a comical sour face, shaking her head, and telling Colonel Fountain in his good ear about how sensitive Sir Edwin was to music. The talk regained confidence, with a certain sense of relief. For forty years, after all, the piano had been untouched, disguised beneath a long-fringed velour shawl, a sturdy platform for all manner of useful or decorative objects, and if anyone after dinner had uncovered the keys and facetiously picked out a phrase the noise that came forth, from under the heaped-up folios and potted plants and the arena of framed photographs, was so jangled by time and neglect as to discourage any further idea of music. Now, however, Corinna was playing the start of the piece, the misleadingly peaceful prologue… ‘Not tonight, old girl,’ called Dudley from across the room, still humorously, but emphatically, and expecting to be understood – he gave Mark a matey grin. Wilfrid had cleared a little space in front of the piano, asking people in the preoccupied way of some official or commissionaire to stand back. There was a moment of silence, in which it seemed their father’s order had been understood, but which Corinna, with a touch of self-righteousness, took as proper expectancy for their performance, and pitched vigorously into ‘The Happy Wallaby’. After three bars, Wilfrid, with a look of selfless submission to order and fate, took the first few steps of his dance, which of course involved crouching and then jumping as far forward as he could. The guests shifted back, shielding their drinks, with little cries of friendly alarm, some clearly thinking this shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Stinker carried on talking loudly as if he hadn’t noticed – ‘One awfully clever thing he said was…’ – but Dudley had put down his drink and stomped across the room, his face already square and staring with ungovernable emotion. He stood by the piano and said, in fact quietly, ‘I said not tonight.’
‘But, Daddy, you did say tonight,’ said Corinna pertly, playing on.
‘And tonight I said not! Change of orders!’ – and a bark of a laugh at the Colonel to suggest he was more in control than he was. Daphne strode forward – it was what she knew they said about Corley, how it had changed in Dudley’s time, the rum mix of folk, the painters and writers, it was bedlam. She felt defiant and apologetic all at once. Wilfrid had stopped jumping, his trust in his sister’s plan abandoned, but Corinna played on.
‘Perhaps not now, darling,’ Freda said, stretching out a lace-cuffed hand to her granddaughter’s shoulder, just as Dudley, bending over them both, his horrible grimace the sudden focus of the crisis, pounded his fists repeatedly on the keys at the high plinky end of the keyboard and maddened by the silly effect elbowed Corinna off the stool and pounded repeatedly at the more resonant and furious octaves at the bottom. Then he slammed the lid shut.
‘Come along,’ said Daphne quietly, and led the two children out of the room, clinging to her hands. Nanny, the one time you wanted her, was nowhere to be seen. Then she found her mother was following her too, which was welcome in a way, except that an awful strain of unexpressed pity and reproach for her, being married to Dudley Valance, a mad brute, would be in the air. Corinna’s lip was trembling, but Wilfrid was already sobbing steadily as he marched along.
When Daphne came back into the drawing-room three minutes later a collective effort at repair had been made. She murmured that the children were fine – she felt an undertow of support hedged with a certain timorous reluctance to go against Dudley. ‘Little devils, eh?’ said the Colonel, and patted her on the arm. Mark and Flo and the S-Ps had seen the like before, and were having an ideally boring conversation about shooting to show that things were under control. Dudley himself, with the touchy geniality of a man who is never in the wrong, was talking to Sebby Stokes, whose natural diplomacy just about carried him through. It was understood that no Valance would ever apologize for anything. Louisa said nothing, though Daphne as usual read her unspoken thoughts very clearly; then she heard her say with necessary clarity to the Colonel, ‘We never saw our boys after six o’clock.’ Daphne knew the person who would be most upset was her own mother, who didn’t come back in before dinner. The best thing to do was to have a stiff drink. And she found within a minute or two that a wary hilarity of recovery had gripped the whole party.
