modern world for Else; only fools put their faith in washing machines, glass and steel, and a Comprehensive School. There was, of course, music, but then they were undiscriminating; and child art, but David remembered only too well how deficient she had found them in piety towards the Vienna School. And then had come Nuclear Disarmament, and the Rogersons – silly children with their caloried school meals and their school recognized skiffle groups (it’s valid, it’s a community
expression
) – because somehow spiritually one with the trees and the rivers – good people. With her, too, Meg’s success with the
Rogersons
was a redemption, although Else’s eye, he could see, was a little more sceptical than Eileen’s.

Afterwards in the large kitchen they gathered together for that mixture for ‘helping hands’ and finishing up drink and food, and gossip, which was Mrs Boniface’s part of the day. They went there by no prearrangement, but singly or in pairs as the dwindling party made it possible. It had been one of Gordon’s high times in the
Andredaswood
routine, when, the last sadly to bid the last guest good-bye, he would rush in, scarcely keeping up his pretended relief that the party was over. Nor was it for him, because then came his famous ‘moment of relaxation’, a barely disguised mounting dénouement to his evening of charming and pleasing and enjoying and
contact-making
.

David remembered how he had snapped once, ‘the star’s dress
rehearsal
, Gordon, in reverse – just old friends and the servants!’ He had always felt that he should disapprove of such a riot of self-
expression
. But Gordon had only answered, ‘Much the best time for a
dress rehearsal. One gives a better performance to the servants and the event itself isn’t spoilt by dismal predictions. The White Queen and I, dear David, always dress rehearse in reverse.’ And then because, as always on party days, he ceased to bother, he had added, ‘As a matter of fact the White Queen and I do
everything
in reverse.’

In any case, it had always been impossible to withhold oneself from Gordon’s will for success on those occasions. He knew his audience, a few old friends who could be trusted not to make too much of skits on the neighbours, Mrs Boniface, with Mr B.
wonderingly
in tow, the hired helps (friends and kindred spirits of Mrs B.), Else, Climbers, latterly the Rattrays – a mixed collection which therefore gave Gordon a greater challenge. He never failed. Even David had found himself roped in, his few rather dry humorous
observations
of the party expanded and broadened by Gordon so that everyone should feel that Mr Parker was almost as amusing as Mr Paget. It was extraordinary how Climbers had always thought that he must resent that ‘almost’ and had taken such pains to assure him that
Gordon
was the comedian, but he the wit. Insecure herself, she could only feel affection for others by supposing them equally insecure. In fact, of course, he had never been happier than when following
Gordon’s
lead.

This evening he was only too well aware that he was no star, nor even an understudy. The few little absurdities or pieces of gossip that he retained from the party remained obstinately dried up in his own personal idiom. No current seemed to run between him and all these people he knew so well to change his little store of observations into flashes, let alone into any pyrotechnic display. Only one blinding flash seemed to have filled the room, stunning all of them into silence – the sudden recognition that Gordon was dead. It had pierced through all the protective insulation that they had wrapped around them since that day when they had first learned of the operation’s
failure
. He sensed that to each at that moment Gordon’s absence stood for all their deprivations and lost hopes in life. But their despairs were only a smudgy penumbra to his own desperate conviction that, through all the years of his association with Gordon, he had deprived himself, deprived them both, of what could have been a transforming friendship and had twisted it by his obsessive guilt into a copy-book lesson of moral maxims. He knew that, in fact, it had been more than that, but at this moment he could feel only its failure in what might have been.

He roused himself to exchange a health with Mr Boniface. Mrs B., he noted, had also come to from her depressed trance and was trying to brighten things a bit with a cockney joke. He remembered that Meg had not been told of the kitchen party and he did not regret it: she would only have underlined Gordon’s absence the more.

And then – there she was, making the most definite of entrances at the kitchen door. He recalled how once they had both laughed at their mother’s comment on a play – ‘Such a badly constructed play, David. And such a waste of Marie Tempest. She was on when the curtain went up. In all good plays the star comes on last.’

It was clear, he thought, that Meg had learnt that lesson. And as the evening went on he had to admit that star she was. She seemed to start with such a disadvantage – no local jokes, no certainty of her audience; but she turned her ignorance into an asset. She confused local personalities in the most comical manner; she assured her audience that she had heard things said that were most improbable from mouths that were even more so; she asked questions in such openly sly mock innocence, that it was apparent not only that she enjoyed her performance, but that she had been genuinely interested in all the people she had met, and not with that dead and rapturous acceptance that she showed towards the members of the household. She made her audience laugh and chatter; she banished Gordon’s ghost. She could not, of course, give what Gordon had given; her performance was not a tried, beloved old turn. But she had
advantages
. It was, if no more, a change, to have the star a woman.
Knowing
less of her audience, she gave them all a chance, bores included, to do their turns and, when called upon, they rose to the occasion. And then she was tragic Mrs Eliot, beautiful and brave, who had stepped out of the pages of the newspaper as a very human heroine.

All sorts of malice filled David’s mind as he felt her success underlining the transience of Gordon’s hold on their loyalties; but he couldn’t sustain the mood – she so patently wanted only to enjoy herself and to see that they did so too. She tried to bring him in and he resisted. At once she let it go and started a cross talk with Mrs B. which only came to an end because they were both giggling so much. Then as suddenly she was sitting quietly by Else’s side.

‘Those friends of yours, the Rogersons,’ he could hear her ask, ‘when am I going to see them again?’

‘You find them especially funny?’ Else spoke in a tone suitable for reproving an over excited child, but, David thought, there’s a note
which suggests that patience may soon be exhausted and love
withdrawn
.

‘Funny? I suppose so. Yes. As most people are. But I found them extremely interesting, I think I should like them. I don’t believe in making up my mind too quickly. But nor, I should imagine, do they!’