The Stranger's Child (18 page)

The High Ground was an immense lawn beyond the formal gardens, from which, though the climb to it seemed slight, you got ‘a remarkable view of nothing’, as Dudley put it: the house itself, of course, and the slowly dropping expanse of farmland towards the villages of Bampton and Brize Norton. It was an easy uncalculating view, with no undue excitement, small woods of beech and poplar greening up across the pasture-land. Somewhere a few miles off flowed the Thames, already wideish and winding, though from here you would never have guessed it. Today the High Ground was being mown, the first time of the year, the donkey in its queer rubber overshoes pulling the clattering mower, steered from behind by one of the men, who took off his cap to them as he approached. Really you didn’t mow at weekends, but Dudley had ordered it, doubtless so as to annoy his guests. George and Madeleine were strolling on the far side, avoiding the mowing, heads down in talk, perhaps enjoying themselves in their own way.

The children hastened, at a ragged march, towards their uncle and aunt – and seemed unsure themselves how much of their delight was real, how much good manners; Corinna by now took delight in good manners for their own sake. George stood his ground, in his dark suit and large brown shoes, and then squatted down with a wary cackle to inspect them for a moment on their own level. Madeleine, wrapped in a long mackintosh, held back, with a thin fixed smile, in which various doubts and questions were tightly hidden.

‘Aunt Madeleine, I’ve learned a new piece to play for you,’ said Corinna straight away.

‘Oh,’ said Madeleine, ‘what is it?’

‘It’s called “The Happy Wallaby”.’

‘Well, my dear,’ said Madeleine, as if seeing something faintly compromising in this, ‘we’ll have to see.’

‘She’s been practising, haven’t you, Corinna,’ said Daphne, and saw her glance at Wilfrid.

‘And Wilfie’s going to do his dance,’ Corinna said.

‘Oh, that will be capital,’ said George. ‘When will you do it? I don’t want to miss that,’ making up for his wife’s lack of warmth.

‘After nursery tea,’ said Daphne. ‘They’re allowed down.’ The thing about seeing George with Madeleine was that it made you fonder of George; he stood up, and they kissed with a noisy firmness that amused them both. ‘How’s Brum?’ said Daphne.

‘Brum’s all right,’ said George.

‘It’s a great deal of work,’ said Madeleine; ‘you don’t see us at our best, I fear!’

‘I don’t think you’ve met Revel Ralph, Madeleine . . . Revel, my brother George Sawle.’

George looked keenly at Revel as he shook his hand. ‘Madeleine and I have been reading a lot about your show . . . congratulations! Your designs sound marvellous.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Madeleine uncertainly.

‘I wonder if we’ll get down,’ said George, now smiling rather anxiously at Revel. ‘I’d love to see it.’

‘Well, let me know, won’t you,’ said Revel.

‘You’ve been, Daph, of course?’ said George.

‘I’d have to stay with someone, wouldn’t I,’ said Daphne.

‘You ought to have a little place in Town,’ said Revel.

‘Well, we did have that very nice flat in Marylebone, but of course Louisa sold it,’ said Daphne, and changed the subject before it got going – ‘Watch out . . .’ The donkey was plodding rapidly towards them, and they set off to the mown side of the lawn, damp grass cuttings clinging to their shoes. ‘God knows why they’re mowing today,’ she said, though she took a kind of pleasure in it too, different from her husband’s – it was something to do with labour, and running a place with twenty servants.

‘How
is
Dudley?’ said George.

‘I think all right,’ said Daphne, with a quick glance at the children.

‘Book coming on?’

‘Oh, I find it best not to ask.’

George gave her a strange look. ‘You’ve not seen any of it?’

‘No, no.’ She took a bright, hard tone: ‘You know he’s very excited about boxing things in.’

‘Oh, yes, I want to see this,’ said George, with his taste for controversy as much as for design. ‘How far is he taking it?’

‘Oh, quite far.’

‘But you don’t mind,’ with a sideways smile at her.

‘Well, there are some things. You’ll see.’

‘What do you think, Ralph?’ said George. ‘For or against the egregious grotesqueries of the Victorians?’ And now Daphne saw they were back in common-room mode, after a brief spontaneous holiday. The children smirked.

Revel thought and said, ‘Can I be somewhere in between?’ with an appealing wriggle in his voice.

‘I’d want to know why. Or rather where.’

‘I suppose what I feel,’ said Revel, after a minute, ‘well, the grotesqueries are what I like best, really, and the more egregious the better.’

‘What? Not St Pancras?’ said George. ‘Not Keble College?’

