‘I mean, can you play?’ Wilfrid asked, shaking his head.
‘I’m not awfully good!’ said Madeleine, pleasantly enough. They went out into the hall. ‘I suppose there’s always the pianola…’ But happily, the men had already wheeled it back down the cow-passage. Wilfrid didn’t want to play the pianola with her. Not meaning to initiate a game, he got under the hall table.
‘What are you doing, dear?’ said Aunt Madeleine.
‘I’m in my house,’ said Wilfrid. In fact it was a game he sometimes played with his mother, and he felt unfaithful to her but also a kind of security as he squatted down with the huge oak timbers almost touching his head. ‘You can come and visit me,’ he said.
‘Oh…! Well, I’m not sure,’ said Madeleine, bending over and peering in.
‘Just sit on the table,’ said Wilfrid. ‘You have to knock.’
‘Of course,’ said Madeleine, with another of those glimpses of being a good sport that complicated the picture. She sat down obediently, and Wilfrid looked out past her swinging green shoes and the translucent hem of her skirt and petticoat. She knocked on the table and said loudly, ‘Is Mr Wilfrid Valance at home?’
‘Oh… I’m not quite sure, madam, I’ll go and look,’ said Wilfrid; and he made a sort of rhythmical mumbling noise, which conveyed very well what someone going to look might sound like.
Almost at once Aunt Madeleine said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask who it is?’
‘Oh God, madam, who is it?’ said Wilfrid.
‘You mustn’t say God,’ said his aunt, though she didn’t sound as if she minded very much.
‘Sorry, Aunt Madeleine, who is it, please?’
The proper answer to this, when he played with his mother, was, ‘It’s Miss Edith Sitwell’, and then they tried not to laugh. His father often laughed about Miss Sitwell, who he said sounded like a man and looked like a mouse. Wilfrid himself laughed about her whenever he could, though in fact he was rather afraid of her.
But Madeleine said, ‘Oh, can you tell Mr Wilfrid Valance that it’s Madeleine Sawle.’
‘Yes, madam,’ said Wilfrid, in a sort of respectful imitation of Wilkes. He ‘went away’ again, and took his time about it. He had a picture of his aunt’s face, smiling impatiently as she sat and waited on the hard table. A wild idea came to him that he would simply say he wasn’t at home. But then a shadow seemed to fall on it, it seemed lazy and cruel. But the game, which his aunt had failed to understand, really depended on the person pretending to be someone else. Otherwise you came to the end of it, and a feeling of boredom and dissatisfaction descended almost at once. Then his deep underlying longing for his mother rose in a wave, and the pain of thinking of her, and Uncle Revel drawing her, stiffened his face. It was a burningly important event from which he had been needlessly shut out. Madeleine suddenly said, ‘Wilfrid, will you be all right there for half a moment, I just have to go and do something.’
‘Oh, yes, all right,’ said Wilfrid; and he saw her slide and then jump the six inches down on to the floor, and her clumpy green shoes going off rather fast towards the stairs.
Wilfrid stayed under the table for ten minutes, in the odour of polish, feeling relief at first, and then the bleak little prickle of abandonment, and then a spreading and anxiously practical sense of the things he might now be able to do. The floorboards were faintly sticky with polish under the crepe rubber soles of his sandals. These unprepared freedoms in his closely minded life were exciting, but shadowed by worry that the system designed to protect him could so easily break down.
He crawled out, over the thick oak stretcher of the table, stood up, and went slowly and indirectly towards the foot of the stairs. Without his aunt to license his escapade, he was in the random and irrational jurisdiction of his father. ‘Daddy I wasn’t,’ he said, as he climbed the stairs, ‘I wasn’t playing on the landing’ – and as each little wounded lie of a denial dropped behind unneeded, the growing sense of freedom was haunted by a blacker sense of guilt. The freedom seemed to stretch uncomfortably, like a held breath. He strolled along the wide landing, still talking inaudibly to himself, head dropping from side to side, in a guilty mime of being alone. Round the corner hung the Blue Lady, with her frightening eyes, and a picture of Scotland, also known as The Goat’s Bottom. A maid came out of a room and crossed to the back-stairs but magically without seeing him, and he got to the laundry- room door. The black china handle was large in his child’s hand, and slightly loose in the door, so that it joggled betrayingly as he turned it and the door creaked quickly open, outwards across the landing, and swung wide if you didn’t hold it, to bang against the chair beside it.
