I
To Pamela Neville said, “Are you afraid of getting old, Pamela?”
Pamela replied, “Not a bit. Are you?” And she confessed it.
“Often it’s like a cold douche of water down my spine, the thought of it. I reason and mock at myself, but I don’t like it. … You’re different; finer, more real, more unselfish. Besides, you’ll have done something worth doing when you have to give up. I shan’t.”
Pamela’s brows went up.
“Kay? Gerda? The pretty dears: I’ve done nothing so nice as them. You’ve done what’s called a woman’s work in the world—isn’t that the phrase?”
“Done it—just so, but so long ago. What now? I still feel young, Pamela, even now that I know I’m not. … Oh Lord, it’s a queer thing, being a woman. A well-off woman of forty-three with everything made comfortable for her and her brain gone to pot and her work in the world done. I want something to bite my teeth into—some solid, permanent job—and I get nothing but sweetmeats, and people point at Kay and Gerda and say ‘That’s your work, and it’s over. Now you can rest, seeing that it’s good, like God on the seventh day.’ ”
“I don’t say ‘Now you can rest. Except just now, while you’re run down.’ ”
“Run down, yes; run down like a disordered clock because I tried to tackle an honest job of work again. Isn’t it sickening, Pamela? Isn’t it ludicrous?”
“Ludicrous—no. Everyone comes up against his own limitations. You’ve got to work within them that’s all. After all, there are plenty of jobs you can do that want doing—simply shouting to be done.”
“Pammie dear, it’s worse than I’ve said. I’m a low creature. I don’t only want to do jobs that want doing: I want to count, to make a name. I’m damnably ambitious. You’ll despise that, of course—and you’re quite right, it is despicable. But there it is. Most men and many women are tormented by it—they itch for recognition.”
“Of course. One is.”
“You too, Pammie?”
“I have been. Less now. Life gets to look short, when you’re thirty-nine.”
“Ah, but you have it—recognition, even fame, in the world you work in. You count for something. If you value it, there it is. I wouldn’t grumble if I’d played your part in the piece. It’s a good part—a useful part and a speaking part.”
“I suppose we all feel we should rather like to play someone else’s part for a change. There’s nothing exciting about mine. Most people would far prefer yours.”
They would, of course; Neville knew it. The happy political wife rather than the unmarried woman worker; Rodney, Gerda and Kay for company rather than Frances Carr. There was no question which was the happier lot, the fuller, the richer, the easier, the more entertaining.
“Ah well. … You see, Rosalind spent the afternoon with me yesterday, and I felt suddenly that it wasn’t for me to be stuck up about her—what am I too but the pampered female idler, taking good things without earning them? It made me shudder. Hence this fit of blues. The pampered, lazy, brainless animal—it is such a terrific sight when in human form. Rosalind talked about Nan, Pamela. In her horrible way—you know. Hinting that she isn’t alone in Rome, but with Stephen Lumley.”
Pamela took off her glasses and polished them.
“Rosalind would, of course. What did you say?”
“I lost my temper. I let out at her. It’s not a thing I often do with Rosalind—it doesn’t seem worth while. But this time I saw red. I told her what I thought of her eternal gossip and scandal. I said, what if Nan and Stephen Lumley, or Nan and anyone else, did arrange to be in Rome at the same time and to see a lot of each other; where was the harm? No use. You can’t pin Rosalind down. She just shrugged her shoulders and smiled, and said ‘My dear, we all know our Nan. We all know too that Stephen Lumley has been in love with her for a year, and doesn’t live with his wife. Then they go off to Rome at the same moment, and one hears that they are seen everywhere together. Why shut one’s eyes to obvious deductions? You’re so like an ostrich, Neville.’ I said I’d rather be an ostrich than a ferret, eternally digging into other people’s concerns—and by the time we had got to that I thought it was far enough, so I had an engagement with my dressmaker.”
“It’s no use tackling Rosalind,” Pamela agreed. “She’ll never change her spots. … Do you suppose it’s true about Nan?”
“I daresay it is. Yes, I’m afraid I do think it’s quite likely true. … Nan was so queer the few times I saw her after Gerda’s accident. I was unhappy about her. She was so hard, and so more than usually cynical and unget-at-able. She told me it had been all her fault, leading Gerda into mischief, doing circus tricks that the child tried to emulate and couldn’t. I couldn’t read her, quite. Her tone about Gerda had a queer edge to it. And she rather elaborately arranged, I thought, so that she shouldn’t meet Barry. Pamela, do you think she had finally and absolutely turned Barry down before he took up so suddenly with Gerda, or. …”
Pamela said, “I know nothing. She told me nothing. But I rather thought, when she came to see me just before she went down to Cornwall, that she had made up her mind to have him. I may have been wrong.”
Neville leant her forehead on her hands and sighed.
“Or you may have been right. And if you were right, it’s the ghastliest tragedy—for her. … Oh, I shouldn’t have let Gerda go and work with him; I should have known better. … Nan had rebuffed him, and he flew off at a tangent, and there was Gerda sitting in his office, as pretty as flowers and with her funny little silent charm. … And if Nan was all the time waiting for him, meaning to say yes when he asked her. … Poor darling Nan, robbed by my horrid little girl, who doesn’t even want to marry. … If that’s the truth, it would account for the Stephen Lumley business. Nan wouldn’t stay on in London, to see them together. If Lumley caught her at that psychological moment, she’d very likely go off with him, out of mere desperation and bravado. That would be so terribly like Nan. … What a desperate, wry, cursed business life is. … On the other hand, she may just be going about with Lumley on her own terms not his. It’s her own affair whichever way it is; what we’ve got to do is to contradict the stories Rosalind is spreading whenever we get the chance. Not that one can scotch scandal once it starts—particularly Rosalind’s scandal.”
“Ignore it. Nan can ignore it when she comes back. It won’t hurt her. Nan’s had plenty of things said about her before, true and untrue, and never cared.”
“You’re splendid at the ignoring touch, Pam. I believe there’s nothing you can’t and don’t ignore.”
“Well, why not? Ignoring’s easy.”
“Not for most of us. I believe it is, for you. In a sense you ignore life itself; anyhow you don’t let it hold and bully you. When your time comes you’ll ignore age, and later death.”
“They don’t matter much, do they? Does anything? I suppose it’s my stolid temperament, but I can’t feel that it does.”
Neville thought, as she had often thought before, that Pamela, like Nan, only more calmly, less recklessly and disdainfully, had the aristocratic touch. Pamela, with her delicate detachments and her light, even touch on things great and small, made her feel fussy and petty and excitable.
“I suppose you’re right, my dear. … ‘All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for the things that are arise out of the unreasonable. …’ I must get back. Give my love to Frances … and when next you see Gerda do try to persuade her that marriage is one of the things that don’t matter and that she might just as well put up with to please us all. The child is a little nuisance—as obstinate as a mule.”