“It’s the whole idea,” she said, hotly. “And I detest all these Labour people. Vile creatures. … Of course I don’t mean people like Rodney—the University men. They’re merely amateurs. But these dreadful Trades Union men, with their walrus moustaches. … Why can’t they shave, like other people, if they want to be taken for gentlemen?”
Neville told her, chaffingly, that she was a mass of prejudice.
Grandmama, who had fallen asleep and dropped the London Mercury onto the floor, diverted the conversation by waking up and remarking that it seemed a less interesting number than usual on the whole, though some of the pieces of poetry were pretty, and that Mrs. Hilary ought not to lie under the open window.
Mrs. Hilary, who was getting worse, admitted that she had better be in bed.
“I hope,” said Grandmama, “that it will be a lesson to you, dear, not to stay in the water so long again, even if you do want to show off before your daughter-in-law.” Grandmama, who disliked Rosalind, usually called her to Mrs. Hilary “your daughter-in-law,” saddling her, so to speak, with the responsibility for Gilbert’s ill-advised marriage. To her grandchildren she would refer to Rosalind as “your sister-in-law,” or “poor Gilbert’s wife.”
“The bathe was worth it,” said Mrs. Hilary, swinging up to high spirits again. “It was a glorious bathe. But I have got rheumatics.”
So Neville stayed on at The Gulls that night, to massage her mother’s joints, and Pamela and Nan went back to Hoxton and Chelsea by the evening train. Pamela had supper, as usual, with Frances Carr, and Nan with Barry Briscoe, and they both talked and talked, about all the things you don’t talk of in families but only to friends.
VII
Neville meanwhile was saying to Grandmama in the drawing-room at The Gulls, after Mrs. Hilary had gone to bed, “I wish mother could get some regular interest or occupation. She would be much happier. Are there no jobs for elderly ladies in the Bay?”
“As many in the Bay,” said Grandmama, up in arms for the Bay, “as anywhere else. Sick-visiting, care committees, boys’ and girls’ classes, and so on. I still keep as busy as I am able, as you know.”
Neville did know. “If mother could do the same. …”
“Mother can’t. She’s never been a rector’s wife, as I have, and she doesn’t care for such jobs. Mother never did care for any kind of work really, even as a girl. She married when she was nineteen and found the only work she was fitted for and interested in. That’s over, and there’s no other she can turn to. It’s common enough, child, with women. They just have to make the best of it, and muddle through somehow till the end.”
“You were different, Grandmama, weren’t you? I mean, you were never at a loss for things to do.”
Grandmama’s thin, delicate face hardened for a moment into grim lines.
“At a loss—yes, I was what you call at a loss twenty years ago, when your grandfather died. The meaning was gone out of life, you see. I was sixty-four. For two years I was cut adrift from everything, and did nothing but brood and find trivial occupations to pass the time somehow. I lived on memories and emotions; I was hysterical and peevish and bored. Then I realised it wouldn’t do; that I might have twenty years and more of life before me, and that I must do something with it. So I took up again all of my old work that I could. It was the hardest thing I ever did. I hated it at first. Then I got interested again, and it has kept me going all these years, though I’ve had to drop most of it now of course. But now I’m so near the end that it doesn’t matter. You can drop work at eighty and keep calm and interested in life. You can’t at sixty; it’s too young. … Mother knows that too, but there seems no work she can do. She doesn’t care for parish work as I do; she never learnt any art or craft or handiwork, and doesn’t want to; she was never much good at intellectual work of any kind, and what mind she had as a girl—and her father and I did try to train her to use it—ran all to seed during her married life, so it’s pretty nearly useless now. She spent herself on your father and all you children, and now she’s bankrupt.”
“Poor darling mother,” Neville murmured.
Grandmama nodded. “Just so. She’s left to read novels, gossip with stupid neighbours, look after me, write to you children, go on walks, and brood over the past. She would have been quite happy like that forty years ago. The young have high spirits, and can amuse themselves without work. She never wanted work when she was eighteen. It’s the old who need work. They’ve lost their spring and their zest for life, and need something to hold on to. It’s all wrong, the way we arrange it—making the young work and the old sit idle. It should be the other way about. Girls and boys don’t get bored with perpetual holidays; they live each moment of them hard; they would welcome the eternal Sabbath; and indeed I trust we shall all do that, as our youth is to be renewed like eagles. But old age on this earth is far too sad to do nothing in. Remember that, child, when your time comes.”
“Why, yes. But when one’s married, you know,
