The Stranger’s Child

1

From where she sat, in the window of the morning-room, the two figures seemed to hurry towards each other. Above the long hedge at the end of the formal garden, a man’s head, jerking with the lurch of a limp, moved impatiently along. ‘Rubbish!’ he shouted. ‘Rubbish!’ Whilst away to the right, between the hazily green horse-chestnuts of the park, a shiny beige car was approaching, its windscreen flashing in the sun.

‘D’, she wrote, and hesitated, with her nib on the paper. Not Darling, so ‘Dear’ certainly, and then another pause, which theatened to turn into a blot, before she added ‘est’: ‘Dearest Revel’. One went up and down the scale with people – certainly among their set there were startling advances in closeness, which sometimes were followed by coolings just as abrupt. Revel, though, was a family friend, the superlative quite proper. ‘It is too awful about David,’ she went on, ‘and you have all my sympathy’ – but she thought, what one really needed was a scale below ‘Dear’, since often one had no time whatever for the person one was warmly embracing on the page: ‘Untrustworthy Jessica’, ‘Detestable Mr Carlton-Brown’.

She heard the car stop outside, the swift jangle of the bell, footsteps and then voices. ‘Is Lady Valance in?’ ‘I believe she’s in the morning-room, madam. Shall I-’ ‘Oh, I won’t disturb her.’ ‘I can tell her’ – Wilkes giving her a clear chance to do the right thing. ‘No, don’t bother. I’ll go straight through to the office.’ ‘Very good, madam.’ It was a small contest of wills, in which the subtle but hamstrung Wilkes was trounced by the forthright Mrs Riley. A minute later he came in to cast an eye at the fire, and said, ‘Mrs Riley has come, my lady. She went through to the office, as she calls it.’

‘Thank you, I heard her,’ said Daphne, looking up and lightly covering the page with her sleeve. She shared a moment’s oddly intimate gaze with Wilkes. ‘I expect she had her plans with her?’

‘She appeared to, madam.’

‘These plans!’ said Daphne. ‘We’re not going to know ourselves soon.’

‘No, madam,’ said Wilkes, passing his white-gloved hand into the black mitten that was kept in the log-basket. ‘But they are still only plans.’

‘Hmm. You mean they may not come off?’

Wilkes smiled rather strictly as he lodged a small branch on the top of the pyre, and controlled the ensuing tumble of ash and sparks. ‘Perhaps not fully, madam, no; and in any case, not… irreversibly.’ He went on confidentially, ‘I understand Lady Valance is with us on the dining-room.’

‘Well, she’s rarely an advocate for change,’ said Daphne a little drily, but with respect for the butler’s old allegiances. With two Lady Valances in the house, there were niceties of expression which even Wilkes was sometimes tripped up by. ‘Though last night she claimed to find the new drawing-room “very restful”.’ She turned back to what she had written, and Wilkes, after a few more testing pokes at the fire, went out of the room.

‘Perhaps best not to come this weekend – we have a houseful with much family &c (my mother) – on top of which Sebby Stokes is coming down to look at Cecil’s poems. It will be somewhat of a “Cecil weekend”, and you would barely get a word in! Though perhaps’ – but here the bracket clock whirred and then hectically struck eleven, its weights spooling downwards at the sudden expense of energy. She had to sit for a moment, when the echo had vanished, to repossess her thoughts. Other clocks (and now she could hear the grandfather in the hall chime in belatedly) showed a more respectful attitude to telling the hour. They struck, all through the house, like attentive servants. Not so that old brass bully the morning-room clock, which banged it out as fast as it could. ‘Life is short!’ it shouted. ‘Get on with it, before I strike again!’ Well, it was their motto, wasn’t it: Carpe Diem! She thought better of her ‘perhaps’, and signed off blandly, ‘Love from us both, Duffel.’

She took her letter into the hall, and stood for a moment by the massive oak table in the middle of the room. It seemed to her suddenly the emblem and essence of Corley. The children tore round it, the dog got under it, the housemaids polished it and polished it, like votaries of a cult. Functionless, unwieldy, an obstacle to anyone who crossed the room, the table had a firm place in Daphne’s happiness, from which she feared it was about to be prised by force. She saw again how imposing the hall was, with its gloomy panelling and Gothic windows, in which the Valance coat of arms was repeated insistently. Would those perhaps be allowed to stay? The fireplace was designed like a castle, with battlements instead of a mantelpiece and turrets on either side, each of which had a tiny window, with shutters that opened and closed. This had come in for particular sarcasm from Eva Riley – it was indeed hard to defend, except by saying foolishly that one loved it. Daphne went to the drawing-room door, put her fingers on the handle, and then flung it open as though hoping to surprise someone other than herself.

The off-white dazzle of it, on a bright April morning, was undeniably effective. It was like a room in some extremely expensive sanatorium. Comfortable modern chairs in grey loose covers had replaced the old clutter of cane and chintz and heavy-fringed velvet. The dark dadoed walls and the coffered ceiling, with its twelve inset panels depicting the months, had been smoothly boxed in, and on the new walls a few of the original pictures were hung beside very different work. There was old Sir Eustace, and his young wife Geraldine, two full-length portraits designed to glance tenderly at each other, but now divided by a large almost ‘abstract’ painting of a factory perhaps or a prison. Daphne turned and looked at Sir Edwin, more respectfully hung on the facing wall, beside the rather chilling portrait of her mother-in-law. This had been done a few years before the War, and showed her in a dark red dress, her hair drawn back, a shining absence of doubt in her large pale eyes. She was holding a closed fan, like a lacquered black baton. Here nothing came between the couple, but still a vague air of satire seemed to threaten them, in their carved and gilded frames. In the old drawing-room, where the curtains, even when roped back, had been so bulky that they kept out much of the light, Daphne had loved to sit and almost, in a way, to hide; but no such refuge was offered by the new one, and she decided to go upstairs and see if the children were ready.

‘Mummy!’ said Wilfrid, as soon as she went into the nursery. ‘Is Mrs Cow coming?’

‘Wilfrid’s afraid of Mrs Cow,’ said Corinna.

‘I am not,’ said Wilfrid.

‘Why would anyone be afraid of a dear old lady?’ said Nanny.

‘Yes, thank you, Nanny,’ said Daphne. ‘Now, my darlings, are you going to give Granny Sawle a special surprise?’

‘Will it be the same surprise as last time?’ said Corinna.

Daphne thought for a second and said, ‘This time it will be a double surprise.’ For Wilfrid these rituals, invented by his sister, were still sickeningly exciting, but Corinna herself was beginning to think them beneath her. ‘We must all be sweet to Mrs Cow,’ Daphne said. ‘She is not very well.’

‘Is she infectious?’ said Corinna, who had only just got over the measles.

‘Not that sort of unwell,’ said Daphne. ‘She has awful arthritis. I’m afraid she’s in a great deal of pain.’

‘Poor lady,’ said Wilfrid, visibly attempting a maturer view of her.

‘I know…’ said Daphne, ‘poor lady.’ She perched selfconsciously on the upholstered top of the high fender. ‘No fire today, then, Nanny?’ she said.

‘Well, my lady, we thought it was almost nice enough to do without.’

‘Are you warm enough, Corinna?’

‘Yes, just about, Mother,’ said Corinna, and glanced uneasily at Mrs Copeland.

‘I am rather cold,’ said Wilfrid, who tended to adopt a grievance once it had been pointed out to him.

‘Then let’s run downstairs and get warmed up,’ said Daphne, in happy contravention of Nanny’s number one rule, and getting up briskly.

‘No two-at-a-time, mind, Wilfrid!’ said Nanny.

‘You can be sure he will be all right with me,’ said Daphne.

When they were out in the top passage, Wilfrid said, ‘Is Mrs Cow stopping for the night?’

‘Wilfrid, of course,’ said Corinna, as if at the end of her patience, ‘she’s coming on the train with Granny Sawle.’

‘Uncle George will take them home on Sunday, after lunch,’ said Daphne; and finding herself holding his hand, she said, ‘I thought it would be nice if you showed her up to her room.’

‘Then I will show Granny up to her room,’ said Corinna, making it harder for Wilfrid to get out of.

‘But what about Wilkes?’ said Wilfrid ingeniously.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Wilkes can put his feet up, and have a nice cup of tea, what do you think?’ said Daphne, and laughed delightedly until Wilfrid joined in on a more tentative note.

On the top stairs, they trotted down hand-in-hand, and in step, which did require a measure of discipline. Then from the window on the first-floor landing she saw the car arriving from the station. ‘They’re here… oh, darlings, run!’ she said, shaking off the children’s hands.

‘Oh, Mummy…’ said Wilfrid, transfixed with anxious excitement.

‘Come on!’ said Corinna; and they pelted down the three bright turns of polished oak, Wilfrid losing his footing on the last corner and bumping down very fast over several steps on his hip, his bottom. Daphne tensed herself, with a touch of annoyance, but now he was limping across the hall and round the table (looking just like his father), and by the time he started self-righteously to wail he was already distracted by the need to do the next thing.

Wilkes appeared, with the new Scottish boy, and Daphne let them go ahead and tackle the car for a minute while she watched from the porch. Awful to admit, but her pleasure at seeing her mother again was a touch defensive: she was thinking of the things her husband would say about her after she’d gone. Wilkes deferred to Freda very properly and smilingly, with his usual intuitive sense of what a guest might need. To Daphne herself she seemed an attractive figure, pretty, flushed, in a new blue dress well above the ankle and a fashionable little hat, with her own anxieties about the visit peeping out very touchingly. The handsome boy was helping Clara Kalbeck, a tactfully physical business: she came over the gravel slowly and determinedly, swathed in black, on two sticks, following Freda like her own old age.

2

Wilfrid glanced across at his sister, and then put his eye back to the chink between the shutters. His leg was burning, and his heart was thumping, but he still hoped to do it right. He saw Robbie come in to the house with the suitcases – he leant forward to watch him and nudged the door open with his cheek. ‘Not till I say,’ said Corinna. Robbie looked up and gave them a wink.

‘I know,’ muttered Wilfrid, and peered at her in the shadows with a mixture of awe and annoyance. The others seemed stuck in the porch, in endless adult talk. He could tell they were talking nonsense. He wanted to shout out at once, and he was also quite scared, as Corinna had said. The weekend loomed above him, with its shadowy guests and challenges. More people were coming tomorrow – Uncle George and Aunt Madeleine, he knew, and a man from London called Uncle Sebby. They would all be talking and talking, but at some point they would have to stop and Corinna would play the piano and Wilfrid would do his dance. He felt hollow with worry and excitement. When a fire was lit in the hall, this little cave-like passage was warm and stuffy, but today it smelt of cold stone. He was glad he had someone with him. At last Granny Sawle stepped in through the front door, and just for a second she glanced at the fireplace, with a dead look, so that Wilfrid knew she was expecting the surprise – though somehow this didn’t spoil it, in a way it made it better, and as soon as she’d dutifully turned her back he flung open his shutters and shouted, ‘Hello, Granny – ’

‘Not yet!’ wailed Corinna. ‘You’ve got it wrong, Wilfrid,’ but Granny had spun round already, a hand pressed to her heart.

‘Oh!’ she said, ‘oh!’ – and so Corinna pushed open her shutters too and shouted the correct announcement, which was, ‘Welcome to Corley Court, Granny Sawle and Mrs Kalbeck!’ with Wilfrid in hilarious unison, riding roughshod over his own mistake, and even though Mrs Kalbeck hadn’t yet made it into the house.

‘It’s too amazing!’ said Granny. ‘The very walls have voices.’ Wilfrid giggled in delight. ‘Ah, Dudley, dear’ – now his father had come in, and the dog barking. She raised her voice – ‘This ancient fireplace has miraculous properties!’

‘Rubbish, Rubbish!’ his father shouted, as the dog ran yelping and shivering towards the front door. ‘Here, Rubbish, come here! Pipe down!’; though Rubbish as usual did no such thing, and wanted to give everyone a Corley welcome of his own.

‘Quite magical!’ Granny held on.

‘Well, it won’t be magical for much longer,’ said his father, in his meaning voice, kissing her on the cheek. ‘Come on out of there, will you!’ though it wasn’t clear now if he was shouting at the children or the dog.

‘Wilfrid messed it up,’ said Corinna in a further announcement, as Mrs Kalbeck leant in through the front door, on one stick after the other, clearly alarmed as Rubbish leapt up and waltzed with her for a moment with his front paws on her tummy – she took two panting steps backwards, and the dog dropped down and sniffed excitedly round her legs, her round black shoes. After that it took a while for her to see where the young girl’s voice was coming from.

‘Frau Kalbeck, marvellous to see you again,’ said Dudley, limping quickly but very heavily across to her, so that he seemed to be playing with her, aping her or just joining in, you couldn’t tell. ‘Please ignore my children.’

‘Oh, but darling,’ said their mother, ‘the children have asked to show the guests up to their rooms.’

Dudley swung round with what they called the ‘mad glint’. The mood thickened, in a familiar way. But he seemed to let them off by saying simply, ‘Oh, the little dears.’

Mrs Kalbeck was awfully slow on the stairs. Wilfrid watched the rubber tip of each stick as it felt for its purchase on the shiny oak. ‘It is very dangerous,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve fallen down here myself.’ Being responsible for her, he found her interesting as well as frightening. He bobbed up and down the stairs beside her, encouraging and assessing her much slower progress. Corinna and Granny Sawle had gone on ahead, and he was worried, as always, about being late, and about what his father would say. ‘This house is Victorian,’ he explained.

Mrs Kalbeck chuckled amongst her sighs, and looked him in the face, levelly but sweetly. ‘And so am I, my dear,’ she said, in her precise German voice, her large grey eyes casting a kind of spell on him.

‘Do you like it then?’ he said.

‘This marvellous old house?’ she said gaily, but peering past him up the polished stairs with anxious blankness.

‘My father can’t warm to it,’ said Wilfrid. ‘He’s going to change it all.’

‘Well,’ she said disappointingly, ‘if that’s what he wants to do.’

Mrs Kalbeck had been put in the Yellow Room, at the far end of the house, and Wilfrid went a step or two ahead of her along the broad strip of carpet on the landing. They passed the open door of Granny Sawle’s room, where Corinna had already been given a present, a bright red scarf which she was looking at in the mirror. It was a cheerful irresistible room, and Wilfrid started to go into it, but then did resist, and walked on. The next door on the other side was his parents’ bedroom. ‘I’m afraid you’re not allowed in that room,’ he said, ‘unless my parents ask you to go in, of course.’ He was embarrassed that he didn’t exactly know Mrs Cow’s name; though at the same time he enjoyed thinking of her by her rude name. He didn’t want to get too close to her black dress, and her smell, white flowers mixed up with something sour and unhappy. ‘Mrs Ka…’ he said tentatively.

‘Yes, Wilfrid.’

‘My name’s not Vilfrid, you know, Mrs Ka…!’

The old lady stopped and pursed her lips obediently. ‘Wil-frid,’ she said, and coloured a little, which confused Wilfrid too for a moment. He looked away. ‘You were saying, Wil-frid, my dear…?’ But of course he couldn’t say. He danced on, down the long sunlit landing, leaving her to catch up.

The door of the Yellow Room was open, and the maid Sarah, not one of his favourites, was standing over Mrs Kalbeck’s old blue suitcase, going through its contents with a slightly comic expression. When Mrs Kalbeck saw her, she lurched forward, almost fell as a rug slid away under her stick. ‘Oh, I can do that,’ she said. ‘Let me do that!’

‘It’s no trouble, madam,’ said Sarah, smiling coolly.

Mrs Kalbeck sat down heavily on the dressing-table stool, panting with indecision, though there was nothing she could do. ‘Those old things…’ she said, and looked quickly from the maid to Wilfrid, hoping he at least hadn’t seen them, and then back again, as they were carried ceremoniously towards an open wardrobe.

‘Well, goodbye,’ said Wilfrid, and withdrew from the room as if not expecting to meet her again.

On the landing, by himself, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that he should have said something. He trailed his fingers along the spines of the books in the bookcase as he passed, producing a low steady ripple. He covered his unease with a kind of insouciance, though no one was watching. He’d done what he’d been told, he’d been extremely kind to Mrs Cow, but his worry was more wounding and obscure: that he’d been told to do it by someone who knew it was wrong, and yet pretended it wasn’t. Three toes on his father’s left foot had been blown off by a German shell, and the man he had learned to call Uncle Cecil was a cold white statue in the chapel downstairs, because of a German sniper with a gun. Wilfrid ran down the corridor, in momentary freedom from any kind of adult, his fear of being late overruled by a blind desire to hide – ran past his grandmother’s room and round the corner, till he got to the linen-room, and went in, and closed the door.

3

‘Have a drink, Duffel,’ said Dudley genially, rather as if she were another guest.

‘We’re having Manhattans,’ said Mrs Riley.

‘Oh…’ said Daphne, not quite looking at either of them, but crossing the room with a good-tempered expression. She still felt distinctly odd, like the subject of an experiment, whenever she came into the ‘new’ drawing-room; and having Mrs Riley herself in the room only made her feel odder. ‘Should we wait for Mother and Clara?’

‘Oh, I don’t know…’ said Dudley. ‘Eva looked thirsty.’

Mrs Riley gave her quick smoky laugh. ‘How do you know Mrs… um -?’ she said.

‘Mrs Kalbeck? She was our neighbour in Middlesex,’ said Daphne, making a moody survey of the bottles on the tray; and though she loved Manhattans, and had loved Manhattan itself, when they’d gone there for Dudley’s book, she set about mixing herself a gin and Dubonnet.

Mrs Riley said, ‘She seems rather… um…’ making a game of her own malice.

‘Yes, she’s a dear,’ said Daphne.

‘She’s certainly an enormous asset at a house party,’ said Dudley.

Daphne gave a pinched smile and said, ‘Poor Clara had a very hard war,’ which was what her mother often said in her friend’s defence, and now sounded almost as satirical as Dudley’s previous remark. She’d never been fond of Clara, but she pitied her, and since they both had brothers who’d been killed in the War, felt a certain kinship with her.

‘Just wait till she starts singing the Ride of the Valkyries,’ Dudley said.

‘Oh, does she do that,’ said Mrs Riley.

‘Well, she loves Wagner,’ said Daphne. ‘You know she took my mother to Bayreuth before the War.’

‘Poor thing…’ said Mrs Riley.

‘She’s never quite recovered,’ said Dudley in a tactful tone, ‘has she, Duffel, your mother, really?’

Mrs Riley chuckled again, and now Daphne looked at her: yes, that was how she chuckled, head back an inch, upper lip spread downwards, a huff of cigarette-smoke: a more or less tolerant gesture as much as a laugh.

‘I don’t rightly know,’ said Daphne, frowning, but seeing the point of keeping her husband in a good humour. A certain amount of baiting of the Sawles would have to be allowed this weekend. She came over with her drink, and dropped into one of the low grey armchairs with a trace of a smirk at its continuing novelty. She thought she’d never seen anything so short, for evening wear, as Eva Riley’s dress, only just on the knee when she sat, or indeed anything so long as her slithering red necklace, doubtless also of her own design. Well, her odd flat body was made for fashion, or at least for these fashions; and her sharp little face, not pretty, really, but made up as if it were, in red, white and black like a Chinese doll. Designers, it seemed, were never off duty. Curled across the corner of a sofa, her red necklace slinking over the grey cushions, Mrs Riley was a sort of advertisement for her room; or perhaps the room was an advertisement for her. ‘I know this weekend has been consecrated to Cecil,’ Daphne said, ‘but actually I’m glad that Clara was persuaded to come. She has no one, really, except my mother. It will mean so much to her. Poor dear, you know she hasn’t even got electricity.’

Dudley snorted delightedly at this. ‘She’ll revel in the electrical fixtures here,’ he said.

Daphne smiled, as if trying not to, while the quick unmeaning use of the word revel lodged and sank in her, a momentary regret; she went on, ‘It’s really rather a hovel she lives in, I mean clean of course, but so tiny and dark. It’s just down the hill from where my mother used to live.’ Still, she knew she had been right to tell Revel not to come.

‘And where you grew up, Duffel,’ said Dudley, as if his wife were getting airs. ‘The famous “Two Acres”.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Riley. ‘What was it…? “Two blessèd acres of English ground!” ’

‘Indeed!’ said Dudley.

‘I suppose that was Cecil’s most famous poem, wasn’t it?’ said Mrs Riley.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Daphne, with another little frown. There was perhaps something reassuring after all about Eva Riley’s long bare legs. A clever woman aiming to seduce a rich man right under his wife’s nose would surely wear something more discreet, and dissembling. Daphne looked away, and out through the window at the garden already losing colour in the early spring evening. At the top of the central section of each window the Valance coat of arms appeared, with the motto beneath it on a folded strip in Gothic letters. The gaudy little shields looked cheerfully at odds with the cold modernity of the room.

Dudley sipped piously at his cocktail, and said, ‘I can’t help feeling slightly mortified that my brother Cecil, heir to a baronetcy and three thousand acres, not to mention one of the ugliest houses in the south of England, should be best remembered for his ode to a suburban garden.’

‘Well,’ said Daphne stoutly, and not for the first time, ‘it was quite a lovely garden. I hope you’re not going to say things like that to Sebby Stokes.’ She watched Mrs Riley’s heavy-lidded smile indulge them both. ‘Or indeed to my poor mother. She’s very proud of that poem. Besides Cecil wrote far more poems about Corley, masses of them, as you well know.’

‘Castle of exotic dreams,’ said Dudley, in an absurd Thespian tone, ‘mirrored in enamelled streams…’ – but sounding in fact quite like Cecil’s ‘poetry voice’.

‘I’m sure even Cecil never wrote anything so awful as that,’ said Daphne. And Dudley, excited by mockery of anything that others held dear, grinned widely at Eva Riley, showing her, like a flash of nakedness, his glistening dog-teeth. Mrs Riley said, very smoothly, jabbing her cigarette out in the ashtray,

‘I’m surprised your mother didn’t marry again.’

‘The General, dear god!’ said Dudley.

‘No… Lady Valance’s mother,’ said Eva Riley.

‘It never seemed to come up, somehow… I’m not sure she’d have wanted it,’ said Daphne, suppressing, in a kind of ruffled dignity, her own uncomfortable thoughts on the subject.

‘She’s a pretty little thing. And she must have been widowed rather young.’

‘Yes – yes, she was,’ said Daphne, absently but firmly; and looked to Dudley to change the subject. He lit a cigarette, and steadied a heavy silver ashtray on the arm of his chair. It was one of over a hundred items that he had had stamped on the bottom: Stolen from Corley Court. Up in his dressing-room he kept a pewter mug of no great value with Stolen from Hepton Castle invitingly engraved on its underside, and he had followed the practice back at Corley, overseeing the work himself with fierce determination.

‘When’s the Stoker getting here?’ he said, after a bit.

‘Oh, not till quite late, not till after dinner,’ said Daphne.

‘I expect he’s got some extremely important business to attend to,’ said Dudley.

‘There’s some important meeting, something about the miners, you know,’ said Daphne.

‘You don’t know Sebastian Stokes,’ Dudley told Mrs Riley. ‘He combines great literary sensitivity with a keen political mind.’

‘Well, of course I’ve heard of him,’ said Mrs Riley, rather cautiously. In Dudley’s talk candour marched so closely with satire that the uninitiated could often only stare and laugh uncertainly at his pronouncements. Now Mrs Riley leant forward to take a new cigarette from the malachite box on the low table.

‘You don’t need to lose any sleep about the miners with Stokes in charge,’ said Dudley.

‘I’m sleeping like a top as it is,’ she said pertly, fiddling with a match.

Daphne took a warming sip of her gin and thought what she could say about the poor miners, if there had been any point to it at all. She said, ‘I think it’s rather marvellous of him to do all this about Cecil when the Prime Minister needs him in London.’

‘But he idolized Cecil,’ said Dudley. ‘He wrote his obituary in The Times, you know.’

‘Oh, really…?’ said Mrs Riley, as if she’d read it and wondered.

‘He did it to please the General, but it came from the heart. A soldier… a scholar… a poet… etc., etc., etc… etc.… and a gentleman!’ Dudley knocked back his drink in a sudden alarming flourish. ‘It was a wonderful send-off; though of course largely unrecognizable to anyone who’d really known my brother Cecil.’

‘So he didn’t really know him,’ said Mrs Riley, still treading warily, but clearly enjoying the treacherous turn of the talk.

‘Oh, they met a few times. One of Cecil’s bugger friends had him down to Cambridge, and they went in a punt and Cecil read him a sonnet, you know, and the Stoker was completely bowled over and got it put in some magazine. And Cecil wrote him some high-flown letters that he put in The Times later on, when he was dead…’ Dudley seemed to run down, and sat gazing, with eyebrows lightly raised, as if at the unthinkable tedium of it all.

‘I see…’ said Mrs Riley, with a coy smirk, and then looked across at Daphne. ‘I don’t suppose you ever knew Cecil, Lady Valance?’ she said.

‘Me, oh good lord yes!’ said Daphne. ‘In fact I knew him long before I met Dud-’ but at that moment the door was opened by Wilkes and her mother came in, hesitantly it seemed, since she was waiting for her friend, on her two slow sticks, to cross the hall, and Clara herself was in distracted conversation with Dudley’s mother, who came in briskly just behind her.

‘My husband, you could fairly say, disliked music,’ said Louisa Valance. ‘It wasn’t that he hated it, you understand. He was in many ways an unduly sensitive man. Music made him sad.’

‘Music is sad, yes,’ said Clara, looking vaguely harassed. ‘But also, I think-’

‘Come in, come and sit,’ said Daphne, with a rescuing smile at Clara’s shabby sparkle, the old black evening dress tight under the arms, the old black evening bag, that had been to the opera long before the War, swinging around the stick in her left hand as she thrust forward into the room. The Scottish boy, handsome as a singer himself in his breeches and evening coat, brought forward a higher chair for her, and propped her sticks by it once she’d sat down. Eva and Dudley seemed lightly mesmerized by the sticks, and gazed at them as if at rude survivals from a culture they thought they had swept away. The boy hovered discreetly, smiled and acted with proper impersonal charm. He was the first appointment Wilkes had made under Daphne’s rule at Corley, and in some incoherent and almost romantic way she thought of him as her own.

‘Sebastian hasn’t arrived?’ said Louisa.

