Sometimes she imagined herself a patient, interviewing one of these odd doctors. A man doctor, not a woman; she didn’t trust woman doctors of any kind; she had always been thankful that Neville had given it up and married instead.
“Insomnia,” she would say, in these imaginary interviews, because that was so easy to start off with.
“You have something on your mind,” said the doctor. “You suffer from depression.”
“Yes, I know that. I was coming to that. That is what you must cure for me.”
“You must think back. … What is the earliest thing you can remember? Perhaps your baptism? Possibly even your first bath? It has been done. …”
“You may be right. I remember some early baths. One of them may have been the first of all, who knows? What of it, doctor?”
But the doctor, in her imaginings, would at this point only make notes in a big book and keep silence, as if he had thought as much. Perhaps, no more than she, he did not know what of it.
Mrs. Hilary could hear herself protesting.
“I am not unhappy because of my baptism, which, so far as I know, went off without a hitch. I am not troubled by my first bath, nor by any later bath. Indeed, indeed you must believe me, it is not that at all.”
“The more they protest,” the psychoanalyst would murmur, “the more it is so.” For that was what Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung always said, so that there was no escape from their aspersions.
“Why do you think you are so often unhappy?” he would ask her, to draw her out and she would reply, “Because my life is over. Because I am an old discarded woman, thrown away onto the dust-heap like a broken eggshell. Because my husband is gone and my children are gone, and they do not love me as I love them. Because I have only my mother to live with, and she is calm and cares for nothing but only waits for the end. Because I have nothing to do from morning till night. Because I am sixty-three, and that is too old and too young. Because life is empty and disappointing, and I am tired, and drift like seaweed tossed to and fro by the waves.”
It sounded indeed enough, and tears would fill her eyes as she said it. The psychoanalyst would listen, passive and sceptical but intelligent.
“Not one of your reasons is the correct one. But I will find the true reason for you and expose it, and after that it will trouble you no more. Now you shall relate to me the whole history of your life.”
What a comfortable moment! Mrs. Hilary, when she came to it in her imagined interview, would draw a deep breath and settle down and begin. The story of her life! How absorbing a thing to relate to someone who really wanted to hear it! How far better than the confessional—for priests, besides requiring only those portions and parcels of the dreadful past upon which you had least desire to dwell, had almost certainly no interest at all in hearing even these, but only did it because they had to, and you would be boring them. They might even say, as one had said to Rosalind during the first confession which had inaugurated her brief ecclesiastical career, and to which she had looked forward with some interest as a luxurious reliving of a stimulating past—“No details, please.” Rosalind, who had had many details ready, had come away disappointed, feeling that the Church was not all she had hoped. But the psychoanalyst doctor would really want to hear details. Of course he would prefer the kind of detail which Rosalind would have been able to furnish out of her experience, for that was what psychoanalysts recognised as true life. Mrs. Hilary’s experiences were pale in comparison; but psychoanalysts could and did make much out of little, bricks without clay. She would tell him all about the children—how sweet they were as babies, how Jim had nearly died of croup, Neville of bronchitis and Nan of convulsions, whereas Pamela had always been so well, and Gilbert had suffered only from infant debility. She would relate how early and how unusually they had all given signs of intelligence; how Jim had always loved her more than anything in the world, until his marriage, and she him (this was a firm article in Mrs. Hilary’s creed); how Neville had always cherished and cared for her, and how she loved Neville beyond anything in the world but Jim; how Gilbert had disappointed her by taking to writing instead of to a man’s job, and then by marrying Rosalind; how Nan had always been tiresome and perverse. And before the children came—all about Richard, and their courtship, and their young married life, and how he had loved and cared for her beyond anything, incredibly tenderly and well, so that all those who saw it had wondered, and some had said he spoilt her. And back before Richard, to girlhood and childhood, to parents and nursery, to her brother and sister, now dead. How she had fought with her sister because they had both always wanted the same things and got in one another’s way! The jealousies, the bitter, angry tears!
To pour it all out—what comfort! To feel that someone was interested, even though it might be only as a case. The trouble about most people was that they weren’t interested. They didn’t mostly, even pretend they were.
II
She tried Barry Briscoe, the weekend he came down and found Nan gone. Barry Briscoe was by way of being interested in people and things in general; he had that kind of alert mind and face.
He came up from the tennis lawn, where he had been playing a single with Rodney, and sat down by her and Grandmama in the shade of the cedar, hot and friendly and laughing and
