The Stranger's Child Part 32

'Well, just about . . .' he said meaninglessly and handed over his coat and scarf. The hall was tiny, with other gla.s.s-panelled doors opening off it a look of sixties brightness that had already become obscurely depressing. 'And how is your mother?' For a moment he felt a kind of awe, repressed till now, at being about to see her, the survivor, the friend of the long dead. And a twinge of something like envy at the thought of the friendship they might have had themselves if he hadn't been a biographer.

'Oh, she's . . .' Wilfrid shook his head and grinned; Paul remembered his hesitations, like a suppressed stammer, in the middle of sentences, but this time the rest of the statement wasn't forthcoming.

The sitting-room was stifling from a two-bar electric fire a great thing like a fire-basket, with glowing fake coals showing dimly in the sunlight. There was a strong smell of burnt dust. Paul came in with a cheerful 'h.e.l.lo, Mrs Jacobs,' determined not to show his shock at the state of the room. She was sitting almost with her back to him, in a wing-chair covered in shabby pink chintz. All around her was an astounding chaos of junk, so extreme that he knew he must simply ignore it. There was a worrying sense of the temporary grown permanent, piled-up objects adapting into furniture, covered by tablecloths and tipsily topped with lamps and vases and figurines.

'It's all right,' she said, half-turning her head, but not looking at him, 'Wilfrid's put me right about you.'

'Oh, yes . . . ?' he laughed cautiously: so she was tackling the question of his review straight off.

'You're not the pianist.'

'No, I'm not you're quite right,' said Paul.

'I have an excellent memory, Mummy, as you know,' said Wilfrid, as if still contradicting her. 'The pianist was a big . . . handsome fellow.'

'Oh, what was he called? that charming young man . . . so talented . . .'

Paul groped round this for a moment, almost as if struggling to remember himself. 'Peter Rowe, do you mean?'

'Peter you see, I rather liked him.'

'Oh, yes, well . . .' murmured Paul, coming round in front of her; she didn't seem interested in shaking hands. She was wearing a thick grey skirt and a blouse under a shabby sleeveless cardigan. She gave him a calculating look, perhaps only the result of her not seeing him properly. After the first awkward moments, he absorbed this as a likely hazard of the hours ahead.

'What became of him, I wonder?'

'Peter? Oh, he's doing all right, I think,' said Paul blandly. He was standing in the small area between the fire and a low coffee-table heaped with books and newspapers, it was almost like a childish dare as the back of his calves got hotter and hotter.

'Of course he taught at Corley Court he was extremely interested in that house, you know.'

'Oh he was,' said Wilfrid, with a shake of the head.

'Extremely interested. He wanted to put back all the jelly-mould ceilings and what-have-you that Dudley did away with.'

'During your time, of course,' said Paul encouragingly, as if the interview had already started. He moved round towards the armchair facing hers, and got out the tape-recorder from his briefcase in a slightly furtive way.

'You see, he's the one I might have expected to be writing about Cecil,' she said. 'He was extremely interested in him, as well.'

'What wasn't he interested in!' said Paul.

Daphne said, 'I'm having a certain amount of trouble with my eyes,' reaching on the little table beside her with its lamp and books. Could she still read, Paul wondered? He half-expected to see his own letters there.

'Yes, so I gathered from Robin,' he said, with a fond tone towards this mutual friend.

'You didn't block the drive, did you?' said Daphne.

'Oh . . . no I got a taxi at Worcester station.'

'Oh, you got a Cathedral. Aren't they expensive?' said Daphne, with a hint of satisfaction. 'Can you find somewhere to sit? One day quite soon Wilfrid's going to sort this room out, but until that day I fear we live in chaos and disorder. It's funny to think I once lived in a house with thirty-five servants.'

'Goodness . . . !' said Paul, lifting a leather Radio Times folder and a heap of thick woollen socks, perhaps waiting to be darned, from the armchair. In her book he was sure she'd said twenty-five servants. He rigged up the microphone on top of the books on the coffee-table between them. 'Why is this house called Olga, I wonder?' he said, just to test the levels.

'Ah! You see, Lady Caroline had it built for her old housekeeper,' said Wilfrid in a pious tone, 'whose name was Olga. She retired here . . . out of sight but not quite . . . out of reach.'

'And now Lady Caroline lets it to you,' said Paul, watching the bobbing red finger which dropped, as if by gravity, when no one spoke.

'Well, we hardly pay a thing . . .'

Daphne chuckled narrowly. 'What have you got there?' she said.

