XI
That Which Remains
I
Through September Neville had nursed Gerda by day and worked by night. The middle of October, just when they usually moved into town for the winter, she collapsed, had what the doctor called a nervous breakdown.
“You’ve been overworking,” he told her. “You’re not strong enough in these days to stand hard brain-work. You must give it up.”
For a fortnight she lay tired and passive, surrendered and inert, caring for nothing but to give up and lie still and drink hot milk. Then she struggled up and mooned about the house and garden, and cried weakly from time to time, and felt depressed and bored, and as if life were over and she were at the bottom of the sea.
“This must be what mother feels,” she thought. “Poor mother. … I’m like her; I’ve had my life, and I’m too stupid to work, and I can only cry. … Men must work and women must weep. … I never knew before that that was true. … I mustn’t see mother just now, it would be the last straw … like the skeletons people used to look at to warn themselves what they would come to. … Poor mother … and poor me. … But mother’s getting better now she’s being analysed. That wouldn’t help me at all. I analyse myself too much already. … And I was so happy a few months ago. What a dreadful end to a good ambition. I shall never work again, I suppose, in any way that counts. So that’s that. … Why do I want to work and to do something? Other wives and mothers don’t. … Or do they, only they don’t know it, because they don’t analyse? I believe they do, lots of them. Or is it only my horrible egotism and vanity, that can’t take a back seat quietly? I was always like that, I know. Nan and I and Gilbert. Not Jim so much, and not Pamela at all. But Rodney’s worse than I am; he wouldn’t want to be counted out, put on the shelf, in the forties; he’d be frightfully sick if he had to stand by and see other people working and getting on and in the thick of things when he wasn’t. He couldn’t bear it; he’d take to drink, I think. … I hope Rodney won’t ever have a nervous breakdown and feel like this, poor darling, he’d be dreadfully tiresome. … Not to work after all. Not to be a doctor. … What then? Just go about among people, grinning like a dog. Winter in town, talking, dining, being the political wife. Summer in the country, walking, riding, reading, playing tennis. Fun, of course. But what’s it all for? When I’ve got Gerda off my hands I shall have done being a mother, in any sense that matters. Is being a wife enough to live for? Rodney’s wife? Oh, I want to be some use, want to do things, to count. … And Rodney will die some time—I know he’ll die first—and then I shan’t even be a wife. And in twenty years I shan’t be able to do things with my body much more, and what then? What will be left? … I think I’m getting hysterical, like poor mother. … How ugly I look, these days.”
She stopped before the looking-glass. Her face looked back at her, white and thin, almost haggard, traced in the last few weeks for the first time with definite lines round brow and mouth. Her dark hair was newly streaked with grey.
“Middle age,” said Neville, and a cold hand was laid round her heart. “It had to come some time, and this illness has opened the door to it. Or shall I look young again when I’m quite well? No, never young again.”
She shivered.
“I look like mother today. … I am like mother. …”
So youth and beauty were to leave her, too. She would recover from this illness and this extinguishing of charm, but not completely, and not for long. Middle age had begun. She would have off days in future, when she would look old and worn instead of always, as hitherto, looking charming. She wouldn’t, in future, be sure of herself; people wouldn’t be sure to think “A lovely woman, Mrs. Rodney Bendish.” Soon they would be saying “How old Mrs. Bendish is getting to look,” and then “She was a pretty woman once.”
Well, looks didn’t matter much really, after all. …
“They do, they do,” cried Neville to the glass, passionately truthful. “If you’re vain they do—and I am vain. Vain of my mind and of my body. … Vanity, vanity, all is vanity … and now the silver cord is going to be loosed and the golden bowl is going to be broken, and I shall be hurt.”
Looks did matter. It was no use canting, and minimising them. They affected the thing that mattered most—one’s relations with people. Men, for instance, cared more to talk to a woman whose looks pleased them. They liked pretty girls, and pretty women. Interesting men cared to talk to them: they told them things they would never tell a plain woman. Rodney did. He liked attractive women. Sometimes he made love to them, prettily and harmlessly.
The thought of Rodney stabbed her. If Rodney were to get to care less … to stop making love to her … worse, to stop needing her. … For he did need her; through all their relationship, disappointing in some of its aspects, his need had persisted, a simple, demanding thing.
Humour suddenly came back.
“This, I suppose, is what Gerda is anticipating, and why
