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

the inevitable.
    She had decided later that it stemmed from a child’s sense of the insecurity of her home, and from her father’s sudden disappearance from the scene. She had declared it hysteria communicated by her mother. She had sometimes carried it further, to an equation withfear of death. But, of course, with Bill she was without these fears. With him, for all the aeroplane stoppings and startings of their coming journey, there could be no ‘Horror in Between’.
    Meanwhile until he returned to the house she was alone. There was nothing for it but to seek the escape she and David had found in the past. Emma, The Mill on the Floss, The Small House at Allington, The Portrait of a Lady lay together with the hand luggage. They were the basic necessities of the voyage, not on any account to be anticipated; there were rules of the game even in stressful times. She went to the bookcase and took down Daisy Miller , an old standby, familiar enough to take quick effect, short enough to anaesthetize only for the ugly hour or so until Bill’s return, easily shaken off, leaving no after effects. Drawing her long legs up under her into the armchair, with cigarettes and matches on the table beside her, she felt herself suddenly the gawky, leggy girl of her past, who had obliterated dreary hotel bedrooms and hideous furnished flats with the subtleties of Daisy’s innocence pitted against the guiles of Rome. It seemed absurd that there should be no David there also, very much the elder brother, legs stretched out, in the other armchair to match her absorption with an equal engrossment in the sad futilities of Emma Bovary’s debts.
    She saw her brother so seldom now, thought of him only rarely, so that his voice came to her imagination as it was in his most self-conscious , whimsical adolescence. ‘My sister,’ she could hear him saying , ‘inclines to the native tongue. My taste is more for the French. But then what English lady can happily support the improprieties that our neighbours across the Channel permit themselves in their so-called polite literature?’ This parodying of early Victorian speech had, thank God, like all David’s other affectations, lasted only a short while, but it came back to Meg now as clearly as if he were speaking in the room; and she found herself longing for a talk, a real gossip with him. Preferring not to dwell on the history of the distant though friendly relations that had grown up between them in the last years, she plunged headlong into Daisy Miller.
    Some time later she was conscious of that muffled banging of the front door that meant that Bill had come home. He had never learned not to bang doors, yet he always remembered at the last minute, just in time to turn the knob and prevent the loudest reverberations. She did not go down to him. He liked to rush at the evening paper, to the stop press with his precious racing results; and then to read the lettersthat had come by the afternoon post. They were mostly bills or from bookmakers, anyway; she had seen them when she came in. He had got increasingly tetchy recently if anyone fussed him during this ritual. He took his racing so seriously nowadays, so differently from the time when a day at Kempton Park or Ascot had been a social occasion for them both. All his racing was by post nowadays. Silly ass, she thought with loving impatience. She could not stand people turning pleasures into fusses. He was just as keen on his bridge, but that had remained a game. Now he would bring with him an air of distraction simply because some wretched horse hadn’t won. And the evening paper would be all muddled and unreadable.
    She could just hear him move across the hall. He moved so deliberately , and yet, considering the extra weight the years had added to his tall, thickset body, surprisingly lightly. Really, she thought, at fifty-five, he’s amazingly young, despite his flushed face and the way his hair is receding. One would take him for either a