The Stranger’s Child

Daphne said, ‘We simply must get back,’ a tight stifling feeling, quite apart from the smoke, in her throat. ‘I’m really rather cold, I’m most frightfully sorry.’ She jerked herself away, dropping her cigarette on the path and stamping on it. The lights from the house threw the hedges and other intervening obstacles into muddled silhouette, but it was hard to retreat with complete dignity; nor was the moonlight as friendly as she’d thought. She cut across the grass, found her heels sinking in loam, stumbled back and around an oddly placed border. It was like a further extension of being tight, a funny nocturnal pretence of knowing where she was going. She felt Eva might be pursuing her, but when she looked over her shoulder she was nowhere to be seen – well, she must be there somewhere, lingering, plotting, blowing thin streams of smoke into the night. Daphne reached the firm flags of the path by the house, and in the second she noticed the dark form curled sideways on the bench beside her, her hand was grasped at – ‘Don’t go in…’

‘Oh, my god! – who’s that? Oh, Tilda…’

‘Sorry, darling, sorry…’

‘You frightened the life out of me…’ Tilda wasn’t letting her hand go.

‘Isn’t it a lovely night?’ she said brightly. ‘How are you?’ And then, ‘I’m just rather worried about Arthur.’

For a moment Daphne couldn’t think who she was talking about. ‘Oh, Stinker, yes… why, Tilda?’ She found herself sitting very temporarily on the bench, on its edge. As if with a child, she put away the unmentionable matter of Mrs Riley. She found Tilda was staring at her, her white little face had forgotten the gaiety of the earlier evening. Had the drink turned on her? In her anxiety she seemed to invest Daphne with unusual powers.

‘Have you seen him?’ she said.

Daphne said, ‘Who…? Oh, Stinker… isn’t he wandering around, I’m sure he’s all right… darling,’ which wasn’t what she usually called her, any more than Stinker was Arthur. She’d always thought of Tilda as a youngish aunt, perhaps, silly, harmless, hers for life.

‘He’s so strange these days, don’t you think?’

‘Is he…?’ In so far as Daphne could be bothered to think about it, she wished he was a good deal stranger.

‘Am I mad? You don’t think, do you, he might be seeing another woman?’

‘Stinker? Oh, surely not, Tilda!’ It was easy and allowable to smile. ‘No, I really don’t think so.’

‘Oh! – oh good’ – Tilda seemed half-relieved. ‘I felt you’d know.’ She flinched, and peered at her again. ‘Why not?’ she said.

Daphne controlled her laugh and said, ‘But it’s obvious Stinker adores you, Tilda.’ And then perhaps thoughtlessly, ‘And anyway, who could it be?’

Tilda half-laughed but hesitated. ‘I suppose I thought perhaps because we haven’t, you know…’And just then Daphne saw Revel step out through the french window and frown along the path to where he evidently heard their voices. She knew Tilda meant because they didn’t have children.

‘Come along,’ said Daphne, getting up, but now in turn grasping Tilda’s hand, to conceal her own brusqueness. Any more on this subject would be unbearable.

‘Well, I’m just going to sit here and wait for him,’ Tilda said, not seeing what was happening, still adrift in drink and her own worry.

‘All right, darling,’ said Daphne, feeling fortune free her and claim her at the same moment. She almost ran along the path.

‘Oh, Duffel, darling,’ said Revel, touching her arm as they came back in together, and taking a smiling five seconds to continue his sentence, ‘do let’s pop up and look at the children sleeping.’

‘Oh,’ said Daphne, ‘of course’, as if it were hopeless of her not to have offered this entertainment already. She gazed at him and her giggle was slightly rueful. She didn’t think she herself could have slept, even two floors up, through the ‘Hickory-Dickory Rag’. And then the earlier horror, at the real piano, came back to her – it was wonderful, a blessing, that she’d forgotten it for a while.

‘Dudley’s gone to bed,’ said Revel, plainly and pleasantly.

‘I see.’ After the garden the drawing-room was a dazzle; and in their absence, it had been perfectly tidied – everything was always tidied. ‘Now, have you got a drink?’ she said.

‘I’ve got a port in every one,’ said Revel, a bit cryptically.

