Read Online The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot by Angus Wilson - Free Book Online

figures.’
    ‘Good girl,’ he said, but his pleasure seemed tepid compared with the ardour he had shown in asking her to forgo the purchase.
    It was not until a few moments before the first guest arrived, as they stood, tall, elegant, ready to please yet united to defend, that Bill suggested, ‘I should have thought it was your mother’s unreliability that was the trouble, if any. The constant moving from one place to another and the absurd enterprises that were bound to fail.’
    Meg dismissed it instantly. ‘Oh, no. That was only financial worry. Sordid if you like, but not that awful emotional chasm that Mummy faced or tried to. The person you loved simply not there. Think of it!’ She shuddered and he put his arm round her waist. ‘Oh, no,’ she repeated , ‘the tea-room and the bookshop and the curio came much later. When we were almost growing up and quite able to cope. Father had finally disappeared by then and I had David to go to.’
    He was about to say something when the bell rang and he turned to opening a bottle of champagne – he would allow no one else to obscure his skill in such tasks.
    *
    At a little before eleven Meg felt free to stand apart from the party for a few minutes and observe. This time of withdrawal was perhaps the highest solemnity of the entertainment ritual for her – then, and, if Bill was in the mood, the inquest afterwards. Despite all her experience now as a hostess, she was still remained keyed up – as they said every good actress must – until this moment. It came then as a relaxation; but also as the time of judgement. She was very critical – the verdict was so nearly always ‘success but’ or ‘success although’. Tonight it was very nearly plain ‘success’. The lame ducks were less of a problem than she had expected, although poor Tom Pirie, anaemic and bearded, clearly needed watching. But then the lame duckswere closer to her affections than the other guests and she inevitably expected to be more on edge about them. Bill’s ease had set the scene in the first quarter of an hour, until her own nervous tension was sufficiently relaxed to allow him to take three cronies into the small room for bridge. He would emerge only to dissolve it all with equal ease.
    The word ‘cronies’ echoed in. her head uncomfortably. It was not a word that she would ever say. It suggested a pseudo-Dickensian old lawyer and his friends. Bill was the least Dickensian person in existence , and not old. And he had no close friends. Perhaps she felt that his bridge playing marked the difference in their ages; if so it was very foolish indeed, lots of young people played cards. She turned from such unpleasing reflections about Bill’s age impatiently. What was more absurd was this snobbish idea that there were things she didn’t say! This too she rejected angrily. She was unashamed that they lived in a certain style. To be so would be the snobbery.
    Suddenly she realized that she was standing there ‘feeling like a successful hostess’. But if she was more self-conscious in this role than at other times it was a matter for amusement rather than for sharp self-censure. It was a part she had always so wished to play. She had hated the muddled, shabby gentility of the occasional parries her mother had given in the intervals of a plucky inefficient struggle to live. She had always made excuses, had been late at the secretarial college, or had hidden upstairs in her bedroom with a book – a book probably in which the part her mother muffed was played so splendidly by Glencora Palliser or Oriane de Guermantes or Clarissa Dalloway. It was not surprising, when at last she was able to assume the role herself, that her sense of it should have been a shade literary, a touch self-conscious .
    She caught a look in young Tom Pirie’s eye that suggested a disgusted rejection of the ‘gracious living’ around him – and no wonder, she thought, if she was playing Glencora Palliser, Oriane, and