Dangerous Ages

Rosalind Hilary

Rosalind wallows in the shallows at the family's birthday bathe, crying out admiration for Mrs. Hilary while noting, with relish, that the others have swum off and left her. She is big, fair, and lazily alive, a woman before whom one must keep up an appearance of immense enjoyment because she is so malicious. Her needling attentions expose the small humiliations of ageing and family love, making her a persistent, needling pressure on the Hilarys' self-possession.

Nan Hilary

Nan writes in Chelsea rooms, drifts through the humanities like a cat in the sun, and is infinitely amused by her niece and nephew—often spiteful to them merely because they are young. Her worst fault is a cynical unkindness she does not strive against, and she is jealous of Gerda and Kay for trespassing on her literary preserves. Yet she carries a broken love for Barry and a reckless plan to flee with Stephen Lumley, and her late-night collapse among her proofs makes her the book's rawest study of a clever woman coming apart.

Gerda

Gerda is twenty, yellow-haired, and earnest about politics and population in a way that both touches and needles her elders. She and Kay submit their literary efforts to Nan for criticism, believing in her powers and her influence, and she never shows the customary abashed hesitation in asking whether her poems have been read. Her slow, clear, crystal mind and her secret mystic thoughts make her the future Barry works for—and the rival Nan cannot quite forgive.

Barry Briscoe

Barry works for the future, smiling encouragingly at infants in prams as 'the hope for the world,' and finds in Gerda's straight-thinking earnestness the citizen and mother of citizens he believes in. He argues politics with Nan and makes no impression on her cynical indifference; she stabs him with her keen wit and eludes him whenever he gets near. His unrequited suit for Nan and his hopeful investment in Gerda place him at the hinge between the novel's generations, a good man whose private bitterness flickers across the office window.

Neville Bendish

Neville's forty-third birthday gathers the family and prompts her wry reckoning with the remote twenties and the extraordinary forties, ages she can hardly believe she has reached. She is the one person Nan has always told the darker secrets of her life, and their garden colloquy—'you're looking very sweet, aged one'—is the book's warmest, most unguarded exchange. Her poems, her age, and her clear-eyed tenderness make her the still centre around which the younger generation's loves and ambitions turn.

Grandmama

Grandmama reads Chekhov's Letters on her knees, having ordered the book because Gilbert and Nan praised it, and eyes Mrs. Hilary with a twinkle when she echoes 'Most' without conviction. She dismisses psychoanalysis by way of Rosalind and Freud by way of breeding, settling people and things very quickly and satisfactorily. From her donkey chair on the esplanade she calls Mrs. Hilary out of the cold sea, the family's sharp-eyed, unsentimental witness to its small dramas of age and pride.