V
“This Barry Briscoe,” said Mrs. Hilary to Neville after lunch, as she watched Nan and he start off for a walk together. “I suppose he’s in love with her?”
“I suppose so. Something of the kind, anyhow.”
Mrs. Hilary said, discontentedly, “Another of Nan’s married men, no doubt. She collects them.”
“No, Barry’s not married.”
Mrs. Hilary looked more interested. “Not? Oh, then it may come to something. … I wish Nan would marry. It’s quite time.”
“Nan isn’t exactly keen to, you know. She’s got so much else to do.”
“Fiddlesticks. You don’t encourage her in such nonsense, I hope, Neville.”
“I? It’s not for me to encourage Nan in anything. She doesn’t need it. But as to marriage—yes, I think I wish she would do it, sometime, whenever she’s ready. It would give her something she hasn’t got; emotional steadiness, perhaps I mean. She squanders a bit, now. On the other hand, her writing would rather go to the wall; if she went on with it it would be against odds all the time.”
“What’s writing?” enquired Mrs. Hilary, with a snap of her finger and thumb. “Writing!”
As this seemed too vague or too large a question for Neville to answer, she did not try to do so, and Mrs. Hilary replied to it herself.
“Mere showing off,” she explained it. “Throwing your paltry ideas at a world which doesn’t want them. Writing like Nan’s I mean. It’s not as if she wrote really good books.”
“Oh well. Who does that, after all? And what is a good book?” Here were two questions which Mrs. Hilary, in her turn, could not answer. Because most of the books which seemed good to her did not, as she well knew, seem good to Neville, or to any of her children, and she wasn’t going to give herself away. She murmured something about Thackeray and Dickens, which Neville let pass.
“Writing’s just a thing to do, as I see it,” Neville went on. “A job, like another. One must have a job, you know. Not for the money, but for the job’s sake. And Nan enjoys it. But I daresay she’d enjoy marriage too.”
“Does she love this man?”
“I don’t know. I shouldn’t be surprised. She hasn’t told me so.”
“Probably she doesn’t, as he’s single. Nan’s so perverse. She will love the wrong men, always.”
“You shouldn’t believe all Rosalind tells you, mother. Rosalind has a too vivid fancy and a scandalous tongue.”
Mrs. Hilary coloured a little. She did not like Neville to think that she had been letting Rosalind gossip to her about Nan.
“You know perfectly well, Neville, that I never trust a word Rosalind says. I suppose I needn’t rely on my daughter-in-law for news about my own daughter’s affairs. I can see things for myself. You can’t deny that Nan has had compromising affairs with married men.”
“Compromising.” Neville turned over the word, thoughtfully and fastidiously. “Funny word, mother. I’m not sure I know what it means. But I don’t think anything ever compromises Nan; she’s too free for that. … Well, let’s marry her off to Barry Briscoe. It will be a quaint ménage, but I daresay they’d pull it off. Barry’s delightful. I should think even Nan could live with him.”
“He writes books about education, doesn’t he? Education and democracy.”
“Well, he does. But there’s always something, after all, against all of us. And it might be worse. It might be poetry or fiction or psychoanalysis.”
Neville said psychoanalysis in order to start another hare and take her mother’s attention off Nan’s marriage before the marriage became crystallised out of all being. But Mrs. Hilary for the first time (for usually she was reliable) did not rise. She looked thoughtful, even a shade embarrassed, and said vaguely, “Oh, people must write, of course. If it isn’t one thing it will be another.” After a moment she added, “This psychoanalysis, Neville,” saying the word with distaste indeed, but so much more calmly than usual that Neville looked at her in surprise. “This psychoanalysis. I suppose it does make wonderful cures, doesn’t it, when all is said?”
“Cures—oh yes, wonderful cures. Shell-shock, insomnia, nervous depression, lumbago, suicidal mania, family life—anything.” Neville’s attention was straying to Grandmama, who was coming slowly towards them down the path, leaning on her stick, so she did not see Mrs. Hilary’s curious, lit eagerness.
“But how can they cure all those things just by talking indecently about sex?”
“Oh mother, they don’t. You’re so crude, darling. You’ve got hold of only one tiny part of it—the part practised by Austrian professors on Viennese degenerates. Many of the doctors are really sane and brilliant. I know of cases. …”
“Well,” said Mrs. Hilary, quickly and rather crossly, “I can’t talk about it before Grandmama.”
Neville got up to meet Grandmama, put a hand under her arm, and conducted her to her special chair beneath the cedar. You had to help and conduct someone so old, so frail, so delightful as Grandmama, even if Mrs. Hilary did wish it were being done by any hand than yours. Mrs. Hilary in fact made a movement to get to Grandmama first, but sixty-three does not rise from low deck chairs so swiftly as forty-three. So she had to watch her daughter leading her mother, and to note once more with a familiar pang the queer, unmistakable likeness between the smooth, clear oval face and the old wrinkled one, the heavily lashed deep blue eyes and the old faded ones, the elfish, close-lipped, dimpling smile and the old, elfish, thin-lipped, sweet one. Neville, her Neville, flower of her flock, her loveliest, first and best,