‘Not yet,’ said Daphne. ‘Not till after dinner.’

‘We have so much to talk about,’ said Louisa, with buoyant impatience.

‘Ah, Mamma…’ said Dudley, coming towards her as if to kiss her, but stopping a few feet off with a wide grin.

‘Good evening, my dear. You knew I was coming in.’

‘Well, I hoped so, Mamma, of course. Now what would you like to drink?’

‘I think a lemonade. It’s quite spring-like today!’

‘Isn’t it,’ said Dudley. ‘Let’s celebrate.’

Louisa gave him the dry smile that seemed partly to absorb and partly to deflect his sarcasms, and looked away. Her eyes lingered on Mrs Riley’s legs, then switched for reassurance to Daphne’s, and her face, not naturally tactful, seemed frozen for five seconds in the forming and suppressing of a ‘remark’. She was standing, perhaps by design, beneath her own portrait, which in a way made remarks superfluous. This was the house she had ruled for forty years. She was gaunter now about the brow than when she’d been painted, sharper about the chin. Her hair had gone from russet to ash, the red dress changed irreversibly to black. Every time she ‘came in’ from the set of rooms she now occupied, and where she often chose to dine alone, she moved with a perceptible shiver of shaken dignity, made all the clearer by the sunny bits of play-acting that accompanied it. ‘I do think you’ve been so clever, my dear,’ she said to Mrs Riley. ‘You’ve changed this room out of all recognition.’ At the corner of her eye she had the abstract painting, which so far she had affected not to have seen at all.

‘Oh, thank you, Lady Valance,’ said Eva, with a slightly nervous laugh.

‘It’s most unexpected,’ said Clara, with her involuntary German air of meaning rather more.

Louisa gazed around. ‘I find it really most restful,’ she said, as if restfulness were a quality she specially cared for.

‘You haven’t seen anything yet,’ said Dudley, lurching towards his mother with her favourite drink. ‘We’re going to brighten the whole place up.’

‘I’d be sorry to see the library changed,’ said Louisa.

‘If you say so, Mamma, the library will be spared, it will retain its primeval gloom.’

‘Well…’ She took a sip of lemonade, and smiled tightly, as if relishing her own good humour. ‘And what of the hall?’

‘Now the hall… I believe Mrs Riley has quite set her sights on the fireplace.’

‘Oh, not the fireplace!’ said Freda, rather wildly. ‘But the children adore the fireplace.’

‘One would have to be a child, surely, to adore the fireplace,’ said Eva Riley.

‘Well, I must be a child in that case,’ said Freda.

‘Which makes me the child of a child,’ said Daphne, ‘a babe in arms!’

Dudley looked round the roomful of women with a glint of annoyance, but at once recovered. ‘You know a lot of the best people nowadays are getting rid of these Victorian absurdities. You should run over and see what the Witherses have done at Badly-Madly, Mamma. They’ve pulled down the bell-tower, and put an Olympic swimming-pool in its place.’

‘Goodness!’ said Louisa – which alternated with ‘Horror!’ in her small repertoire of interjections, and was more or less interchangeable with it.

‘At Madderleigh, of course,’ said Eva Riley, ‘they got to work long ago. They boxed in the dining-room there in the Eighties, I believe.’

‘There you are! Even the man who built it couldn’t stand it,’ said Dudley.

‘The man who built this house was your grandfather,’ said Louisa. ‘He loved it.’

‘I know… wasn’t it odd of him?’

‘But then you never showed any feeling for the things your grandfather held dear, or your father either.’ She grinned round at the others, as though they were all with her.

‘Oh, not true,’ said Dudley, ‘I love cows, and claret.’

‘Now won’t you sit down, Louisa?’ said Freda warmly, smoothing the expanse of plumped cushion beside her. Daphne knew she hated the candour of talk at Corley since Sir Edwin had died, the constant sparring she herself had quickly become inured to.

‘I prefer a hard chair, my dear,’ said Louisa. ‘I find armchairs somewhat effeminate.’ She sighed. ‘I wonder what Cecil would have made of all these changes.’

‘Mm, I wonder,’ said Dudley, turning away; and then facetiously, as if only half-hoping to be heard, ‘Perhaps you could ask him, the next time you’re in touch?’

Daphne slid a horrified glance at Louisa, it wasn’t clear if she’d heard, Dudley’s head was nodding in noiseless laughter, and his mother went on with tense determination, ‘Cecil had a keen sense of tradition, he was never less than dignified-’ but at that moment the door flew open, and there was Nanny, with a hand on each child’s shoulder. She held them to her, perhaps a moment too long, in a little tableau of her own efficiency. ‘Well, here they are!’ she said. When Granny Sawle visited, they were brought down at six, between nursery supper and bed. Wilfrid broke away and ran to greet her, with a low sweeping bow, which was his new game, while Corinna walked in front of the fireplace with her hands behind her back, as though about to make one of her announcements. They each found a moment to peep nervously at their father – but Dudley’s high spirits didn’t much falter.

‘Say hello to Mrs Riley,’ he said.

‘Hello, Mrs Riley,’ said the children, promptly but with no great warmth.

‘My dears…’ said Mrs Riley over her cocktail-glass.

Wilfrid ran round politely to bow to Granny V as well, who said warily, ‘Look at you!’ as with a quick panting sound and the thwack of his tail against chairs and table-legs Rubbish bustled across the room from the open garden door and excitedly circled his master.

‘Oh, do we really want the dog in?’ said Daphne, with a flutter of panic as her mother raised her drink away from its thrusting nose and made a face at the gamy heat of its breath. She got up to grab it, but Dudley was growling indulgently and provokingly, ‘Oh, Wubbishy Wubbishy Wubbish!’ and had already produced from somewhere one of the bone-hard black biscuits that Rubbish was said to like, which after a bit of teasing he threw into the air – it went down in one. Clara was still nervous of the dog, and smiled keenly at it to suggest she was not. She hid her shyness in a bit of pantomime, stretching out a hand in childish reconciliation, but she had no biscuit, and Rubbish walked past as if he hadn’t seen her.

Corinna had moved in a discreetly purposeful way towards the piano, and now perched on the edge of the stool, studying her father for the best moment to speak. ‘You’re not going to play for us, or anything, are you, old girl?’ said Dudley.

‘Oh, does she play?’ said Eva, with a sly spurt of smoke.

‘Play? She’s a perfect fiend at the piano,’ said Dudley. ‘Aren’t you, my darling?’ At which Corinna smiled uncertainly.

‘I’ll play for you tomorrow,’ she said.

‘Good idea. Play for Uncle George,’ said Dudley, tired already of his own sarcasm, as well as the subject itself.

‘And Wilfie can do his dance,’ said Corinna, reminding her father of the terms of the deal.

‘Well exactly…’ said Dudley after a minute.

Louisa, still rather fixed on Eva, said, ‘I imagine you might care for music, Mrs Riley?’

Mrs Riley smiled at her to prepare her for her answer: ‘Oh, awfully – certain music, at least.’

‘What, Gounod and what have you?’

‘Not Gounod particularly, no…’

‘I should think one would draw the line at Gounod.’

‘Now Wilfie,’ said Dudley, with a loud cough, as if reproving him; but then went on, ‘have you heard about the Colonel and the Rat?’

‘No, Daddy,’ said Wilfrid softly, hardly daring to believe that a poem was starting, but perhaps apprehensive too about its subject.

‘Well…’ said Dudley. ‘The Colonel was there, with bristling hair, and a terrible air, of pain and despair.’

Wilfrid laughed at this, or at least at the awful face his father had pulled to go with it; anything awful could be funny too. ‘Oh ducky,’ said Daphne, ‘is Daddy doing doggerel for you.’

‘It’s not doggerel, Duffel,’ said Dudley, tightly suppressing a snort at so much alliteration, ‘it’s called Skeltonics, it dates from the time of King Henry VIII. If you remember Skelton was the poet laureate.’

‘Oh, in that case,’ said Daphne.

‘Well, if you don’t want me to tell you a poem.’

‘Oh, yes, Daddy!’ said Wilfrid.

‘Your uncle Cecil was a famous poet, but what people tend not to know is that I have quite a talent that way myself.’

Daphne glanced at Louisa, who had an unprovokable look, as though she found her son and her grandson equally beyond comprehension.

‘I know, Daddy,’ said Wilfrid, and stood yearningly by his father’s knee, almost as if he might be going to lay his hand on it.

4

After breakfast the next day Daphne appeared in the nursery, just as Mrs Copeland was getting the children ready for a walk: ‘No, Wilfrid, not those white trousers, you’ll be all over mud.’

‘Mud will be all over me, you mean, Nanny,’ he said.

‘Mother, we’re walking to Pritchett’s farm,’ said Corinna, with a stoical wince as Mrs Copeland pulled a band over her hair.

‘Don’t worry, Nanny,’ said Daphne, ‘I’ll take them myself. We’ve got photographers.’

‘Indeed, my lady!’ said Nanny, with a keen smile and a hint of pique, scanning her charges with a sharper eye. ‘Shall we be in the papers again, then?’

‘Well, we shall,’ Daphne wanted to say, ‘not you’, but she made do with, ‘It’s the Sketch, I think.’

Mrs Copeland tugged a little harder at Corinna’s hair. ‘My sister in London sent Sir Dudley’s picture from the Daily Mail.’

‘I fear publicity is all a part of being a successful writer,’said Daphne, ‘these days! No, leave those trousers on, my duck – we’ll just be sitting about in the garden.’

Wilfrid frowned at her bravely for a moment, but then turned and went to the window as if suddenly remembering something outside. ‘Wilfrid was promised to see the new foal,’ said Corinna, in a pitying, almost mocking voice, ‘and the little chicks in the incubator,’ but she was touched already by the strange contagion of grief, and when a wail went up from the window she started to crumple too, which was worse for her because of the loss of status. She didn’t make much noise, but she attended to her doll’s overnight bag with a swollen face, jamming in the parasol and the tiny red cardigan.

‘Oh, are you bringing Mavis, darling?’ said Daphne. Corinna nodded vigorously but didn’t risk speaking.

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ said Nanny smugly.

‘Oh, Wilfie, don’t cry,’ said Daphne, picturing the new foal nuzzling its mother and then running off with a nervy sense of untested liberty; but she hardened herself: ‘You don’t want to look all blotchy in the paper.’

‘I don’t want to be in the paper,’ said Wilfrid tragically, his back still turned. Again, Daphne saw the sense of this, but she said,

‘My duck, what a thing to say. You’ll be famous. You’ll be there with Bonzo the Dog, think of that. All over England people will be asking themselves’ – here she ran over and snatched him up with a grunt and a slight stagger at his six-year-old weight – “Who is that lucky, lucky little boy?” ’

But Wilfrid seemed to find that idea even more upsetting than the missed muddy walk.

Out among the maze-like hedges and commas of lawn in the flower-garden, Daphne saw him brighten and perhaps forget. After half a minute his dragging sorrow had a skip in it, there was a glance of reconciliation, a further ten seconds of remembered sorrow, rather formal and conscious, and then the surely unselfconscious surrender to the game of the paths. Gravel, or flagged, or narrow strips of grass, the paths curled between hedges, flanked the long borders, or opened into circles that had nearly identical statues in them, and presented a further compass of decisions, on which the children rarely tried to agree. Now Corinna marched ahead, down the main grass walk that was flanked with clematis grown along chains, dipping and rising between tall posts – in a week or two it would be a blaze of white, like the route of a wedding. She clutched, not Mavis, but Mavis’s red leather reticule. Wilfie avoided the processional way – he cantered around to left and right, talking in an odd private voice, sometimes sounding furious with himself or with some imaginary friend or follower. ‘Come along, my darling, let’s see what those fish are up to,’ said Daphne.

A pool of dumb goldfish struck her as a wan consolation for the hot breath and smells and squelch of a farmyard, and Wilfie himself, when they all arrived at the central pond, took a bit of encouraging to focus on it. ‘Can they all be under that leaf?’ said Daphne. The pool was ringed by a flagged path, and then four stone seats between high rose arches, thick with red and dark green leaves and only the tips of one or two buds as yet showing pink or white. Daphne sat down, with a passive conventional sense that it would make a good place for a photograph.

‘Mother, is Sebby coming here?’ said Corinna, setting her case on the bench between them.

‘I don’t know, darling,’ said Daphne, glancing round. ‘He’s talking to your father.’

‘What on earth is Uncle Sebby doing?’ said Wilfrid.

‘He’s not Uncle Sebby,’ said Corinna, with a giggle.

‘No, ducky, he’s not…’ Poor Wilfie was haunted and puzzled by phantom uncles. Uncle Cecil at least was in the house, in a highly idealized marmoreal form, and was often invoked, but Uncle Hubert was mentioned so rarely that he barely existed for him – she wasn’t sure that he had ever even seen his picture. All he had to go on, for uncles, was an occasional appearance by Uncle George, with his long words. When most uncles no longer existed, it was natural to co-opt one or two who did.

‘Well, you see,’ said Daphne, ‘it’s been decided that there’s going to be a book of all Uncle Cecil’s poems, and Sebby’s come down to talk to your father about it, and Granny V, and well, talk to everybody really.’

‘Why?’ said Wilfrid.

‘Well… there’s to be a memoir, you know… the story of Uncle Cecil’s life, and Granny V wants Sebby to write it. So he needs to talk to all the people who knew him.’

Wilfrid said nothing, and started on a game, and a minute later, staring into the pond, said, ‘A memoir…!’ under his breath, as if they all knew it was a mad idea.

‘Poor Uncle Cecil,’ said Corinna, in one of her calculated turns of piety. ‘What a great man he was!’

‘Oh… well…’ said Daphne.

‘And so handsome.’

‘No, he was,’ Daphne allowed.

‘Was he more handsome than Daddy, would you say?’

‘He had enormous hands,’ said Daphne, looking round at the first bark of the dog, which must mean Dudley, and everyone coming.

‘Oh, Mother!’

‘He was a great climber, you know. Always clambering up the Dolomites or somewhere.’

‘What’s the Dolomites?’ said Wilfrid, stirring the fishpond tentatively with a short stick.

‘It’s mountains,’ said Corinna, as Rubbish busied in through the rose arch behind them, went rather fast round half the circle, and came back, nose low and lively over the flagstones, scruffy grey tail flickering. Wilfrid pointed his wet stick bravely at him and Corinna commanded, ‘Rubbish!’ but Rubbish only gave them a perfunctory sniff; it was almost hurtful to the children how little they counted for in the dog’s stark system of command and reward, though a relief too, of course. ‘Bad dog!’ said Wilfrid. Sometimes Rubbish explored by himself, sometimes he joined you flatteringly for the outset of a walk and then doubled off on business of his own, but mainly he was Dudley’s running herald, hounded himself by his own shouted name. Daphne waited for the shouts, ignoring the dog, and rather disliking it; but no shouts came and in a minute Rubbish, oddly polite, stepping forward and stopping, gave a long cajoling whine, and when she looked round there was Revel under the arch.

He made a little picture of himself, in its frame. ‘My dear,’ said Daphne, ‘you made it!’ as though she’d encouraged him rather than put him off. She felt she put a hint of warning in her welcome, in the look she gave him, which searched his charming sharp little face for signs of distress. He almost ignored her, bit his lip in mock-penitence, while his dark eyes went from one child to the other. He made everything depend on them – he was the opposite of the dog. ‘Rubbish told me I’d find you here,’ he said, coming forward to kiss Corinna on the silky top of her hair, pulling Wilfie quickly against his thigh, while the dog barked brusquely and then, its duty done, trotted back towards the house without looking round.

‘Uncle Revel,’ said Wilfrid, taking the surprise more easily than his mother, ‘will you draw a brontosaurus?’

‘I’ll draw anything you like, darling,’ said Revel. ‘Though brontosauruses are rather hard.’ He came towards Daphne, who stood up, without quite wanting to, and felt his cheek and chin harsh against hers for a second. He said quietly, ‘I hope you don’t mind, I rang up Dud and he said just to come.’

‘No, of course,’ she said. ‘Did you see someone? Did you see the photographer?’ She felt somehow that Revel’s visit, if it had to happen, should be kept out of the papers – and of course, if the photographers saw him they’d want him: he seemed to her to come emphasized, transfigured, set apart by success in a light of his own that was subtly distinct from the general gleam of the April day. Everyone was talking about him, not as much perhaps as they were about Sebby and the Trade Unions, but a good deal more than about Dudley, or Mrs Riley, or of course herself! And now he’d had a frightful row with David, so the gleam about him was that of suffering as well as fame. Surely the last thing he needed was to see himself splashed all over the Sketch.

‘There was a chap in a greasy trilby I don’t think I’ve seen before,’ Revel said.

‘Hmm, that’ll be him,’ said Daphne.

‘And I think I spotted your brother and his wife.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Daphne, rather heavily.

‘Fair, balding, wire-framed glasses…?’

‘That sounds like Madeleine…’

‘But nice-looking,’ said Revel, with the little giggle she loved. ‘Madeleine more severe. Heavy tread, awful hat. If I may say so.’

‘Oh, say what you like,’ said Daphne. ‘Everyone does here.’

‘Is Uncle George here?’ said Wilfrid.

‘He is,’ said Revel. ‘I think they were going up to the High Ground.’

‘How perfectly obstreperous of him,’ said Corinna.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Daphne.

‘How entirely preposterous,’ said Corinna.

‘Well, perhaps we should join them,’ Daphne said. And taking charge, she went out under the further rose arch, with the children eventually following, and Revel ambling between them and Daphne, speaking in the pointed way one did with other people’s children, to amuse them and amuse the listening parent in a different way. ‘Certainly I don’t think any brontosauruses have been spotted in Berkshire for several years now,’ he said. ‘But I’m told there are other wild beasts, some of them fiendishly disguised in smart white trousers…’ Daphne felt the magnetic disturbance of his presence just behind her, at the corner of her eye as she led them up the steps and passed through the white gate under the arch. You were wonderfully safe of course with a man like Revel; but then the safety itself had something elastic about it. There were George and Madeleine – so odd that they’d set straight off on a walk. Perhaps just so as to be doing something, since Madeleine was unable to relax; or possibly to put off seeing Dudley for as long as they decently could.

The High Ground was an immense lawn beyond the formal gardens, from which, though the climb to it seemed slight, you got ‘a remarkable view of nothing’, as Dudley put it: the house itself, of course, and the slowly dropping expanse of farmland towards the villages of Bampton and Brize Norton. It was an easy uncalculating view, with no undue excitement, small woods of beech and poplar greening up across the pasture-land. Somewhere a few miles off flowed the Thames, already wideish and winding, though from here you would never have guessed it. Today the High Ground was being mown, the first time of the year, the donkey in its queer rubber overshoes pulling the clattering mower, steered from behind by one of the men, who took off his cap to them as he approached. Really you didn’t mow at weekends, but Dudley had ordered it, doubtless so as to annoy his guests. George and Madeleine were strolling on the far side, avoiding the mowing, heads down in talk, perhaps enjoying themselves in their own way.

The children hastened, at a ragged march, towards their uncle and aunt – and seemed unsure themselves how much of their delight was real, how much good manners; Corinna by now took delight in good manners for their own sake. George stood his ground, in his dark suit and large brown shoes, and then squatted down with a wary cackle to inspect them for a moment on their own level. Madeleine, wrapped in a long mackintosh, held back, with a thin fixed smile, in which various doubts and questions were tightly hidden.

‘Aunt Madeleine, I’ve learned a new piece to play for you,’ said Corinna straight away.

‘Oh,’ said Madeleine, ‘what is it?’

‘It’s called “The Happy Wallaby”.’

‘Well, my dear,’ said Madeleine, as if seeing something faintly compromising in this, ‘we’ll have to see.’

‘She’s been practising, haven’t you, Corinna,’ said Daphne, and saw her glance at Wilfrid.

‘And Wilfie’s going to do his dance,’ Corinna said.

‘Oh, that will be capital,’ said George. ‘When will you do it? I don’t want to miss that,’ making up for his wife’s lack of warmth.

‘After nursery tea,’ said Daphne. ‘They’re allowed down.’ The thing about seeing George with Madeleine was that it made you fonder of George; he stood up, and they kissed with a noisy firmness that amused them both. ‘How’s Brum?’ said Daphne.

‘Brum’s all right,’ said George.

‘It’s a great deal of work,’ said Madeleine; ‘you don’t see us at our best, I fear!’

‘I don’t think you’ve met Revel Ralph, Madeleine… Revel, my brother George Sawle.’

George looked keenly at Revel as he shook his hand. ‘Madeleine and I have been reading a lot about your show… congratulations! Your designs sound marvellous.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Madeleine uncertainly.

‘I wonder if we’ll get down,’ said George, now smiling rather anxiously at Revel. ‘I’d love to see it.’

‘Well, let me know, won’t you,’ said Revel.

‘You’ve been, Daph, of course?’ said George.

‘I’d have to stay with someone, wouldn’t I,’ said Daphne.

‘You ought to have a little place in Town,’ said Revel.

‘Well, we did have that very nice flat in Marylebone, but of course Louisa sold it,’ said Daphne, and changed the subject before it got going – ‘Watch out…’ The donkey was plodding rapidly towards them, and they set off to the mown side of the lawn, damp grass cuttings clinging to their shoes. ‘God knows why they’re mowing today,’ she said, though she took a kind of pleasure in it too, different from her husband’s – it was something to do with labour, and running a place with twenty servants.

‘How is Dudley?’ said George.

‘I think all right,’ said Daphne, with a quick glance at the children.

‘Book coming on?’

‘Oh, I find it best not to ask.’

George gave her a strange look. ‘You’ve not seen any of it?’

‘No, no.’ She took a bright, hard tone: ‘You know he’s very excited about boxing things in.’

‘Oh, yes, I want to see this,’ said George, with his taste for controversy as much as for design. ‘How far is he taking it?’

‘Oh, quite far.’

‘But you don’t mind,’ with a sideways smile at her.

‘Well, there are some things. You’ll see.’

‘What do you think, Ralph?’ said George. ‘For or against the egregious grotesqueries of the Victorians?’ And now Daphne saw they were back in common-room mode, after a brief spontaneous holiday. The children smirked.

Revel thought and said, ‘Can I be somewhere in between?’ with an appealing wriggle in his voice.

‘I’d want to know why. Or rather where.’

‘I suppose what I feel,’ said Revel, after a minute, ‘well, the grotesqueries are what I like best, really, and the more egregious the better.’

‘What? Not St Pancras?’ said George. ‘Not Keble College?’

‘Oh, when I first saw St Pancras,’ said Revel, ‘I thought it was the most beautiful building on earth.’

‘And you didn’t change your mind when you’d seen the Parthenon.’

Revel blushed slightly – Daphne thought perhaps he had yet to see the Parthenon. ‘Well, I feel there’s room in the world for more than one kind of beauty,’ he said, ‘put it that way,’ firmly but graciously.

George took this in, seemed even to blush a little himself. He stopped and looked away towards the house: turrets and gables, the glaring plate glass in Gothic windows, the unrestful patterns of red, white and black brick. Creeper spread like doubt around the openings at the western end. Daphne felt she wouldn’t have chosen it, felt it had in a way chosen her, and now she would be sick at heart to lose it. She turned to Madeleine. ‘I remember when George first came to stay here, Madeleine,’ she said: ‘we thought we’d never hear the end of the splendours of Corley Court. Oh, the jelly-mould domes in the dining-room!’ But such comical alliances with her sister-in-law rarely stuck – Madeleine smiled for a second, but her allegiance to George’s intellect was the firmer. ‘No grotesqueries then!’ insisted Daphne.

George clearly thought it wise to laugh at himself for a moment: ‘Cecil liked them, and one didn’t argue with Cecil.’ It seemed not to bother him that he was mocking his sister’s home.

‘I see,’ said Revel, with that mixture of dryness and forgiveness that was so unlike Dudley’s humour. ‘So you know the house quite well.’

‘Oh, quite…’ said George absently, the question of why he so rarely came to Corley perhaps embarrassing him. ‘You’re too young to have known Cecil,’ he said.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Revel solemnly, and with the faintest smile, since his youth was generally thought to be in his favour, it was what all the articles in the magazines dwelt on – his being so brilliant so young.

‘But you’ve been over Corley before,’ said George, now a touch proprietary.

‘Oh, heaps of times,’ said Revel; and a strange sort of tension, of rivalry and regret, seemed for a moment to flicker in the two men’s different smiles.

‘Anyway, you’ll meet Mrs Riley,’ said Daphne, ‘she’s staying for the weekend.’

‘Oh, is she…’ said Revel, as if seeing a disadvantage after all in his visit.

‘She hung around for ages, you know, measuring things up or whatever she does and dropping ash on the carpet; and then Dud for some reason asked her to stay. And would you believe it, she had all her evening clothes in the boot of her car.’

‘Why did she?’ said Wilfrid.

‘She’ll have been on the way to someone else’s house, old chap,’ said George.

‘Well, she designs clothes,’ said Corinna. ‘She’s got tons of skirts and dresses in the car. She’s going to make one for me, green velvet, with a low waist and no particular bust.’

‘No particular bust!’ said Daphne. And then, ‘Is she indeed!’

‘Is she all right?’ said Revel. ‘I dare say she is – we come at things from different ends.’

Daphne was a little unsure about the turn she’d given the talk. ‘I’m sure she’s a genius,’ she said. ‘I’m just not awfully good with very fashionable people.’ And she thought, and where is she now? – in a scurry of anxiety which she quickly brought to heel.

‘I don’t expect she comes cheap,’ said Revel.

‘No. In fact she’s quite violently expensive,’ said Daphne, in a way that suggested a more than reasonable cause of annoyance.

They strolled back, their group still tentative and self-conscious, towards the white gate under the stone arch, and the broad path back to the house. Freda and Clara had come out for some air, and were moving at their own peculiar pace among the spring beds and low hedges of the formal garden. Daphne saw the man that Revel had mentioned, in a brown trilby, lope across and engage them in talk – they seemed confused, earnestly helpful, and then somewhat defensive. Clara raised one stick, and pointed it, as if sending him off. He had a camera-case slung round his neck, but didn’t seem interested in using the camera on them. ‘Go on, my darlings, rescue Granny Sawle,’ said Daphne. But just then the man, backing away and glancing round, saw Dudley himself emerge through the garden door, with the look of tricky geniality that he put on for the press, and with Sebby just behind him, jammed in the doorway by the excitable dog, and clearly more reluctant to be seen.

