The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (54 page)

After Climbers’ final departure, Meg said, ‘It used to be Maggie Tulliver, you know. But there was as much rivalry in my love for you, David, then, as in Maggie’s for Tom. And now you’re Knightly and Mr Woodhouse. I hope it’s not too Freudian.’

They both laughed. Afterwards it occurred to him as strange that he should feel so unworried at her assertion of dependence on him. Yet if Emma depended on Knightly and on her father, they, after all, remained with their own lives of masculine privacy uninvaded. Whereas in the past, in their youth, he had felt all the time that
assertion
of Meg’s to control, to prove that he was not necessarily her superior because he was the boy, to use her control of him as a signal of victory – the most cruel that there could be – to wave in the face of their mother. Amusedly, he thought, in any case there’s an irony implicit in what she said and she knows it – Knightly was a prig and Mr Woodhouse a vegetable. He was well aware that there was
something
of both in him. As long, it seemed to him, as there was that degree of detachment in her ‘dependence’ on him, their happy relationship was surely also free from danger.

Only once in those last months of the year did Meg behave in a way that irritated David. The occasion was annoying enough, for it was entirely of her own making. Suddenly it seemed that Meg had
decided
that it was an absurdity to burden themselves with two parties in the New Year; one of them must be held in the fortnight before Christmas. Useless for David to urge that the pressure of winter
deliveries
was even further swelled then by the supplying of Christmas potted plants; she merely said, ‘There may be a rush, David, but there’s nothing in this nursery you can’t delegate.’

It was the first time she had mentioned David’s own work. She was, he could see, watching his reaction with a quizzical smile that was ready to vanish at any sign of resentment. For a moment he did resent it. He had fashioned his own life, he had only his own conscience to satisfy; for Meg to walk in halfway through the performance and judge the line of the play was inadmissible criticism. Yet if he was really satisfied with the amount of Martha tasks that he contributed to life, he surely ought not to mind others judging it with a certain mockery. It should be enough for him that Gordon, who had known the breaking work of those first five years of the nursery should have approved his acceptance of the lightened load of these last years, should indeed have left him enough money to continue to accept it. He and Gordon had always detested worship of work as one of the most assertive and corroding of human passions. But for this very reason Gordon would have found any bullfrog swelling of resentment at Meg’s amusement peculiarly ridiculous. So now he laughed.

‘Do you remember,’ he asked, ‘how Mother delighted to find that things would just cover a sixpence? I suppose my labours would hardly cover that.’

‘Oh, no, David, you do quite enough work to cover half-a-crown. But you’ve still enough time to give a party. Anyway, two parties spread out like that are far less exhausting than two in the same week. And people will expect it just before Christmas. Anyone would think that I hadn’t proved a success at the summer party. I shall be able to run the whole affair this time with Mrs B. You’ll hardly know a thing about it until it’s over.’ She piled up the reasons.

David felt disturbed lest beneath her easy happiness at
Andredaswood
there might be some pressing boredom. He asked, ‘Is life
proving
distressingly dull for you here, Meg?’

She said, ‘Oh, David, don’t make such a thing about it. No. I just would like to show myself off a bit. I’m bound to be a backslider now and again.’

They laughed. And so the party was given.

Meg was as good as her word; the arrangements were excellent. On the morning of the party day, Mary Gardner rang up and asked did David mind if she brought the Grant-Pritchards, she thought it would be good business anyway for David to meet them. Not at all, David said, but who would they be? Michael Grant-Pritchard! Mary exclaimed, but surely David had heard of him; he was that M.P. who’d been so strong in pressing the Government about the Trade
Union danger. David said that the Trade Union danger had not threatened Andredaswood closely so far … There was an agreed irony in any conversation he held with Mary Gardner that did not concern music. No doubt, he said, Mary’s husband had felt it more seriously, Mary laughed but then spoke in her serious, responsible voice. People who didn’t live in the clouds had reason to know how dangerous all these restrictive practices and things were. Anyway Michael
Grant-Pritchard
, who was a brilliant lawyer, was one of
the
coming men and the sooner David knew about him the better, especially as he was buying ‘Oblongs’ now that the Phipsons were going to live near Cape Town. David would certainly like Frederica Grant-Pritchard, she was so very quiet; in any case he must, for she had all sorts of ideas about the garden at ‘Oblongs’. The garden at ‘Oblongs’, David said, was a creation of Miss Jekyll’s, and while he was not wholly in accord with Miss Jekyll’s horticultural aesthetic, she had been one of our great gardeners; the Phipsons had already done enough to ruin her creation by their neglect, he did not propose to assist Mrs
Grant-Pritchard
in completing the ruin of a great garden by her ideas,
whatever
they
might be. But Mary Gardner only replied with one of the principal articles of her creed. ‘My dear David,’ she said, ‘money is money.’

