The Stranger's Child Part 33

'Mm? He'd never had a friend before, poor George. I think we were all rather tickled when he suddenly produced one.'

Paul grinned at this with the reluctant sense of kinship that sometimes ghosted his interviews. 'And could you see why they were such friends? Did they seem very close?'

Again Daphne sighed out, as if to say she might as well be candid. 'I think it was just a clear case of old-fashioned' she paused and sipped 'well, hero-worship, really, wasn't it? George was very young for his age, emotionally. I suppose Cambridge brought him out a bit.' She winced. 'To be honest, George has always been a bit of a cold fish.'

Paul played for a pondering moment or two with even more candid phrases, but looking at her he was doubtful, and frightened of disgusting her. He said, 'I just wondered if you felt he was jealous of your affair with Cecil?'

'George? No, no;' and as if not satisfied with her earlier put-down, or feeling that by now it didn't matter anyway, 'George never exactly had normal human emotions, you see. I don't know why. And I dare say it hasn't done him any harm life's probably much simpler without them, though a bit dull, wouldn't you think!' Paul pictured George with the half-naked Cecil on the roof at Corley, and smiled distantly, at a loss as to how much of this she believed or expected him to believe; and to how much she might quite willingly have forgotten. 'If you'd come a few years ago, I'd have suggested you go and talk to him, but I'm afraid he's rather lost it now up top, you know. I think poor Madeleine has quite a struggle with him.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' said Paul.

'No, he'd have been a useful person for you to talk to. I don't mean to suggest he was ever a bore, by the way. He was an intellectual, he was always the brains of the family.'

Paul let a moment pa.s.s, while he looked at his papers, his little mime of being an interviewer, which seemed more for his own benefit than for hers. 'Do you mind if I ask you you say in the book that it was, well, a love-affair you and Cecil, I mean . . . !'

'Well, indeed.'

'You wrote to each other, but did you see each other?'

'Didn't I say . . . ? No, we saw each other fairly often, I think.'

'The War, I suppose, intervened.'

'Well, the War, quite. We didn't see each other so often then.'

'I've been trying to work out from the Letters when he was in England he signed up almost at once, September 1914.'

'Yes, well he loved the War.'

'So he was out in France by December, and then only home quite rarely on leave, until he until he was killed, eighteen months later.'

'That must be right, yes,' said Daphne, with a small cough of impatience.

Paul said, in a tactical tone, but with a quick apologetic smile, 'Can I jump forward to the last time you saw him?'

'Oh, yes . . .' she gasped, as if momentarily dizzy.

'What happened then?'

'Well, again . . .' She shook her head, as if to say that she'd have liked to help. 'I think it was all very much as I said in my little book.'

So Paul read out, rather skimmingly, the pa.s.sage he'd read on the train earlier, which she listened to with an air of curiosity as well as mild defiance. Again he wasn't sure how to do it: how did you ask an eighty-three-year-old woman if someone had he hardly liked to say it even to himself. And if Cecil had got her pregnant well, of course she could get the whole thing off her chest at last, in a tearful rush of relief, but something told Paul it wasn't going to happen in the present atmosphere. Still, when he looked up, it seemed she was moved by her own words. 'Well, there you are!' she said, and shook her head again. It was one of those disorienting moments, all too common in Paul's life, when he saw he'd missed something, and thinking back he still couldn't see what had triggered the very quick change of emotion in the other person. He wondered if she was about to cry. Socially awkward, but wonderful for the book if the trick had worked and he'd stirred some brand new memory; he glanced at the patient revolution of the tape. Then he saw he'd got it wrong again or else she was brusquely shutting him out from her unexpected turn of feeling. She said, 'To tell the truth I sometimes feel I'm shackled to old Cecil. It's partly his fault, for getting killed if he'd lived we would just have been figures in each other's pasts, and I don't suppose anyone would have cared two hoots.'

'Oh, I think they might have done . . . !' was he teasing her or rea.s.suring her? 'I understand you were planning to get married?'

'Well . . . Even if we had I don't imagine it would have been a great success.'