‘Here we are,’ said Dudley, as they all came up, shaking hands with George, shaking hands, rather pointedly, with Madeleine, though grinning at her fiercely as he did so. ‘And Revel, my dear, you’ve made it.’ He turned with a lurch to embrace the whole group in his grin. ‘What a lovely reunion!’ Daphne glanced at her mother, who she felt was the one most vulnerable to Dudley’s performance, but she was too caught up in her own reunion with George to notice it.

‘Hello, George!’ said Freda, with a brave little quiver, the tone of someone not quite sure of being remembered. And perhaps this tiny glimpse touched George as well – he enveloped his mother in a firm hug, sweetly, and guiltily, protracted.

‘Maddy, dear,’ he said, and Madeleine too held Freda’s shoulder and angled in for a kiss under the tilting brims of their hats.

‘Now, I’m sorry to say, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Dudley, ‘that our little weekend idyll has been infiltrated by one of the tireless and pitiless agents of Fleet Street. What’s your name?’

‘Oh, I’m Goldblatt, Sir Dudley,’ said the photographer, swallowing Dudley’s harsh tone, ‘Jerry Goldblatt,’ lifting his trilby an inch as he looked over the group.

‘Jerry Goldblatt,’ said Dudley, and paused unpleasantly, ‘is just going to take a few snapshots for the Sketch.’

‘I prefer to say portraits,’ said Goldblatt, ‘portrait groups.’

‘So if you wouldn’t mind awfully doing what he says for ten minutes, then we can get the damn fellow out of here.’

‘Much obliged,’ said Goldblatt, ‘well, ladies and gentlemen – ’

But they saw very quickly that it was Dudley who’d be telling them what to do. A trying hour or more of sittings ensued, different groupings around various stone seats, or posed, with a hint of awkward clowning, under the raised arms and bare breasts of bronze and marble statues. The Scottish boy made himself useful, and quickly set up the croquet lawn, where they started a pretend game which immediately got serious, and was abandoned with bad grace for work at another location. Really there were three of them the photographer wanted, Dudley, Sebby and Revel, with Daphne and the children as decorative extras. Dudley of course knew this, but in a complicated rigmarole brought in all the others, and nearly pretended not to want to be involved himself at all.

Dudley said: ‘But look here, Goldblatt, you must have a snapshot of our friend Frau Kalbeck. You know, she’s one of the original Valkyries of Stanmore Hill.’

‘Oh, yes, Sir Dudley?’ said the photographer warily.

‘No, no, please…!’ said Clara, tickled but mortified at the same time. She seemed ready to tuck her sticks out of sight. Daphne said,

‘But not if you don’t want to, dear,’ and indeed thought it quite impossible that they’d use such a photograph, which would make it, in the longer view, even sadder for her.

‘Perhaps not, I think,’ said Clara, and hid her tiny disappointment in a histrionic call – ‘But where is dear Mrs Riley?’ It was unexpected, but she seemed to have taken a shine to Eva.

‘Dudley dear, where’s Mrs Riley?’ said Daphne coolly.

‘Oh lord…’ said Dudley, the mad glint showing for a second through his puzzled tone. ‘Robbie, run and look for Mrs Riley’ – and as Robbie went swiftly away, ‘She may be just too busy…’

‘Is that Mrs Eva Riley, sir?’ said Jerry Goldblatt, with a cunning glance at the house. ‘The interior decorator?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Dudley, ‘Mrs Riley, the famous interior decorator of the Carousel Restaurant,’ as if writing the copy for the Sketch as well.

‘That is a stroke of luck, Sir Dudley,’ said Goldblatt.

Daphne saw that Dudley had got almost everything he wanted; he’d rescued a stylish, amusing and important party from the jaws of the other one that bored him to madness, and posed it, for as long as the camera’s flashes lasted, for the world to see. Sebby Stokes in fact declined to join in, suspecting that he shouldn’t be seen playing croquet while the nation stood on the brink of a general strike; he shrewdly told Goldblatt he would be ‘working on Cabinet papers in the library’. George, quite new to the world of publicity, acted up determinedly, followed Revel’s instructions for new poses, and whisked the children along in a hectic and rather touching show of affection. He seemed to like Revel – perhaps the little friction in their views on St Pancras Station had excited him. Madeleine, with the unhappy solidarity of the shy, had perched beside Clara, and in effect opted out of the photographs. As for Revel himself, Daphne saw that she needn’t have worried, in fact there was almost some further friction in his eagerness to direct arrangements himself. ‘Well… yes…’ said Dudley, frowning, ‘no, no, my dear, you’re the designer!’ – shaking his head none the less in slight bafflement, while Jerry Goldblatt pleaded, ‘If I could just have Lady Valance and the kiddies?’ Then Eva Riley arrived, her long legs white in sheeny stockings, almost laughably fashionable, a pearl-coloured cloche hat pulled down tight on her black bob. ‘Do you really need me?’ she wailed, and Jerry Goldblatt called back that he certainly did.

Revel and Daphne had their picture taken together, back by the fishpond. They stood on either side of a rose arch, each with one arm raised like a dancer to gesture at the view beyond it. Daphne laughed to show she was not an actress, not certainly a dancer, and looked across at Revel, who kept a straighter face. She felt her laughter had a touch of panic to it. She had an apprehensive image of next week’s Sketch on the morning-room table, and their silly faces vying for attention with the antics of Bonzo the Dog.

5

At the end of lunch George slipped out from the dining-room and set off for a distant lavatory, treasuring the prospect of four or five minutes alone. He felt stifled already by the subject of Cecil, and by the thought of a further twenty-four hours devoted to his brilliance, bravery and charm. What things they all found themselves saying. Perhaps in certain monasteries, or in finishing schools, the conversation at meals was as strictly prescribed. The General threw up a topic, and the rest of them batted it gingerly to and fro, with Sebastian Stokes as umpire; even Dudley’s sneering had been edgily reined in. George had met Stokes once before, in Cambridge, when they’d all gone out in a punt, Cecil clearly exciting his guest by his lordly thrust and toss of the pole and intermittent recital of sonnets. Stokes seemed not to remember that George had been of the party, and George didn’t remind him, when the talk turned to their Cambridge days. He felt undeniably uneasy, and drank several glasses of champagne, in the hope they would relax him, but they had only made him hot and giddy, while the dining-room itself, with its gaudy décor, its mirrors and gilding, had appeared to him more ghastly than ever, like some funereal fairground. Of course one indulged the dead, wrote off their debts; one forgave them as one lamented them; and Cecil had been mightily clever and fearless, no doubt, and had broken many hearts in his short life. But surely no one but Louisa could want a new memorial to him, ten years after his passing? Here they all were, submissively clutching their contributions. A dispiriting odour, of false piety and dutiful suppression, seemed to rise from the table and hang like cabbage-smells in the jelly-mould domes of the ceiling.

As he crossed the hall, the door under the stairs was shoved open by Wilkes, with the surprising look, for just a second, of a man who has a life of his own.

‘Ah, sir…!’ said Wilkes, turning to catch the door, the age-old benignity back at once like a faint blush.

‘Thanks so much, Wilkes,’ said George. And since he had him there, ‘I hope you’re well.’

‘Very well, thank you, sir, very well indeed,’ as if made even fitter by George’s solicitude.

‘I’m so glad.’

‘I trust you’re well, too, sir; and Mrs Sawle…’

‘Oh, yes, both frightfully busy and burdened with work, you know, but, thank you, pretty well.’

George and Wilkes were both holding the door, while Wilkes gazed at him with his usual flattering lack of impatience, of any suggestion that a moment before he had been rushing elsewhere. ‘It’s good to see you back at Corley, sir.’ Though it struck George that Wilkes’s mastery of implicit moral commentary was conveyed in the same smooth phrase.

He frowned and said, ‘We don’t get down as often as we should like.’

‘It’s possibly not very convenient for you,’ allowed Wilkes, letting his hand drop.

‘Well, not terribly,’ George said.

‘I know Lady Valance is especially pleased you’ve come, sir.’

‘Oh…’

‘I mean the old Lady, sir, particularly… though your sister, too, I’m sure!’

‘Oh, well it’s the least I could do for her,’ said George, with adequate conviction, he felt.

‘Since you and Captain Valance were such great friends.’

‘Well, yes,’ said George quickly, and rather sternly, over his own incipient blush. ‘Though goodness, it all feels a world ago, Wilkes.’ He looked around the hall, with a kind of weary marvelment that it was still there, the armorial windows, the brightly polished ‘hall chairs’ no one would dream of sitting on, the vast brown canvas of a Highland glen, with long-horned cattle standing in the water. He remembered looking at this painting on his first visit, and Cecil’s father telling him it was ‘a very fine picture’, and what sort of cows they were. Cecil was behind him, not quite touching, a latent heat; he had said something, ‘That’s MacArthur’s herd, isn’t it, Pa?’ – his interest as smooth and confident as his deceit; the old boy had agreed, and they’d gone into lunch, Cecil’s hand just for a moment in the small of his guest’s back. ‘Of course I remember it all,’ said George, and even working it up a bit in his embarrassment: ‘I always remember that Scottish picture.’ The picture itself could hardly have been duller, but it was eloquent of something – the drinking cattle seemed almost to embody Sir Edwin’s artless unawareness of what his son got up to.

‘Ah, yes, sir,’ said Wilkes, to show it meant something, surely rather different, to him too. ‘Sir Edwin cared greatly for “The Loch of Galber”. He often said he preferred it to the Raphael.’

‘Yes…’ said George, not sure if Wilkes’s eyebrows, raised in amiable remembrance, acknowledged the general opinion about the Raphael. ‘I was thinking, Wilkes, Mr Stokes should have a word with you about Cecil while he’s here.’

‘Oh, it hasn’t been suggested, sir.’

‘Really? You probably knew him better than anybody.’

‘It’s true, sir, in some ways I did,’ said Wilkes modestly, and with something else in his hesitancy, a hazy vision of all the people who nursed the illusion of ‘knowing’ Cecil best of all.

‘Lady Valance made it clear at luncheon that she wants a full picture of his childhood years,’ said George, with a hint of pomp. ‘She has a poem he wrote when he was only three, I believe…’

Wilkes’s pink, attentive face absorbed the idea of this new kind of service, which would evidently be a very delicate one. ‘Of course I have numerous memories,’ he said, rather doubtfully.

‘Cecil always spoke of you with the greatest… admiration, you know,’ said George, and then put in the word he’d just dodged, ‘and affection, Wilkes.’

Wilkes murmured half-gratefully, and George looked down for a moment before saying, ‘My own feeling is that we should tell Mr Stokes all we can; it’s for him to judge what details to include.’

‘I’m sure there’s nothing I wouldn’t be happy to tell Mr Stokes, sir,’ said Wilkes, with a geniality close to reproach.

‘No, no,’ said George, ‘no, I’m sure…’ – and again he felt a little flustered by this courteous saunter round an unmentionable truth. ‘But I mustn’t keep you!’ And with a snuffle and a little bow, which seemed unintentionally to mimic the butler himself, and made George colour suddenly again, he turned through the door, which he closed softly behind him, and started down the long passage.

It was a strange sensation, this passage. He went along it with the natural rights of a guest, a slightly tipsy adult free to do as he pleased, but breathless at once with the reawoken feelings of his first visit, thirteen years before. Nothing had changed: the dim natural light, the school-like smell of polish, the long row of portraits of almost rectangular bulls and cows. He was dismayed to find himself blushing so soon and so much. He wondered anxiously if Wilkes, a valet in those days, who had been so helpful and tactful with him, and always somehow to hand, hadn’t also been present, unremembered, in other scenes. Had he come and gone, silently, unnoticed? Was it indeed part of a very good valet’s duties to spy, to read letters, to go through waste-paper baskets, the more fully to know his master’s thoughts and anticipate his needs? Would that increase or diminish his respect for his master? Was it not said, by one of the French aphorists, that great men rarely seemed great to their valets? And it was here, where you turned the corner, that Cecil had grabbed him and kissed him, in his very first minutes at Corley, while showing him where to wash his hands. Kissed him in his imperious way, with a twist of aggression. George’s heart jumped and raced, for a moment, remembering. The kiss, together with the tension of arrival at a country house and his own keen desire to impress and deceive Cecil’s parents, had made George suddenly mad with worry. He had struggled with Cecil, who was proud of his strength. The cloakroom was thick with coats, as if a meeting or a concert were going on next door, and Cecil pushed him against them, lifting a tall stiff mackintosh off its peg – it toppled slowly over them and put a comical kind of stop to things, for the time being.

Beyond the coats was the sombre marble and mahogany washroom, and then the third room, with its towering cistern and high-up prison-like window. George locked the door with a remembered sense of refuge; and then with a gasp of confusion that the man he was hiding from was long dead.

On his way back along the passage he saw the charm of avoiding the party for a little longer, and decided to visit the chapel and look at Cecil’s effigy. On the occasion of Daphne and Dudley’s wedding, the tomb had been unfinished, a brick box that one had to go to left or right of. To tell the truth, he’d avoided looking at it. There had seemed to be some awful lurking joke that they were getting married over Cecil’s dead body. Now there was no one in the hall, no sound of voices, and he skirted the monstrous oak table and went out into the glassed-in arcade, half cloister, half conservatory, which ran along the side of the house to the chapel door. Here too everything seemed the same, everything old and old-fashioned, muddled and habitual, waiting no doubt for Mrs Riley’s ruthless hand. Hard to bear in mind it was only fifty years old, younger than his own mother. It looked sunk in habit and history. Gothic plinths held up stone tubs of flowers; three brass chandeliers, crudely wired for electricity, hung to just above head-height; the floor was of diapered tiles, crimson and biscuit. George felt how the dark oak door of the chapel loomed, seemed to summon and dishearten the visitor with the same black stare. He gripped the cold ring of the handle, the latch shot up inside with a clack, and again he saw Cecil, bustling him through on that first afternoon, with a glance back over his shoulder, in case they were being followed – ‘This gloomy hole is the family chapel’ – and holding him tightly round his upper arm. George had peeped about, in an excited muddle, trying to smother his awe in the required show of disdain for religion, while sensing none the less that Cecil would expect some sign of admiration at there being a chapel at all. Surely they were both rather thrilled by it. The chapel was tall for its modest size, the timber roof shadowy, the thwarted light through the stained-glass window giving the place, by afternoon, the atmosphere of the time just after sunset. Pale things glowed weakly, but others, tiles and tapestries, were dull until the eyes adjusted.

Now what he saw, among the grey shadows, was Cecil’s white figure, stretched out flat, and seeming to float above the floor. The sun had long since gone off the garish glass of the east window, and what daylight there was, oblique and qualified, seemed all to be gathered in Cecil. His feet pointed away, towards the altar. It was as if the chapel had been built for him.

George pushed the door to, without quite closing it, and stood by the first pew’s end, with a stern expression and a very slight feeling of fear. He was alone with his old pal again, almost as though he’d come into a hospital ward rather than a chapel, and was afraid of disturbing him, half-hoped to find him asleep and to slip away, having kept his word. That was a kind of visit he’d paid many times, in the War, and after, dreading to see what had happened to a fellow, afraid of the horror in his own face. Here there was a sickly smell of Easter lilies rather than disinfectant. ‘Hello, Cecil, old boy,’ he said, pleasantly and not very loudly, with a dim echo, and then he laughed to himself in the silence that followed. They wouldn’t have to have an awkward conversation. He listened to the silence, chapel silence, with its faint penumbra of excluded sounds – birdsong, periodic rattle of the distant mower, soft thumps that were less the wind on the roof than the pulse in his ear.

Cecil was laid out in dress uniform, with rich attention to detail. The sculptor had fastened his attention on the cuff-badges, the captain’s square stars, the thin square flower of the Military Cross. The buttons shone dully in their strange new light, brass transmuted into marble. Who was it…? George stooped to read the name, which was dashingly signed along the edge of the cushion: ‘Professor Farinelli’ – dashing and a touch pedantic too. The effigy lay on a plain white chest, with less readable lettering, Gothic and plaited, running right round it in a long band: CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC CAPTAIN 6TH BATT ROYAL BERKSHIRE REGT BORN APRIL 13 1891 FELL AT MARICOURT JULY 1 1916 CRAS INGENS ITERABIMUS AEQUOR. It was a thoroughly dignified piece of work, in fact magnificently proper. It struck George, as the chapel itself had on that first day, as a quietly crushing assertion of wealth and status, of knowing what to do. It seemed to place Cecil in some floating cortège of knights and nobles reaching back through the centuries to the Crusades. George saw them for a moment like gleaming boats in a thousand chapels and churches the length of the land. He gripped Cecil’s marble boot-caps, and waggled them sulkily; his hand waggled, the boot-caps eternally not. Then he edged round to look at the dead man’s face.

His first polite thought was that he must have forgotten what Cecil looked like, in the ten years and more since he’d been in a room with him alive. But no, of course, the long curved nose… the wide cheekbones… the decisive mouth: they were surely what he remembered. Naturally the rather bulbous eyes were closed, the hair short and soldierly, as it must have been latterly, pushed back flat about a central parting. The nose had grown somehow mathematical. The whole head had an air of the ideal that bordered on the standardized; it simplified, no doubt, in some acceptable accord between the longings of the parents and the limits of the artist’s skill. The Professor had never set eyes on Cecil – he must have worked from photographs, chosen by Louisa, which only told their own truth. Cecil had been much photographed, and doubtless much described; he was someone who commanded description, which was a rareish thing, most people going on for years on end with not a word written down as to what they looked like. And yet all these depictions were in a sense failures, just as this resplendent effigy was… So George reasoned for half a minute, looking over the polished features, the small seamed cushions of the closed eyes that once had seen right into him; thinking already what phrases he would use when he spoke to Louisa about it; whilst he tried to hold off some other unexpected sadness – not that he had lost Cecil, but that some longing of his own, awakened by the day and the place, some occult opportunity of meeting him again, had been so promptly denied.

None the less, he thought he would sit for a minute or two, in the flanking pew – he couldn’t quite have said why; but when he was there he dropped his forehead to his raised hand, leant forward slightly and prayed, in a vague, largely wordless way, a prayer of images and reproaches. He looked up, on a level now with Cecil’s sleeping form, the obdurate nose pointing roofwards, the soldierly commonplace of the body, posed perhaps by some artist’s model, not completely unlike Cecil, not a runt or a giant, but not Cecil in any particular way. And pictures of the particular Cecil rose towards him, naked and dripping on the banks of the Cam, or trotting through the Backs in his rugger bags and clattering studs, white and unassailable before a match, filthy and bloody after it. They were beautiful images, but vague as well with touching and retouching. He had others, more magical and private, images less seen than felt, memories kept by his hands, the heat of Cecil, the hair-raising beauty of his skin, of his warm waist under his shirt, and the trail of rough curls leading down from his waist. George’s praying fingers spread in a tentative caress of recollection. And then of course the celebrated… the celebrated membrum virile, unguessed for ever beneath the marble tunic, but once so insistently alive and alert… How Cecil went on about it, pompously and responsibly – it might have been the Magna Carta from the way he talked of it. Absurd but undeniable, even now, so that the colour came to George’s face and he thought of Madeleine, as a kind of remedy, though it didn’t seem to work like that, in fact didn’t seem to work at all.

George dropped his head again, rather wondering about this probing of old feelings. It was awful that Cecil was dead, he’d been wonderful in many ways, and who knew what he might not have gone on to do for English poetry. Yet the plain truth was that months went past without his thinking of him. Had Cecil lived, he would have married, inherited, sired children incessantly. It would have been strange, in some middle-aged drawing-room, to have stood on the hearthrug with Sir Cecil, in blank disavowal of their mad sodomitical past. Was it even a past? – it was a few months, it was a moment. And then might there have been another moment, in the study one night, which Cecil now occupied as surely as his father had done, some instinctual surrender to the old passion, George bald and professorial, Cecil haggard and scarred? Could passion survive such changes? The scene was undeniably fantastic. Did he take off his glasses? Perhaps Cecil by then had glasses too, a monocle that dropped between them just as their lips approached. Only young men kissed, and even then not frequently. He saw the charming troublesome face of Revel Ralph, and pictured himself in the same tense proximity with him, with a sudden canter of the heart of a kind he had almost forgotten.

There was the sharp moan of the door on its hinges, and Sebby Stokes stepped in, with his quiet official air, gleam of high white collar and silvery head. He pushed the door almost closed, as George had done, and came forward – clearly he thought he was alone, for these first few moments, and for George, half-hidden by the tomb, his unguarded expression had an odd, almost comic interest. Stokes surely felt the slight but unusual thrill of his imminent encounter with Cecil. George saw more clearly something feminine and nervous in his walk and glance; but there was something else too in the set of his mouth, his frown of appraisal – something hard and impatient, not glimpsed at all in the infinite diplomacy of his social manner. George stood up abruptly and enjoyed his jump of alarm, and humorous recovery, in which a trace of irritation lingered for a minute. ‘Ah! Mr Sawle… You startled me.’

‘Well, you startled me,’ said George equably.

‘Oh! Hmm, my apologies…’ Stokes walked around the tomb with a firmer expression, frank but respectful, so that now you couldn’t tell what he thought. ‘Quite a fine piece of work, don’t you think? May I call you George? – it seems to be the style here now, and one hates to appear stuffy!’

‘Of course,’ said George, ‘I wish you would,’ and then wondered if he was meant to call Stokes Sebby, which seemed an unwarranted jump into familiarity with a man so much older and so oddly, almost surprisingly, distinguished.

‘It’s not a bad likeness, by any means,’ Stokes said. ‘Often I’m afraid they don’t quite get them if they haven’t known them. I’ve seen some very hand-me-down efforts.’

‘Yes…’ said George, out of courtesy, but feeling, now the subject was being aired, more critical and proprietary. ‘Of course I didn’t see him later on,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t quite feel I’ve found him here.’ He drew his fingers thoughtfully down Cecil’s arm, and glanced for an abstracted moment at the marble hands, which lay idly on his tunicked stomach, almost touching, the hands of a sleeper. They were small and neat, somewhat stylized and square, in what was clearly the Professor’s way. They were the hands of a gentleman, or even of a large child, untested by labour or use. But they were not the hands of Cecil Valance, mountaineer, oarsman and seducer. If the Captain’s neat head was a well-meant approximation, his hands were an imposture. George said, ‘And of course the hands are quite wrong.’

‘Yes?’ said Stokes, with a momentary anxiety, and then, a little reluctantly, ‘No, I think you’re right,’ a sense of their unequal intimacies in the air.

‘But when did you last see him yourself, I wonder?’

‘Oh… well…’ Stokes looked at him: ‘It must have been… ten days before he was killed?’

‘Oh, well, there you are…’

‘He was on leave unexpectedly, you know, and I invited him to dine at my club.’ Stokes said this in a natural, practical tone, but it was clear the invitation had meant a great deal to him.

‘How was he?’

‘Oh, he was splendid. Cecil was always splendid.’ Stokes smiled for a moment at the marble figure, which certainly seemed to encourage this view. George felt, as he had with Wilkes, that the older man’s words lightly censured some suspected impropriety in his own. ‘Of course I first met him in a punt,’ said Stokes, while George’s pulse quickened at the chance for disclosure, a diverting little episode.

‘You came to Cambridge…’ he said, neutrally, with a quiet sense of the chance flowing away. There had been four or five of them in the punt, Ragley and Willard certainly, both now dead, and someone else George couldn’t see. His own focus, like Sebby’s evidently, had been on the figure with the pole at the rear.

‘Lady Blanchard’s son, Peter, had asked me down to meet Cecil, and meet some of the new poets.’

‘Of course…’ said George, ‘yes, Peter Blanchard…’

‘Peter Blanchard was full of Cecil.’

‘Yes, wasn’t he just…’ said George, looking away, distantly bewildered to think how jealous of Blanchard he’d been. The absolute torments of those days, the flicker of gowns in stairwells, the faces glimpsed as curtains were closed, seemed now like distant superstitions. What could any such emotions mean years later, and when their objects were dead? Stokes gave him a quick uncertain glance, but pushed on humorously,

‘I can’t remember them all now. There was a young man who never said a word, and who had the job of keeping the champagne cold.’

‘Did he have the bottles on strings in the water…?’ said George, now feeling terribly foolish, in retrospect as well as in the present moment. The bottles used to knock against the hull with each forward thrust of the boat; when you loosened the wire the corks went off like shots into the overhanging willows.

‘Exactly so,’ said Stokes, ‘exactly so. It was a splendid day. I’ll never forget Cecil reading – or not reading, reciting – his poems. He seemed to have them by heart, didn’t he, so that they came out like talk; but in quite a different voice, the poet’s voice. It was distinctly impressive. He recited “Oh do not smile on me” – though one could hardly help it, of course!’

‘No, I’m sure,’ said George, blushing abruptly and turning away. He peered at the altar, beyond its polished brass rail, as though he had found something interesting. Was he doomed to glow like a beacon throughout the whole weekend?

‘But you were never one of the poets?’

‘What…? Oh, never written a line,’ said George, over his shoulder.

‘Ah…’ – Stokes murmured behind him. ‘But you have the satisfaction of having inspired, or occasioned, or anyway in some wise brought about perhaps his most famous poem.’

George turned – they were rather penned in in this space between the tomb and the altar. The question was laboriously genial but he ran over it again carefully. ‘Oh, if you mean “Two Acres”,’ he said. ‘Well that of course was written for my sister.’

Stokes smiled vaguely at him and then at the floor. It was as if a mist of delicacy had obscured the subject. ‘Of course I must ask Lady Valance – Daphne – about that when we talk this afternoon. Do you not see yourself in the lines, what is it? “I wonder if there’s any man more / Learned than the man of Stanmore”?’

George laughed warily. ‘Guilty as charged,’ he said – though he knew ‘learned’ had not been Cecil’s original choice of epithet. ‘You know he wrote it first in Daphne’s autograph book.’

‘I have it,’ said Stokes, with the brevity that lay just beyond his delicacy; and then, ‘She must have felt she’d got rather more than she bargained for,’ with a surprising laugh.

