Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Corinna had moved in a discreetly purposeful way towards the piano, and now perched on the edge of the stool, studying her father for the best moment to speak. ‘You’re not going to play for us, or anything, are you, old girl?’ said Dudley.

‘Oh, does she play?’ said Eva, with a sly spurt of smoke.

‘Play? She’s a perfect fiend at the piano,’ said Dudley. ‘Aren’t you, my darling?’ At which Corinna smiled uncertainly.

‘I’ll play for you tomorrow,’ she said.

‘Good idea. Play for Uncle George,’ said Dudley, tired already of his own sarcasm, as well as the subject itself.

‘And Wilfie can do his dance,’ said Corinna, reminding her father of the terms of the deal.

‘Well exactly…’ said Dudley after a minute.

Louisa, still rather fixed on Eva, said, ‘I imagine you might care for music, Mrs Riley?’

Mrs Riley smiled at her to prepare her for her answer: ‘Oh, awfully – certain music, at least.’

‘What, Gounod and what have you?’

‘Not Gounod particularly, no…’

‘I should think one would draw the line at Gounod.’

‘Now Wilfie,’ said Dudley, with a loud cough, as if reproving him; but then went on, ‘have you heard about the Colonel and the Rat?’

‘No, Daddy,’ said Wilfrid softly, hardly daring to believe that a poem was starting, but perhaps apprehensive too about its subject.

‘Well…’ said Dudley. ‘The Colonel was there, with bristling hair, and a terrible air, of pain and despair.’

Wilfrid laughed at this, or at least at the awful face his father had pulled to go with it; anything awful could be funny too. ‘Oh ducky,’ said Daphne, ‘is Daddy doing doggerel for you.’

‘It’s not doggerel, Duffel,’ said Dudley, tightly suppressing a snort at so much alliteration, ‘it’s called Skeltonics, it dates from the time of King Henry VIII. If you remember Skelton was the poet laureate.’

‘Oh, in that case,’ said Daphne.

‘Well, if you don’t want me to tell you a poem.’

‘Oh, yes, Daddy!’ said Wilfrid.

‘Your uncle Cecil was a famous poet, but what people tend not to know is that I have quite a talent that way myself.’

Daphne glanced at Louisa, who had an unprovokable look, as though she found her son and her grandson equally beyond comprehension.

‘I know, Daddy,’ said Wilfrid, and stood yearningly by his father’s knee, almost as if he might be going to lay his hand on it.

After breakfast the next day Daphne appeared in the nursery, just as Mrs Copeland was getting the children ready for a walk: ‘No, Wilfrid, not those white trousers, you’ll be all over mud.’

‘Mud will be all over me, you mean, Nanny,’ he said.

‘Mother, we’re walking to Pritchett’s farm,’ said Corinna, with a stoical wince as Mrs Copeland pulled a band over her hair.

‘Don’t worry, Nanny,’ said Daphne, ‘I’ll take them myself. We’ve got photographers.’

‘Indeed, my lady!’ said Nanny, with a keen smile and a hint of pique, scanning her charges with a sharper eye. ‘Shall we be in the papers again, then?’

‘Well, we shall,’ Daphne wanted to say, ‘not you’, but she made do with, ‘It’s the Sketch , I think.’

Mrs Copeland tugged a little harder at Corinna’s hair. ‘My sister in London sent Sir Dudley’s picture from the Daily Mail .’

‘I fear publicity is all a part of being a successful writer,’said Daphne, ‘these days! No, leave those trousers on, my duck – we’ll just be sitting about in the garden.’

Wilfrid frowned at her bravely for a moment, but then turned and went to the window as if suddenly remembering something outside. ‘Wilfrid was promised to see the new foal,’ said Corinna, in a pitying, almost mocking voice, ‘and the little chicks in the incubator,’ but she was touched already by the strange contagion of grief, and when a wail went up from the window she started to crumple too, which was worse for her because of the loss of status. She didn’t make much noise, but she attended to her doll’s overnight bag with a swollen face, jamming in the parasol and the tiny red cardigan.

‘Oh, are you bringing Mavis, darling?’ said Daphne. Corinna nodded vigorously but didn’t risk speaking.

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ said Nanny smugly.

‘Oh, Wilfie, don’t cry,’ said Daphne, picturing the new foal nuzzling its mother and then running off with a nervy sense of untested liberty; but she hardened herself: ‘You don’t want to look all blotchy in the paper.’

‘ I don’t want to be in the paper ,’ said Wilfrid tragically, his back still turned. Again, Daphne saw the sense of this, but she said,

‘My duck, what a thing to say. You’ll be famous. You’ll be there with Bonzo the Dog, think of that. All over England people will be asking themselves’ – here she ran over and snatched him up with a grunt and a slight stagger at his six-year-old weight – “Who is that lucky, lucky little boy?” ’

But Wilfrid seemed to find that idea even more upsetting than the missed muddy walk.

Out among the maze-like hedges and commas of lawn in the flower-garden, Daphne saw him brighten and perhaps forget. After half a minute his dragging sorrow had a skip in it, there was a glance of reconciliation, a further ten seconds of remembered sorrow, rather formal and conscious, and then the surely unselfconscious surrender to the game of the paths. Gravel, or flagged, or narrow strips of grass, the paths curled between hedges, flanked the long borders, or opened into circles that had nearly identical statues in them, and presented a further compass of decisions, on which the children rarely tried to agree. Now Corinna marched ahead, down the main grass walk that was flanked with clematis grown along chains, dipping and rising between tall posts – in a week or two it would be a blaze of white, like the route of a wedding. She clutched, not Mavis, but Mavis’s red leather reticule. Wilfie avoided the processional way – he cantered around to left and right, talking in an odd private voice, sometimes sounding furious with himself or with some imaginary friend or follower. ‘Come along, my darling, let’s see what those fish are up to,’ said Daphne.

A pool of dumb goldfish struck her as a wan consolation for the hot breath and smells and squelch of a farmyard, and Wilfie himself, when they all arrived at the central pond, took a bit of encouraging to focus on it. ‘Can they all be under that leaf?’ said Daphne. The pool was ringed by a flagged path, and then four stone seats between high rose arches, thick with red and dark green leaves and only the tips of one or two buds as yet showing pink or white. Daphne sat down, with a passive conventional sense that it would make a good place for a photograph.

‘Mother, is Sebby coming here?’ said Corinna, setting her case on the bench between them.

‘I don’t know, darling,’ said Daphne, glancing round. ‘He’s talking to your father.’

‘What on earth is Uncle Sebby doing?’ said Wilfrid.

‘He’s not Uncle Sebby,’ said Corinna, with a giggle.

‘No, ducky, he’s not…’ Poor Wilfie was haunted and puzzled by phantom uncles. Uncle Cecil at least was in the house, in a highly idealized marmoreal form, and was often invoked, but Uncle Hubert was mentioned so rarely that he barely existed for him – she wasn’t sure that he had ever even seen his picture. All he had to go on, for uncles, was an occasional appearance by Uncle George, with his long words. When most uncles no longer existed, it was natural to co-opt one or two who did.

‘Well, you see,’ said Daphne, ‘it’s been decided that there’s going to be a book of all Uncle Cecil’s poems, and Sebby’s come down to talk to your father about it, and Granny V, and well, talk to everybody really.’