IV
The day that followed was strange, and does not sound likely, but life often does not. Nan took Mrs. Hilary out to lunch at a trattoria near the Forum, as it were to change the subject, and they spent the usual first afternoon of visitors in Rome, who hasten to view the Forum with a guide to the most recent excavations in their hands. Mrs. Hilary felt completely uninterested today in recent or any other excavations. But, obsessed even now with the old instinctive desire (the fond hope, rather) not to seem unintelligent before her children, more especially when she was not on good terms with them, she accompanied Nan, who firmly and deftly closed or changed the subjects of unlawful love, Stephen Lumley, Capri, returning to England, and her infant acts of wilfulness, whenever her mother opened them, which was frequently, as Mrs. Hilary found these things easier conversational topics than the buildings in the Forum. Nan was determined to keep the emotional pressure low for the rest of the day, and she was fairly competent at this when she tried. As Mrs. Hilary had equal gifts at keeping it high, it was a well-matched contest. When she left the Forum for a tea shop, both were tired out. The Forum is tiring; emotion is tiring; tears are tiring; quarrelling is tiring; travelling through to Rome is tiring; all five together are annihilating.
However, they had tea.
Mrs. Hilary was cold and bitter now, not hysterical. Nan, who was living a bad life, and was also tiresomely exactly informed about the differences between the Forum in ’99 and the Forum today (a subject on which Mrs. Hilary was hazy) was not fit, until she came to a better mind, to be spoken to. Mrs. Hilary shut her lips tight and averted her reddened eyes. She hated Nan just now. She could have loved her had she been won to repentance, but now—“Nan was never like the rest,” she thought.
Nan persisted in making light, equable conversation, which Mrs. Hilary thought in bad taste. She talked of England and the family, asked after Grandmama, Neville and the rest.
“Neville is extremely ill,” Mrs. Hilary said, quite untruly, but that was, to do her justice, the way in which she always saw illness, particularly Neville’s. “And worried to death about Gerda, who seems to have gone off her head since that accident in Cornwall. She is still sticking to that insane, wicked notion about not getting married.”
Nan had heard before of this.
“She’ll give that up,” she said, coolly, “when she finds she really can’t have Barry if she doesn’t. Gerda gets what she wants.”
“Oh, you all do that, the whole lot of you. … And a nice example you’re setting the child.”
“She’ll give it up,” Nan repeated, keeping the conversation on Gerda. “Gerda hasn’t the martyr touch. She won’t perish for a principle. She wants Barry and she’ll have him, though she may hold out for a time. Gerda doesn’t lose things, in the end.”
“She’s a very silly child, and I suppose she’s been mixing with dreadful friends and picked up these ideas. At twenty there’s some excuse for ignorant foolishness.” But none at thirty-three, Mrs. Hilary meant.
“Barry Briscoe,” she added, “is being quite firm about it. Though he is desperately in love with her, Neville tells me; desperately.”
He’s soon got over you, even if he did care for you once, and even if you did send him away, her emphasis implied.
In Nan, casually flicking the ash off her cigarette, a queer impulse came and went. For a moment she wanted to cry; to drop hardness and lightness and pretence, and cry like a child and say “Mother, comfort me. Don’t go on hurting me. I love Barry. Be kind to me, oh be kind to me!”
If she had done it, Mrs. Hilary would have taken her in her arms and been all mother, and the wound in their affection would have been temporarily healed.
Nan said nonchalantly “I suppose he is. They’re sure to be all right. … Now what next, mother? It’s getting dark for seeing things.”
“I am tired to death,” said Mrs. Hilary. “I shall go back to those dreadful rooms and try to rest. … It has been an awful day. … I hate Rome. In ’99 it was so different. Father and I went about together; he showed me everything. He knew about it all. Besides. …”
Besides, how could I enjoy sightseeing after that scene this morning, and with this awful calamity that has happened?
They went back. Mrs. Hilary was desperately missing her afternoon hour with Mr. Cradock. She had come to rely on it on a Wednesday.
V
Nan sat up late, correcting proofs, after Mrs. Hilary had gone to bed. Galleys lay all round her on the floor by the stove. She let them slip from her knee and lie there. She hated them. …
She pressed her hands over her eyes, shutting them out, shutting out life. She was going off with Stephen Lumley. She had told him so this morning. Both their lives were broken; hers by Barry, whom she loved, his by his wife, whom he disliked. He loved her; he wanted her. She could with him find relief, find life a tolerable thing. They could have a good time together. They were good companions; their need, though dissimilar, was mutual. They saw the same beauty, spoke the same tongue, laughed at the same things. In the very thought of Stephen, with his cynical humour, his clear, keen mind, his lazy power of brain, Nan had found relief all that day, reacting desperately from a mind fuddled with sentiment and emotion as with drink, a soft, ignorant brain, which knew and cared about nothing except people, a hysterical passion of anger and malice. They had pushed her sharply and abruptly over the edge of decision, that mind and brain and passion. Stephen, against whom
