The Stranger's Child Part 15

'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 furnis.h.i.+ng 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 embarra.s.sments, was a mere charade. He picked up the autograph alb.u.m, 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-gla.s.s 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 b.u.t.tercup. 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.

7.

Freda crossed the hall and started up the great staircase, stopping for a moment on each frighteningly polished tread, reaching up for the banister, which was too wide and Elizabethan in style to hold on to properly, more like the coping of a wall than a handrail. It must be nice for Daphne to have a coat of arms, she supposed there it was, at each turn, in the paws of a rampant beast with a lantern on its head. She too had dreamt of that for her daughter, in the beginning, before she knew what she knew. Corley Court was a forbidding place even in the sanctuary of her room the dark panelling and the Gothic fireplace induced a feeling of entrapment, a fear that something impossible was about to be asked of her. She closed the door, crossed the threadbare expanse of crimson carpet, and sat down at the dressing-table, close to tears with her confused relieved unhappy sense of not having said to Sebastian Stokes any of the things she could have said, and had known, in her heart, that she wouldn't.

The one letter she'd shown him, her widow's mite, she'd called it, was mere twaddle, a 'Collins'. She saw his courteous but very quick eye running over it, his turning the page as if there still might be something of interest on the other side, but of course there was not. He'd sat there, like the family doctor, he'd said, though to her he was a figure of daunting importance, toughness and suppleness, someone who spoke every day with Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr Baldwin. He was charming but his charm was the charm of diplomacy, charm designed not only to please but to save time and get things done; it was hardly the unconscious charm of a trusted friend. She had felt very foolish, and the pressure of what she was not going to say drove even the simplest conversation out of her mind. She did say that Cecil had made a terrible mess in his room, and it had sounded petty of her, to say such a thing of a poet and a hero who had won the Military Cross. She alluded, in addition, to his 'liveliness' and the various things he had broken widow's mites, again, pathetic grievances. What she couldn't begin to say was the mess Cecil Valance had made of her children.

She waited a minute and then got up her handbag and opened it inside was a bulging manila envelope torn and folded around a bundle of other letters . . . She couldn't really bear to look at them again. She ought simply to have destroyed them, when she'd found them, during the War. But something had kept her back there was a great bonfire going, all the autumn leaves, she went out and opened it with a fork, a red and grey winking and smouldering core to it, she could have dropped the commonplace-looking packet in without a soul knowing or caring. That was what she told George she had done; but in fact she couldn't do it. Was it reverence, or mere superst.i.tion? They were letters written by a gentleman that surely in itself meant little or nothing; and by a poet, which gave them a better right to immortality, but which needn't have swayed her. Disgusted by her own unresolved confusion, she tugged out the bundle on to the dressing-table and stared at it. Cecil Valance's impatient handwriting had a strange effect on her, even now; for a year and more it had come das.h.i.+ng and tumbling into her house, letters to George, then letters to Daphne, and the b.l.o.o.d.y, b.l.o.o.d.y poem, which she wished had never been written. The letters to Daphne were splendid enough to turn a young girl's head, though Freda hadn't liked their tone, and she could see that Daphne had been frightened by them as much as she was thrilled. Of course she was out of her depth with a man six years older, but then he was out of his depth too: they were horrible posturing letters in which he seemed to be blaming the poor child for something or other that was really his own failing. And yet Freda had not discouraged him it seemed to her now she'd been out of her depth as well. And perhaps, who knew, it would all have turned out all right.

It was the letters to George, hidden at once, destroyed for all the rest of the family knew, mentioned only breezily 'Cess sends his love!': they had turned out to be the unimagined and yet vaguely dreaded thing. There they had lain, in his room, all the time that George was away in the army 'intelligence', planning, other matters she couldn't be told about. Those endless summer evenings at 'Two Acres', just her and Daphne she would drift through the boys' rooms, take down their old school-books, fold and brush their unused clothes, tidy the drawers of the little bureau beside George's bed, all the childish clutter, the batched-up postcards, the letters . . . Without even touching them now, her mind saw certain phrases, saw them twisting dense and snakelike in the heart of the bundle. Well, she wouldn't read them ever again, there was no need to put herself through that. Letters from King's College, Cambridge, from Hamburg, Lubeck, old Germany before the War, Milan; letters of course from this very house. She edged them back into the brown envelope, which tore open a little more and was now next to useless. Then she tidied her hair, made her face look no less worried with a few more dabs of powder, and set off once again down the long landing to Clara's room.

