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

sudden fears that now attacked her visited him yet more fiercely. He looked sometimes possessed with more than the haggard anxiety of a difficult brief or an exhausting day in court; his blue eyes were glazed and his wide mouth loosely open with what seemed to her something very like plain fright.
    This too would not do. She recited carefully to herself their personal beatitudes; and blessings they were indeed – good health, energy, a proper income, a decent social conscience, wide interests, humour shared, sufficient humour indeed to accept large parts of life unshared, and, through it all, complete happiness together. It was simply superstitious fear of hubris that threatened to gnaw through such a fabric; and for atavistic, puritan superstition there was no cure like the months of wonderful new interests, the days of lazy ease that now lay ahead of them. Meanwhile, however, it was clear that the fabric was not strong enough to withstand the gnawing, and she turned about the room for some distracting task.
    It was now that her own energy and Bettina’s competence seemed such mixed blessings. The packing had been completed two days before and the house made ready for the Copemans. There was little to do in any case, since Mrs Copeman thought everything ‘quite beautiful’ – especially the Louis XV buhl table and the Palladian secretaire; and, as she also thought Gino and Bettina ‘quite wonderful people’ and expressed her intention of leaving all the arrangements to them, there seemed nothing that Meg herself could do except to make the same act of trust. They had never before let the house, but then they had never before thought of being away for so long. No doubtBill’s determination to find their American tenants so perfect, though intended simply to allay her qualms, was also a completely sensible one. Certainly the Copemans were perfect in one thing, their agreement to do without the porcelain collection. Mrs Copeman, having inquired if any pieces were Sèvres and having found that they were not, had been quite definite in her views,
    ‘Well, they’re certainly quite beautiful,’ she had said. ‘Trent and I don’t care too much for things that can’t be used as they were made to be, Mrs Eliot.’
    Meg had said to Bill, ‘I don’t know whether she thought I was going to say she could use the Meissen plates or the Nymphenburg jug. And anyway what does she think the Derby Chinoiserie figures were meant to be used for?’
    So the porcelain was to be stored. And Meg certainly felt that leaving the house was going to be the easier for it. She ought now, if friends’ felicitations were any guide, to be giving herself up to wondrous imaginings of the six months ahead of her. Anticipation, they said, was the greater part of pleasure. But, of course, they were wrong. How could she, leaving Europe for the first time, suddenly imagine what she had never before thought of? She could delve up fragments of travel films ill attended to, and season them with the cautious reservation that the reality would probably prove far more commonplace , but such imaginings were hardly likely to be wondrous and would certainly not allay the pain in her stomach that always came when she contemplated the unknown. For this was it, of course – the cause and centre of all her recent unfamiliar depressions – simply what she had known so intensely in girlhood and adolescence, but had experienced decreasingly as the years passed, what, in their teens, she and David had christened ‘The Horror in Between’. Every visit to the seaside, every return home had been a horror to them, a dreaded anticipation of what might lie at the other end. It was only in her twenties that she had been able to concentrate on books or scenery when travelling in trains, and, even later, as the destination approached , particularly on the return home, her mind would become clogged with a cotton wool of fright, and her stomach would heave in revolt against