Rose Macaulay - Dangerous Ages

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"Precisely. I was coming to that. Of course you can't cure sleeplessness
until you have cured the fundamental things that are wrong with your
life. Now, if you please, tell me all you can about yourself."

Here was the wonderful moment. Mrs. Hilary drew a long breath, and told
him. A horrid (she felt that somehow he was rather horrid) little man
with furtive eyes that wouldn't meet hers--(and he wasn't quite a
gentleman, either, but still, he wanted to hear all about her) he was
listening attentively, drinking it in. Not watching tennis while she
talked, like Barry Briscoe in the garden. Ah, she could go on and on,
never tired; it was like swimming in warm water.

He would interrupt her with questions. Which had she preferred, her
father or her mother? Well, perhaps on the whole her father. He nodded;
that was the right answer; the other he would have quietly put aside as
one of the deliberate inaccuracies so frequently practised by his
patients. "You can leave out the perhaps. There's no manner of doubt
about it, you know." Lest he should say (instead of only looking it)
that she had been in love with her good father and he with her, Mrs.
Hilary hurried on. She had a chaste mind, and knew what these Freudians
were. It would, she thought (not knowing her doctor and how it would
have come to the same thing, only he would have thought her a more
pronounced case, because of the deception), have been wiser to have said
that she had preferred her mother, but less truthful, and what she was
enjoying now was an orgy of truth-telling. She got on to her marriage,
and how intensely Richard had loved her. He tried for a moment to be
indecent about love and marriage, but in her deep excitement she hardly
noticed him, but swept on to the births of the children, and Jim's croup.

"I see," he said presently, "that you prefer to avoid discussing certain
aspects of life. You obviously have a sex complex."

"Of course, of course. Don't you find that in all your patients? Surely
we may take that for granted...." She allowed him his sex complex,
knowing that Freudians without it would be like children deprived of a
precious toy; for her part she was impatient to get back to Jim, her
life's chief passion. The Oedipus complex, of course he would say it
was; what matter, if he would let her talk about it? And Neville. It was
strange to have a jealous passion for one's daughter. But that would, he
said, be an extension of the ego complex--quite simple really.

She came to the present.

"I feel that life has used me up and flung me aside like a broken tool.
I have no further relation to life, nor it to me. I have spent myself and
been spent, and now I am bankrupt. Can you make me solvent again?"

She liked that as she said it.

He scribbled away, like a mouse scrabbling.

"Yes. Oh yes. There is no manner of doubt about it. None whatever. If you
are perfectly frank, you can be cured. You can be adjusted to life. Every
age in human life has its own adjustment to make, its own relation to its
environment to establish. All that repressed libido must be released and
diverted.... You have some bad complexes, which must be sublimated...."

It sounded awful, the firm way he said it, like teeth or appendixes which
must be extracted. But Mrs. Hilary knew it wouldn't be like that really,
but delightful and luxurious, more like a Turkish bath.

"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-analyst 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 assent. 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-analyst 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 pronunciation 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-class 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, refreshing
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.

"But I must go on like this if I'm ever going to get through my exams."

"You're not going to, old thing. You're quite obviously unfitted to. It's
not your job any more. It's absurd to try; really it is."

Neville shut her eyes.

"Doctors ... doctors. They have it on the brain,--the limitations of the
feminine organism."

"Because they know something about it. But I'm not speaking of the
feminine organism just now. I should say the same to Rodney if _he_
thought of turning doctor now, after twenty years of politics."

"Rodney never could have been a doctor. He hates messing about with
bodies."

"Well, you know what I think. I can't stop you, of course. It's only a
question of time, in any case. You'll soon find out for yourself that
it's no use."

"I think," she answered, in her small, unemotional voice, "that it's
exceedingly probable that I shall."

She lay inertly in the deep chair, her eyes shut, her hands opened, palms
downwards, as if they had failed to hold something.

