Dangerous Ages Part 12

"You must have a course," he told her. "You are an obvious case for a course of treatment. St. Mary's Bay? Excellent. There is a practising psycho-a.n.a.lyst there now. You should have an hour's treatment twice a week, to be really effective.... You would prefer a man, I take it?"

He shot his eyes at her for a moment, in statement, not in enquiry. Well he knew how much she would prefer a man. She murmured a.s.sent. He rose.

The hour was over.

"How much will the course be?" she asked.

"A guinea an hour, Dr. Cradock charges. He is very cheap."

"Yes, I see. I must think it over. And you?"

He told her his fee, and she blenched, but paid it. She was not rich, but it had been worth while. It was a beginning. It had opened the door into a new and richer life. St. Mary's Bay was illumined in her thoughts, instead of being drab and empty as before. Sublimated complexes twinkled over it like stars. Freed libido poured electrically about it. And Dr.

Cradock, she felt, would be more satisfactory as a doctor than this man, who affected her with a faint nausea when he looked at her, though he seldom did so.

2

Windover too was illumined. She could watch almost calmly Neville talking to Grandmama, wheeling her round the garden to look at the borders, for Grandmama was a great gardener.

Then Jim came down for a week-end, and it was as if the sun had risen on Surrey. He sat with Mrs. Hilary in the arbour. She told him about Dr.

Evans and the other psycho-a.n.a.lyst doctor at St. Mary's Bay. He frowned over Dr. Evans, who lived in the same street as he did.

"Rosalind sent you to him; of course; she would. Why didn't you ask me, mother? He's a desperate Freudian, you know, and they're not nearly so good as the others. Besides, this particular man is a shoddy scoundrel, I believe.... Was he offensive?"

"I wouldn't let him be, Jim. I was prepared for that. I ... I changed the conversation."

Jim laughed, and did his favourite trick with her hand, straightening the thin fingers one by one as they lay across his sensitive palm. How happy it always made her!

"Well," he said, "I daresay this man down at the Bay is all right. I'll find out if he's any good or not.... They talk a lot of tosh, you know, mother; you'll have to sift the grain from the chaff."

But he saw that her eyes were interested, her face more alert than usual, her very poise more alive. She had found a new interest in life, like keeping a parrot, or learning bridge, or getting religion. It was what they had always tried to find for her in vain.

"So long," he said, "as you don't believe more than half what they tell you.... Let me know how it goes on, won't you, and what this man is like.

If I don't approve I shall come and stop it."

She loved that from Jim.

"Of course, dearest. Of course I shall tell you about it. And I know one must be careful."

It was something to have become an object for care; it put one more in the foreground. She would have gone on willingly with the subject, but Jim changed her abruptly for Neville.

"Neville's looking done up."

She felt the little sharp pang which Neville's name on Jim's lips had always given her. His very p.r.o.nunciation of it hurt her--"Nivvle," he said it, as if he had been an Irishman. It brought all the past back; those two dear ones talking together, studying together, going off together, bound by a hundred common interests, telling each other things they never told her.

"Yes. It's this ridiculous work of hers. It's so absurd: a married woman of her age making her head ache working for examinations."

In old days Jim and Neville had worked together. Jim had been proud of Neville's success; she had been quicker than he. Mrs. Hilary, who had welcomed Neville's marriage as ending all that, foresaw a renewal of the hurtful business.

But Jim looked grave and disapproving over it.

"It is absurd," he agreed, and her heart rose. "And of course she can't do it, can't make up all that leeway. Besides, her brain has lost its grip. She's not kept it sharpened; she's spent her life on people. You can't have it both ways--a woman can't, I mean. Her work's been different. She doesn't seem to realise that what she's trying to learn up again now, in the spare moments of an already full life, demands a whole lifetime of hard work. She can't get back those twenty years; no one could. And she can't get back the clear, gripping brain she had before she had children. She's given some of it to them. That's nature's way, unfortunately. Hard luck, no doubt, but there it is; you can't get round it. Nature's a hybrid of fool and devil."

He was talking really to himself, but was recalled to his mother by the tears which, he suddenly perceived, were distorting her face.

"And so," she whispered, her voice choked, "we women get left...."

He looked away from her, a little exasperated. She cried so easily and so superfluously, and he knew that these tears were more for herself than for Neville. And she didn't really come into what he had been saying at all; he had been talking about brains.

"It's all right as far as most women are concerned," he said. "Most women have no brains to be spoilt. Neville had. Most women could do nothing at all with life if they didn't produce children; it's their only possible job. _They've_ no call to feel ill-used."

"Of course," she said, unsteadily, struggling to clear her voice of tears, "I know you children all think I'm a fool. But there was a time when I read difficult books with your father ... he, a man with a first-cla.s.s mind, cared to read with me and discuss with me...."

"Oh yes, yes, mother, I know."

Jim and all of them knew all about those long-ago difficult books. They knew too about the clever friends who used to drop in and talk.... If only Mrs. Hilary could have been one of the nice, jolly, refres.h.i.+ng people who own that they never read and never want to. All this fuss about reading, and cleverness--how tedious it was! As if being stupid mattered, as if it was worth bothering about.

"Of course we don't think you a fool, mother dear; how could we?"

Jim was kind and affectionate, never ironic, like Gilbert, or impatient, like Nan. But he felt now the need for fresh air; the arbour was too small for him and Mrs. Hilary, who was as tiring to others as to herself.

"I think I shall go and interrupt Neville over her studies," said Jim, and left the arbour.

Mrs. Hilary looked after him, painfully loving his square, straight back, his fine dark head, just flecked with grey, the clean line of his profile, with the firm jaw clenched over the pipe. To have produced Jim--wasn't that enough to have lived for? Mrs. Hilary was one of those mothers who apply the Magnificat to their own cases. She always felt a bond of human sympathy between herself and that lady called the Virgin Mary, whom she thought over-estimated.

3

Neville raised heavy violet eyes, faintly ringed with shadows, to Jim as he came into the library. She looked at him for a moment absently, then smiled. He came over to her and looked at the book before her.

"Working? Where've you got to? Let's see how much you know."

He took the book from her and glanced at it to see what she had been reading.

"Now we'll have an examination; it'll be good practice for you."

He put a question, and she answered it, frowning a little.

"H'm. That's not very good, my dear."

He tried again; this time she could not answer at all. At the third question she shook her head.

"It's no use, Jimmy. My head's hopeless this afternoon. Another time."

He shut the book.

"Yes. So it seems.... You're overdoing it, Neville. You can't go on like this."

She lay back and spread out her hands hopelessly.