Corley, sir.’ Though it struck George that Wilkes’s mastery of implicit moral commentary was conveyed in the same smooth phrase.
He frowned and said, ‘We don’t get down as often as we should like.’
‘It’s possibly not very convenient for you,’ allowed Wilkes, letting his hand drop.
‘Well, not terribly,’ George said.
‘I know Lady Valance is especially pleased you’ve come, sir.’
‘Oh…’
‘I mean the old Lady, sir, particularly… though your sister, too, I’m sure!’
‘Oh, well it’s the least I could do for her,’ said George, with adequate conviction, he felt.
‘Since you and Captain Valance were such great friends.’
‘Well, yes,’ said George quickly, and rather sternly, over his own incipient blush. ‘Though goodness, it all feels a world ago, Wilkes.’ He looked around the hall, with a kind of weary marvelment that it was still there, the armorial windows, the brightly polished ‘hall chairs’ no one would dream of sitting on, the vast brown canvas of a Highland glen, with long-horned cattle standing in the water. He remembered looking at this painting on his first visit, and Cecil’s father telling him it was ‘a very fine picture’, and what sort of cows they were. Cecil was behind him, not quite touching, a latent heat; he had said something, ‘That’s MacArthur’s herd, isn’t it, Pa?’ – his interest as smooth and confident as his deceit; the old boy had agreed, and they’d gone into lunch, Cecil’s hand just for a moment in the small of his guest’s back. ‘Of course I remember it all,’ said George, and even working it up a bit in his embarrassment: ‘I always remember that Scottish picture.’ The picture itself could hardly have been duller, but it was eloquent of something – the drinking cattle seemed almost to embody Sir Edwin’s artless unawareness of what his son got up to.
‘Ah, yes, sir,’ said Wilkes, to show it meant something, surely rather different, to him too. ‘Sir Edwin cared greatly for “The Loch of Galber”. He often said he preferred it to the Raphael.’
‘Yes…’ said George, not sure if Wilkes’s eyebrows, raised in amiable remembrance, acknowledged the general opinion about the Raphael. ‘I was thinking, Wilkes, Mr Stokes should have a word with you about Cecil while he’s here.’
‘Oh, it hasn’t been suggested, sir.’
‘Really? You probably knew him better than anybody.’
‘It’s true, sir, in some ways I did,’ said Wilkes modestly, and with something else in his hesitancy, a hazy vision of all the people who nursed the illusion of ‘knowing’ Cecil best of all.
‘Lady Valance made it clear at luncheon that she wants a full picture of his childhood years,’ said George, with a hint of pomp. ‘She has a poem he wrote when he was only three, I believe…’
Wilkes’s pink, attentive face absorbed the idea of this new kind of service, which would evidently be a very delicate one. ‘Of course I have numerous memories,’ he said, rather doubtfully.
‘Cecil always spoke of you with the greatest… admiration, you know,’ said George, and then put in the word he’d just dodged, ‘and affection, Wilkes.’
Wilkes murmured half-gratefully, and George looked down for a moment before saying, ‘My own feeling is that we should tell Mr Stokes all we can; it’s for him to judge what details to include.’
‘I’m sure there’s nothing I wouldn’t be happy to tell Mr Stokes, sir,’ said Wilkes, with a geniality close to reproach.
‘No, no,’ said George, ‘no, I’m sure…’ – and again he felt a little flustered by this courteous saunter round an unmentionable truth. ‘But I mustn’t keep you!’ And with a snuffle and a little bow, which seemed unintentionally to mimic the butler himself, and made George colour suddenly again, he turned through the door, which he closed softly behind him, and started down the long passage.
