The Stranger’s Child

‘And may I just say that I admired the book a great deal.’

‘Oh – that’s kind of you,’ she said, pretty drily. ‘Well, I suppose the main reason was that I was lucky enough to know a lot of people more talented and interesting than myself.’

‘Of course, in a way I wish you’d written more about yourself.’

‘Well, there’s a certain amount that gets in, I hope.’ She squinted at the tape-recorder, aware it was capturing this flannel, and her reaction to it. ‘I was very much brought up in the understanding that the men all around me were the ones who were doing the important things. A lot of them wrote their own memoirs, or, you know, their lives are being written about now – there’s this new life of Mark Gibbons that’s going to come out.’

‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard about it,’ Paul said; Karen had got the proofs – unindexed, but a quick read through had produced only passing references to Daphne; Daphne, it seemed, had them too.

‘The publisher sent it. Wilfrid’s been reading it to me, because I can’t read any more. But of course she’s got all sorts of things wrong.’

‘Were you consulted for that book?’

‘Oh yes, the woman wrote to me. But really, I put it all in my own book – everything I thought worth saying about Mark, who was a dear friend, of course.’

‘Well, I know,’ said Paul, and looked at her rather cannily; but it was instantly clear from her hard half-smile that no confessions about bearing his child were remotely on the cards. ‘I remember meeting him at your seventieth.’

‘Ah, do you…’ – she accepted this. ‘Yes, he must have been there. Isn’t it awful, I’ve forgotten,’ she said, and smiled more sweetly, as if she’d just seen a good way out of his future questions.

‘Well, of course I’m hoping not to get it wrong,’ said Paul, ‘with your help!’ He sipped a little of the weak coffee. It struck him that if Daphne had helped her a bit more, the biographer of Mark Gibbons might not have made the mistakes that she was now deploring. It was a recurrent little knot of self-defeating resistance that perhaps all biographers of recent subjects had to confront and undo. People wouldn’t tell you things, and then they blamed you for not knowing them – unless they were George Sawle, of course, where the flow of secrets had been so disinhibited as to be almost unusable. Still, Daphne was an old lady, of whom he was reasonably fond, and he said gently, ‘I suppose you wanted to put the record straight a bit, though.’

‘Well, a bit – about “Two Acres” and things, you see. In the poem I’m merely referred to as “you”. And of course in Sebby Stokes’s thing I’m “Miss S.”!’

Paul laughed sympathetically, half-embarrassed by his own new suspicion that the ‘you’ of the poem was really George. ‘There’s more about you in… Sir Dudley’s book.’

‘Yes… but then he’s always so down on everybody.’

‘I was surprised by how little he says about Cecil.’

‘I know…’ – she sounded amiable but bored at once by talk of Black Flowers.

‘I suppose Cecil must have been the first real writer you’d met.’

‘Oh, yes, well as I said in the book, he was the most famous person I had met before I was married, though he wasn’t actually terribly famous at the time. I mean, he’d had poems here and there, but he hadn’t yet published a book or anything.’

‘Night Wake wasn’t till 1916, was it, only a few months before he was killed?’

‘That’s probably right,’ said Daphne. ‘And then after that of course he emerged as quite an important figure.’

‘But you’d read some of his poems before you met him?’

‘I think one or two.’

‘So to you he would have been a glamorous figure before you’d even set eyes on him.’

‘We were all quite curious to meet him.’

‘What do you remember about his first visit to “Two Acres”? Why don’t you just tell me about that.’

She tucked in her chin. ‘Well, he arrived,’ she said, as if resolved to tackle the question squarely.

‘He arrived at 5.27,’ said Paul.

‘Did he…? Yes.’

‘I think… your brother… must have met him.’

‘Well, of course he had.’

‘No…! I mean, he was at the station.’

‘Oh, quite possibly.’

‘Do you remember when you first saw Cecil yourself?’

‘Well, it would have been then.’

‘And did you feel an immediate attraction to him?’

‘Well, he was very striking, you know. I was only sixteen… very innocent… well, we all were in those days – I’d certainly never had a boyfriend, or anything like that – I was a great reader, I read romantic novels, but I had no knowledge of romance myself – and a lot of poetry, of course, Keats, and Tennyson we all loved…’ – Paul saw her easing into a routine, something sweet and artificial in her voice. He let her run on, his own face abstracted and impatient as he saw the shape of his next question, a rather tougher one. When she seemed to have finished, and turned to pick up her coffee, he said,

‘Can I ask you, what did you think about your brother’s friendship with Cecil?’

‘Oh…’ she huffed over her mug. ‘Well, it was very unusual.’

‘In what way?’ said Paul, with a small shake of the head.

‘Mm? He’d never had a friend before, poor George. I think we were all rather tickled when he suddenly produced one.’

Paul grinned at this with the reluctant sense of kinship that sometimes ghosted his interviews. ‘And could you see why they were such friends? Did they seem very close?’

Again Daphne sighed out, as if to say she might as well be candid. ‘I think it was just a clear case of old- fashioned’ – she paused and sipped – ‘well, hero-worship, really, wasn’t it? George was very young for his age, emotionally. I suppose Cambridge brought him out a bit.’ She winced. ‘To be honest, George has always been a bit of a cold fish.’

Paul played for a pondering moment or two with even more candid phrases, but looking at her he was doubtful, and frightened of disgusting her. He said, ‘I just wondered if you felt he was jealous of your affair with Cecil?’

‘George? No, no;’ and as if not satisfied with her earlier put-down, or feeling that by now it didn’t matter anyway, ‘George never exactly had normal human emotions, you see. I don’t know why. And I dare say it hasn’t done him any harm – life’s probably much simpler without them, though a bit dull, wouldn’t you think!’ Paul pictured George with the half-naked Cecil on the roof at Corley, and smiled distantly, at a loss as to how much of this she believed or expected him to believe; and to how much she might quite willingly have forgotten. ‘If you’d come a few years ago, I’d have suggested you go and talk to him, but I’m afraid he’s rather lost it now – up top, you know. I think poor Madeleine has quite a struggle with him.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Paul.

‘No, he’d have been a useful person for you to talk to. I don’t mean to suggest he was ever a bore, by the way. He was an intellectual, he was always the brains of the family.’

Paul let a moment pass, while he looked at his papers, his little mime of being an interviewer, which seemed more for his own benefit than for hers. ‘Do you mind if I ask you – you say in the book that it was, well, a love- affair – you and Cecil, I mean…!’

‘Well, indeed.’

‘You wrote to each other, but did you see each other?’

‘Didn’t I say…? No, we saw each other fairly often, I think.’

‘The War, I suppose, intervened.’

‘Well, the War, quite. We didn’t see each other so often then.’

‘I’ve been trying to work out from the Letters when he was in England – he signed up almost at once, September 1914.’

‘Yes, well he loved the War.’

‘So he was out in France by December, and then only home quite rarely on leave, until he – until he was