Wilfie to work out the cartoons, but she couldn’t quite shake off the feeling of being a visitor, as if in a public library, with rules and fines. As the scene of her mother-in-law’s now ‘famous’ book tests, too, it had an unhappy air. Of these Sebby probably knew nothing, but to her the room was tainted by earlier attempts to contact Cecil – all nonsense, of course, as she and Eva agreed, but like much nonsense not entirely easy to dismiss.
Sebby sat down, on the same side of the table as she was, and again with an evident awareness of the niceties, she half his age, but a titled lady, he far more clever, a distinguished guest who’d been asked to perform a peculiar service for his hosts. ‘I hope this isn’t distressing for you,’ he said.
‘Oh, not at all,’ said Daphne graciously, her smile expressing a mild amazement at the thought that perhaps it should be. She saw Sebby’s own undecided glance. He said,
‘Dear Cecil aroused keen feelings in many of those who crossed his path.’
‘Indeed he did…’
‘And you would seem, from the letters you’ve so generously shared with me, to have had a similar effect on him.’
‘I know, isn’t it awful,’ said Daphne.
‘Hah…’ Sebby again unsure of her. He turned to pick up a clutch of the letters. She hadn’t been able to read them again herself, out of a strong compound embarrassment at everything they said about both of them. ‘There are beautiful passages – I sat up late with them last night, in my room.’ He smiled mildly as he turned over the small folded pages, recreating his own pleasure. Daphne saw him propped up in the very grand bed in the Garnet Room and handling these papers with a mixture of eagerness and regret. He was used to dealing with confidential matters, though not as a rule perhaps the amorous declarations of excitable young men. He hesitated, looked up at her, and started reading, with an affectionate expression: ‘ “The moon tonight, dear child, I suppose shines as bright on Stanmore as it does on Mme Collet’s vegetable garden and on the very long nose of the adjutant, who is snoring enough to wake the Hun on the far side of the room. Are you too snoring – do you snore, child? – or do you lie awake and think of your poor dirty Cecil far away? He is much in need of his Daphne’s kind words and…” ’ – Sebby petered out discreetly at the slither into intimacy. ‘Delightful, isn’t it?’
‘Oh… yes… I don’t remember,’ said Daphne half-turning her head to see. ‘The ones from France are a bit better, aren’t they?’
‘I found them most touching,’ said Sebby. ‘I have letters of my own from him, two or three… but these strike quite another tone.’
‘He had something to write about,’ said Daphne.
‘He had a great deal to write about,’ said Sebby, with a quick smile of courteous reproof. He looked through a few more letters, while Daphne wondered if she could possibly explain her feelings, even had she wanted to; she felt she would have to understand them first, and this unnatural little chat was hardly going to help her to do that. What she felt then; and what she felt now; and what she felt now about what she felt then: it wasn’t remotely easy to say. Sebby was every inch the bachelor – his intuitions about a young girl’s first love and about Cecil himself as a lover were unlikely to be worth much. Cecil’s way of being in love with her was alternately to berate her and to berate himself: there wasn’t much fun in it, for all his famed high spirits. Yet he always seemed happy when away from her (which was most of the time) and she had sensed more and more how much he enjoyed the absences he was always deploring. The War when it came was an absolute godsend. Sebby said, ‘Tell me if I am being too inquisitive, but I feel it will help me to a clearer vision of what might have been. Here’s the letter, what is it, June 1916, “Tell me, Daphne, will you be my widow?” ’
‘Oh, yes…’ She coloured slightly.
‘Do you remember how you replied to that?’
‘Oh, I said of course.’
‘And you considered yourselves… engaged?’
Daphne smiled and looked down at the deep red carpet almost puzzled for a moment that she had ended up here anyway. What was the status of a long-lost expectation? She couldn’t now recapture any picture she might then have had of a future life with Cecil. ‘As far as I remember we both agreed to keep it a secret. I wasn’t altogether Louisa’s idea of the next Lady Valance.’
Sebby smiled back rather furtively at this little irony. ‘Your letters to Cecil haven’t survived.’
‘I do hope not!’
‘I have the impression Cecil never kept letters, which is really rather trying of him.’
‘He saw you coming, Sebby!’ said Daphne, and laughed to cover the surprise of her own tone. He wasn’t used to teasing, but she wasn’t sure he minded it.
‘Indeed!’ Sebby rose, and looked for a book on the table. ‘Well, I don’t want to keep you too long.’
‘Oh…! Well, you haven’t.’ Perhaps she had rattled him after all, he thought she was simply being flippant.
‘What I hope you might do,’ said Sebby, ‘is to write down for me a few paragraphs, simply evoking dear Cecil, and furnishing perhaps an anecdote or two. A little memorandum.’
‘A memorandum, yes.’
‘And then if I may quote from the letters…’ – she had a first glimpse of his impatience – the impersonal logic of even the most flattering diplomatist. Of course one had to remember that he was burdened with far more pressing things.
‘I suppose that would be all right.’
‘I expect to call you simply Miss S., unless you object’ – which Daphne found after a mere moment’s fury she didn’t. ‘And now I might ask you just to run through “Two Acres” with me, for any little insights you might give me – local details and so on. I didn’t like to press your mother.’
‘Oh, by all means,’ said Daphne, with a muddled feeling of relief and disappointment that Sebby had failed to press her too – but that was it, of course, she saw it now, and it was good not to have wasted time on it: he was going to say nothing in this memoir of his, Louisa was in effect his editor, and this weekend of ‘research’, for all its sadness and piquancy and interesting embarrassments, was a mere charade. He picked up the autograph album, the mauve silk now rucked and stained by hundreds of grubby thumbs, and leafed delicately through. There was something else in it for him, no doubt – a busy man wouldn’t make this effort without some true personal reason. Sebby too had been awfully fond of Cecil. She gazed up at the carved end of the nearest bookcase, and the stained-glass window beyond it, in a mood of sudden abstraction. The April brilliance that threatened the fire in the morning-room here threw sloping drops and shards of colour across the wall and across the white marble fireplace. They painted the blind marble busts of Homer and Milton, pink, turquoise and buttercup. The colours seemed to warm and caress them as they slid and stretched. She pictured Cecil as he had been on his last leave; she had a feeling that when she met him that hot summer night he had just come from dinner with Sebby. Well, he was never going to know about that. For now, she had to come up with something more appropriate; something that she felt wearily had already been written, and that she had merely to find and repeat.
7
Freda crossed the hall and started up the great staircase, stopping for a moment on each frighteningly polished tread, reaching up for the banister, which was too wide and Elizabethan in style to hold on to properly, more like the coping of a wall than a handrail. It must be nice for Daphne to have a coat of arms, she supposed – there it was, at each turn, in the paws of a rampant beast with a lantern on its head. She too had dreamt of that for her daughter, in the beginning, before she knew what she knew. Corley Court was a forbidding place – even in the sanctuary of her room the dark panelling and the Gothic fireplace induced a feeling of entrapment, a fear that something impossible was about to be asked of her. She closed the door, crossed the threadbare expanse of crimson carpet, and sat down at the dressing-table, close to tears with her confused relieved unhappy sense of not having said to Sebastian Stokes any of the things she could have said, and had known, in her heart, that she wouldn’t.
The one letter she’d shown him, her widow’s mite, she’d called it, was mere twaddle, a ‘Collins’. She saw his courteous but very quick eye running over it, his turning the page as if there still might be something of interest on the other side, but of course there was not. He’d sat there, like the family doctor, he’d said, though to her he was a figure of daunting importance, toughness and suppleness, someone who spoke every day with Sir Herbert
