Time of Hope Read Online Free PDF

true-blue conservative.
    Aunt Milly tried to cheer her up. Many people were asking after her, said Aunt Milly.
    ‘I’m sure they are,’ said my mother, with bitter self-consciousness.
    Some of her women friends at the church were anxious to call on her, Aunt Milly continued.
    ‘I don’t want to see any of them,’ said my mother. ‘I want to be left alone, Milly. Please to keep them away.’
    For several days my mother did not go outside the house. She had collapsed in a helpless, petrified, silent gloom. She could not bear the sight of her neighbours’ eyes. She could guess only too acutely what they were saying, and she was seared by each turn of her imagination. She knew they thought that she was vain and haughty, and that she put on airs. Now they had her at their mercy. She even put off her fortune-telling friends from their weekly conclave. She was too far gone to seek such hope.
    I went about quietly, as though she were ill. In fact she was often ill; for, despite her vigour and strength of will, her zest in anything she did, her dignified confidence that, through the grand scale of her nature, she could expect always to take the lead – despite all the power of her personality, she could never trust her nerves. She had much stamina – in the long run she was tough in body as well as in spirit – but some of my earliest recollections were of her darkened bedroom, a brittle voice, a cup of tea on a little table in the twilight, a faint aroma of brandy in the air.
    She never drank, except in those periods of nervous exhaustion, but in my childish memory that smell lingered, partly because of the heights of denunciation to which it raised Aunt Milly.
    After the bankruptcy, my mother hid away from anything they were saying about us. She was not ill so much as limp and heartbrokenly despondent. It was a week before she took herself in hand.
    She came down to breakfast on the first Sunday in August (it was actually Sunday, 2nd August, 1914). She carried her head high, and her eyes were bold.
    ‘Bertie,’ she said to my father, ‘I shall go to church this morning.’
    ‘Well, I declare,’ said my father.
    ‘I want you to come with me, dear,’ my mother said to me. She took it for granted that my father did not attend church.
    It was a blazing hot August morning, and I tried to beg myself off.
    ‘No, Lewis,’ she said in her most masterful tone. ‘I want you to come with me. I intend to show them that they can say what they like. I’m not going to demean myself by taking any notice.’
    ‘You might leave it a week or two, Lena,’ suggested my father mildly.
    ‘If I don’t go today, people might think we had something to be ashamed of,’ said my mother, without logic but with some magnificence.
    She had made her decision on her way down to breakfast, and, buoyed up by defiance and the thought of action, she looked a different woman. Almost with exhilaration, she went back to the bedroom to put on her best dress, and when she came down again she wheeled round before me in a movement that was, at the same time, stately and coquettishly vain,
    ‘Does mother look nice?’ she said. ‘Will you be proud of me? Shall I do?’
    Her dress was cream-coloured, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and an hourglass waist. She picked up the skirt now and then, for she took pleasure in her ankles, She was putting on a large straw hat and admiring herself in the mirror over the sideboard, when the church bell began to ring. ‘We’re coming,’ said my mother, as the bell clanged on insistently. ‘There’s no need to ring. We’re coming.’
    She was excited, flushed and handsome. She gave me the prayer books to carry, opened a white parasol, stepped out into the brilliant street. She walked with the slow, stylised step that had become second nature to her in moments of extreme dignity. She took my hand: her fingers were trembling.
    Outside the church we met several neighbours, who said ‘Good morning, Mrs Eliot’. My