The Stranger's Child

  And Robin, too – there was a good deal of Robin this and that. She couldn’t think what he meant by sending him, recommending him; though then a shadowy understanding, grim, frivolous, almost wordless – the old thing that she didn’t even picture – turned over and after a minute lay down again at the side of her mind. As well as which, there was something else, which maybe was actually a blessing in its way, that for quite long stretches of the conversation young Paul Bryant had clearly not been listening to a word she said. He thought she couldn’t see him at all, reading something while she talked; then he hurried her along, or he came in suddenly with some completely irrelevant other thing. Maybe he thought he knew all the answers already, but in that case why ask questions? Of course he had it all on his blasted tape-recorder, but that didn’t exempt him from the normal courtesies. She thought in the morning she would ring up Robin at the office and give him a very hard time about it.

  She turned over once more and settled with a spasm of self-righteousness; and was on the very edge of sleep again when the obvious idea that she could put Paul Bryant off altogether made her suddenly and beautifully alert. Wilfrid had taken him back to the Feathers, that fearful dump – she was glad he was staying there. He seemed to think it was quite the thing! Only two stars, he’d said, but very comfortable . . . She’d get her son to ring up for her first thing in the morning. She lay there, half-plotting, half-drowsing, imagining it, the afternoon without him, freedom tinged, but not irreparably spoilt, by guilt. She was pretty sure she had said he could come twice, and besides he had come from London specially. But why should she be put upon, at the age of eighty-three? She wasn’t at all well, she was having a lot of trouble with her eyes . . . She really mustn’t worry about it. He’d been through all Cecil’s letters to her, which he claimed were manipulative and self-pitying – perfectly true, perhaps, but then what more did he want from her? He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh. And she felt that if she did, Paul Bryant was hardly the person she would want to share it with.

  Daphne was supposed to have a good memory, and this reputation sustained her uneasily in face of the thousands of things she couldn’t remember. People had been amazed by what she’d dredged up for her book, but much of it, as she’d nearly admitted to Paul Bryant, was – not fiction, which one really mustn’t do about actual people, but a sort of poetical reconstruction. The fact was that all the interesting and decisive things in her adult life had happened when she was more or less tight: she had little recall of anything that occurred after about 6.45, and the blur of the evenings, for the past sixty years and more, had leaked into the days as well. Her first problem, in doing her book, had been to recall what anyone said; in fact she had made up all the conversations, based (if one was strictly truthful) on odd words the person almost certainly had said, and within about five, or at the outside ten, years of the incident recorded. Was this just her failing? Now and then people gave her the most astonishing reports of what she had said, drolleries they would never forget, and rather gratifying to her – though perhaps these should be treated with comparable suspicion? Sometimes she knew for sure that they were mixing her up with someone else. She had probably taken too long with her memoirs. Basil had encouraged her, told her quite freely to write all about Revel, and Dudley before him, ‘significant figures!’ he’d said, self-mockingly. But it had taken thirty years to bring it off, over which time she’d naturally forgotten a great deal that she’d known very well when she started out. If she’d kept a diary it would have been different, but she never had, and her experience as a memoirist, if typical, couldn’t help but throw the most worrying light over half the memoirs that were written. Certain of her incidents were tied indubitably to Berkshire or Chelsea, but a host of others took place against a general-purpose scenery, as in some repertory theatre, of drinks-tray and mirrors and chintz-covered sofas, blending all social life into one staggeringly extended run.

  She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books about music and art – she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were a thing people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle: looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene: a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the streets outside – a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.

  She woke to find grey light spreading above the curtains, and made a wary assessment of the time. These early wakings were anxious countings of loss and gain – was it late enough not to mind being woken? Might it still be early enough to lay a presentable claim on more sleep? With the coming on of spring one was more defenceless. Five-fifty: not too bad. And as soon as she wondered about whether she had to go to the loo she found she did. Out of bed, into slippers, dressing-gown on over pyjamas – she was glad she couldn’t see herself in the mirror as more than a blurred bundle. Light on, out past Wilfrid’s door, the click of the loose parquet, but it wouldn’t wake him. He had the large capacity for sleep of a child. She had a picture, not much changed in fifty years, of his head on the pillow, and nothing ever happening to him, at least that she knew of. And now there was this Birgit, with her shadowy plans. Poor Wilfrid was so naïve that he couldn’t see the woman for the fortune-hunter she was – and what a fortune! . . . Daphne tutted as she groped her way through the shadowy cupboard in which the wash-basin and lavatory were like surreal intrusions in a mountain of rubbish.

  In the morning, bright and early, Lady Caroline Messent rang to invite her to tea. The phone at Olga was fixed to the kitchen wall, Caroline perhaps having pictured Olga herself as habitually in that room, and standing more or less to attention when she spoke to her. ‘I can’t, my dear,’ said Daphne, ‘I’ve got this young man coming back.’

  ‘Oh, do put him off,’ said Caroline in her droll scurry of a voice. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He’s called – he’s interrogating me, I’m like a prisoner in my own home.’

  ‘Darling . . .’ said Caroline, allowing that for the present at least it was Daphne’s home. ‘I wouldn’t stand for it. Is he from the gas board?’

