The Stranger's Child (62 page)

Wilfrid, sensing his brief absence, had come back in and was edging round the end of the sitting-room, apparently looking for something. ‘And I really must ask you,’ Paul said in a rush, ‘if you still have the book with the manuscript of “Two Acres” in it. I’d love to see it.’

‘Well, you’re out of luck, I’m afraid,’ said Daphne.

‘You don’t have it?’

She frowned almost crossly. ‘Where is it, Wilfrid?’

‘I believe it’s in London, Mother,’ said Wilfrid, peering into a large wicker basket on top of a pile of old curtains, ‘it’s gone to be photographed.’

‘It’s being photographed,’ she confirmed. ‘It’s extraordinarily delicate, well, it’s seventy years old, isn’t it? – nearly seventy.’

‘No, that’s a very good idea,’ Paul said. ‘Who’s doing it for you?’

‘I can’t remember his name – he’s doing the new edition of Cecil’s poems.’

‘Oh, well you’re in good hands,’ Paul said.

‘What is his name?’

‘I think he’s called Dr Nigel Dupont.’

‘Exactly. He told me he feels a very personal connection with Cecil because he was at school at Corley.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘He got interested in him from seeing his tomb all the time in the chapel.’

‘How interesting,’ said Paul, as the heavy likelihood that Dupont had been a pupil of Peter’s closed sickeningly about him. ‘Did Nigel . . . um . . . come to see you?’

‘No, it was all very easy, we did it by mail.’

‘Recorded delivery,’ said Wilfrid.

‘He doesn’t give two pins about, you know, the biographical side,’ said Daphne, ‘he’s very much a textual editor, would you call it.’

‘Well, indeed.’

‘All the different editions and what have you.’

‘Fascinating . . .’ Paul edged back towards his chair. Outside, the afternoon was beginning to lower, late sunlight making the dirty windows opaque.

‘Well, it is rather fascinating. He says they’re full of mistakes. It was Sebby Stokes, you know, he messed around with them quite a bit, apparently, I suppose he thought he was improving them.’

‘Perhaps he was!’

Daphne turned and said, ‘Why don’t you and Mr Bryant get out round the village.’

‘We don’t know that he wants to,’ Wilfrid said.

‘Walk down to the farm, you like that.’

It was a bold distraction on Daphne’s part, cutting short the interview, but Paul had been hoping for a chance to talk to Wilfrid in private at some point. So out they went, Paul borrowing a large loose pair of old black wellingtons, which Wilfrid told him, once they’d got into the road, had ‘formerly belonged to Basil’.

‘Oh, really?’ said Paul, disliking the thought of wearing a dead man’s shoes; they dragged and clunked on the tarmac. ‘For some reason I hadn’t imagined he was so big . . .’ Later he thought it odd that Daphne had hung on to them, moved house with them. Wilfrid had put on a pair of mud-caked workman’s boots, and a kind of car-coat over his fleece. His big monkish head, with its tufts of grey hair, was bare.

‘This isn’t one of the attractive, picturesque villages,’ Wilfrid said. They strode back down the lane, past the shop with its steamed-up window, past the council houses, and then into another lane that ran up the side of some fenced-off parkland, ploughed fields on the other side. Away from the bungalow Wilfrid became both franker and more anxious; he said twice, ‘She can look after herself for half an hour.’

‘She’s lucky to have you,’ Paul said, sounding feebly polite.

‘Oh, she drives me potty!’ said Wilfrid, with a grin of guilty excitement. Now they mounted the verge to let a tractor and trailer go past, great clots of silage dropping off behind it into the lane. Wilfrid stared at the driver but didn’t greet him. Paul wasn’t sure what to say – he felt both mother and son were cheered up and somehow kept going by driving each other potty.

‘Well, she’s made a very good recovery,’ said Paul.

‘Thanks to Nurse Valance,’ said Wilfrid, in an odd pert tone.

Paul couldn’t think what Wilfrid would have been doing if he hadn’t had his mother to look after. ‘But you have some help?’

‘Nothing worth mentioning. And of course the whole thing makes it . . . very hard for me to have a girlfriend.’

Paul managed to raise his eyebrows in sympathy. ‘No, I can imagine . . .’

