Dangerous Ages Part 9

Mrs. Hilary could hear herself protesting.

"I am _not_ unhappy because of my baptism, which, so far as I know, went off without a hitch. I am _not_ troubled by my first bath, nor by any later bath. Indeed, indeed you must believe me, it is not that at all."

"The more they protest," the psycho-a.n.a.lyst would murmur, "the more it is so." For that was what Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung always said, so that there was no escape from their aspersions.

"Why do _you_ think you are so often unhappy?" he would ask her, to draw her out and she would reply, "Because my life is over. Because I am an old discarded woman, thrown away onto the dust-heap like a broken egg-sh.e.l.l. Because my husband is gone and my children are gone, and they do not love me as I love them. Because I have only my mother to live with, and she is calm and cares for nothing but only waits for the end.

Because I have nothing to do from morning till night. Because I am sixty-three, and that is too old and too young. Because life is empty and disappointing, and I am tired, and drift like seaweed tossed to and fro by the waves."

It sounded indeed enough, and tears would fill her eyes as she said it.

The psycho-a.n.a.lyst would listen, pa.s.sive and sceptical but intelligent.

"Not one of your reasons is the correct one. But I will find the true reason for you and expose it, and after that it will trouble you no more.

Now you shall relate to me the whole history of your life."

What a comfortable moment! Mrs. Hilary, when she came to it in her imagined interview, would draw a deep breath and settle down and begin.

The story of her life! How absorbing a thing to relate to someone who really wanted to hear it! How far better than the confessional--for priests, besides requiring only those portions and parcels of the dreadful past upon which you had least desire to dwell, had almost certainly no interest at all in hearing even these, but only did it because they had to, and you would be boring them. They might even say, as one had said to Rosalind during the first confession which had inaugurated her brief ecclesiastical career, and to which she had looked forward with some interest as a luxurious re-living of a stimulating past--"No details, please." Rosalind, who had had many details ready, had come away disappointed, feeling that the Church was not all she had hoped. But the psycho-a.n.a.lyst doctor would really want to hear details. Of course he would prefer the kind of detail which Rosalind would have been able to furnish out of her experience, for that was what psycho-a.n.a.lysts recognised as true life. Mrs. Hilary's experiences were pale in comparison; but psycho-a.n.a.lysts could and did make much out of little, bricks without clay. She would tell him all about the children--how sweet they were as babies, how Jim had nearly died of croup, Neville of bronchitis and Nan of convulsions, whereas Pamela had always been so well, and Gilbert had suffered only from infant debility.

She would relate how early and how unusually they had all given signs of intelligence; how Jim had always loved her more than anything in the world, until his marriage, and she him (this was a firm article in Mrs.

Hilary's creed); how Neville had always cherished and cared for her, and how she loved Neville beyond anything in the world but Jim; how Gilbert had disappointed her by taking to writing instead of to a man's job, and then by marrying Rosalind; how Nan had always been tiresome and perverse.

And before the children came--all about Richard, and their courts.h.i.+p, and their young married life, and how he had loved and cared for her beyond anything, incredibly tenderly and well, so that all those who saw it had wondered, and some had said he spoilt her. And back before Richard, to girlhood and childhood, to parents and nursery, to her brother and sister, now dead. How she had fought with her sister because they had both always wanted the same things and got in one another's way! The jealousies, the bitter, angry tears!

To pour it all out--what comfort! To feel that someone was interested, even though it might be only as a case. The trouble about most people was that they weren't interested. They didn't mostly, even pretend they were.

2

She tried Barry Briscoe, the week-end he came down and found Nan gone.

Barry Briscoe was by way of being interested in people and things in general; he had that kind of alert mind and face.

He came up from the tennis lawn, where he had been playing a single with Rodney, and sat down by her and Grandmama in the shade of the cedar, hot and friendly and laughing and out of breath. Now Neville and Rodney were playing Gerda and Kay. Grandmama's old eyes, pleased behind their gla.s.ses, watched the b.a.l.l.s fly and thought everyone clever who got one over the net. She hadn't played tennis in her youth. Mrs. Hilary's more eager, excited eyes watched Neville driving, smas.h.i.+ng, volleying, returning, and thought how slim and young a thing she looked, to have all that power stored in her. She was fleeter than Gerda, she struck harder than Kay, she was trickier than all of them, the beloved girl. That was the way Mrs. Hilary watched tennis, thinking of the players, not of the play. It is the way some people talk, thinking of the talkers, not of what they are saying. It is the personal touch, and a way some women have.

