The Stranger's Child

  ‘Oh . . .’ she said, with an air of momentary concession. She had strongly drawn black eyebrows which made her look hard to please. ‘Was there something else?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Paul; and feeling he shouldn’t be put in the wrong, ‘He just left me here.’

  ‘Ah . . . !’ said Mrs Keeping, and half-turning she called out, ‘Leslie!’ Mr Keeping appeared at the end of the hall. ‘This young man doesn’t know if he’s been dismissed or not’ – and she stared rather drolly at Paul, as if to say the joke was on everyone but her.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Keeping. ‘This is Paul Bryant. He’s just joined us from Wantage.’

  ‘From Wantage . . . !’ said Mrs Keeping, as if this were droller still.

  ‘We all have to come from somewhere, you know,’ said Mr Keeping.

  Paul had grown up in the mild but untested belief that Wantage was a fine little town. ‘Well, sir, it was good enough for King Alfred,’ he said.

  Mrs Keeping half-allowed the protest, and the joke. ‘Mmm, you’re going back a bit,’ she said. Though something else had occurred to her. She set her head on one side and frowned at his shoulders, his posture. ‘How strong are you?’ she said.

  ‘Well, reasonably,’ said Paul, confused by the scrutiny. ‘Yes, I suppose . . .’

  ‘Then I think I can use you. Come through,’ a tiny glow of cajolement now in her tone.

  ‘Paul may have other plans, darling,’ said Mr Keeping, but in easy surrender to his wife.

  ‘I shan’t need him for long.’

  ‘I’ve certainly got a couple of minutes,’ said Paul.

  They went down the hall and into the room at the end. ‘I don’t want my husband risking his back,’ said Mrs Keeping. The sitting-room was densely furnished, large easy-chairs and sofas arm to arm on a thick gold carpet, nests of tables, standard-lamps, and a pair of surprising Victorian portraits, very large in the room, a woman in red and a man in black, looking out over the stereogram and the teak TV cabinet that flanked the fireplace. On top of the TV were several framed photos, in which Paul made out two boys, surely Julian and John, in yachting gear. They stepped out through the open french windows on to a wide patio. ‘This is Mr Bryant,’ said Mrs Keeping. ‘You can leave your briefcase there.’

  ‘Oh . . . right . . .’ said Paul, nodding at the two females who were sitting in deckchairs. They were identified as ‘My mother, Mrs Jacobs’ – this was the old lady in the straw hat, whom he’d already seen – and ‘Jenny Ralph . . . my niece, yes, my half-brother’s daughter!’ as if she’d just worked it out for the first time. Paul himself only pretended to do so, nodded again and murmured hello as he sidled past. Jenny Ralph was a frowning dark-haired girl a bit younger than he was, with a book and a notepad on her knee – he felt himself sidestepping some sulky challenge she seemed to throw out.

  The problem was a stone trough on the far side of the lawn, which had somehow slipped or been pushed off one of the two squat blocks it sat on, earth strewn on the grass and a clump of disoriented wallflowers, orangey-black, leaning out and up. ‘I jolly well hope you can shift it,’ said Mrs Keeping, with a return of her unjolly tone, almost as though Paul had pushed it over himself. ‘I don’t want it falling on Roger,’ she said.

  Paul stooped down and gave the trough a preliminary heave. The only effect of this was to rock it very slightly on the skewed axis of the other block. ‘You don’t want to bring the whole thing down,’ said Mrs Keeping. She stood several yards away, perhaps to be clear of any such accident.

  ‘No . . .’ said Paul; and then, ‘It’s quite heavy actually, isn’t it.’

  ‘You’d stand a better chance with your jacket off.’

  Paul obeyed, and seeing that Mrs Keeping showed no intention of taking the jacket from him hung it on a lichenous garden seat nearby. Without the jacket he felt even less able, his skinny frame more exposed. ‘Right!’ he said, and laughed rather fatuously. His hostess, as he tried to think of her, gave him a provisional sort of smile. He worked his hands in under the near corner of the trough, where it lay on the grass, but after a couple of hefts in the shuddering manner of a caber-tosser he could only raise it an inch and let it down again heavily just where it had been. He shook his head, and glanced across at the figures on the patio thirty yards off. Mr Keeping had joined his mother-in-law and niece, and they were gazing generally in his direction as they talked but, perhaps from politeness, not showing any detailed interest. He felt simultaneously important and completely insignificant.

