The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (58 page)

He shook his head, and she said, ‘No, you’re quite right. Now that you are happy. Oh, I’m not against happiness. Dear God, no. But how long will this last? This compromise, for that’s what it is, David. You give me calm, I give you happiness. You pretend to change things to the way that I want them for you. Yes, it is
for
you, as it was
for
Bill. That’s the way I destroy people, I suppose. And
I
pretend that I accept your pretence. I’ve tried to fool myself because I’ve wanted to be with you so much, but last night it came home to me too forcibly. You’ve given up the frets, the irksome things that pressed upon you – that Africa book; Else; probably you’ll gradually give up the nursery. But you won’t start the quartet again – why? Because it’s more cosy sitting with me reading all the books we read when we were young; and if I like to believe that out of it something constructive will come, a book worth writing, well, I’ll gradually learn that it won’t. Oh, you may not think that consciously; but that’s how it’s going. And it’s all my fault. I’ve just misunderstood. All the things I’ve tried to relieve you of – the nursery work that had no
interest
for you, playing in a poor quartet because of a woman you had nothing in common with, working on a book you despised. Yes, and no doubt living with a man you loved whom you never touched. All this self-denial and self-discipline which seemed futile to me was what made you apart, withdrawn – what gave you that calm that saved me
when I was lost. And now slowly but surely the calm is turning into plain self-indulgent apathy, the irksome disciplines into pleasing
triviality
. And you just don’t notice it, David, that’s what I can’t
understand
. I’ve tried not to, but the sentimental, cosy futility of last night decided me.’

He said slowly, ‘You only decided this last night! I see, Meg, you’ll go away for a while, but you’ll come back.’

She made no answer, and he went on, asking, ‘Where will you go? You know how it was before.’

She said, ‘Oh God, David, do you think I want to go back to that loneliness. But I can face it now, and that’s because of the help you’ve given me. Surely that I can take on loneliness again shows you how important I think it is for us to break this up.’

He said, ‘Meg, I haven’t made many plans for myself in my life, but don’t you see how horribly lonely I am going to be?’

She answered slowly, ‘Indeed I do, David. It’s an agony to me to think that you will be so and to believe that if I wanted to, I could change it. Your loneliness is your strength, David. And anyhow, what does it mean? You will be alone. I will be alone. Were we any less so really when Bill and Gordon were alive? No, that’s casuistry. But all the same, for you, David, I know that loneliness and self-denial have made you somebody of strength, and I will not destroy it. Nor, David – let me be honest – will I destroy myself. You feel that apart, cut off from the world, you can live a life that, by not harming, helps the world. I’ve wanted to persuade myself into it because it soothed me; but for me the only way I can feel of use is to keep my curiosity, to be with people – yes, even awful people like Michael
Grant-Pritchard
. It’s no denial of your truth, but for me the only sense is to assert one’s faith in people by living among them. I’m quite a silly person, David, really.’

She looked at him wearily. ‘I can’t produce more than platitudes, David, but don’t let’s hurt ourselves more than we need; we’re only such very unimportant specks among millions. I love this place, David, and you more than I could have believed. When time’s passed a bit, I’ll come for a visit. But don’t expect letters, I don’t write. But I’ll let you know that all’s well.’

He said, ‘This is only a sudden impulse, Meg. You’ll come back.’

She was silent, then she said very lightly, ‘I’ve flown in this, that, and the other direction, David, so that it’s very reasonable you should think so.’ She had made preparation enough, however, for a taxi to
come, and for her luggage to be sent on after her. She kissed him on the cheek. ‘Don’t come to the station,’ she said and was gone.

*

It was only ten days later that a letter arrived. ‘I’ve taken a job with two psycho-analysts – husband and wife, a very roly-poly, chuckling
gemütlich
middle-aged German and a funny, slightly common,
intelligent
, good-looking English wife who wears jeans. She’s years younger than him, she seems almost a girl. It will be interesting to see the witchdoctoring and voodoo from behind the scenes. And I’ve found a room near Regent’s Park that really isn’t at all bad, with a sort of Victorian landlady that I would not have believed existed. She’s a Baptist and never goes further than Baker Street or Swiss
Cottage
. She talked about having crossed the water five or six years ago to see a sister in Kennington! And all this is a little street behind that expense account world of Abbey Road.’ There were four pages of interesting things she had seen or heard.

David’s nursery seemed to envelop him into a mist where every sound or sight in Andredaswood came with the shock of an object walked into blindly.

No letter came then for many weeks. David’s loneliness, his
unhappiness
grew into unbearable tensions and insomnia. He spent much of his energy fighting a wish to hate and to blame her. One afternoon he heard Tim singing, ‘I’m a little boy that’s lost in a wood, misunderstood. Won’t you be good and watch, watch over me,’ his eyes filled with tears. It was a turning point. Such nauseating self-pity drove him at any rate to a determined course of self-control, so that gradually the unhappiness became a numbed pain. He remembered Gordon more and more, though Meg not less, yet he felt that Meg had perhaps only filled in the void that Gordon had left.

