Rose Macaulay - Dangerous Ages
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Rose Macaulay >> Dangerous Ages
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The thought of Rodney stabbed her. If Rodney were to get to care
less ... to stop making love to her ... worse, to stop needing
her.... For he did need her; through all their relationship,
disappointing in some of its aspects, his need had persisted, a simple,
demanding thing.
Humour suddenly came back.
"This, I suppose, is what Gerda is anticipating, and why she won't have
Barry tied to her. If Rodney wasn't tied to me he could flee from my
wrinkles...."
"Oh, what an absurd fuss one makes. What does any of it matter? It's all
in the course of nature, and the sooner 'tis over the sooner to sleep.
Middle age will be very nice and comfortable and entertaining, once one's
fairly in it.... I go babbling about my wasted brain and fading looks as
if I'd been a mixture of Sappho and Helen of Troy.... That's the worst of
being a vain creature.... What will Rosalind do when _her_ time comes?
Oh, paint, of course, and dye--more thickly than she does now, I mean.
She'll be a ghastly sight. A raddled harridan. At least I shall always
look respectable, I hope. I shall go down to Gerda. I want to look at
something young. The young have their troubles, poor darlings, but they
don't know how lucky they are."
2
In November Neville and Gerda, now both convalescent, joined Rodney in
their town flat. Rodney thought London would buck Neville up. London does
buck you up, even if it is November and there is no gulf stream and not
much coal. For there is always music and always people. Neville had a
critical appreciation of both. Then, for comic relief, there are
politics. You cannot be really bored with a world which contains the
mother of Parliaments, particularly if her news is communicated to you
at first hand by one of her members. Disgusted you may be and are, if
you are a right-minded person, but at least not bored.
What variety, what excitement, what a moving picture show, is this tragic
and comic planet! Why want to be useful, why indulge such tedious
inanities as ambitions, why dream wistfully of doing one's bit, making
one's work, in a world already as full of bits, bright, coloured, absurd
bits, like a kaleidoscope, as full of marks (mostly black marks) as a
novel from a free library? A dark and bad and bitter world, of course,
full of folly, wickedness and misery, sick with poverty and pain, so that
at times the only thing Neville could bear to do in it was to sit on some
dreadful committee thinking of ameliorations for the lot of the very
poor, or to go and visit Pamela in Hoxton and help her with some job or
other--that kind of direct, immediate, human thing, which was a sop to
uneasiness and pity such as the political work she dabbled in, however
similar its ultimate aim, could never be.
3
To Pamela Neville said, "Are you afraid of getting old, Pamela?"
Pamela replied, "Not a bit. Are you?" And she confessed it.
"Often it's like a cold douche of water down my spine, the thought of it.
I reason and mock at myself, but I _don't_ like it.... You're different;
finer, more real, more unselfish. Besides, you'll have done something
worth doing when you have to give up. I shan't."
Pamela's brows went up.
"Kay? Gerda? The pretty dears: I've done nothing so nice as them. You've
done what's called a woman's work in the world--isn't that the phrase?"
"Done it--just so, but so long ago. What now? I still feel young, Pamela,
even now that I know I'm not. ... Oh Lord, it's a queer thing, being a
woman. A well-off woman of forty-three with everything made comfortable
for her and her brain gone to pot and her work in the world done. I want
something to bite my teeth into--some solid, permanent job--and I get
nothing but sweetmeats, and people point at Kay and Gerda and say 'That's
your work, and it's over. Now you can rest, seeing that it's good, like
God on the seventh day.'"
"_I_ don't say 'Now you can rest. Except just now, while you're run
down.'"
"Run down, yes; run down like a disordered clock because I tried to
tackle an honest job of work again. Isn't it sickening, Pamela? Isn't it
ludicrous?"
"Ludicrous--no. Everyone comes up against his own limitations. You've got
to work within them that's all. After all, there are plenty of jobs you
can do that want doing--simply shouting to be done."
"Pammie dear, it's worse than I've said. I'm a low creature. I don't only
want to do jobs that want doing: I want to count, to make a name. I'm
damnably ambitious. You'll despise that, of course--and you're quite
right, it is despicable. But there it is. Most men and many women are
tormented by it--they itch for recognition."
"Of course. One is."
"You too, Pammie?"
"I have been. Less now. Life gets to look short, when you're
thirty-nine."
"Ah, but you have it--recognition, even fame, in the world you work in.
You count for something. If you value it, there it is. I wouldn't grumble
if I'd played your part in the piece. It's a good part--a useful part
and a speaking part."
