The Stranger's Child (15 page)

‘Then let’s run downstairs and get warmed up,’ said Daphne, in happy contravention of Nanny’s number one rule, and getting up briskly.

‘No two-at-a-time, mind, Wilfrid!’ said Nanny.

‘You can be sure he will be all right with me,’ said Daphne.

When they were out in the top passage, Wilfrid said, ‘Is Mrs Cow stopping for the night?’

‘Wilfrid,
of course
,’ said Corinna, as if at the end of her patience, ‘she’s coming on the train with Granny Sawle.’

‘Uncle George will take them home on Sunday, after lunch,’ said Daphne; and finding herself holding his hand, she said, ‘I thought it would be nice if you showed her up to her room.’

‘Then I will show Granny up to her room,’ said Corinna, making it harder for Wilfrid to get out of.

‘But what about Wilkes?’ said Wilfrid ingeniously.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Wilkes can put his feet up, and have a nice cup of tea, what do you think?’ said Daphne, and laughed delightedly until Wilfrid joined in on a more tentative note.

On the top stairs, they trotted down hand-in-hand, and in step, which did require a measure of discipline. Then from the window on the first-floor landing she saw the car arriving from the station. ‘They’re here . . . oh, darlings, run!’ she said, shaking off the children’s hands.

‘Oh, Mummy . . .’ said Wilfrid, transfixed with anxious excitement.

‘Come on!’ said Corinna; and they pelted down the three bright turns of polished oak, Wilfrid losing his footing on the last corner and bumping down very fast over several steps on his hip, his bottom. Daphne tensed herself, with a touch of annoyance, but now he was limping across the hall and round the table (looking just like his father), and by the time he started self-righteously to wail he was already distracted by the need to do the next thing.

Wilkes appeared, with the new Scottish boy, and Daphne let them go ahead and tackle the car for a minute while she watched from the porch. Awful to admit, but her pleasure at seeing her mother again was a touch defensive: she was thinking of the things her husband would say about her after she’d gone. Wilkes deferred to Freda very properly and smilingly, with his usual intuitive sense of what a guest might need. To Daphne herself she seemed an attractive figure, pretty, flushed, in a new blue dress well above the ankle and a fashionable little hat, with her own anxieties about the visit peeping out very touchingly. The handsome boy was helping Clara Kalbeck, a tactfully physical business: she came over the gravel slowly and determinedly, swathed in black, on two sticks, following Freda like her own old age.

Wilfrid glanced across at his sister, and then put his eye back to the chink between the shutters. His leg was burning, and his heart was thumping, but he still hoped to do it right. He saw Robbie come in to the house with the suitcases – he leant forward to watch him and nudged the door open with his cheek. ‘Not till I say,’ said Corinna. Robbie looked up and gave them a wink.

‘I know,’ muttered Wilfrid, and peered at her in the shadows with a mixture of awe and annoyance. The others seemed stuck in the porch, in endless adult talk. He could tell they were talking nonsense. He wanted to shout out at once, and he was also quite scared, as Corinna had said. The weekend loomed above him, with its shadowy guests and challenges. More people were coming tomorrow – Uncle George and Aunt Madeleine, he knew, and a man from London called Uncle Sebby. They would all be talking and talking, but at some point they would have to stop and Corinna would play the piano and Wilfrid would do his dance. He felt hollow with worry and excitement. When a fire was lit in the hall, this little cave-like passage was warm and stuffy, but today it smelt of cold stone. He was glad he had someone with him. At last Granny Sawle stepped in through the front door, and just for a second she glanced at the fireplace, with a dead look, so that Wilfrid knew she was expecting the surprise – though somehow this didn’t spoil it, in a way it made it better, and as soon as she’d dutifully turned her back he flung open his shutters and shouted, ‘Hello, Granny – ’

‘Not yet!’ wailed Corinna. ‘You’ve got it wrong, Wilfrid,’ but Granny had spun round already, a hand pressed to her heart.

‘Oh!’ she said, ‘oh!’ – and so Corinna pushed open her shutters too and shouted the correct announcement, which was, ‘Welcome to Corley Court, Granny Sawle and Mrs Kalbeck!’ with Wilfrid in hilarious unison, riding roughshod over his own mistake, and even though Mrs Kalbeck hadn’t yet made it into the house.

