The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot by Angus Wilson Page B

party.’
    Only as they were going downstairs she suddenly asked him, ‘Do you think fear can be communicated in the womb?’
    He stopped dead and held to the banister. She turned and, looking at him, was appalled that she could be so far from him as to have had no inkling of what issues, long dead for her, might still be brought to life in his mind by an idle word. She gave him release in words that came too casually quick to sound convincingly casual even to her own ear.
    ‘I was thinking about Mother,’ she said, ‘and how I’ve always had irrational fears about journeys and homecomings. David had them too as a boy. It might so easily have been prenatal. Homecoming for her so often meant the discovery of some new exploit of Daddy’s – an affair with the governess, even just that he’d gone away with no warning. Do you think that could be the reason?’
    She saw that he could not easily throw off the first associations her question had aroused in him.
    ‘I don’t know, my dear,’ he said, ‘I’m no gynaecologist or prenatal expert.’
    She felt suddenly rebellious at having her communication, however tactless, left on her hands. ‘More likely really,’ she went on, ‘my early childhood. Daddy at the front and Mummy always apprehensive that she’d find a telegram when she got home. She could have communicated the fear to David too even though he was hardly born when the war ended. Don’t you think so?’ Bill did not answer.
    But at dinner he asked her suddenly, ‘Shouldn’t you have invited David up here before we went off?’
    ‘Oh, no darling. I’ve written to him and at this time of the year I imagine the nursery keeps him frightfully busy. Autumn’s the time when all the big orders for next year come in.’
    ‘Well, he’s got Gordon Paget, hasn’t he? To say nothing of Paget’s capital. And that monstrous regiment of women in breeches. He could surely get up for one night.’
    ‘Oh, he would have done, of course, if I’d asked him. But it would have meant asking Gordon too.’
    He raised his eyebrows. ‘When you’re going away for six months?’
    ‘Well, you know how David is if one doesn’t ask Gordon.’
    ‘It’s so long since we’ve seen him that I forget. In any case we could have stood Gordon for one night. I rather liked him the few times that I met him.’
    She felt so annoyed at this continued implied rebuke of what was, after all, something entirely on her own conscience that she smiled and said, ‘You’re being very broad-minded.’ How much in his turn he disliked her implication was clear to her from his remaining silent. Anxious to appease, she said, ‘It would have meant inviting Else Bode too.’
    He was clearly grateful for this release into more orthodox relationships . ‘Oh well, in that case, of course, you couldn’t. Not the whole caravanserai.’ He laughed happily at Else Bode – a stock joke.
    She felt it now due to him, her annoyance appeased, to express her grievance directly. ‘Why should you think I ought to see David?’ she asked.
    ‘Oh – you mentioned partings,’ he said, ‘as the fly in your ointment of our holiday.’
    ‘Oh, I didn’t mean anyone in particular,’ she cried, ‘only leaving my regular life behind – the committee, the galleries, the theatres, andso on. It’s just my love of tramlines. Once I’ve left them I shall adore it all.’
    He smiled at her a little paternally. ‘I think you will,’ he said. ‘But it might be different if we were leaving people behind as well.’
    At first she was a little scornfully amused, thinking that he was jealous even of her threadbare tie with David, since he himself had no one at all in the world; but it then occurred to her that he was still brooding over her tactlessly sudden mention of childbirth. She sought for something that could please him out of his brooding thoughts but she could find nothing less trivial than, ‘I’ve cancelled my order for the Nymphenburg