Clara had had her fire made up, and sat beside it, dressed as if ready to be taken somewhere, but without her shoes on: her brown-stockinged legs, which gave her such pain, were propped on a bulging pile of cus.h.i.+ons.

'Have you had your chat?' she said.

'Yes. It was nothing much.'

'Mm, you were very quick,' said Clara, in that half-admiring, half-critical tone that Freda had grown so used to.

She said, 'One doesn't want to waste his time,' in her own murmur of suppressed impatience. 'Have they been looking after you?' She bustled round the room as though doing so herself, then went restlessly to the window. 'Would you like to go outside? I've made enquiries and they've still got Sir Edwin's old bath-chair, if you want it. They can get it out for you.'

'Oh, no, Freda, thank you very much.'

'I'm sure that handsome Scotch boy would be happy to give you a push.'

'No, no, my dear, really!'

If she wouldn't be pushed, in any sense, there was little to be done. Freda knew they both wanted to go home, though Clara obviously couldn't say so, and from Freda it would have been a pitiful admission. She missed her daughter, and loved her grandchildren, but visits to Corley were generally unhappy affairs. Even the c.o.c.ktail hour lost something of its normal promise when c.o.c.ktails themselves had such alarming effects on their host.

'Shall we hear Corinna play the piano,' Clara said, 'before we go?'

'This evening, I think Dudley's promised them.'

'Oh, in that case,' said Clara.

This bedroom, at the end of the house, looked out over an expanse of lawn towards the high red wall of the kitchen garden, beyond which the ridges of greenhouses gleamed in the sun. Not normally a walker, Freda dimly planned a little solitary 'trudge' or 'totter', to calm her feelings though she knew she might well be snared by some chivalrous fellow-guest. She was frightened of Mrs Riley, and undecided on the charm of young Mr Revel Ralph. 'I might go out for a bit, dear,' she said over her shoulder. Clara made a sort of preoccupied grunt, as if too busy getting herself comfortable to take in what her friend was saying. 'Apparently there's a magnolia that has to be seen to be believed.' Now, from the direction of the formal garden, two brown-clad figures came slowly walking, George with his hands behind his back, and Madeleine with hers in the pockets of her mackintosh. Their hands seemed somehow locked away from any mutual use they might have been put to, and although the two of them were busily in conversation, George throwing back his head to lend weight to his p.r.o.nouncements, they looked much more like colleagues than like a couple.

Standing at the window, Freda saw herself already crossing the gra.s.s, and saw for a reckless and inspired moment that having the letters with her she should give them back to George; perhaps that would prove to be the real achievement of this arduous visit. It would be a kind of exorcism, a demon cast out of her at last. Her heart was skipping from the double impact of the thought and the opportunity almost too pressing, with too little s.p.a.ce for reflection and stepping back. And then it was as if she saw the letters hurled furiously in the air, falling and blowing across the lawn between them, trapped underfoot by a suddenly game Louisa, fetched out from beneath the bushes by an agile Sebby Stokes. She remembered what she had always felt, that they couldn't be let out though the feeling now was subtly altered by the momentary vision of release. They were George's letters, and he should have them, but to give them to him after all this time would be to show him that something was live that he had surely thought dead ten years ago.

'Well, I'll get out for a bit, dear,' she said again. Now George and Madeleine had gone. Probably she could tell all this to Clara, who out of her difficult existence had garnered a good deal of wisdom; but in a way it was her wisdom that she feared it might make her look, by contrast, a fool. No one else could possibly be told, since no one keeps other people's secrets, and Daphne in particular must never know of it. Now young Mr Ralph had come strolling into view, in conversation with the Scotch boy himself, who seemed to be leading him towards the walled garden. He had his sketchbook with him, and Freda was struck by the relaxed and friendly way they went along together; of course they were both very young, and Revel Ralph no doubt was anything but stuffy. They disappeared through the door in the wall. The sense that everyone else was doing something filled her with agitation.

Back in her room she put on a hat, and made sure that the letters were safely stowed. It was absurd, but they had become her guilty secret, as they had once been George's. She went down one of the back staircases, which she probably wasn't supposed to, but she felt she would rather run into a housemaid than a fellow-guest. It led to something called the Gentlemen's Lobby, with the smoking-room beyond, and a small door out on to the back drive. She skirted the end of the house, and then the end of the formal garden, which she'd had enough of. She had an idea of getting into the woods for half an hour, before tea. In a minute or two she was under the shade of the trees, big chestnuts already coming into flower, and the limes putting out small brilliant green shoots. She pushed back her hat and looked upward, giddy at the diamonds of sky among the leaves. Then she walked on, still unusually fast, and after a short while, stepping over twigs and beech mast, rather out of breath.