"I suppose we all feel we should rather like to play someone else's part
for a change. There's nothing exciting about mine. Most people would far
prefer yours."
They would, of course; Neville knew it. The happy political wife rather
than the unmarried woman worker; Rodney, Gerda and Kay for company rather
than Frances Carr. There was no question which was the happier lot, the
fuller, the richer, the easier, the more entertaining.
"Ah well.... You see, Rosalind spent the afternoon with me yesterday, and
I felt suddenly that it wasn't for me to be stuck up about her--what am I
too but the pampered female idler, taking good things without earning
them? It made me shudder. Hence this fit of blues. The pampered, lazy,
brainless animal--it is such a terrific sight when in human form.
Rosalind talked about Nan, Pamela. In her horrible way--you know. Hinting
that she isn't alone in Rome, but with Stephen Lumley."
Pamela took off her glasses and polished them.
"Rosalind would, of course. What did you say?"
"I lost my temper. I let out at her. It's not a thing I often do with
Rosalind--it doesn't seem worth while. But this time I saw red. I told
her what I thought of her eternal gossip and scandal. I said, what if Nan
and Stephen Lumley, or Nan and anyone else, did arrange to be in Rome at
the same time and to see a lot of each other; where was the harm? No use.
You can't pin Rosalind down. She just shrugged her shoulders and smiled,
and said 'My dear, we all know our Nan. We all know too that Stephen
Lumley has been in love with her for a year, and doesn't live with his
wife. Then they go off to Rome at the same moment, and one hears that
they are seen everywhere together. Why shut one's eyes to obvious
deductions? You're so like an ostrich, Neville.' I said I'd rather be
an ostrich than a ferret, eternally digging into other people's
concerns,--and by the time we had got to that I thought it was far
enough, so I had an engagement with my dressmaker."
"It's no use tackling Rosalind," Pamela agreed. "She'll never change her
spots.... Do you suppose it's true about Nan?"
"I daresay it is. Yes, I'm afraid I do think it's quite likely
true.... Nan was so queer the few times I saw her after Gerda's accident.
I was unhappy about her. She was so hard, and so more than usually
cynical and unget-at-able. She told me it had been all her fault,
leading Gerda into mischief, doing circus tricks that the child tried to
emulate and couldn't. I couldn't read her, quite. Her tone about Gerda
had a queer edge to it. And she rather elaborately arranged, I thought,
so that she shouldn't meet Barry. Pamela, do you think she had finally
and absolutely turned Barry down before he took up so suddenly with
Gerda, or...."
Pamela said, "I know nothing. She told me nothing. But I rather thought,
when she came to see me just before she went down to Cornwall, that she
had made up her mind to have him. I may have been wrong."
Neville leant her forehead on her hands and sighed.
"Or you may have been right. And if you were right, it's the ghastliest
tragedy--for her.... Oh, I shouldn't have let Gerda go and work with him;
I should have known better.... Nan had rebuffed him, and he flew off at a
tangent, and there was Gerda sitting in his office, as pretty as flowers
and with her funny little silent charm.... And if Nan was all the time
waiting for him, meaning to say yes when he asked her.... Poor darling
Nan, robbed by my horrid little girl, who doesn't even want to
marry.... If that's the truth, it would account for the Stephen Lumley
business. Nan wouldn't stay on in London, to see them together. If Lumley
caught her at that psychological moment, she'd very likely go off with
him, out of mere desperation and bravado. That would be so terribly like
Nan.... What a desperate, wry, cursed business life is.... On the other
hand, she may just be going about with Lumley on her own terms not his.
It's her own affair whichever way it is; what we've got to do is to
contradict the stories Rosalind is spreading whenever we get the chance.
Not that one can scotch scandal once it starts--particularly Rosalind's
scandal."
"Ignore it. Nan can ignore it when she comes back. It won't hurt her.
Nan's had plenty of things said about her before, true and untrue, and
never cared."
"You're splendid at the ignoring touch, Pam. I believe there's nothing
you can't and don't ignore."
"Well, why not? Ignoring's easy."
"Not for most of us. I believe it is, for you. In a sense you ignore life
itself; anyhow you don't let it hold and bully you. When your time comes
you'll ignore age, and later death."
"They don't matter much, do they? Does anything? I suppose it's my stolid
temperament, but I can't feel that it does."
Neville thought, as she had often thought before, that Pamela, like Nan,
only more calmly, less recklessly and disdainfully, had the aristocratic
touch. Pamela, with her delicate detachments and her light, even touch on
things great and small, made her feel fussy and petty and excitable.
