Dangerous Ages | Page 8

copy," and Mrs. Hilary would say, "In that case I
suppose I am thinking of another book," and Rosalind would say to
Neville or Pamela or Gilbert or Nan, "Your darling mother. I adore
her!" and Nan, contemptuous of her mother for thinking such trivial
pretence worth while, and with Rosalind for thinking malicious
exposure worth while, would shrug her shoulders and turn away.
2
All but Neville arrived by the same train from town, the one getting in
at 12.11. Neville had come from Surrey the day before and spent the
night, because Mrs. Hilary liked to have her all to herself for a little
time before the others came. After Jim, Neville was the child Mrs.
Hilary preferred. She had always been a mother with marked
preferences. There were various barriers between her and her various
children; Gilbert, who was thirty-eight, had annoyed her long ago by
taking up literature as a profession on leaving Cambridge, instead of
doing what she described as "a man's job," and later on by marrying
Rosalind, who was fast, and, in Mrs. Hilary's opinion, immoral. Pamela,
who was thirty-nine and working in a settlement in Hoxton, annoyed
her by her devotion to Frances Carr, the friend with whom she lived.

Mrs. Hilary thought them very silly, these close friendships between
women. They prevented marriage, and led to foolish fussing about one
another's health and happiness. Nan annoyed her by "getting talked
about" with men, by writing books which Mrs. Hilary found both dull
and not very nice, in tone, and by her own irritated reactions to her
mother's personality. Nan, in fact, was often rude and curt to her.
But Jim, who was a man and a doctor, a strong, good-humoured person
and her eldest son, annoyed her not at all. Nor did Neville, who was her
eldest daughter and had given her grandchildren and infinite sympathy.
Neville, knowing all these things and more, always arrived on the
evenings before her mother's birthdays, and they talked all the morning.
Mrs. Hilary was at her best with Neville. She was neither irritable nor
nervous nor showing off. She looked much less than sixty-three. She
was a tall, slight, trailing woman, with the remains of beauty, and her
dark, untidy hair was only streaked with grey. Since her husband had
died, ten years ago, she had lived at St. Mary's Bay with her mother. It
had been her old home; not The Gulls, but the vicarage, in the days
when St. Mary's Bay had been a little fishing village without an
esplanade. To old Mrs. Lennox it was the same fishing village still, and
the people, even the summer visitors, were to her the flock of her late
husband, who had died twenty years ago.
"A good many changes lately," she would say to them. "Some people
think the place is improving. But I can't say I like the esplanade."
But the visitors, unless they were very old, didn't know anything about
the changes. To them St. Mary's Bay was not a fishing village but a
seaside resort. To Mrs. Hilary it was her old home, and had healthy air
and plenty of people for her mother to gossip with and was as good a
place as any other for her to parch in like a withered flower now that
the work of her life was done. The work of her life had been making a
home for her husband and children; she had never had either the desire
or the faculties for any other work. Now that work was over, and she
was rather badly left, as she cared neither for cards, knitting, gardening,
nor intellectual pursuits. Once, seven years ago, at Neville's instigation,
she had tried London life for a time, but it had been no use. The people

she met there were too unlike her, too intelligent and up to date; they
went to meetings and concerts and picture exhibitions and read books
and talked about public affairs not emotionally but coolly and drily;
they were mildly surprised at Mrs. Hilary's vehemence of feeling on all
points, and she was strained beyond endurance by their knowledge of
facts and catholicity of interests. So she returned to St. Mary's Bay,
where she passed muster as an intelligent woman, gossiped with her
mother, the servants and their neighbours, read novels, brooded over
the happier past, walked for miles alone along the coast, and slipped
every now and then, as she had slipped even in youth, over the edge of
emotionalism into hysterical passion or grief. Her mother was no use at
such times; she only made her worse, sitting there in the calm of old
age, looking tranquilly at the end, for her so near that nothing mattered.
Only Jim or Neville were of any