‘But there you are!’ said Wilfrid. ‘I’m with her till the end now. Now that’s Staunton Hall over there, she’d want me to . . . point that out. That’s where Lady Caroline lives.’

‘Olga’s former employer.’

‘Olga is what she calls her . . . Petit Trianon.’ Paul made out the bulk of a large square house among the trees a couple of fields away. The sun was now very low over the hedges behind them, and the small attic windows of the mansion glowed as if all the lights were on. ‘Do you want to see the farm?’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Paul.

‘I wouldn’t have minded being a farmer,’ said Wilfrid.

They walked on for a while and Paul said, ‘Well, of course! – your grandfather . . .’

‘I always liked animals. There were two farms at Corley. One very much . . . grew up amongst all that’ – with a return of his precise, clerical tone, perhaps to cover the strange disjunction between then and now. As Robin had reminded him, Wilfrid would soon be the fourth baronet.

‘Do you remember your grandfather at all?’

‘Oh, hardly. He died when I was . . . four or five. You know, I called him . . . Grandpa Olly-olly – because that was all he could say.’

‘He had a stroke, didn’t he.’

‘He could only make that sort of olly-olly noise.’

‘Were you frightened of him?’

‘I expect a bit,’ said Wilfrid. ‘I was a rather nervous child’ – as if looking back on some quite alien state.

‘Your father was fond of him.’

‘I don’t think my father had much time for him.’

‘Ah . . . he writes about him very nicely.’

‘Yes, he does,’ said Wilfrid.

A steady increase in the mud in the lane, and round a right-angled bend was the entrance to the farmyard, a concrete platform for the milk-churns at the gate, and beyond it a glistening oily-brown quagmire of cow-shit stretching away to the open doors of a corrugated-iron barn. ‘Well, this must be it!’ said Paul. He didn’t see the point of fouling up the late Basil Jacobs’s wellies, and Wilfrid’s boots were hardly up to it. Wilfrid seemed to feel some irritable embarrassment, having brought him here, but then said,

‘We’d probably better be getting back anyway.’

‘Do you ever see your father?’ said Paul, as they turned round.

‘Not often,’ said Wilfrid firmly, and looked out across the fields.

‘He must have been very upset about . . . your sister.’

‘You’d think . . . wouldn’t you?’

Paul sensed he’d pressed him enough, and changed the subject to his hotel, which he was worried about getting back to.

‘The bad thing was,’ Wilfrid cut in, ‘that he didn’t come to the funeral. He
said
he was going to come over, but that week of course Leslie . . . blew his brains out, and my sister’s funeral was put back, as a result, and he didn’t come after all. He just had a horrible wreath . . . delivered.’

‘That’s awful,’ said Paul. He wanted to say hadn’t Dudley had various mental problems, but he rather gathered that Wilfrid had had them too, so he merely looked at him respectfully for a moment.

‘But then he never much cared for my sister,’ Wilfrid said, ‘so though bad, it wasn’t perhaps . . . surprising.’

‘No, I see . . .’

‘Though sometimes there’s something . . . almost surprising in a person being so completely true to type.’

‘You mean on this one occasion you really thought he’d do the right thing.’

‘Stupidly, we did,’ said Wilfrid, and there seemed little more to say after that; though a good deal for Paul to think about.

Now the sun had sunk among the black cloud-bars to the west, and the back of the village huddled clear but bleak in the neutral light of the early evening. Chicken-runs, garden sheds, heaps of garden refuse thrown over the hedge all year long; a car on bricks, a greenhouse painted white, the jostle of tall TV aerials against the cold sky. Paul pictured his street in Tooting and the lit red buses with a shiver of longing. It was what Peter used to call his
nostalgie du pavé,
the panicky longing for London. ‘Oh, my dear,’ he would say, in Wantage or Foxleigh, ‘I’m not dying here.’