‘Yes, doesn’t it go on,’ said George. He himself felt sick of the poem, though still wearily pleased by his connection with it; bored and embarrassed by its popularity, therefore amused by its having a secret, and sadly reassured by the fact that it could never be told. There were parts of it unpublished, unpublishable, that Cecil had read to him – now lost for ever, probably. The English idyll had its secret paragraphs, priapic figures in the trees and bushes… ‘Well, Daphne can tell you the story,’ he said, with his usual disavowal of it.

Stokes said, in a most tactful tone, ‘But you and Cecil were clearly… very dear friends,’ the tact being a continued sympathy for his loss, of course, but suggesting to George some further, not quite welcome, sympathy, of a subtler kind.

‘Oh, for a while we were terrific pals.’

‘Do you recall how you met?’

‘Do you know, I’m not sure.’

‘I suppose in College…’

‘Cecil was very much a figure in College. It was flattering if he took an interest. I think I’d won… oh, one of our essay prizes. Cecil took a keen interest in the younger historians…’

‘Quite so, I imagine,’ said Stokes, with perhaps a passing twinkle at George’s tone.

‘I’m not really able to talk about it,’ said George, and saw Stokes’s ghost of a smile stiffen with repressed curiosity. ‘But still… you must know about the Society, I imagine.’

‘Ah, I see, the Society…’

‘Cecil was my Father.’ It was striking, and useful, how one set of secrets nested inside another.

‘I see…’ said Stokes again, with the usual faint drollery of an Oxford man about Cambridge customs. Still, the exchange of esoteric fact was very much his line, and his face softened once more into a ready reflector of hints and allusions. ‘So he…’

‘He picked me – he put me up,’ said George curtly, as if he shouldn’t be giving even this much away.

Stokes smiled almost slyly over this. ‘And do you still go back?’

‘So you do know about us, perhaps everyone knows.’

‘Oh, I don’t think by any means.’

George shrugged. ‘I haven’t been back for years. I’m immensely busy with the department in Birmingham. I can’t tell you how it nails me down.’ He heard his own forced note, and thought he saw Stokes hear it too, absorb it and conceal it. He went on, with a quick laugh, ‘I’ve rather left Cambridge behind, to be frank.’

‘Well, perhaps one day they will call you back.’

Stokes seemed to speak from the world of discreet power, of committees and advisers, and George smiled and murmured at his courtesy. ‘Perhaps. Who knows.’

‘And what about letters, by the way?’

‘Oh, I had many letters from him,’ said George, with a sigh, and choosing Stokes’s word, ‘really splendid letters… But I’m afraid they were lost when we moved from “Two Acres”. At least they’ve never turned up.’

‘That is a shame,’ said Stokes, so sincerely as to suggest a vague suspicion. ‘My own letters from Cecil, only a handful, you know, but they were marvellous things… joyous things. Even up to the end he had such spirit. I will certainly give some beautiful instances.’

‘I hope you will.’

‘And of course if yours were to be found…’

‘Ah,’ said George, with a laugh to cover his momentary vertigo. Was ever such a letter written by a man to a man? How the world would howl and condemn if it read over my shoulder, yet everything in it is as natural and true as the spring itself. He slid past Stokes to look at the tomb again and thought he could ask practically, ‘I suppose you’re his literary executor?’

‘Yes,’ said Stokes; and perhaps hearing something more in the question,‘He didn’t appoint me, to be completely frank, but I made a promise I’d look after all that for him.’ George saw he couldn’t ask if the promise had been made to Cecil in person or was purely a duty Stokes had imposed on himself.

‘Well, he’s very lucky, in that at least.’

‘There has to be someone…’

‘Mm, but someone with judgement. Posthumous publication doesn’t always enhance a writer’s reputation.’ He took a frank, almost academic note. ‘I don’t know how you would rate Cecil Valance, as a poet?’

‘Oh…’ Stokes looked at him, and then looked at Cecil, who now seemed to cause him a slight inhibition, his marble nose alert for any disloyalty. ‘Oh, I think no one would question,’ he said, ‘do you? that a number, really a goodly few, of Cecil’s poems, especially perhaps the lyrics… one or two of the trench poems, certainly… “Two Acres”, indeed, lighter but of course so charming… will be read for as long as there are readers with an ear for English music, and an eye for English things…’

This large claim seemed rather to evaporate in its later clauses. George glanced at Cecil’s knightly figure and said kindly, ‘I just wonder if people aren’t growing sick of the War.’

‘Oh, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the War,’ said Stokes.

‘Well, no,’ said George. ‘And of course much of Cecil’s work was done before the War.’

‘Quite so, quite so… but the War made his name, you’d have to agree; when Churchill quoted those lines from “Two Acres” in The Times, Cecil had become a war poet…’ Stokes sat down, at the end of the first pew, as though to mitigate the strict air of debate, as well as to show he had time for it.

‘And yet,’ said George, as he often had before, with a teacher’s persistence, ‘ “Two Acres” itself was written a full year before war broke out.’

‘Yes…’ said Stokes, with something of a committee face. ‘Yes. But isn’t there often, in our poets and our artists, a prophetic strain?’ He smiled in concession: ‘Or if not that precisely, a fore-knowledge, a sense, perhaps, of the great inevitable that most of us are deaf and blind to?’

‘It may be so,’ said George, wary of this sweeping talk, which in his view bedevilled too much of what passed as literary criticism. ‘But to that I’d say two things. You’d agree, I’m sure, that we were all talking about war long before it happened. You didn’t need prophetic gifts to know what was going on, though Cecil certainly, who went to Hamburg and Berlin, and had been sailing up on the Frisian coast, was very much in the picture. My second point is that as I’m sure you know Cecil appended that further little section to “Two Acres” when it came out in New Numbers.’

‘ “The greyhound in its courses, / The hawk above the hill”, you mean.’

‘ “Move not more surely to their end / Than England to the kill”,’ said George, pleased to cap the quotation, though far from pleased by the words themselves. ‘Which of course has nothing to do with “Two Acres” the house, though it turns the poem “Two Acres” into a war poem of – in my view – a somewhat depressing kind.’

‘It certainly changes the poem,’ said Stokes more leniently.

‘For us it was a bit like finding a gun-emplacement at the bottom of the garden… But perhaps you think rather better of it. I’m a historian, not a critic.’

‘I’m not sure I allow a clear distinction.’

‘I mean I’m not a reader of new poetry. I don’t keep up, as you do.’

‘Well, I try,’ said Stokes. ‘I admit there are poets writing at this moment whom I don’t fully understand – some of the Americans, perhaps…’

‘But you keep up,’ George assured him.

Stokes seemed to ponder. ‘I think more in terms of those individuals I can help,’ he said, something at once noble and needy in his tone.

‘And now…’

‘And now… well, now I must get all Valance’s things up together,’ said Stokes, standing up, with the air of someone late for work.

‘How much is there, would you say?’

Stokes paused as if considering a further confidence. ‘Oh, it will be quite a book.’

‘A lot of new things…?’

A tiny flinch. ‘Well, a good many old ones.’

‘Mm, you mean the infant effusions.’

Sebby Stokes looked around, with his almost comical air of simultaneous candour and caution. ‘The infant effusions, as you so justly put it.’

‘Not omittable?’

‘All addressed to Mamma!’

‘Of course…’

‘Most unfortunate.’

‘Touching, in a way, perhaps?’

‘Oh, touching, certainly. Certainly that.’

George giggled ruefully. ‘And then Marlborough, I suppose?’

‘There the view grows a good deal brighter. Some of the schoolboy work we know from Night Wake, of course, but I shall comb the Marlburian with much keenness.’

‘But again… later unknown things?’

Stokes looked at him keenly, even pleadingly, for a second. ‘If you know of any…’

‘As I say, we’d rather lost touch.’

‘No… The fact is I am a little troubled by something.’ Stokes glanced at the tomb. ‘When I last saw Cecil that night in London, he showed me a handful of new poems, some of them unfinished. We went back to my flat after dinner, and he read to me, it must have been for half an hour or so. Very striking: both in itself and, somehow, in the way he read: very quiet and… thoughtful. It was a new voice – you might say a personal voice, as much as a poetical one, if you see what I mean. I was most taken, and stirred.’ Stokes was brusque for a moment with reawoken feeling.

George pictured this scene with a forgiving sense of the Cecil that Stokes had never known, the nudist, the satyr, the fornicator; and with a twist of envy too – the bachelor flat, Cecil in uniform, the bewildering brevity of a soldier’s leave, the luxury of talk about poems over a coal fire. ‘And what subjects was he dealing with?’

‘Oh, they were war poems, poems about his men, trench life. They were very… candid,’ said Stokes frankly but airily, briefly searching George’s face.

‘Mm, I’d like to see them.’ (No, the coal fire was nonsense, some memory of his own – it must have been June, windows open on to the London night.)

Stokes nodded impatiently. ‘So indeed should I.’

‘Ah. He didn’t leave them with you.’

‘He said he’d send them,’ said Stokes, with a touch of petulance; and then, with an accepting snuffle, ‘but of course he went back to France without finding occasion to do so.’

‘He had other things on his mind,’ said George.

‘I’m sure he did…’ said Stokes, clearly not in need of a lesson.

‘And these poems weren’t among his effects?’ George had a sense of Stokes’s pretty formidable efficiency rattled by this lapse.

Stokes shook his head, and looked up quickly, almost furtively, at the groan of the door behind them. ‘Anyway… here is your wife!’

George turned and saw Madeleine step cautiously into the gloom. He raised a hand reassuringly and called, ‘Hello, Mad’ – the echoes reawoken.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said Madeleine. She came forward, adjusting her eyes to the shadows and perhaps to something else in the atmosphere. ‘Are you praying, or plotting?’

‘Neither,’ said George.

‘Both,’ said Stokes.

‘We’ve been communing with Cecil,’ said George.

‘Well, it’s Cecil I’ve come to see,’ said Madeleine, in her own tone, with its possible tremor of humour; George had seen people peer at her, trying to make it out. The two men stood silent and observant as she approached the effigy and looked it over, with her scholarly firmness of interest and her cool immunity to all aesthetic sensations. ‘Is it a good likeness?’ she said.

‘As it happens,’ said Stokes, ‘we weren’t quite able in the end to decide; were we, George? Is it Cecil, or is it, as it were, someone else?’ He had a slight air of taking sides and teasing Madeleine, which George entirely understood and keenly resented. He said,

‘I’m afraid I don’t think it’s him.’

Madeleine stood by the head of the tomb, with the straight-backed look of a senior nurse. Impossible to guess how much she knew; or even to know how much she guessed. ‘Was he not bigger?’ she said.

‘Oh… possibly…’ said George, coming over to face her across the body, with a clear, disingenuous desire to be open, casual, critical if need be. ‘But it’s not that.’

‘Not more muscular?’ said Madeleine, giving a glimpse perhaps of what she’d been encouraged to believe about the dead hero.

George stood, with his eyebrows raised, gently shaking his head… ‘What can I say? – just more alive, simply.’

‘Ha, yes,’ said Madeleine, and gave him a quick puzzled look. ‘Have you been having a useful discussion?’

‘Your husband has been moderately forthcoming,’ said Stokes. ‘Though I feel I haven’t finished with him yet.’

‘Sebastian has a great deal to do,’ said George, and laughed.

Stokes bowed his head with courteous humour. ‘Indeed, and I must get on – I’ve promised to interrogate your dear mother…’ And he went out, with that slight hardening of the face again at the prospect of further work and new calculations.

George looked up at his wife, and then down again at Cecil, who seemed somehow to have turned into a piece of evidence, ambiguous but irreducible, lying between them. He had an almost physical sense of changing the subject as he turned away and said, ‘You know, old Valance has been quite bearable, so far.’

Madeleine smiled tightly. ‘So far. But then we have only been here for three hours.’

‘I imagine it’s pretty galling for him to have this fuss kicked up about Cecil, all over again.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said Madeleine, naturally contrary.

‘One sees the anniversaries stretching ahead for ever.’

‘Dudley Valance is a very strange man. I think it very sad, if he’s jealous after all this time.’

‘A bad war, of course.’

‘Though you might think not so bad as Cecil’s. Louisa was just telling me about the death. How they went out to France themselves to see him.’

‘Yes, he hung on, didn’t he, for several days…?’ George had an idea that ‘Fell at Maricourt’ was a sonorous formula, rather than the strict and messy truth.

‘They got permission to bring his body back. I say they, but I had the impression it was Louisa’s doing.’

‘She’s not called the General for nothing.’

‘One can sympathize with them wanting to see their son,’ said Madeleine fairly.

‘Well, of course, darling.’

‘Though immediately one thinks of the thousands of parents who simply couldn’t do that.’

‘Very true. My own dear mother, for instance.’

‘Well, there you are,’ said Madeleine, but as if arguing rather than agreeing – it was their way, their own odd intimacy, though charged now with something more anxious. ‘They brought him back here, and he was laid out in his own room, facing the rising sun.’

‘Oh, god. What, in the coffin?’ George pursed his lips against a horrified giggle.

‘I wasn’t quite clear,’ said Madeleine.

‘No… Where was he hit exactly?’

‘Well, I could hardly ask, could I. I suppose he might have been very disfigured.’

George saw how he’d been able to avoid such questions before; and had a certain sense, too, of Madeleine choosing her moment to raise them.

‘I don’t think you’ve ever told me,’ she said, ‘about when you heard the news.’

‘Oh, didn’t I, Mad…?’ George blinked, and frowned at the floor. His thoughts ran along the diagonals, the larger red lozenge of the tiles. Well, she’d asked him, and he must answer. ‘I do remember one or two things about it very well. I was up at Marston, of course, I remember it was very hot, and everyone was tired and tense about what was happening in France. Then after dinner I was called to the telephone. As soon as I heard it was Daphne, I felt quite sick with dread that something had happened to Hubert, and when it turned out to be Cecil, awful to say but I remember the news had to fight with a sort of upsurge of relief.’ He glanced at his wife. ‘I remember blurting out, “But Huey’s all right!” and old Daph saying, rather crossly, you know, “What…? Oh, Huey’s fine,” and then, her exact words, “It’s beautiful Cecil who’s dead” – and then she sort of wailed into the telephone, an extraordinary sound I’ve never heard her make before or since.’ George himself, looking at Madeleine, gave a weird gasp of a laugh. She looked back, showing in her blankly pondering face that she had other questions. ‘Beautiful Cecil is dead,’ said George quietly again, in a tone of amused reminiscence. Well, he would never forget the words, or the sudden wild licence of grief so startling in someone as close as a sister. Even then he had resisted them, their sudden appeal to something shared but never said till now. In truth, more than most deaths that summer, Cecil’s death had seemed both quite impossible and numbly unsurprising. Within a week or so he had seen it as inevitable.

6

‘Darling: Piccadilly…’ said Mrs Riley: ‘two cs?’

‘Well, yes!’ said Daphne.

‘Oh, I think two,’ said her mother, after a moment.

‘I’m not entirely stupid,’ said Mrs Riley, ‘but there are one or two words…’ She drew a bold line beneath the address, and smiled mischievously at what she’d written. None of them knew what the letter was, but the address in Piccadilly seemed designed to make them wonder. They were in the morning-room, with its chintz and china, and a small fire disappearing in the sunlight. Freda gazed at the pale flames and said, as Daphne knew she would,

‘The sun will put that fire out.’

Mrs Riley lit a cigarette with a hint of impatience. ‘My dear, do you believe that?’ she said.

‘You may laugh,’ said Freda, and then, ‘At least, that’s what I believe,’ and smiled at her rather timidly. She had clearly registered her daughter’s dislike for the woman, but herself perhaps found her no more than disconcerting.

Daphne said pleasantly, ‘Well, we’ll hardly miss it, Mummy, will we, it’s such a warm day.’ She smiled across at her mother, who was sitting with another letter in her lap, an old one, whose envelope, half-ripped in the long-ago moment of opening it, she was pressing and smoothing with her thumb.

‘This is all I have,’ she said. ‘I hardly knew Cecil.’

‘It really doesn’t matter,’ said Daphne. ‘Anyway, you did.’

‘I didn’t know he was going to be a great poet.’

‘Mm, well, I’m not sure anyone thinks that…’ The far door led to the library, and there Sebby Stokes was having his little chats. She thought Wilkes was in there now, being pressed for recollections, early signals of genius. The talk of course wasn’t audible, but none the less somehow present to those in the morning-room, sitting like waiting patients half-expecting to hear cries from the surgery. Freda looked at her daughter, with a fretful effort at concentration.

‘I do remember one or two things about him… Was it twice he came to the house? I’ve only the one letter, you see.’

‘Twice perhaps, yes.’

‘He was very energetic,’ said Freda.

‘Well, he could be, couldn’t he…’

Though nothing was ever said, Daphne felt that her mother hadn’t specially cared for Cecil. She saw him again, larger than life in their house, stooping briefly to their low-beamed ways. They had given him special rights, as a poet and a member of the upper classes; he’d been allowed to break things, to stay up all night, worship the dawn… They’d done their best to treat his absurdities as virtues, enlightening novelties. He’d been welcomed, as a friend of George’s, which was a novelty in itself. Had Freda picked up on the goings-on in the garden, after nightfall? There was much that she’d missed in those years, with the bottles in the wardrobe, and who knew where else. She had been excited by the poem, and really quite encouraging when Cecil started writing to Daphne – she saw a future in it, no doubt; she had allowed them to meet, when Cecil was on leave. Even so, something was amiss. It seemed possible Cecil had done or said some particular small thing, some slight that Freda could never mention and never forget – and in fact rather treasured for the reliable throb of indignation it caused… Now he was just an excuse for her – Daphne knew she’d come for the weekend so as to see the children. But Freda’s frown softened: ‘I’ll never forget him reading to us that night in the garden – reading Swinburne, was it, and in such a voice…’

‘Oh yes… Was it Swinburne? I know he read In Memoriam.’

‘Ha, indeed, how apt,’ said Freda, and then looked blankly again at the thin flames. ‘Didn’t he read us his own things?’

‘He kept us up all night listening to him,’ said Daphne.

‘We were out on the lawn, weren’t we, under the stars…’ Daphne didn’t think this was right, but nor was it worth correcting. Freda’s gaze wandered round the room and out, beyond Mrs Riley, to the present-day lawns and the trees of the Park beyond. ‘I sometimes think how different things would have been if George had never met Cecil,’ she said.

‘Well, yes…!’ said Daphne, with a short laugh. ‘Of course they would, Mother.’

‘No, darling, you know,’ Freda said, ‘but I do think some of his ideas were rather silly… I don’t know… one can’t say that, I suppose.’

‘His ideas…?’ Daphne felt she half knew what her mother meant. ‘I think you can say what you like.’

Freda seemed to weigh up this privilege. ‘He certainly turned your head,’ she said, in a rather bleak tone.

‘I was very young,’ said Daphne quietly, wishing more than ever that Mrs Riley wasn’t occupying her desk, toying with her fountain pen, and observing the conversation, in her disappointed and reducing way: now she said almost slyly,

‘You must have been a mere girl, my dear.’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘She was very susceptible,’ Freda explained, ‘weren’t you, Daphne?’

‘Thank you, Mother!’

‘And then he wrote his most famous poem for you, you must have been swept off your feet,’ said Mrs Riley, enjoying the picture.

‘No, he did,’ said Freda.

Daphne said, ‘Well… he wrote it for all of us, really, didn’t he.’ She felt vaguely amazed now by the whole business of the poem, by the awkward memory of what it had once meant to her. She would never have been allowed to keep it to herself. That morning she knew it was the most precious thing she had ever been given, and even then she had felt it being taken away from her. Everyone had wanted a part of it. Well, now they had it, they were welcome to it, if she tried to claim it back it was only as mortifying evidence of her first infatuation. Sometimes she acted her role: when people found out the story, and gloated over her, she agreed what a very lucky young lady she had been; but where possible she went on to say that she no longer cared. Within a week she had learned from George that other people were reading it. It appeared in New Numbers, a good deal rewritten. Then when Cecil died, it was quoted by Churchill himself, in The Times. She had just lent the famous autograph book to Sebby Stokes; it was a bit greasy and frayed, the other entries before it and after it looking sweetly strait-laced and proper in comparison. But the poem itself… ‘It’s entered the language, hasn’t it,’ she said.

‘It’s a bit of a jingle,’ said Freda, which Daphne had heard her say before.

‘You must be awfully proud,’ Mrs Riley insisted.

‘Well, you know,’ said Freda.

Mrs Riley shook her head. ‘I can’t help wondering what Cecil would think of us all talking about him like this.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he’d be pleased to find he was still the centre of attention,’ said Daphne.

‘Cecil was awfully fond of Cecil!’ said Freda. ‘If you know what I mean.’

Mrs Riley looked round for a second before saying, rather archly, ‘Does your mother-in-law still get messages from him, I wonder?’

‘Not any more,’ said Daphne. ‘Anyway, it was all nonsense, all that, and all very sad.’

‘What’s that, dear?’

‘Oh, nothing, Mother… Louisa’s book tests, you remember.’

‘Oh, that, yes…’ said Freda with a little stricken look. ‘So sad.’

‘I’m sure it must be nonsense,’ said Mrs Riley, ‘but I’ve always thought it would be fun to try.’

‘I don’t think fun comes into it very much,’ said Freda, frankly bemused.

‘We could try and get through to old Cecil…’ said Mrs Riley jauntily. But here the door opened and with an effect both tactful and inescapable Sebby Stokes came in.

‘Dear Mrs Sawle…’ he said, smiling and cushioning his formality.

‘Oh, well!’ Freda said, with a humorous tremor, reaching for her handbag.

Daphne watched her mother cross the room, saw her distinctly, her comic note of bravery, knowing she was watched, flustered but making a go of it, an amenable guest in her daughter’s house. There was a little stoop of humility as she passed through the door, into the larger but darker library beyond, a hint of frailty, an affectation of bearing more than her fifty-nine years, a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted. Daphne saw what was sturdy and capable and truthful in the mother she’d always known, the bigger woman, morally big, that no one else but George perhaps could see; and at the same time she saw exactly how shaken and vulnerable she was. She was a grieving mother herself, though in the hierarchy of mourning here her grief was largely overlooked. Sebby glanced back with an abstracted nod as he pulled the door to. The dry click of the lock seemed oddly momentous.

Mrs Riley got up from the desk and came over towards her. She had a sort of sloping and swooping walk, with a nerviness that was plastered over in her drawling talk. She crossed the hearthrug and flicked her ash into the fire. ‘This whole thing’s getting rather like one of Agatha Christie’s,’ she said, ‘with our Sebastian as clever Monsieur Poirot.’

‘I know…’ said Daphne, getting up too, and moving towards the window.

‘I wonder who did it. I don’t think I did…’

‘I suppose you’d remember?’ said Daphne, resisting the game. Outside, on the far side of the lawn, Revel was sitting on a stone bench drawing the house.

‘D’you think he’ll have us all in together at the end for the solution?’

‘Somehow I doubt it,’ said Daphne. There was something so charming in his posture, his look, the look he had of being himself a figure in a picture, that she couldn’t help smiling, and then sighing. He’d done it, seized the day – he was outside in the late April sunshine, while Daphne was in here like a child held back for some futile punishment. She looked down at her desk, where the letter lay on the blotter, but with Mrs Riley’s lacquered cigarette-case hiding the address.

‘I see your friend Revel’s making a drawing,’ said Mrs Riley.

‘I know, I feel very lucky,’ said Daphne, turning away from the window.

‘Mm, he’s clearly got something,’ said Mrs Riley. She smiled abstractedly. ‘Quite a feminine touch – more feminine, probably, than me!’

‘Oh… well…’

‘He’s still terribly young, of course.’

‘That’s true…’

‘How old is he?’

‘I believe he’s twenty-four,’ said Daphne, slightly confused, and went on quickly, ‘I’m so pleased he’s drawing the house. He’s always had a great deal of feeling for Corley Court.’

‘You mean, you want him to capture it before I pull it down!’ said Mrs Riley, acknowledging her sense of rivalry with a laugh and a hint of a blush – a peculiar effect under so much pale powder. ‘Well, you needn’t worry.’

‘Oh, I’m not worried,’ said Daphne, with a tight little smile, but feeling rattled. Mrs Riley gazed out rather drolly at Revel, so that Daphne hoped he wouldn’t look this way and see her.

‘How did you get to know him?’

This was easy. ‘He drew the jacket for The Long Gallery.’

‘Oh, your husband’s book, you mean?’ said Mrs Riley unguardedly.

‘You remember, the pretty drawing of the old Gothic window…’

Mrs Riley threw her cigarette away, and became very simple. ‘To tell the truth, I feel rather foolish,’ she said.

‘Oh…’

‘I mean, not having known Cecil.’

‘It’s hardly foolish not to have known Cecil,’ said Daphne, with dry indulgence. So much of her own foolishness, she thought, stemmed from the fact that she had.

‘Well…’ said Mrs Riley, and she made a little grimace of reluctance, and went on, ‘Are you absolutely sure you wouldn’t rather I pushed off?’

‘Oh… Eva…’ said Daphne, with a gasp, ‘no, no,’ frowning and colouring uncomfortably in turn. ‘How could you?’

‘Are you sure? I feel like some ghastly “gate-crasher”, as they say.’ Daphne had an image of Mrs Riley’s smart little car smashing into the wrought-iron gates of Corley Court. ‘I’m not at all poetical. I’m not literary, like you are.’

‘Well…’

‘No, you are. You’re always reading, I’ve seen you. Well, you’re married to a writer, for heaven’s sake! I only ever read thrillers. I was frankly surprised’ – and she crossed the room again for her cigarette case – ‘you know, when your husband asked me to stay.’

‘Well…’ said Daphne awkwardly, ‘I dare say he wanted some light relief from all this talk about his brother.’

‘Oh, perhaps, I wonder…’ said Eva, not immediately adjusting herself to this role.

‘I mean we can’t talk about Cecil every minute of the day – we’d go mad! Do you think I might have one of your cigarettes?’

‘Oh, my dear, I didn’t know,’ said Eva, coming back, offering the case languidly, but with a sharp glance.

‘Thank you.’ Daphne was urging her blush to subside, with its clear disclosure of her mutinous feelings, and the proof it gave Mrs Riley of her own clever tactics. She struck a match, away from her, awkwardly, and held it out to Eva, hiding her nerves by moving it around absent-mindedly, so that Eva stooped and laughed. When they were both puffing, Eva looked at her frankly, with a hint of amusement as she angled her smoke sideways. She said, ‘Well, I’m glad you think it’s all right.’ And then, ‘Tell me truly, don’t you ever find it just a teeny bit depressing having Cecil lying around next door – don’t you sometimes just want to forget about all that, really? I have to say I’m thoroughly sick of the War, and I think a lot of people feel the same.’

