IV
At four o’clock on Thursday afternoon Rosalind went upstairs and put on an extra coating of powder and rouge. She also blackened her eyelashes and put on her lips salve the colour of strawberries rather than of the human mouth. She wore an afternoon dress with transparent black sleeves through which her big arms gleamed, pale and smooth. She looked a superb and altogether improper creature, like Lucrezia Borgia or a Titian madonna. She came down and lay among great black and gold satin cushions, and lit a scented cigarette and opened a new French novel. Black and gold was her new scheme for her drawing-room; she had had it done this spring. It had a sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold hair. Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a decadent and cynical pope. The note of the room was really too pronounced for Gilbert’s fastidious and scholarly eloquence; he lost vitality in it, and dwindled to the pale thin casket of a brain.
And Mrs. Hilary, when she entered it, trailing in, tall and thin, in her sagging grey coat and skirt, her wispy grey hair escaping from under her floppy black hat, and with the air of having till a moment ago been hung about with parcels (she had left them in the hall), looked altogether unsuited to her environment, like a dowdy lady from the provinces, as she was.
Rosalind came forward and took her by the hands.
“Well, mother dear, this is an unusual honour. … How long is it since we last had you here?”
Rosalind, enveloping her mother-in-law in extravagant fragrance, kissed her on each cheek. The kiss of Messalina! Mrs. Hilary glanced at the great mirror over the fireplace to see whether it had come off on her cheeks, as it might well have done.
Rosalind placed her on a swelling, billowy, black and gold chair, piled cushions behind her shoulders, made her lie back at an obtuse angle, a grey, lank, elderly figure, strange in that opulent setting, her long dusty black feet stretched out before her on the golden carpet.
Desperately uncomfortable and angular Rosalind made you feel, petting you and purring over you and calling you “mother dear,” with that glint always behind her golden-brown eyes which showed that she was up to no good, that she knew you hated her and was only leading you on that she might strike her claws into you the deeper. The great beautiful cat: that was what Rosalind was. You didn’t trust her for a moment.
She was pouring out tea.
“Lemon? But how dreadfully stupid of me! I’d forgotten you take milk … oh yes, and sugar. …”
She rang, and ordered sugar. Mothers take it; not the mothers of Rosalind’s world, but mothers’ meetings, and school treats, and mothers-in-law up from the seaside.
“Are you up for shopping? How thrilling! Where have you been? … Oh, High Street. Did you find anything there?”
Mrs. Hilary knew that Rosalind would see her off, hung over with dozens of parcels, and despise them, knowing that if they were so many they must also be cheap.
“Oh, there’s not much to be got there, of course,” she said. “I got a few little things—chiefly for my mother to give away in the parish. She likes to have things. …”
“But how noble of you both! I’m afraid I never rise to that. It’s all I can manage to give presents to myself and nearest rellies. And you came up to town just to get presents for the parish! You’re wonderful, mother!”
“Oh, I take a day in town now and then. Why not? Everyone does.”
Extraordinary how defiant Rosalind made one feel, prying and questioning and trying to make one look absurd.
“Why, of course! It freshens you up, I expect; makes a change. … But you’ve come up from Windover, haven’t you, not the seaside?”
Rosalind always called St. Mary’s Bay the seaside. To her our island coasts were all one; the seaside was where you went to bathe, and she hardly distinguished between north, south, east and west.
“How are they down at Windover? I heard that Nan was there, with that young man of hers who performs good works. So unlike Nan herself! I hope she isn’t going to be so silly as to let it come to anything; they’d both be miserable. But I should think Nan knows better than to marry a square-toes. I daresay he knows better too, really. … And how’s poor old Neville? I think this doctoring game of hers is simply a scream, the poor old dear.”
To hear Rosalind discussing Neville. … Messalina coarsely patronising a wood-nymph … the cat striking her claws into a singing bird. … And poor—and old! Neville was, indeed, six years ahead of Rosalind, but she looked the younger of the two, in her slim activity, and didn’t need to paint her face either. Mrs. Hilary all but said so.
“It is a great interest to Neville, taking up her medical studies again,” was all she could really say. (What a hampering thing it is to be a lady!) “She thoroughly enjoys it, and looks younger than ever. She is playing a lot of tennis, and beats them all.”