Frederica Grant-Pritchard proved to be a rather big woman in her late thirties. She seemed, at first, shy and undistinguished, likely to be a bore. Her shyness was, however, a quality that predisposed David in her favour, and when it turned out that her ‘ideas’ were simply a desire to restore the garden at ‘Oblongs’ to Miss Jekyll’s original
design
he was quite won over. She had taken great trouble to read all Miss Jekyll’s books, and, if David found it rather strange at this time to meet someone from a sophisticated world who seemed unaware that herbaceous borders and wild gardens and iris walks were not the perfection of gardening, he was only too ready to sink his criticism before such genuine, if naïve, enthusiasm. Looking at her swelling white neck and bosom, her rather prominent blue eyes, fresh
complexion
and red hair, he thought sadly that had she lived in the age of Rubens, she would have been a great beauty. To have discovered this made him feel that somehow she was his own creation, whose
shyness
and ordinariness must be warmed and cherished by him. He would have talked to her for much longer, but that to be noticed by the host was clearly an ordeal for her.

‘All your other guests,’ she said, and then blushed for fear she had
seemed to remind him of his social duty. They were fully agreed, however, that he was to assist her professionally in her garden scheme. ‘I expect I shall be here quite a lot,’ she said. ‘Michael doesn’t find me much help in London. So we bought this house.’

Her husband’s constituency, it seemed, was in North London so that what with his constituency and with the House, he was not likely to be much at ‘Oblongs’. Frederica Grant-Pritchard seemed quite relieved at this – ‘He might get bored,’ she said – and David, looking at her husband, felt no distress.

Michael Grant-Pritchard looked all that David had expected – tall, dark, with greying side hair, too charming, too distinguished, and a great deal too assured. What or whether he was all that could be deduced from his appearance, David had no intention of finding out; he instinctively kept away from such embodiments of self-assertion as notable people must inevitably be. Mr Grant-Pritchard made only one contribution to his wife’s plans for the garden. ‘Don’t let her
exclude
roses altogether, will you? I’m simple enough to think that a garden’s not a garden at all unless it has roses. The old-fashioned sort, you know, that have got some scent.’

The belief that modern roses lacked scent was one of the common delusions that David found most tedious, so he merely smiled in answer to this affability. He had no doubt, anyway, that left to his
uninstructed
taste, Michael Grant-Pritchard would prefer roses of the largest size and of the most vulgarly ‘delicate’ shade regardless of their scent.

Even if David had wished to improve his knowledge of Michael Grant-Pritchard, he would not have found it easy. Meg and the
distinguished
visitor talked to one another throughout almost the
entire
party. David, Mary Gardner, Tim, even Climbers, brought up various people to be introduced to Michael Grant-Pritchard; they were one and all politely but firmly shaken off. Frederica, with an awful sudden brightness, produced, David thought, not only by
shyness
but by a real fear of her husband, said, in the manner of a totally different woman, a bright, domineering middle-class wife, ‘Now, Michael, that’s quite enough, you know. You’re monopolizing Mrs Eliot.’

‘Frederica,’ he said to Meg, ‘always
observes
things at parties. And this time, darling, your observation’s quite correct.’

