Part 12 (1/2)
”You must have a course,” he told her. ”You are an obvious case for a course of treatment. St. Mary's Bay? Excellent. There is a practising psycho-a.n.a.lyst there now. You should have an hour's treatment twice a week, to be really effective.... You would prefer a man, I take it?”
He shot his eyes at her for a moment, in statement, not in enquiry. Well he knew how much she would prefer a man. She murmured a.s.sent. He rose.
The hour was over.
”How much will the course be?” she asked.
”A guinea an hour, Dr. Cradock charges. He is very cheap.”
”Yes, I see. I must think it over. And you?”
He told her his fee, and she blenched, but paid it. She was not rich, but it had been worth while. It was a beginning. It had opened the door into a new and richer life. St. Mary's Bay was illumined in her thoughts, instead of being drab and empty as before. Sublimated complexes twinkled over it like stars. Freed libido poured electrically about it. And Dr.
Cradock, she felt, would be more satisfactory as a doctor than this man, who affected her with a faint nausea when he looked at her, though he seldom did so.
2
Windover too was illumined. She could watch almost calmly Neville talking to Grandmama, wheeling her round the garden to look at the borders, for Grandmama was a great gardener.
Then Jim came down for a week-end, and it was as if the sun had risen on Surrey. He sat with Mrs. Hilary in the arbour. She told him about Dr.
Evans and the other psycho-a.n.a.lyst doctor at St. Mary's Bay. He frowned over Dr. Evans, who lived in the same street as he did.
”Rosalind sent you to him; of course; she would. Why didn't you ask me, mother? He's a desperate Freudian, you know, and they're not nearly so good as the others. Besides, this particular man is a shoddy scoundrel, I believe.... Was he offensive?”
”I wouldn't let him be, Jim. I was prepared for that. I ... I changed the conversation.”
Jim laughed, and did his favourite trick with her hand, straightening the thin fingers one by one as they lay across his sensitive palm. How happy it always made her!
”Well,” he said, ”I daresay this man down at the Bay is all right. I'll find out if he's any good or not.... They talk a lot of tosh, you know, mother; you'll have to sift the grain from the chaff.”
But he saw that her eyes were interested, her face more alert than usual, her very poise more alive. She had found a new interest in life, like keeping a parrot, or learning bridge, or getting religion. It was what they had always tried to find for her in vain.
”So long,” he said, ”as you don't believe more than half what they tell you.... Let me know how it goes on, won't you, and what this man is like.
If I don't approve I shall come and stop it.”
She loved that from Jim.
”Of course, dearest. Of course I shall tell you about it. And I know one must be careful.”
It was something to have become an object for care; it put one more in the foreground. She would have gone on willingly with the subject, but Jim changed her abruptly for Neville.
”Neville's looking done up.”
She felt the little sharp pang which Neville's name on Jim's lips had always given her. His very p.r.o.nunciation of it hurt her--”Nivvle,” he said it, as if he had been an Irishman. It brought all the past back; those two dear ones talking together, studying together, going off together, bound by a hundred common interests, telling each other things they never told her.
”Yes. It's this ridiculous work of hers. It's so absurd: a married woman of her age making her head ache working for examinations.”
In old days Jim and Neville had worked together. Jim had been proud of Neville's success; she had been quicker than he. Mrs. Hilary, who had welcomed Neville's marriage as ending all that, foresaw a renewal of the hurtful business.