Man must say farewell
To parents now,
And to William Tell,
And Mrs Cow.
Edith Sitwell, ‘Jodelling Song’
1
From where she sat, in the window of the morning-room, the two figures seemed to hurry towards each other. Above the long hedge at the end of the formal garden, a man’s head, jerking with the lurch of a limp, moved impatiently along. ‘Rubbish!’ he shouted. ‘Rubbish!’ Whilst away to the right, between the hazily green horse-chestnuts of the park, a shiny beige car was approaching, its windscreen flashing in the sun.
‘D’, she wrote, and hesitated, with her nib on the paper. Not Darling, so ‘Dear’ certainly, and then another pause, which theatened to turn into a blot, before she added ‘est’: ‘Dearest Revel’. One went up and down the scale with people – certainly among their set there were startling advances in closeness, which sometimes were followed by coolings just as abrupt. Revel, though, was a family friend, the superlative quite proper. ‘It is too awful about David,’ she went on, ‘and you have all my sympathy’ – but she thought, what one really needed was a scale below ‘Dear’, since often one had no time whatever for the person one was warmly embracing on the page: ‘Untrustworthy Jessica’, ‘Detestable Mr Carlton-Brown’.
She heard the car stop outside, the swift jangle of the bell, footsteps and then voices. ‘Is Lady Valance in?’ ‘I believe she’s in the morning-room, madam. Shall I-’ ‘Oh, I won’t disturb her.’ ‘I can tell her’ – Wilkes giving her a clear chance to do the right thing. ‘No, don’t bother. I’ll go straight through to the office.’ ‘Very good, madam.’ It was a small contest of wills, in which the subtle but hamstrung Wilkes was trounced by the forthright Mrs Riley. A minute later he came in to cast an eye at the fire, and said, ‘Mrs Riley has come, my lady. She went through to the office, as she calls it.’
‘Thank you, I heard her,’ said Daphne, looking up and lightly covering the page with her sleeve. She shared a moment’s oddly intimate gaze with Wilkes. ‘I expect she had her plans with her?’
‘She appeared to, madam.’
‘These plans!’ said Daphne. ‘We’re not going to know ourselves soon.’
‘No, madam,’ said Wilkes, passing his white-gloved hand into the black mitten that was kept in the log-basket. ‘But they are still only plans.’
‘Hmm. You mean they may not come off?’
Wilkes smiled rather strictly as he lodged a small branch on the top of the pyre, and controlled the ensuing tumble of ash and sparks. ‘Perhaps not fully, madam, no; and in any case, not… irreversibly.’ He went on confidentially, ‘I understand Lady Valance is with us on the dining-room.’
‘Well, she’s rarely an advocate for change,’ said Daphne a little drily, but with respect for the butler’s old allegiances. With two Lady Valances in the house, there were niceties of expression which even Wilkes was sometimes tripped up by. ‘Though last night she claimed to find the new drawing-room “very restful”.’ She turned back to what she had written, and Wilkes, after a few more testing pokes at the fire, went out of the room.
‘Perhaps best not to come this weekend – we have a
She took her letter into the hall, and stood for a moment by the massive oak table in the middle of the room. It seemed to her suddenly the emblem and essence of Corley. The children tore round it, the dog got under it, the housemaids polished it and polished it, like votaries of a cult. Functionless, unwieldy, an obstacle to anyone who crossed the room, the table had a firm place in Daphne’s happiness, from which she feared it was about to be prised by force. She saw again how imposing the hall was, with its gloomy panelling and Gothic windows, in which the Valance coat of arms was repeated insistently. Would those perhaps be allowed to stay? The fireplace was designed like a castle, with battlements instead of a mantelpiece and turrets on either side, each of which had a tiny window, with shutters that opened and closed. This had come in for particular sarcasm from Eva Riley – it was indeed hard to defend, except by saying foolishly that one loved it. Daphne went to the drawing-room door, put her fingers on the handle, and then flung it open as though hoping to surprise someone other than herself.
The off-white dazzle of it, on a bright April morning, was undeniably effective. It was like a room in some extremely expensive sanatorium. Comfortable modern chairs in grey loose covers had replaced the old clutter of cane and chintz and heavy-fringed velvet. The dark dadoed walls and the coffered ceiling, with its twelve inset panels depicting the months, had been smoothly boxed in, and on the new walls a few of the original pictures were hung beside very different work. There was old Sir Eustace, and his young wife Geraldine, two full-length portraits designed to glance tenderly at each other, but now divided by a large almost ‘abstract’ painting of a factory perhaps or a prison. Daphne turned and looked at Sir Edwin, more respectfully hung on the facing wall, beside the rather chilling portrait of her mother-in-law. This had been done a few years before the War, and showed her in a dark red dress, her hair drawn back, a shining absence of doubt in her large pale eyes. She was holding a closed fan, like a lacquered black baton. Here nothing came between the couple, but still a vague air of satire seemed to threaten them, in their carved and gilded frames. In the old drawing-room, where the curtains, even when roped back, had been so bulky that they kept out much of the light, Daphne had loved to sit and almost, in a way, to hide; but no such refuge was offered by the new one, and she decided to go upstairs and see if the children were ready.
‘Mummy!’ said Wilfrid, as soon as she went into the nursery. ‘Is Mrs Cow coming?’
‘Wilfrid’s afraid of Mrs Cow,’ said Corinna.
‘I am not,’ said Wilfrid.
‘Why would anyone be afraid of a dear old lady?’ said Nanny.
‘Yes, thank you, Nanny,’ said Daphne. ‘Now, my darlings, are you going to give Granny Sawle a special surprise?’
‘Will it be the same surprise as last time?’ said Corinna.
Daphne thought for a second and said, ‘This time it will be a double surprise.’ For Wilfrid these rituals, invented by his sister, were still sickeningly exciting, but Corinna herself was beginning to think them beneath her. ‘We must all be sweet to Mrs Cow,’ Daphne said. ‘She is not very well.’
‘Is she infectious?’ said Corinna, who had only just got over the measles.
‘Not that sort of unwell,’ said Daphne. ‘She has awful arthritis. I’m afraid she’s in a great deal of pain.’
‘Poor lady,’ said Wilfrid, visibly attempting a maturer view of her.
‘I know…’ said Daphne, ‘poor lady.’ She perched selfconsciously on the upholstered top of the high fender. ‘No fire today, then, Nanny?’ she said.
‘Well, my lady, we thought it was almost nice enough to do without.’
‘Are you warm enough, Corinna?’
‘Yes, just about, Mother,’ said Corinna, and glanced uneasily at Mrs Copeland.
