and it brought her to life again.
‘You liked the evening?’ she asked.
‘Yes. I was a bit worried about your overtiring yourself. But it went very well, I thought. Bessemer played an appalling game of bridge. You can never tell with Americans what their standard’s going to be. But he’s a pleasant and interesting person.’
She said, speaking each word with deliberation, ‘I am looking forward to the holiday, Bill.’ Then she added, ‘You’re a much nicer person than I am, you know.’
He came over and kissed her. ‘You must go to bed,’ he told her.
*
Sexual satisfaction, adding to her exhaustion, yet lent her a wakeful ease. She felt as though she were floating above the bed in the cool darkness of the room. She shut her eyes. Colours and shapes turned tounwilled scenes and faces from the past – absurdly dominating them, her mother’s with her neck scrawny and yellow against her pearls and her large brown timid eyes. It had always been her mother’s neck and eyes that in her last years had been the focus of Meg’s exasperation in their mute demand for pity. She tried to will the image away, to summon others, but all that came were hideous, distorted versions of the same wretched appeal Bill, in his sleep, moved his arm from under her and turned on his side. She opened her eyes and said, ‘David rang me up, darling. He would have done so before, but Gordon has been ill.’
He was too far gone in sleep to understand her. ‘That’s all right,’ he mumbled. ‘We’ll keep going.’
The phrase returned to Meg many times as Bill slept beside her in the aeroplane on the night after they left Paris. A whisky, a glance at the stockmarkets in the air-flown Times, a few pages of The Portrait of a Lady – he had insisted that he had better ‘give all these Maisies and Daisies a second trial’ since she found so much in them – and he had fallen asleep even before the beastly, dormitory-like semi-darkness, which was all that the air company allowed to encourage sleep, had transformed the cabin from two double rows of human beings carefully preserving their privacy and individuality in absorbed, petty occupations into a frightening, passive, ghostlike assemblage of contrasted breathings. It was not alone the irritating pilot light, nor the scrabblings and whispers of Miss Vines, the stewardess, and of Mr C. T. Colman, the steward, nor even the sense of Greece and Turkey and the sea so many thousand feet below them, that kept Meg desperately awake, absurdly fighting the effects of a sleeping pill while pretending to welcome them; it was all these and, above all, a horror of joining this mass of dormant humanity, led into their passivity by her own husband. She pictured him as a Pied Piper and they as rats or children – it didn’t really seem to matter which. He could surrender without a qualm because he was sure of keeping going, sure of arrival and, if not sure of what they would meet there, sure of his capacity to deal with it. But flying through space like this, with the tattered fragments of her normal daily life torn from her by the furious gale of changing time and place, she felt herself without any of the magic protection that being Mrs William Eliot of 102 Lord North Street gave to her, naked to meet the mysterious demands that would be made upon her by this destination that was coming so rapidly towards her through the darkness. She needed all her powers to retain her identityfor herself, let alone to preserve or to create a personality to meet a changed, unfamiliar outside world. I’m like the creatures in Looking Glass land, she thought. I have to run twice as fast even to stay where I am.
At first, as the struggle for and against sleep tore her apart, she welcomed the ridiculous clock changes which brought morning closer and with it the banishment of the breathing zombie orchestra around her. But as the hours passed, she began to feel a strange calm unity with this sleeping world, and
‘You liked the evening?’ she asked.
‘Yes. I was a bit worried about your overtiring yourself. But it went very well, I thought. Bessemer played an appalling game of bridge. You can never tell with Americans what their standard’s going to be. But he’s a pleasant and interesting person.’
She said, speaking each word with deliberation, ‘I am looking forward to the holiday, Bill.’ Then she added, ‘You’re a much nicer person than I am, you know.’
He came over and kissed her. ‘You must go to bed,’ he told her.
*
Sexual satisfaction, adding to her exhaustion, yet lent her a wakeful ease. She felt as though she were floating above the bed in the cool darkness of the room. She shut her eyes. Colours and shapes turned tounwilled scenes and faces from the past – absurdly dominating them, her mother’s with her neck scrawny and yellow against her pearls and her large brown timid eyes. It had always been her mother’s neck and eyes that in her last years had been the focus of Meg’s exasperation in their mute demand for pity. She tried to will the image away, to summon others, but all that came were hideous, distorted versions of the same wretched appeal Bill, in his sleep, moved his arm from under her and turned on his side. She opened her eyes and said, ‘David rang me up, darling. He would have done so before, but Gordon has been ill.’
He was too far gone in sleep to understand her. ‘That’s all right,’ he mumbled. ‘We’ll keep going.’
The phrase returned to Meg many times as Bill slept beside her in the aeroplane on the night after they left Paris. A whisky, a glance at the stockmarkets in the air-flown Times, a few pages of The Portrait of a Lady – he had insisted that he had better ‘give all these Maisies and Daisies a second trial’ since she found so much in them – and he had fallen asleep even before the beastly, dormitory-like semi-darkness, which was all that the air company allowed to encourage sleep, had transformed the cabin from two double rows of human beings carefully preserving their privacy and individuality in absorbed, petty occupations into a frightening, passive, ghostlike assemblage of contrasted breathings. It was not alone the irritating pilot light, nor the scrabblings and whispers of Miss Vines, the stewardess, and of Mr C. T. Colman, the steward, nor even the sense of Greece and Turkey and the sea so many thousand feet below them, that kept Meg desperately awake, absurdly fighting the effects of a sleeping pill while pretending to welcome them; it was all these and, above all, a horror of joining this mass of dormant humanity, led into their passivity by her own husband. She pictured him as a Pied Piper and they as rats or children – it didn’t really seem to matter which. He could surrender without a qualm because he was sure of keeping going, sure of arrival and, if not sure of what they would meet there, sure of his capacity to deal with it. But flying through space like this, with the tattered fragments of her normal daily life torn from her by the furious gale of changing time and place, she felt herself without any of the magic protection that being Mrs William Eliot of 102 Lord North Street gave to her, naked to meet the mysterious demands that would be made upon her by this destination that was coming so rapidly towards her through the darkness. She needed all her powers to retain her identityfor herself, let alone to preserve or to create a personality to meet a changed, unfamiliar outside world. I’m like the creatures in Looking Glass land, she thought. I have to run twice as fast even to stay where I am.
At first, as the struggle for and against sleep tore her apart, she welcomed the ridiculous clock changes which brought morning closer and with it the banishment of the breathing zombie orchestra around her. But as the hours passed, she began to feel a strange calm unity with this sleeping world, and
Similar Books
