The Stranger's Child Part 18

'I'm sure the child doesn't know about that,' said Uncle George quietly.

'Actually, I'm learning reading with Nanny,' said Wilfrid, abandoning the table and going off towards the corner of the room, where there was a cupboard with some interesting old things in.

'Jolly good,' said George. 'So what are you reading now? Why don't we read something together?' Wilfrid felt his uncle's grateful relief at the idea of a book he was already sitting down in one of the slippery leather chairs.

'Corinna's reading The Silver Charger,' he said.

'Isn't that a bit hard for you?' said Madeleine.

'Daphne loved that book,' said George. 'It's a children's book.'

'I'm not reading it,' said Wilfrid. 'I don't really want to read now, Uncle George. Have you seen this card machine?' He opened the cupboard, and got the card machine out very carefully, but still banging it against the door. He carried it over and handed it to his uncle, who had a.s.sumed a slightly absent smile.

'Ah, yes . . . jolly good . . .' Uncle George wasn't very clever at understanding it, he had it round the wrong way. 'Quite a historic object,' he said, ready to hand it back.

'What is it?' said Madeleine, coming over. 'Oh, yes, I see . . . Historic indeed. Quite useless now, I fear!'

'I like it,' said Wilfrid, and something struck him again, by his uncle's knee, with his aunt bending over him, with her smell like an old book. 'Uncle George,' he said, 'why don't you have any children?'

'Well, darling,' said Uncle George, 'we just haven't got round to it yet.' He peered at the machine with new interest; but then went on, 'You know, Auntie and I are both very busy at our university. And to be absolutely honest with you, we don't have a very great deal of money.'

'Lots of poor people have babies,' Wilfrid said, rather bluntly, since he knew his uncle was talking nonsense.

'Yes, but we want to bring up our little boys and girls in comfort, with some of the lovely things in life that you and your sister have, for instance.'

Madeleine said, 'Remember, George, you need to finish those remarks for the Vice-Chancellor.'

'I know, my love,' said George, 'but it's so much pleasanter conversing with our nephew.'

Nevertheless, a minute later George was saying, 'I suppose you're right, Mad.' A real anxiety started up in Wilfrid that he would be left alone with Aunt Madeleine. 'You'll be all right with Auntie, won't you?'

'Oh, please, Uncle George' Wilfrid felt the anxiety close in on him, but offset at once by a dreary feeling he couldn't explain, that he was going to have to go through with whatever it was, and it didn't really matter.

'We'll do something lovely later,' said George, tentatively ruffling his nephew's hair, and then smoothing it back down again. He turned in the doorway. 'We can have your famous dance.'

When he'd gone, Madeleine rather seized on this.

'Well, I can't do it by myself,' said Wilfrid, hands on hips.

'Oh, I suppose you'd want music.'

'I mean, can you play?' Wilfrid asked, shaking his head.

'I'm not awfully good!' said Madeleine, pleasantly enough. They went out into the hall. 'I suppose there's always the pianola . . .' But happily, the men had already wheeled it back down the cow-pa.s.sage. Wilfrid didn't want to play the pianola with her. Not meaning to initiate a game, he got under the hall table.

'What are you doing, dear?' said Aunt Madeleine.

'I'm in my house,' said Wilfrid. In fact it was a game he sometimes played with his mother, and he felt unfaithful to her but also a kind of security as he squatted down with the huge oak timbers almost touching his head. 'You can come and visit me,' he said.

'Oh . . . ! Well, I'm not sure,' said Madeleine, bending over and peering in.

'Just sit on the table,' said Wilfrid. 'You have to knock.'

'Of course,' said Madeleine, with another of those glimpses of being a good sport that complicated the picture. She sat down obediently, and Wilfrid looked out past her swinging green shoes and the translucent hem of her skirt and petticoat. She knocked on the table and said loudly, 'Is Mr Wilfrid Valance at home?'

'Oh . . . I'm not quite sure, madam, I'll go and look,' said Wilfrid; and he made a sort of rhythmical mumbling noise, which conveyed very well what someone going to look might sound like.

