The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (8 page)

It was clear that Lady Pirie had something more important on her mind than Donald’s profession, for she looked impatient. ‘Ah! I
daresay
some of these wretched cases one reads of are enough to make
anyone
stern. Although I must say we find in
our
job that being tough is just a lazy way of avoiding the problem, don’t we, Meg?’ She looked up for approval at a modern lesson well learned. Meg smiled but Lady Pirie waited for no verbal agreement, she had seen her chance.

‘You mustn’t think I meant that Meg was hard when I said she was efficient, Mr Templeton. They don’t go together at all you know, in the work we do. No, she’s a model of
practical
kindness.’ And now, as though she had prepared sufficient introduction to satisfy social
politeness, she said in a lower voice to Meg, ‘Go and be kind to my Tom, dear, will you? He’s afraid that you’re angry because he’s come in those corduroys.’

Meg realized that she had so taken Tom Pine’s corduroys for granted that she had not noticed their incongruity with the rest of the company’s dress. She believed that half Viola Pirie’s trouble with her son came from treating him as a child, so she said, ‘I’m sure he’s not a bit afraid. Tom always has the courage of his beliefs. But I’d love to talk to him.’

Lady Pirie smiled happily and, her task done, resumed her social duty.

‘You’d find it difficult to believe, Mr Templeton,’ she said in her usual loud brusque tones, as Meg moved away, ‘that our hostess of this evening was the same person as the efficient young woman …’

Meg was glad to escape from Donald Templeton’s eye as he
listened
. Besides, she reflected, it was only because Viola Pirie had felt so critical in the afternoon that she thought it necessary to be so praising in the evening; for all her honest gruffness she was a strangely up and down woman; no wonder that Tom Pirie fought with her as he did.

Meg thought of Bill’s charge that Tom Pirie was dirty-minded as she advanced towards him. He
did
have what her mother would have called a very peculiar look in his eye. But it was impossible to associate anyone as feeble with sex. I feel sure, she thought, that he’s never gone farther than pathetic masturbation fancies. She put the thought from her with disgust.

‘Well,’ he said as Meg sat down on the sofa beside him, ‘you’ve got the establishment here tonight all right, haven’t you?’ His voice was solemn and funereal, making his beard seem to belong more to the ghost of Hamlet’s father than to a young man in revolt.

It annoyed her that if he must try to keep up with his generation, he should get it all wrong.

‘No,’ she said, ‘none of these people have anything to do with
ruling
the country. A few of them have a financial pull, I suppose, but that’s their limit.’

‘The money bags are the ruin of this country,’ he said. He might have been one of his mother’s ex-colonial friends instead of an angry young man. His ideas were in a sickening muddle.

‘They seem to make you feel very superior,’ Meg said and she looked at his glass of beer. It annoyed her that he alone had insisted on beer.

He disregarded her comment. ‘It’s the bottom, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What do you get out of it?’

She was hard put to it not to dry him up by being playful, but she had determined long ago on helping him, because of Viola and
because
of what she herself had felt at his age – keeping a lifeline to her youth had somehow become very important since she had turned forty.

‘Partly pure pleasure. But not much, I agree,’ she said. ‘Partly it’s something I can do well. Partly they’re a lot of them important to Bill’s career.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘spending money to make money. Is it chargeable to expenses?’

Heaven knew, she thought, what absurd imaginings of brutal
virility
were going through his head when he spoke to her like that; and the folly of it was that if he shaved off that beard and dressed only a little more carefully he would be very attractive no doubt to some girl (although she’d have to be rather soulful to take those mournful dark eyes).

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I don’t do the income tax returns. Would you like me to ask Bill?’ The introduction of Bill’s name, even in so facetious a context, made Tom look as though he’d been ‘threatened with the headmaster’, so she went on hurriedly. ‘A lot of them are old friends you know, like your mother.’

‘You won’t make much money out of her.’

‘We’re going away for six months. And so we asked our friends to a party. Does that satisfy you?’ She put it to him simply.

He gazed round at the thirty or so guests. ‘Friends!’ he said, ‘you must be big hearted.’

‘What a sentimentalist you are!’ she cried. ‘Friend’s a perfectly good conventional word covering a great number of people who don’t touch one’s heart deeply. Will you feel happier if I say “The Gang” is here?’