"What then, Jim? If I can't be a doctor what can I be? Besides Rodney's
wife, I mean? I don't say besides the children's mother, because that's
stopped being a job. They're charming to me, the darlings, but they don't
need me any more; they go their own way."

Jim had noticed that.

"Well, after all, you do a certain amount of political work--public
speaking, meetings, and so on. Isn't that enough?"

"That's all second-hand. I shouldn't do it but for Rodney. I'm not
public-spirited enough. If Rodney dies before I do, I shan't go on with
that.... Shall I just be a silly, self-engrossed, moping old woman, no
use to anyone and a plague to myself?"

The eyes of both of them strayed out to the garden.

"Who's the silly moping old woman?" asked Mrs. Hilary's voice in the
doorway. And there she stood, leaning a little forward, a strained smile
on her face.

"Me, mother, when I shall be old," Neville quickly answered her, smiling
in return. "Come in, dear. Jim's telling me how I shall never be a
doctor. He gave me a _viva voce_ exam., and I came a mucker over it."

Her voice had an edge of bitterness; she hadn't liked coming a mucker,
nor yet being told she couldn't get through exams. She had plenty of
vanity; so far everyone and everything had combined to spoil her. She
was determined, in the face of growing doubt, to prove Jim wrong yet.

"Well," Mrs. Hilary said, sitting down on the edge of a chair, not
settling herself, but looking poised to go, so as not to seem to intrude
on their conversation, "well, I don't see why you want to be a doctor,
dear. Everyone knows women doctors aren't much good. _I_ wouldn't trust
one."

"Very stupid of you, mother," Jim said, trying to pretend he wasn't
irritated by being interrupted. "They're every bit as good as men."

"Fancy being operated on by a woman surgeon. I certainly shouldn't risk
it."

"_You_ wouldn't risk it ... _you_ wouldn't trust them. You're so
desperately personal, mother. You think that contributes to a discussion.
All it does contribute to is your hearers' knowledge of your limitations.
It's uneducated, the way you discuss."

He smiled at her pleasantly, taking the sting out of his words, turning
them into a joke, and she smiled too, to show Neville she didn't mind,
didn't take it seriously. Jim might hurt her, but if he did no one should
know but Jim himself. She knew that at times she irritated even his good
temper by being uneducated and so on, so that he scolded her, but he
scolded her kindly, not venomously, as Nan did.

"Well, I've certainly no right to be uneducated," she said, "and I can't
say I'm ever called so, except by my children.... Do you remember the
discussions father and I used to have, half through the night?"

Jim and Neville did remember and thought "Poor father," and were silent.

"I should think," said Mrs. Hilary, "there was very little we didn't
discuss. Politics, books, trades unions, class divisions, moral
questions, votes for women, divorce ... we thrashed everything out.
We both thoroughly enjoyed it."

Neville said "I remember." Familiar echoes came back to her out of the
agitated past.

"Those lazy men, all they want is to get a lot of money for doing no
work."

"I like the poor well enough in their places, but I cannot abide them
when they try to step into ours."

"Let women mind their proper business and leave men's alone."

"I'm certainly not going to be on calling terms with my grocer's wife."

"I hate these affected, posing, would-be clever books. Why can't people
write in good plain English?"...

Richard Hilary, a scholar and a patient man, blinded by conjugal love,
had met futilities with arguments, expressions of emotional distaste with
facts, trying to lift each absurd wrangle to the level of a discussion;
and at last he died, leaving his wife with the conviction that she had
been the equal mate of an able man. Her children had to face and conquer,
with varying degrees of success, the temptation to undeceive her.

"But I'm interrupting," said Mrs. Hilary. "I know you two are having a
private talk. I'll leave you alone...."

"No, no, mother." That was Neville, of course. "Stay and defend me from
Jim's scorn."

How artificial one had to be in family life! What an absurd thing these
emotions made of it!

Mrs. Hilary looked happier, and more settled in her chair.

"Where are Kay and Gerda?" Jim asked.