She started to think she shouldn't go too far, and ducked her way out under the edge of the wood into the gra.s.sland of the Park. A long white fence divided the Park from the High Ground, and she drifted along by it for a moment or two in one of those intense un.o.bserved dilemmas as to whether she should try to climb over it; that she was un.o.bserved had first, very casually, to be checked. There were two slender iron rails, the upper at hip height, and a flat-topped post every six feet or so, to hold on to. She rehea.r.s.ed the lifting of her skirt, with another look round, then quickly steadied her walking shoe on the lower rail, while gripping the upper one, but in the same second she knew that of course she couldn't get over it, and she went on to the distant gate, in a fl.u.s.tered pretence of being in no particular hurry.

The High Ground had just been mown, and as soon as Freda had shut the gate behind her, she found the cuttings, still green and damp, were clinging to her shoes. And there they were again, George and Mad, crossing the far end of the enormous lawn, which must have been a good two acres in itself. She felt she had been ambushed by the very thing that she was hoping to avoid; but also perhaps that it was futile to try to avoid it. They kept to themselves, always talking, always walking, Freda sensed no one cared for them much, and George had always been somewhat shy and stiff until (there it was again) Cecil had come on the scene. She had tried not to watch him at lunch, knowing what she knew: this weekend must be distinctly uncomfortable for him; she was surprised in a way that he'd come. Though if he had, in whatever fas.h.i.+on, loved Cecil . . . Now she saw the gleam on his gla.s.ses, his bald brow quite distinctive, they spotted her and said something to each other then George waved. She hurried on for a moment, but no she saw them so rarely . . . she stopped and picked up a black feather, its tip sheared off by the mower, then she turned and strolled slowly towards them, with a frown and smile, and awkward side-glances, and the air of nurturing an amusing remark.

The fact was that this whole business with the letters was kept alive by her own sense of guilt dormant, forgettable, easily slept with for much of the time, but at moments like this crinkling everything she said to him into bright insincerity. She should never have read them; but once she'd found them, taken one from its envelope with a s.h.i.+fty but tender curiosity, and then read its astounding first page, she found she couldn't stop. She wondered now at her own grim curiosity, her need to know the worst when surely she would rather have known nothing. She glanced at George, beaming mildly, fifty yards away, and saw him on the morning she'd confronted him, George in uniform, grieving for his brother, fighting a war. Her own grief must have triggered it, licensed it. And he hadn't known what to do, any more than she had: he was angry with her as he had never been, they were private letters, she had no right, and at the same time he was haggard with shame and horror at his mother knowing what had gone on. 'It was all over,' he said which was obvious, since Cecil was dead 'it had all been over long ago.' And then before the war was out he had proposed to this dreary bluestocking, so that she felt, at her most candid and unhappy moments, that she had condemned him herself to a life of high-minded misery. 'h.e.l.lo! h.e.l.lo!' said George.

Freda raised her chin and grinned at them.

'Enjoying your walk, Mother?' said Madeleine.

'It's been rather lovely' she looked up at them with the raffish twinkle of a parent dwarfed by her children.

'I didn't know you liked walking,' said Madeleine, suspiciously.

Freda said, 'There's a lot you don't know, my dear,' and then looked at her own words with a touch of surprise.

'You've had your little chat with Sebby,' said George.

'Yes, yes' she dismissed it.

'All right?'

'Well, I really had nothing to say.'

George gave a little purse-lipped smile, and gazed around at the woods. 'No, I suppose not.' And then, 'Are you going back to the house?'

'I'm very much ready for a cup of tea.'

'We'll come with you.'

As they walked they looked at the house, and it seemed to Freda they were each thinking of something they might say about it. Their self-consciousness focused on it, with an air of latent amus.e.m.e.nt and concern, but for at least a minute none of them spoke. Freda glanced up at George and wondered if the incident that was gnawing at her self-possession was equally present to him. In the nine years since, it had never once been mentioned; bland evasiveness had slowly a.s.sumed the appearance of natural forgetfulness.

'Oh, have you looked at the tomb?' said Madeleine, as they went through the white gate and into the garden.

'Well, I've seen it before,' said Freda. She disliked the tomb very much for strong but again not quite explicable reasons.

'Quite splendid, isn't it.'

'Yes, it is!'

