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

Mrs Dalloway all at the same time. Nevertheless if he wanted to be an angry young man he really should look less damp and dismal – and to suppose that a beard was going to help him! Vexed by his naïveté out of her abstraction, she reminded herself that a hostess exists only in fulfilling her hospitable functions. She saw Donald Templeton isolated in a corner. Over all the years of her marriage she had never succeeded in unbuttoning the urbane, slightly prim guise that Bill’s nearest approach to a friend always presented to her; it was unlikely that she would ever succeed now. Yet on this last night before theirlong absence it would be not nice, but fitting, and therefore satisfactory , to go through the motions of trying once again to reach him. If by a wave of a hand, she thought, she could ever have transformed his sleek, waxy face and his plump body into something, well something less like a doctored tomcat, she would have been friends with him long ago.
    For Bill, of course, a man’s outward appearance hardily existed; men either shared his interests, in which case they were useful as friends, or they didn’t. Donald had the best legal brain he knew and that was all there was to it. But she couldn’t feel like that. Men shouldn’t seem like doctored toms. Donald adopted the affectations of an eighteenth-century gentleman, but he was far more like an Edwardian drawing room tenor. She cut short the access of malice by going across to him.
    ‘Well? Well?’ he asked, thrusting his face a little too closely at her, ‘so you’re going to hold the gorgeous East in fee?’
    It was ridiculous, she thought; he was less than Bill’s age and he spoke to her as though she was a small girl.
    ‘I hope it won’t be too gorgeous,’ she said. ‘I imagine everything there to be in bright, eye-aching colours enough as it is.’
    ‘So you think the Orient may be a bit of a sell, what?’ He shouted this separated interrogative ‘what’ at intervals in his conversation, under the impression, she supposed, that he gave the effect of some portly Regency Admiral on the quarter deck.
    If it was shyness, as no doubt she ought to think it was, she could only hope to reduce his affectation by answering on as simple a level as possible.
    ‘The East isn’t really the part I’m looking forward to,’ she said. ‘All the disease and the dirt and the teeming millions.’ She spoke with an edge of irony, to set such a narrow Western point of view at a proper distance from herself. It annoyed her then when he ignored this separation.
    ‘I don’t imagine they see themselves like that.’
    ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘I know perfectly well that they’re taking over tomorrow .’ He did not answer and she asked almost angrily, ‘Well, is that what you meant?’
    ‘Yes,’ he said doubtfully and he looked away from her, seeking an escape from the conversation, but finding none, he added, ‘Yes, I suppose I did. But knowing’s one thing, feeling’s quite another. I imagine you’ll feel it all when you’re there. What?’
    ‘You exaggerate my powers of comprehension. I’m far from the sort of person who apprehends history in a flash; not even a few weeks in Singapore will be able to do that for me.’
    He laughed. ‘Good,’ he said and, although she could not be quite sure of what he was commending, she felt that he was accepting her a little for the first time.
    ‘But as to having a point of view,’ she said, ‘how can I? I don’t understand anything about them , and won’t in such a short visit. As for regretting that our day is over, whatever would be the good of that?’
    He made no comment and she felt the need to increase his sympathy at cost to herself.
    ‘Bill,’ she remarked, ‘thinks my compassion will be strained.’
    ‘By the teeming millions?’ he asked and they shared for the first time a smile of affection for Bill; but he withdrew from any further intimacy.
    ‘It’ll do Bill the world of good. To take