David, overhearing this, wondered that Meg should continue
talking
to someone who was so crudely bullying to his wife. True, Meg,
hearing only this inept intervention of Frederica Grant-Pritchard’s, might well have presumed her to be a silly, tactless women but even so … He was annoyed enough to say directly to Meg, ‘I think the party wants a little supervision,’ but she looked round the room and answered quite simply, ‘Oh, I don’t think so, David. They all look quite happy.’

It wasn’t even true. There was no doubt that Michael
Grant-Pritchard
had offended the greater number of his new neighbours by ignoring them, and Meg had quite lost the good opinion she had won in the summer. Climbers, like a scout on the losing side in a battle, kept bringing reports of people who were leaving ‘rather hurt’ by Mrs Eliot’s failure to talk to them. Eileen and the Rogersons were
disgusted
that she should make such a fuss of a man whose politics stank. Even Tim said, ‘I didn’t know Mrs E. had parliamentary aspirations. She’s certainly got
him
thinking she’s the best.’

Yet there was no element of flirtation in Meg’s manner with Michael Grant-Pritchard; nor, David had to admit, in his to her, though it was easy to imagine the sickening sort of womanizer he was. There was a good deal of gaiety and laughter in their conversation, it was true, spotlit perhaps the
more as the rest of the party fell into an increasingly deadened sense
of being unnoticed; but, in the main, they seemed to be discussing solemnly, or rather, Meg almost greedily asking questions and putting up objections as he held forth. Once or twice, indeed, they seemed to be in violent disagreement. Meg’s voice rose above the subdued chatter, saying, ‘I think that’s a lot of
high-flown
talk to keep your conscience quiet’; and he later suddenly boomed in a tone hardly decorated even with politeness, ‘I’m afraid you simply don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Suddenly, as the party was almost ended, they seemed tacitly to agree to break up their conversation and mingle with the other guests. For the remaining ten minutes Michael Grant-Pritchard gave an
exhibition
of his charm working at full pressure, and Meg, too, was at the top of her social form. With a certain pleasure, David noted that they were both too late to repair the effect they had created.

He was as puzzled about Michael Grant-Pritchard’s motives for behaving so ‘badly’ as he was about Meg’s, but a good deal less concerned. He supposed, perhaps, that the man for some reason was in a bad temper with his wife, to whom he had certainly caused acute embarrassment. Then, too, these were not his constituents, nor indeed people who particularly ‘mattered’; perhaps he had bought ‘
Oblongs
’
with the intention of working off the contempt and dislike for human beings that his careerism normally forbade him to express. It was said that ambitious, successful people never failed in charm even with the dustman, for fear of offending potentially useful people; but David reflected that this might well be a groundless platitude; he knew nothing about the psychology of careerism and cared less. Probably, he thought, Meg had seemed the only
mondaine
person present, although really this was not true. It was impossible to say what the man’s motives had been. He had known Bill in the course of business, it seemed, but they had not been close colleagues; and Michael Grant-Pritchard was certainly not likely to be governed by sentiment or by any compassion for Meg’s tragic loss of her husband. It was really most likely that he had used Meg as a weapon in some complicated marital battle. As he left, he had said to her, ‘I shall hold you to your promise,’ and although Frederica Grant-Pritchard did not look particularly distressed at this, she was no doubt intended to be inflamed into some fire of jealousy. David felt that he had seldom met a man that he disliked so much, and he hoped never to have to consider him again.

Meg’s motives he had to consider. She continued to be entertaining and charming on the adjournment to the kitchen, but only Mrs
Boniface
, unaware of the party’s failure, responded. The others were listless and resentful. It seemed that Meg realized that she had gone too far to recover them, for suddenly, with no more than a perfunctory smile, she left the kitchen.

After what he judged a decent interval of five minutes, he followed her into the drawing room. She was crouched in front of the huge fireplace, trying, with puffs of the bellows, to hold in glow the wood that yet obstinately paled into white ash. She stopped as soon as he came in. All the glasses and dishes and ashtrays had been removed, but the room still wore a desolate battlefield air. He said, ‘There’s no point in keeping the fire alive. We can’t sit in here. Let’s go to the morning room. We can have the electric fire there.’

She answered, ‘We’d better not sit together, David. I feel so guilty that I shall probably say something unkind.’