But Barry Briscoe, watching cleverly through his bright gla.s.ses, was thinking of the strokes. He was an unconscious person. He lived in moments.

"Well done, Gerda," Grandmama would call, when Gerda, cool and nonchalant, dropped, a sitter at Rodney's feet, and when Rodney smashed it back she said, "But father's too much for you."

"Gerda's a _scandal_," Barry said. "She doesn't care. She can hit all right when she likes. She thinks about something else half the time."

His smile followed the small white figure with its bare golden head that gleamed in the grey afternoon. An absurd, lovable, teasable child, he found her.

Grandmama's maid came to wheel her down to the farm. Grandmama had promised to go and see the farmer's wife and new baby. Grandmama always saw wives and new babies. They never palled. You would think that by eighty-four she had seen enough new babies, more than enough, that she had seen through that strange business and could now take it for granted, the stream of funny new life cascading into the already so full world.

But Grandmama would always go and see it, handle it, admire it, peer at it with her smiling eyes that had seen so many lives come and go and that must know by now that babies are born to trouble as naturally as the sparks fly upward.

So off Grandmama rode in her wheeled chair, and Mrs. Hilary and Barry Briscoe were left alone. Mrs. Hilary and this pleasant, brown, friendly young man, who cared for Workers' Education and Continuation Schools, and Penal Reform, and Garden Cities, and Getting Things Done by Acts of Parliament, about all which things Mrs. Hilary knew and cared nothing.

But vaguely she felt that they sprang out of and must include a care for human beings as such, and that therefore Barry Briscoe would listen if she told him things.

So (it came out of lying on gra.s.s, which Barry was doing) she told him about the pneumonia of Neville as a child, how they had been staying in Cornwall, miles from a doctor, and without Mr. Hilary, and Mrs. Hilary had been in despair; how Jim, a little chap of twelve, had ridden off on his pony in the night to fetch the doctor, across the moors. A long story; stories about illnesses always are. Mrs. Hilary got worked up and excited as she told it; it came back to her so vividly, the dreadful night.

"He was a Dr. Chalmers, and so kind. When he saw Neville he was horrified; by that time she was delirious. He said if Jim hadn't gone straight to him but had waited till the morning, it might have been too late...."

"Too late: quite. ..." Barry Briscoe had an understanding, sympathetic grip of one's last few words. So much of the conversation of others eludes one, but one should hold fast the last few words.

"Oh played, Gerda: did you that time, Bendish...."

Gerda had put on, probably by accident, a sudden, absurd twist that had made a fool of Rodney.

That was what Barry Briscoe was really attending to, the silly game. This alert, seemingly interested, attentive young man had a nice manner, that led you on, but he didn't really care. He lived in the moment: he cared for prisoners and workers, and probably for people who were ill _now_, but not that someone had been ill all those years ago. He only pretended to care; he was polite. He turned his keen, pleasant face up to her when he had done shouting about the game, and said "How splendid that he got to you in time!" but he didn't really care. Mrs. Hilary found that women were better listeners than men. Women are perhaps better trained; they think it more ill-mannered not to show interest. They will listen to stories about servants, or reports of the inane sayings of infants, they will hear you through, without the flicker of a yawn, but with e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns and noddings, while you tell them about your children's diseases. They are well-bred; they drive themselves on a tight rein, and endure. They are the world's martyrs.

But men, less restrained, will fidget and wander and sigh and yawn, and change the subject.

To trap and hold the sympathy of a man--how wonderful! Who wanted a pack of women? What you really wanted was some man whose trade it was to listen and to give heed. Some man to whom your daughter's pneumonia, of however long ago, was not irrelevant, but had its own significance, as having helped to build you up as you were, you, the problem, with your wonderful, puzzling temperament, so full of complexes, inconsistencies and needs. Some man who didn't lose interest in you just because you were grey-haired and sixty-three.

"I'm afraid I've been taking your attention from the game," said Mrs.

Hilary to Barry Briscoe.

Compunction stabbed him. Had he been rude to this elderly lady, who had been telling him a long tale without a point while he watched the tennis and made polite, attentive sounds?

"Not a bit, Mrs. Hilary." He sat up, and looked friendlier than ever.