When he laughed, as now, he gave a high giggle even more out of keeping with his beard than was his hollow voice. ‘All right, you win,’ he said. ‘Anyway, who are they?’

‘Well, that’s Alice Ripley, and that’s a man called Turner who’s head of some sort of big trust, and those are the Pargiters, they run that gallery off Brook Street …’

‘Oh! Blimey,’ he said, ‘not the names.’

Although the ‘blimey’ was an affectation there was a certain
genuine youthfulness about his response that made Meg feel she was getting somewhere with him.

‘Just the general lines of business will be enough,’ he added. She had to laugh as she categorized, for his face showed how satisfied he was that the answer was as he expected.

‘Architects, lots of lawyers, of course, some business men …’

‘But cultivated,’ he interjected.

‘I hope so,’ she said, ‘a civil servant or two, a couple of painters and their wives.’

‘All at the top or on the way there,’ he announced with naïve triumph, ‘and what a glossy finish it’s given them.’

‘Now there you’re just being silly,’ she said. ‘Glossy’s quite the wrong word.’

‘Oh, I don’t mean vulgar. Not the least little bit,’ he tried to imitate a mincing, ladylike voice, but he was no mimic, ‘but glossy in the most gracious sort of way.’

‘Oh! Gracious living!’ she cried. ‘Really, Tom, you live on
catchwords
. If you mean pretentious, they’re not. And if you mean what you say, well why on earth shouldn’t people lead decorative lives?’ She chose the adjective to show that she had no intention of retreating.

‘You judge so much by surfaces,’ she went on. ‘This is the social face. But most of these people are hard-working, married couples
absorbed
in each other and in their children. That’s why,’ she told him, ‘we haven’t that deep sincerity of friendship that you seem to feel is the only justification for knowing people. You don’t, Tom, when you get to a certain age, if you’ve found any happiness. It’s Bill and me,’ she waved her hand, ‘and Alec and Rosamund Turner and all the other couples. We’re sufficient to ourselves. It doesn’t mean we don’t want to meet. But we
are
sufficient.’

‘Very cosy,’ he said.

‘No. Just as happy as we can manage in a not very easy world. Oh! I wouldn’t mind if you were complaining that we had no right to it because of others less fortunate, as I did when I was young. But you don’t care about that. You’re just jealous.’

‘Of this?’ he asked contemptuously.

She smiled and nodded; then, ‘No,’ she cried. ‘I’m wrong. I judge everybody too much by myself. You may be more like my brother. I wish you could meet him. Not that you’d get on together, I expect. Generations are so different.’

‘Generations?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t
that
a catchword?’

But Meg, serious, was not to be deflected. She allowed herself a moment of feminine silliness to be rid of his intervention.

‘Well, there it is. Some catchwords are true and some aren’t,’ she said.

‘I only meant that I think I get on with you all right.’ He stuttered as he said it and blushed as he saw that he had spat on her arm.

‘Then you probably wouldn’t get on with David,’ she said,
thinking
how awful it was for him not to be able to be intimate without spitting, and how impossible it was for her to register the one without the other. ‘David and I,’ she said, warming to her reminiscence, ‘reacted so differently to our background. We had a most impossible one, you know. Genteel penury.’

‘It’s my own,’ Tom said.

‘Nonsense,’ she cried, ‘or rather not nonsense, but how different the same things can be. Your father was a distinguished man and your mother’s not only good but she has such marvellous good sense. My father was often called a very unsatisfactory man by people, or so Mother told us. He was certainly a very unsatisfactory husband and father. So unsatisfactory that in the end he just went away. To get away from the unsatisfactoriness, I suppose, but even that didn’t work very well, because he’d hardly landed in America before he died of pneumonia. And then Mother buckled to – that was always her phrase – and coped. Unfortunately poor dear, unlike
your
mother, she hadn’t the faintest idea how to cope. She had a little capital. Her father had been the headmaster of a successful private school. She tried her best to improve on it, but always with the rider that she should be known for a lady. I suppose she couldn’t help that, it was her generation. But it was fatal for us. All along the South Coast – teashops in the South Downs without enough winter trade to survive, a curio shop tucked away in a part of Hove that no one went to. David and I loathed every minute of it, her pluckiness and her failures. And there’s the difference between us. For all that, David now lives right on the middle of those ghastly Downs. And I can’t even go down to see him; I hate the memory of it so.’

