The Stranger's Child (26 page)

‘But, Daddy, you did say tonight,’ said Corinna pertly, playing on.

‘And tonight I said not! Change of orders!’ – and a bark of a laugh at the Colonel to suggest he was more in control than he was. Daphne strode forward – it was what she knew they said about Corley, how it had changed in Dudley’s time, the rum mix of folk, the painters and writers, it was bedlam. She felt defiant and apologetic all at once. Wilfrid had stopped jumping, his trust in his sister’s plan abandoned, but Corinna played on.

‘Perhaps not now, darling,’ Freda said, stretching out a lace-cuffed hand to her granddaughter’s shoulder, just as Dudley, bending over them both, his horrible grimace the sudden focus of the crisis, pounded his fists repeatedly on the keys at the high plinky end of the keyboard and maddened by the silly effect elbowed Corinna off the stool and pounded repeatedly at the more resonant and furious octaves at the bottom. Then he slammed the lid shut.

‘Come along,’ said Daphne quietly, and led the two children out of the room, clinging to her hands. Nanny, the one time you wanted her, was nowhere to be seen. Then she found her mother was following her too, which was welcome in a way, except that an awful strain of unexpressed pity and reproach for her, being married to Dudley Valance, a mad brute, would be in the air. Corinna’s lip was trembling, but Wilfrid was already sobbing steadily as he marched along.

When Daphne came back into the drawing-room three minutes later a collective effort at repair had been made. She murmured that the children were fine – she felt an undertow of support hedged with a certain timorous reluctance to go against Dudley. ‘Little devils, eh?’ said the Colonel, and patted her on the arm. Mark and Flo and the S-Ps had seen the like before, and were having an ideally boring conversation about shooting to show that things were under control. Dudley himself, with the touchy geniality of a man who is never in the wrong, was talking to Sebby Stokes, whose natural diplomacy just about carried him through. It was understood that no Valance would ever apologize for anything. Louisa said nothing, though Daphne as usual read her unspoken thoughts very clearly; then she heard her say with necessary clarity to the Colonel, ‘We never saw our boys after six o’clock.’ Daphne knew the person who would be most upset was her own mother, who didn’t come back in before dinner. The best thing to do was to have a stiff drink. And she found within a minute or two that a wary hilarity of recovery had gripped the whole party.

By the time they went into dinner Daphne’s mood was one of nonsensical amusement veering into breathless semi-alarm at not knowing what was going on. She thought she had better bring out Colonel Fountain before the mad atmosphere of the evening engulfed them all. After the fish was served she asked him clearly about Cecil, and heard her words cantering on into a sudden general silence – her voice sounded not quite her own. The Colonel was sitting halfway along the table, on Louisa’s right, and glanced around keenly, almost challengingly, as he spoke, as if at a briefing of a different kind. Those looking at him found themselves watching Louisa as well, who took on a solemn and anxious expression, her eyes fixed on the silver salt-cellar in front of her. It was not the story of Cecil’s death, thank heavens, but of the famous occasion when he’d won his MC, bringing back three of his wounded men under fire. The Colonel outlined the situation in large terms, enlisting the salt-cellar as a German machine-gun post. The more detailed account he gave of the episode itself was done with honour and a sense of conviction somehow heightened by his reticent manner; but Daphne – and possibly others round the table – had a disappointing sense that he no longer distinguished it clearly from a dozen such episodes. He had written a splendid letter to Louisa at the time, and of course recommended Cecil for his medal, and his form of words now was very close to those ten-year-old accounts. Perhaps Dudley and Mark, who had been in similar ‘shows’, envisaged it more freshly. Daphne’s eye roamed round the room as Colonel Fountain spoke. It was the room she had associated most with Cecil, from the day they’d first met, and now it looked at its exotic best, with candles reflected in the angled mirrors and in the dim gold leaf of the jelly-mould domes overhead. At the far end, in the glow of an electric lamp, hung the Raphael portrait of a bonneted young man. ‘I don’t know quite how he did it,’ the Colonel said. ‘The mist had pretty well cleared – he was horribly exposed.’ She knew Revel loved the room as much as she did, and she took her time to let her eyes come to rest on him, when he seemed immediately to know, and glanced up at her.

