The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (13 page)

‘This is Mr Dykes,’ Miss Vines said, ‘our Srem Panh representative. He’ll look after you, Mrs Eliot.’

What a disgustingly inept time for introductions and strange
surnames
! Nevertheless Meg made herself smile vaguely in the direction of a silly little reddish moustache and a common accent that said, ‘Your husband acted like a hero, Mrs Eliot. The Minister doesn’t want to intrude but he’s asked me …’

‘Please,’ Meg said, ‘I don’t want to hear all this now. I want to be with my husband.’

‘Oh, of course, I quite understand’; the common voice was faintly patronizing. ‘We’ve telephoned to the British Consul.’ He said it with pride. These irrelevant emotions in the voices that came to her made her feel, as the words in French had done, that she and Bill were lost among a crowd of lunatics. She dreaded so that this sense of being at the mercy of people with no hold on reality might penetrate poor Bill’s clouding consciousness. She held his hand more tightly.

‘I’m looking after you, darling,’ she said. ‘It’s Meg. I’m looking after you, Bill.’

His words were blurred now; she could only just distinguish them – ‘Can’t afford to go out now,’ he seemed to be saying. The tall man for some extraordinary reason insisted on shaking hands with her.
‘
Je
regrette mais il faut que je
continue
mon
voyage,
Madame,
’
he said.
‘Mais
vous
pouvez
me
croire,
les
médecins
indigènes
sont
excellents.
Ils
feront
de
leur
mieux.’
And a little sallow woman, apparently his wife, for he murmured,
‘Madame,
ma
femme’,
said, ‘
Soyez
tranquille,
chère
Madame,
le
bon
Dieu
vous
gardera.’
It was ludicrous.

In the ambulance, seated on a small pull-down seat by the side of Bill’s stretcher, she felt thankful for the strange, amber, cat-faced men in white. Where Europeans might have attempted some
conventional
expression of speech and feature, they gave her decent silence and only the occasional gaze of their large solemn eyes. The
anonymous
heaven had turned to hell, but even so the anonymity offered its solace.

Bill’s breathing had become strained and, although he gave no
consciousness
of pain, it rose now and then to a kind of involuntary groan, most dreadful to her because it seemed to be taking his humanity from him. He muttered occasionally, but though she strained to hear him she could catch no stray word, no more than a faint sighing. Before they reached the hospital he had slipped from druggedness into death, Meg sensed it only from a slight relaxation of the two attendants, but she had been deceived before, deceived out of precious moments when he needed her; death should not find her again so easy, so shamefully easy a believer.

They came to a halt; the attendants opened the door and a small soft hand took her arm and helped her down. A tiny little Badai nurse craned to hold a huge umbrella over Meg’s head towering above her. The rain thundered and splashed around their ankles as they ran into the doorway. Through the now thin, dreary moonlight Meg could discern long glass-fronted balconies above them. She imagined
hundreds
of faces – brown, yellow, white – pressed to watch their entry. We’re giving an all-night show at any rate, she thought bitterly. She saw herself and Bill praising this wonderful modern hospital of which the Badais were no doubt so bloody proud.

They were taking the stretcher in at another door. She turned and ran towards it. ‘Where are they taking him?’ she cried. With the little nurse in pursuit, crying, ‘All right, all right,’ she ran, stumbled, fell into a pool of rainwater, bruising her knee, cutting her hand.

A man came and lifted her up. ‘Come along this way, Mrs Eliot.’ The voice was refined, Edinburgh. ‘The doctors are with your
husband
now. There, there,’ he said like any old Scots nanny. ‘Come and sit down a moment.’

He was a black-haired, flat-chested man with a little moustache and timid green-flecked brown eyes; beneath his transparent macintosh she could see a white dinner jacket.

‘I’m Marriot,’ he said. ‘British consul. They’re a wonderful crowd of doctors here, I can tell you.’ He took her into a small waiting room with palm trees in pots.

‘Dear me, that’s a nasty little cut on your hand.’ He called to the nurse in Badai. In a moment everything was washings, dressings, an injection. ‘You have to be very careful of cuts here, you know. We’re not in England now.’