'There's the letter where he says, "will you be my widow?" ' Paul thought it wasn't tactful, even now, to mention the fact, exposed by the Letters, that Cecil had also asked Margaret Ingham to be his widow on the very same day. 'But I suppose he was rather . . . fickle, perhaps?'

'Well, of course he was. But the thing you have to understand is that Cecil made you feel you were at the absolute centre of his universe.' And at this Paul felt both pity and a hint of envy.

Quite soon it was time for the customary, necessary, and often useful visit to the loo a welcome escape into privacy, a gape in the mirror, and a chance to pry un.o.bserved into the subject's habits and att.i.tude to hygiene and sense of humour. At Olga perhaps a touch of mad humour showed in the junk that had been piled and propped in the gloomy and mouldy-smelling little room. Behind the door there was a stack of pictures with cracked gla.s.s and a folding card-table, and under the basin the long box of a croquet set with JACOBS stencilled on the lid. Opposite the basin his shoulder brushed a large murky painting in a fancy gilt frame with various bits chipped off: it showed a pale young man with a black hat and a snooty expression, and was streaked across as though someone had tried to clean it with a muddy sponge. The lavatory, which could never have been a bright room, was made all the gloomier by Virginia creeper which covered the lower part of the frosted-gla.s.s window and had forced its way in through the opening top light, a long strand feeling its way across the wall, above a stack of large objects covered in a tablecloth. Paul hardly liked to use the loo itself, dark as peat below the water-line, and with what Peter Rowe used to call a lesbian seat, that had to be held up. Under the tablecloth it turned out there were wine boxes, sealed with brittle yellow Sellotape, which might be worth exploring on a later visit. Along the wall beside the loo books and magazines were stacked several feet high. On top was the issue of the Tatler with Daphne's interview in it, and a six-year-old Country Life with a feature on Staunton Hall, 'the home of Lady Caroline Messent' he supposed they must be kept there for some small ritual of rea.s.surance. The books were like a jumble sale in which you might find something it was clearly either Daphne or Wilfrid's habit to mark their place each time with a torn-off sheet of toilet-paper. The cohabitation of mother and son oppressed Paul here more than he could explain. He sat down for a minute, and looked sideways at the t.i.tles. And there, just above floor level, and tricky to prise out, was Black Flowers, in its dust-jacket, torn and stained, but the first edition, 1944, on cheap wartime paper, signed: 'For Wilfrid, Dudley Valance'. It was too stark and sad and valuable to leave here, and Paul placed it where he would be able to get it later. He washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror to a.s.sess his progress and give himself a quick pep-talk, slightly thrown by the murky sneer of the young man in the frame behind him.

Wilfrid, sensing his brief absence, had come back in and was edging round the end of the sitting-room, apparently looking for something. 'And I really must ask you,' Paul said in a rush, 'if you still have the book with the ma.n.u.script of "Two Acres" in it. I'd love to see it.'

'Well, you're out of luck, I'm afraid,' said Daphne.

'You don't have it?'

She frowned almost crossly. 'Where is it, Wilfrid?'

'I believe it's in London, Mother,' said Wilfrid, peering into a large wicker basket on top of a pile of old curtains, 'it's gone to be photographed.'

'It's being photographed,' she confirmed. 'It's extraordinarily delicate, well, it's seventy years old, isn't it? nearly seventy.'

'No, that's a very good idea,' Paul said. 'Who's doing it for you?'

'I can't remember his name he's doing the new edition of Cecil's poems.'

'Oh, well you're in good hands,' Paul said.

'What is his name?'

'I think he's called Dr Nigel Dupont.'

'Exactly. He told me he feels a very personal connection with Cecil because he was at school at Corley.'

'Oh, really?'

'He got interested in him from seeing his tomb all the time in the chapel.'

'How interesting,' said Paul, as the heavy likelihood that Dupont had been a pupil of Peter's closed sickeningly about him. 'Did Nigel . . . um . . . come to see you?'

'No, it was all very easy, we did it by mail.'

'Recorded delivery,' said Wilfrid.

'He doesn't give two pins about, you know, the biographical side,' said Daphne, 'he's very much a textual editor, would you call it.'

'Well, indeed.'

'All the different editions and what have you.'

