The Stranger's Child (23 page)

‘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.