The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (4 page)

Now Miss Gorres too laughed. ‘We shall miss you here, Mrs Eliot,’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Oh, all over the place. Australia, South America, probably New York. My husband works so hard. This is a kind of treat for him. Only he’s always so restless on holiday that it’s no good trying to stay in one place.’

‘If I had not travelled so much against my will,’ said Miss Gorres, ‘I should envy you. Even so I
do
envy you the collections you will see. Perhaps I can give you some introductions to collectors and galleries. Look,’ she announced, ‘have you time for a drink?’

Meg had no time at all to spare and had sworn to herself that she would not be cluttered up with introductions on the trip. To see Miss Gorres so relaxed, however, to be offered a
tête-à-tête
that was surely given only to very few, and then only for the clearest business motives, was such a tribute to the easy terms she had established as she could not resist.

‘Of course. Thank you,’ she said.

Their heads were bowed almost conspiratorially over letters and visiting cards when a loud, flat drawl echoed through the small
showroom
.

‘Meg! You’re drinking. I do think you’re clever to find drink here. You must be one of those people who get booze out of a stone.’

Meg turned, as indeed did the few other visitors to Sczekely’s, to see a dumpy figured, middle-aged woman in a grubby black suit smiling vaguely, moonily about the room. Moony, too, was perhaps the adjective to describe her face, for it was heavily made up in the Dutch doll manner – plump, smooth, and lifeless except for very bright blue eyes, so round that they gave an appearance of perpetual childish fright.

‘Poll, how lovely to see you,’ Meg said quietly.

Miss Gorres replaced the papers in her drawer and disposed of
glasses and bottle in a cupboard, although Meg had not finished her drink.

‘It isn’t very lovely to see all the beautiful drink put away,’ Poll said, more to the room than to Miss Gorres.

‘Why are you going to all those filthy foreign places, Meg?
Travelling
in aeroplanes and never knowing where your things are. That’s no life for a girl.’

‘Bill’s got an important case in Singapore, some big rubber
company’s
interests. And we’re going to blue the fees on a world trip. He so needs a rest, poor darling.’

‘Oh, husbands!’ said Poll, with a crushing emphasis on the first syllable of the word and in the tone of one who had enjoyed great numbers of husbands, which indeed she had.

‘Not that Bill doesn’t seem much more like one’s favourite dish than a husband. But then they all do until you marry them. Have you got lots of lovely “mon” for me, Miss Garrish?’ she asked without pausing.

Miss Gorres referred to a card index as the most appropriate place for Poll’s affairs.

‘I’m selling the two bits of Chelsea that my mum left me,’ Poll
explained
to Meg. ‘It’s all against promises to the dying and so on. But I do think circumstances alter facts, don’t you?’

To Meg it seemed that Poll was really asking for support. ‘Of course they do, darling,’ she said as warmly as possible.

Poll seemed to consider for a moment. ‘I think,’ she said with hesitation, ‘I meant that facts altered circumstances. But thank you for agreeing with me.’

Miss Gorres meanwhile had taken one of the cards from the index drawer and laid it on her desk.

‘No sale yet, I’m afraid, Mrs Robson,’ she said.

Meg could not for the moment connect Poll with the name
Robson
, and Poll, seeing this, announced:

‘You didn’t know I’d gone back to Robson, did you, darling? Well, I have. Only not with everybody. I’m trying it out. But I think I shall, because although Robson was quite ghastly in a lot of ways, he was really better than my others. What do you mean “no sale”?’ she
continued
, turning to Miss Gorres. ‘I know for a fact that Mrs Chisholm was after one and Lord Morrington said he’d bought the other.
Mary
Chisholm, Meg,’ she added in explanation, ‘not the old one. I shouldn’t think
she’d
buy
porcelain, would you?’ She burst into a loud
laugh at the absurdity of the idea, completing the isolation of Miss Gorres whose tone of voice openly announced that she was not
prepared
to maintain patience with her as long as she would with most clients. ‘You gave us a reserve price. None of the offers so far have reached that reserve.’

‘What do you mean, reached that reserve?’ Poll asked. She made Miss Gorres’ phrase sound like the ultimate hypocritical evasion. ‘I’m sure Lord Morrington would never have offered less than I asked. You don’t seem very good at selling things.’

‘You asked rather a high reserve,’ Miss Gorres said.

‘I didn’t ask more than I needed,’ Poll said, and then laughed loudly at her own frankness. ‘It’s my bloody trustees,’ she announced to the room.