Neville told him "In Guildford, helping Barry Briscoe with W.E.A.
meetings. They're spending a lot of time over that just now; they're both
as keen as mustard. Nearly as keen as he is. He sets people on fire. It's
very good for the children. They're bringing him up here to spend Sunday.
I think he hopes every time to find Nan back again from Cornwall, poor
Barry. He was very down in the mouth when she suddenly took herself off."

"If Nan doesn't mean to have him, she shouldn't have encouraged him,"
said Mrs. Hilary. "He was quite obviously in love with her."

"Nan's always a dark horse," Neville said. "She alone knows what she
means."

Jim said "She's a flibberty-gibbet. She'd much better get married. She's
not much use in the world at present. Now if _she_ was a doctor ... or
doing something useful, like Pamela...."

"Don't be prejudiced, Jimmy. Because you don't read modern novels
yourself you think it's no use their being written."

"I read some modern novels. I read Conrad, in spite of the rather absurd
attitude some people take up about him; and I read good detective
stories, only they're so seldom good. I don't read Nan's kind. People
tell me they're tremendously clever and modern and delightfully written
and get very well reviewed, I daresay. I very seldom agree with
reviewers, in any case. Even about Conrad they seem to me (when I read
them--I don't often) to pick out the wrong points to admire and to miss
the points I should criticise."

Mrs. Hilary said "Well, I must say I can't read Nan's books myself.
Simply, I don't think them good. I dislike all her people so much, and
her style."

"You're a pair of old Victorians," Neville told them, pleasing Mrs.
Hilary by coupling them together and leaving Jim, who knew why she did
it, undisturbed. Neville was full of graces and tact, a possession Jim
had always appreciated in her.

"And there," said Neville, who was standing at the window, "are Barry
Briscoe and the children coming in."

Jim looked over her shoulder and saw the three wheeling their bicycles up
the drive.

"Gerda," he remarked, "is a prettier thing every time I see her."

CHAPTER VII

GERDA

1

It rained so hard, so much harder even than usual, that Sunday, that only
Barry and Gerda went to walk. Barry walked in every kind of weather, even
in the July of 1920.

To-day after lunch Barry said "I'm going to walk over the downs. Anyone
coming?" and Gerda got up silently, as was her habit. Kay stretched
himself and yawned and said "Me for the fireside. I shall have to walk
every day for three weeks after to-day," for he was going to-morrow on a
reading-party. Rodney and Jim were playing a game of chess that had
lasted since breakfast and showed every sign of lasting till bed-time;
Neville and Mrs. Hilary were talking, and Grandmama was upstairs, having
her afternoon nap.

2

They tramped along, waterproofed and bare-headed, down the sandy road.
The rain swished in Gerda's golden locks, till they clung dank and limp
about her cheeks and neck; it beat on Barry's glasses, so that he took
them off and blinked instead. The trees stormed and whistled in the
southerly wind that blew from across Merrow Downs. Barry tried to whistle
down it, but it caught the sound from his puckered lips and whirled it
away.

Through Merrow they strode, and up onto the road that led across the
downs, and there the wind caught them full, and it was as if buckets of
water were being flung into their faces. The downs sang and roared; the
purple-grey sky shut down on the hill's shoulder like a tent.

"Lord, what fun," said Barry, as they gasped for breath.

Gerda was upright and slim as a wand against the buffeting; her white
little face was stung into shell-pink; her wet hair blew back like yellow
seaweed.

Barry thought suddenly of Nan, who revelled in storms, and quickly shut
his mind on the thought. He was schooling himself to think away from Nan,
with her wild animal grace and her flashing mind and her cruel, careless
indifference.

Gerda would have walked like this forever. Her wide blue eyes blinked
away the rain; her face felt stung and lashed, yet happy and cold; her
mouth was stiff and tight. She was part of the storm; as free, as fierce,
as singing; though outwardly she was all held together and silent, only
smiling a little with her shut mouth.

