“There’s work,” mused Neville, thinking of the various links with life, the rafts, rather, which should carry age over the cold seas of tedious regret. “And there’s natural gaiety. And intellectual interests. And contacts with other people—permanent contacts and temporary ones. And beauty. All those things. For some people, too, there’s religion.”
“And for all of us food and drink,” said Mrs. Hilary, sharply. “Oh, I suppose you think I’ve no right to complain, as I’ve got all those things, except work.”
But Neville shook her head, knowing that this was a delusion of her mother’s, and that she had, in point of fact, none of them, except the contacts with people, which mostly either overstrained, irritated or bored her, and that aspect of religion which made her cry. For she was a Unitarian, and thought the Gospels infinitely sad and the souls of the departed most probably so merged in God as to be deprived of all individuality.
“It’s better to be High Church or Roman Catholic and have services, or an Evangelical and have the Voice of God,” Neville decided. And, indeed, it is probable that Mrs. Hilary would have been one or other of these things if it had not been for her late husband, who had disapproved of superstition and had instructed her in the Higher Thought and the Larger Hope.
III
Though heaviness endured for the night, joy came in the morning, as is apt to happen where there is sea air. Mrs. Hilary on her birthday had a revulsion to gaiety, owing to a fine day, her unstable temperament, letters, presents and being made a fuss of. Also Grandmama said, when she went up to see her after breakfast, “This new dress suits you particularly, my dear child. It brings out the colour in your eyes,” and everyone likes to hear that when they are sixty-three or any other age.
So, when the rest of her children arrived, Mrs. Hilary was ready for them.
They embraced her in turn; Pamela, capable, humorous and intelligent, the very type of the professional woman at her best, but all the time preferring Frances Carr, anxious about her because she was overworking and run down; Nan, her extravagant present in her hands, on fire to protect her mother against old age, depression and Rosalind, yet knowing too how soon she herself would be smouldering with irritation; Gilbert, spare and cynical, writer of plays and literary editor of the Weekly Critic, and with him his wife Rosalind, whom Mrs. Hilary had long since judged as a voluptuous rake who led men on and made up unseemly stories and her lovely face, but who insisted on coming to The Gulls with Gilbert to see his adorable mother. Rosalind, who was always taking up things—art, or religion, or spiritualism, or young men—and dropping them when they bored her, had lately taken up psychoanalysis. She was studying what she called her mother-in-law’s “case,” looking for and finding complexes in her past which should account for her somewhat unbalanced present.
“I’ve never had complexes,” Mrs. Hilary would declare, indignantly, as if they had been fleas or worse, and indeed when Rosalind handled them they were worse, much. From Rosalind Mrs. Hilary got the most unpleasant impression possible (which is to say a good deal) of psychoanalysts. “They have only one idea, and that is a disgusting one,” she would assert, for she could only rarely and with difficulty see more than one idea in anything, particularly when it was a disgusting one. Her mind was of that sort—tenacious, intolerant, and not many-sided. That was where (partly where) she fell foul of her children, who saw sharply and clearly all around things and gave to each side its value. They knew Mrs. Hilary to be a muddled bigot, whose mind was stuffed with concrete instances and insusceptible of abstract reason. If anyone had asked her what she knew of psychoanalysis, she would have replied, in effect, that she knew Rosalind, and that was enough, more than enough, of psychoanalysis for her. She had also looked into Freud, and rightly had been disgusted.
“A man who spits deliberately onto his friends’ stairs, on purpose to annoy the servants … that is enough, the rest follows. The man is obviously a loathsome and indecent vulgarian. It comes from being a German, no doubt.” Which settled that; and if anyone murmured “An Austrian,” she would say, “It comes to the same thing, in questions of breeding.” Mrs. Hilary, like Grandmama, settled people and things very quickly and satisfactorily.
They all sat in the front garden after lunch and looked out over the wonderful shining sea. Grandmama sat in her wheeled chair, Chekhov’s Letters on her knees. She had made Mrs. Hilary get this book from Mudie’s because she had read favourable reviews of it by Gilbert and Nan. Grandmama was a cleverish old lady, cleverer than her daughter.
“Jolly, isn’t it,” said Gilbert, seeing the book.
“Very entertaining,” said Grandmama, and Mrs. Hilary echoed “Most,” at which Grandmama eyed her with a twinkle, knowing that it bored her, like all the Russians. Mrs. Hilary cared nothing for style (“Literature!” said Lady Adela. “Give me something to read!”); she liked nice lifelike books about people as she believed them to be, and though she was quite prepared to believe that real Russians were like Russians in books, she felt that she did not care to meet either of them. But Mrs. Hilary had learnt that intelligent persons seldom liked the books which seemed to her to be about real, natural people, any more than they admired the pictures which struck her as being like things as they were. Though she thought those who differed from her profoundly wrong, she never admitted ignorance of the books they admired. For she was in a better position to differ from them about a book if she had nominally read it—and really it didn’t matter if she had actually done so or not,