'Fascinating . . .' Paul edged back towards his chair. Outside, the afternoon was beginning to lower, late sunlight making the dirty windows opaque.

'Well, it is rather fascinating. He says they're full of mistakes. It was Sebby Stokes, you know, he messed around with them quite a bit, apparently, I suppose he thought he was improving them.'

'Perhaps he was!'

Daphne turned and said, 'Why don't you and Mr Bryant get out round the village.'

'We don't know that he wants to,' Wilfrid said.

'Walk down to the farm, you like that.'

It was a bold distraction on Daphne's part, cutting short the interview, but Paul had been hoping for a chance to talk to Wilfrid in private at some point. So out they went, Paul borrowing a large loose pair of old black wellingtons, which Wilfrid told him, once they'd got into the road, had 'formerly belonged to Basil'.

'Oh, really?' said Paul, disliking the thought of wearing a dead man's shoes; they dragged and clunked on the tarmac. 'For some reason I hadn't imagined he was so big . . .' Later he thought it odd that Daphne had hung on to them, moved house with them. Wilfrid had put on a pair of mud-caked workman's boots, and a kind of car-coat over his fleece. His big monkish head, with its tufts of grey hair, was bare.

'This isn't one of the attractive, picturesque villages,' Wilfrid said. They strode back down the lane, past the shop with its steamed-up window, past the council houses, and then into another lane that ran up the side of some fenced-off parkland, ploughed fields on the other side. Away from the bungalow Wilfrid became both franker and more anxious; he said twice, 'She can look after herself for half an hour.'

'She's lucky to have you,' Paul said, sounding feebly polite.

'Oh, she drives me potty!' said Wilfrid, with a grin of guilty excitement. Now they mounted the verge to let a tractor and trailer go past, great clots of silage dropping off behind it into the lane. Wilfrid stared at the driver but didn't greet him. Paul wasn't sure what to say he felt both mother and son were cheered up and somehow kept going by driving each other potty.

'Well, she's made a very good recovery,' said Paul.

'Thanks to Nurse Valance,' said Wilfrid, in an odd pert tone.

Paul couldn't think what Wilfrid would have been doing if he hadn't had his mother to look after. 'But you have some help?'

'Nothing worth mentioning. And of course the whole thing makes it . . . very hard for me to have a girlfriend.'

Paul managed to raise his eyebrows in sympathy. 'No, I can imagine . . .'

'But there you are!' said Wilfrid. 'I'm with her till the end now. Now that's Staunton Hall over there, she'd want me to . . . point that out. That's where Lady Caroline lives.'

'Olga's former employer.'

'Olga is what she calls her . . . Pet.i.t Trianon.' Paul made out the bulk of a large square house among the trees a couple of fields away. The sun was now very low over the hedges behind them, and the small attic windows of the mansion glowed as if all the lights were on. 'Do you want to see the farm?'

'I don't mind,' said Paul.

'I wouldn't have minded being a farmer,' said Wilfrid.

They walked on for a while and Paul said, 'Well, of course! your grandfather . . .'

'I always liked animals. There were two farms at Corley. One very much . . . grew up amongst all that' with a return of his precise, clerical tone, perhaps to cover the strange disjunction between then and now. As Robin had reminded him, Wilfrid would soon be the fourth baronet.

'Do you remember your grandfather at all?'

'Oh, hardly. He died when I was . . . four or five. You know, I called him . . . Grandpa Olly-olly because that was all he could say.'

'He had a stroke, didn't he.'

'He could only make that sort of olly-olly noise.'

'Were you frightened of him?'

'I expect a bit,' said Wilfrid. 'I was a rather nervous child' as if looking back on some quite alien state.

'Your father was fond of him.'

'I don't think my father had much time for him.'

'Ah . . . he writes about him very nicely.'

'Yes, he does,' said Wilfrid.

A steady increase in the mud in the lane, and round a right-angled bend was the entrance to the farmyard, a concrete platform for the milk-churns at the gate, and beyond it a glistening oily-brown quagmire of cow-s.h.i.t stretching away to the open doors of a corrugated-iron barn. 'Well, this must be it!' said Paul. He didn't see the point of fouling up the late Basil Jacobs's wellies, and Wilfrid's boots were hardly up to it. Wilfrid seemed to feel some irritable embarra.s.sment, having brought him here, but then said, 'We'd probably better be getting back anyway.'