It was a strange sensation, this passage. He went along it with the natural rights of a guest, a slightly tipsy adult free to do as he pleased, but breathless at once with the reawoken feelings of his first visit, thirteen years before. Nothing had changed: the dim natural light, the school-like smell of polish, the long row of portraits of almost rectangular bulls and cows. He was dismayed to find himself blushing so soon and so much. He wondered anxiously if Wilkes, a valet in those days, who had been so helpful and tactful with him, and always somehow to hand, hadn’t also been present, unremembered, in other scenes. Had he come and gone, silently, unnoticed? Was it indeed part of a very good valet’s duties to spy, to read letters, to go through waste-paper baskets, the more fully to know his master’s thoughts and anticipate his needs? Would that increase or diminish his respect for his master? Was it not said, by one of the French aphorists, that great men rarely seemed great to their valets? And it was here, where you turned the corner, that Cecil had grabbed him and kissed him, in his very first minutes at Corley, while showing him where to wash his hands. Kissed him in his imperious way, with a twist of aggression. George’s heart jumped and raced, for a moment, remembering. The kiss, together with the tension of arrival at a country house and his own keen desire to impress and deceive Cecil’s parents, had made George suddenly mad with worry. He had struggled with Cecil, who was proud of his strength. The cloakroom was thick with coats, as if a meeting or a concert were going on next door, and Cecil pushed him against them, lifting a tall stiff mackintosh off its peg – it toppled slowly over them and put a comical kind of stop to things, for the time being.
Beyond the coats was the sombre marble and mahogany washroom, and then the third room, with its towering cistern and high-up prison-like window. George locked the door with a remembered sense of refuge; and then with a gasp of confusion that the man he was hiding from was long dead.
On his way back along the passage he saw the charm of avoiding the party for a little longer, and decided to visit the chapel and look at Cecil’s effigy. On the occasion of Daphne and Dudley’s wedding, the tomb had been unfinished, a brick box that one had to go to left or right of. To tell the truth, he’d avoided looking at it. There had seemed to be some awful lurking joke that they were getting married over Cecil’s dead body. Now there was no one in the hall, no sound of voices, and he skirted the monstrous oak table and went out into the glassed-in arcade, half cloister, half conservatory, which ran along the side of the house to the chapel door. Here too everything seemed the same, everything old and old-fashioned, muddled and habitual, waiting no doubt for Mrs Riley’s ruthless hand. Hard to bear in mind it was only fifty years old, younger than his own mother. It looked sunk in habit and history. Gothic plinths held up stone tubs of flowers; three brass chandeliers, crudely wired for electricity, hung to just above head-height; the floor was of diapered tiles, crimson and biscuit. George felt how the dark oak door of the chapel loomed, seemed to summon and dishearten the visitor with the same black stare. He gripped the cold ring of the handle, the latch shot up inside with a clack, and again he saw Cecil, bustling him through on that first afternoon, with a glance back over his shoulder, in case they were being followed – ‘This gloomy hole is the family chapel’ – and holding him tightly round his upper arm. George had peeped about, in an excited muddle, trying to smother his awe in the required show of disdain for religion, while sensing none the less that Cecil would expect some sign of admiration at there being a chapel at all. Surely they were both rather thrilled by it. The chapel was tall for its modest size, the timber roof shadowy, the thwarted light through the stained-glass window giving the place, by afternoon, the atmosphere of the time just after sunset. Pale things glowed weakly, but others, tiles and tapestries, were dull until the eyes adjusted.
Now what he saw, among the grey shadows, was Cecil’s white figure, stretched out flat, and seeming to float above the floor. The sun had long since gone off the garish glass of the east window, and what daylight there was, oblique and qualified, seemed all to be gathered in Cecil. His feet pointed away, towards the altar. It was as if the chapel had been built for him.
George pushed the door to, without quite closing it, and stood by the first pew’s end, with a stern expression and a very slight feeling of fear. He was alone with his old pal again, almost as though he’d come into a hospital ward rather than a chapel, and was afraid of disturbing him, half-hoped to find him asleep and to slip away, having kept his word. That was a kind of visit he’d paid many times, in the War, and after, dreading to see what had happened to a fellow, afraid of the horror in his own face. Here there was a sickly smell of Easter lilies rather than disinfectant. ‘Hello, Cecil, old boy,’ he said, pleasantly and not very loudly, with a dim echo, and then he laughed to himself in the silence that followed. They wouldn’t have to have an awkward conversation. He listened to the silence, chapel silence, with its faint penumbra of excluded sounds – birdsong, periodic rattle of the distant mower, soft thumps that were less the wind on the roof than the pulse in his ear.