"I suppose you're right, my dear.... 'All is laughter, all is dust,
all is nothingness, for the things that are arise out of the
unreasonable....' I must get back. Give my love to Frances... and when
next you see Gerda do try to persuade her that marriage is one of the
things that don't matter and that she might just as well put up with to
please us all. The child is a little nuisance--as obstinate as a mule."
4
Neville, walking away from Pamela's grimy street in the November fog,
felt that London was terrible. An ugly clamour of strident noises and
hard, shrill voices, jabbering of vulgar, trivial things. A wry,
desperate, cursed world, as she had called it, a pot seething with
bitterness and all dreadfulness, with its Rosalinds floating on the top
like scum.
And Nan, her Nan, her little vehement sister, whom she had mothered
of old, had pulled out of countless scrapes--Nan had now taken her
life into her reckless hands and done what with it? Given it, perhaps,
to a man she didn't love, throwing cynical defiance thereby at love,
which had hurt her; escaping from the intolerable to the shoddy. Even
if not, even supposing the best, Nan was hurt and in trouble; Neville
was somehow sure of that. Men were blind fools; men were fickle children.
Neville almost wished now that Barry would give up Gerda and go out to
Rome and fetch Nan back. But, to do that, Barry would have to fall
out of love with Gerda and into love again with Nan; and even Barry,
Neville imagined, was not such a weathercock as that. And Barry would
really be happier with Gerda. With all their differences, they were
both earnest citizens, both keen on social progress. Nan was a cynical
flibberty-gibbet; it might not have been a happy union. Perhaps happy
unions were not for such as Nan. But at the thought of Nan playing that
desperate game with Stephen Lumley in Rome, Neville's face twitched....
She would go to Rome. She would see Nan; find out how things were. Nan
always liked to see her, would put up with her even when she wanted no
one else.
That was, at least, a job one could do. These family jobs--they still go
on, they never cease, even when one is getting middle-aged and one's
brain has gone to pot. They remain, always, the jobs of the affections.
She would write to Nan to-night, and tell her she was starting for Rome
in a few days, to have a respite from the London fogs.
5
But she did not start for Rome, or even write to Nan, for when she got
home she went to bed with influenza.
CHAPTER XII
THE MOTHER
1
The happiness Mrs. Hilary now enjoyed was of the religious type--a deep,
warm glow, which did not lack excitement. She felt as those may be
presumed to feel who have just been converted to some church--newly
alive, and sunk in spiritual peace, and in profound harmony with life.
Where were the old rubs, frets, jars and ennuis? Vanished, melted like
yesterday's snows in the sun of this new peace. It was as if she had cast
her burden upon the Lord. That, said her psycho-analyst doctor, was quite
in order; that was what it ought to be like. That was, in effect, what
she had in point of fact done; only the place of the Lord was filled by
himself. To put the matter briefly, transference of burden had been
effected; Mrs. Hilary had laid all her cares, all her perplexities, all
her grief, upon this quiet, acute-looking man, who sat with her twice a
week for an hour, drawing her out, arranging her symptoms for her,
penetrating the hidden places of her soul, looking like a cross between
Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Henry Ainley. Her confidence in him was, he told
her, the expression of the father-image, which surprised Mrs. Hilary a
little, because he was twenty years her junior.
Mrs. Hilary felt that she was getting to know herself very well indeed.
Seeing herself through Mr. Cradock's mind, she felt that she was indeed a
curious jumble of complexes, of strange, mysterious impulses, desires and
fears. Alarming, even horrible in some ways; so that often she thought
"Can he be right about me? Am I really like that? Do I really hope that
Marjorie (Jim's wife) will die, so that Jim and I may be all in all to
each other again? Am I really so wicked?" But Mr. Cradock said that it
was not at all wicked, perfectly natural and normal--the Unconscious
_was_ like that. And worse than that; how much worse he had to break to
Mrs. Hilary, who was refined and easily shocked, by gentle hints and slow
degrees, lest she should be shocked to death. Her dreams, which she had
to recount to him at every sitting, bore such terrible significance--they
grew worse and worse in proportion, as Mrs. Hilary could stand more.
"Ah well," Mrs. Hilary sighed uneasily, after an interpretation into
strange terms of a dream she had about bathing, "it's very odd, when I've
never even thought about things like that."
"Your Unconscious," said Mr. Cradock, firmly, "has thought the more. The
more your Unconscious is obsessed by a thing, the less your conscious
self thinks of it. It is shy of the subject, for that very reason."
