‘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 . . . Petit 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-shit 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 embarrassment, 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 pavé, 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 cluster of bottles with an ice-bucket, phials of Tabasco and bitters, all the paraphernalia of the cocktail 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 Dick 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 nobody 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?’
‘You must know a lot of people whose lives have been written.’
‘Yes, or they turn up in someone else’s, you know.’
‘Like you, yourself, indeed, Mummy!’ said Wilfrid.
‘The thing is, they all get it wrong.’ She’d now got back into that irritable mood that she clearly enjoyed.
‘The best ones don’t, perhaps,’ said Paul.
‘They take against people,’ said Daphne, ‘or someone they talk to bears a grudge, and tells them things that aren’t right. And they put it all in as if it was gospel!’ This was obviously meant as a warning, but was said as if it had completely slipped her mind that he was writing a biography himself. She glowed, chin tucked in, eyes turned on him but, as he had to remind himself, barely seeing him; though a tremor of contact seemed to pass between them through the quivering heat
of the electric fire.
‘Well . . . !’ Paul paused respectfully. The first rush of the gin seemed to present him with a view of all the things it was in his grasp to ask her, the numerous doubts and rumours and aspersions he had heard, about her and her family. Did she have any idea what had gone on between George and Cecil, for instance? Did Wilfrid himself know the theory that his sister was Cecil’s child? He had to tread carefully, but he saw more clearly than ever that the writer of a life didn’t only write about the past, and that the secrets he dealt in might have all kinds of consequences in other lives, in years to come. With Wilfrid present, knocking back an orange squash, he could hardly say or ask anything intimate; though Daphne too was more open and cheerful after a drink – it might have been worth trying.
Still, something warned Paul not to accept a second gin, and at seven o’clock he asked if he could call a taxi. Daphne smiled firmly at this, and Wilfrid said he’d be happy to drive him into Worcester in the Renault.
‘I really don’t want to make you turn out at night,’ Paul said, his courteous demurral covering a natural nervousness about the car as well as the driver.
‘Oh, I like to take her out for a spin,’ said Wilfrid, so that for a moment Paul thought Daphne was coming too. ‘It’s not good for her just to . . . stand in the drive from one week to the next.’
Daphne stood up, and hanging on to the large oak chest got across the room with a new air of warmth and enthusiasm. ‘Where do you live?’ she said, almost as if thinking of a return visit.
‘I live in Tooting Graveney.’
‘Oh, yes . . . Is that near Oxford?’
‘Not really, no . . . It’s near Streatham.’
‘Streatham, oh!’ – even this seemed rather a lark.
They now shook hands. ‘Well, thank you so much.’ It was perhaps a moment to call her Daphne, but he held off till their second session. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, same time.’
Paul wondered afterwards if it was a true misunderstanding or a bit of Dudleyesque fooling. She halted by the door into the hall, head cocked in confusion. ‘Oh, are you coming back?’ she said.
‘Oh . . . well’ – Paul gasped. ‘I think that was . . . what we agreed!’ He’d got nothing out of her today, but was resignedly treating it as a warm-up for the real explorations the following afternoon.
‘What are we doing tomorrow, Wilfrid?’
‘I should be surprised if we were doing anything very much,’ said Wilfrid, in a way that made Paul wonder whether all his patient simplicities weren’t perhaps a very cool kind of sarcasm.
In the Renault it was rather as if a child drove an adult, both of them pretending that it wasn’t worrying or surprising. It emerged that the dip-switch was broken, so that they had either to crawl along on side-lights, the hedges looming dimly above them, or to be flashed at by on-coming motorists blinded by the headlights on full beam. Wilfrid coped with both things with his usual whimsical patience. Paul didn’t want to distract him, but when they got on to the main road he said, ‘I hope I’m not tiring your mother.’
‘I think she’s enjoying it,’ Wilfrid said; and with a glance in the mirror, as if to check she wasn’t there, ‘She likes telling a story.’
Paul very much wished she would tell him a story. He said, ‘I’m afraid it was all so long ago.’
‘There are things she won’t talk about . . . I hope we can trust you on that,’ said Wilfrid, with an unexpected note of solidarity after his earlier grumbling about her.
‘Well . . .’ – Paul was torn between the discretion just requested of him and the wish to ask Wilfrid what he was talking about. ‘I obviously don’t want to say anything that would upset her – or any of the family.’ Might Wilfrid himself tell him things? Paul had no idea what he was capable of, mentally. He clearly loved his mother and more or less hated his father, but he might not be the ally Paul needed for his further prying into the dealings of the Sawles and Valances. If Corinna was really Cecil’s daughter, then Dudley’s shocking coolness towards her might have some deeper cause.
‘I don’t think you’re married, are you?’ Wilfrid asked, peering forward over the wheel into the muddled glare on the edge of Worcester.
‘No, I’m not . . .’
‘No, Mother thought not.’
‘Ah, yes . . . well, hmm.’