When they got back to the bungalow, Paul said ‘Thanks so much, I should probably push off now,’ but to his surprise Daphne said, ‘Have a drink first.’ She made her way, holding on to table and chair, to the corner of the room where on a crowded surface there was a cluster of bottles with an ice-bucket, phials of Tabasco and bitters, all the paraphernalia of the cocktail hour. Wilfrid was sent out to the garage to get ice from the freezer. ‘He knows we need it, and then he makes such a face!’ said Daphne. ‘G-and-t?’ Paul said yes, and smiled at the thought of the time he’d first met her, over the same drink, when he’d sat in the garden trying not to look up her skirt. Daphne opened a tonic bottle with a practised snap, the tonic fizzing out round the top and dripping down her wrist. ‘Have you got it?’ she said, as Wilfrid returned with the silver plastic bucket. ‘Oh, look, it’s all an enormous lump, you’ll have to break it up, I can’t possibly use this. Really, Wilfrid!’ – making a half-hearted comedy out of her annoyance for the sake of their guest.

When they were settled, Daphne came back with a genial but purposeful look to the new book on Mark Gibbons that she’d been reading, which she said again wasn’t good at all, and anyway half the point of Mark was lost if the pictures were in black-and-white. (Paul guessed she meant Wilfrid had been reading it to her, but as usual his agency was somehow elided.) She said it was funny how some people emerged from the great backward and abyss while others were wholly forgotten. Mark had had a sort of handy-man, called Dick Mint, who was a bit of a character, fixed the car, looked after the garden, and was often to be found sitting in Mark’s kitchen at Wantage jawing endlessly with his employer. A pretty fair bore, actually, but he had his remarks: he thought the Post-Impressionists were something to do with the GPO. Perhaps, what? twenty people in the whole world knew him, hardly a household name. Lived in a caravan. And now, thanks to this book, thousands of people, probably, were going to know about him – he’d become a character on a world stage. People in America would know about him. Whereas the woman who came in, whose name Daphne thought was Jean, who did all the washing and cleaning, wasn’t mentioned at all – in fact nobody now thought of her from one year to the next.

‘I must read the Mark Gibbons book,’ Paul said, wishing he’d had the tape-recorder on through this spiel.

‘Really I shouldn’t bother,’ said Daphne.

Paul laughed. ‘This must happen to you quite a lot.’

‘Mm?’

‘You must know a lot of people whose lives have been written.’

‘Yes, or they turn up in someone else’s, you know.’

‘Like you, yourself, indeed, Mummy!’ said Wilfrid.

‘The thing is, they all get it wrong.’ She’d now got back into that irritable mood that she clearly enjoyed.

‘The best ones don’t, perhaps,’ said Paul.

‘They take against people,’ said Daphne, ‘or someone they talk to bears a grudge, and tells them things that aren’t right. And they put it all in as if it was gospel!’ This was obviously meant as a warning, but was said as if it had completely slipped her mind that he was writing a biography himself. She glowed, chin tucked in, eyes turned on him but, as he had to remind himself, barely seeing him; though a tremor of contact seemed to pass between them through the quivering heat of the electric fire.

‘Well . . . !’ Paul paused respectfully. The first rush of the gin seemed to present him with a view of all the things it was in his grasp to ask her, the numerous doubts and rumours and aspersions he had heard, about her and her family. Did she have any idea what had gone on between George and Cecil, for instance? Did Wilfrid himself know the theory that his sister was Cecil’s child? He had to tread carefully, but he saw more clearly than ever that the writer of a life didn’t only write about the past, and that the secrets he dealt in might have all kinds of consequences in other lives, in years to come. With Wilfrid present, knocking back an orange squash, he could hardly say or ask anything intimate; though Daphne too was more open and cheerful after a drink – it might have been worth trying.

Still, something warned Paul not to accept a second gin, and at seven o’clock he asked if he could call a taxi. Daphne smiled firmly at this, and Wilfrid said he’d be happy to drive him into Worcester in the Renault.

‘I really don’t want to make you turn out at night,’ Paul said, his courteous demurral covering a natural nervousness about the car as well as the driver.

‘Oh, I like to take her out for a spin,’ said Wilfrid, so that for a moment Paul thought Daphne was coming too. ‘It’s not good for her just to . . . stand in the drive from one week to the next.’

Daphne stood up, and hanging on to the large oak chest got across the room with a new air of warmth and enthusiasm. ‘Where do you live?’ she said, almost as if thinking of a return visit.