The Stranger's Child (25 page)

‘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.

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.’