He was so calm and soothing and nannylike that she wanted to hit him; but she simply stared into space and said nothing. And now to add to the nightmare absurdity a little red-haired, coppery-faced, lioness-like woman, with plastic macintosh covering a long white nylon evening dress, came up and touched Mr Marriot on the arm.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the doctor’ll be here in a moment with the report.’

For a second Meg looked at him defiantly. She must make up to Bill for her faithlessness, for walking behind Miss Vines slowly, for leaving him alone in those precious moments of consciousness, for accepting his death so easily. Now they would have to tear acceptance out of her. And then suddenly she slumped, exhausted, on the wooden bench. This, she thought, is the first moment of losing Bill, losing the only presence of him that I can understand, oh, pray God that there will come some other presence of him to be with me in these dreadful, dead years ahead.

‘There’s no need for the doctor to come,’ she said dully, ‘I know that my husband is dead.’

‘Ah, you’ve known it all along.’ Mr Marriot’s genteel voice was full of sad kindness; and Mrs Marriot put her hand on Meg’s arm and stroked it. But Meg could feel their burden lighten, as though she had owned up to stealing the chocolates and they would no longer have the sad, painful, tiring task of keeping the whole school in.

At their urging she went into the long, high mortuary room in which Bill’s body lay, his eyes closed now, on a hospital bed. Memory and love and a terrible pity fought together in her exhausted mind, and an aching love emerged as master; but even so she kept tight a small part of herself, frozen and separate, for she knew that, if she were ever to find him as he would be with her for the future, she must not hold on to him as he had been. Only she wanted to announce to him that everything that in any way had to do with him – even this
corpse so soon to be given over to strangers and then to decay – was the object of her utter love and reverence. She bent down and kissed his lips.

It was so difficult not to hate the Marriots and their kindness as part of the whole obscene and sudden horror that had come out of nowhere and engulfed her.

‘The great thing now is rest,’ Mr Marriot said, as he started up the car. ‘Doctor Maung has given us these tablets. They’ll help you to sleep, Mrs Eliot. You’ll stay with us just as long as you feel the need. If there’s anyone at home you want me to cable to, please tell me. Mind you, they’ll see it all in the newspapers tomorrow.’

She looked at him through her exhaustion as though he had emerged from the shadows to show her the face of a lunatic.

‘Ah, yes, I’m afraid so,’ he said hurriedly. ‘But nobody’ll worry you about it. I’ll see to that.’

Her attempt at a smile embarrassed him even further.

‘You’ve come at a terrible season,’ he said. ‘The monsoon you know. Hence our appearance. I always think these plastic macintoshes make people look like strips of celluloid.’

‘I’m afraid,’ Meg said, ‘that everything appears to be made of celluloid at the moment.’

It was a simple and exact statement – the nearest thing she could find to break her silence in the politeness due to him. He took it as a request to meet at a deeper level.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘like a film. Yes, I’m afraid it must all seem very unreal. Or rather not afraid, for the shadow-show we all play in is a poor one at best. And if grief brings us glimpses beyond it, well …’

At the back of the car Mrs Marriot stirred. ‘Everybody’s bound to seem absolutely unreal,’ she said, ‘unreal and bloody.’ Her voice faintly stirred surprise in Meg – it was not Scotch but a husky strangulated, upperclass contralto. ‘The only thing
we
can do,’ Mrs Marriot went on, ‘is to keep the
other
unreal, bloody people away from you. And one good thing is that after this is over, you’ll never see us again. You needn’t hate or like us, you needn’t remember us or even think about us again. We’re just here to keep stupid annoyances away and make things a bit easier.’

Meg strove to acknowledge this kind realism; but how could she, for the reality was simply that she couldn’t feel them as individuals at all, only as part of the dead weight that had suddenly fallen upon her; their voices were no more than misconceived sound effects that like
the thrashing rain added to the unreality of this improvised
melodrama
. By some fantastic error they had shot into the audience and killed Bill; now they were asking her …

But her unhappiness broke through the comfort of such metaphors, she could think of nothing but Bill lying dead in that room. A
horrible
fantasy that he was only drugged, that at this very moment these wicked cat-faced people were using his body to increase their
command
of Western skills, seized her so strongly that she put her hand to the door. She mastered her hysteria, turned with a desperate smile to Mrs Marriot in the back of the car, and surprised her greedily munching a bar of chocolate.

