Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Eva looked glad to see her. She went on, ‘You know, I feel very fortunate to have met your husband’ – modest but also subtly possessive.

‘It’s silly of me,’ said Daphne, ‘I don’t quite know how you did.’ She knew what Dudley had said, of course.

‘Well, I fitted up Bobby Bannister’s place in Surrey, didn’t I, and he must have told… your husband about me. I rather think he gave him the whole idea for improving Corley.’

This was exactly Dudley’s version too, though the cool nerve of ‘improving’ made Daphne laugh. She said, ‘It’s become a bit of a thing with Dud – I think he’s doing it mainly to upset his mother.’

‘Oh, I do hope it’s rather more than that,’ said Eva. ‘I must say I love working here’ – and she gave Daphne a look of rather unnerving sweetness.

‘Well…’ Daphne went back towards the window to see where Revel and George had got to, but there was now no sign of them. Then there was the click of the library door, and Daphne turned, expecting her mother to be shown back in, amid reassuring murmurs and thanks – but it was Sebby alone, head cocked, with an apologetic half-smile. It seemed Freda had been shown out the other way, into the hall: this was oddly confounding for a second or two, as though she had vanished in some more permanent sense. ‘She seemed anxious about her friend,’ Sebby said.

‘Ah yes, I fear she’s not at all well.’ Daphne gave a bland nod to Eva and went in, and when he closed the door behind her, the click confirmed her earlier sense of the process: you watched for a bit, and then you were part of it. A slight awkwardness, at being a guest in her own house, coloured the first moments for both of them, but they smiled through it. ‘I feel rather like a doctor,’ said Sebby.

‘Mrs Riley thought a detective,’ said Daphne.

Sebby was hesitant but sure. ‘Really I hope no more than a well-meaning friend,’ he said, and waited for Daphne to sit down. On the big table he had laid out the publications in which Cecil’s verses had appeared – a small pile of periodicals, the anthologies, Georgian Poetry , the Cambridge Poets , and the one book he’d published in his lifetime, Night Wake and Other Poems , in its soft grey paper covers easily dog-eared and torn. Another pile seemed to contain things in manuscript – there was her autograph book, given up this morning. Daphne was impressed, and again unsettled by the evidence of a clear procedure. She saw that she hadn’t prepared. This was because she hadn’t been able to, her mind wouldn’t fix on any of the things she knew she might say, she had had an unaccountable confidence that inspiration would come to her as soon as Sebby’s questions began. Now she regretted the past ten minutes spent sparring with Eva, when she could have been putting her thoughts in order.

‘Forgive me for one moment,’ Sebby said, turning to the table and starting to search through the pile of handwritten things. Daphne glimpsed her own letters from Cecil, which she had also dutifully surrendered – again she didn’t want to think about them. She looked at his stooped back and then at the long dim room beyond him. Though she was, as Eva had said, a reader, she had never exactly taken to the library – like Dudley’s study, which she never entered, it was a part of the house outside her sway. Sometimes she came in to look for a book, a novel from the great leather sets of Trollope or Dickens, or an old bound volume of Punch for Wilfie to work out the cartoons, but she couldn’t quite shake off the feeling of being a visitor, as if in a public library, with rules and fines. As the scene of her mother-in-law’s now ‘famous’ book tests, too, it had an unhappy air. Of these Sebby probably knew nothing, but to her the room was tainted by earlier attempts to contact Cecil – all nonsense, of course, as she and Eva agreed, but like much nonsense not entirely easy to dismiss.

Sebby sat down, on the same side of the table as she was, and again with an evident awareness of the niceties, she half his age, but a titled lady, he far more clever, a distinguished guest who’d been asked to perform a peculiar service for his hosts. ‘I hope this isn’t distressing for you,’ he said.

‘Oh, not at all,’ said Daphne graciously, her smile expressing a mild amazement at the thought that perhaps it should be. She saw Sebby’s own undecided glance. He said,

‘Dear Cecil aroused keen feelings in many of those who crossed his path.’

‘Indeed he did…’

‘And you would seem, from the letters you’ve so generously shared with me, to have had a similar effect on him.’

‘I know, isn’t it awful,’ said Daphne.

‘Hah…’ Sebby again unsure of her. He turned to pick up a clutch of the letters. She hadn’t been able to read them again herself, out of a strong compound embarrassment at everything they said about both of them. ‘There are beautiful passages – I sat up late with them last night, in my room.’ He smiled mildly as he turned over the small folded pages, recreating his own pleasure. Daphne saw him propped up in the very grand bed in the Garnet Room and handling these papers with a mixture of eagerness and regret. He was used to dealing with confidential matters, though not as a rule perhaps the amorous declarations of excitable young men. He hesitated, looked up at her, and started reading, with an affectionate expression: ‘ “The moon tonight, dear child, I suppose shines as bright on Stanmore as it does on Mme Collet’s vegetable garden and on the very long nose of the adjutant, who is snoring enough to wake the Hun on the far side of the room. Are you too snoring – do you snore, child? – or do you lie awake and think of your poor dirty Cecil far away? He is much in need of his Daphne’s kind words and…” ’ – Sebby petered out discreetly at the slither into intimacy. ‘Delightful, isn’t it?’

‘Oh… yes… I don’t remember,’ said Daphne half-turning her head to see. ‘The ones from France are a bit better, aren’t they?’

‘I found them most touching,’ said Sebby. ‘I have letters of my own from him, two or three… but these strike quite another tone.’

‘He had something to write about,’ said Daphne.

‘He had a great deal to write about,’ said Sebby, with a quick smile of courteous reproof. He looked through a few more letters, while Daphne wondered if she could possibly explain her feelings, even had she wanted to; she felt she would have to understand them first, and this unnatural little chat was hardly going to help her to do that. What she felt then; and what she felt now; and what she felt now about what she felt then: it wasn’t remotely easy to say. Sebby was every inch the bachelor – his intuitions about a young girl’s first love and about Cecil himself as a lover were unlikely to be worth much. Cecil’s way of being in love with her was alternately to berate her and to berate himself: there wasn’t much fun in it, for all his famed high spirits. Yet he always seemed happy when away from her (which was most of the time) and she had sensed more and more how much he enjoyed the absences he was always deploring. The War when it came was an absolute godsend. Sebby said, ‘Tell me if I am being too inquisitive, but I feel it will help me to a clearer vision of what might have been. Here’s the letter, what is it, June 1916, “Tell me, Daphne, will you be my widow?” ’

‘Oh, yes…’ She coloured slightly.

‘Do you remember how you replied to that?’

‘Oh, I said of course.’

‘And you considered yourselves… engaged?’

Daphne smiled and looked down at the deep red carpet almost puzzled for a moment that she had ended up here anyway. What was the status of a long-lost expectation? She couldn’t now recapture any picture she might then have had of a future life with Cecil. ‘As far as I remember we both agreed to keep it a secret. I wasn’t altogether Louisa’s idea of the next Lady Valance.’