‘Forgive me for one moment,’ Sebby said, turning to the table and starting to search through the pile of handwritten things. Daphne glimpsed her own letters from Cecil, which she had also dutifully surrendered – again she didn’t want to think about them. She looked at his stooped back and then at the long dim room beyond him. Though she was, as Eva had said, a reader, she had never exactly taken to the library – like Dudley’s study, which she never entered, it was a part of the house outside her sway. Sometimes she came in to look for a book, a novel from the great leather sets of Trollope or Dickens, or an old bound volume of Punch for Wilfie to work out the cartoons, but she couldn’t quite shake off the feeling of being a visitor, as if in a public library, with rules and fines. As the scene of her mother-in-law’s now ‘famous’ book tests, too, it had an unhappy air. Of these Sebby probably knew nothing, but to her the room was tainted by earlier attempts to contact Cecil – all nonsense, of course, as she and Eva agreed, but like much nonsense not entirely easy to dismiss.
Sebby sat down, on the same side of the table as she was, and again with an evident awareness of the niceties, she half his age, but a titled lady, he far more clever, a distinguished guest who’d been asked to perform a peculiar service for his hosts. ‘I hope this isn’t distressing for you,’ he said.
‘Oh, not at all,’ said Daphne graciously, her smile expressing a mild amazement at the thought that perhaps it should be. She saw Sebby’s own undecided glance. He said,
‘Dear Cecil aroused keen feelings in many of those who crossed his path.’
‘Indeed he did . . .’
‘And you would seem, from the letters you’ve so generously shared with me, to have had a similar effect on him.’
‘I know, isn’t it awful,’ said Daphne.
‘Hah . . .’ Sebby again unsure of her. He turned to pick up a clutch of the letters. She hadn’t been able to read them again herself, out of a strong compound embarrassment at everything they said about both of them. ‘There are beautiful passages – I sat up late with them last night, in my room.’ He smiled mildly as he turned over the small folded pages, recreating his own pleasure. Daphne saw him propped up in the very grand bed in the Garnet Room and handling these papers with a mixture of eagerness and regret. He was used to dealing with confidential matters, though not as a rule perhaps the amorous declarations of excitable young men. He hesitated, looked up at her, and started reading, with an affectionate expression: ‘ “The moon tonight, dear child, I suppose shines as bright on Stanmore as it does on Mme Collet’s vegetable garden and on the very long nose of the adjutant, who is snoring enough to wake the Hun on the far side of the room. Are you too snoring – do you snore, child? – or do you lie awake and think of your poor dirty Cecil far away? He is much in need of his Daphne’s kind words and . . .” ’ – Sebby petered out discreetly at the slither into intimacy. ‘Delightful, isn’t it?’
‘Oh . . . yes . . . I don’t remember,’ said Daphne half-turning her head to see. ‘The ones from France are a bit better, aren’t they?’
‘I found them most touching,’ said Sebby. ‘I have letters of my own from him, two or three . . . but these strike quite another tone.’
‘He had something to write about,’ said Daphne.
‘He had a great deal to write about,’ said Sebby, with a quick smile of courteous reproof. He looked through a few more letters, while Daphne wondered if she could possibly explain her feelings, even had she wanted to; she felt she would have to understand them first, and this unnatural little chat was hardly going to help her to do that. What she felt then; and what she felt now; and what she felt now about what she felt then: it wasn’t remotely easy to say. Sebby was every inch the bachelor – his intuitions about a young girl’s first love and about Cecil himself as a lover were unlikely to be worth much. Cecil’s way of being in love with her was alternately to berate her and to berate himself: there wasn’t much fun in it, for all his famed high spirits. Yet he always seemed happy when away from her (which was most of the time) and she had sensed more and more how much he enjoyed the absences he was always deploring. The War when it came was an absolute godsend. Sebby said, ‘Tell me if I am being too inquisitive, but I feel it will help me to a clearer vision of what might have been. Here’s the letter, what is it, June 1916, “Tell me, Daphne, will you be my widow?” ’
‘Oh, yes . . .’ She coloured slightly.
‘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 furnishing 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 embarrassments, was a mere charade. He picked up the autograph album, 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-glass 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 buttercup. 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 superstition? 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 dashing and tumbling into her house, letters to George, then letters to Daphne, and the bloody, bloody 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, Lübeck, 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 cushions.
‘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 cocktail hour lost something of its normal promise when cocktails 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 pronouncements, they looked much more like colleagues than like a couple.
Standing at the window, Freda saw herself already crossing the grass, 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 space 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 le
t 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.