Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Me, oh good lord yes!’ said Daphne. ‘In fact I knew him long before I met Dud-’ but at that moment the door was opened by Wilkes and her mother came in, hesitantly it seemed, since she was waiting for her friend, on her two slow sticks, to cross the hall, and Clara herself was in distracted conversation with Dudley’s mother, who came in briskly just behind her.

‘My husband, you could fairly say, disliked music,’ said Louisa Valance. ‘It wasn’t that he hated it, you understand. He was in many ways an unduly sensitive man. Music made him sad.’

‘Music is sad, yes,’ said Clara, looking vaguely harassed. ‘But also, I think-’

‘Come in, come and sit,’ said Daphne, with a rescuing smile at Clara’s shabby sparkle, the old black evening dress tight under the arms, the old black evening bag, that had been to the opera long before the War, swinging around the stick in her left hand as she thrust forward into the room. The Scottish boy, handsome as a singer himself in his breeches and evening coat, brought forward a higher chair for her, and propped her sticks by it once she’d sat down. Eva and Dudley seemed lightly mesmerized by the sticks, and gazed at them as if at rude survivals from a culture they thought they had swept away. The boy hovered discreetly, smiled and acted with proper impersonal charm. He was the first appointment Wilkes had made under Daphne’s rule at Corley, and in some incoherent and almost romantic way she thought of him as her own.

‘Sebastian hasn’t arrived?’ said Louisa.

‘Not yet,’ said Daphne. ‘Not till after dinner.’

‘We have so much to talk about,’ said Louisa, with buoyant impatience.

‘Ah, Mamma…’ said Dudley, coming towards her as if to kiss her, but stopping a few feet off with a wide grin.

‘Good evening, my dear. You knew I was coming in.’

‘Well, I hoped so, Mamma, of course. Now what would you like to drink?’

‘I think a lemonade. It’s quite spring-like today!’

‘Isn’t it,’ said Dudley. ‘Let’s celebrate.’

Louisa gave him the dry smile that seemed partly to absorb and partly to deflect his sarcasms, and looked away. Her eyes lingered on Mrs Riley’s legs, then switched for reassurance to Daphne’s, and her face, not naturally tactful, seemed frozen for five seconds in the forming and suppressing of a ‘remark’. She was standing, perhaps by design, beneath her own portrait, which in a way made remarks superfluous. This was the house she had ruled for forty years. She was gaunter now about the brow than when she’d been painted, sharper about the chin. Her hair had gone from russet to ash, the red dress changed irreversibly to black. Every time she ‘came in’ from the set of rooms she now occupied, and where she often chose to dine alone, she moved with a perceptible shiver of shaken dignity, made all the clearer by the sunny bits of play-acting that accompanied it. ‘I do think you’ve been so clever, my dear,’ she said to Mrs Riley. ‘You’ve changed this room out of all recognition.’ At the corner of her eye she had the abstract painting, which so far she had affected not to have seen at all.

‘Oh, thank you, Lady Valance,’ said Eva, with a slightly nervous laugh.

‘It’s most unexpected,’ said Clara, with her involuntary German air of meaning rather more.

Louisa gazed around. ‘I find it really most restful,’ she said, as if restfulness were a quality she specially cared for.

‘You haven’t seen anything yet,’ said Dudley, lurching towards his mother with her favourite drink. ‘We’re going to brighten the whole place up.’

‘I’d be sorry to see the library changed,’ said Louisa.

‘If you say so, Mamma, the library will be spared, it will retain its primeval gloom.’

‘Well…’ She took a sip of lemonade, and smiled tightly, as if relishing her own good humour. ‘And what of the hall?’

‘Now the hall… I believe Mrs Riley has quite set her sights on the fireplace.’

‘Oh, not the fireplace!’ said Freda, rather wildly. ‘But the children adore the fireplace.’

‘One would have to be a child, surely, to adore the fireplace,’ said Eva Riley.

‘Well, I must be a child in that case,’ said Freda.

‘Which makes me the child of a child,’ said Daphne, ‘a babe in arms!’

Dudley looked round the roomful of women with a glint of annoyance, but at once recovered. ‘You know a lot of the best people nowadays are getting rid of these Victorian absurdities. You should run over and see what the Witherses have done at Badly-Madly, Mamma. They’ve pulled down the bell-tower, and put an Olympic swimming-pool in its place.’

‘Goodness!’ said Louisa – which alternated with ‘Horror!’ in her small repertoire of interjections, and was more or less interchangeable with it.

‘At Madderleigh, of course,’ said Eva Riley, ‘they got to work long ago. They boxed in the dining-room there in the Eighties, I believe.’

‘There you are! Even the man who built it couldn’t stand it,’ said Dudley.

‘The man who built this house was your grandfather,’ said Louisa. ‘He loved it.’

‘I know… wasn’t it odd of him?’

‘But then you never showed any feeling for the things your grandfather held dear, or your father either.’ She grinned round at the others, as though they were all with her.

‘Oh, not true,’ said Dudley, ‘I love cows, and claret.’

‘Now won’t you sit down, Louisa?’ said Freda warmly, smoothing the expanse of plumped cushion beside her. Daphne knew she hated the candour of talk at Corley since Sir Edwin had died, the constant sparring she herself had quickly become inured to.

‘I prefer a hard chair, my dear,’ said Louisa. ‘I find armchairs somewhat effeminate.’ She sighed. ‘I wonder what Cecil would have made of all these changes.’

‘Mm, I wonder,’ said Dudley, turning away; and then facetiously, as if only half-hoping to be heard, ‘Perhaps you could ask him, the next time you’re in touch?’

Daphne slid a horrified glance at Louisa, it wasn’t clear if she’d heard, Dudley’s head was nodding in noiseless laughter, and his mother went on with tense determination, ‘Cecil had a keen sense of tradition, he was never less than dignified-’ but at that moment the door flew open, and there was Nanny, with a hand on each child’s shoulder. She held them to her, perhaps a moment too long, in a little tableau of her own efficiency. ‘Well, here they are!’ she said. When Granny Sawle visited, they were brought down at six, between nursery supper and bed. Wilfrid broke away and ran to greet her, with a low sweeping bow, which was his new game, while Corinna walked in front of the fireplace with her hands behind her back, as though about to make one of her announcements. They each found a moment to peep nervously at their father – but Dudley’s high spirits didn’t much falter.

‘Say hello to Mrs Riley,’ he said.

‘Hello, Mrs Riley,’ said the children, promptly but with no great warmth.

‘My dears…’ said Mrs Riley over her cocktail-glass.

Wilfrid ran round politely to bow to Granny V as well, who said warily, ‘Look at you!’ as with a quick panting sound and the thwack of his tail against chairs and table-legs Rubbish bustled across the room from the open garden door and excitedly circled his master.

‘Oh, do we really want the dog in?’ said Daphne, with a flutter of panic as her mother raised her drink away from its thrusting nose and made a face at the gamy heat of its breath. She got up to grab it, but Dudley was growling indulgently and provokingly, ‘Oh, Wubbishy Wubbishy Wubbish!’ and had already produced from somewhere one of the bone-hard black biscuits that Rubbish was said to like, which after a bit of teasing he threw into the air – it went down in one. Clara was still nervous of the dog, and smiled keenly at it to suggest she was not. She hid her shyness in a bit of pantomime, stretching out a hand in childish reconciliation, but she had no biscuit, and Rubbish walked past as if he hadn’t seen her.