‘Oh, when I first saw St Pancras,’ said Revel, ‘I thought it was the most beautiful building on earth.’

‘And you didn’t change your mind when you’d seen the Parthenon.’

Revel blushed slightly – Daphne thought perhaps he had yet to see the Parthenon. ‘Well, I feel there’s room in the world for more than one kind of beauty,’ he said, ‘put it that way,’ firmly but graciously.

George took this in, seemed even to blush a little himself. He stopped and looked away towards the house: turrets and gables, the glaring plate glass in Gothic windows, the unrestful patterns of red, white and black brick. Creeper spread like doubt around the openings at the western end. Daphne felt she wouldn’t have chosen it, felt it had in a way chosen her, and now she would be sick at heart to lose it. She turned to Madeleine. ‘I remember when George first came to stay here, Madeleine,’ she said: ‘we thought we’d never hear the end of the splendours of Corley Court. Oh, the jelly-mould domes in the dining-room!’ But such comical alliances with her sister-in-law rarely stuck – Madeleine smiled for a second, but her allegiance to George’s intellect was the firmer. ‘No grotesqueries then!’ insisted Daphne.

George clearly thought it wise to laugh at himself for a moment: ‘Cecil liked them, and one didn’t argue with Cecil.’ It seemed not to bother him that he was mocking his sister’s home.

‘I see,’ said Revel, with that mixture of dryness and forgiveness that was so unlike Dudley’s humour. ‘So you know the house quite well.’

‘Oh, quite . . .’ said George absently, the question of why he so rarely came to Corley perhaps embarrassing him. ‘You’re too young to have known Cecil,’ he said.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Revel solemnly, and with the faintest smile, since his youth was generally thought to be in his favour, it was what all the articles in the magazines dwelt on – his being so brilliant so young.

‘But you’ve been over Corley before,’ said George, now a touch proprietary.

‘Oh, heaps of times,’ said Revel; and a strange sort of tension, of rivalry and regret, seemed for a moment to flicker in the two men’s different smiles.

‘Anyway, you’ll meet Mrs Riley,’ said Daphne, ‘she’s staying for the weekend.’

‘Oh, is she . . .’ said Revel, as if seeing a disadvantage after all in his visit.

‘She hung around for ages, you know, measuring things up or whatever she does and dropping ash on the carpet; and then Dud for some reason asked her to stay. And would you believe it, she had all her evening clothes in the boot of her car.’

‘Why did she?’ said Wilfrid.

‘She’ll have been on the way to someone else’s house, old chap,’ said George.

‘Well, she designs clothes,’ said Corinna. ‘She’s got tons of skirts and dresses in the car. She’s going to make one for me, green velvet, with a low waist and no particular bust.’

‘No particular bust!’ said Daphne. And then, ‘Is she indeed!’

‘Is she all right?’ said Revel. ‘I dare say she is – we come at things from different ends.’

Daphne was a little unsure about the turn she’d given the talk. ‘I’m sure she’s a genius,’ she said. ‘I’m just not awfully good with very fashionable people.’ And she thought,
and where is she now?
– in a scurry of anxiety which she quickly brought to heel.

‘I don’t expect she comes cheap,’ said Revel.

‘No. In fact she’s quite violently expensive,’ said Daphne, in a way that suggested a more than reasonable cause of annoyance.

They strolled back, their group still tentative and self-conscious, towards the white gate under the stone arch, and the broad path back to the house. Freda and Clara had come out for some air, and were moving at their own peculiar pace among the spring beds and low hedges of the formal garden. Daphne saw the man that Revel had mentioned, in a brown trilby, lope across and engage them in talk – they seemed confused, earnestly helpful, and then somewhat defensive. Clara raised one stick, and pointed it, as if sending him off. He had a camera-case slung round his neck, but didn’t seem interested in using the camera on them. ‘Go on, my darlings, rescue Granny Sawle,’ said Daphne. But just then the man, backing away and glancing round, saw Dudley himself emerge through the garden door, with the look of tricky geniality that he put on for the press, and with Sebby just behind him, jammed in the doorway by the excitable dog, and clearly more reluctant to be seen.

‘Here we are,’ said Dudley, as they all came up, shaking hands with George, shaking hands, rather pointedly, with Madeleine, though grinning at her fiercely as he did so. ‘And Revel, my dear, you’ve made it.’ He turned with a lurch to embrace the whole group in his grin. ‘What a lovely reunion!’ Daphne glanced at her mother, who she felt was the one most vulnerable to Dudley’s performance, but she was too caught up in her own reunion with George to notice it.