  ‘You’re going to have to empty it, you know,’ said Mrs Keeping, as though Paul had been actively refusing to do this.

  He saw a certain stoical humour was going to be necessary – a smiling surrender of his time and plans. ‘Have you got a spade, please?’ he said.

  ‘You’ll need something to put the soil on, of course. And do be careful with my wallflowers, won’t you,’ she said, with a hint of graciousness now they’d come to such niceties. ‘Do you know, I’m going to get that girl involved.’

  ‘Oh, I think I can manage . . .’ said Paul.

  ‘It will do her absolutely no harm,’ said Mrs Keeping. ‘She’s going up to Oxford next term and she does nothing but sit and read. Her parents are in Malaya, which is why she’s stuck with us’ – with a fairly clear suggestion she felt they were stuck with her. She moved off across the lawn, chin raised already, calling out.

  Jenny Ralph took Paul off to the far side of the garden, and through a rustic arch into the sunless corner that sheltered the compost-heap and a cobweb-windowed shed. At first she treated him with the nervous snootiness of a child to an unknown servant. ‘You should find whatever you need in there,’ she said, watching him edge in among the clutter of the shed. The mower blocked the way, its bin caked at the rim with dung-like clots of dried grass. He reached over for a spade and kicked a loosely propped stack of canes that spilled and clattered ungraspably in every direction. There was a stifling smell of creosote and two-stroke fuel. ‘It’s rather hell in there,’ said Jenny from outside. She had a notably posh voice, but casual where her aunt was crisp. The accent was more striking, more revealing, in a young person. She sounded mildly fed up with it, but with no real intention of abandoning it.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ Paul called back. He covered the awkwardness he felt with a girl in a brisk bit of business, passing out the spade, some old plastic sacks – he must be five or six years older than her, but the advantage felt frail. Her poor skin and the oily shine of her dark curly hair were signs of the troubles he’d hardly emerged from himself. The fact that she wasn’t especially pretty, though in some ways a relief, seemed also to put some subtly chivalrous pressure on him. He emerged, a trowel in his raised hand, just a little satirical.

  ‘I don’t suppose you want to be doing this for a minute,’ Jenny said, with a slyly commiserating smile. ‘I’m afraid they’re always getting people involved.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said Paul.

  ‘You know it’s a test. Aunt Corinna’s always testing people, she can’t help it. I’ve seen it masses of times. I don’t just mean on the piano, either.’

  ‘Oh, have you?’ said Paul, amused by her frankness, which seemed original and upper-class too. He looked out nervously as they came on to the lawn. Aunt Corinna was in the far corner, inspecting a sagging trellis and, quite possibly, lining up further tasks or tests for him. Beside her a large weeping beech-tree spread awkwardly but romantically, a table sheltered under its skirts.

  ‘You know she should have been a concert pianist. That’s what everyone says, at least; I don’t know if it’s actually true. I mean anyone can say they should have been something. Anyway now she teaches the piano. She gets fantastic results, of course, though you can see the children are simply terrified of her. Julian says she’s a sadist,’ she said, a touch self-consciously.

  ‘Oh . . . !’ said Paul, with a frown and disparaging laugh and then, from the mention of anything taboo, a sure-fire, searchin
g blush. Sometimes they ebbed unnoticed, sometimes kept coming, self-compounding. He stooped and half-hid himself spreading the plastic sacks on the grass. ‘So Julian’s her younger son,’ he said, still with his back to her.

  ‘Oh, John wouldn’t say that, he’s far too square.’

  ‘So Julian isn’t square . . . ?’

  ‘What’s Julian? Julian’s sort of . . . elliptical.’ They both laughed. ‘Have I embarrassed you?’ said Jenny.

  ‘Not at all,’ said Paul, recovering. ‘The whole of your family’s new to me, you see. I’m from Wantage.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Jenny – as if this was in fact a bit of a drawback. ‘Well, they’re rather a nightmare to sort out . . . the old lady you met over there is my grandmother.’

  ‘You mean Mrs Jacobs?’

  ‘Yes, she married again when my father was quite small. She’s been married three times.’

  ‘Goodness.’

  ‘I know . . . She’s about to be seventy, and we’re going to have a huge enormous party.’