‘Oh, I like having him there,’ said Daphne, not quite truthfully, but seeing with a little run of the pulse another channel for her larger resentment of Eva to push into. ‘You see, I lost a brother too, though no one ever remembers that.’

‘Darling, I’d no idea.’

‘No, well, how could you have,’ said Daphne grudgingly.

‘You mean in the War…’

‘Yes, a bit later than Cecil. There weren’t any articles about it in The Times.’

‘Won’t you tell me about him?’

‘Well, he was a dear,’ said Daphne. She pictured her mother, beyond the heavy oak doors of the library, and keeping the whole matter to herself.

Eva sat down, as if to pay more solemn attention, and threw back the loose cushion to make a space beside her, but Daphne preferred to remain on her feet. ‘What was he called?’

‘Oh… Hubert. Hubert Sawle. He was my elder brother.’ She felt the odd prickly decorum of telling Eva but very little of the solemn heartache which she hoped none the less to convey. When she went to the window, it seemed that Revel had gone; her spirits sank for a moment, but then she saw him again, talking to George – their heads and shoulders could be seen as they moved slowly away among the hedges. Now George stopped him and they laughed together. A twinge of jealous irritation went through her. ‘No, Hubert was very much our mainstay, as my father had died young.’

‘He wasn’t married, then?’

‘No, he wasn’t… He did get very close to a girl, from Hampshire…’

‘Oh…?’

Daphne turned back into the room. ‘Anyway, nothing happened.’

‘A lot of brave girls were left high and dry by the War,’ said Eva, in a strange defiant tone. Then, with a little gasp, ‘I hope I didn’t upset your mother by what I said earlier about, you know, getting in touch with Cecil – I mean actually I do think it’s ridiculous, but of course I didn’t know about your brother.’

‘I think she did go to a séance once, but it didn’t work for her.’

‘No, well…’

Daphne found she didn’t want to talk about Louisa’s spiritualist obsession, which she and Dudley both deplored, to anyone outside the family; a feeling of loyalty was sharpened by her indignation at Eva’s mockery, which at the same time she perfectly understood. Then the bracket clock struck three-thirty, banishing all thought. ‘What a brute that thing is!’ said Eva, with a tight shake of the head, as though to say even Daphne surely wouldn’t regret getting rid of it. Then she was saying, ‘No, your husband read me that bit in his new book, you know, about the famous book tests – awfully funny, isn’t it, actually, the way he does it – that’s what put it in my mind.’

‘Oh, really…’ said Daphne, dawdlingly, though she knew her whole face was stiffening by the second, ungovernable, with hurt and indignation. ‘Will you excuse me for a moment,’ and she turned and went out quickly into the hall, where the grandfather clock was now mellowly stating the time, and the clock in the drawing-room beyond, with no sense of the mortifying scrumple of her feelings as she hurried to the front door and out into the porch. She stood looking across the gravel, at the various trees, and up the long slope of the entrance drive, to the inner set of gates, with the whole blue Berkshire afternoon lying hidden beyond them. She puffed at the last half-inch of the cigarette with a certain revulsion, and then trod it under her heel on the doorstep. She wasn’t going to mention it to Dudley, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell Eva Riley herself that no one had ever seen a word of ‘his new book’, much less had awfully amusing bits of it read to them. Some occasion in his ‘office’, no doubt, over the plans. The awful undermining evidence that all her own scruples of loyalty to Louisa, to the family, weren’t actually shared by the head of the family himself. She felt foolish, in her simple high-mindedness, and furious much more than hurt. She touched her hair and her neck as though in front of a mirror and then she did what one always did at Corley, and went back in.

Eva looked glad to see her. She went on, ‘You know, I feel very fortunate to have met your husband’ – modest but also subtly possessive.

‘It’s silly of me,’ said Daphne, ‘I don’t quite know how you did.’ She knew what Dudley had said, of course.

‘Well, I fitted up Bobby Bannister’s place in Surrey, didn’t I, and he must have told… your husband about me. I rather think he gave him the whole idea for improving Corley.’

This was exactly Dudley’s version too, though the cool nerve of ‘improving’ made Daphne laugh. She said, ‘It’s become a bit of a thing with Dud – I think he’s doing it mainly to upset his mother.’

‘Oh, I do hope it’s rather more than that,’ said Eva. ‘I must say I love working here’ – and she gave Daphne a look of rather unnerving sweetness.

‘Well…’ Daphne went back towards the window to see where Revel and George had got to, but there was now no sign of them. Then there was the click of the library door, and Daphne turned, expecting her mother to be shown back in, amid reassuring murmurs and thanks – but it was Sebby alone, head cocked, with an apologetic half-smile. It seemed Freda had been shown out the other way, into the hall: this was oddly confounding for a second or two, as though she had vanished in some more permanent sense. ‘She seemed anxious about her friend,’ Sebby said.

‘Ah yes, I fear she’s not at all well.’ Daphne gave a bland nod to Eva and went in, and when he closed the door behind her, the click confirmed her earlier sense of the process: you watched for a bit, and then you were part of it. A slight awkwardness, at being a guest in her own house, coloured the first moments for both of them, but they smiled through it. ‘I feel rather like a doctor,’ said Sebby.

‘Mrs Riley thought a detective,’ said Daphne.

Sebby was hesitant but sure. ‘Really I hope no more than a well-meaning friend,’ he said, and waited for Daphne to sit down. On the big table he had laid out the publications in which Cecil’s verses had appeared – a small pile of periodicals, the anthologies, Georgian Poetry, the Cambridge Poets, and the one book he’d published in his lifetime, Night Wake and Other Poems, in its soft grey paper covers easily dog-eared and torn. Another pile seemed to contain things in manuscript – there was her autograph book, given up this morning. Daphne was impressed, and again unsettled by the evidence of a clear procedure. She saw that she hadn’t prepared. This was because she hadn’t been able to, her mind wouldn’t fix on any of the things she knew she might say, she had had an unaccountable confidence that inspiration would come to her as soon as Sebby’s questions began. Now she regretted the past ten minutes spent sparring with Eva, when she could have been putting her thoughts in order.

‘Forgive me for one moment,’ Sebby said, turning to the table and starting to search through the pile of handwritten things. Daphne glimpsed her own letters from Cecil, which she had also dutifully surrendered – again she didn’t want to think about them. She looked at his stooped back and then at the long dim room beyond him. Though she was, as Eva had said, a reader, she had never exactly taken to the library – like Dudley’s study, which she never entered, it was a part of the house outside her sway. Sometimes she came in to look for a book, a novel from the great leather sets of Trollope or Dickens, or an old bound volume of Punch for Wilfie to work out the cartoons, but she couldn’t quite shake off the feeling of being a visitor, as if in a public library, with rules and fines. As the scene of her mother-in-law’s now ‘famous’ book tests, too, it had an unhappy air. Of these Sebby probably knew nothing, but to her the room was tainted by earlier attempts to contact Cecil – all nonsense, of course, as she and Eva agreed, but like much nonsense not entirely easy to dismiss.

Sebby sat down, on the same side of the table as she was, and again with an evident awareness of the niceties, she half his age, but a titled lady, he far more clever, a distinguished guest who’d been asked to perform a peculiar service for his hosts. ‘I hope this isn’t distressing for you,’ he said.

‘Oh, not at all,’ said Daphne graciously, her smile expressing a mild amazement at the thought that perhaps it should be. She saw Sebby’s own undecided glance. He said,

‘Dear Cecil aroused keen feelings in many of those who crossed his path.’

‘Indeed he did…’

‘And you would seem, from the letters you’ve so generously shared with me, to have had a similar effect on him.’

‘I know, isn’t it awful,’ said Daphne.

‘Hah…’ Sebby again unsure of her. He turned to pick up a clutch of the letters. She hadn’t been able to read them again herself, out of a strong compound embarrassment at everything they said about both of them. ‘There are beautiful passages – I sat up late with them last night, in my room.’ He smiled mildly as he turned over the small folded pages, recreating his own pleasure. Daphne saw him propped up in the very grand bed in the Garnet Room and handling these papers with a mixture of eagerness and regret. He was used to dealing with confidential matters, though not as a rule perhaps the amorous declarations of excitable young men. He hesitated, looked up at her, and started reading, with an affectionate expression: ‘ “The moon tonight, dear child, I suppose shines as bright on Stanmore as it does on Mme Collet’s vegetable garden and on the very long nose of the adjutant, who is snoring enough to wake the Hun on the far side of the room. Are you too snoring – do you snore, child? – or do you lie awake and think of your poor dirty Cecil far away? He is much in need of his Daphne’s kind words and…” ’ – Sebby petered out discreetly at the slither into intimacy. ‘Delightful, isn’t it?’

‘Oh… yes… I don’t remember,’ said Daphne half-turning her head to see. ‘The ones from France are a bit better, aren’t they?’

‘I found them most touching,’ said Sebby. ‘I have letters of my own from him, two or three… but these strike quite another tone.’

‘He had something to write about,’ said Daphne.

‘He had a great deal to write about,’ said Sebby, with a quick smile of courteous reproof. He looked through a few more letters, while Daphne wondered if she could possibly explain her feelings, even had she wanted to; she felt she would have to understand them first, and this unnatural little chat was hardly going to help her to do that. What she felt then; and what she felt now; and what she felt now about what she felt then: it wasn’t remotely easy to say. Sebby was every inch the bachelor – his intuitions about a young girl’s first love and about Cecil himself as a lover were unlikely to be worth much. Cecil’s way of being in love with her was alternately to berate her and to berate himself: there wasn’t much fun in it, for all his famed high spirits. Yet he always seemed happy when away from her (which was most of the time) and she had sensed more and more how much he enjoyed the absences he was always deploring. The War when it came was an absolute godsend. Sebby said, ‘Tell me if I am being too inquisitive, but I feel it will help me to a clearer vision of what might have been. Here’s the letter, what is it, June 1916, “Tell me, Daphne, will you be my widow?” ’

‘Oh, yes…’ She coloured slightly.

‘Do you remember how you replied to that?’

‘Oh, I said of course.’

‘And you considered yourselves… engaged?’

Daphne smiled and looked down at the deep red carpet almost puzzled for a moment that she had ended up here anyway. What was the status of a long-lost expectation? She couldn’t now recapture any picture she might then have had of a future life with Cecil. ‘As far as I remember we both agreed to keep it a secret. I wasn’t altogether Louisa’s idea of the next Lady Valance.’

Sebby smiled back rather furtively at this little irony. ‘Your letters to Cecil haven’t survived.’

‘I do hope not!’

‘I have the impression Cecil never kept letters, which is really rather trying of him.’

‘He saw you coming, Sebby!’ said Daphne, and laughed to cover the surprise of her own tone. He wasn’t used to teasing, but she wasn’t sure he minded it.

‘Indeed!’ Sebby rose, and looked for a book on the table. ‘Well, I don’t want to keep you too long.’

‘Oh…! Well, you haven’t.’ Perhaps she had rattled him after all, he thought she was simply being flippant.

‘What I hope you might do,’ said Sebby, ‘is to write down for me a few paragraphs, simply evoking dear Cecil, and furnishing perhaps an anecdote or two. A little memorandum.’

‘A memorandum, yes.’

‘And then if I may quote from the letters…’ – she had a first glimpse of his impatience – the impersonal logic of even the most flattering diplomatist. Of course one had to remember that he was burdened with far more pressing things.

‘I suppose that would be all right.’

‘I expect to call you simply Miss S., unless you object’ – which Daphne found after a mere moment’s fury she didn’t. ‘And now I might ask you just to run through “Two Acres” with me, for any little insights you might give me – local details and so on. I didn’t like to press your mother.’

‘Oh, by all means,’ said Daphne, with a muddled feeling of relief and disappointment that Sebby had failed to press her too – but that was it, of course, she saw it now, and it was good not to have wasted time on it: he was going to say nothing in this memoir of his, Louisa was in effect his editor, and this weekend of ‘research’, for all its sadness and piquancy and interesting embarrassments, was a mere charade. He picked up the autograph album, the mauve silk now rucked and stained by hundreds of grubby thumbs, and leafed delicately through. There was something else in it for him, no doubt – a busy man wouldn’t make this effort without some true personal reason. Sebby too had been awfully fond of Cecil. She gazed up at the carved end of the nearest bookcase, and the stained-glass window beyond it, in a mood of sudden abstraction. The April brilliance that threatened the fire in the morning-room here threw sloping drops and shards of colour across the wall and across the white marble fireplace. They painted the blind marble busts of Homer and Milton, pink, turquoise and buttercup. The colours seemed to warm and caress them as they slid and stretched. She pictured Cecil as he had been on his last leave; she had a feeling that when she met him that hot summer night he had just come from dinner with Sebby. Well, he was never going to know about that. For now, she had to come up with something more appropriate; something that she felt wearily had already been written, and that she had merely to find and repeat.

7

Freda crossed the hall and started up the great staircase, stopping for a moment on each frighteningly polished tread, reaching up for the banister, which was too wide and Elizabethan in style to hold on to properly, more like the coping of a wall than a handrail. It must be nice for Daphne to have a coat of arms, she supposed – there it was, at each turn, in the paws of a rampant beast with a lantern on its head. She too had dreamt of that for her daughter, in the beginning, before she knew what she knew. Corley Court was a forbidding place – even in the sanctuary of her room the dark panelling and the Gothic fireplace induced a feeling of entrapment, a fear that something impossible was about to be asked of her. She closed the door, crossed the threadbare expanse of crimson carpet, and sat down at the dressing-table, close to tears with her confused relieved unhappy sense of not having said to Sebastian Stokes any of the things she could have said, and had known, in her heart, that she wouldn’t.

The one letter she’d shown him, her widow’s mite, she’d called it, was mere twaddle, a ‘Collins’. She saw his courteous but very quick eye running over it, his turning the page as if there still might be something of interest on the other side, but of course there was not. He’d sat there, like the family doctor, he’d said, though to her he was a figure of daunting importance, toughness and suppleness, someone who spoke every day with Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr Baldwin. He was charming but his charm was the charm of diplomacy, charm designed not only to please but to save time and get things done; it was hardly the unconscious charm of a trusted friend. She had felt very foolish, and the pressure of what she was not going to say drove even the simplest conversation out of her mind. She did say that Cecil had made a terrible mess in his room, and it had sounded petty of her, to say such a thing of a poet and a hero who had won the Military Cross. She alluded, in addition, to his ‘liveliness’ and the various things he had broken – widow’s mites, again, pathetic grievances. What she couldn’t begin to say was the mess Cecil Valance had made of her children.

She waited a minute and then got up her handbag and opened it – inside was a bulging manila envelope torn and folded around a bundle of other letters… She couldn’t really bear to look at them again. She ought simply to have destroyed them, when she’d found them, during the War. But something had kept her back – there was a great bonfire going, all the autumn leaves, she went out and opened it with a fork, a red and grey winking and smouldering core to it, she could have dropped the commonplace-looking packet in without a soul knowing or caring. That was what she told George she had done; but in fact she couldn’t do it. Was it reverence, or mere superstition? They were letters written by a gentleman – that surely in itself meant little or nothing; and by a poet, which gave them a better right to immortality, but which needn’t have swayed her. Disgusted by her own unresolved confusion, she tugged out the bundle on to the dressing-table and stared at it. Cecil Valance’s impatient handwriting had a strange effect on her, even now; for a year and more it had come dashing and tumbling into her house, letters to George, then letters to Daphne, and the bloody, bloody poem, which she wished had never been written. The letters to Daphne were splendid enough to turn a young girl’s head, though Freda hadn’t liked their tone, and she could see that Daphne had been frightened by them as much as she was thrilled. Of course she was out of her depth with a man six years older, but then he was out of his depth too: they were horrible posturing letters in which he seemed to be blaming the poor child for something or other that was really his own failing. And yet Freda had not discouraged him – it seemed to her now she’d been out of her depth as well. And perhaps, who knew, it would all have turned out all right.

It was the letters to George, hidden at once, destroyed for all the rest of the family knew, mentioned only breezily – ‘Cess sends his love!’: they had turned out to be the unimagined and yet vaguely dreaded thing. There they had lain, in his room, all the time that George was away in the army – ‘intelligence’, planning, other matters she couldn’t be told about. Those endless summer evenings at ‘Two Acres’, just her and Daphne – she would drift through the boys’ rooms, take down their old school-books, fold and brush their unused clothes, tidy the drawers of the little bureau beside George’s bed, all the childish clutter, the batched-up postcards, the letters… Without even touching them now, her mind saw certain phrases, saw them twisting dense and snakelike in the heart of the bundle. Well, she wouldn’t read them ever again, there was no need to put herself through that. Letters from King’s College, Cambridge, from Hamburg, Lübeck, old Germany before the War, Milan; letters of course from this very house. She edged them back into the brown envelope, which tore open a little more and was now next to useless. Then she tidied her hair, made her face look no less worried with a few more dabs of powder, and set off once again down the long landing to Clara’s room.

Clara had had her fire made up, and sat beside it, dressed as if ready to be taken somewhere, but without her shoes on: her brown-stockinged legs, which gave her such pain, were propped on a bulging pile of cushions.

‘Have you had your chat?’ she said.

‘Yes. It was nothing much.’

‘Mm, you were very quick,’ said Clara, in that half-admiring, half-critical tone that Freda had grown so used to.

She said, ‘One doesn’t want to waste his time,’ in her own murmur of suppressed impatience. ‘Have they been looking after you?’ She bustled round the room as though doing so herself, then went restlessly to the window. ‘Would you like to go outside? I’ve made enquiries and they’ve still got Sir Edwin’s old bath-chair, if you want it. They can get it out for you.’

‘Oh, no, Freda, thank you very much.’

‘I’m sure that handsome Scotch boy would be happy to give you a push.’

‘No, no, my dear, really!’

If she wouldn’t be pushed, in any sense, there was little to be done. Freda knew they both wanted to go home, though Clara obviously couldn’t say so, and from Freda it would have been a pitiful admission. She missed her daughter, and loved her grandchildren, but visits to Corley were generally unhappy affairs. Even the cocktail hour lost something of its normal promise when cocktails themselves had such alarming effects on their host.

‘Shall we hear Corinna play the piano,’ Clara said, ‘before we go?’

‘This evening, I think – Dudley’s promised them.’

‘Oh, in that case,’ said Clara.

This bedroom, at the end of the house, looked out over an expanse of lawn towards the high red wall of the kitchen garden, beyond which the ridges of greenhouses gleamed in the sun. Not normally a walker, Freda dimly planned a little solitary ‘trudge’ or ‘totter’, to calm her feelings – though she knew she might well be snared by some chivalrous fellow-guest. She was frightened of Mrs Riley, and undecided on the charm of young Mr Revel Ralph. ‘I might go out for a bit, dear,’ she said over her shoulder. Clara made a sort of preoccupied grunt, as if too busy getting herself comfortable to take in what her friend was saying. ‘Apparently there’s a magnolia that has to be seen to be believed.’ Now, from the direction of the formal garden, two brown-clad figures came slowly walking, George with his hands behind his back, and Madeleine with hers in the pockets of her mackintosh. Their hands seemed somehow locked away from any mutual use they might have been put to, and although the two of them were busily in conversation, George throwing back his head to lend weight to his pronouncements, they looked much more like colleagues than like a couple.

Standing at the window, Freda saw herself already crossing the grass, and saw for a reckless and inspired moment that having the letters with her she should give them back to George; perhaps that would prove to be the real achievement of this arduous visit. It would be a kind of exorcism, a demon cast out of her at last. Her heart was skipping from the double impact of the thought and the opportunity – almost too pressing, with too little space for reflection and stepping back. And then it was as if she saw the letters hurled furiously in the air, falling and blowing across the lawn between them, trapped underfoot by a suddenly game Louisa, fetched out from beneath the bushes by an agile Sebby Stokes. She remembered what she had always felt, that they couldn’t be let out – though the feeling now was subtly altered by the momentary vision of release. They were George’s letters, and he should have them, but to give them to him after all this time would be to show him that something was live that he had surely thought dead ten years ago.

‘Well, I’ll get out for a bit, dear,’ she said again. Now George and Madeleine had gone. Probably she could tell all this to Clara, who out of her difficult existence had garnered a good deal of wisdom; but in a way it was her wisdom that she feared – it might make her look, by contrast, a fool. No one else could possibly be told, since no one keeps other people’s secrets, and Daphne in particular must never know of it. Now young Mr Ralph had come strolling into view, in conversation with the Scotch boy himself, who seemed to be leading him towards the walled garden. He had his sketchbook with him, and Freda was struck by the relaxed and friendly way they went along together; of course they were both very young, and Revel Ralph no doubt was anything but stuffy. They disappeared through the door in the wall. The sense that everyone else was doing something filled her with agitation.

Back in her room she put on a hat, and made sure that the letters were safely stowed. It was absurd, but they had become her guilty secret, as they had once been George’s. She went down one of the back staircases, which she probably wasn’t supposed to, but she felt she would rather run into a housemaid than a fellow-guest. It led to something called the Gentlemen’s Lobby, with the smoking-room beyond, and a small door out on to the back drive. She skirted the end of the house, and then the end of the formal garden, which she’d had enough of. She had an idea of getting into the woods for half an hour, before tea. In a minute or two she was under the shade of the trees, big chestnuts already coming into flower, and the limes putting out small brilliant green shoots. She pushed back her hat and looked upward, giddy at the diamonds of sky among the leaves. Then she walked on, still unusually fast, and after a short while, stepping over twigs and beech mast, rather out of breath.

She started to think she shouldn’t go too far, and ducked her way out under the edge of the wood into the grassland of the Park. A long white fence divided the Park from the High Ground, and she drifted along by it for a moment or two in one of those intense unobserved dilemmas as to whether she should try to climb over it; that she was unobserved had first, very casually, to be checked. There were two slender iron rails, the upper at hip height, and a flat-topped post every six feet or so, to hold on to. She rehearsed the lifting of her skirt, with another look round, then quickly steadied her walking shoe on the lower rail, while gripping the upper one, but in the same second she knew that of course she couldn’t get over it, and she went on to the distant gate, in a flustered pretence of being in no particular hurry.

The High Ground had just been mown, and as soon as Freda had shut the gate behind her, she found the cuttings, still green and damp, were clinging to her shoes. And there they were again, George and Mad, crossing the far end of the enormous lawn, which must have been a good two acres in itself. She felt she had been ambushed by the very thing that she was hoping to avoid; but also perhaps that it was futile to try to avoid it. They kept to themselves, always talking, always walking, Freda sensed no one cared for them much, and George had always been somewhat shy and stiff – until (there it was again) Cecil had come on the scene. She had tried not to watch him at lunch, knowing what she knew: this weekend must be distinctly uncomfortable for him; she was surprised in a way that he’d come. Though if he had, in whatever fashion, loved Cecil… Now she saw the gleam on his glasses, his bald brow quite distinctive, they spotted her and said something to each other – then George waved. She hurried on for a moment, but no – she saw them so rarely… she stopped and picked up a black feather, its tip sheared off by the mower, then she turned and strolled slowly towards them, with a frown and smile, and awkward side-glances, and the air of nurturing an amusing remark.

The fact was that this whole business with the letters was kept alive by her own sense of guilt – dormant, forgettable, easily slept with for much of the time, but at moments like this crinkling everything she said to him into bright insincerity. She should never have read them; but once she’d found them, taken one from its envelope with a shifty but tender curiosity, and then read its astounding first page, she found she couldn’t stop. She wondered now at her own grim curiosity, her need to know the worst when surely she would rather have known nothing. She glanced at George, beaming mildly, fifty yards away, and saw him on the morning she’d confronted him, George in uniform, grieving for his brother, fighting a war. Her own grief must have triggered it, licensed it. And he hadn’t known what to do, any more than she had: he was angry with her as he had never been, they were private letters, she had no right, and at the same time he was haggard with shame and horror at his mother knowing what had gone on. ‘It was all over,’ he said – which was obvious, since Cecil was dead – ‘it had all been over long ago.’ And then before the war was out he had proposed to this dreary bluestocking, so that she felt, at her most candid and unhappy moments, that she had condemned him herself to a life of high-minded misery. ‘Hello! Hello!’ said George.

Freda raised her chin and grinned at them.

‘Enjoying your walk, Mother?’ said Madeleine.

‘It’s been rather lovely’ – she looked up at them with the raffish twinkle of a parent dwarfed by her children.

‘I didn’t know you liked walking,’ said Madeleine, suspiciously.

Freda said, ‘There’s a lot you don’t know, my dear,’ and then looked at her own words with a touch of surprise.

‘You’ve had your little chat with Sebby,’ said George.

‘Yes, yes’ – she dismissed it.

‘All right?’

‘Well, I really had nothing to say.’

George gave a little purse-lipped smile, and gazed around at the woods. ‘No, I suppose not.’ And then, ‘Are you going back to the house?’

‘I’m very much ready for a cup of tea.’

‘We’ll come with you.’

As they walked they looked at the house, and it seemed to Freda they were each thinking of something they might say about it. Their self-consciousness focused on it, with an air of latent amusement and concern, but for at least a minute none of them spoke. Freda glanced up at George and wondered if the incident that was gnawing at her self-possession was equally present to him. In the nine years since, it had never once been mentioned; bland evasiveness had slowly assumed the appearance of natural forgetfulness.

‘Oh, have you looked at the tomb?’ said Madeleine, as they went through the white gate and into the garden.

‘Well, I’ve seen it before,’ said Freda. She disliked the tomb very much – for strong but again not quite explicable reasons.

‘Quite splendid, isn’t it.’

‘Yes, it is!’

‘I was thinking about poor old Huey,’ said George, in this at least chasing her own thoughts.

‘Oh, I know…’

‘We must go, darling,’ said George, taking his mother’s arm with what felt to her like extravagant forgiveness.

‘To France…?’

‘We’ll go this summer, during the long vac.’

‘Well, I’d love that,’ said Freda, gripping George to her, then glancing almost shyly at Madeleine. It seemed to her a mystery, another of the great evasions whose nothingness filled her life, that they hadn’t been already.