The rest of dinner passed in the blur of three successive wines, but Dudley, though drunker, was making a better effort not to be rattled. Daphne had decided she must ration the number of times she looked pointedly at Revel, and she soon felt he had come to a similar agreement with himself – it was amusing, and then threatened to become awkward. Sebby naturally was questioned a certain amount about the miners and his answers gave them all the feeling they were at the heart of the crisis without anything much being revealed at all. Mark was more provoked by this than the others, and had clearly taken against Sebby altogether. He talked a good deal of unnecessary rot, or sense that sounded like rot, about his experience growing up behind a butcher’s shop in Reading, until Dudley, who was the only person who could, said, ‘You really must learn, Mark dear, not to look down on those who have grown up without your own disadvantages,’ and a big licensed laugh ran round the table. To Daphne it was hauntingly like the early days of their marriage, the trance of pleasure and purely happy expectation that Dudley could cast her into. He gleamed in the candlelight and the certainty of his own handsomeness. Then she found her reawakened longing focused on Revel’s thin artistic fingers lying loosely spread on the tablecloth, as though waiting for someone to pick them up. And then already it was time for the ladies to withdraw – the easy but decisive initiative in which she still felt, on a night like this, a callow usurper of her mother-in-law.

When the men came through, Colonel Fountain’s driver was fetched out from the servants’ dining-room – they were setting off straight away to Aldershot. Daphne saw him off from the front doorstep, feeling terribly squiffy and incoherent. She shook the Colonel’s hand between both her own, but could think of nothing to say. Though the old boy had been a bit of a disappointment she felt incoherently that they had also let him down.

Back in the drawing-room she found there was talk of a game. Those who were keen half-smothered their interest, and those who weren’t pretended blandly that they didn’t mind. Louisa, who hated to waste time, was hemming a handkerchief for the British Legion sale. ‘Wotsit?’ she said, squinting down her nose as she tied off the thread.

‘Well, I wonder,’ said George, with a look that Daphne had known since childhood, the concealed excitement, the cool smile that warned them that, should he condescend to play, he would certainly win.

‘Before the War,’ Louisa explained to Sebby Stokes, ‘we played Wotsit for hours at a time. Dudley and Cecil went at it like rabbits. Of course Cecil knew far more.’

‘Cecil was so terribly clever, Mamma,’ said Dudley. ‘I’m not sure rabbits are
specially
known for their General Knowledge, are they . . . ?’

‘Or what about the adverb game,’ said Eva, ‘that’s always a riot.’

‘Ah yes, adverbs,’ said Louisa, as if recalling an unsatisfactory encounter with them in the past.

‘Which ones are they?’ said Tilda.

‘You know, darling, like
quickly
or . . . or
winsomely
,’ said Eva.

‘You have to do something in the manner of the word,’ said Madeleine, unenthusiastically.

‘It can be rather fun,’ said Revel, giving Daphne a sweet but uncertain smile: ‘it’s about how you do things.’

‘Oh I
see
. . .’ said Tilda.

Daphne felt she didn’t mind playing, but she knew that Louisa wouldn’t like anything boisterous or dependent on a sense of humour for its success. They had played the adverb game once with the children, Louisa baffling them all by picking
seldom
. And in fact she said now, ‘I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I bid you all goodnight.’ The men leapt to their feet, there was a warm overlapping chorus of goodnights, light-hearted protests; amid which Sebby said quietly that he had papers to read, and Freda too, with a sadly cringing smile at Dudley, announced that she had had a lovely day. Daphne went out with them as far as the foot of the stairs, with a certain apologetic air of her own; though she was grateful of course to see them clamber off to bed.

They all had another drink, the idea of a game still hanging in the air. Madeleine started prattling, in a painful attempt to ward off the threat. Tilda asked if anyone knew the rules for Strip Jack Naked. Then Dudley rang for Wilkes and told him to get the pianola out; they were going to have some dancing. ‘Oh, what fun,’ said Eva, with a hard smile through her cigarette-smoke.

‘I’m going to play for my guests,’ said Dudley. ‘It’s only right.’

‘And the carpet . . .’ murmured Daphne, with a shrug, as though she didn’t really care, which was the only way to get Dudley to do so.

‘Yes, remember my carpet!’ said Eva.

‘In the hall, Wilkes,’ said Dudley.

‘As you wish, Sir Dudley,’ said Wilkes, managing to convey, beneath his rosy pleasure at the prospect of the guests enjoying themselves, a flicker of apprehension.

