The Stranger's Child (24 page)

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.