The old lady stopped and pursed her lips obediently. ‘
The door of the Yellow Room was open, and the maid Sarah, not one of his favourites, was standing over Mrs Kalbeck’s old blue suitcase, going through its contents with a slightly comic expression. When Mrs Kalbeck saw her, she lurched forward, almost fell as a rug slid away under her stick. ‘Oh, I can do that,’ she said. ‘Let me do that!’
‘It’s no trouble, madam,’ said Sarah, smiling coolly.
Mrs Kalbeck sat down heavily on the dressing-table stool, panting with indecision, though there was nothing she could do. ‘Those old things…’ she said, and looked quickly from the maid to Wilfrid, hoping he at least hadn’t seen them, and then back again, as they were carried ceremoniously towards an open wardrobe.
‘Well, goodbye,’ said Wilfrid, and withdrew from the room as if not expecting to meet her again.
On the landing, by himself, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that he should have said something. He trailed his fingers along the spines of the books in the bookcase as he passed, producing a low steady ripple. He covered his unease with a kind of insouciance, though no one was watching. He’d done what he’d been told, he’d been extremely kind to Mrs Cow, but his worry was more wounding and obscure: that he’d been told to do it by someone who knew it was wrong, and yet pretended it wasn’t. Three toes on his father’s left foot had been blown off by a German shell, and the man he had learned to call Uncle Cecil was a cold white statue in the chapel downstairs, because of a German sniper with a gun. Wilfrid ran down the corridor, in momentary freedom from any kind of adult, his fear of being late overruled by a blind desire to hide – ran past his grandmother’s room and round the corner, till he got to the linen-room, and went in, and closed the door.
3
‘Have a drink, Duffel,’ said Dudley genially, rather as if she were another guest.
‘We’re having Manhattans,’ said Mrs Riley.
‘Oh…’ said Daphne, not quite looking at either of them, but crossing the room with a good-tempered expression. She still felt distinctly odd, like the subject of an experiment, whenever she came into the ‘new’ drawing-room; and having Mrs Riley herself in the room only made her feel odder. ‘Should we wait for Mother and Clara?’
‘Oh, I don’t know…’ said Dudley. ‘Eva looked thirsty.’
Mrs Riley gave her quick smoky laugh. ‘How do you know Mrs… um -?’ she said.
‘Mrs Kalbeck? She was our neighbour in Middlesex,’ said Daphne, making a moody survey of the bottles on the tray; and though she loved Manhattans, and had loved Manhattan itself, when they’d gone there for Dudley’s book, she set about mixing herself a gin and Dubonnet.
Mrs Riley said, ‘She seems rather… um…’ making a game of her own malice.
‘Yes, she’s a dear,’ said Daphne.
‘She’s certainly an enormous asset at a house party,’ said Dudley.
Daphne gave a pinched smile and said, ‘Poor Clara had a very hard war,’ which was what her mother often said in her friend’s defence, and now sounded almost as satirical as Dudley’s previous remark. She’d never been fond of Clara, but she pitied her, and since they both had brothers who’d been killed in the War, felt a certain kinship with her.
‘Just wait till she starts singing the Ride of the Valkyries,’ Dudley said.
‘Oh, does she do that,’ said Mrs Riley.
‘Well, she loves Wagner,’ said Daphne. ‘You know she took my mother to Bayreuth before the War.’
‘Poor thing…’ said Mrs Riley.
‘She’s never quite recovered,’ said Dudley in a tactful tone, ‘has she, Duffel, your mother, really?’
Mrs Riley chuckled again, and now Daphne looked at her: yes, that was how she chuckled, head back an inch, upper lip spread downwards, a huff of cigarette-smoke: a more or less tolerant gesture as much as a laugh.
‘I don’t rightly know,’ said Daphne, frowning, but seeing the point of keeping her husband in a good humour. A certain amount of baiting of the Sawles would have to be allowed this weekend. She came over with her drink, and dropped into one of the low grey armchairs with a trace of a smirk at its continuing novelty. She thought she’d never seen anything so short, for evening wear, as Eva Riley’s dress, only just on the knee when she sat, or indeed anything so long as her slithering red necklace, doubtless also of her own design. Well, her odd flat body was made for fashion, or at least for these fashions; and her sharp little face, not pretty, really, but made up as if it were, in red, white and black like a Chinese doll. Designers, it seemed, were never off duty. Curled across the corner of a sofa, her red necklace slinking over the grey cushions, Mrs Riley was a sort of advertisement for her room; or perhaps the room was an advertisement for her. ‘I know this weekend has been consecrated to Cecil,’ Daphne said, ‘but actually I’m glad that Clara was persuaded to come. She has no one, really, except my mother. It will mean so much to her. Poor dear, you know she hasn’t even got electricity.’
Dudley snorted delightedly at this. ‘She’ll revel in the electrical fixtures here,’ he said.
Daphne smiled, as if trying not to, while the quick unmeaning use of the word
‘And where you grew up, Duffel,’ said Dudley, as if his wife were getting airs. ‘The famous “Two Acres”.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Riley. ‘What was it…? “Two blessed acres of English ground!” ’
‘Indeed!’ said Dudley.
‘I suppose that was Cecil’s most famous poem, wasn’t it?’ said Mrs Riley.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Daphne, with another little frown. There was perhaps something reassuring after all about Eva Riley’s long bare legs. A clever woman aiming to seduce a rich man right under his wife’s nose would surely wear something more discreet, and dissembling. Daphne looked away, and out through the window at the garden already losing colour in the early spring evening. At the top of the central section of each window the Valance coat of arms appeared, with the motto beneath it on a folded strip in Gothic letters. The gaudy little shields looked cheerfully at odds with the cold modernity of the room.
Dudley sipped piously at his cocktail, and said, ‘I can’t help feeling slightly mortified that my brother Cecil, heir to a baronetcy and three thousand acres, not to mention one of the ugliest houses in the south of England, should be best remembered for his ode to a suburban garden.’
‘Well,’ said Daphne stoutly, and not for the first time, ‘it was quite a lovely garden. I hope you’re not going to say things like that to Sebby Stokes.’ She watched Mrs Riley’s heavy-lidded smile indulge them both. ‘Or indeed to my poor mother. She’s very proud of that poem. Besides Cecil wrote far more poems about Corley, masses of them, as you well know.’
‘Castle of exotic dreams,’ said Dudley, in an absurd Thespian tone, ‘mirrored in enamelled streams…’ – but sounding in fact quite like Cecil’s ‘poetry voice’.
‘I’m sure even Cecil never wrote anything so awful as that,’ said Daphne. And Dudley, excited by mockery of anything that others held dear, grinned widely at Eva Riley, showing her, like a flash of nakedness, his glistening dog-teeth. Mrs Riley said, very smoothly, jabbing her cigarette out in the ashtray,
‘I’m surprised your mother didn’t marry again.’
‘The General, dear god!’ said Dudley.
‘No… Lady Valance’s mother,’ said Eva Riley.
‘It never seemed to come up, somehow… I’m not sure she’d have wanted it,’ said Daphne, suppressing, in a kind of ruffled dignity, her own uncomfortable thoughts on the subject.
‘She’s a pretty little thing. And she must have been widowed rather young.’
‘Yes – yes, she was,’ said Daphne, absently but firmly; and looked to Dudley to change the subject. He lit a cigarette, and steadied a heavy silver ashtray on the arm of his chair. It was one of over a hundred items that he had had stamped on the bottom:
