“Something happened that night after you’d gone. You know how I felt. I couldn’t stop wanting you. My mind was tied to you and couldn’t get away. Well—that night something let go—quite suddenly. Something went.
“It’s a year ago and it hasn’t come back.
“I didn’t know what on earth you meant by ‘not wanting and still caring’; but I think I see now. I don’t ‘want’ you any more and I ‘care’ more than ever. …
“Don’t ‘work like blazes.’ Still I’m glad you like it. I can get you any amount of the same thing—more than you’ll care to do.”
VII
He didn’t know how hard it was to “work like blazes.” You had to keep your eyes ready all the time to see what Mamma was doing. You had to take her up and down stairs, holding her lest she should turn dizzy and fall. If you left her a minute she would get out of the room, out of the house and on to the Green by herself and be frightened.
Mamma couldn’t remember the garden. She looked at her flowers with dislike.
You had brought her on a visit to a strange, disagreeable place and left her there. She was angry with you because she couldn’t get away.
Then, suddenly, for whole hours she would be good: a child playing its delicious game of goodness. When Dr. Charles came in and you took him out of the room to talk about her you would tell her to sit still until you came back. And she would smile, the sweet, serious smile of a child that is being trusted, and sit down on the parrot chair; and when you came back you would find her sitting there, still smiling to herself because she was so good.
Why do I love her now, when she is like this—when “this” is what I was afraid of, what I thought I could not bear—why do I love her more, if anything, now than I’ve ever done before? Why am I happier now than I’ve ever been before, except in the times when I was writing and the times when I was with Richard?
VIII
Forty-five. Yesterday she was forty-five, and today. Tomorrow she would be forty-six. She had come through the dreadful, dangerous year without thinking of it, and nothing had happened. Nothing at all. She couldn’t imagine why she had ever been afraid of it; she could hardly remember what being afraid of it had felt like.
Aunt Charlotte—Uncle Victor—
If I were going to be mad I should have gone mad long ago: when Roddy came back; when Mark died; when I sent Richard away. I should be mad now.
It was getting worse.
In the cramped room where the big bed stuck out from the wall to within a yard of the window, Mamma went about, small and weak, in her wadded lavender Japanese dressing-gown, like a child that can’t sit still, looking for something it wants that nobody can find. You couldn’t think because of the soft pad-pad of the dreaming, sleepwalking feet in the lamb’s-wool slippers.
When you weren’t looking she would slip out of the room on to the landing to the head of the stairs, and stand there, vexed and bewildered when you caught her.
IX
Mamma was not well enough now to get up and be dressed. They had moved her into Papa’s room. It was bright all morning with the sun. She was happy there. She remembered the yellow furniture. She was back in the old bedroom at Five Elms.
Mamma lay in the big bed, waiting for you to brush her hair. She was playing with her white flannel dressing jacket, spread out before her on the counterpane, ready. She talked to herself.
“Lindley Vickers—Vickers Lindley.”
But she was not thinking of Lindley Vickers; she was thinking of Dan, trying to get back to Dan.
“Is Jenny there? Tell her to go and see what Master Roddy’s doing.” She thought Catty was Jenny. … “Has Dan come in?”
Sometimes it would be Papa; but not often; she soon left him for Dan and Roddy.
Always Dan and Roddy. And never Mark.
Never Mark and never Mary. Had she forgotten Mark or did she remember him too well? Or was she afraid to remember? Supposing there was a black hole in her mind where Mark’s death was, and another black hole where Mary had been? Had she always held you together in her mind so that you went down together? Did she hold you together now, in some time and place safer than memory?
She was still playing with the dressing-jacket. She smoothed it, and patted it, and folded it up and laid it beside her on the bed. She took up her pocket-handkerchief and shook it out and folded it and put it on the top of the dressing-jacket.
“What are you doing, you darling?”
“Going to bed.”
She looked at you with a half-happy, half-frightened smile, because you had found her out. She was putting out the baby clothes, ready. Serious and pleased and frightened.
“Who will take care of my little children when I’m laid aside?”
She knew what she was lying in the big bed for.
X
It was really bedtime. She was sitting up in the armchair while Catty who was Jenny made her bed. The long white sheet lay smooth and flat on the high mattress; it hung down on the floor.
Mamma was afraid of the white sheet. She wouldn’t go back to bed.
“There’s a coffin on the bed. Somebody’s died of cholera,” she said.
Cholera? That was what she thought Mark had died of.
She knows who I am now.
XI
Richard had written to say he was married. On the twenty-fifth of February. That was just ten days after Mamma died.
“We’ve known each other the best part of our lives. So you see it’s a very sober middle-aged affair.”
He had married the woman who loved him when he