‘Poor old Worcester,’ said Wilfrid a minute later, as the car swerved through a sort of urban motorway right next to the Cathedral; up above, too close to see properly, reared floodlit masonry, the great Gothic tower. ‘How could they have butchered the old place like this?’ Paul heard this as a catch-phrase, saw mother and son on their trips into town coming out with it each time. ‘Right next to the Cathedral,’ said Wilfrid, craning out to encourage Paul to do the same, while the car wandered over into the fast lane – there was a massive blast on a horn, a lit truck as tall as the tower screeching behind them, then thundering past.
Turning left, and then passing staunchly through a No Entry sign, they travelled the length of a one-way street in the wrong direction, Wilfrid mildly offended by the rudeness of on-coming drivers, turned another corner, and there they were outside the front door of the Feathers. ‘Amazing,’ said Paul.
‘I know this old town backwards,’ said Wilfrid.
‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,’ said Paul, opening the door.
‘Shall I pick you up?’ said Wilfrid, with just a hint of breathlessness, Paul thought, a glimpse of excitement at having this visitor in their lives. But Paul insisted he was perfectly happy to get a Cathedral. He stood and watched as Wilfrid drove off into the night.
9
Daphne followed her regime as usual that evening – there was the hot milk, and then the tiny glass of cherry brandy, to take the sickening sleepy taste away. Her sleeping pill itself was swallowed with the last cooled inch of the milk, and after that a pleasant certainty that the day was wound up suffused her, well before the physical surrender to temazepam. Tonight the cherry brandy seemed to celebrate the fact. She said, ‘What time is he coming back?’ just to have it confirmed that it wasn’t till after lunch. Wilfrid started on the film that followed the News, but her macular thing made the telly both boring and upsetting. So she left him to it, going out of the room with a passing pat at his arm or shoulder, and made her way to the other end (in so far as Olga had another end) of the house.
Book at Bedtime this week was the autobiography of a woman – she couldn’t remember her name, or what exactly she’d been up to in Kenya last night when sleep had come with just enough warning for her to switch off the radio and the bedside light. On the dressing-table, an awful cheap white and gilt thing, stood the photographs she never really looked at, but she peered at them now, in her sidelong way, as she smeared on her face cream. Their interest seemed enhanced after the visit from the young man, and she was glad he hadn’t seen them. The one of her with Corinna and Wilfrid by the fishpond at Corley was her favourite – so small but clear: she turned it to the light with a creamy thumb. Who had taken it, she wondered? . . . The photo, known by heart, was the proof of an occasion she couldn’t remember at all. The Beaton photo of Revel in uniform was, pleasingly, almost famous: other portraits from the same session had appeared in books, one of them in her own book, but this exact photograph, with its momentary drop of the pose, the mischievous tongue-tip on the upper lip, was hers alone. A pictorial virtue, of the kind that Revel himself had taught her to understand, had been made of the hideous great-coat. His lean head and fresh-cropped poll were framed by the upturned collar – he looked like some immensely wicked schoolboy, though she knew if you looked closely you could see the fine lines round the eyes and the mouth that Beaton had touched out in the published images.
She woke in the dark out of dreams of her own mother, very nearly a nightmare; it was wartime and she was searching for her, going in and out of shops and cafés asking if anyone had seen her. Daphne never remembered her dreams, but even so she felt sure she had never dreamt a
bout her mother before – she was a novelty, an intruder! It was bracing, disconcerting, amusing even, once she had felt for the switch at the neck of the lamp, and squinted at the time, and had a small drink of water. Freda had died in 1940, so the Blitz setting made almost too much sense. And no doubt talking to the young man, trying to cope with all his silly and rather unpleasant questions, had brought her back. In talking, she had only touched on her mother, whose actual presence in 1913 she could no longer see at all, but that must have been enough to set the old girl going, as if greedy for more attention. Daphne kept the light on for a while longer, with a barely conscious sense that in childhood she would have done the same, longing for her mother but too proud to call for her.
In the dark again she found she was at the tipping-point, relief at the closing-down of yesterday was ebbing irrecoverably, and already the dread of tomorrow (which of course was already today) was thickening like regret around her heart. Why on earth had she said he could come back? Why had she let him come at all, after that idiotic condescending piece about her book in the Listener, or perhaps the New Statesman? He was only pretending to be a friend – something no interviewer, probably, had ever been. Paul Bryant . . . he was like some little wire-haired ratter, with his long nose and his tweed jacket and his bloody-minded way of going at things. Daphne turned over in a spasm of confused annoyance, at him and at herself. She didn’t know what was worse, the genial vague questions or the stern particular ones. He called him Cecil all the time, not as if he’d known him, exactly, but as if he could help him. ‘What was Cecil like?’ – what a stupid question . . . ‘When you say in your book he made love to you, what happened exactly?’ She’d said ‘Pass!’ to that one, rather good, as if she were on Mastermind. She thought tomorrow she would just say ‘Pass!’ to everything.