‘Any shock always makes me ravenous,’ Mrs Marriot’s boyish grin was the best she could do in apology,

Meg let out a hysterical giggle and then felt suddenly released from them – despite all their kindness, they were indifferent, as remote from her as she from them; the isolation she needed was not really
threatened
.

A more unexpected threat awaited her when they reached the Marriots’ long, low white house. Reporters were already on the spot.

‘Mrs Eliot has nothing to say to you fellows,’ Mr Marriot told them and added something in Badai. Meg wondered vaguely if his Scots accent still came through, and if he had found the equivalent of ‘
fellows
’ in this strange, singing language. ‘Helen’ll take you up to your room,’ he told her. ‘I’ll have these chaps in for a whisky. If you can’t satisfy their curiosity it’s always as well to quench their thirst.’ He winked at Meg.

‘We should like to have a photograph of Mrs Eliot, please,’ one of the little men asked, smiling at her. Mistily she returned the smile and apparently roused Mr Marriot’s fears.

‘Now don’t let yourself get involved, Mrs Eliot,’ he said. ‘You chaps’ll have no photograph tonight. But you can all have a wee drop of Scotch to get your insides as wet as your outsides.’ His Scots act was clearly familiar and popular, for there was a wave of giggling and immediate acquiescence in his plan.

Going up the broad wooden staircase from the large, circular
hallway
to the bedrooms, Meg, deadened though all her senses were, was struck by the beauty of the house.

‘You have a very lovely house,’ she said.

‘You
have
to have something in this place,’ Helen Marriot told her.
‘Don’t let Jimmie’s talking get on your nerves. Tell me if it’s too much and I’ll keep him quiet. But he’ll be a power of strength with newspapers and officials and all that sort of thing.’

‘He’s a very kind man.’

Helen Marriot turned on the landing and faced her.

‘Oh! He’s a pet,’ she said. ‘But there’s no need to let him worry you.’ Perhaps it was Meg’s blank look that made her add, ‘Or maybe I’ll be the one to get on your nerves. I do on a lot of people’s.’

Along the pale lemon wood of the corridor walls hung
reproductions
of Dufy. Helen Marriot’s white crinoline dress and vivid red hair seemed to repeat their decorative, rather chichi effect of splashes of bright colour. Meg longed for the darkness to descend and blot out all this irrelevance.

In the large bedroom the lemon-coloured wood was varied with panels of some lighter, almost white wood. The familiarity of
receiving
a guest seemed to banish the occasion from Helen Marriot’s mind. She flitted about the room, indicating cupboards, a shelf of bedside books, an ivory box of cigarettes; she went into the attached
bathroom
and turned on taps to demonstrate showers, showed bath salts and fan apparatus. Meg followed her round automatically, saying every now and again, ‘Thank you.’ She had found it now as the word that would suffice to hold the world at bay in the coming weeks. Helen suddenly went to the door and clapped her hands. Even at that moment the improbability of people really summoning their servants in this way made Meg want to laugh. A moment later a pretty,
high-cheekboned
Badai girl appeared with Meg’s suitcases and – Meg
suddenly
saw – Bill’s. Immediately she felt a desperate need to get Bill’s things away from the cat-faced creature. The very existence of these Badais who had killed Bill seemed revolting to her; she must get the girl out of the room lest she should open the cases and touch any of Bill’s clothes.

She tried to find some way of effecting this tactfully but she was too tired to invent.

‘I don’t want her to touch the clothes, please.’

She had said it and was horrified. So, clearly, was Mrs Marriot, though she tried to mask her embarrassment and disgust. She spoke very gently to the girl, who bowed, smiled and left.

‘They’re very wonderful people, the Badais, Mrs Eliot. A race of natural aristocrats we think.’ Meg’s tragedy clearly could not excuse her from all censure. ‘You must remember,’ Helen Marriot went on,
‘that for Aung Ma you’re surrounded by a halo of heroism. She’ll do anything for you. She worships old Prek Namh.’

Meg sat down on the large bed with its scarlet cotton cover. Helen, getting no reply, said, ‘Prek Namh the minister.’ And then almost irritably, ‘You mustn’t believe all these stories about the Badais being Communist. Your husband’s already a national hero to most of them, the man who gave his life for the minister.’