She left them in the hall, and went up to her room, freshly, nearly tearfully, preoccupied with Hubert. Really his death should have put all these other worries in proportion. The heavy ache of loss was quickened by a touch of indignation. She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well. That Huey wasn’t clever or beautiful, had never met Lytton Strachey or written a sonnet or climbed anything higher than an apple-tree – all this she was somehow forced to acknowledge at each tentative mention of his name to Cecil’s mother. She took off her hat, sat down, and attended rather violently to her hair.

She knew it was pointless, heartless, to begrudge Louisa the consolation of having been with Cecil at the end, the aristocratic reach across the Channel that had brought him back, when tens of thousands of others were fated to stay there till doomsday. Daphne said it was the reason the old lady resisted moving out of the big house: she wanted to stay where she could visit her son every day. Freda was picturing Huey, back at ‘Two Acres’, on his last leave – and now the tears welled up and she dropped the comb and fiddled in her sleeve for her handkerchief. In the letters that were sent to her after his death, they had spoken of the wood where he had fallen, trying to take a machine-gun post that was concealed in it: Ivry Wood. Over and over in those weeks she had looked out across her own modest landscape, her own little birch-wood, with a rending sense that Huey would never set foot there again. Almost impossible to grasp, on that first day, that he’d been buried already in France – under shell-fire, they said, with a reading from Revelations. Already he’d been put away for ever, out of the air. And whenever she thought of it, and pictured Ivry Wood, it was her own little spinney she saw, for want of anything better, strangely translated to northern France, and Huey running into it, into the desultory spray of the guns.

Later he had been reburied, and she had photographs of the grave, and of the interment itself. A padre in a white surplice, under an umbrella, men firing a salute. Well, now at last George would take her, and Daphne too perhaps, over to France, they would all go, and she would look at it. She had only been abroad once, before the War, when she and Clara made their pilgrimage to Bayreuth, two widows on the smutty ferry, the stifling trains with German soldiers singing in the next carriage. The thought of this new visit, of the resolute approach to the place, squeezed at her throat.

8

When Daphne was getting dressed that evening Dudley strolled in to her room and said, almost in a yawn, that he hoped Mark Gibbons wouldn’t take against Revel. ‘Oh,’ said Daphne, faintly puzzled but more concerned about dinner, and the horrors of the seating-plan, where she felt her skills as a hostess most exposed. ‘It seems to me Revel gets on with everyone.’ She slithered her pearl-coloured petticoat over her head, and smoothed it down with her palms, pleased to hear his name at such a moment. She would have him sit near, though not next to her. Naturally her mother must sit on Dudley’s right, but if Clara was tucked away safely in the middle was it better to have Eva or Madeleine on his left? Daphne thought she might well inflict Madeleine on him. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘there’s no urgent reason they should meet, is there?’ And then it came out that Dudley had asked Mark to dinner, and Flora, and also the Strange-Pagets – on the grounds that ‘we haven’t seen them for ages’.

‘Christ, you might have told me!’ said Daphne, feeling her colour flare up. ‘And the bloody S-Ps, of all people…’ She caught herself in the mirror, helpless in her underwear, her stockinged feet, her panic slightly comic to Dudley in the glinting freedom of the background. First and foremost she thought of the langoustines, already stretched by Revel’s arrival.

‘Oh, Duffel…’ said Dudley, frowning a little at the jet studs in his shirt-front. ‘Mark’s a marvellous painter.’

‘Mark may be a bloody genius,’ said Daphne, hurrying with her dress, ‘but he still has to eat.’

Dudley turned to her with that unstable mixture of indulgence and polite bewilderment and mocking distaste that she had come to know and dread and furiously resent. ‘Well Flora’s a vegetarian, Duffel, remember,’ he said: ‘just throw her some nuts and an orange and she’ll be as happy as a pig in shit.’ And he gave her his widest smile, his moist sharp dog-teeth making their old deplorable appeal, but horrible now as his trench language. Daphne thought she had better go down herself and see the cook. It would be one of those ghastly announcements that was all too clearly a plea.

Mark Gibbons, who had painted the large abstract ‘prison’ in the drawing-room, lived on a farm near Wantage with his half-Danish girlfriend Flora. Daphne liked him a good deal without ceasing to be frightened of him. He and Dudley had met in the army, a strangely intimate locking of opposites, it seemed to Daphne, Mark being a socialist and the son of a shopkeeper. He showed no interest in actually marrying Flora, and very little in dressing for dinner, which was the more immediate worry, with Louisa coming in, and Colonel Fountain, who’d been Cecil’s superior officer, driving over from Aldershot. Rattling down the back-stairs two at a time Daphne saw her seating-plan collapse in a jumble of incompatibilities, her husband and mother-in-law like repelling magnets. The Strange-Pagets at least were easier, a dull rather older couple with a lot of money and a country house of their own on the other side of Pusey. Dudley had known Stinker Strange-Paget since boyhood, and was defiantly loyal to him, treating his dim parochial gossip like the wisdom of some gnomic sage.

Sebby Stokes came down first, and Daphne, who’d popped in to the drawing-room for a gin and lemon, was caught for several minutes in distracted conversation with him, a certain warm relief none the less creeping in from the drink. Their earlier chat in the library was a coloured shadow, an attempted intimacy that would never be repeated. She perched on a window-seat, glancing out on to the gravel, where any moment cars would appear. She had done what she could, she must relax. Sebby seemed still to be talking about Cecil, whom she’d forgotten for a moment was the pretext for this whole party. Wasn’t this what would happen to all of them, remembrance forgotten in the chaos of other preoccupations? ‘I’ve been reading all the letters your mother-in-law received from Cecil’s men.’

‘Aren’t they splendid!’ said Daphne.

‘By George, they loved him,’ said Sebby, in what she felt was an odd tone. She looked at him, standing stiffly with his glass and his cigarette, such a sleek and perfect embodiment of how to behave, and again she saw what she had glimpsed that afternoon, that he had loved him, and would do anything for his good name. She said, mildly but mischievously,

‘We had splendid letters about my brother too. Though I suppose they’re always likely to be splendid, aren’t they. No one ever wrote and said, “Captain Valance was a beast.” ’

‘No, indeed…’ said Sebby, with a twitch of a smile.

‘What are you going to call the book, just Poems, I suppose?’

‘Or Collected Poems, I think. Louisa favours The Poetical Works of, which your husband feels is too Mrs Hemans.’

‘For once I think he’s right,’ said Daphne. And then there was a warning drone like a plane in the distance and in a moment a brown baker’s van, which was Mark and Flo’s form of conveyance, came roaring and throbbing down the drive.

‘He finds it so useful for his paintings!’ Daphne found herself explaining, shouting gaily, and feeling she really wasn’t ready for this evening at all. When Mark clambered out from the cab in a full and proper dinner-suit, she felt so relieved that she kissed both George and Madeleine, who had just come in, and were not expecting it. Behind them in the hall was her mother, and then Revel looking at the fireplace while Eva Riley stuck her head out of one of the turret windows. ‘Absurd!’ she was saying. ‘Too sickening!’ Well, it was quite a party, it had been set in motion, and Daphne was gamely pretending to drive it – it was understandable surely if she felt slightly sick herself as it gathered speed. Her mother said quietly that Clara was very tired, and had asked for supper in her room – Daphne felt it was bound to happen, yet a further change to the seating-plan, but she merely told Wilkes, and asked him to sort it out. Then she went and got another gin.

It turned out that Mark knew Eva Riley already, which was a good thing and also vaguely irritating. He called her ‘old girl’ or ‘Eva Brick’ in his cheerful, slightly menacing way. This preexisting friendship was put on display, and even exaggerated, in front of the other guests. They had a number of acquaintances in common, none of them known personally to anyone else, and Mark kept up conversation about these fascinating absent people with a certain determination, as if aping some polite convention: ‘What’s old Romilly up to?’ he asked, and then, ‘How did you find Stella?’

‘Oh, she was on killing form,’ said Eva, with her secretive smile, perhaps even a little embarrassed. Mark’s painting, hanging so prominently in the room, seemed to encourage him, and somehow represent him, as a challenge, a wild figure several moves ahead of them all.

As on the previous day Dudley had a look of risky high spirits, having wrestled his own party out of the one his wife and his mother had so carefully planned. Even Colonel Fountain’s arrival was an occasion for mischief. ‘Colonel, you know the General,’ said Dudley when he was shown in, which rather threw the old boy for the first minute or two. Daphne had pictured Colonel Fountain as an ebullient figure who liked a drink, but in fact he was a quiet, ascetic-looking man, who’d been deafened in one ear in France, and had trouble with casual conversation. He attached himself courteously to Louisa, and stuck to her, like some old uncle at a children’s party, a rout of names he couldn’t be sure he’d caught.

Last of all, the Strange-Pagets were delivered by their chauffeur and shown in to the noisy drawing-room, Dudley hailed them histrionically, the party was complete, and just at that moment the door opened again, and there was Nanny with the children, down for their half-hour. This was less than ideal. Daphne saw Nanny looking at Dudley, and Dudley’s stare back, the expressionless mask behind which outrage is forming and focusing. There seemed something faintly mutinous mixed in with Nanny’s normal servility. It was an evening the children might better have been kept upstairs – but by the same token an evening when they specially wanted to come down. Nanny raised her hands and released them into the crowd, and Daphne swooped over to them with a rare rather shameful desire to tidy them away. In these ultra-modern drawing-rooms there was nowhere to hide. They ran in among the legs of the others, looking for affection, or at least attention. Granny Sawle of course was reliable, and Revel talked to children so pleasantly and levelly they might have thought themselves adults. Stinker and Tilda, who had no children, always viewed them with curiosity and a hint of fear – or so Daphne felt. Again she remembered she must simply leave them to it.

She talked for a while determinedly to Flo, whom she liked very much, about the forthcoming fair at Fernham, and an exhibition that Mark was having in London, but with a slight sense she was turning her back on other responsibilities. She glanced round: it was all right, Corinna was being charming to the Colonel, Wilfie was discussing the miners’ strike with George and Sebby Stokes. She introduced Flo to her mother, and they quickly got on to the Ring; Flo had been last year to Bayreuth, and Daphne watched her mother warm to the unexpected pleasure of the subject. ‘I wish you could meet my dear friend Mrs Kalbeck,’ she said, ‘she’s just upstairs! We went to Bayreuth together before the War.’ In a moment they were naming singers, Freda doubting them as soon as she said them. ‘We had the great thrill of meeting Madame Schumann-Heink,’ she said, ‘who sang one of the Norns, I think it was.’At which point they all heard a quiet but momentous arpeggio from the piano across the room. And following, but with the accidental quality still of a rehearsal, the maddening little tune that Daphne had been pretending for days to greatly admire. ‘Oh, no…!’ said Dudley, crisply but gaily, like a good sport, over the general noise of the talk. There was an amused, half-distracted turning of heads. Wilfie had gone to stand beside the piano, with his back to the room, tellingly like a child being punished. Madeleine and George, whose special treat this was, stood close by, with the look almost of parents who have sent their own child up on to the stage; but the others had no idea of the plans and promises coming inexorably into play. Louisa had put on a comical sour face, shaking her head, and telling Colonel Fountain in his good ear about how sensitive Sir Edwin was to music. The talk regained confidence, with a certain sense of relief. For forty years, after all, the piano had been untouched, disguised beneath a long-fringed velour shawl, a sturdy platform for all manner of useful or decorative objects, and if anyone after dinner had uncovered the keys and facetiously picked out a phrase the noise that came forth, from under the heaped-up folios and potted plants and the arena of framed photographs, was so jangled by time and neglect as to discourage any further idea of music. Now, however, Corinna was playing the start of the piece, the misleadingly peaceful prologue… ‘Not tonight, old girl,’ called Dudley from across the room, still humorously, but emphatically, and expecting to be understood – he gave Mark a matey grin. Wilfrid had cleared a little space in front of the piano, asking people in the preoccupied way of some official or commissionaire to stand back. There was a moment of silence, in which it seemed their father’s order had been understood, but which Corinna, with a touch of self-righteousness, took as proper expectancy for their performance, and pitched vigorously into ‘The Happy Wallaby’. After three bars, Wilfrid, with a look of selfless submission to order and fate, took the first few steps of his dance, which of course involved crouching and then jumping as far forward as he could. The guests shifted back, shielding their drinks, with little cries of friendly alarm, some clearly thinking this shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Stinker carried on talking loudly as if he hadn’t noticed – ‘One awfully clever thing he said was…’ – but Dudley had put down his drink and stomped across the room, his face already square and staring with ungovernable emotion. He stood by the piano and said, in fact quietly, ‘I said not tonight.’

‘But, Daddy, you did say tonight,’ said Corinna pertly, playing on.

‘And tonight I said not! Change of orders!’ – and a bark of a laugh at the Colonel to suggest he was more in control than he was. Daphne strode forward – it was what she knew they said about Corley, how it had changed in Dudley’s time, the rum mix of folk, the painters and writers, it was bedlam. She felt defiant and apologetic all at once. Wilfrid had stopped jumping, his trust in his sister’s plan abandoned, but Corinna played on.

‘Perhaps not now, darling,’ Freda said, stretching out a lace-cuffed hand to her granddaughter’s shoulder, just as Dudley, bending over them both, his horrible grimace the sudden focus of the crisis, pounded his fists repeatedly on the keys at the high plinky end of the keyboard and maddened by the silly effect elbowed Corinna off the stool and pounded repeatedly at the more resonant and furious octaves at the bottom. Then he slammed the lid shut.

‘Come along,’ said Daphne quietly, and led the two children out of the room, clinging to her hands. Nanny, the one time you wanted her, was nowhere to be seen. Then she found her mother was following her too, which was welcome in a way, except that an awful strain of unexpressed pity and reproach for her, being married to Dudley Valance, a mad brute, would be in the air. Corinna’s lip was trembling, but Wilfrid was already sobbing steadily as he marched along.

When Daphne came back into the drawing-room three minutes later a collective effort at repair had been made. She murmured that the children were fine – she felt an undertow of support hedged with a certain timorous reluctance to go against Dudley. ‘Little devils, eh?’ said the Colonel, and patted her on the arm. Mark and Flo and the S-Ps had seen the like before, and were having an ideally boring conversation about shooting to show that things were under control. Dudley himself, with the touchy geniality of a man who is never in the wrong, was talking to Sebby Stokes, whose natural diplomacy just about carried him through. It was understood that no Valance would ever apologize for anything. Louisa said nothing, though Daphne as usual read her unspoken thoughts very clearly; then she heard her say with necessary clarity to the Colonel, ‘We never saw our boys after six o’clock.’ Daphne knew the person who would be most upset was her own mother, who didn’t come back in before dinner. The best thing to do was to have a stiff drink. And she found within a minute or two that a wary hilarity of recovery had gripped the whole party.

By the time they went into dinner Daphne’s mood was one of nonsensical amusement veering into breathless semi-alarm at not knowing what was going on. She thought she had better bring out Colonel Fountain before the mad atmosphere of the evening engulfed them all. After the fish was served she asked him clearly about Cecil, and heard her words cantering on into a sudden general silence – her voice sounded not quite her own. The Colonel was sitting halfway along the table, on Louisa’s right, and glanced around keenly, almost challengingly, as he spoke, as if at a briefing of a different kind. Those looking at him found themselves watching Louisa as well, who took on a solemn and anxious expression, her eyes fixed on the silver salt-cellar in front of her. It was not the story of Cecil’s death, thank heavens, but of the famous occasion when he’d won his MC, bringing back three of his wounded men under fire. The Colonel outlined the situation in large terms, enlisting the salt-cellar as a German machine-gun post. The more detailed account he gave of the episode itself was done with honour and a sense of conviction somehow heightened by his reticent manner; but Daphne – and possibly others round the table – had a disappointing sense that he no longer distinguished it clearly from a dozen such episodes. He had written a splendid letter to Louisa at the time, and of course recommended Cecil for his medal, and his form of words now was very close to those ten-year-old accounts. Perhaps Dudley and Mark, who had been in similar ‘shows’, envisaged it more freshly. Daphne’s eye roamed round the room as Colonel Fountain spoke. It was the room she had associated most with Cecil, from the day they’d first met, and now it looked at its exotic best, with candles reflected in the angled mirrors and in the dim gold leaf of the jelly-mould domes overhead. At the far end, in the glow of an electric lamp, hung the Raphael portrait of a bonneted young man. ‘I don’t know quite how he did it,’ the Colonel said. ‘The mist had pretty well cleared – he was horribly exposed.’ She knew Revel loved the room as much as she did, and she took her time to let her eyes come to rest on him, when he seemed immediately to know, and glanced up at her.

The rest of dinner passed in the blur of three successive wines, but Dudley, though drunker, was making a better effort not to be rattled. Daphne had decided she must ration the number of times she looked pointedly at Revel, and she soon felt he had come to a similar agreement with himself – it was amusing, and then threatened to become awkward. Sebby naturally was questioned a certain amount about the miners and his answers gave them all the feeling they were at the heart of the crisis without anything much being revealed at all. Mark was more provoked by this than the others, and had clearly taken against Sebby altogether. He talked a good deal of unnecessary rot, or sense that sounded like rot, about his experience growing up behind a butcher’s shop in Reading, until Dudley, who was the only person who could, said, ‘You really must learn, Mark dear, not to look down on those who have grown up without your own disadvantages,’ and a big licensed laugh ran round the table. To Daphne it was hauntingly like the early days of their marriage, the trance of pleasure and purely happy expectation that Dudley could cast her into. He gleamed in the candlelight and the certainty of his own handsomeness. Then she found her reawakened longing focused on Revel’s thin artistic fingers lying loosely spread on the tablecloth, as though waiting for someone to pick them up. And then already it was time for the ladies to withdraw – the easy but decisive initiative in which she still felt, on a night like this, a callow usurper of her mother-in-law.

When the men came through, Colonel Fountain’s driver was fetched out from the servants’ dining-room – they were setting off straight away to Aldershot. Daphne saw him off from the front doorstep, feeling terribly squiffy and incoherent. She shook the Colonel’s hand between both her own, but could think of nothing to say. Though the old boy had been a bit of a disappointment she felt incoherently that they had also let him down.

Back in the drawing-room she found there was talk of a game. Those who were keen half-smothered their interest, and those who weren’t pretended blandly that they didn’t mind. Louisa, who hated to waste time, was hemming a handkerchief for the British Legion sale. ‘Wotsit?’ she said, squinting down her nose as she tied off the thread.

‘Well, I wonder,’ said George, with a look that Daphne had known since childhood, the concealed excitement, the cool smile that warned them that, should he condescend to play, he would certainly win.

‘Before the War,’ Louisa explained to Sebby Stokes, ‘we played Wotsit for hours at a time. Dudley and Cecil went at it like rabbits. Of course Cecil knew far more.’

‘Cecil was so terribly clever, Mamma,’ said Dudley. ‘I’m not sure rabbits are specially known for their General Knowledge, are they…?’

‘Or what about the adverb game,’ said Eva, ‘that’s always a riot.’

‘Ah yes, adverbs,’ said Louisa, as if recalling an unsatisfactory encounter with them in the past.

‘Which ones are they?’ said Tilda.

‘You know, darling, like quickly or… or winsomely,’ said Eva.

‘You have to do something in the manner of the word,’ said Madeleine, unenthusiastically.

‘It can be rather fun,’ said Revel, giving Daphne a sweet but uncertain smile: ‘it’s about how you do things.’

‘Oh I see…’ said Tilda.

Daphne felt she didn’t mind playing, but she knew that Louisa wouldn’t like anything boisterous or dependent on a sense of humour for its success. They had played the adverb game once with the children, Louisa baffling them all by picking seldom. And in fact she said now, ‘I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I bid you all goodnight.’ The men leapt to their feet, there was a warm overlapping chorus of goodnights, light-hearted protests; amid which Sebby said quietly that he had papers to read, and Freda too, with a sadly cringing smile at Dudley, announced that she had had a lovely day. Daphne went out with them as far as the foot of the stairs, with a certain apologetic air of her own; though she was grateful of course to see them clamber off to bed.

They all had another drink, the idea of a game still hanging in the air. Madeleine started prattling, in a painful attempt to ward off the threat. Tilda asked if anyone knew the rules for Strip Jack Naked. Then Dudley rang for Wilkes and told him to get the pianola out; they were going to have some dancing. ‘Oh, what fun,’ said Eva, with a hard smile through her cigarette-smoke.

‘I’m going to play for my guests,’ said Dudley. ‘It’s only right.’

‘And the carpet…’ murmured Daphne, with a shrug, as though she didn’t really care, which was the only way to get Dudley to do so.

‘Yes, remember my carpet!’ said Eva.

‘In the hall, Wilkes,’ said Dudley.

‘As you wish, Sir Dudley,’ said Wilkes, managing to convey, beneath his rosy pleasure at the prospect of the guests enjoying themselves, a flicker of apprehension.

The pianola was kept in the cow-passage. In a minute Dudley came out into the hall to watch Robbie and another of the men wheel it roaringly across the wide oak floor. He went down the passage himself, and came back with an awkward armful of the rolls: he had a wild look, mockery mixed up with genuine excitement. It was the moment when Daphne knew she had lost what frail control of the evening she might ever have had – she gave it up in a familiar mixture of misery and relief.

Some of the rolls were just well-known numbers, foxtrots and the like; one or two were the special ones made by Paderewski, of short pieces by Chopin, which were supposed to sound like him playing it himself. Dudley only ever played these to send them up with his absurd imitation of a wild-haired virtuoso. Now he threaded a roll in, drunkenly concentrating, smiling to himself at the treat he was preparing for them, smiling at the machine itself, which he had a childish reverence for. Then he sat down, flung his head back, and started pedalling – out came the foxtrot they’d had a hundred times, and which Daphne knew she would have on the brain if something bigger and better couldn’t be made to replace it. The keys going up and down under invisible hands had something almost menacing about them.

Mark, who was as tight as Dudley, immediately seized hold of Daphne, and they shimmied off at a lively stagger across the hall; she felt Mark’s warm but undiscriminating interest in her as a member of the opposite sex, they were both breathless with laughter and then Mark bumped quite hard into the table and almost fell over, still holding on to her. She freed herself, and looked around at the others, Madeleine virtually in hiding, doubled up behind the pianola, as if looking for something she’d dropped, and George pretending to praise Dudley’s playing with a keen facetious grin, entirely ignored by Dudley himself. Of course she wanted to dance with Revel, but he, quite reasonably, she supposed, had presented his hand to Flo, and moved off with her very confidently, steering as if by magic past the various hazards of hall chairs, plant-stands and the grandfather clock. Daphne only half-followed them, then she saw Revel smiling at her over Flo’s shoulder in a perfectly open way from which, none the less, she felt allowed to draw something quite private. The roll came to an end, and Dudley jumped up to choose a replacement, which turned out to be the other foxtrot he always played. He had no ear for music, but was obsessively attached to these two numbers, or at least to playing them, with a staring pretence that anyone who really did care for music would love them too. So Daphne took hold of Stinker, with a certain mischievous determination, and he bumped along beside her and somewhat on top of her, gasping, ‘Oh, my dear girl, you’re too fast for me…’ In a moment Dudley started singing raucously as he pedalled, ‘Oh, the lights of home!… the lights of home! and a place I can call my own!’

‘What’s that?’ shouted Stinker over his shoulder, trying boldly to wriggle out of dancing.

‘What? You can’t be so Philistine. It’s a lovely song by my brother Cecil’ – and he pounded on, jamming the words in to the rhythm nonsensically, and soon with tears of laughter running down his cheeks. Above him the large unapprehending cows in ‘The Loch of Galber’ gazed on. The roll came to an end.

‘Goodness, I’m hot after all that,’ said Stinker, and murmuring extravagantly about what tremendous fun it all was he steered his way back into the drawing-room. Cautious clinking and crashing could be heard and the hoarse gasp of the gazogene; then the pianola started up again. ‘Come on, Stinker!’ shouted Dudley, ‘it’s the “Hickory-Dickory Rag” – your favourite!’

‘Come on, Stinker!’ cried Tilda, with exceptional high spirits, so that people laughed at her a little, but then immediately joined her, ‘Come on, we’re starting!’ – Flo was darting around already, and Eva, taking the man’s part, seized her shoulders and trotted her briskly down the room, head jerking up and down like a hen in a new kind of move she seemed to have designed herself. The women’s beads could just be heard, rattling against each other. ‘Oh!’ said Tilda, ‘oh, my golly!’ She followed them with a wide-eyed smile that Daphne had never seen before, something touching and comical in her pleasure, gazing at each of the others to see if they shared it; she peered almost cunningly at George, whose own smile was broad but slightly strained, and suddenly she had hooked his arm round her somehow, and they were moving off together, Tilda doing some intent little back-kicks and George, with shouts of ‘Whoops!’ and ‘Oh, my word!’ randomly trying something similar. ‘Oh, do come on, Stinker!’ shouted Dudley again, rocking from side to side like a cyclist on a steep hill as he worked at the treadles, something mad and relentless in his grin. ‘Stinker!’ shouted Mark, ‘Stinker-winker!’ But Stinker resisted all these calls, and a minute later Daphne saw him wander past the window with a tumbler in his hand, and disappear into the relative safety of the garden. There was a large moon tonight, and he seemed to be peering around for it.

When the dancing stopped, Flo said, ‘Let’s all go outside and get some air.’ Daphne glanced at Revel, who said, ‘Oh, good idea,’ with a sweeping smile which lingered for a moment on her before dropping thoughtfully aside. There was a rush to the front door, even shoving and protesting, then Mark, already out on the drive, singing lustily, to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here’, which seemed to Daphne rather rude, though preferable no doubt to many of the other army songs that he and Dudley sang when they were drunk, such as ‘Christmas Day in the Workhouse’, which he started to sing next.

‘Tell Mark to stop singing,’ said Daphne to Flo, who seemed to get the point. On a still night every word would be audible in Louisa’s bedroom.

‘You coming out, Dud?’ said George, still panting a bit, and letting his high spirits run on over his brother-in-law.

‘Eh…? Oh – no, no,’ said Dudley, swivelling round on the stool, and then back again to reach for his drink. ‘No, no – you all go out. I’m going to stop in and read.’