'Do you ever see your father?' said Paul, as they turned round.

'Not often,' said Wilfrid firmly, and looked out across the fields.

'He must have been very upset about . . . your sister.'

'You'd think . . . wouldn't you?'

Paul sensed he'd pressed him enough, and changed the subject to his hotel, which he was worried about getting back to.

'The bad thing was,' Wilfrid cut in, 'that he didn't come to the funeral. He said he was going to come over, but that week of course Leslie . . . blew his brains out, and my sister's funeral was put back, as a result, and he didn't come after all. He just had a horrible wreath . . . delivered.'

'That's awful,' said Paul. He wanted to say hadn't Dudley had various mental problems, but he rather gathered that Wilfrid had had them too, so he merely looked at him respectfully for a moment.

'But then he never much cared for my sister,' Wilfrid said, 'so though bad, it wasn't perhaps . . . surprising.'

'No, I see . . .'

'Though sometimes there's something . . . almost surprising in a person being so completely true to type.'

'You mean on this one occasion you really thought he'd do the right thing.'

'Stupidly, we did,' said Wilfrid, and there seemed little more to say after that; though a good deal for Paul to think about.

Now the sun had sunk among the black cloud-bars to the west, and the back of the village huddled clear but bleak in the neutral light of the early evening. Chicken-runs, garden sheds, heaps of garden refuse thrown over the hedge all year long; a car on bricks, a greenhouse painted white, the jostle of tall TV aerials against the cold sky. Paul pictured his street in Tooting and the lit red buses with a shiver of longing. It was what Peter used to call his nostalgie du pave, the panicky longing for London. 'Oh, my dear,' he would say, in Wantage or Foxleigh, 'I'm not dying here.'

When they got back to the bungalow, Paul said 'Thanks so much, I should probably push off now,' but to his surprise Daphne said, 'Have a drink first.' She made her way, holding on to table and chair, to the corner of the room where on a crowded surface there was a cl.u.s.ter of bottles with an ice-bucket, phials of Tabasco and bitters, all the paraphernalia of the c.o.c.ktail hour. Wilfrid was sent out to the garage to get ice from the freezer. 'He knows we need it, and then he makes such a face!' said Daphne. 'G-and-t?' Paul said yes, and smiled at the thought of the time he'd first met her, over the same drink, when he'd sat in the garden trying not to look up her skirt. Daphne opened a tonic bottle with a practised snap, the tonic fizzing out round the top and dripping down her wrist. 'Have you got it?' she said, as Wilfrid returned with the silver plastic bucket. 'Oh, look, it's all an enormous lump, you'll have to break it up, I can't possibly use this. Really, Wilfrid!' making a half-hearted comedy out of her annoyance for the sake of their guest.

When they were settled, Daphne came back with a genial but purposeful look to the new book on Mark Gibbons that she'd been reading, which she said again wasn't good at all, and anyway half the point of Mark was lost if the pictures were in black-and-white. (Paul guessed she meant Wilfrid had been reading it to her, but as usual his agency was somehow elided.) She said it was funny how some people emerged from the great backward and abyss while others were wholly forgotten. Mark had had a sort of handy-man, called d.i.c.k Mint, who was a bit of a character, fixed the car, looked after the garden, and was often to be found sitting in Mark's kitchen at Wantage jawing endlessly with his employer. A pretty fair bore, actually, but he had his remarks: he thought the Post-Impressionists were something to do with the GPO. Perhaps, what? twenty people in the whole world knew him, hardly a household name. Lived in a caravan. And now, thanks to this book, thousands of people, probably, were going to know about him he'd become a character on a world stage. People in America would know about him. Whereas the woman who came in, whose name Daphne thought was Jean, who did all the washing and cleaning, wasn't mentioned at all in fact n.o.body now thought of her from one year to the next.

'I must read the Mark Gibbons book,' Paul said, wishing he'd had the tape-recorder on through this spiel.

'Really I shouldn't bother,' said Daphne.

Paul laughed. 'This must happen to you quite a lot.'

'Mm?'