How absurdly her voice rang when she spoke of Neville or Jim! It always made Rosalind’s lip curl mockingly.
“Wonderful creature! I do admire her. When I’m her age I shall be too fat to take any exercise at all. I think it’s splendid of women who keep it up through the forties. … She won’t be bored, even when she’s sixty, will she?”
That was a direct hit, which Mrs. Hilary could bear better than hits at Neville.
“I see no reason,” said Mrs. Hilary, “why Neville should ever be bored. She has a husband and children. Long before she is sixty she will have Kay’s and Gerda’s children to be interested in.”
“No, I suppose one can’t well be bored if one has grandchildren, can one,” Rosalind said, reflectively.
There was a silence, during which Mrs. Hilary’s eyes, coldly meeting Rosalind’s with their satirical comment, said “I know you are too selfish a woman ever to bear children, and I thank God for it. Little Hilarys who should be half yours would be more than I could endure.”
Rosalind, quite understanding, smiled her slow, full-mouthed, curling smile, and held out to her mother-in-law the gold case with scented cigarettes.
“Oh no, you don’t, do you. I never can remember that. It’s so unusual.”
Her eyes travelled over Mrs. Hilary, from her dusty black shoes to her pale, lined face. They put her, with deliberation, into the class with companions, housekeepers, poor relations. Having successfully done that (she knew it was successful, by Mrs. Hilary’s faint flush) she said “You don’t look up to much, mother dear. Not as if Neville had been looking after you very well.”
Mrs. Hilary, seeing her chance, swallowed her natural feelings and took it.
“The fact is, I sleep very badly. Not particularly just now, but always. … I thought. … That is, someone told me … that there have been wonderful cures for insomnia lately … through that new thing. …”
“Which new thing? Sedobrol? Paraldehyd? Gilbert keeps getting absurd powders and tablets of all sorts. Thank God, I always sleep like a top.”
“No, not those. The thing you practice. Psychoanalysis, I mean.”
“Oh, psycho. But you wouldn’t touch that, surely? I thought it was anathema.”
“But if it really does cure people. …”
Rosalind’s eyes glittered and gleamed. Her strawberry-red mouth curled joyfully.
“Of course it has. … Not that insomnia is always a case for psycho, you know. It’s sometimes incipient mania.”
“Not in my case.” Mrs. Hilary spoke sharply.
“Why no, of course not. … Well, I think you’d be awfully wise to get analysed. Whom do you want to go to?”
“I thought you could tell me. I know no names. … A man,” Mrs. Hilary added quickly.
“Oh, it must be a man? I was going to say, I’ve a vacancy myself for a patient. But women usually want men doctors. They nearly all do. It’s supposed to be part of the complaint. … Well, I could fix you up a preliminary interview with Dr. Claude Evans. He’s very good. He turns you right inside out and shows you everything about yourself, from your first infant passion to the thoughts you think you’re keeping dark from him as you sit in the consulting room. He’s great.”
Mrs. Hilary was flushed. Hope and shame tingled in her together.
“I shan’t want to keep anything dark. I’ve no reason.”
Rosalind’s mocking eyes said “That’s what they all say.” Her lips said “The foreconscious self always has its reasons for hiding up the things the unconscious self knows and feels.”
“Oh, all that stuff. …” Mrs. Hilary was sick of it, having read too much about it in The Breath of Life. “I hope this Dr. Evans will talk to me in plain English, not in that affected jargon.”
“He’ll use language suited to you, I suppose,” said Rosalind, “as far as he can. But these things can’t always be put so that just anyone can grasp them. They’re too complicated. You should read it up beforehand, and try if you can understand it a little.”
Rosalind, who had no brains herself, insulting Mrs. Hilary’s, was rather more than Mrs. Hilary could bear. Rosalind she knew for a fool, so far as intellectual matters went, for Nan had said so. Clever enough at clothes, and talking scandal, and winning money at games, and skating over thin ice without going through—but when it came to a book, or an idea, or a political question, Rosalind was no whit more intelligent than she was, in fact much less. She was a rotten psychoanalyst, all her in-laws were sure.