When he opened the door again he was pretending that not long had passed. The clock in the hall was sounding, far away, down below, quarter past, half past, quarter to, though the hour itself hung undisclosed in the grey light of the landing window. He looked both ways with a sense of dread that had been magically banished in the laundry-room itself, and a tense tactical excitement at the prospect of the long corridor and the stairs. His dread was partly still guilt and partly a different kind of awkward feeling, that maybe no one had missed him. It seemed best to take the other back-stairs, at the far end of the main landing, and get round to the nursery that way, and then simply insist he had been there all along. He closed the laundry-room door, with cautious control of the handle, and went along by the wall and looked round the corner.
Mrs Cow was lying face down, her right hand loosely gripping her stick, which had pushed the long Persian runner up in a wave against the legs of a small table, knocking off the little bronze huntsman, who also lay on his face on the floor, with his pike sticking out. Her other stick was some feet away, as if she’d tossed it in a sudden spasm or attempt to ward something off, and her left arm was trapped under her at an angle that would have been painful for a conscious person. Wilfrid stared, looked away, approached very cautiously, heel to toe in his sandals, not wanting to be heard, least of all by the old lady herself. Then he said ‘Oh, Mrs Cow…?’ – almost absently, as if starting on some question that would come to him if he kept talking: the point was to get the adult person’s attention and keep it. Part of him knew of course that she wouldn’t answer, would never answer a question again, in her wilful German voice. But something advised him to pretend politely, for a little while more, that she was still up to a chat. He came round her head, which was turned sideways, her left cheek to the carpet; and saw her right eye, hooded, half-open. Therefore not looking at him, but seeming to be part of her speechless search for something out of range, something that might have helped her. Trembling, slightly but uncontrollably, he squatted down and turned his own head sideways to try to meet her gaze, which in a normal person would have brought about a flicker of engagement. He saw how her mouth, also half-open, had let out a small slick of saliva, its shine fading as it darkened the red of the carpet.
The old lady’s left arm was pinned under her, but the hand was poking out: there it lay on the carpet, small and thick, humped and dimpled. Wilfrid stared at it, from his squatting position, then stood up and walked around her again. He was frightened that the hand might move, and also, oddly, almost sickeningly, tempted by it. Looking both ways, holding his breath, he bent down, reached his fingers towards it; then picked it up. In a second he dropped it, and clutched his own warm hands together, then thrust them into his armpits, in a way that he had. He stared at Mrs Kalbeck’s dropped hand, and then in the second he turned away it stirred and retracted slightly, and lay back as it had been before.
On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going – not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down. Helplessly he marched to the door of his father’s study. It was the most unapproachable room in the house, a room of unrememberable size and everything in it, clock and fender and crackling waste-paper basket, dark with prohibitions. His father’s anger, unleashed last night, at the piano, had withdrawn into it, like a dragon to its lair. Wilfrid stood for a moment outside the door, and wiped his nose thoroughly on his sleeve. Though he was helpless, he was oddly lucid. He knew that to knock would introduce more suspense into the thing than anyone could bear, and risk bringing further wrath upon his head in advance; so, very tactfully, he turned the handle.
The room was unexpectedly dark, the heavy curtains almost closed, and he moved forward not really listening to the clock but with a sense that the spaces between its deep ticks were stretching, as if it was thinking of stopping. The stripe of light across the red carpet made the shadow even deeper, for the first few seconds. Wilfrid knew his father had headaches in the morning, and avoided the light, and this sent another wave of despairing apology over him. At the same time the one line of light showed up ridges and knots in the carpet, which itself had the half-strangeness of something in a dream – in a house where he knew all the carpets as territories, castles, jumping squares, there was this other room with a carpet he had never jumped on. For a long time they seemed not to see him, and as he stepped forward it was as if he still had a chance to step back – the first they would know of his presence would be the click of the door behind him. Nanny was turned away from him, lying with her legs up on the settee, and watching his father, on the other side of the band of light, by the fireplace. His father was still in his dressing-gown, and with his sword in his hand looked like a knight. The fender here was a castle,