Almost at once Aunt Madeleine said, 'Aren't you going to ask who it is?'

'Oh G.o.d, madam, who is it?' said Wilfrid.

'You mustn't say G.o.d,' said his aunt, though she didn't sound as if she minded very much.

'Sorry, Aunt Madeleine, who is it, please?'

The proper answer to this, when he played with his mother, was, 'It's Miss Edith Sitwell', and then they tried not to laugh. His father often laughed about Miss Sitwell, who he said sounded like a man and looked like a mouse. Wilfrid himself laughed about her whenever he could, though in fact he was rather afraid of her.

But Madeleine said, 'Oh, can you tell Mr Wilfrid Valance that it's Madeleine Sawle.'

'Yes, madam,' said Wilfrid, in a sort of respectful imitation of Wilkes. He 'went away' again, and took his time about it. He had a picture of his aunt's face, smiling impatiently as she sat and waited on the hard table. A wild idea came to him that he would simply say he wasn't at home. But then a shadow seemed to fall on it, it seemed lazy and cruel. But the game, which his aunt had failed to understand, really depended on the person pretending to be someone else. Otherwise you came to the end of it, and a feeling of boredom and dissatisfaction descended almost at once. Then his deep underlying longing for his mother rose in a wave, and the pain of thinking of her, and Uncle Revel drawing her, stiffened his face. It was a burningly important event from which he had been needlessly shut out. Madeleine suddenly said, 'Wilfrid, will you be all right there for half a moment, I just have to go and do something.'

'Oh, yes, all right,' said Wilfrid; and he saw her slide and then jump the six inches down on to the floor, and her clumpy green shoes going off rather fast towards the stairs.

Wilfrid stayed under the table for ten minutes, in the odour of polish, feeling relief at first, and then the bleak little p.r.i.c.kle of abandonment, and then a spreading and anxiously practical sense of the things he might now be able to do. The floorboards were faintly sticky with polish under the crepe rubber soles of his sandals. These unprepared freedoms in his closely minded life were exciting, but shadowed by worry that the system designed to protect him could so easily break down.

He crawled out, over the thick oak stretcher of the table, stood up, and went slowly and indirectly towards the foot of the stairs. Without his aunt to license his escapade, he was in the random and irrational jurisdiction of his father. 'Daddy I wasn't,' he said, as he climbed the stairs, 'I wasn't playing on the landing' and as each little wounded lie of a denial dropped behind unneeded, the growing sense of freedom was haunted by a blacker sense of guilt. The freedom seemed to stretch uncomfortably, like a held breath. He strolled along the wide landing, still talking inaudibly to himself, head dropping from side to side, in a guilty mime of being alone. Round the corner hung the Blue Lady, with her frightening eyes, and a picture of Scotland, also known as The Goat's Bottom. A maid came out of a room and crossed to the back-stairs but magically without seeing him, and he got to the laundry-room door. The black china handle was large in his child's hand, and slightly loose in the door, so that it joggled betrayingly as he turned it and the door creaked quickly open, outwards across the landing, and swung wide if you didn't hold it, to bang against the chair beside it.

When he opened the door again he was pretending that not long had pa.s.sed. The clock in the hall was sounding, far away, down below, quarter past, half past, quarter to, though the hour itself hung undisclosed in the grey light of the landing window. He looked both ways with a sense of dread that had been magically banished in the laundry-room itself, and a tense tactical excitement at the prospect of the long corridor and the stairs. His dread was partly still guilt and partly a different kind of awkward feeling, that maybe no one had missed him. It seemed best to take the other back-stairs, at the far end of the main landing, and get round to the nursery that way, and then simply insist he had been there all along. He closed the laundry-room door, with cautious control of the handle, and went along by the wall and looked round the corner.

