“Tell me,” he said, half to please Nan’s mother and half on his own account, “some stories of Nan when she was small. I should think she was a fearful child. …”
He was interested, thought Mrs. Hilary, in Nan, but not in her. That was natural, of course. No man would ever again want to hear stories of her childhood. The familiar bitterness rose and beat in her like a wave. Nan was thirty-four and she was sixty-three. She could talk only of far-off things, and theories about conduct and life which sounded all right at first but were exposed after two minutes as not having behind them the background of any knowledge or any brain. That hadn’t mattered when she was a girl; men would often rather they hadn’t. But at sixty-three you have nothing. … The bitter emptiness of sixty-three turned her sick with frustration. Life was over, over, over, for her and she was to tell stories of Nan, who had everything.
Then the mother in her rose up, to claim and grasp for her child, even for the child she loved least.
“Nan? Nan was always a most dreadfully sensitive child, and temperamental. She took after me, I’m afraid; the others were more like their father. I remember when she was quite a little thing. …”
Barry had asked for it. But he hadn’t known that, out of the brilliant, uncertain Nan, exciting as a Punch and Judy show, anything so tedious could be spun. …
III
Mrs. Hilary was up in town by herself for a day’s shopping. The sales were on at Barker’s and Derry and Tom’s. Mrs. Hilary wandered about these shops, and even Ponting’s and bought little bags, and presents for everyone, remnants, oddments, underwear, some green silk for a frock for Gerda, a shady hat for herself, a wonderful cushion for Grandmama with a picture of the sea on it, a silk knitted jumper for Neville, of the same purplish blue as her eyes. She was happy, going about like a bee from flower to flower, gathering this honey for them all. She had come up alone; she hadn’t let Neville come with her. She had said she was going to be an independent old woman. But what she really meant was that she had proposed herself for tea with Rosalind in Campden Hill Square, and wanted to be alone for that.
Rosalind had been surprised, for Mrs. Hilary seldom favoured her with a visit. She had found the letter on the hall table when she and Gilbert had come in from a dinner party two evenings ago.
“Your mother’s coming to tea on Thursday, Gilbert. Tea with me. She says she wants a talk. I feel flattered. She says nothing about wanting to see you, so you’d better leave us alone, anyhow for a bit.”
Rosalind’s beautiful bistre-brown eyes smiled. She enjoyed her talks with her mother-in-law; they furnished her with excellent material, to be worked up later by the raconteuse’s art into something too delicious and absurd. She enjoyed, too, telling Mrs. Hilary the latest scandals; she was so shocked and disgusted; and it was fun dropping little accidental hints about Nan, and even about Gilbert. Anyhow, what a treasure of a relic of the Victorian age! And how comic in her jealousy, her ingenuous, futile boasting, her so readily exposed deceits! And how she hated Rosalind herself, the painted, corrupt woman who was dragging Gilbert down!
“Whatever does she want a talk about?” Rosalind wondered. “It must be something pretty urgent, to make her put up with an hour of my company.”
IV
At four o’clock on Thursday afternoon Rosalind went upstairs and put on an extra coating of powder and rouge. She also blackened her eyelashes and put on her lips salve the colour of strawberries rather than of the human mouth. She wore an afternoon dress with transparent black sleeves through which her big arms gleamed, pale and smooth. She looked a superb and altogether improper creature, like Lucrezia Borgia or a Titian madonna. She came down and lay among great black and gold satin cushions, and lit a scented cigarette and opened a new French novel. Black and gold was her new scheme for her drawing-room; she had had it done this spring. It had a sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold hair. Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a decadent and cynical pope. The note of the room was really too pronounced for Gilbert’s fastidious and scholarly eloquence; he lost vitality in it, and dwindled to the pale thin casket of a brain.
And Mrs. Hilary, when she entered it, trailing in, tall and thin, in her sagging grey coat and skirt, her wispy grey hair escaping from under her floppy black hat, and with the air of having till a moment ago been hung about with parcels (she had left them in the hall), looked altogether unsuited to her environment, like a dowdy lady from the provinces, as she was.
Rosalind came forward and took her by the hands.
“Well, mother dear, this is an unusual honour. … How long is it since we last had you here?”
Rosalind, enveloping her mother-in-law in extravagant fragrance, kissed her on each cheek. The kiss of Messalina! Mrs. Hilary glanced at the great mirror over the fireplace to see whether it had come off on her cheeks, as it might well have done.
Rosalind placed her on a swelling, billowy, black and gold