  Paul started gingerly unearthing the plants from the trough – they trembled under this further assault on their dignity. He stood them, in their trailing tangle of earth and roots, on the old Fisons sack. Soft clots of some kind of manure, loosely forked into the soil, were still slightly slimy. ‘I hope I’m doing this right,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Jenny, who like the others was watching but not exactly paying attention.

  ‘So your aunt said you’re going up to Oxford.’ He tried to disguise his envy, if that’s what it was, in a genial avuncular tone.

  ‘Did she. Yes, I am.’

  ‘What are you going to study?’

  ‘I’m reading French at St Anne’s.’ She made it sound beautifully exclusive, the rich simplicity of the proper nouns. He had taken his mother all round Oxford, gaping at the colleges, as a kind of masochistic treat for both of them before he went off to Loughborough to train for the bank; but they hadn’t bothered with the women’s colleges. ‘Julian’s applying to Univ this year.’

  ‘Mm, so you might be there together.’

  ‘Which would be rather fab,’ said Jenny.

  When he’d dug out all the earth he rocked the trough with both hands and it moved more readily. Still, he laughed at the second looming failure. ‘Here goes,’ he said, and squatted down again. Over the lawn he saw Mrs Keeping bearing down, with her keen sense of timing. With a violent force that in the moment itself seemed almost comical he heaved up the great stone object and with a stifled shout he lodged it on its other block, on the edge of it at least, but the job was done. ‘Aha!’ said Mrs Keeping, ‘we’re getting there at last,’ and as he held it steady and smiled almost devotedly up at her he felt it turn under his hand; if he hadn’t jumped back in the second it slipped and fell it would have crushed his foot – the block underneath had lurched over, and now the trough itself, massive and unmoving, lay sideways on the grass. ‘Oh god, are you all right?’ said Jenny, gripping his arm with a welcome note of hysteria. Mrs Keeping herself made a kind of panting noise. ‘Now we’re jiggered,’ she said. ‘Oh look,’ said Jenny, ‘your hand’s bleeding.’ How it had happened he didn’t know, and it was only now she said it that it began to hurt, a dull deep pang in the ball of the thumb and needle-like stinging of the grazed flesh. He supposed the pain had been held in check by the knowledge, so far his alone, that the trough had cracked in two.

  Ten minutes later he found himself – clown, hero, victim, he couldn’t tell which – in a low garden chair with a large gin-and-tonic in his right hand. His left hand was impressively bandaged, the fingers hard to move in their tight sheath. Mrs Keeping, with a smirk of remorse, had bandaged it herself, the remorse turning steadily more aggressive as the long strip of stuff was bound tighter and tighter. Now the family glanced at his hand with concern and regret and a touch of self-satisfaction. Paul, tongue-tied, reached out to scratch Roger the Jack Russell, who had come round to the back of the house and was sitting panting in one of the broad purple cushions of aubrietia which spread over the flagstones. Mr Keeping was in the drawing-room, fixing drinks for the others; he called out through the french windows, ‘Your usual, darling?’

  ‘Absolutely!’ said Mrs Keeping, with a tight little laugh and shake of the head, as if to say she’d earned it. She perched on the wooden bench, and tore at the cellophane on a packet of Kensitas.

  ‘And what about Daphne?’

  ‘Gin and It!’ shouted Mrs Jacobs, as if taking part in a game.

  ‘Large one?’

  ‘Vast!’

  Paul and Jenny laughed at this, but Mrs Keeping gave a barely amused grunt. Mrs Jacobs was sitting facing Paul, and between them was a low metal-framed table with a mosaic top. Over the rim of the table he had, if he wanted it, a direct view into the beige-coloured mysteries of her underwear. In her shapeless sundress and wide floppy hat she had an air of collapse, but her expression was friendly and alert, if ready, with age and perhaps a degree of deafness, to let one or two things slip past her. She wore large glasses with clear lower rims and tops like tawny eyebrows. When her drink was set in front of her on the mosaic table, she gave it a keen but illusionless smile, as if to say she knew what would become of it. Her smile showed surprisingly brown teeth – a smoker’s smile that went with the smoky catch in her voice. ‘Well, cheers!’

  ‘Cheerio . . .’ Mr Keeping sat down, still in his bank manager’s suit, which made his own large g-and-t look slightly surreal.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Jenny.

  ‘What are you drinking, child?’ said Mrs Jacobs.

  ‘Oh, cider, Granny . . .’

  ‘I didn’t know you liked cider.’