Mrs. Hilary was certainly shy of the subject, for that reason or others.
When she felt too shy of it, Mr. Cradock let her change it. "It may be
true," she would say, "but it's very terrible, and I would rather not
dwell on it."
So he would let her dwell instead on the early days of her married life,
or on the children's childhood, or on her love for Neville and Jim, or on
her impatience with her mother.
2
They were happy little times, stimulating, cosy little times. They spoke
straight to the heart, easing it of its weight of tragedy. A splendid
man, Mr. Cradock, with his shrewd, penetrating sympathy, his kind
firmness. He would listen with interest to everything; the sharp words
she had had with Grandmama, troubles with the maids, the little rubs
of daily life (and what a rubbing business life is, to be sure!) as
well as to profounder, more tragic accounts of desolation, jealousy,
weariness and despair. He would say "Your case is a very usual one,"
so that she did not feel ashamed of being like that. He reduced it all,
dispassionately and yet not unsympathetically, and with clear scientific
precision, to terms of psychical and physical laws. He trained his
patient to use her mind and her will, as well as to remember her dreams
and to be shocked at nothing that they signified.
Mrs. Hilary would wake each morning, or during the night, and clutch at
the dream which was flying from her, clutch and secure it, and make it
stand and deliver its outlines to her. She was content with outlines; it
was for Mr. Cradock to supply the interpretation. Sometimes, if Mrs.
Hilary couldn't remember any dreams, he would supply, according to a
classic precedent, the dream as well as the interpretation. But on the
whole, deeply as she revered and admired him, Mrs. Hilary preferred to
remember her own dreams; what they meant was bad enough, but the meaning
of the dreams that Mr. Cradock told her she had dreamt was beyond all
words.... That terrible Unconscious! Mrs. Hilary disliked it excessively;
she felt rather as if it were a sewer, sunk beneath an inadequate
grating.
But from Mr. Cradock she put up with hearing about it. She would have put
up with anything. He was so steadying and so wonderful. He enabled her to
face life with a new poise, a fresh lease of strength and vitality. She
told Grandmama so. Grandmama said "Yes, my dear, I've observed it in you.
It sounds to me an unpleasing business, but it is obviously doing you
good, so far. I only wish it may last. The danger may be reaction, after
you have finished the course and lost touch with this young man." (Mr.
Cradock was forty-five, but Grandmama, it must be remembered, was
eighty-four.) "You will have to guard against that. In a way it was a
pity you didn't take up church-going instead; religion lasts."
"And these quackeries do not," Grandmama finished her sentence to
herself, not wishing to be discouraging.
"Not always," Mrs. Hilary truly replied, meaning that religion did not
always last.
"No," Grandmama agreed. "Unfortunately not always. Particularly when it
is High Church. There was your uncle Bruce, of course...."
Mrs. Hilary's uncle Bruce, who had been High Church for a season, and had
even taken Orders in the year 1860, but whose faith had wilted in the
heat and toil of the day, so that by 1870 he was an agnostic barrister,
took Grandmama back through the last century, and she became reminiscent
over the Tractarian movement, and, later, the Ritualists.
"The Queen never could abide them," said Grandmama. "Nor could Lord
Beaconsfield, nor your father, though he was always kind and tolerant.
I remember when Dr. Jowett came to stay with us, how they talked about
it.... Ah well, they've become very prominent since then, and done a
great deal of good work, and there are many very able, excellent men and
women among them.... But they're not High Church any longer, they tell
me. They're Catholics in these days. I don't know enough of them to judge
them, but I don't think they can have the dignity of the old High Church
party, for if they had I can't imagine that Gilbert's wife, for instance,
would have joined them, even for so short a time as she did.... Well, it
suits some people, and psycho-analysis obviously suits others. Only I do
hope you will try to keep moderate and balanced, my child, and not
believe all this young man tells you. Parts of it do sound so very
strange."
(But Mrs. Hilary would not have dreamt of repeating to Grandmama the
strangest parts of all.)
"I feel a new woman," she said, fervently, and Grandmama smiled, well
pleased, thinking that it certainly did seem rather like the old
evangelical conversions of her youth. (Which, of course, did not always
last, any more than the High Church equivalents did.)
All Grandmama committed herself to, in her elderly caution, which came
however less from age than from having known Mrs. Hilary for sixty-three
years, was "Well, well, we must see."
3
And then Rosalind's letter came. It came by the afternoon post--the big,
mauve, scented, sprawled sheets, dashingly monographed across one corner.
