The Stranger’s Child

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.

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 naive 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.’