‘Hello, George!’ said Freda, with a brave little quiver, the tone of someone not quite sure of being remembered. And perhaps this tiny glimpse touched George as well – he enveloped his mother in a firm hug, sweetly, and guiltily, protracted.

‘Maddy, dear,’ he said, and Madeleine too held Freda’s shoulder and angled in for a kiss under the tilting brims of their hats.

‘Now, I’m sorry to say, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Dudley, ‘that our little weekend idyll has been infiltrated by one of the tireless and pitiless agents of Fleet Street. What’s your name?’

‘Oh, I’m Goldblatt, Sir Dudley,’ said the photographer, swallowing Dudley’s harsh tone, ‘Jerry Goldblatt,’ lifting his trilby an inch as he looked over the group.

‘Jerry Goldblatt,’ said Dudley, and paused unpleasantly, ‘is just going to take a few snapshots for the
Sketch
.’

‘I prefer to say portraits,’ said Goldblatt, ‘portrait groups.’

‘So if you wouldn’t mind awfully doing what he says for ten minutes, then we can get the damn fellow out of here.’

‘Much obliged,’ said Goldblatt, ‘well, ladies and gentlemen – ’

But they saw very quickly that it was Dudley who’d be telling them what to do. A trying hour or more of sittings ensued, different groupings around various stone seats, or posed, with a hint of awkward clowning, under the raised arms and bare breasts of bronze and marble statues. The Scottish boy made himself useful, and quickly set up the croquet lawn, where they started a pretend game which immediately got serious, and was abandoned with bad grace for work at another location. Really there were three of them the photographer wanted, Dudley, Sebby and Revel, with Daphne and the children as decorative extras. Dudley of course knew this, but in a complicated rigmarole brought in all the others, and nearly pretended not to want to be involved himself at all.

Dudley said: ‘But look here, Goldblatt, you must have a snapshot of our friend Frau Kalbeck. You know, she’s one of the original Valkyries of Stanmore Hill.’

‘Oh, yes, Sir Dudley?’ said the photographer warily.

‘No, no, please . . . !’ said Clara, tickled but mortified at the same time. She seemed ready to tuck her sticks out of sight. Daphne said,

‘But not if you don’t want to, dear,’ and indeed thought it quite impossible that they’d use such a photograph, which would make it, in the longer view, even sadder for her.

‘Perhaps not, I think,’ said Clara, and hid her tiny disappointment in a histrionic call – ‘But where is dear Mrs Riley?’ It was unexpected, but she seemed to have taken a shine to Eva.

‘Dudley dear, where’s Mrs Riley?’ said Daphne coolly.

‘Oh lord . . .’ said Dudley, the mad glint showing for a second through his puzzled tone. ‘Robbie, run and look for Mrs Riley’ – and as Robbie went swiftly away, ‘She may be just too busy . . .’

‘Is that Mrs Eva Riley, sir?’ said Jerry Goldblatt, with a cunning glance at the house. ‘The interior decorator?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Dudley, ‘Mrs Riley, the famous interior decorator of the Carousel Restaurant,’ as if writing the copy for the
Sketch
as well.

‘That is a stroke of luck, Sir Dudley,’ said Goldblatt.

Daphne saw that Dudley had got almost everything he wanted; he’d rescued a stylish, amusing and important party from the jaws of the other one that bored him to madness, and posed it, for as long as the camera’s flashes lasted, for the world to see. Sebby Stokes in fact declined to join in, suspecting that he shouldn’t be seen playing croquet while the nation stood on the brink of a general strike; he shrewdly told Goldblatt he would be ‘working on Cabinet papers in the library’. George, quite new to the world of publicity, acted up determinedly, followed Revel’s instructions for new poses, and whisked the children along in a hectic and rather touching show of affection. He seemed to like Revel – perhaps the little friction in their views on St Pancras Station had excited him. Madeleine, with the unhappy solidarity of the shy, had perched beside Clara, and in effect opted out of the photographs. As for Revel himself, Daphne saw that she needn’t have worried, in fact there was almost some further friction in his eagerness to direct arrangements himself. ‘Well . . . yes . . .’ said Dudley, frowning, ‘no, no, my dear, you’re the designer!’ – shaking his head none the less in slight bafflement, while Jerry Goldblatt pleaded, ‘If I could just have Lady Valance and the kiddies?’ Then Eva Riley arrived, her long legs white in sheeny stockings, almost laughably fashionable, a pearl-coloured cloche hat pulled down tight on her black bob. ‘Do you really need me?’ she wailed, and Jerry Goldblatt called back that he certainly did.