"Gilbert's wife," pronounced Grandmama, non-committally from her easy
chair, and, said in that tone, it was quite sufficient comment. "Another
cup of tea, please, Emily."
Mrs. Hilary gave it to her, then began to read aloud the letter from
Gilbert's wife. Gilbert's wife was one of the topics upon which she and
Grandmama were in perfect accord, only that Mrs. Hilary was irritated
when Grandmama pushed the responsibility for the relationship onto her by
calling Rosalind "your daughter-in-law."
Mrs. Hilary began to read the letter in the tone used by well-bred women
when they would, if in a slightly lower social stratum, say "Fancy that
now! Did you ever, the brazen hussy!" Grandmama listened, cynically
disapproving, prepared to be disgusted yet entertained. On the whole she
thoroughly enjoyed letters from Gilbert's wife. She settled down
comfortably in her chair with her second cup of tea, while Mrs. Hilary
read two pages of what Grandmama called "foolish chit-chat." Rosalind's
letters were really like the gossipping imbecilities written by Eve of
the Tatler, or the other ladies who enliven our shinier-paper weeklies
with their bright personal babble. She did not often waste one of them on
her mother-in-law; only when she had something to say which might annoy
her.
"Do you hear from Nan?" the third page of the letter began. "I hear from
the Bramertons, who are wintering in Rome--the Charlie Bramertons, you
know, great friends of mine and Gilbert's (he won a pot of money on the
Derby this year and they've a dinky flat in some palace out there--), and
they meet Nan about, and she's always with Stephen Lumley, the painter
(rotten painter, if you ask me, but he's somehow diddled London into
admiring him, don't expect you've heard of him down at the seaside).
Well, they're quite simply _always_ together, and the Brams say that
everyone out there says it isn't in the least an ambiguous case--no two
ways about it. He doesn't live with his wife, you know. You'll excuse me
passing this on to you, but it does seem you ought to know. I mentioned
it to Neville the other day, just before the poor old dear went down with
the plague, but you know what Neville is, she always sticks up for Nan
and doesn't care _what_ she does, or what people say. People are talking;
beasts, aren't they! But that's the way of this wicked old world, we all
do it. Gilbert's quite upset about it, says Nan ought to manage her
affairs more quietly. But after all and between you and me it's not the
first time Nan's been a Town Topic, is it.
"How's the psycho going? Isn't Cradock rather a priceless pearl? You're
over head and ears with him by now, of course, we all are. Psycho
wouldn't do you any good if you weren't, that's the truth. Cradock told
me himself once that transference can't be effected without the patient
being a little bit smitten. Personally I should give up a man patient at
once if he didn't rather like me. But isn't it soothing and comforting,
and doesn't it make you feel good all over, like a hot bath when you're
fagged out...."
But Mrs. Hilary didn't get as far as this. She stopped at "not the first
time Nan's been a Town Topic...." and dropped the thin mauve sheets onto
her lap, and looked at Grandmama, her face queerly tight and flushed, as
if she were about to cry.
Grandmama had finished her tea, and had been listening quietly.
Mrs. Hilary said "Oh, my God," and jerked her head back, quivering like
a nervous horse who has had a shock and does not care to conceal it.
"Your daughter-in-law," said Grandmama, without excitement, "is an
exceedingly vulgar young woman."
"Vulgar? Rosalind? But of course.... Only that doesn't affect Nan...."
"Your daughter-in-law," Grandmama added, "is also a very notorious liar."
"A liar ... oh yes, yes, yes.... But this time it's true. Oh I feel,
I know, it's true. Nan _would_. That Stephen Lumley--he's been hanging
about her for ages. ... Oh yes, it's true what they say. The very
worst...."
Grandmama glanced at her curiously. The very worst in that direction
had become strangely easier of credence by Mrs. Hilary lately. Grandmama
had observed that. Mr. Cradock's teaching had not been without its
effect. According to Mr. Cradock, people were usually engaged either in
practising the very worst, or in desiring to practise it, or in wishing
and dreaming that they had practised it. It was the nature of mankind,
and not in the least reprehensible, though curable. Thus Mr. Cradock.
Mrs. Hilary had, against her own taste, absorbed part of his teaching,
but nothing could ever persuade her that it was not reprehensible: it
quite obviously was. Also disgusting. Mr. Cradock might say what he
liked. It _was_ disgusting. And when the man had a wife....
"It is awful," said Mrs. Hilary. "Awful.... It must be stopped. I shall
go to Rome. At once."
"That won't stop it, dear, if it is going on. It will only irritate the
young people."
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