But Jim, who was a man and a doctor, a strong, good-humoured person and her eldest son, annoyed her not at all. Nor did Neville, who was her eldest daughter and had given her grandchildren and infinite sympathy.
Neville, knowing all these things and more, always arrived on the evenings before her mother’s birthdays, and they talked all the morning. Mrs. Hilary was at her best with Neville. She was neither irritable nor nervous nor showing off. She looked much less than sixty-three. She was a tall, slight, trailing woman, with the remains of beauty, and her dark, untidy hair was only streaked with grey. Since her husband had died, ten years ago, she had lived at St. Mary’s Bay with her mother. It had been her old home; not The Gulls, but the vicarage, in the days when St. Mary’s Bay had been a little fishing village without an esplanade. To old Mrs. Lennox it was the same fishing village still, and the people, even the summer visitors, were to her the flock of her late husband, who had died twenty years ago.
“A good many changes lately,” she would say to them. “Some people think the place is improving. But I can’t say I like the esplanade.”
But the visitors, unless they were very old, didn’t know anything about the changes. To them St. Mary’s Bay was not a fishing village but a seaside resort. To Mrs. Hilary it was her old home, and had healthy air and plenty of people for her mother to gossip with and was as good a place as any other for her to parch in like a withered flower now that the work of her life was done. The work of her life had been making a home for her husband and children; she had never had either the desire or the faculties for any other work. Now that work was over, and she was rather badly left, as she cared neither for cards, knitting, gardening, nor intellectual pursuits. Once, seven years ago, at Neville’s instigation, she had tried London life for a time, but it had been no use. The people she met there were too unlike her, too intelligent and up to date; they went to meetings and concerts and picture exhibitions and read books and talked about public affairs not emotionally but coolly and drily; they were mildly surprised at Mrs. Hilary’s vehemence of feeling on all points, and she was strained beyond endurance by their knowledge of facts and catholicity of interests. So she returned to St. Mary’s Bay, where she passed muster as an intelligent woman, gossiped with her mother, the servants and their neighbours, read novels, brooded over the happier past, walked for miles alone along the coast, and slipped every now and then, as she had slipped even in youth, over the edge of emotionalism into hysterical passion or grief. Her mother was no use at such times; she only made her worse, sitting there in the calm of old age, looking tranquilly at the end, for her so near that nothing mattered. Only Jim or Neville were of any use then.
Neville on the eve of this her sixty-third birthday soothed one such outburst. The tedium of life, with no more to do in it—why couldn’t it end? The lights were out, the flowers were dead—and yet the unhappy actors had to stay and stay and stay, idling on the empty, darkened stage. (That was how Mrs. Hilary, with her gift for picturesque language, put it.) Must it be empty, must it be dark, Neville uselessly asked, knowing quite well that for one of her mother’s temperament it must. Mrs. Hilary had lived in and by her emotions; nothing else had counted. Life for her had burnt itself out, and its remnant was like the fag end of a cigarette, stale and old.
“Shall I feel like that in twenty years?” Neville speculated aloud.
“I hope,” said Mrs. Hilary, “that you won’t have lost Rodney. So long as you have him. …”
“But if I haven’t. …”
Neville looked down the years; saw herself without Rodney, perhaps looking after her mother, who would then have become (strange, incredible thought, but who could say?) calm with the calm of age; Kay and Gerda married or working or both. … What then? Only she was better equipped than her mother for the fag end of life; she had a serviceable brain and a sound education. She wouldn’t pass empty days at a seaside resort. She would work at something, and be interested. Interesting work and interesting friends—her mother, by her very nature, could have neither, but was just clever enough to feel the want of them. The thing was to start some definite work now, before it was too late.
“Did Grandmama go through it?” Neville asked her mother.
“Oh, I expect so. I was selfish; I was wrapped up in home and all of you; I didn’t notice. But I think she had it badly, for a time, when first she left the vicarage. … She’s contented now.”
They both looked at Grandmama, who was playing patience on the sofa and could not hear their talking for the sound