'I was thinking about poor old Huey,' said George, in this at least chasing her own thoughts.

'Oh, I know . . .'

'We must go, darling,' said George, taking his mother's arm with what felt to her like extravagant forgiveness.

'To France . . . ?'

'We'll go this summer, during the long vac.'

'Well, I'd love that,' said Freda, gripping George to her, then glancing almost shyly at Madeleine. It seemed to her a mystery, another of the great evasions whose nothingness filled her life, that they hadn't been already.

She left them in the hall, and went up to her room, freshly, nearly tearfully, preoccupied with Hubert. Really his death should have put all these other worries in proportion. The heavy ache of loss was quickened by a touch of indignation. She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well. That Huey wasn't clever or beautiful, had never met Lytton Strachey or written a sonnet or climbed anything higher than an apple-tree all this she was somehow forced to acknowledge at each tentative mention of his name to Cecil's mother. She took off her hat, sat down, and attended rather violently to her hair.

She knew it was pointless, heartless, to begrudge Louisa the consolation of having been with Cecil at the end, the aristocratic reach across the Channel that had brought him back, when tens of thousands of others were fated to stay there till doomsday. Daphne said it was the reason the old lady resisted moving out of the big house: she wanted to stay where she could visit her son every day. Freda was picturing Huey, back at 'Two Acres', on his last leave and now the tears welled up and she dropped the comb and fiddled in her sleeve for her handkerchief. In the letters that were sent to her after his death, they had spoken of the wood where he had fallen, trying to take a machine-gun post that was concealed in it: Ivry Wood. Over and over in those weeks she had looked out across her own modest landscape, her own little birch-wood, with a rending sense that Huey would never set foot there again. Almost impossible to grasp, on that first day, that he'd been buried already in France under sh.e.l.l-fire, they said, with a reading from Revelations. Already he'd been put away for ever, out of the air. And whenever she thought of it, and pictured Ivry Wood, it was her own little spinney she saw, for want of anything better, strangely translated to northern France, and Huey running into it, into the desultory spray of the guns.

Later he had been reburied, and she had photographs of the grave, and of the interment itself. A padre in a white surplice, under an umbrella, men firing a salute. Well, now at last George would take her, and Daphne too perhaps, over to France, they would all go, and she would look at it. She had only been abroad once, before the War, when she and Clara made their pilgrimage to Bayreuth, two widows on the s.m.u.tty ferry, the stifling trains with German soldiers singing in the next carriage. The thought of this new visit, of the resolute approach to the place, squeezed at her throat.

8.

When Daphne was getting dressed that evening Dudley strolled in to her room and said, almost in a yawn, that he hoped Mark Gibbons wouldn't take against Revel. 'Oh,' said Daphne, faintly puzzled but more concerned about dinner, and the horrors of the seating-plan, where she felt her skills as a hostess most exposed. 'It seems to me Revel gets on with everyone.' She slithered her pearl-coloured petticoat over her head, and smoothed it down with her palms, pleased to hear his name at such a moment. She would have him sit near, though not next to her. Naturally her mother must sit on Dudley's right, but if Clara was tucked away safely in the middle was it better to have Eva or Madeleine on his left? Daphne thought she might well inflict Madeleine on him. 'Anyway,' she said, 'there's no urgent reason they should meet, is there?' And then it came out that Dudley had asked Mark to dinner, and Flora, and also the Strange-Pagets on the grounds that 'we haven't seen them for ages'.

'Christ, you might have told me!' said Daphne, feeling her colour flare up. 'And the b.l.o.o.d.y S-Ps, of all people . . .' She caught herself in the mirror, helpless in her underwear, her stockinged feet, her panic slightly comic to Dudley in the glinting freedom of the background. First and foremost she thought of the langoustines, already stretched by Revel's arrival.

'Oh, Duffel . . .' said Dudley, frowning a little at the jet studs in his s.h.i.+rt-front. 'Mark's a marvellous painter.'

'Mark may be a b.l.o.o.d.y genius,' said Daphne, hurrying with her dress, 'but he still has to eat.'

Dudley turned to her with that unstable mixture of indulgence and polite bewilderment and mocking distaste that she had come to know and dread and furiously resent. 'Well Flora's a vegetarian, Duffel, remember,' he said: 'just throw her some nuts and an orange and she'll be as happy as a pig in s.h.i.+t.' And he gave her his widest smile, his moist sharp dog-teeth making their old deplorable appeal, but horrible now as his trench language. Daphne thought she had better go down herself and see the cook. It would be one of those ghastly announcements that was all too clearly a plea.