The pianola was kept in the cow-passage. In a minute Dudley came out into the hall to watch Robbie and another of the men wheel it roaringly across the wide oak floor. He went down the passage himself, and came back with an awkward armful of the rolls: he had a wild look, mockery mixed up with genuine excitement. It was the moment when Daphne knew she had lost what frail control of the evening she might ever have had – she gave it up in a familiar mixture of misery and relief.

Some of the rolls were just well-known numbers, foxtrots and the like; one or two were the special ones made by Paderewski, of short pieces by Chopin, which were supposed to sound like him playing it himself. Dudley only ever played these to send them up with his absurd imitation of a wild-haired virtuoso. Now he threaded a roll in, drunkenly concentrating, smiling to himself at the treat he was preparing for them, smiling at the machine itself, which he had a childish reverence for. Then he sat down, flung his head back, and started pedalling – out came the foxtrot they’d had a hundred times, and which Daphne knew she would have on the brain if something bigger and better couldn’t be made to replace it. The keys going up and down under invisible hands had something almost menacing about them.

Mark, who was as tight as Dudley, immediately seized hold of Daphne, and they shimmied off at a lively stagger across the hall; she felt Mark’s warm but undiscriminating interest in her as a member of the opposite sex, they were both breathless with laughter and then Mark bumped quite hard into the table and almost fell over, still holding on to her. She freed herself, and looked around at the others, Madeleine virtually in hiding, doubled up behind the pianola, as if looking for something she’d dropped, and George pretending to praise Dudley’s playing with a keen facetious grin, entirely ignored by Dudley himself. Of course she wanted to dance with Revel, but he, quite reasonably, she supposed, had presented his hand to Flo, and moved off with her very confidently, steering as if by magic past the various hazards of hall chairs, plant-stands and the grandfather clock. Daphne only half-followed them, then she saw Revel smiling at her over Flo’s shoulder in a perfectly open way from which, none the less, she felt allowed to draw something quite private. The roll came to an end, and Dudley jumped up to choose a replacement, which turned out to be the other foxtrot he always played. He had no ear for music, but was obsessively attached to these two numbers, or at least to playing them, with a staring pretence that anyone who really did care for music would love them too. So Daphne took hold of Stinker, with a certain mischievous determination, and he bumped along beside her and somewhat on top of her, gasping, ‘Oh, my dear girl, you’re too fast for me . . .’ In a moment Dudley started singing raucously as he pedalled, ‘Oh, the lights of home! . . . the lights of home! and a place I can call my own!’

‘What’s that?’ shouted Stinker over his shoulder, trying boldly to wriggle out of dancing.

‘What? You can’t be so Philistine. It’s a lovely song by my brother Cecil’ – and he pounded on, jamming the words in to the rhythm nonsensically, and soon with tears of laughter running down his cheeks. Above him the large unapprehending cows in ‘The Loch of Galber’ gazed on. The roll came to an end.

‘Goodness, I’m hot after all that,’ said Stinker, and murmuring extravagantly about what tremendous fun it all was he steered his way back into the drawing-room. Cautious clinking and crashing could be heard and the hoarse gasp of the gazogene; then the pianola started up again. ‘Come on, Stinker!’ shouted Dudley, ‘it’s the “Hickory-Dickory Rag” – your favourite!’

‘Come on, Stinker!’ cried Tilda, with exceptional high spirits, so that people laughed at her a little, but then immediately joined her, ‘Come on, we’re starting!’ – Flo was darting around already, and Eva, taking the man’s part, seized her shoulders and trotted her briskly down the room, head jerking up and down like a hen in a new kind of move she seemed to have designed herself. The women’s beads could just be heard, rattling against each other. ‘Oh!’ said Tilda, ‘oh, my golly!’ She followed them with a wide-eyed smile that Daphne had never seen before, something touching and comical in her pleasure, gazing at each of the others to see if they shared it; she peered almost cunningly at George, whose own smile was broad but slightly strained, and suddenly she had hooked his arm round her somehow, and they were moving off together, Tilda doing some intent little back-kicks and George, with shouts of ‘Whoops!’ and ‘Oh, my word!’ randomly trying something similar. ‘Oh, do come on, Stinker!’ shouted Dudley again, rocking from side to side like a cyclist on a steep hill as he worked at the treadles, something mad and relentless in his grin. ‘Stinker!’ shouted Mark, ‘Stinker-winker!’ But Stinker resisted all these calls, and a minute later Daphne saw him wander past the window with a tumbler in his hand, and disappear into the relative safety of the garden. There was a large moon tonight, and he seemed to be peering around for it.