Miss Gorres clearly found these personal revelations unpleasantly alien to the reticent decorum her own misfortunes had taught her. ‘I think perhaps you should see Mr Sczekely himself about it.’

‘I think I better had,’ said Poll, ‘where is he?’

‘He’s away this afternoon.’

‘Well, really,’ Poll cried. ‘What was the good of saying I should see him?’ To Meg she appeared to be about to stamp her foot in rage. Miss Gorres walked away ostentatiously to talk to another visitor to the gallery.

‘I hope you’re not going to be as cross as this at my party this
evening
,’ Meg said.

‘It isn’t crossness. It’s righteous anger. That beast must have known I wanted the money. I
always
hate little crop-haired women.’

‘Poor thing,’ Meg explained in a lowered voice, ‘I know she’s
difficult
. But she was in the worst of the concentration camps, Poll, for years.’

‘Well,’ said Poll, ‘suffering hasn’t ennobled
her
, has it?’ However, when Miss Gorres came back, she said, ‘Mrs Eliot says I’ve been jolly cross. Forgive and put it down to aching feet, will you? But do get a good price for them. After all, seeing as how they’ve got the
sentimental
value, I wouldn’t sell them unless I wanted the money pretty badly, would I?’

For a moment Meg thought that all Poll’s little efforts to be nice, including the comic cockney of her last sentence, were not going to soften Miss Gorres, so she smiled herself and said, ‘Well, I’m sure my friend couldn’t say fairer than that, could she?’

It was unlikely that Meg’s cockney appeased Miss Gorres as Poll’s
had not, but something did, for she said: ‘I’ll do my very best for you, Mrs Robson.’

Poll took no more notice of her. M promise I won’t be cross at your party, Meg,’ she said, ‘but I expect I shall cry. I always do when people are going away. Even just for the weekend.’

After Poll’s departure, Meg could not forbear completing the
cordiality
. ‘Poor Poll,’ she said. ‘You were wonderful with her, Miss Gorres.’ It was only when she saw that Miss Gorres was accepting the praise with a flush of pleasure that she realized where her mood had led her. She got up hurriedly and left the gallery with only a
murmured
good-bye.

She had passed Westminster Abbey and was nearing home, when she remembered that she had not called for the air-sickness pills
Doctor
Loundes had prescribed for her. And there in the chemist’s shop in Victoria Street was Jill Stokes – poor Jill – her oldest friend whom at Bill’s request she had
not
invited to the party. ‘Oh, look here, not the Grim Grenadier, you know,’ he had said, when he saw Jill’s name on the list of prospective guests, ‘at least not if my tastes are being
consulted
.’ And of course, they had been, for it was as much his party as Meg’s.

Jill, standing so upright by the Toilet Requisites sign, did indeed look the Grenadier. Her red woollen suit was as simple as Meg’s blue one, but the simplicity suggested drabness rather than chic. Meg
reflected
embarrassedly that this was merely the difference of cost. Jill’s height, too, no greater than Meg’s, seemed gawky rather than
graceful
; and her regular features – straight nose, high brow beneath
swept-up
grey hair – had the severity of a ward sister rather than of a Roman matron. Her smile, Meg thought, so perpetual, had become with years the frozen smile of death. Almost unconsciously Meg began to
summon
all the expressive pantomime of her own mobile irregular face. I do see what Mother meant by the advantages of being a
jolie
laide
, she thought.

For a moment she was shocked at her instinctive pleasure at
outshining
poor Jill, but then remembering her youthful jealousy of her friend’s classic looks she felt justified in her present little triumph. One can’t always have kind thoughts, she decided.

‘I’m buying some soap and maybe a hot water bottle,’ Jill
announced
and added, ‘I don’t know why I should tell you. It can’t be of any possible interest. But then, you know, I have no small talk these days.’ She smiled even more brightly as she uttered the last words.

It was on the tip of Meg’s tongue to say that she was quite up to any big talk in which Jill felt inclined to indulge – that was how she would have answered when they were girls. Then she remembered the
significance
that attached – had indeed now attached for fifteen years – to the words ‘these days’. The greatest irony that she could permit
herself
nowadays without offending Jill was to parody her flatness.
‘I’m
getting seasick pills for our little trip,’ she said.

‘
Little
trip! That’s quite marvellous, isn’t it?’ Jill laughed. ‘I thought you were going by air anyway,’ she said.