Mark Gibbons, who had painted the large abstract 'prison' in the drawing-room, lived on a farm near Wantage with his half-Danish girlfriend Flora. Daphne liked him a good deal without ceasing to be frightened of him. He and Dudley had met in the army, a strangely intimate locking of opposites, it seemed to Daphne, Mark being a socialist and the son of a shopkeeper. He showed no interest in actually marrying Flora, and very little in dressing for dinner, which was the more immediate worry, with Louisa coming in, and Colonel Fountain, who'd been Cecil's superior officer, driving over from Aldershot. Rattling down the back-stairs two at a time Daphne saw her seating-plan collapse in a jumble of incompatibilities, her husband and mother-in-law like repelling magnets. The Strange-Pagets at least were easier, a dull rather older couple with a lot of money and a country house of their own on the other side of Pusey. Dudley had known Stinker Strange-Paget since boyhood, and was defiantly loyal to him, treating his dim parochial gossip like the wisdom of some gnomic sage.

Sebby Stokes came down first, and Daphne, who'd popped in to the drawing-room for a gin and lemon, was caught for several minutes in distracted conversation with him, a certain warm relief none the less creeping in from the drink. Their earlier chat in the library was a coloured shadow, an attempted intimacy that would never be repeated. She perched on a window-seat, glancing out on to the gravel, where any moment cars would appear. She had done what she could, she must relax. Sebby seemed still to be talking about Cecil, whom she'd forgotten for a moment was the pretext for this whole party. Wasn't this what would happen to all of them, remembrance forgotten in the chaos of other preoccupations? 'I've been reading all the letters your mother-in-law received from Cecil's men.'

'Aren't they splendid!' said Daphne.

'By George, they loved him,' said Sebby, in what she felt was an odd tone. She looked at him, standing stiffly with his gla.s.s and his cigarette, such a sleek and perfect embodiment of how to behave, and again she saw what she had glimpsed that afternoon, that he had loved him, and would do anything for his good name. She said, mildly but mischievously, 'We had splendid letters about my brother too. Though I suppose they're always likely to be splendid, aren't they. No one ever wrote and said, "Captain Valance was a beast." '

'No, indeed . . .' said Sebby, with a twitch of a smile.

'What are you going to call the book, just Poems, I suppose?'

'Or Collected Poems, I think. Louisa favours The Poetical Works of, which your husband feels is too Mrs Hemans.'

'For once I think he's right,' said Daphne. And then there was a warning drone like a plane in the distance and in a moment a brown baker's van, which was Mark and Flo's form of conveyance, came roaring and throbbing down the drive.

'He finds it so useful for his paintings!' Daphne found herself explaining, shouting gaily, and feeling she really wasn't ready for this evening at all. When Mark clambered out from the cab in a full and proper dinner-suit, she felt so relieved that she kissed both George and Madeleine, who had just come in, and were not expecting it. Behind them in the hall was her mother, and then Revel looking at the fireplace while Eva Riley stuck her head out of one of the turret windows. 'Absurd!' she was saying. 'Too sickening!' Well, it was quite a party, it had been set in motion, and Daphne was gamely pretending to drive it it was understandable surely if she felt slightly sick herself as it gathered speed. Her mother said quietly that Clara was very tired, and had asked for supper in her room Daphne felt it was bound to happen, yet a further change to the seating-plan, but she merely told Wilkes, and asked him to sort it out. Then she went and got another gin.

It turned out that Mark knew Eva Riley already, which was a good thing and also vaguely irritating. He called her 'old girl' or 'Eva Brick' in his cheerful, slightly menacing way. This preexisting friends.h.i.+p was put on display, and even exaggerated, in front of the other guests. They had a number of acquaintances in common, none of them known personally to anyone else, and Mark kept up conversation about these fascinating absent people with a certain determination, as if aping some polite convention: 'What's old Romilly up to?' he asked, and then, 'How did you find Stella?'

'Oh, she was on killing form,' said Eva, with her secretive smile, perhaps even a little embarra.s.sed. Mark's painting, hanging so prominently in the room, seemed to encourage him, and somehow represent him, as a challenge, a wild figure several moves ahead of them all.