"I've been thrilled." A charming, easy liar Barry was, when he deemed it necessary. His Quaker parents would have been shocked. But there was truth in it, after all. For people were so interested in themselves, that one was, in a sense, interested in the stories they told one, even stories about illness. Besides, this was the mother of Nan; Nan, who was so abruptly and inexplicably not here to-day, whose absence was hurting him, when he stopped to think, like an aching tooth; for he was not sure, yet feared, what she meant by it.

"Tell me," he said, half to please Nan's mother and half on his own account, "some stories of Nan when she was small. I should think she was a fearful child...."

He was interested, thought Mrs. Hilary, in Nan, but not in her. That was natural, of course. No man would ever again want to hear stories of _her_ childhood. The familiar bitterness rose and beat in her like a wave. Nan was thirty-four and she was sixty-three. She could talk only of far-off things, and theories about conduct and life which sounded all right at first but were exposed after two minutes as not having behind them the background of any knowledge or any brain. That hadn't mattered when she was a girl; men would often rather they hadn't. But at sixty-three you have nothing.... The bitter emptiness of sixty-three turned her sick with frustration. Life was over, over, over, for her and she was to tell stories of Nan, who had everything.

Then the mother in her rose up, to claim and grasp for her child, even for the child she loved least.

"Nan? Nan was always a most dreadfully sensitive child, and temperamental. She took after me, I'm afraid; the others were more like their father. I remember when she was quite a little thing...."

Barry had asked for it. But he hadn't known that, out of the brilliant, uncertain Nan, exciting as a Punch and Judy show, anything so tedious could be spun....

3

Mrs. Hilary was up in town by herself for a day's shopping. The sales were on at Barker's and Derry and Tom's. Mrs. Hilary wandered about these shops, and even Ponting's and bought little bags, and presents for everyone, remnants, oddments, underwear, some green silk for a frock for Gerda, a shady hat for herself, a wonderful cus.h.i.+on for Grandmama with a picture of the sea on it, a silk knitted jumper for Neville, of the same purplish blue as her eyes. She was happy, going about like a bee from flower to flower, gathering this honey for them all. She had come up alone; she hadn't let Neville come with her. She had said she was going to be an independent old woman. But what she really meant was that she had proposed herself for tea with Rosalind in Campden Hill Square, and wanted to be alone for that.

Rosalind had been surprised, for Mrs. Hilary seldom favoured her with a visit. She had found the letter on the hall table when she and Gilbert had come in from a dinner party two evenings ago.

"Your mother's coming to tea on Thursday, Gilbert. Tea with me. She says she wants a talk. I feel flattered. She says nothing about wanting to see you, so you'd better leave us alone, anyhow for a bit."

Rosalind's beautiful bistre-brown eyes smiled. She enjoyed her talks with her mother-in-law; they furnished her with excellent material, to be worked up later by the raconteuse's art into something too delicious and absurd. She enjoyed, too, telling Mrs. Hilary the latest scandals; she was so shocked and disgusted; and it was fun dropping little accidental hints about Nan, and even about Gilbert. Anyhow, what a treasure of a relic of the Victorian age! And how comic in her jealousy, her ingenuous, futile boasting, her so readily exposed deceits! And how she hated Rosalind herself, the painted, corrupt woman who was dragging Gilbert down!

"Whatever does she want a talk about?" Rosalind wondered. "It must be something pretty urgent, to make her put up with an hour of my company."

4

At four o'clock on Thursday afternoon Rosalind went upstairs and put on an extra coating of powder and rouge. She also blackened her eyelashes and put on her lips salve the colour of strawberries rather than of the human mouth. She wore an afternoon dress with transparent black sleeves through which her big arms gleamed, pale and smooth. She looked a superb and altogether improper creature, like Lucrezia Borgia or a t.i.tian madonna. She came down and lay among great black and gold satin cus.h.i.+ons, and lit a scented cigarette and opened a new French novel. Black and gold was her new scheme for her drawing-room; she had had it done this spring.

It had a sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold hair. Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a decadent and cynical pope. The note of the room was really too p.r.o.nounced for Gilbert's fastidious and scholarly eloquence; he lost vitality in it, and dwindled to the pale thin casket of a brain.

And Mrs. Hilary, when she entered it, trailing in, tall and thin, in her sagging grey coat and skirt, her wispy grey hair escaping from under her floppy black hat, and with the air of having till a moment ago been hung about with parcels (she had left them in the hall), looked altogether unsuited to her environment, like a dowdy lady from the provinces, as she was.