Mrs. Hilary said, “I’ve been reading a good deal about it lately. It doesn’t seem to me very difficult, though exceedingly foolish in parts.”
Rosalind was touchy about psychoanalysis; she always got angry if people said it was foolish in any way. She was like that; she could see no weak points in anything she took up; it came from being vain, and not having a brain. She said one of the things angry people say, instead of discussing the subject rationally.
“I don’t suppose the amount of it you’ve been able to read would seem difficult. If you came to anything difficult you’d probably stop, you see. Anyhow, if it seems to you so foolish why do you want to be analysed?”
“Oh, one may as well try things. I’ve no doubt there’s something in it besides the nonsense.”
Mrs. Hilary spoke jauntily, with hungry, unquiet, seeking eyes that would not meet Rosalind’s. She was afraid that Rosalind would find out that she wanted to be cured of being miserable, of being jealous, of having inordinate passions about so little. Rosalind, in some ways a great stupid cow, was uncannily clever when it came to being spiteful and knowing about you the things you didn’t want known. It must be horrible to be psychoanalysed by Rosalind, who had no pity and no reticence. The things about you would not only be known but spread abroad among all those whom Rosalind met. A vile, dreadful tongue.
“You wouldn’t, I expect, like me to analyse you,” said Rosalind. “Not a course, I mean, but just once, to advise you better whom to go to. It’d have the advantage, anyhow, that I’d do it free. Anyone else will charge you three guineas at the least.”
“I don’t think,” said Mrs. Hilary, “that relations—or connections—ought to do one another. No, I’d better go to someone I don’t know, if you’ll give me the name and address.”
“I thought you’d probably rather,” Rosalind said in her slow, soft, cruel voice, like a cat’s purr. “Well, I’ll write down the address for you. It’s Dr. Evans: he’ll probably pass you on to someone down at the seaside, if he considers you a suitable case for treatment.”
He would; of course he would. Mrs. Hilary felt no doubt as to that.
Gilbert came in from the British Museum. He looked thin and nervous and sallow amid all the splendour. He kissed his mother, thinking how queer and untidy she looked, a stranger and pilgrim in Rosalind’s drawing-room. He too might look there at times a stranger and pilgrim, but at least, if not voluptuous, he was neat. He glanced proudly and yet ironically from his mother to his magnificent wife, taking in and understanding the supra-normal redundancies of her makeup.
“Rosalind,” said Mrs. Hilary, knowing that it would be less than useless to ask Rosalind to keep her secret, “has been recommending me a psychoanalyst doctor. I think it is worth while trying if I can get my insomnia cured that way.”
“My dear mother! After all your fulminations against the tribe! Well, I think you’re quite right to give it a trial. Why don’t you get Rosalind to take you on?”
The fond pride in his voice! Yet there was in his eyes, as they rested for a moment on Rosalind, something other than fond pride; something more like mockery.
Mrs. Hilary got up to go, and fired across the rich room the one shot in her armoury.
“I believe,” she said, “that Rosalind prefers chiefly to take men patients. She wouldn’t want to be bored with an old woman.”
The shot drove straight into Gilbert’s light-strung sensitiveness. Shell-shocked officers; any other officers; anything male, presentable and passably young; these were Rosalind’s patients; he knew it, and everyone else knew it. For a moment his smile was fixed into the deliberate grin of pain. Mrs. Hilary saw it, saw Gilbert far back down the years, a small boy standing up to punishment with just that brave, nervous grin. Sensitive, defiant, vulnerable, fastidiously proud—so Gilbert had always been and always would be.
Remorsefully she clung to him.
“Come and see me out, dearest boy” (so she called him, though Jim was really that)—and she ignored Rosalind’s slow, unconcerned protest against her last remark. “Why, mother, you know I asked to do you” … but she couldn’t prevent Rosalind from seeing her out too, hanging her about with all the ridiculous parcels, kissing her on both cheeks.
Gilbert was cool and dry, pretending she hadn’t hurt him. He would always take hurts like that, with that deadly, steely lightness. By its deadliness, its steeliness, she knew that it was all true (and much more besides) that she had heard about Rosalind and her patients.