Mrs Cow was lying face down, her right hand loosely gripping her stick, which had pushed the long Persian runner up in a wave against the legs of a small table, knocking off the little bronze huntsman, who also lay on his face on the floor, with his pike sticking out. Her other stick was some feet away, as if she'd tossed it in a sudden spasm or attempt to ward something off, and her left arm was trapped under her at an angle that would have been painful for a conscious person. Wilfrid stared, looked away, approached very cautiously, heel to toe in his sandals, not wanting to be heard, least of all by the old lady herself. Then he said 'Oh, Mrs Cow . . . ?' almost absently, as if starting on some question that would come to him if he kept talking: the point was to get the adult person's attention and keep it. Part of him knew of course that she wouldn't answer, would never answer a question again, in her wilful German voice. But something advised him to pretend politely, for a little while more, that she was still up to a chat. He came round her head, which was turned sideways, her left cheek to the carpet; and saw her right eye, hooded, half-open. Therefore not looking at him, but seeming to be part of her speechless search for something out of range, something that might have helped her. Trembling, slightly but uncontrollably, he squatted down and turned his own head sideways to try to meet her gaze, which in a normal person would have brought about a flicker of engagement. He saw how her mouth, also half-open, had let out a small slick of saliva, its shine fading as it darkened the red of the carpet.

The old lady's left arm was pinned under her, but the hand was poking out: there it lay on the carpet, small and thick, humped and dimpled. Wilfrid stared at it, from his squatting position, then stood up and walked around her again. He was frightened that the hand might move, and also, oddly, almost sickeningly, tempted by it. Looking both ways, holding his breath, he bent down, reached his fingers towards it; then picked it up. In a second he dropped it, and clutched his own warm hands together, then thrust them into his armpits, in a way that he had. He stared at Mrs Kalbeck's dropped hand, and then in the second he turned away it stirred and retracted slightly, and lay back as it had been before.

On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the b.u.mp of each step as he hurried down. Helplessly he marched to the door of his father's study. It was the most unapproachable room in the house, a room of unrememberable size and everything in it, clock and fender and crackling waste-paper basket, dark with prohibitions. His father's anger, unleashed last night, at the piano, had withdrawn into it, like a dragon to its lair. Wilfrid stood for a moment outside the door, and wiped his nose thoroughly on his sleeve. Though he was helpless, he was oddly lucid. He knew that to knock would introduce more suspense into the thing than anyone could bear, and risk bringing further wrath upon his head in advance; so, very tactfully, he turned the handle.

The room was unexpectedly dark, the heavy curtains almost closed, and he moved forward not really listening to the clock but with a sense that the s.p.a.ces between its deep ticks were stretching, as if it was thinking of stopping. The stripe of light across the red carpet made the shadow even deeper, for the first few seconds. Wilfrid knew his father had headaches in the morning, and avoided the light, and this sent another wave of despairing apology over him. At the same time the one line of light showed up ridges and knots in the carpet, which itself had the half-strangeness of something in a dream in a house where he knew all the carpets as territories, castles, jumping squares, there was this other room with a carpet he had never jumped on. For a long time they seemed not to see him, and as he stepped forward it was as if he still had a chance to step back the first they would know of his presence would be the click of the door behind him. Nanny was turned away from him, lying with her legs up on the settee, and watching his father, on the other side of the band of light, by the fireplace. His father was still in his dressing-gown, and with his sword in his hand looked like a knight. The fender here was a castle, with bra.s.s battlements, and on the black hearthstone beyond it there was a wild heap of smashed plates other curved splinters of china were scattered across the carpet too. Again Wilfrid took in the pattern, they were the thick French plates with a c.o.c.kerel on them, the wedding present they all said was hideous and ghastly. Nanny heard him, and glanced round, she half sat up and hugged a cushion to her. 'Captain,' she said.

'What is it?' said his father, turning to look at him, frowning, not angrily, exactly, but as if trying to make something out. He laid the sword down on the mantelpiece.

And Wilfrid knew he couldn't say. He stepped further into the light. He hoped his own blotchy cheeks and sniffy nose were proof that something serious had happened, but there was no question of saying what. He said, 'Oh, Daddy, I've just seen . . . Mrs Cow.'

'Oh, yes,' said his father, at once visibly disappointed.