‘We are,’ Meg admitted, ‘but I think the pills are the same.’

‘Are they? Well, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never flown.’ Jill paused and then added, ‘I don’t know why I say “never flown” as though I was always going by boat. I haven’t been abroad since
nineteen-thirty-nine
.’

‘I don’t think you’ve missed much.’

‘Haven’t I? Well, that of course I can’t tell, Meg.’ She asked the price of the large sized cake of Sandalwood soap and then said, ‘No, the small size will have to do. Isn’t it appalling,’ she remarked to the assistant, ‘how everything goes up?’ She turned to Meg, ‘All this conversation about prices grows on one. It’s one of the worst curses you avoid by not being poor.’

Meg, in retreat immediately, said the one thing she had determined not to. ‘What have you been doing with yourself lately, Jill?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I seem to keep busy,’ Jill began in the even, consciously boring voice that Meg had intended not to provoke. Or had she? Why else had she asked the pointless question?

‘The flat’s very small of course, but all the same … I only have Mrs Davies once a week now, you know. So there are always a lot of chores to do when I get back from work. I actually went to a film last week. I must say one thing for going out so seldom, I enjoy it like a small child when I do. Evelyn came up on Thursday. She didn’t bring the baby which was naturally a bit disappointing. But I do understand. London’s hardly a pleasure to her if she has to lug babies around. Anyway grandmothers are always a pest. You’re lucky not to be one,’ she laughed. ‘There you are,’ she said, ‘a dismal chronicle. But you asked for it. The truth is I’m just as jealous of the life you lead, Meg, as I sound to be. Beastly, isn’t it? But there it is.’

Meg strove desperately to meet her friend’s sincerity. ‘I do wish,’ she said, ‘that we saw each other more often, Jill. It’s idiotic to say this,
I know, when I’m just off to the ends of the earth. But I’ll be back in the spring and then we’ll meet regularly for lunch as we used to.’

‘My dear Meg,’ Jill announced maternally, but not with the gruff affectionate maternalism of Lady Pirie, rather as the mother
deliberately
carrying out a detachment of affection. ‘Perhaps we may.’ She smiled a little remotely and then added, ‘And perhaps we won’t. Let’s be honest and add that.’

So it always was, Meg thought, their long friendship led her
automatically
to make advances only for Jill to cut them short when she felt them an intrusion. It was all very well for Jill to show that she had kept honesty and intelligence intact beneath her trivial
grumblings
and platitudes, but to be left holding the advances that had been forced from you – and they
were
forced by Jill’s silent demand for commiseration – made the friendship seem so one-sided. Time and the instinctive sympathies bred of it made her prefer Jill to all her friends – to Viola Pirie or to Poll even – but instinct could after all prove a deceptive bore.

Meg moved away to a counter to ask for the pills, and Jill, with her usual informality, turned to leave the shop with no further
good-byes
. So erect and dowdy and ungiving she seemed that Meg felt immediately how impossible it was for her ever to have any but a lonely ‘plucky’ life. And, after all, wasn’t Jill’s failure to give what her friends asked from her exactly the root of that independence which, however charmless, they all so applauded?

At once Meg called after her. ‘Oh, Jill, we’re having a few people in this evening. Just good-bye to old friends. Do come. About nine. I should be happy to see you.’ And, fearing that her late invitation might only wound, she added, ‘And Bill, too, will be so glad.’

When Jill did not even smile at the rider about Bill but said quite simply, ‘Thank you, Meg, I should like that very much,’ Meg felt for a moment that were Bill there to hear he
would
be glad that she had given the invitation, but the feeling was quickly gone. He would not be glad. He wanted no friendships for her that were centrifugal to her relationship with him. Such friends as he had who were not joint friends but nominally ‘his own’ – legal colleagues, poker or racing associates, a few limpetlike old school or university friends – he made nothing of, or, at any rate, no more than his social distractions demanded. And any surplus affection that such friends seemed to
expect
of him he warded off with easy chaffing generosity and ‘a helping hand in time of trouble’. She needed her friends no more than he did
his, for it was not as if she was without a balance to his absorption in his profession as some wives would have been. Social work,
porcelain
, books, etc. were not just fill ups for her, they were objects of real absorption. And, as the eighteenth-century red brick of Lord North Street came in sight through the windscreen, she added to them the house – for that was at the centre of all the life she had made for
herself
.