The Stranger's Child Read online

  ‘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.