'I think she's fallen over.'

His father tutted and went to stand beside his desk, switched on the lamp, peered at some papers as if already getting on with something important. His hair, normally black and shiny, stood up at one side like a wing. Nanny seemed entirely uninterested; she had stood up, straightened her skirt, shifted the cushions on the settee to find her handbag. Without looking at him, Dudley said, 'And have you told her to get up?'

'No, Daddy,' said Wilfrid, feeling another wail rising in his chest at his father's perversity. He said, 'She can't get up, you see, as a matter of fact.'

'Broken both her legs, has she?'

Wilfrid shook his head, but couldn't say more, for fear of crying, which his father couldn't stand.

'I wonder if I should look, Sir Dudley?' said Nanny, with odd reluctance, patting her hair. It was her day off, anyway: she probably didn't want to be involved. Slowly, with the playful menace he brought to telling a story, Dudley turned his head, and stared at Wilfrid.

'I wonder if what you're trying to tell me, Wilfrid,' he said, 'is that Frau Kalbeck is dead?'

'Yes, Daddy, she is!' said Wilfrid, and in the relief of it he was very nearly grinning at just the same moment the saved-up tears poured out of him again.

'Of course she should never have come here,' said his father, still maddeningly unexcited, but no longer blaming Wilfrid himself, it seemed. He looked sharply at Nanny. 'Upsetting my son like this.' And then he gave a surprising laugh. 'Well, it's taught her a lesson, what? She won't be coming here again.'

Nanny stood behind Wilfrid, and laid her hands hesitantly on his shoulders. 'Now, don't cry, there's a good boy,' she said. He struggled to obey her, as he wanted to, for a moment, but when he thought of the dead woman's face again, and her hand moving by itself, it was all beyond him and over him like a wave.

'Run along to Wilkes's room and telephone Dr Wyatt, would you, Nanny?' said his father.

'At once, Sir Dudley,' said Nanny. Wilfrid of course would go with her, but she turned uncertainly at the door, and his father nodded and said, 'You stay here, old boy.'

So Wilfrid went to his father, and was pulled experimentally for a second or two against the heavy strange-scented skirts of the brocade dressing-gown. It was the touch of privilege, a feel of the luxurious concessions allowed when something awful had happened, and in the interesting surprise of it he at once stopped crying. Then they went together, snapping odd sharp fragments of china underfoot, to the window, and each drew back a curtain. Nothing was said about the dinner service; and his father already had the mischievous preoccupied look that sometimes announced a treat, an idea that had just surprised him and demanded to be shared. It was like the mad glint, but usually nicer. Staring into the garden, fixing his eye so hard on something that Wilfrid thought for a moment it must be the source of his amus.e.m.e.nt, he started to talk, too quietly and rapidly at first for him to follow 'The body was found it lay on the ground without a sound'

'Oh, Skeleton, Daddy,' he said and his father grinned tolerantly.

' old fat Mrs Cow with her face like a sow you won't hear from her now' he turned and walked excitedly round the room, Wilfrid had a distracted sense of how he really never noticed his father's limp 'with her Wagner and Liszt and her hair in a twist and always p.i.s.sed like a terrible Hun with a twelve-bore gun what? '

'Yes, Daddy . . .'

' smelly old Valkyrie rosewater talc-ery came down to Corley and said she was poorly took it quite sorely . . .' A little flick of spit from his father's mouth danced in the light as he turned. Wilfrid couldn't follow or understand a lot of the words themselves, but the joy of improvisation caught at him as well as the sense of horror that his father's poems always challenged you not to feel. He had got to the door and flung it open 'And that, young man,' he said, 'is more than I've written of my book for the past six months.'

'Really, Daddy?' said Wilfrid, unable to decide from his father's tone if this was a cause for celebration or despair.

THREE.

'Steady, boys, steady!'

1.

At five o'clock, when they were all getting their things, Miss Cobb, the Manager's secretary, made a rare appearance in the staff-room. 'Oh, Mr Bryant,' she said, 'with Miss Carter away, I wonder if you would walk with Mr Keeping.'