She looked up to see the Pargiters ready to depart. ‘I must say
good-bye
to them, but I’ll come back and finish my story. I think it’s
important
to you,’ she said, although by now she was not too certain how it affected him, only knew that she had found a ready vacuum to fill with a story she had long wanted to tell.

She made her good-byes to the Pargiters, spoke here and there, saw
that drinks were replenished. She noted with amusement that Poll had found the only faintly disreputable man present and Jill the only
completely
dead one. Viola Pirie she saw was hard at it with Donald Templeton, telling him of the need for men to help in organized charity; and Donald oddly looked flattered but less smug. Under all this activity her story ran on in her mind. She brought two glasses of champagne to the sofa, ‘No,’ she said authoritatively to Tom, ‘no more beer. You must drink champagne. Everyone needs a change now and again, dearie,’ she added in a cockney accent.

And now having already constructed her story word for word in her mind, she started off again so quickly that Tom, who with
difficulty
pierced through a cloud of anxious self-absorption to hear any conversation, followed only with jolts and bumps.

‘Neither David nor I were stupid,’ she said. ‘I don’t know that Mother was really, but she had let her intelligence slide for the sake of the conventions she loved. And anyway she felt that being plucky was more appropriate, more correct for people of our class and time than being clever. She saw our bookishness as a sort of betrayal. And, of course, we were frightfully priggish at that age.’

Tom put on a face of humorous self-defence when he heard the word, but Meg was so concerned with her story that she hardly noticed it.

‘David got all the university scholarships. It’s easier for a man. But even so he was cleverer than me. Very clever, in fact, in his academic way. Just before the war he was elected to a junior fellowship at Magdalen. But when he came back he gave it all up and took the nursery garden that he runs down in Sussex.’

‘
I
don’t want to cultivate gardens,’ Tom said. ‘I want to cultivate myself. I suppose that’s what you’d call the priggishness of youth.’

She couldn’t quite let him get away with that. ‘David and I were seventeen when we said that sort of thing,’ she told him. ‘You’re – what is it, Tom? Twenty-four?’ Conscious of the maternal,
patronizing
element in her remark, she tried to impart a more intimate note to her voice. ‘I’m on your side,’ she said. ‘You know that. Neither Bill nor I were annoyed because you threw up the export job Bill found for you. I was only annoyed that you preferred to think we were. It was such a poor compliment to our friendship. If you want to go from job to job – selling vintage cars, serving in bookshops, all these other things – well and good. As long as you don’t sponge on Viola, I’m with you.’

Below his beard his thin neck reddened. ‘Of course you know that I am sponging,’ he said defiantly.

‘Well, it’s disgraceful,’ she cried, but there seemed nothing more to say about it.

She had wanted to tell him how David had chosen another path to hers; to suggest that if a man wanted to ‘find himself’ it might mean, as for David, isolation and hard manual work. But really there seemed no relation between the two cases – and anyhow to put David’s
decision
in that light was complete falsification, for it omitted all mention of pacifism and of Gordon Paget. The truth was, she supposed, that she was anxious to clear her own conscience of the charge of
narrow-mindedness
, to show that she knew that there were other ways of living than the one she had chosen.

And her own way of living, of course, was what she really wanted to discuss, or rather expound – the life she and Bill had made, and why it had been worth making. Heaven knew why she would wish to extol it from the housetops and to poor Tom Pirie of all people, except that there was a strange feeling of judgement in the air, a sort of stocktaking. She saw for a moment her mother opening a long
envelope
at the breakfast table and heard her saying, ‘Well, Meg, all very nice as usual. They place so much importance on success in exams nowadays, don’t they? I wonder if that’s quite right for girls. But then schoolmistresses live so much out of the world.’ And what world do you live in? she had always wanted to cry, where success doesn’t count? She had not felt that particular anger for many years. Viola Pirie was probably quite right – good-bye parties were all fudge. It was not as if they were going to the moon anyway.