‘It’s too amazing!’ said Granny. ‘The very walls have voices.’ Wilfrid giggled in delight. ‘Ah, Dudley, dear’ – now his father had come in, and the dog barking. She raised her voice – ‘This ancient fireplace has miraculous properties!’

‘Rubbish, Rubbish!’ his father shouted, as the dog ran yelping and shivering towards the front door. ‘Here, Rubbish, come here! Pipe down!’; though Rubbish as usual did no such thing, and wanted to give everyone a Corley welcome of his own.

‘Quite magical!’ Granny held on.

‘Well, it won’t be magical for much longer,’ said his father, in his meaning voice, kissing her on the cheek. ‘Come on out of there, will you!’ though it wasn’t clear now if he was shouting at the children or the dog.

‘Wilfrid messed it up,’ said Corinna in a further announcement, as Mrs Kalbeck leant in through the front door, on one stick after the other, clearly alarmed as Rubbish leapt up and waltzed with her for a moment with his front paws on her tummy – she took two panting steps backwards, and the dog dropped down and sniffed excitedly round her legs, her round black shoes. After that it took a while for her to see where the young girl’s voice was coming from.

‘Frau Kalbeck, marvellous to see you again,’ said Dudley, limping quickly but very heavily across to her, so that he seemed to be playing with her, aping her or just joining in, you couldn’t tell. ‘Please ignore my children.’

‘Oh, but darling,’ said their mother, ‘the children have asked to show the guests up to their rooms.’

Dudley swung round with what they called the ‘mad glint’. The mood thickened, in a familiar way. But he seemed to let them off by saying simply, ‘Oh, the little dears.’

Mrs Kalbeck was awfully slow on the stairs. Wilfrid watched the rubber tip of each stick as it felt for its purchase on the shiny oak. ‘It
is
very dangerous,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve fallen down here myself.’ Being responsible for her, he found her interesting as well as frightening. He bobbed up and down the stairs beside her, encouraging and assessing her much slower progress. Corinna and Granny Sawle had gone on ahead, and he was worried, as always, about being late, and about what his father would say. ‘This house is Victorian,’ he explained.

Mrs Kalbeck chuckled amongst her sighs, and looked him in the face, levelly but sweetly. ‘And so am I, my dear,’ she said, in her precise German voice, her large grey eyes casting a kind of spell on him.

‘Do you like it then?’ he said.

‘This marvellous old house?’ she said gaily, but peering past him up the polished stairs with anxious blankness.

‘My father can’t warm to it,’ said Wilfrid. ‘He’s going to change it all.’

‘Well,’ she said disappointingly, ‘if that’s what he wants to do.’

Mrs Kalbeck had been put in the Yellow Room, at the far end of the house, and Wilfrid went a step or two ahead of her along the broad strip of carpet on the landing. They passed the open door of Granny Sawle’s room, where Corinna had already been given a present, a bright red scarf which she was looking at in the mirror. It was a cheerful irresistible room, and Wilfrid started to go into it, but then did resist, and walked on. The next door on the other side was his parents’ bedroom. ‘I’m afraid you’re not allowed in that room,’ he said, ‘unless my parents ask you to go in, of course.’ He was embarrassed that he didn’t exactly know Mrs Cow’s name; though at the same time he enjoyed thinking of her by her rude name. He didn’t want to get too close to her black dress, and her smell, white flowers mixed up with something sour and unhappy. ‘Mrs Ka . . .’ he said tentatively.

‘Yes, Wilfrid.’

‘My name’s not Vilfrid, you know, Mrs Ka . . . !’

The old lady stopped and pursed her lips obediently. ‘
Wil
–frid,’ she said, and coloured a little, which confused Wilfrid too for a moment. He looked away. ‘You were saying,
Wil
–frid, my dear . . . ?’ But of course he couldn’t say. He danced on, down the long sunlit landing, leaving her to catch up.

The door of the Yellow Room was open, and the maid Sarah, not one of his favourites, was standing over Mrs Kalbeck’s old blue suitcase, going through its contents with a slightly comic expression. When Mrs Kalbeck saw her, she lurched forward, almost fell as a rug slid away under her stick. ‘Oh, I can do that,’ she said. ‘Let me do that!’

‘It’s no trouble, madam,’ said Sarah, smiling coolly.