  ‘Oh, much worse.’ Daphne steadied herself against the worktop which she could dimly see was a dangerous muddle of dirty dishes, half-empty bottles and pill-packets. ‘He turned up yesterday – he’s like the Kleeneze man.’

  ‘You mean hawking?’

  ‘He says I met him at Corinna and Leslie’s, but I have absolutely no recollection of it.’

  ‘Oh, I see . . .’ said Caroline, as if now siding slightly with the intruder. ‘But what does he want?’

  Daphne sighed heavily. ‘Smut, essentially.’

  ‘Smut?’

  ‘He’s trying to write a book about Cecil.’

  ‘Cecil? Oh, Valance, you mean? Yes, I see.’

  ‘You know, I’ve already written all about it.’

  Caroline paused. ‘I suppose it was only a matter of time,’ she said.

  ‘Hmm? I don’t know what he’s got into his head. He’s insinuating, if you know what I mean. He’s more or less saying that I didn’t come clean in some way in my book.’

  ‘No, that must be awfully annoying.’

  ‘Well, less awfully, more bloody, actually, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson said to my father.’

  ‘So funny, that,’ said Caroline.

  ‘Really Cecil means nothing to me – I was potty about him for five minutes sixty years ago. The significant thing about Cecil, as far as I’m concerned,’ said Daphne, half-hearing h
erself go on, ‘is that he led to Dud, and the children, and all the grown-up part of my life, which naturally he had no part in himself!’

  ‘Well, tell that to your Kleeneze man, darling,’ said Caroline, evidently thinking Daphne protested too much.

  ‘I suppose I should.’ And she saw there was a little shameful reluctance to do so, and thus reduce even further her interest for the young man. It struck her suddenly that Caroline must already know him. ‘I’m fairly sure he was at your launch party,’ she said. ‘Paul Bryant.’

  ‘You don’t mean the young man from . . . was it Canterbury . . . one of the red-bricks.’

  ‘He might be, I suppose. He used to work in the bank with Leslie.’

  ‘Ah, no. But there certainly was a clever young man, you’re quite right, doing something on Cecil’s poetry.’

  ‘No, I know who you mean, I can’t remember his name. I’ve dealt with him already. This is another young man.’

  ‘Mm, my dear, it’s obviously Cecil’s moment,’ said Caroline.

  10

  Next morning Paul sat in his hotel room, going over his notes, with a coffee tray beside him: the pitted metal pot with the untouchable handle, the lipsticked cup, the bowl of white sugar in soft paper tubes which he emptied serially into the three strong cupfuls he took, getting quickly excited and overheated. On a plate with a doily were five biscuits, and though he’d only just had breakfast he ate them all, the types so familiar – the Bourbon, the sugared Nice, the rebarbative ginger-nut, popped in whole – that he was touched for a moment by a sense of the inseparable poverty and consistency of English life, as crystallized in the Peek Frean assortment box. He sat back in his chair as he munched and levelled a look at his own industrious jaw movements in the mirror; and a less comfortable sensation came over him. The fact was he had never watched himself eating, and was astonished at his forceful, rodent-like look, the odd sag of his neck on one side as he chewed, the working flicker of his temples. This must be what his company was like to others, what Karen faced each night over dinner, and the realization made him run down pensively, stop chewing mid-biscuit and then start up again as if to catch himself unawares. He wasn’t at all sure he would want to confide his own secrets to such a man.

  He was writing up further aspects of yesterday’s meeting in his diary – a book in which the sparse record of his own life was now largely replaced by the ramifying details of others’. Now and then he played back the tape, more for the feel of it than because he believed he would get much out of it. There was a fair amount he had forgotten, but he knew too that there were spells in any interview when he didn’t listen to the other person: it was partly the perennial self-consciousness, his sense of playing a role – laughing, sighing, sadly nodding – eclipsing any likelihood of taking in whatever was being said; and it was partly some colder sense that the interviewee was evasive or repetitive, deliberately boring him and wasting his time. It was appalling what they couldn’t remember, and with his primary witnesses, all in their eighties, he had a view of them stuck in a rut, or a wheel, doggedly chasing the same few time-smoothed memories along with their nose and their paws. When he’d gone through ‘The Hammock’ with Daphne, hoping to goad her memory, she had carried on using the same words and phrases as she had in her book, and probably had for fifty years before that. In her book she’d made such a thing of this youthful romance, and he could see that the thing that she’d made had replaced the now remote original experience, and couldn’t usefully be interrogated for any further unrevealed details. She didn’t actually seem at all interested in Cecil, much less in the chance Paul was giving her, at the end of her life, to put things straight. He laughed warily when he thought of her little snub, as he was leaving (‘Are you coming back?’); but in a way it simply made him more determined.

  George’s theory about Corinna, if true, threw a very strange light on to Dudley. Perhaps today he should try to get her on to the subject of her first marriage, and trick her, almost, into some revelation. George had said such marriages happened a great deal at that time. Obviously Paul would have to track down Corinna’s birth certificate. How complicit was Dudley in the whole thing? It was a most peculiar love triangle. In Black Flowers Dudley coped with his brother’s affairs in his customary ramblingly cutting style.