As they climbed the downs, the wind blew more wildly in their faces.
Gerda swayed against it, and Barry took her by the arm and half pushed
her.

So they reached Newlands Corner, and all southern Surrey stormed below
them, and beyond Surrey stormed Sussex, and beyond Sussex the angry,
unseen sea.

They stood looking, and Barry's arm still steadied Gerda against the
gale.

Gerda thought "It will end. It will be over, and we shall be sitting at
tea. Then Sunday will be over, and on Monday he will go back to town."
The pain of that end of the world turned her cold beneath the glow of the
storm. Then life settled itself, very simply. She must go too, and work
with him. She would tell him so on the way home, when the wind would let
them talk.

They turned their backs on the storm and ran down the hill towards
Merrow. Gerda, light as a leaf on the wind, could have run all the way
back; Barry, fit and light too, but fifteen years ahead of her, fell
after five minutes into a walk.

Then they could talk a little.

"And to-morrow I shall be plugging in town," sighed Barry.

Gerda always went straight to her point.

"May I come into your office, please, and learn the work?"

He smiled down at her. Splendid child!

"Why, rather. Do you mean it? When do you want to come?"

"To-morrow?"

He laughed. "Good. I thought you meant in the autumn. ... To-morrow
by all means, if you will. As a matter of fact we're frightfully
short-handed in the office just now. Our typist has crocked, and we
haven't another yet, so people have to type their own letters."

"I can do the typing," said Gerda, composedly. "I can type quite well."

"Oh, but that'll be dull for you. That's not what you want, is it?
Though, if you want to learn about the work, it's not a bad way ... you
get it all passing through your hands.... Would you really take on that
job for a bit?"

Gerda nodded.

They were rapid and decided people; they did not beat about the bush. If
they wanted to do a thing and there seemed no reason why not, they did
it.

"That's first-class," said Barry. "Give it a trial, anyhow.... Of course
you'll be on trial too; we may find it doesn't work. If so, there are
plenty of other jobs to be done in the office. But that's what we most
want at the moment."

Barry had a way of assuming that people would want, naturally, to do the
thing that most needed doing.

Gerda's soul sang and whistled down the whistling wind. It wasn't over,
then: it was only beginning. The W.E.A. was splendid; work was splendid;
Barry Briscoe was splendid; life was splendid. She was sorry for Kay at
Cambridge, Kay who was just off on a reading party, not helping in the
world's work but merely getting education. Education was inspiring in
connection with Democracy, but when applied to oneself it was dull.

The rain was lessening. It fell on their heads more lightly; the wind was
like soft wet kisses on their backs, as they tramped through Merrow, and
up the lane to Windover.

3

They all sat round the tea-table, and most of them were warm and sleepy
from Sunday afternoon by the fire, but Barry and Gerda were warm and
tingling from walking in the storm. Some people prefer one sensation,
some the other.

Neville thought "How pretty Gerda looks, pink like that." She was glad
to know that she too looked pretty, in her blue afternoon dress. It
was good, in that charming room, that they should all look agreeable
to the eye. Even Mrs. Hilary, with her nervous, faded grace, marred by
self-consciousness and emotion. And Grandmama, smiling and shrewd, with
her old in-drawn lips; and Rodney, long and lounging and clever; Jim,
square-set, sensible, clean-cut, beautiful to his mother and to his women
patients, good for everyone to look at; Barry, brown and charming, with
his quick smile; the boy Kay, with his pale, rounded, oval face, his
violet eyes like his mother's, only short-sighted, so that he had a trick
of screwing them up and peering, and a mouth that widened into a happy
sweetness when he smiled.

They were all right: they all fitted in with the room and with each
other.

Barry said "I've not been idle while walking. I've secured a secretary.
Gerda says she's coming to work at the office for us for a bit. Now, at
once."

He had not Gerda's knack of silence. Gerda would shut up tight over her
plans and thoughts, like a little oyster. She was no babbler; she did
things and never talked. But Barry's plans brimmed up and over.

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