  ‘Well, I don’t particularly, but I’m not allowed spirits yet, and one has to get drunk on something, doesn’t one.’

  ‘I suppose one does . . .’ said Mrs Jacobs, as if weighing up a completely new theory.

  ‘Paul’s just started at the bank this week, Daphne,’ said Mr Keeping. ‘He’s joined us from Wantage.’

  ‘Oh, I love Wantage,’ said Mrs Jacobs; and after a moment, ‘In fact I once ran away to Wantage.’

  ‘Oh, Mother, really,’ said Mrs Keeping.

  ‘Just for a night or two, when your father was being especially beastly.’ Paul had never heard anyone speak like this, and couldn’t say at first if it was real or theatrical, truly sophisticated or simply embarrassing. He glanced at Mrs Keeping, who was smiling tightly and batting her eyelids with contained impatience. ‘I took you and Wilfie under my wing and drove like hell to Wantage. We stayed with Mark for a day or two. Mark Gibbons, you know,’ she said to Paul, ‘the marvellous painter. We stayed with him till the heat died down.’

  ‘Anyway,’ muttered Mrs Keeping, drawing on her cigarette.

  ‘We did, darling. You’re probably too young to remember.’ She sounded slightly wounded, but used to being so.

  ‘You didn’t know how to drive, Mother,’ Mrs Keeping went on brightly, but unable to stop herself.

  ‘Of course I could drive . . .’

  Mrs Keeping blew out smoke with a hard humorous expression. ‘We needn’t bore Mr Bryant with our family nonsense,’ she said.

  Paul, in the first nice giddiness of a very strong gin-and-tonic, smiled, ducked his head, showed he didn’t mind the mild bewilderment at unexplained names and facts. As often with older people he was both bored and unaccountably involved at the same time. ‘No, no,’ he said, and grinned at Mr Keeping, who surveyed the whole scene with quizzical composure. The evening had swollen to a shape entirely unimagined an hour before.

  ‘You see, I think our family is jolly interesting,’ said Mrs Jacobs. ‘I think you underestimate its interest. You should take more pride in it.’ She reached down beside her chair and brought up her bag, the large tapestry bag with wooden jaws that Paul had seen earlier. She started going through it.

  Mrs Keeping sighed and was more conciliatory. ‘Well, I am proud of one or two of them, Mother
, you know that very well. Cecil’s not exactly my cup of tea, but my father, for all his . . . oddities, has moments of genius.’

  ‘Well, he’s certainly very clever,’ said Mrs Jacobs, brows lightly furrowed over her bag. Paul had the impression of a small-scale chaos of papers, powder compacts, glasses cases, pills. She stopped for a moment and looked up at him, her hand in the bag marking her place. ‘Jenny’s grandfather was a marvellous painter, too. You may have heard of him, Revel Ralph? No . . . he was, well, he was very different from Mark Gibbons. I suppose you’d say more decorative.’

  ‘I think Mark’s a bit over the hill, Granny,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Well, possibly, my dear, since he’s almost as old as me.’ Paul knew how old this was, of course, but didn’t know if it was a secret. ‘You probably think Revel’s hopelessly old hat too.’

  Jenny made a moue and raised her eyebrows as if to say she could reach her own negative judgements. ‘No, I like Grandpa’s things. I find them rather piquant, actually. Particularly the late ones.’ Again Paul was amused and impressed by the confidence of her views. She spoke with a small frown as if she was at Oxford already. He said, ‘Is he . . . not still alive?’

  ‘He was killed in the War,’ said Mrs Keeping, with a quick shake of the head, stubbing out her cigarette.

  ‘Well, he was extraordinarily brave,’ said Mrs Jacobs. ‘He had two tanks blown up under him, and he was running to reach a third one when a shell got him.’ Her cigarette was in one hand, her lighter in the other, but she went on, before anyone else could, ‘He was a hero, actually. He got a posthumous gong, you know . . .’

  ‘What became of that, Granny?’ said Jenny in a more docile tone.

  ‘Oh, I have it,’ said Mrs Jacobs, quickly puffing, ‘of course I have it.’ Paul wasn’t clear whom her indignation was aimed at. She gave him a look as if they were united against the others. ‘You know, people think he was flighty and gay and what-have-you, but in fact he could be quite fearless.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘I’m sure . . .’ slightly mesmerized by her and already an admirer of this man he had never heard of a minute ago.