‘Oh…’ said Tilda, still breathless and delighted. Dudley stood up with a fixed but already absent smile, shuffled sideways and dropped back on to the edge of the stool, which shot away across the bare floor – he lunged for the edge of the keyboard as he fell, George jumped from the flying cut-glass tumbler, and Daphne started forward but merely snatched his elbow as he thumped heavily backwards, with a furious shout of ‘Watch out!’ as if someone else was behaving dangerously. ‘Oh!’ said Tilda again. He lay there for several seconds, then sat up like the Dying Gaul, leaning on one hand, staring at the floor as though only just containing his patience, then raised his other hand, whether for help or to ward help off it was hard to tell. Daphne found herself gasping with alarm and pity and almost giggling with childish hilarity.

‘No, I’m perfectly all right,’ said Dudley, and sprang up quite smartly, in the soldier-like way he still had, though unsteady for a moment as he gained his feet. A wince of pain was covered by a sarcastic laugh at the whole situation. His shirt-front and lapel were wet with whisky.

‘Are you sure, old man?’ said George. Dudley didn’t answer or even look at him, but crossed the hall with uncertain dignity, flung open the door and disappeared into the cow-passage, the door swinging loudly shut behind him.

‘You go on out,’ said Daphne to the others. With a familiar resolve she went after Dudley, but with a newer sense looming beyond it that it wasn’t just repetition, it was getting much worse.

She found him in the washroom, and his dripping face as he raised it from the basin was alarmingly red. The veins in his temples stood out as if he’d been throttled. But when he had dried himself and sleeked back his hair the colour receded and he looked almost normal. Daphne thought of various futile reproaches and suggestions. She watched him dab at his lapel with the damp towel and then throw it on the floor, as he always did. Then she found he was smiling at her in the mirror, just a moment of doubt as he hooked her glance, the old trick he did without thinking. ‘Oh my god, Duff’ – he turned and lurched into her, his teeth moist and gleaming, his arms went heavily round her shoulders not her waist, he was kissing her and kissing her, squashing and probing as though to get at something; she didn’t know what if anything she gave: all she got from it herself was a compounded sequence of discomforts, the sour flare of drink and cigars into her face. He hadn’t done this for ages, it was like a violent little visit from the days when they still made love. He stood back, shaking her lightly, encouragingly, like a good old friend, then he was limping off, head down, head up, with the oblivious sense of a new mission, the unspoken agreements of the demented and the drunk. ‘Come on, Duffel,’ he called over his shoulder as he opened the door into the hall. She stood where she was, and watched the door swing closed again behind him.

‘Oh, my dear, isn’t Dudley joining us?’ said Eva, when she got out on to the flagged path.

‘No, he can’t,’ said Daphne, with some satisfaction, pulling her wrap round her. ‘You know, he doesn’t go out at night.’

‘What, not at all?’ said Eva. ‘How very funny of him…’ She sounded archly suspicious, and then Daphne wondered if Eva had in fact been out at night with Dudley, though she could hardly think when.

‘You know, he doesn’t talk about it, but it’s one of his things.’

‘Oh, is it one of his things.’

‘Dud not coming out?’ said Mark, suddenly behind them, and now with a hand round her waist – round both their waists.

‘He doesn’t, darling, as you know,’ said Daphne; and then she explained, for Eva’s benefit, and trying to ignore Mark’s quite purposeful grasp for a moment: ‘It’s a thing from the War, as a matter of fact. I probably shouldn’t say…’ – and on the hard path, finding her way in the long spills of light from the drawing-room windows, which only deepened the shadows, she made a little mime of her hesitation. ‘You know, it was a great friend of his who was killed in the War. Shot dead by a sniper right beside him. They’d seen him in the moonlight, you see, and that’s why he can never bear moonlight.’

‘Oh Lord,’ said Eva.

Daphne stopped. ‘He heard the shot and he saw the black flower open on the boy’s brow, and he was dead, right beside him.’ She’d rather muffed the story, which Dudley told, on very rare occasions, with a shaking hand and choked throat, and which wasn’t really hers to tell. She felt the horror as well as the rather striking poetry of it all so keenly that she hardly knew if she was Dudley’s protector or betrayer – she seemed inextricably to be both. ‘And then of course Cecil, you know…’

‘Oh, was he killed in the moonlight too?’ said Eva.

‘Well, no, but a sniper, it all connects up,’ said Daphne. In truth, other people’s traumas were hard to bear steadily in mind.

In a minute Mark left them – she saw him running at a crouch behind the low hedges to ambush Tilda and Flo, who were walking together between the moonlit chains of clematis. She didn’t much want to be alone with Eva; she looked around for Revel, whom she could hear laughing with George nearby… still, it presented an opportunity. ‘I was never sure,’ she murmured, ‘well you’ve never said, you know, but about Mr Riley.’

‘Oh, my dear…’ said Eva, with a quiet smoky laugh, amused as well as embarrassed.

‘I don’t mean to pry.’

‘About old Trev…? There’s not a very great deal to say.’

‘I mean, is he not still alive?’

‘Oh yes, good lord… though he’s, you know, a fair age.’

‘I see,’ said Daphne. Of course no one knew how old Eva was herself. ‘I thought perhaps he’d been killed in the War.’

‘Not a bit,’ said Eva. She sounded cagey but somehow excited. Bare-bosomed nymphs raised their arms above them as they turned, by some silent consensus, into the path towards the fishpond. There was no colour, but the garden seemed more and more on the brink of it in the moonlight, as if dim reds and purples might shyly reveal themselves amongst the grey. Daphne turned and looked back at the house, which appeared at its most romantic. The moon burned and slid from window to window as they walked.

‘So: Trevor…’ she said, after a minute. ‘And you’re not divorced or anything.’ It was slyly amusing to stick at the question, and after quite a lot of drinks you didn’t care so much about good manners.

‘Not actually,’ said Eva, ‘no.’ Daphne supposed she must have married him for money. She saw Trevor Riley as a man who owned a small factory of some kind. Maybe the War, far from killing him, had made him a fortune. She found Eva slipping her arm through hers, and with her other hand giving the long-fringed scarf she was wearing a further twist round her neck – she felt the silky fringe brush her cheek as it whisked round. Eva shivered slightly, and pulled Daphne against her. ‘I do think marriage is often a fearful nuisance, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Well…! I really don’t know.’

‘Mm?’ said Eva.

‘Well, it’s something that sometimes has to be endured, I dare say.’

‘Indeed,’ said Eva, with a throb of grim humour.

‘I don’t know if Trevor was unfaithful,’ said Daphne, and shivered herself at the closeness of the subject. They paced on, in apparent amity, whilst Eva perhaps worked out what to say. Her evening bag, like a tiny satchel slung down to the hip, nudged against her with each step, and evidence about her underclothes, which had puzzled Daphne a good deal, could obscurely be deduced in the warm pressure of Eva’s side against her upper arm. She must wear no more than a camisole, no need really for any kind of brassière… She seemed unexpectedly vulnerable, slight and slippery in her thin stuffs.

‘Can I tempt you?’ said Eva, her hand dropping for a second against Daphne’s hip. The nacreous curve of her cigarette case gleamed like treasure in the moonlight.

‘Oh…! hmm… well, all right…’

Up flashed the oily flame of her lighter. ‘I like to see you smoking,’ said Eva, as the tobacco crackled and glowed.

‘I’m starting to like it myself,’ said Daphne.

‘There you are,’ said Eva; and as they strolled on, their pace imposed by the darkness more than anything else, she slid her arm companionably round Daphne’s waist.

‘Let’s try not to fall into the fishpond,’ Daphne said, moving slightly apart.

‘I wish you’d let me make you something lovely,’ said Eva.

‘What, to wear, you mean?’

‘Of course.’

‘Oh, you’re very kind, but I wouldn’t hear of it,’ said Daphne. Having her redesign her house was one thing, but her person quite another. She imagined her absurdity, coming down to dinner, kitted out in one of Eva’s little tunics.

‘I don’t know where you get your things mainly now, dear?’

Daphne laughed rather curtly through her cigarette-smoke. ‘Elliston and Cavell’s, for the most part.’

And Eva laughed too. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and snuggled against her again cajolingly. ‘I don’t think you know how enchanting you could look.’ Now they had stopped, and Eva was assessing her, through the fairy medium of the moonlight, one hand on Daphne’s hip, the other, with its glowing cigarette, running up her forearm to her shoulder, where the smoke slipped sideways into her eyes. She pinched the soft stuff of her dress at the waist, where Daphne had felt her eyes rest calculatingly before. In a hesitant but almost careless tone Eva said, ‘I wish you’d let me make you happy.’

Daphne said, ‘We simply must get back,’ a tight stifling feeling, quite apart from the smoke, in her throat. ‘I’m really rather cold, I’m most frightfully sorry.’ She jerked herself away, dropping her cigarette on the path and stamping on it. The lights from the house threw the hedges and other intervening obstacles into muddled silhouette, but it was hard to retreat with complete dignity; nor was the moonlight as friendly as she’d thought. She cut across the grass, found her heels sinking in loam, stumbled back and around an oddly placed border. It was like a further extension of being tight, a funny nocturnal pretence of knowing where she was going. She felt Eva might be pursuing her, but when she looked over her shoulder she was nowhere to be seen – well, she must be there somewhere, lingering, plotting, blowing thin streams of smoke into the night. Daphne reached the firm flags of the path by the house, and in the second she noticed the dark form curled sideways on the bench beside her, her hand was grasped at – ‘Don’t go in…’

‘Oh, my god! – who’s that? Oh, Tilda…’

‘Sorry, darling, sorry…’

‘You frightened the life out of me…’ Tilda wasn’t letting her hand go.

‘Isn’t it a lovely night?’ she said brightly. ‘How are you?’ And then, ‘I’m just rather worried about Arthur.’

For a moment Daphne couldn’t think who she was talking about. ‘Oh, Stinker, yes… why, Tilda?’ She found herself sitting very temporarily on the bench, on its edge. As if with a child, she put away the unmentionable matter of Mrs Riley. She found Tilda was staring at her, her white little face had forgotten the gaiety of the earlier evening. Had the drink turned on her? In her anxiety she seemed to invest Daphne with unusual powers.

‘Have you seen him?’ she said.

Daphne said, ‘Who…? Oh, Stinker… isn’t he wandering around, I’m sure he’s all right… darling,’ which wasn’t what she usually called her, any more than Stinker was Arthur. She’d always thought of Tilda as a youngish aunt, perhaps, silly, harmless, hers for life.

‘He’s so strange these days, don’t you think?’

‘Is he…?’ In so far as Daphne could be bothered to think about it, she wished he was a good deal stranger.

‘Am I mad? You don’t think, do you, he might be seeing another woman?’

‘Stinker? Oh, surely not, Tilda!’ It was easy and allowable to smile. ‘No, I really don’t think so.’

‘Oh! – oh good’ – Tilda seemed half-relieved. ‘I felt you’d know.’ She flinched, and peered at her again. ‘Why not?’ she said.

Daphne controlled her laugh and said, ‘But it’s obvious Stinker adores you, Tilda.’ And then perhaps thoughtlessly, ‘And anyway, who could it be?’

Tilda half-laughed but hesitated. ‘I suppose I thought perhaps because we haven’t, you know…’And just then Daphne saw Revel step out through the french window and frown along the path to where he evidently heard their voices. She knew Tilda meant because they didn’t have children.

‘Come along,’ said Daphne, getting up, but now in turn grasping Tilda’s hand, to conceal her own brusqueness. Any more on this subject would be unbearable.

‘Well, I’m just going to sit here and wait for him,’ Tilda said, not seeing what was happening, still adrift in drink and her own worry.

‘All right, darling,’ said Daphne, feeling fortune free her and claim her at the same moment. She almost ran along the path.

‘Oh, Duffel, darling,’ said Revel, touching her arm as they came back in together, and taking a smiling five seconds to continue his sentence, ‘do let’s pop up and look at the children sleeping.’

‘Oh,’ said Daphne, ‘of course’, as if it were hopeless of her not to have offered this entertainment already. She gazed at him and her giggle was slightly rueful. She didn’t think she herself could have slept, even two floors up, through the ‘Hickory-Dickory Rag’. And then the earlier horror, at the real piano, came back to her – it was wonderful, a blessing, that she’d forgotten it for a while.

‘Dudley’s gone to bed,’ said Revel, plainly and pleasantly.

‘I see.’ After the garden the drawing-room was a dazzle; and in their absence, it had been perfectly tidied – everything was always tidied. ‘Now, have you got a drink?’ she said.

‘I’ve got a port in every one,’ said Revel, a bit cryptically.

‘I think I’ve had enough,’ said Daphne, looking down on the tray of bottles, some friendly, some perhaps over-familiar, one or two to be avoided. She sloshed herself out another glass of claret. ‘Oh, Tilda’s outside!’ she explained to Stinker, who had just come in, stumbling on the sill of the french window. ‘You’ve just missed her.’ He leant on a table and gazed at her, but found nothing immediate to say.

She led the way down the cow-passage and up the east back-stairs, Revel touching her at each half-landing very lightly between the shoulders. His face when she glanced at it was considerate, with inward glints of anticipated pleasure. She was excited almost to the point of talking nonsense. ‘All rather back-stairs, as Mrs Riley would say,’ she said.

‘I don’t think this is quite what she had in mind, do you,’ said Revel coolly, so that a leap had been taken, several unsayable matters all at once in the air. Daphne’s heart was beating and she felt herself gripped at the same time by a strange gliding languor, as if to counter and conceal the speed of her pulse. She said,

‘I’ve got to tell you about the oddest scene just now, with old Mrs Riley. I’m absolutely certain she was making love to me.’

Revel gave a careless laugh. ‘So she does have good taste, after all.’

Daphne thought this rather glib, though charming of course. ‘Well…’

‘You see I thought she’d set her sights on Flo, who has a bit of a look of all that, doesn’t she.’

‘You see I thought…’ – but it was too much to explain, and now a housemaid was coming along the top landing with a baby, no, a hot-water bottle wrapped in a shawl. ‘You’re so sweet to the children,’ Daphne said loudly, ‘they’ll be thrilled to see you,’ giving the servant an absent-minded nod as she came past and thinking all would be explained by this, her virtue as a mother touchingly asserted after the frightful racket from downstairs. ‘If they’re not asleep, of course, I mean!’ She kissed her raised forefinger and pushed open the door with preposterous caution. Then she had the drama of the light behind her for a minute, before they both came in and Revel closed the door with a muffled snap. Now a sallow night-light glowed from the table and heaped large shadows on the beds and up the walls. ‘No, Wilfie darling, you go back to sleep,’ she said. She peered down at him uncertainly in the stuffy gloom – he had stirred and groaned but was not perhaps awake… then across at Corinna, by the window, who looked less than lovely, flat on her back, head arched back on the pillow and snoring reedily. ‘If only she could see herself,’ murmured Daphne, in wistful mockery of her ceremonious child.

‘If only we could see ourselves…’ said Revel. ‘I mean, I expect if you saw me…’

‘Mm,’ said Daphne, leaning back, almost feeling with her shoulders to where he was, feeling his left hand slip lightly round her waist, confident but courteous and staying only a moment. ‘Mm… well, there you have them!’ – stepping aside in a way that felt dance-like, a promise to return. She muttered into her wineglass as she swigged. ‘Not a terribly pretty picture, I’m afraid.’ She felt a run of trivial apology opening up in front of her, the children perhaps not pleasing to Revel. He must be aware of the smell of the chamber-pot, she seemed to see Wilfie’s yellow tinkle. ‘Of course their father never looks at them – when they’re asleep, I mean – well, as little as possible at other times – when they’re awake! – they can’t contrive to be picturesque at all times of the day and night – ’ she shook her head and sipped again, turned back to Revel. Revel was picking up Roger, Wilfie’s brown bear, and frowning at the creature in the pleasant quizzical way of a family doctor: then he looked at her with the same snuffly smile, as if it didn’t matter what she said. Her own mention of Dudley hung oddly in the half-light of the top-floor room.

She went round to the far side of Wilfrid’s little bed, set her glass down on the bedside table, peered down at him, then perched heavily on the side of the bed. His wide face, like a soft little caricature of his father, all mouth and eyes. She thought of Dudley kissing her just now, in the cow-passage, all her knowledge of him that had to be kept from a child, their child, facing blankly upwards, one cheek in shadow, the other in the gleam of the night-light. She didn’t want to think of her husband at all, but his kiss was still there, in her lips, bothering away at her. She gently straightened and smoothed and straightened again the turned-over top of Wilfrid’s sheet. Dudley had a way of trapping you, he stalked your conscience, his maddest moments were also oddly tactical. And then of course he was pitiable, wounded, haunted – all that. Wilfrid’s head twitched, his eyelids opened and closed and he turned his whole body in a sudden convulsion to the right, then in a second or two he thumped back again, murmured furiously and lay the other way. He had bad dreams that were sometimes spooled out for her, formless descriptions, comically earnest, too boring to do more than pretend to listen to. He claimed to dream about Sergeant Bronson, which Daphne deplored and felt very slightly jealous of. She leant over him and straddled him with her arm, as if to keep him to herself, to say he was spoken for. ‘Uncle Revel,’ said Wilfrid sociably.

‘Hello, old chap!’ whispered Revel, smiling down at him, setting Roger down safely by the pillow. ‘We didn’t mean to wake you up.’

Wilfrid gave him a look of unquestioning approval and then his eyes closed and he swallowed and pursed his lips. As they both watched him, the happy look slowly faded from his face, until it was again a soft witless mask.

‘You see how he adores you,’ said Daphne, almost with a note of complaint, a breathless laugh. She gave him a long stare over the child’s head. Revel’s smiling coolness made her wonder for a moment more soberly if she was being played with. He went to the table and pulled out the diminutive child’s chair and sat down with his knees raised. He pretended drolly that life was always lived on this scale. She watched him, vaguely amused. The night-light made a study of his face as he worked quickly at a drawing. It seemed the very last moment of a smile lingered there in his teasing concentration. He used the children’s crayons as though they were all an artist could desire, and he was the master of them. Then with a louder snort Corinna had woken herself up and sat up and coughed uninhibitedly.

‘Mother, what is it?’ she said.

‘Go back to sleep, my duck,’ said Daphne, with a little shushing moue, affectionate but slightly impatient with her. The child’s hair was tousled and damp.

‘No, Mother, what’s the matter?’ she said. It was hard to tell if she was angry or merely confused, waking up to these unexpected figures in her room.

‘Shush, darling, nothing,’ said Daphne. ‘Uncle Revel and I came up to say goodnight.’

‘He’s not Uncle Revel actually,’ said Corinna; though Daphne felt this was not the only matter on which she might put her in the wrong. The child had a fearfully censorious vein; what she really meant was that her mother was drunk.

Revel looked over his shoulder, half-turned on the little chair. ‘We were wondering if we might still see that dance, if we asked very nicely,’ he said, which actually wasn’t a very good idea.

‘Oh, it’s too late for that,’ said Corinna, ‘far too late,’ as if they were the children pleading with her for some special concession. And getting out of bed she thumped across the room and went out to the lavatory. Daphne slightly dreaded her coming back and making more of a scene, allowing herself to say what she thought. If they all said what they thought… And now Wilfrid had woken again at the noise, with a furtive look, like an adult pretending not to have slept. She watched Revel finishing his drawing. There was the clank and torrent of the cistern, suddenly louder as the door was opened. But now Corinna seemed more balanced, more awake perhaps. She got back into bed with the little twitch of propriety that was part of her daylight character.

‘Shall I just read you something, darling, and then you both go back to sleep,’ Daphne said.

‘Yes, please,’ said Corinna, lying down and turning on her side, ready for both the reading and the sleeping.

Daphne looked by Wilfrid’s bed, then got up to see what books Corinna had. It was rather a bore, but they would be asleep again in a moment. ‘Are you reading The Silver Charger – how I adored that book… though I think I was a good deal older…’

‘There you are, little one,’ said Revel, getting up from the desk and holding his picture in front of Wilfrid to catch the light. The child pondered it, with a conditional sort of smile, against the pull of sleep. ‘I’ll put it over here, shall I?’

‘Mm,’ said Wilfrid. Daphne couldn’t quite make it out; she saw the great bill of a bird.

‘It’s chapter eight,’ said Corinna. Did she think that she ought to have a drawing too? Perhaps, tomorrow, Revel could be asked to make her one, if he wouldn’t mind – he might even draw her likeness…

‘ “So Lord Pettifer climbed into his carriage,” ’ Daphne read, rather cautiously in the dim light, ‘ “which was all of gold… with two handsome footmen in scarlet livery with gold braid, and the coachman in his great cockled hat – cocked hat – and the green” – I’m so sorry! – “the great coat of arms of the Pettifers of Morden emblazoned upon the doors. The snow had begun to fall, very gently and silently, and its soft white flakes sat – settled – for a moment on the manes of the four black horses and on the gold… panaches of the footmen’s hats” – oh lawks, I remember them – or how do we say it? – panaches, French…’ She looked up over the edge of the book at Revel, who was a dark column against the low light, perhaps a little impatient with her performance. He was a man of the theatre, after all; it was just that reading aloud brought out how much you’d had to drink. ‘ “ ‘I shall return before dusk on Sunday!’ said Lord Pettifer. ‘Pray tell Miranda, my ward, to prepare… herself.’ ” ’ She wasn’t sure how much feeling to put into the speeches; and in fact at that moment there was a snort from Corinna’s bed, and Daphne saw that her mouth had opened, and she was already asleep. She peered hopefully at Wilfrid, who was gazing at her clearly, though he couldn’t have had the least idea what was going on. ‘Well, I’ll just read a little bit more, shall I?’ she said. And lowering her voice she read on, skipping a fair bit, through the wonderful description of Lord Pettifer’s journey to Dover through the falling snow, which she hadn’t read since she was a girl. How quaint it looked – part of her didn’t want to read it like this, distracted by Revel, stumbling over the words; but partly she kept it up out of simple disquiet about stopping. ‘ “In the distance they saw the lights of a lonely house – that she could never return,” ’ read Daphne, turning over two pages at once, and taking a moment to realize. She glanced at Wilfrid, then carried on, quite at a loss as to what was happening herself. He smiled distantly, as if to say now it made sense, and to thank her politely, and turned away from the light and pulled up his knees under the covers, which she felt she could take as a sign to stop.

When they were outside in the passage again, things were both more urgent and more awkward. She felt it might go wrong if it wasn’t acted on quickly, it would wither on the stem in a horrible embarrassment of delay and indecision. But then Revel put his arms round her lightly. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘Nanny…!’

‘Oh…’

‘Let’s go down.’

‘Really?’ said Revel. ‘If you like.’ For the first time she had a sense that she could wound him, she could add to his other hurts; though he pressed his little flinching frown into a look of concern for her.

‘No, you’ll see,’ she said, and kissed him quickly on the cheek. She led him round, through the L-shaped top passage and out on to the top of the main stairs, with their sudden drama, the gryphons or whatever they were with their shields and raised glass globes of light descending beneath them. She thought, the glare of publicity.

‘They’re wyverns,’ she said, ‘I think,’ as they went down.

‘Ah,’ said Revel, as if he had indeed asked.

In the enormous mirror on the first-floor landing there they went, figures in a story, out of the light into the shadow. She thought she was calmer now but then she started gossiping under her breath, ‘My dear, I simply have to tell you what Tilda Strange-Paget said’ – she peered round – ‘about Stinker!’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Revel, half-listening, like someone driving.

‘I’m not at all sure I should. But apparently he’s got another woman, tucked away.’

Revel chuckled. ‘Mm, I wonder where he, um, tucks her.’ He slowed and turned outside the door of his room. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, how can one be sure…’

‘No, I mean…’ He looked from her to the door. What she wanted was so simple and she felt suddenly lost. She had an odd, quite superhuman sensation of hearing her mother’s breathing in her room, and then an image of Clara in hers, miles away, and Dudley of course, but she couldn’t think of that.

‘No, not here,’ she said; and taking him on she went round the corner. A single lamp burnt on a table for the guests, and when she opened the linen-room door it flung a great shadow up like a wing across the ceiling. ‘Will you come in here?’ She was solemn but she giggled too.

It was dark, which was the beauty of it, and then the skylight was seen to glimmer – the moon, of course, throwing other shadows down into the well of the room. Again there was no colour, just the white gleam of the high-piled sheets on the shelves among realms of grey. ‘You can climb out at the top on to the roof,’ said Daphne.

‘Not now, I think,’ murmured Revel, and putting his hands on either side of her face he kissed her. She rocked in front of him for a moment before she put her arms round him, gripped the loose bulk of the dinner-jacket over his wiry unknown body. She let him kiss her, as though it were still reversible, a mere gambit, and then with a violent grunt of assent she started to kiss him back.

They kissed and kissed, Revel respectfully holding her and stroking her, a faint comedy of self-consciousness creeping into their murmurs and half-smiles between kisses, the little mimicking rhythms of the kisses themselves. Still, it was completely lovely, a forgotten pleasure, to be pleasing someone who sought simply to please you. She had never been kissed by two men in one evening before – well, she’d only been kissed by two or three men ever. The contrast, in so intimate a thing, was bewilderingly beautiful. The of course unmentioned fact, that it was men that Revel liked to kiss, made it the more flattering, though perhaps more unreal. Revel had something more than a man’s normal experience in all this, it shone in his mischievous eyes. Daphne couldn’t be sure, now it had finally started, that it was serious after all. But if it wasn’t serious, perhaps that would be its charm, its point. She stood away for a moment – in the monochrome gleam from the skylight she touched Revel’s face, his clever nose, his brow, his lips. He took her hand as she did so and kissed it. Then he kissed her again on her cheek. It was almost odd he didn’t push her further. She wondered now if he had ever kissed a woman before. She supposed when men kissed each other it was a pretty rough business; she didn’t quite like to think about it. She knew she must encourage Revel, without making him feel at all inadequate or in need of encouragement. He was younger than her, but he was a man. In some strange romantic way, to please him, she wished she could be a man herself. ‘We can do whatever you like, you know,’ she said, and then wondered, as he laughed, what she was letting herself in for.