'Oh,' said Paul, glancing round at the others, 'I don't know . . .' In his mind he was already halfway home, in the high summer evening.

'I'll do it,' said Heather Jones.

'Mr Keeping did ask for Mr Bryant,' said Miss Cobb. 'He likes to get to know the new staff.'

'Well, of course I will, in that case,' said Paul, blushing, with no idea, really, what he was being asked.

'I'll tell Mr Keeping. In five minutes, in the Public s.p.a.ce? Thank you so much . . .' and Miss Cobb withdrew, with her sad flinch of a smile.

In a week he had got to know all their names, which were still coloured and almost physical for him, made distinct by their newness and the need to tell them apart. Heather Jones and Hannah Gearing; Jack Reeves, the chief cashier; Geoff Viner, the second cashier, a bit of a looker; Susie Carter, a good-natured chatterbox, who was off today, attending a funeral in Newbury. Her empty chair and shrouded typewriter had quietened the office behind him. He slid his thermos into his briefcase and said quietly to Heather, 'What does Susie do with Mr Keeping exactly?'

Heather seemed to think for a moment. 'Oh she just walks home with him.'

Hannah, with her more maternal note, said, 'Mr Keeping likes someone to keep him company. Normally Susie goes because she lives up past the church. It's a nice little walk, really it'll only take you five minutes.'

'Just don't say, "How are you, Keeping?" ' said June Underwood.

'I won't,' said Paul, to whom the whole business sounded odd and euphemistic. From what he had seen of him, Mr Keeping was a cool and formal sort of man, with a sarcastic streak, but he'd noticed the staff took a strangely protective att.i.tude to him. If they'd ever thought it odd for a middle-aged man to need walking home, they treated it now as the normal thing. He said, 'Isn't the Manager meant to live over the bank?' He'd seen upstairs, where the sitting-room of the bank house was lined with filing-cabinets and the bedrooms were stacked with old desks and junk.

'Well, this one doesn't,' said Jack Reeves, who'd just got his pipe going, the coa.r.s.e dry smoke like a sign of his authority.

Geoff Viner, taming his hair with a comb and the flat of his hand, said, 'I a.s.sume you don't know Mrs Keeping.'

'Oh, you know her, Geoffrey, do you!' said June, and a bit of a laugh went round the room.

Jack Reeves said, 'I a.s.sure you Mrs Keeping has no intention of living over the shop.'

'I'd hardly call the Midland Bank a shop,' said Heather.

'Her words, not mine,' said Jack.

'Well, she's got the boys to think of too,' said Hannah. 'They need a proper garden to run around in.'

'What children have they got?' said Paul.

'Well, I say boys . . . John's at college, isn't he.'

'John, the elder boy, is at Durham University' Jack Reeves frowned over his pipe, out of his greater intimacy with the Manager. 'Julian is in the Sixth Form at Oundle School, and doing very well, I believe.' He sucked and nodded and gazed over their heads. 'They talk of Oxford' and he went out, leaving them half a roomful of smoke.

In the Gents Paul washed the money smell, copper and nickel and grubby paper, from his hands. The geyser rumbled. Grey-black suds speckled the basin. He was bothered about the imminent walk, but it was an opportunity, as his mother would say, and it looked a little easier if the Keepings had sons, one of them about Paul's own age. John and Julian: he saw them, seductive images spun from nothing; already they were showing him around their large garden. He smiled narrowly at himself in the mirror, turning a little to left and right: he had a long nose, the 'Bryant nose', his mother said, disclaiming it; his hair was cut horribly short for the new job, and the strip light, which spared nothing, brought out its odd coppery sheen and the stipple of spots across his forehead. Then he started grinning, to see what that looked like, but immediately Geoff came in behind him and went to the urinal; it was a double one, on a raised step, and Paul looked furtively at Geoff's back in the mirror.

'No, the thing about the boss, young Paul,' Geoff said, with a quick glance over his shoulder, 'is he had a very bad war.'