In this mood, he began to think again of ‘Africa’; he wrote to the publisher. They had found as yet no substitute author and he agreed to resume work on the book. He could not really tell whether this was because Gordon’s memory pulled him to it, or whether it was to escape from the misery that he felt in reading the Gothic novels
without
Meg beside him. He involved himself again completely in the nursery affairs. Tim was inevitably disappointed, and Eileen angry, but, it seemed, she found it easier to blame it all on Meg. Indeed the feeling they all had that Meg had treated him badly – and his obvious misery confirmed it – made his return to the nursery easier. When he mentioned that Meg was working for a psychiatrist, Climbers said,
‘I should think that might do her a lot of good, shouldn’t you, David?’ and Tim said quite simply, ‘I miss her.’

He received another long letter from Meg at Christmas. She was leaving the psychiatrists, she said, but on very good terms. ‘It’s been quite fascinating. They’re inclined to be godlike in their attitude to everybody, but it’s understandable really if you saw the ghastly wrecks they’ve helped. They have eighty per cent success! They’ve been very kind to me and I’ve met a lot of fascinating people through them. But I can’t accept their attitude to their two children; and as my motivation is all too obvious, and anyway, they’re hardly likely to listen to me, we discussed it all and agreed it was better that I should leave. They’ve given me a wonderful reference. I’m going to work with Helen Rampton, the Labour M.P. I thought a woman out for a career would be interesting. She seems an edgy, unsatisfied sort of woman with a strange and pleasing directness. I think we shall get on well together. She’s involved these days with what she calls “the old people scandal”; I seem to be back with “Aid to the Elderly” but from a rather more interesting vantage point. Funnily enough I got the job through some friends of Bill’s who used often to come to Lord North Street. I never knew them well, but I’ve seen a good deal of some of our nicer friends of those days.’

Then suddenly the writing changed. ‘David, I should dearly love to come to Andredaswood for Christmas, but I just can’t. I’m not free yet nor, I suspect, are you.’ There was a postscript. ‘I haven’t been able to keep away from ceramics. David, there’s a quite perfect very small object, what they call a chamber candlestick – Bow with a blue underglaze. Would you buy it for three hundred and fifty pounds? Why should you? It’s only that I should love to buy again
and
I should like to think of it at Andredaswood.’

David agreed. When it arrived, he thought it quite lovely. He hoped its presence might draw Meg down there again. Else Bode, who had returned to take over the housekeeping, thought it ‘unreal’. Mrs Paget, who had now come to live at Andredaswood so that Else could look after her, wondered what Gordon would say about the expenditure of so much money on a candlestick. A second stroke had left her still mobile, but with her mind impaired.

In the early spring, David got a letter from Hong Kong. Meg had gone there as secretary to a Labour delegation examining the social services of the Crown Colonies. ‘I can’t tell you how interesting work with Helen Rampton has been. She’s a desperately sad woman in
many ways; she hasn’t got quite what’s required ever to become a minister, and she knows it. Yet it hasn’t made her ungenerous. She’s been extraordinarily kind to me. This trip, of course, has been a
lifetime’s
chance. I was terrified of what would happen when we went to Srem Panh, because I miss Bill so dreadfully still, and always shall. But we only stopped at the airport and it meant nothing. Nothing at all. My memories now of Bill are happy ones. And what I didn’t do for him I shall have always to suffer for. Something that could have been upsetting but in the end was only comic happened at Nairobi. An old American woman got on the plane for Colombo. She was that old globe-trotting Christian Scientist I told you about that was on the plane to Srem Panh with Bill and me. I thought she hadn’t
recognized
me but she had. As we got off she said with such an archness it was almost obscene, “Love’s a great healer, dear.” I suppose she thought that I’d married again, but as I was sitting next to Ronald Shuffler, the Trade Union man, who’s seventy-five and fifteen stone, it wasn’t very flattering.’

Towards the end of the letter she wrote, ‘As a matter of fact, I think I shall make a change when I get back. I know the political chatter now. I should like to see something of the industrial side of things. Old Shuffler suggested that I got a job as secretary to a personnel officer at some big works in the London area. It seems a good idea. At any rate in a few years at least, the modern world won’t be able to take me by surprise so easily again.’

There came other letters from Meg in her new job during the summer and autumn months. David was always aware that in the back of his mind he knew that she would return; and being so aware, he ceased to feel the possibility as a very real one.

One of Britain’s most distinguished novelists, Sir Angus Wilson was born in 1913. Educated at Westminster and Merton College, Oxford he joined the British Museum as a cataloguer before being called up for service in 1941. His literary career began with a collection of short stories published in 1949. These were followed by other short-story collections, novels and plays.

Co-founder with Malcolm Bradbury of the MA programme in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, Wilson was appointed professor in 1967. Chair of many literary panels, including the Booker prize, and campaigner for homosexual equality he was knighted in 1980. He died in 1991.