Dangerous Ages | Page 9

Hilary had lived in and by her emotions; nothing else had counted. Life for her had burnt itself out, and its remnant was like the fag end of a cigarette, stale and old.
"Shall I feel like that in twenty years?" Neville speculated aloud.
"I hope," said Mrs. Hilary, "that you won't have lost Rodney. So long as you have him...."
"But if I haven't...."
Neville looked down the years; saw herself without Rodney, perhaps looking after her mother, who would then have become (strange, incredible thought, but who could say?) calm with the calm of age; Kay and Gerda married or working or both.... What then? Only she was better equipped than her mother for the fag end of life; she had a serviceable brain and a sound education. She wouldn't pass empty days at a seaside resort. She would work at something, and be interested. Interesting work and interesting friends--her mother, by her very nature, could have neither, but was just clever enough to feel the want of them. The thing was to start some definite work now, before it was too late.
"Did Grandmama go through it?" Neville asked her mother.
"Oh, I expect so. I was selfish; I was wrapped up in home and all of you; I didn't notice. But I think she had it badly, for a time, when first she left the vicarage.... She's contented now."
They both looked at Grandmama, who was playing patience on the sofa and could not hear their talking for the sound of the sea. Yes, Grandmama was (apparently) contented now.
"There's work," mused Neville, thinking of the various links with life, the rafts, rather, which should carry age over the cold seas of tedious regret. "And there's natural gaiety. And intellectual interests. And contacts with other people--permanent contacts and temporary ones. And beauty. All those things. For some people, too, there's religion."
"And for all of us food and drink," said Mrs. Hilary, sharply. "Oh, I suppose you think I've no right to complain, as I've got all those things, except work."
But Neville shook her head, knowing that this was a delusion of her mother's, and that she had, in point of fact, none of them, except the contacts with people, which mostly either over-strained, irritated or bored her, and that aspect of religion which made her cry. For she was a Unitarian, and thought the Gospels infinitely sad and the souls of the departed most probably so merged in God as to be deprived of all individuality.
"It's better to be High Church or Roman Catholic and have services, or an Evangelical and have the Voice of God," Neville decided. And, indeed, it is probable that Mrs. Hilary would have been one or other of these things if it had not been for her late husband, who had disapproved of superstition and had instructed her in the Higher Thought and the Larger Hope.
3
Though heaviness endured for the night, joy came in the morning, as is apt to happen where there is sea air. Mrs. Hilary on her birthday had a revulsion to gaiety, owing to a fine day, her unstable temperament, letters, presents and being made a fuss of. Also Grandmama said, when she went up to see her after breakfast, "This new dress suits you particularly, my dear child. It brings out the colour in your eyes," and everyone likes to hear that when they are sixty-three or any other age.
So, when the rest of her children arrived, Mrs. Hilary was ready for them.
They embraced her in turn; Pamela, capable, humorous and intelligent, the very type of the professional woman at her best, but all the time preferring Frances Carr, anxious about her because she was overworking and run down; Nan, her extravagant present in her hands, on fire to protect her mother against old age, depression and Rosalind, yet knowing too how soon she herself would be smouldering with irritation; Gilbert, spare and cynical, writer of plays and literary editor of the Weekly Critic, and with him his wife Rosalind, whom Mrs. Hilary had long since judged as a voluptuous rake who led men on and made up unseemly stories and her lovely face, but who insisted on coming to The Gulls with Gilbert to see his adorable mother. Rosalind, who was always taking up things--art, or religion, or spiritualism, or young men--and dropping them when they bored her, had lately taken up psycho-analysis. She was studying what she called her mother-in-law's "case," looking for and finding complexes in her past which should account for her somewhat unbalanced present.
"I've never had complexes," Mrs. Hilary would declare, indignantly, as if they had been fleas or worse, and indeed when Rosalind handled them they were worse, much. From Rosalind Mrs. Hilary got the most unpleasant impression possible (which is to say a good deal) of psycho-analysts.