9

Then for twenty minutes the world belonged to the birds. Thickly in the woods, and out on the High Ground, all through the gardens, on benches and bushes, and high up here among the roofs and chimneys, finches and thrushes, starlings and blackbirds were singing their songs to the daybreak all at once. Wilfrid opened his eyes, and in the greyish light he saw his sister, sitting up in bed, peering at her book. With a cautious turn of the head and a little steady concentration he worked out that it was half past six. There was something strange on the bedside table, that held his attention for a minute, with its shadowy glimmer, but he didn’t want to think about it. It made no sense, like a window where no window could ever be. He let his eyes close. The birdsong was so loud that after it had woken you it drove you back to sleep. Then, when you woke again, it was really day, and the birds by now were further off and much less important. You forgot all about them. He saw the door was half-open: Corinna had already gone to wash and he needed to ask her one or two things about the night, about the noises and music and coming and going that were tangled up with it like dreams. He turned over and there on the mantelpiece, propped up by the Toby jug, was Uncle Revel’s flamingo, standing on one leg, and giving him a crafty smile. A bit of the dream had stayed in the solid world, as a proof or a promise, and he slipped out of bed and took it down. Uncle Revel had been here, with his mother, laughing and joking, and he had done a drawing, very quickly, like a magic trick. Wilfrid took the drawing back to bed with him – of course the strange thing on the table, misleading him before with its magic gleam, was his mother’s wineglass, with the last bit of dark red wine still in it, and bits of black rust in the wine. He peered into the glass, and confusingly the sour smell was the smell of his mother’s latest kisses. He heard Nanny in her bedroom next door, the worrying creak of her floorboards, rattle of curtain-rings. She was talking to someone, it sounded like the maid Sarah. They came on to the landing. ‘Another of their wild nights,’ Nanny was saying. ‘God knows what they’ll be like this morning.’ Sarah groaned and laughed. ‘Duffel up here at god knows what time, with her young artist friend, to have a look at the little ones sleeping, she said. Of course, how can they sleep through that, it upsets them. They’ll be little horrors after a night like that.’

‘Aah…!’ said Sarah, who sounded nicer today. Wilfrid hated what Nanny said about his mother.

‘Well, my day off, dear, I don’t have to deal with them!’

‘Robbie says they were playing at sardines,’ said Sarah.

‘Sardines! Silly buggers, more likely…’ said Nanny, and the two women cackled and seemed to go away down the corridor. ‘I suppose you heard the music…’ Nanny was saying, as the door at the top of the stairs thumped shut. Well, they’d all heard the music, Wilfrid thought. His mother had been dancing with Uncle Revel in the hall, and he had the scene still bright in his head. Now he wanted to sleep; but in his heart and mind there was a muddled stirring of protest, at the abuse and disrespect to his mother but also at the restless and broken night she had given him. He was exhausted by dreams.

Almost at once, various things happened, perfectly normal but none the less oddly upsetting in their way of keeping on happening. Very early a message came up that Mr Stokes was leaving and her ladyship wanted the children down. Corinna was already practising the piano, and the maid brought Wilfrid down by himself. He felt lonely and reluctant, and frowned a good deal so as not to give way. In the hall the pianola still stood, with its keyboard closed, at an angle to the wall. He loved the pianola, and once or twice his father had worked the pedals for him and let him run his hands up and down over the dancing keys, while Corinna looked on in disdain. But today it seemed only a jangling reminder of the night before, a toy that others had played on without him. He wished intensely they would take it away. He went out to examine the Daimler. Even Robbie’s wink, as he brought out the luggage for Uncle Sebby, was displeasing and lacking in respect. Why did he always have to wink at him? ‘And how are you, Master Wilfrid?’ said Robbie.

‘Well, I’m very overwrought,’ said Wilfrid.

Robbie pondered this for a minute, with a tiny smile. ‘Overwrought, you say? Now, why would that be?’ He handed the bags to Sebby’s chauffeur, and Wilfrid came round to see them stowed in the boot. The great interest of the boot, with its unusual door and trench-like black interior, struggled feebly with his mood of discontent.

‘Well, I had a bad night, if you must know,’ said Wilfrid.

‘Ah,’ said Robbie, and nodded sympathetically, but still with an unsettling hint of amusement. ‘Kept you awake with their dancing, did they?’ At which Wilfrid could only look up at him and nod back.

Granny V came down to see Sebby off, and they talked interminably for two or three minutes while Wilfrid wandered round the Daimler, looking at the lamps and at his own reflection looming and folding in the dark grey bodywork. Then Sebby came over and shook his hand, and unexpectedly gave him a large coin before getting into the car, which took off up the drive in a sudden cloud of blue oil-smoke. Wilfrid smiled at the departing car, and at his grandmother, who was watching him keenly for the proper reactions, though in fact he felt bothered and slightly indignant. ‘Goodness!’ said Granny V, in a gloating but critical voice, ‘a crown!’ He put it in his trouser pocket but he felt it was Wilkes who should have been given it.

Then almost at once the trap was brought round, to take Corinna and both her grandmothers to church in Littlemore. Lady Valance herself would drive the mile and a half each way, and Corinna was bleating a promise extracted earlier, that she would be allowed to take the reins for some of the time. The pony could be heard through the open front door twitching its harness, the stable-boy talking to it. There was a flutter in the hall, gloves and hats being found. Granny V always wore the same sort of thing, which was black and took no time, but Corinna had a new dress and a new bonnet, which Granny Sawle was helping her to tie on firmly.

‘It seems such a shame not to use the chapel here,’ said Granny S, as Uncle George and Aunt Madeleine appeared.

‘Nowadays,’ said Granny V, with strange emphasis, ‘the use of the chapel is restricted to the major festivals’; and she went out into the drive.

‘ “Nowadays”,’ said George, ‘seems to have become Louisa’s favoured term of opprobrium.’ He looked comically at his mother. ‘You don’t have to go at all, darling,’ he said. ‘We never do, you know.’

She fussed with the bow under Corinna’s chin. ‘Louisa does seem to count on my going.’

‘Mm, but you needn’t be bullied,’ said George.

‘Oh, please come, Granny,’ said Corinna.

‘Oh, I’m coming, child, never fear,’ said her grandmother, holding her at arm’s length and looking at her rather sternly.

Wilfrid traipsed out again with his aunt and uncle to see the party leave. As Granny V settled herself on the bench the pony dropped a quick but heavy heap of dung on to the gravel. Wilfrid giggled, and Corinna held her nose up unhappily. The trap jolted and moved off at a brisk pace, as if nothing had happened, leaving the boy to bring a shovel. At the top of the drive Granny Sawle turned and waved. Wilfrid stood beside his aunt and uncle and waved back, half-heartedly, with the sun in his eyes. ‘Well, here we are, Wilfrid,’ said Aunt Madeleine, which he felt just about summed it up. She stood stiff above him, blocking his view of some much happier morning, in which he was sitting at a table with Uncle Revel, drawing pictures of birds and mammals. When they went back into the house his mother appeared from the morning-room with a strange fixed smile.

‘I hope you slept for a minute or two?’ she said.

‘Oh, far more,’ said Uncle George, ‘ten minutes at least.’

‘I had a full half-hour,’ said Aunt Madeleine, apparently not joking.

‘What a night,’ said George. ‘I feel bright green this morning. I don’t know how you take the pace, Daph.’

‘It requires some getting used to,’ she said. ‘One has to be broken in.’

Wilfrid stared at his uncle for signs of this exotic colouring. Actually, his mother and George both looked very pale.

‘And how are you, Mummy?’ he said.

‘Good morning, little one,’ his mother said.

‘Do you do this every weekend?’ said Madeleine.

‘No, sometimes we’re very quiet and good, aren’t we, my angel,’ said his mother, as he ran to her and she stooped and pulled him in. He felt a quick shudder go through her, and held her tighter. Then after a moment she stood, and he had more or less to let go. She reached for him vaguely again, but somehow she wasn’t there. He looked up into her face, and its utterly familiar roundness and fairness, the batting of the eyelashes, the tiny lines by her mouth when she smiled, beauties he had always known and never for a moment needed to describe, seemed to him for a few strange seconds the features of someone else. ‘Well, I must get on,’ she said.

‘No, Mummy…’ said Wilfrid.

‘Hardly the best moment,’ she explained to Madeleine, ‘but Revel has offered to draw my picture, which feels too good an offer to refuse, even with a hangover.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said George, and smiled at her very steadily. ‘No, that should be quite something.’

‘Oh, Mummy, can I come too, can I come and watch?’ cried Wilfrid.

And again his mother gave him a strange bland look in which something hurtfully humorous seemed also to lurk. ‘No, Wilfie, not a good idea. An artist has to concentrate, you know. You can see it when it’s done.’ It was all too much for him, and the tears rose up in a stifling wail. He longed for his mother, but he pushed her off, shouting and gulping, fending them all off, with the tears dripping down on to his jersey.

So after that he was left, for an undefined period, with Uncle George and Aunt Madeleine. They went into the library, where George leant by the empty fireplace and talked to him encouragingly. Wilfrid stood listlessly spinning the large coloured globe, with its well-known splodges of British pink, first one way, then the other. His hands smacked lightly on the bright varnished paper, and the world echoed faintly inside. As often after a great explosion of tears he felt abstracted and weak, and it took him a while to see the point of things again.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen your father this morning,’ said George.

Wilfrid thought about how to answer this. He said, ‘We don’t see Daddy in the mornings.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Well, not as a rule. You see, he’s writing his book.’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said George. ‘Well, that’s the most important thing, isn’t it.’

Wilfrid didn’t agree to this exactly. He said, ‘He’s writing a book about the War.’

‘Not like his other book, then,’ said Madeleine, who with her head back and her glasses on the end of her nose was gaping at the shelves above her.

‘Not at all,’ said Wilfrid. ‘It’s about Sergeant Bronson.’

‘Oh yes…’ said George vaguely. ‘So he tells you about it? How exciting…’

The constraints of strict truth felt more threateningly present in this room full of old learning. He wandered off to the centre table with a smile, keeping his answer. ‘Uncle George,’ he said, ‘do you like Uncle Revel’s pictures?’

‘Oh, very much, old boy. Not that I’ve seen very many of them. He’s still very young, you know,’ said George, looking less green now than pink. ‘You know he’s not really an uncle, don’t you?’

‘I know,’ said Wilfrid. ‘He’s an honourable uncle.’

‘Well, ha, ha!… Well, yes, that’s right.’

‘You mean an honorary uncle,’ said Madeleine.

‘Oh,’ said Wilfrid, ‘yes…’

‘I expect you mean both, don’t you, Wilfie,’ said George, and smiled at him understandingly. Wilfrid knew his father couldn’t stomach Aunt Madeleine, and he felt this gave him licence to hate her too. She hadn’t brought him a present, but as a matter of fact that wasn’t it at all. She never said anything nice, and when she tried to it turned out to be horrible. Now she tucked in her chin and gave him her pretend smile, staring at him over her glasses. He leant on the table, and opened and shut the hinged silver ink-well, several times, making its nice loud clopping noise. Aunt Madeleine winced.

‘I suppose this is where Granny does her book tests, isn’t it,’ she said, wrinkling her nose, her smile turning hard.

‘I’m sure the child doesn’t know about that,’ said Uncle George quietly.

‘Actually, I’m learning reading with Nanny,’ said Wilfrid, abandoning the table and going off towards the corner of the room, where there was a cupboard with some interesting old things in.

‘Jolly good,’ said George. ‘So what are you reading now? Why don’t we read something together?’ Wilfrid felt his uncle’s grateful relief at the idea of a book – he was already sitting down in one of the slippery leather chairs.

‘Corinna’s reading The Silver Charger,’ he said.

‘Isn’t that a bit hard for you?’ said Madeleine.

‘Daphne loved that book,’ said George. ‘It’s a children’s book.’

‘I’m not reading it,’ said Wilfrid. ‘I don’t really want to read now, Uncle George. Have you seen this card machine?’ He opened the cupboard, and got the card machine out very carefully, but still banging it against the door. He carried it over and handed it to his uncle, who had assumed a slightly absent smile.

‘Ah, yes… jolly good…’ Uncle George wasn’t very clever at understanding it, he had it round the wrong way. ‘Quite a historic object,’ he said, ready to hand it back.

‘What is it?’ said Madeleine, coming over. ‘Oh, yes, I see… Historic indeed. Quite useless now, I fear!’

‘I like it,’ said Wilfrid, and something struck him again, by his uncle’s knee, with his aunt bending over him, with her smell like an old book. ‘Uncle George,’ he said, ‘why don’t you have any children?’

‘Well, darling,’ said Uncle George, ‘we just haven’t got round to it yet.’ He peered at the machine with new interest; but then went on, ‘You know, Auntie and I are both very busy at our university. And to be absolutely honest with you, we don’t have a very great deal of money.’

‘Lots of poor people have babies,’ Wilfrid said, rather bluntly, since he knew his uncle was talking nonsense.

‘Yes, but we want to bring up our little boys and girls in comfort, with some of the lovely things in life that you and your sister have, for instance.’

Madeleine said, ‘Remember, George, you need to finish those remarks for the Vice-Chancellor.’

‘I know, my love,’ said George, ‘but it’s so much pleasanter conversing with our nephew.’

Nevertheless, a minute later George was saying, ‘I suppose you’re right, Mad.’ A real anxiety started up in Wilfrid that he would be left alone with Aunt Madeleine. ‘You’ll be all right with Auntie, won’t you?’

‘Oh, please, Uncle George’ – Wilfrid felt the anxiety close in on him, but offset at once by a dreary feeling he couldn’t explain, that he was going to have to go through with whatever it was, and it didn’t really matter.

‘We’ll do something lovely later,’ said George, tentatively ruffling his nephew’s hair, and then smoothing it back down again. He turned in the doorway. ‘We can have your famous dance.’

When he’d gone, Madeleine rather seized on this.

‘Well, I can’t do it by myself,’ said Wilfrid, hands on hips.

‘Oh, I suppose you’d want music.’

‘I mean, can you play?’ Wilfrid asked, shaking his head.

‘I’m not awfully good!’ said Madeleine, pleasantly enough. They went out into the hall. ‘I suppose there’s always the pianola…’ But happily, the men had already wheeled it back down the cow-passage. Wilfrid didn’t want to play the pianola with her. Not meaning to initiate a game, he got under the hall table.

‘What are you doing, dear?’ said Aunt Madeleine.

‘I’m in my house,’ said Wilfrid. In fact it was a game he sometimes played with his mother, and he felt unfaithful to her but also a kind of security as he squatted down with the huge oak timbers almost touching his head. ‘You can come and visit me,’ he said.

‘Oh…! Well, I’m not sure,’ said Madeleine, bending over and peering in.

‘Just sit on the table,’ said Wilfrid. ‘You have to knock.’

‘Of course,’ said Madeleine, with another of those glimpses of being a good sport that complicated the picture. She sat down obediently, and Wilfrid looked out past her swinging green shoes and the translucent hem of her skirt and petticoat. She knocked on the table and said loudly, ‘Is Mr Wilfrid Valance at home?’

‘Oh… I’m not quite sure, madam, I’ll go and look,’ said Wilfrid; and he made a sort of rhythmical mumbling noise, which conveyed very well what someone going to look might sound like.

Almost at once Aunt Madeleine said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask who it is?’

‘Oh God, madam, who is it?’ said Wilfrid.

‘You mustn’t say God,’ said his aunt, though she didn’t sound as if she minded very much.

‘Sorry, Aunt Madeleine, who is it, please?’

The proper answer to this, when he played with his mother, was, ‘It’s Miss Edith Sitwell’, and then they tried not to laugh. His father often laughed about Miss Sitwell, who he said sounded like a man and looked like a mouse. Wilfrid himself laughed about her whenever he could, though in fact he was rather afraid of her.

But Madeleine said, ‘Oh, can you tell Mr Wilfrid Valance that it’s Madeleine Sawle.’

‘Yes, madam,’ said Wilfrid, in a sort of respectful imitation of Wilkes. He ‘went away’ again, and took his time about it. He had a picture of his aunt’s face, smiling impatiently as she sat and waited on the hard table. A wild idea came to him that he would simply say he wasn’t at home. But then a shadow seemed to fall on it, it seemed lazy and cruel. But the game, which his aunt had failed to understand, really depended on the person pretending to be someone else. Otherwise you came to the end of it, and a feeling of boredom and dissatisfaction descended almost at once. Then his deep underlying longing for his mother rose in a wave, and the pain of thinking of her, and Uncle Revel drawing her, stiffened his face. It was a burningly important event from which he had been needlessly shut out. Madeleine suddenly said, ‘Wilfrid, will you be all right there for half a moment, I just have to go and do something.’

‘Oh, yes, all right,’ said Wilfrid; and he saw her slide and then jump the six inches down on to the floor, and her clumpy green shoes going off rather fast towards the stairs.

Wilfrid stayed under the table for ten minutes, in the odour of polish, feeling relief at first, and then the bleak little prickle of abandonment, and then a spreading and anxiously practical sense of the things he might now be able to do. The floorboards were faintly sticky with polish under the crepe rubber soles of his sandals. These unprepared freedoms in his closely minded life were exciting, but shadowed by worry that the system designed to protect him could so easily break down.

He crawled out, over the thick oak stretcher of the table, stood up, and went slowly and indirectly towards the foot of the stairs. Without his aunt to license his escapade, he was in the random and irrational jurisdiction of his father. ‘Daddy I wasn’t,’ he said, as he climbed the stairs, ‘I wasn’t playing on the landing’ – and as each little wounded lie of a denial dropped behind unneeded, the growing sense of freedom was haunted by a blacker sense of guilt. The freedom seemed to stretch uncomfortably, like a held breath. He strolled along the wide landing, still talking inaudibly to himself, head dropping from side to side, in a guilty mime of being alone. Round the corner hung the Blue Lady, with her frightening eyes, and a picture of Scotland, also known as The Goat’s Bottom. A maid came out of a room and crossed to the back-stairs but magically without seeing him, and he got to the laundry-room door. The black china handle was large in his child’s hand, and slightly loose in the door, so that it joggled betrayingly as he turned it and the door creaked quickly open, outwards across the landing, and swung wide if you didn’t hold it, to bang against the chair beside it.

When he opened the door again he was pretending that not long had passed. The clock in the hall was sounding, far away, down below, quarter past, half past, quarter to, though the hour itself hung undisclosed in the grey light of the landing window. He looked both ways with a sense of dread that had been magically banished in the laundry-room itself, and a tense tactical excitement at the prospect of the long corridor and the stairs. His dread was partly still guilt and partly a different kind of awkward feeling, that maybe no one had missed him. It seemed best to take the other back-stairs, at the far end of the main landing, and get round to the nursery that way, and then simply insist he had been there all along. He closed the laundry-room door, with cautious control of the handle, and went along by the wall and looked round the corner.

Mrs Cow was lying face down, her right hand loosely gripping her stick, which had pushed the long Persian runner up in a wave against the legs of a small table, knocking off the little bronze huntsman, who also lay on his face on the floor, with his pike sticking out. Her other stick was some feet away, as if she’d tossed it in a sudden spasm or attempt to ward something off, and her left arm was trapped under her at an angle that would have been painful for a conscious person. Wilfrid stared, looked away, approached very cautiously, heel to toe in his sandals, not wanting to be heard, least of all by the old lady herself. Then he said ‘Oh, Mrs Cow…?’ – almost absently, as if starting on some question that would come to him if he kept talking: the point was to get the adult person’s attention and keep it. Part of him knew of course that she wouldn’t answer, would never answer a question again, in her wilful German voice. But something advised him to pretend politely, for a little while more, that she was still up to a chat. He came round her head, which was turned sideways, her left cheek to the carpet; and saw her right eye, hooded, half-open. Therefore not looking at him, but seeming to be part of her speechless search for something out of range, something that might have helped her. Trembling, slightly but uncontrollably, he squatted down and turned his own head sideways to try to meet her gaze, which in a normal person would have brought about a flicker of engagement. He saw how her mouth, also half-open, had let out a small slick of saliva, its shine fading as it darkened the red of the carpet.

The old lady’s left arm was pinned under her, but the hand was poking out: there it lay on the carpet, small and thick, humped and dimpled. Wilfrid stared at it, from his squatting position, then stood up and walked around her again. He was frightened that the hand might move, and also, oddly, almost sickeningly, tempted by it. Looking both ways, holding his breath, he bent down, reached his fingers towards it; then picked it up. In a second he dropped it, and clutched his own warm hands together, then thrust them into his armpits, in a way that he had. He stared at Mrs Kalbeck’s dropped hand, and then in the second he turned away it stirred and retracted slightly, and lay back as it had been before.

On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going – not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down. Helplessly he marched to the door of his father’s study. It was the most unapproachable room in the house, a room of unrememberable size and everything in it, clock and fender and crackling waste-paper basket, dark with prohibitions. His father’s anger, unleashed last night, at the piano, had withdrawn into it, like a dragon to its lair. Wilfrid stood for a moment outside the door, and wiped his nose thoroughly on his sleeve. Though he was helpless, he was oddly lucid. He knew that to knock would introduce more suspense into the thing than anyone could bear, and risk bringing further wrath upon his head in advance; so, very tactfully, he turned the handle.

The room was unexpectedly dark, the heavy curtains almost closed, and he moved forward not really listening to the clock but with a sense that the spaces between its deep ticks were stretching, as if it was thinking of stopping. The stripe of light across the red carpet made the shadow even deeper, for the first few seconds. Wilfrid knew his father had headaches in the morning, and avoided the light, and this sent another wave of despairing apology over him. At the same time the one line of light showed up ridges and knots in the carpet, which itself had the half-strangeness of something in a dream – in a house where he knew all the carpets as territories, castles, jumping squares, there was this other room with a carpet he had never jumped on. For a long time they seemed not to see him, and as he stepped forward it was as if he still had a chance to step back – the first they would know of his presence would be the click of the door behind him. Nanny was turned away from him, lying with her legs up on the settee, and watching his father, on the other side of the band of light, by the fireplace. His father was still in his dressing-gown, and with his sword in his hand looked like a knight. The fender here was a castle, with brass battlements, and on the black hearthstone beyond it there was a wild heap of smashed plates – other curved splinters of china were scattered across the carpet too. Again Wilfrid took in the pattern, they were the thick French plates with a cockerel on them, the wedding present they all said was hideous and ghastly. Nanny heard him, and glanced round, she half sat up and hugged a cushion to her. ‘Captain,’ she said.

‘What is it?’ said his father, turning to look at him, frowning, not angrily, exactly, but as if trying to make something out. He laid the sword down on the mantelpiece.

And Wilfrid knew he couldn’t say. He stepped further into the light. He hoped his own blotchy cheeks and sniffy nose were proof that something serious had happened, but there was no question of saying what. He said, ‘Oh, Daddy, I’ve just seen… Mrs Cow.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said his father, at once visibly disappointed.

‘I think she’s fallen over.’

His father tutted and went to stand beside his desk, switched on the lamp, peered at some papers as if already getting on with something important. His hair, normally black and shiny, stood up at one side like a wing. Nanny seemed entirely uninterested; she had stood up, straightened her skirt, shifted the cushions on the settee to find her handbag. Without looking at him, Dudley said, ‘And have you told her to get up?’

‘No, Daddy,’ said Wilfrid, feeling another wail rising in his chest at his father’s perversity. He said, ‘She can’t get up, you see, as a matter of fact.’

‘Broken both her legs, has she?’

Wilfrid shook his head, but couldn’t say more, for fear of crying, which his father couldn’t stand.

‘I wonder if I should look, Sir Dudley?’ said Nanny, with odd reluctance, patting her hair. It was her day off, anyway: she probably didn’t want to be involved. Slowly, with the playful menace he brought to telling a story, Dudley turned his head, and stared at Wilfrid.

‘I wonder if what you’re trying to tell me, Wilfrid,’ he said, ‘is that Frau Kalbeck is dead?’

‘Yes, Daddy, she is!’ said Wilfrid, and in the relief of it he was very nearly grinning at just the same moment the saved-up tears poured out of him again.

‘Of course she should never have come here,’ said his father, still maddeningly unexcited, but no longer blaming Wilfrid himself, it seemed. He looked sharply at Nanny. ‘Upsetting my son like this.’ And then he gave a surprising laugh. ‘Well, it’s taught her a lesson, what? She won’t be coming here again.’

Nanny stood behind Wilfrid, and laid her hands hesitantly on his shoulders. ‘Now, don’t cry, there’s a good boy,’ she said. He struggled to obey her, as he wanted to, for a moment, but when he thought of the dead woman’s face again, and her hand moving by itself, it was all beyond him and over him like a wave.

‘Run along to Wilkes’s room and telephone Dr Wyatt, would you, Nanny?’ said his father.

‘At once, Sir Dudley,’ said Nanny. Wilfrid of course would go with her, but she turned uncertainly at the door, and his father nodded and said,

‘You stay here, old boy.’

So Wilfrid went to his father, and was pulled experimentally for a second or two against the heavy strange-scented skirts of the brocade dressing-gown. It was the touch of privilege, a feel of the luxurious concessions allowed when something awful had happened, and in the interesting surprise of it he at once stopped crying. Then they went together, snapping odd sharp fragments of china underfoot, to the window, and each drew back a curtain. Nothing was said about the dinner service; and his father already had the mischievous preoccupied look that sometimes announced a treat, an idea that had just surprised him and demanded to be shared. It was like the mad glint, but usually nicer. Staring into the garden, fixing his eye so hard on something that Wilfrid thought for a moment it must be the source of his amusement, he started to talk, too quietly and rapidly at first for him to follow – ‘The body was found – it lay on the ground – without a sound’ -

‘Oh, Skeleton, Daddy,’ he said and his father grinned tolerantly.

‘ – old fat Mrs Cow – with her face like a sow – you won’t hear from her now’ – he turned and walked excitedly round the room, Wilfrid had a distracted sense of how he really never noticed his father’s limp – ‘with her Wagner and Liszt – and her hair in a twist – and always pissed – like a terrible Hun – with a twelve-bore gun – what? – ’

‘Yes, Daddy…’

‘ – smelly old Valkyrie – rosewater talc-ery – came down to Corley – and said she was poorly – took it quite sorely…’ A little flick of spit from his father’s mouth danced in the light as he turned. Wilfrid couldn’t follow or understand a lot of the words themselves, but the joy of improvisation caught at him as well as the sense of horror that his father’s poems always challenged you not to feel. He had got to the door and flung it open – ‘And that, young man,’ he said, ‘is more than I’ve written of my book for the past six months.’

‘Really, Daddy?’ said Wilfrid, unable to decide from his father’s tone if this was a cause for celebration or despair.