By the time they went into dinner Daphne’s mood was one of nonsensical amusement veering into breathless semi-alarm at not knowing what was going on. She thought she had better bring out Colonel Fountain before the mad atmosphere of the evening engulfed them all. After the fish was served she asked him clearly about Cecil, and heard her words cantering on into a sudden general silence – her voice sounded not quite her own. The Colonel was sitting halfway along the table, on Louisa’s right, and glanced around keenly, almost challengingly, as he spoke, as if at a briefing of a different kind. Those looking at him found themselves watching Louisa as well, who took on a solemn and anxious expression, her eyes fixed on the silver salt-cellar in front of her. It was not the story of Cecil’s death, thank heavens, but of the famous occasion when he’d won his MC, bringing back three of his wounded men under fire. The Colonel outlined the situation in large terms, enlisting the salt-cellar as a German machine-gun post. The more detailed account he gave of the episode itself was done with honour and a sense of conviction somehow heightened by his reticent manner; but Daphne – and possibly others round the table – had a disappointing sense that he no longer distinguished it clearly from a dozen such episodes. He had written a splendid letter to Louisa at the time, and of course recommended Cecil for his medal, and his form of words now was very close to those ten-year-old accounts. Perhaps Dudley and Mark, who had been in similar ‘shows’, envisaged it more freshly. Daphne’s eye roamed round the room as Colonel Fountain spoke. It was the room she had associated most with Cecil, from the day they’d first met, and now it looked at its exotic best, with candles reflected in the angled mirrors and in the dim gold leaf of the jelly-mould domes overhead. At the far end, in the glow of an electric lamp, hung the Raphael portrait of a bonneted young man. ‘I don’t know quite how he did it,’ the Colonel said. ‘The mist had pretty well cleared – he was horribly exposed.’ She knew Revel loved the room as much as she did, and she took her time to let her eyes come to rest on him, when he seemed immediately to know, and glanced up at her.
The rest of dinner passed in the blur of three successive wines, but Dudley, though drunker, was making a better effort not to be rattled. Daphne had decided she must ration the number of times she looked pointedly at Revel, and she soon felt he had come to a similar agreement with himself – it was amusing, and then threatened to become awkward. Sebby naturally was questioned a certain amount about the miners and his answers gave them all the feeling they were at the heart of the crisis without anything much being revealed at all. Mark was more provoked by this than the others, and had clearly taken against Sebby altogether. He talked a good deal of unnecessary rot, or sense that sounded like rot, about his experience growing up behind a butcher’s shop in Reading, until Dudley, who was the only person who could, said, ‘You really must learn, Mark dear, not to look down on those who have grown up without your own disadvantages,’ and a big licensed laugh ran round the table. To Daphne it was hauntingly like the early days of their marriage, the trance of pleasure and purely happy expectation that Dudley could cast her into. He gleamed in the candlelight and the certainty of his own handsomeness. Then she found her reawakened longing focused on Revel’s thin artistic fingers lying loosely spread on the tablecloth, as though waiting for someone to pick them up. And then already it was time for the ladies to withdraw – the easy but decisive initiative in which she still felt, on a night like this, a callow usurper of her mother-in-law.
When the men came through, Colonel Fountain’s driver was fetched out from the servants’ dining-room – they were setting off straight away to Aldershot. Daphne saw him off from the front doorstep, feeling terribly squiffy and incoherent. She shook the Colonel’s hand between both her own, but could think of nothing to say. Though the old boy had been a bit of a disappointment she felt incoherently that they had also let him down.
Back in the drawing-room she found there was talk of a game. Those who were keen half-smothered their interest, and those who weren’t pretended blandly that they didn’t mind. Louisa, who hated to waste time, was hemming a handkerchief for the British Legion sale. ‘Wotsit?’ she said, squinting down her nose as she tied off the thread.
‘Well, I wonder,’ said George, with a look that Daphne had known since childhood, the concealed excitement, the cool smile that warned them that, should he condescend to play, he would certainly win.
‘Before the War,’ Louisa explained to Sebby Stokes, ‘we played Wotsit for hours at a time. Dudley and Cecil went at it like rabbits. Of course Cecil knew far more.’
‘Cecil was so terribly clever, Mamma,’ said Dudley. ‘I’m not sure rabbits are
‘Or what about the adverb game,’ said Eva, ‘that’s always a riot.’
‘Ah yes, adverbs,’ said Louisa, as if recalling an unsatisfactory encounter with them in the past.
‘Which ones are they?’ said Tilda.
‘You know, darling, like