Mrs Kalbeck sat down heavily on the dressing-table stool, panting with indecision, though there was nothing she could do. ‘Those old things . . .’ she said, and looked quickly from the maid to Wilfrid, hoping he at least hadn’t seen them, and then back again, as they were carried ceremoniously towards an open wardrobe.

‘Well, goodbye,’ said Wilfrid, and withdrew from the room as if not expecting to meet her again.

On the landing, by himself, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that he should have said something. He trailed his fingers along the spines of the books in the bookcase as he passed, producing a low steady ripple. He covered his unease with a kind of insouciance, though no one was watching. He’d done what he’d been told, he’d been extremely kind to Mrs Cow, but his worry was more wounding and obscure: that he’d been told to do it by someone who knew it was wrong, and yet pretended it wasn’t. Three toes on his father’s left foot had been blown off by a German shell, and the man he had learned to call Uncle Cecil was a cold white statue in the chapel downstairs, because of a German sniper with a gun. Wilfrid ran down the corridor, in momentary freedom from any kind of adult, his fear of being late overruled by a blind desire to hide – ran past his grandmother’s room and round the corner, till he got to the linen-room, and went in, and closed the door.

‘Have a drink, Duffel,’ said Dudley genially, rather as if she were another guest.

‘We’re having Manhattans,’ said Mrs Riley.

‘Oh . . .’ said Daphne, not quite looking at either of them, but crossing the room with a good-tempered expression. She still felt distinctly odd, like the subject of an experiment, whenever she came into the ‘new’ drawing-room; and having Mrs Riley herself in the room only made her feel odder. ‘Should we wait for Mother and Clara?’

‘Oh, I don’t know . . .’ said Dudley. ‘Eva looked thirsty.’

Mrs Riley gave her quick smoky laugh. ‘How do you know Mrs . . . um – ?’ she said.

‘Mrs Kalbeck? She was our neighbour in Middlesex,’ said Daphne, making a moody survey of the bottles on the tray; and though she loved Manhattans, and had loved Manhattan itself, when they’d gone there for Dudley’s book, she set about mixing herself a gin and Dubonnet.

Mrs Riley said, ‘She seems rather . . . um . . .’ making a game of her own malice.

‘Yes, she’s a dear,’ said Daphne.

‘She’s certainly an enormous asset at a house party,’ said Dudley.

Daphne gave a pinched smile and said, ‘Poor Clara had a very hard war,’ which was what her mother often said in her friend’s defence, and now sounded almost as satirical as Dudley’s previous remark. She’d never been fond of Clara, but she pitied her, and since they both had brothers who’d been killed in the War, felt a certain kinship with her.

‘Just wait till she starts singing the Ride of the Valkyries,’ Dudley said.

‘Oh, does she do that,’ said Mrs Riley.

‘Well, she loves Wagner,’ said Daphne. ‘You know she took my mother to Bayreuth before the War.’

‘Poor thing . . .’ said Mrs Riley.

‘She’s never quite recovered,’ said Dudley in a tactful tone, ‘has she, Duffel, your mother, really?’

Mrs Riley chuckled again, and now Daphne looked at her: yes, that was how she chuckled, head back an inch, upper lip spread downwards, a huff of cigarette-smoke: a more or less tolerant gesture as much as a laugh.

‘I don’t rightly know,’ said Daphne, frowning, but seeing the point of keeping her husband in a good humour. A certain amount of baiting of the Sawles would have to be allowed this weekend. She came over with her drink, and dropped into one of the low grey armchairs with a trace of a smirk at its continuing novelty. She thought she’d never seen anything so short, for evening wear, as Eva Riley’s dress, only just on the knee when she sat, or indeed anything so long as her slithering red necklace, doubtless also of her own design. Well, her odd flat body was made for fashion, or at least for these fashions; and her sharp little face, not pretty, really, but made up as if it were, in red, white and black like a Chinese doll. Designers, it seemed, were never off duty. Curled across the corner of a sofa, her red necklace slinking over the grey cushions, Mrs Riley was a sort of advertisement for her room; or perhaps the room was an advertisement for her. ‘I know this weekend has been consecrated to Cecil,’ Daphne said, ‘but actually I’m glad that Clara was persuaded to come. She has no one, really, except my mother. It will mean so much to her. Poor dear, you know she hasn’t even got electricity.’