  My wife had met Cecil before the War, when he had been something of a mentor to her brother George Sawle, and it was after a visit to the Sawles’ cottage in Harrow that he had written ‘Two Acres’, a poem that attained some celebrity in the war years, and after. I suspect she was a good deal dazzled by his energy and his profile, and as an ardent consumer of romantic verse she was surely impressed to meet a real live poet, dark-eyed and raven-haired. There are certainly signs that he was fond of her, though these should not be exaggerated; my brother was accustomed to admiration, and as a rule was gracious to those who provided it. He wrote his famous poem at her request for some memento in her visitors’ book, but he had only known her at the time for two days. It amused me somewhat that Cecil, heir to three thousand acres, should have been best-known for his ode to a mere two. Very thoughtfully, he invited her to Corley once when her brother also was staying with us.

  There followed various sarcasms about George’s visits to the Valances.

  He showed a keen interest in both house and estate. If he had the unintended air at times of an agent or bailiff, his preoccupations were no doubt largely intellectual. He and Cecil were sometimes absent for hours, returning with tales of what they had found in the labyrinthine cellars or secluded attics of the house, or with reports, which pleased my father, of the quality of the grazing or the woodsman-ship shown on the Corley farms.

  Paul thought again about George and Cecil on the roof, the whole rich difficult range of unspoken testimony, in images and implications. Surely Dudley was hinting here at something he couldn’t possibly have said outright?

  Daphne, two or three years younger, was more open and at ease, and spoke her mind in a manner that sometimes startled my mother but habitually delighted me. She had grown up with two elder brothers of her own, and was used to their spoiling. I was thrown together with her by the somewhat exclusive nature of George and Cecil’s pursuits, and our own relations were at first fraternal; it was clear that she idolized Cecil, but to me she was an amusingly artless companion, unaffected by the family view of me as, if not a black, then certainly a greyish sheep. She loved to talk, and her face lit up with amusement at the simplest pleasantries. To her Corley Court was less a matter for the social historian than a vision out of some old romance. Its inhuman aspects were part of its charm. The stained glass windows that kept out the light, the high ceilings that baffled all attempts at heating, the barely penetrable thickets of overladen tables, chairs and potted palms that filled the rooms, were invested with a kind of magic. ‘I should like very much to live in a house like this,’ she said, on the occasion of that first visit. Four years later she was married in the chapel at Corley, and in due course, if for a limited span, was herself the mistress of the house.

  Paul decided hotels were hardly the best place to work. All around there was noise – a late riser above had pulled the bath-plug and the waste fell with an unembarrassed frothing and gargling sound through a pipe apparently inches from his desk; the maid had come in twice, even though check-out wasn’t till eleven; baffled but unbeaten, she toiled in the hallway with the hoover or went up and down opening and slamming the doors; in a room immediately to his left, and previously unsuspected, some sort of business meeting had got under way, with periodic laughter and the rambling voice of a man addressing them, a completely meaningless phrase now and then discernible through the thin wall. Paul sat back with a yelp of frustration; yet he saw the scene had already a kind of anecdotal quality, and he wrote it up too in his diary, as a reminder of the biographer’s difficult existence.

  When he got back to Olga, just before two o’clock, he found the front door open and heard Wilfrid’s voice coming from the kitc
hen, speaking more regularly and emphatically than usual. Even so, he couldn’t make out at first what he was saying. He felt he’d chanced on something awkwardly private. There was a sense of possible crisis. Rather than ring the bell, Paul stepped into the hall and gripping his briefcase stood leaning forward with an apologetic expression. It dawned on him that Wilfrid was reading to his mother. ‘ “Ah hammer . . . dryers ever seen”,’ he seemed to say. For a dislocated second Paul couldn’t place it; then of course he knew. Are Hamadryads ever seen / Between the dancing veils of green . . . ? He was reading ‘Two Acres’ for her, and she was making a grumbling noise or coming in on the words herself as if to say the reading was hardly necessary; it was a sort of briefing perhaps for her second day’s interview, and Paul found something reassuring in that – and something oddly touching in the reversal of roles, son reading to mother. ‘ “Or pause, then take the hidden turn, The path amid—” ’ ‘ “The path amid the hip-high fern”,’ Daphne came in. ‘You don’t read it at all well.’

  ‘Perhaps you would rather I didn’t?’ said Wilfrid in his usual tone of dry forbearance.

  ‘Poetry, I mean, you have no idea how to read poetry. It’s not the football results . . .’

  ‘Well I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘The curfew tolls the knell of passing day: one; The ploughman homeward plods his weary way: nil,’ said Daphne, getting a bit carried away. ‘When I’m gone, you should get a job on the telly.’

  ‘Don’t . . . talk like that,’ said Wilfrid, and Paul, not seeing their faces, took a moment to realize it was not her mockery but the mention of her going that he was objecting to. And what indeed would he do then? Puzzled for a moment by his own muddled feelings of affection and irritation towards Daphne, Paul tiptoed back out again and rang the bell.