The Stranger’s Child

kept a pewter mug of no great value with Stolen from Hepton Castle invitingly engraved on its underside, and he had followed the practice back at Corley, overseeing the work himself with fierce determination.

‘When’s the Stoker getting here?’ he said, after a bit.

‘Oh, not till quite late, not till after dinner,’ said Daphne.

‘I expect he’s got some extremely important business to attend to,’ said Dudley.

‘There’s some important meeting, something about the miners, you know,’ said Daphne.

‘You don’t know Sebastian Stokes,’ Dudley told Mrs Riley. ‘He combines great literary sensitivity with a keen political mind.’

‘Well, of course I’ve heard of him,’ said Mrs Riley, rather cautiously. In Dudley’s talk candour marched so closely with satire that the uninitiated could often only stare and laugh uncertainly at his pronouncements. Now Mrs Riley leant forward to take a new cigarette from the malachite box on the low table.

‘You don’t need to lose any sleep about the miners with Stokes in charge,’ said Dudley.

‘I’m sleeping like a top as it is,’ she said pertly, fiddling with a match.

Daphne took a warming sip of her gin and thought what she could say about the poor miners, if there had been any point to it at all. She said, ‘I think it’s rather marvellous of him to do all this about Cecil when the Prime Minister needs him in London.’

‘But he idolized Cecil,’ said Dudley. ‘He wrote his obituary in The Times, you know.’

‘Oh, really…?’ said Mrs Riley, as if she’d read it and wondered.

‘He did it to please the General, but it came from the heart. A soldier… a scholar… a poet… etc., etc., etc… etc.… and a gentleman!’ Dudley knocked back his drink in a sudden alarming flourish. ‘It was a wonderful send-off; though of course largely unrecognizable to anyone who’d really known my brother Cecil.’

‘So he didn’t really know him,’ said Mrs Riley, still treading warily, but clearly enjoying the treacherous turn of the talk.

‘Oh, they met a few times. One of Cecil’s bugger friends had him down to Cambridge, and they went in a punt and Cecil read him a sonnet, you know, and the Stoker was completely bowled over and got it put in some magazine. And Cecil wrote him some high-flown letters that he put in The Times later on, when he was dead…’ Dudley seemed to run down, and sat gazing, with eyebrows lightly raised, as if at the unthinkable tedium of it all.

‘I see…’ said Mrs Riley, with a coy smirk, and then looked across at Daphne. ‘I don’t suppose you ever knew Cecil, Lady Valance?’ she said.

‘Me, oh good lord yes!’ said Daphne. ‘In fact I knew him long before I met Dud-’ but at that moment the door was opened by Wilkes and her mother came in, hesitantly it seemed, since she was waiting for her friend, on her two slow sticks, to cross the hall, and Clara herself was in distracted conversation with Dudley’s mother, who came in briskly just behind her.

‘My husband, you could fairly say, disliked music,’ said Louisa Valance. ‘It wasn’t that he hated it, you understand. He was in many ways an unduly sensitive man. Music made him sad.’

‘Music is sad, yes,’ said Clara, looking vaguely harassed. ‘But also, I think-’

‘Come in, come and sit,’ said Daphne, with a rescuing smile at Clara’s shabby sparkle, the old black evening dress tight under the arms, the old black evening bag, that had been to the opera long before the War, swinging around the stick in her left hand as she thrust forward into the room. The Scottish boy, handsome as a singer himself in his breeches and evening coat, brought forward a higher chair for her, and propped her sticks by it once she’d sat down. Eva and Dudley seemed lightly mesmerized by the sticks, and gazed at them as if at rude survivals from a culture they thought they had swept away. The boy hovered discreetly, smiled and acted with proper impersonal charm. He was the first appointment Wilkes had made under Daphne’s rule at Corley, and in some incoherent and almost romantic way she thought of him as her own.

‘Sebastian hasn’t arrived?’ said Louisa.