'I hope you don't mind if I tape our conversation . . .' Paul clicked the b.u.t.ton and rewound.

'Perhaps as well to get it right,' said Daphne uncertainly. It was the tape-recorder's odd insinuations of flattery and mistrust. Some people glanced at it as an awkward third person in the room, others were calmed by the just-detectable turning of the spool, some, like old Joan Valance, a second cousin of Cecil's whom he'd tracked down in Sidmouth, were moved to gabbling relief at having so impartial and receptive an audience. Daphne fidgeted with her cushions. 'I'll have to be careful what I say.'

'Oh, I hope not,' with his ear to the idiotic tone of the playback.

'Very careful.'

'If you want to tell me anything off the record, you can: just say, and I'll stop the tape.'

'No, I don't think I'll be doing that,' said Daphne, with a quick smile. 'Aren't we having any refreshments, Wilfrid?'

'Well, if you care to ask for them . . .'

They both said coffee. 'Bring us a couple of coffees, Wilfrid, and then find something useful to do. You could make a start on clearing up those things in the garage.'

'Oh, that's a very big job, Mummy,' said Wilfrid, as if not so easily fooled.

When he had gone out of the room, she said, 'It's only a very big job because he will keep putting it off. Oh, he's so . . . disorganized,' and she shifted her cushion again, flinched and half-turned, the powder-and-smoke-smudged discs of her gla.s.ses blank for a second in the light. This irritable nervousness might be hard to deal with. Paul wanted to remind her of their old connections, but he was wary of mentioning Corinna. He said, just while they waited, 'I was wondering, do you see much of John, and Julian, and Jenny?' They sounded like characters in a children's book.

'We're a bit cut off here, to be perfectly frank,' she said. He saw she wouldn't want to admit to feeling neglected.

'What are they doing now?' with a glance at the red needle.

'Well . . .' She was slow to warm to the question. 'Well, they're all extremely busy, and successful, as you might expect. Jennifer's a doctor I mean, not an actual doctor, obviously. She's teaching at Edinburgh, I think it's Edinburgh. Wilfrid will put me right if it's not.'

'Teaching French literature?'

'Yes . . . and John of course has his very successful wine business.'

'He takes after his grandfather,' said Paul, almost fondly.

'His grandfather doesn't have a wine business.'

'No, I meant I believe Sir Dudley is involved in the sherry world, isn't he.'

'Oh, I see . . . And Julian well Julian's the artistic one. He's very creative.'

Paul could tell from her tone, which was also fond, but final, that he shouldn't ask what form this creativity took. He felt his own secret interest in Julian as a sixth-former might somehow burn through. Daphne said, 'Why, have you met Dudley?'

'Yes, I have,' said Paul simply, with no idea as yet what line to take about him. He told her a bit about the Oxford conference, in what felt to him a very fair-minded way, and finding he had already somehow both censored and excused Dudley's crushing put-down over the phone; as an anecdote it had a value that went some way to compensate for the further talk they had never had. 'He was quite controversial. He said that war poems, being written at the time, were usually not much good, "inept and amateurish" I think were his words; whereas the great war writing was all in prose, and appeared ten years later or more in his case, of course.'

'That sounds like Dudley.'

'He wouldn't say anything much about Cecil.'

She pondered for a minute, and he thought she might say something about him herself. 'Of course they've made him an honorary fellow, haven't they,' she said.

'I didn't know that.'

'Yes, they have. We're talking about your father,' Daphne said, as Wilfrid came back in.

'Oh . . . !' said Wilfrid, with a surprising cold grimace.

'Not Wilfie's favourite person,' said Daphne.

When Wilfrid had gone out again, there was swiftly a new atmosphere, of involuntary intimacy, as if Paul were a doctor and about to ask her to undo her blouse. He checked the tape again. Daphne had a look of conditional resignation. He cleared his throat and looked at his notes, his plan, designed to make the whole thing more like a conversation, and for both of them more convincing. Still, it sounded more stilted than he'd meant: 'I was wondering about the way you wrote your memoirs, er, The Short Gallery, as a set of portraits of other people, rather than one of yourself.' He was afraid she couldn't see his respectful smile.

'Oh, yes.' Her head went back an inch. No doubt the shadowy question of his review of that book lurked somewhere beyond the actual question beyond all of them. 'Well . . .'

'I mean' Paul laughed 'why did you do it like that? Of course, I remember when I first met you you said you were writing your memoirs then, so I know it occupied you for a long time. That was thirteen years ago!'

'No, it did,' said Daphne. 'Much longer than that, even.'

'And may I just say that I admired the book a great deal.'

'Oh that's kind of you,' she said, pretty drily. 'Well, I suppose the main reason was that I was lucky enough to know a lot of people more talented and interesting than myself.'

'Of course, in a way I wish you'd written more about yourself.'

'Well, there's a certain amount that gets in, I hope.' She squinted at the tape-recorder, aware it was capturing this flannel, and her reaction to it. 'I was very much brought up in the understanding that the men all around me were the ones who were doing the important things. A lot of them wrote their own memoirs, or, you know, their lives are being written about now there's this new life of Mark Gibbons that's going to come out.'

'Oh, yes, I've heard about it,' Paul said; Karen had got the proofs unindexed, but a quick read through had produced only pa.s.sing references to Daphne; Daphne, it seemed, had them too.

'The publisher sent it. Wilfrid's been reading it to me, because I can't read any more. But of course she's got all sorts of things wrong.'

'Were you consulted for that book?'

'Oh yes, the woman wrote to me. But really, I put it all in my own book everything I thought worth saying about Mark, who was a dear friend, of course.'

'Well, I know,' said Paul, and looked at her rather cannily; but it was instantly clear from her hard half-smile that no confessions about bearing his child were remotely on the cards. 'I remember meeting him at your seventieth.'

'Ah, do you . . .' she accepted this. 'Yes, he must have been there. Isn't it awful, I've forgotten,' she said, and smiled more sweetly, as if she'd just seen a good way out of his future questions.

'Well, of course I'm hoping not to get it wrong,' said Paul, 'with your help!' He sipped a little of the weak coffee. It struck him that if Daphne had helped her a bit more, the biographer of Mark Gibbons might not have made the mistakes that she was now deploring. It was a recurrent little knot of self-defeating resistance that perhaps all biographers of recent subjects had to confront and undo. People wouldn't tell you things, and then they blamed you for not knowing them unless they were George Sawle, of course, where the flow of secrets had been so disinhibited as to be almost unusable. Still, Daphne was an old lady, of whom he was reasonably fond, and he said gently, 'I suppose you wanted to put the record straight a bit, though.'

'Well, a bit about "Two Acres" and things, you see. In the poem I'm merely referred to as "you". And of course in Sebby Stokes's thing I'm "Miss S."!'

Paul laughed sympathetically, half-embarra.s.sed by his own new suspicion that the 'you' of the poem was really George. 'There's more about you in . . . Sir Dudley's book.'

'Yes . . . but then he's always so down on everybody.'

'I was surprised by how little he says about Cecil.'

'I know . . .' she sounded amiable but bored at once by talk of Black Flowers.

'I suppose Cecil must have been the first real writer you'd met.'

'Oh, yes, well as I said in the book, he was the most famous person I had met before I was married, though he wasn't actually terribly famous at the time. I mean, he'd had poems here and there, but he hadn't yet published a book or anything.'

'Night Wake wasn't till 1916, was it, only a few months before he was killed?'

'That's probably right,' said Daphne. 'And then after that of course he emerged as quite an important figure.'

'But you'd read some of his poems before you met him?'

'I think one or two.'

'So to you he would have been a glamorous figure before you'd even set eyes on him.'

'We were all quite curious to meet him.'

'What do you remember about his first visit to "Two Acres"? Why don't you just tell me about that.'

She tucked in her chin. 'Well, he arrived,' she said, as if resolved to tackle the question squarely.

'He arrived at 5.27,' said Paul.

'Did he . . . ? Yes.'

'I think . . . your brother . . . must have met him.'

'Well, of course he had.'

'No . . . ! I mean, he was at the station.'

'Oh, quite possibly.'

'Do you remember when you first saw Cecil yourself?'

'Well, it would have been then.'

'And did you feel an immediate attraction to him?'

'Well, he was very striking, you know. I was only sixteen . . . very innocent . . . well, we all were in those days I'd certainly never had a boyfriend, or anything like that I was a great reader, I read romantic novels, but I had no knowledge of romance myself and a lot of poetry, of course, Keats, and Tennyson we all loved . . .' Paul saw her easing into a routine, something sweet and artificial in her voice. He let her run on, his own face abstracted and impatient as he saw the shape of his next question, a rather tougher one. When she seemed to have finished, and turned to pick up her coffee, he said, 'Can I ask you, what did you think about your brother's friendship with Cecil?'

'Oh . . .' she huffed over her mug. 'Well, it was very unusual.'

'In what way?' said Paul, with a small shake of the head.