the subject as he turned away and said, ‘You know, old Valance has been quite bearable, so far.’
Madeleine smiled tightly. ‘So far. But then we have only been here for three hours.’
‘I imagine it’s pretty galling for him to have this fuss kicked up about Cecil, all over again.’
‘I don’t see why,’ said Madeleine, naturally contrary.
‘One sees the anniversaries stretching ahead for ever.’
‘Dudley Valance is a very strange man. I think it very sad, if he’s jealous after all this time.’
‘A bad war, of course.’
‘Though you might think not so bad as Cecil’s. Louisa was just telling me about the death. How they went out to France themselves to see him.’
‘Yes, he hung on, didn’t he, for several days…?’ George had an idea that ‘Fell at Maricourt’ was a sonorous formula, rather than the strict and messy truth.
‘They got permission to bring his body back. I say they, but I had the impression it was Louisa’s doing.’
‘She’s not called the General for nothing.’
‘One can sympathize with them wanting to see their son,’ said Madeleine fairly.
‘Well, of course, darling.’
‘Though immediately one thinks of the thousands of parents who simply couldn’t do that.’
‘Very true. My own dear mother, for instance.’
‘Well, there you are,’ said Madeleine, but as if arguing rather than agreeing – it was their way, their own odd intimacy, though charged now with something more anxious. ‘They brought him back here, and he was laid out in his own room, facing the rising sun.’
‘Oh, god. What, in the coffin?’ George pursed his lips against a horrified giggle.
‘I wasn’t quite clear,’ said Madeleine.
‘No… Where was he hit exactly?’
‘Well, I could hardly ask, could I. I suppose he might have been very disfigured.’
George saw how he’d been able to avoid such questions before; and had a certain sense, too, of Madeleine choosing her moment to raise them.
‘I don’t think you’ve ever told me,’ she said, ‘about when you heard the news.’
‘Oh, didn’t I, Mad…?’ George blinked, and frowned at the floor. His thoughts ran along the diagonals, the larger red lozenge of the tiles. Well, she’d asked him, and he must answer. ‘I do remember one or two things about it very well. I was up at Marston, of course, I remember it was very hot, and everyone was tired and tense about what was happening in France. Then after dinner I was called to the telephone. As soon as I heard it was Daphne, I felt quite sick with dread that something had happened to Hubert, and when it turned out to be Cecil, awful to say but I remember the news had to fight with a sort of upsurge of relief.’ He glanced at his wife. ‘I remember blurting out, “But Huey’s all right!” and old Daph saying, rather crossly, you know, “What…? Oh, Huey’s fine,” and then, her exact words, “It’s beautiful Cecil who’s dead” – and then she sort of wailed into the telephone, an extraordinary sound I’ve never heard her make before or since.’ George himself, looking at Madeleine, gave a weird gasp of a laugh. She looked back, showing in her blankly pondering face that she had other questions. ‘Beautiful Cecil is dead,’ said George quietly again, in a tone of amused reminiscence. Well, he would never forget the words, or the sudden wild licence of grief so startling in someone as close as a sister. Even then he had resisted them, their sudden appeal to something shared but never said till now. In truth, more than most deaths that summer, Cecil’s death had seemed both quite impossible and numbly unsurprising. Within a week or so he had seen it as inevitable.
6
‘Darling:
‘Well, yes!’ said Daphne.
‘Oh, I think two,’ said her mother, after a moment.
‘I’m not entirely stupid,’ said Mrs Riley, ‘but there are one or two words…’ She drew a bold line beneath the address, and smiled mischievously at what she’d written. None of them knew what the letter was, but the address in Piccadilly seemed designed to make them wonder. They were in the morning-room, with its chintz and china, and a small fire disappearing in the sunlight. Freda gazed at the pale flames and said, as Daphne knew she would,
‘The sun will put that fire out.’
Mrs Riley lit a cigarette with a hint of impatience. ‘My dear, do you believe that?’ she said.
‘You may laugh,’ said Freda, and then, ‘At least, that’s what I believe,’ and smiled at her rather timidly. She had clearly registered her daughter’s dislike for the woman, but herself perhaps found her no more than disconcerting.
Daphne said pleasantly, ‘Well, we’ll hardly miss it, Mummy, will we, it’s such a warm day.’ She smiled across at her mother, who was sitting with another letter in her lap, an old one, whose envelope, half-ripped in the long- ago moment of opening it, she was pressing and smoothing with her thumb.
‘This is all I have,’ she said. ‘I hardly knew Cecil.’
‘It really doesn’t matter,’ said Daphne. ‘Anyway, you did.’
‘I didn’t know he was going to be a great poet.’
‘Mm, well, I’m not sure anyone thinks that…’ The far door led to the library, and there Sebby Stokes was having his little chats. She thought Wilkes was in there now, being pressed for recollections, early signals of genius. The talk of course wasn’t audible, but none the less somehow present to those in the morning-room, sitting like waiting patients half-expecting to hear cries from the surgery. Freda looked at her daughter, with a fretful effort at concentration.
‘I do remember one or two things about him… Was it twice he came to the house? I’ve only the one letter, you see.’
‘Twice perhaps, yes.’
‘He was very energetic,’ said Freda.
‘Well, he could be, couldn’t he…’
Though nothing was ever said, Daphne felt that her mother hadn’t specially cared for Cecil. She saw him again, larger than life in their house, stooping briefly to their low-beamed ways. They had given him special rights, as a poet and a member of the upper classes; he’d been allowed to break things, to stay up all night, worship the dawn… They’d done their best to treat his absurdities as virtues, enlightening novelties. He’d been welcomed, as a friend of George’s, which was a novelty in itself. Had Freda picked up on the goings-on in the garden, after nightfall? There was much that she’d missed in those years, with the bottles in the wardrobe, and who knew where else. She had been excited by the poem, and really quite encouraging when Cecil started writing to Daphne – she saw a future in it, no doubt; she had allowed them to meet, when Cecil was on leave. Even so, something was amiss. It seemed possible Cecil had done or said some particular small thing, some slight that Freda could never mention and never forget – and in fact rather treasured for the reliable throb of indignation it caused… Now he was just an excuse for her – Daphne knew she’d come for the weekend so as to see the children. But Freda’s frown softened: ‘I’ll never forget him reading to us that night in the garden – reading Swinburne, was it, and in such a voice…’
‘Oh yes… Was it Swinburne? I know he read
‘Ha, indeed, how apt,’ said Freda, and then looked blankly again at the thin flames. ‘Didn’t he read us his own things?’
‘He kept us up all night listening to him,’ said Daphne.
‘We were out on the lawn, weren’t we, under the stars…’ Daphne didn’t think this was right, but nor was it worth correcting. Freda’s gaze wandered round the room and out, beyond Mrs Riley, to the present-day lawns and the trees of the Park beyond. ‘I sometimes think how different things would have been if George had never met Cecil,’ she said.
‘Well, yes…!’ said Daphne, with a short laugh. ‘Of course they would, Mother.’
‘No, darling, you know,’ Freda said, ‘but I do think some of his ideas were rather silly… I don’t know… one