‘Not yet,’ said Daphne. ‘Not till after dinner.’

‘We have so much to talk about,’ said Louisa, with buoyant impatience.

‘Ah, Mamma…’ said Dudley, coming towards her as if to kiss her, but stopping a few feet off with a wide grin.

‘Good evening, my dear. You knew I was coming in.’

‘Well, I hoped so, Mamma, of course. Now what would you like to drink?’

‘I think a lemonade. It’s quite spring-like today!’

‘Isn’t it,’ said Dudley. ‘Let’s celebrate.’

Louisa gave him the dry smile that seemed partly to absorb and partly to deflect his sarcasms, and looked away. Her eyes lingered on Mrs Riley’s legs, then switched for reassurance to Daphne’s, and her face, not naturally tactful, seemed frozen for five seconds in the forming and suppressing of a ‘remark’. She was standing, perhaps by design, beneath her own portrait, which in a way made remarks superfluous. This was the house she had ruled for forty years. She was gaunter now about the brow than when she’d been painted, sharper about the chin. Her hair had gone from russet to ash, the red dress changed irreversibly to black. Every time she ‘came in’ from the set of rooms she now occupied, and where she often chose to dine alone, she moved with a perceptible shiver of shaken dignity, made all the clearer by the sunny bits of play-acting that accompanied it. ‘I do think you’ve been so clever, my dear,’ she said to Mrs Riley. ‘You’ve changed this room out of all recognition.’ At the corner of her eye she had the abstract painting, which so far she had affected not to have seen at all.

‘Oh, thank you, Lady Valance,’ said Eva, with a slightly nervous laugh.

‘It’s most unexpected,’ said Clara, with her involuntary German air of meaning rather more.

Louisa gazed around. ‘I find it really most restful,’ she said, as if restfulness were a quality she specially cared for.

‘You haven’t seen anything yet,’ said Dudley, lurching towards his mother with her favourite drink. ‘We’re going to brighten the whole place up.’

‘I’d be sorry to see the library changed,’ said Louisa.

‘If you say so, Mamma, the library will be spared, it will retain its primeval gloom.’

‘Well…’ She took a sip of lemonade, and smiled tightly, as if relishing her own good humour. ‘And what of the hall?’

‘Now the hall… I believe Mrs Riley has quite set her sights on the fireplace.’

‘Oh, not the fireplace!’ said Freda, rather wildly. ‘But the children adore the fireplace.’

‘One would have to be a child, surely, to adore the fireplace,’ said Eva Riley.

‘Well, I must be a child in that case,’ said Freda.

‘Which makes me the child of a child,’ said Daphne, ‘a babe in arms!’

Dudley looked round the roomful of women with a glint of annoyance, but at once recovered. ‘You know a lot of the best people nowadays are getting rid of these Victorian absurdities. You should run over and see what the Witherses have done at Badly-Madly, Mamma. They’ve pulled down the bell-tower, and put an Olympic swimming-pool in its place.’

‘Goodness!’ said Louisa – which alternated with ‘Horror!’ in her small repertoire of interjections, and was more or less interchangeable with it.

‘At Madderleigh, of course,’ said Eva Riley, ‘they got to work long ago. They boxed in the dining-room there in the Eighties, I believe.’

‘There you are! Even the man who built it couldn’t stand it,’ said Dudley.

‘The man who built this house was your grandfather,’ said Louisa. ‘He loved it.’

‘I know… wasn’t it odd of him?’

‘But then you never showed any feeling for the things your grandfather held dear, or your father either.’ She grinned round at the others, as though they were all with her.

‘Oh, not true,’ said Dudley, ‘I love cows, and claret.’

‘Now won’t you sit down, Louisa?’ said Freda warmly, smoothing the expanse of plumped cushion beside her. Daphne knew she hated the candour of talk at Corley since Sir Edwin had died, the constant sparring she herself had quickly become inured to.