‘I think I’ve had enough,’ said Daphne, looking down on the tray of bottles, some friendly, some perhaps over- familiar, one or two to be avoided. She sloshed herself out another glass of claret. ‘Oh, Tilda’s outside!’ she explained to Stinker, who had just come in, stumbling on the sill of the french window. ‘You’ve just missed her.’ He leant on a table and gazed at her, but found nothing immediate to say.

She led the way down the cow-passage and up the east back-stairs, Revel touching her at each half-landing very lightly between the shoulders. His face when she glanced at it was considerate, with inward glints of anticipated pleasure. She was excited almost to the point of talking nonsense. ‘All rather back-stairs, as Mrs Riley would say,’ she said.

‘I don’t think this is quite what she had in mind, do you,’ said Revel coolly, so that a leap had been taken, several unsayable matters all at once in the air. Daphne’s heart was beating and she felt herself gripped at the same time by a strange gliding languor, as if to counter and conceal the speed of her pulse. She said,

‘I’ve got to tell you about the oddest scene just now, with old Mrs Riley. I’m absolutely certain she was making love to me.’

Revel gave a careless laugh. ‘So she does have good taste, after all.’

Daphne thought this rather glib, though charming of course. ‘Well…’

‘You see I thought she’d set her sights on Flo, who has a bit of a look of all that, doesn’t she.’

‘You see I thought…’ – but it was too much to explain, and now a housemaid was coming along the top landing with a baby, no, a hot-water bottle wrapped in a shawl. ‘You’re so sweet to the children,’ Daphne said loudly, ‘they’ll be thrilled to see you,’ giving the servant an absent-minded nod as she came past and thinking all would be explained by this, her virtue as a mother touchingly asserted after the frightful racket from downstairs. ‘If they’re not asleep, of course, I mean!’ She kissed her raised forefinger and pushed open the door with preposterous caution. Then she had the drama of the light behind her for a minute, before they both came in and Revel closed the door with a muffled snap. Now a sallow night-light glowed from the table and heaped large shadows on the beds and up the walls. ‘No, Wilfie darling, you go back to sleep,’ she said. She peered down at him uncertainly in the stuffy gloom – he had stirred and groaned but was not perhaps awake… then across at Corinna, by the window, who looked less than lovely, flat on her back, head arched back on the pillow and snoring reedily. ‘If only she could see herself,’ murmured Daphne, in wistful mockery of her ceremonious child.

‘If only we could see ourselves…’ said Revel. ‘I mean, I expect if you saw me…’

‘Mm,’ said Daphne, leaning back, almost feeling with her shoulders to where he was, feeling his left hand slip lightly round her waist, confident but courteous and staying only a moment. ‘Mm… well, there you have them!’ – stepping aside in a way that felt dance-like, a promise to return. She muttered into her wineglass as she swigged. ‘Not a terribly pretty picture, I’m afraid.’ She felt a run of trivial apology opening up in front of her, the children perhaps not pleasing to Revel. He must be aware of the smell of the chamber-pot, she seemed to see Wilfie’s yellow tinkle. ‘Of course their father never looks at them – when they’re asleep, I mean – well, as little as possible at other times – when they’re awake! – they can’t contrive to be picturesque at all times of the day and night – ’ she shook her head and sipped again, turned back to Revel. Revel was picking up Roger, Wilfie’s brown bear, and frowning at the creature in the pleasant quizzical way of a family doctor: then he looked at her with the same snuffly smile, as if it didn’t matter what she said. Her own mention of Dudley hung oddly in the half-light of the top-floor room.

She went round to the far side of Wilfrid’s little bed, set her glass down on the bedside table, peered down at him, then perched heavily on the side of the bed. His wide face, like a soft little caricature of his father, all mouth and eyes. She thought of Dudley kissing her just now, in the cow-passage, all her knowledge of him that had to be kept from a child, their child, facing blankly upwards, one cheek in shadow, the other in the gleam of the night- light. She didn’t want to think of her husband at all, but his kiss was still there, in her lips, bothering away at her. She gently straightened and smoothed and straightened again the turned-over top of Wilfrid’s sheet. Dudley had a way of trapping you, he stalked your conscience, his maddest moments were also oddly tactical. And then of course he was pitiable, wounded, haunted – all that. Wilfrid’s head twitched, his eyelids opened and closed and he turned his whole body in a sudden convulsion to the right, then in a second or two he thumped back again, murmured furiously and lay the other way. He had bad dreams that were sometimes spooled out for her, formless