As on the previous day Dudley had a look of risky high spirits, having wrestled his own party out of the one his wife and his mother had so carefully planned. Even Colonel Fountain's arrival was an occasion for mischief. 'Colonel, you know the General,' said Dudley when he was shown in, which rather threw the old boy for the first minute or two. Daphne had pictured Colonel Fountain as an ebullient figure who liked a drink, but in fact he was a quiet, ascetic-looking man, who'd been deafened in one ear in France, and had trouble with casual conversation. He attached himself courteously to Louisa, and stuck to her, like some old uncle at a children's party, a rout of names he couldn't be sure he'd caught.

Last of all, the Strange-Pagets were delivered by their chauffeur and shown in to the noisy drawing-room, Dudley hailed them histrionically, the party was complete, and just at that moment the door opened again, and there was Nanny with the children, down for their half-hour. This was less than ideal. Daphne saw Nanny looking at Dudley, and Dudley's stare back, the expressionless mask behind which outrage is forming and focusing. There seemed something faintly mutinous mixed in with Nanny's normal servility. It was an evening the children might better have been kept upstairs but by the same token an evening when they specially wanted to come down. Nanny raised her hands and released them into the crowd, and Daphne swooped over to them with a rare rather shameful desire to tidy them away. In these ultra-modern drawing-rooms there was nowhere to hide. They ran in among the legs of the others, looking for affection, or at least attention. Granny Sawle of course was reliable, and Revel talked to children so pleasantly and levelly they might have thought themselves adults. Stinker and Tilda, who had no children, always viewed them with curiosity and a hint of fear or so Daphne felt. Again she remembered she must simply leave them to it.

She talked for a while determinedly to Flo, whom she liked very much, about the forthcoming fair at Fernham, and an exhibition that Mark was having in London, but with a slight sense she was turning her back on other responsibilities. She glanced round: it was all right, Corinna was being charming to the Colonel, Wilfie was discussing the miners' strike with George and Sebby Stokes. She introduced Flo to her mother, and they quickly got on to the Ring; Flo had been last year to Bayreuth, and Daphne watched her mother warm to the unexpected pleasure of the subject. 'I wish you could meet my dear friend Mrs Kalbeck,' she said, 'she's just upstairs! We went to Bayreuth together before the War.' In a moment they were naming singers, Freda doubting them as soon as she said them. 'We had the great thrill of meeting Madame Schumann-Heink,' she said, 'who sang one of the Norns, I think it was.'At which point they all heard a quiet but momentous arpeggio from the piano across the room. And following, but with the accidental quality still of a rehearsal, the maddening little tune that Daphne had been pretending for days to greatly admire. 'Oh, no . . . !' said Dudley, crisply but gaily, like a good sport, over the general noise of the talk. There was an amused, half-distracted turning of heads. Wilfie had gone to stand beside the piano, with his back to the room, tellingly like a child being punished. Madeleine and George, whose special treat this was, stood close by, with the look almost of parents who have sent their own child up on to the stage; but the others had no idea of the plans and promises coming inexorably into play. Louisa had put on a comical sour face, shaking her head, and telling Colonel Fountain in his good ear about how sensitive Sir Edwin was to music. The talk regained confidence, with a certain sense of relief. For forty years, after all, the piano had been untouched, disguised beneath a long-fringed velour shawl, a st.u.r.dy platform for all manner of useful or decorative objects, and if anyone after dinner had uncovered the keys and facetiously picked out a phrase the noise that came forth, from under the heaped-up folios and potted plants and the arena of framed photographs, was so jangled by time and neglect as to discourage any further idea of music. Now, however, Corinna was playing the start of the piece, the misleadingly peaceful prologue . . . 'Not tonight, old girl,' called Dudley from across the room, still humorously, but emphatically, and expecting to be understood he gave Mark a matey grin. Wilfrid had cleared a little s.p.a.ce in front of the piano, asking people in the preoccupied way of some official or commissionaire to stand back. There was a moment of silence, in which it seemed their father's order had been understood, but which Corinna, with a touch of self-righteousness, took as proper expectancy for their performance, and pitched vigorously into 'The Happy Wallaby'. After three bars, Wilfrid, with a look of selfless submission to order and fate, took the first few steps of his dance, which of course involved crouching and then jumping as far forward as he could. The guests s.h.i.+fted back, s.h.i.+elding their drinks, with little cries of friendly alarm, some clearly thinking this shouldn't be allowed to happen. Stinker carried on talking loudly as if he hadn't noticed 'One awfully clever thing he said was . . .' but Dudley had put down his drink and stomped across the room, his face already square and staring with ungovernable emotion. He stood by the piano and said, in fact quietly, 'I said not tonight.'

'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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sociated 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.