The Stranger's Child (19 page)
Revel and Daphne had their picture taken together, back by the fishpond. They stood on either side of a rose arch, each with one arm raised like a dancer to gesture at the view beyond it. Daphne laughed to show she was not an actress, not certainly a dancer, and looked across at Revel, who kept a straighter face. She felt her laughter had a touch of panic to it. She had an apprehensive image of next week’s
Sketch
on the morning-room table, and their silly faces vying for attention with the antics of Bonzo the Dog.
At the end of lunch George slipped out from the dining-room and set off for a distant lavatory, treasuring the prospect of four or five minutes alone. He felt stifled already by the subject of Cecil, and by the thought of a further twenty-four hours devoted to his brilliance, bravery and charm. What things they all found themselves saying. Perhaps in certain monasteries, or in finishing schools, the conversation at meals was as strictly prescribed. The General threw up a topic, and the rest of them batted it gingerly to and fro, with Sebastian Stokes as umpire; even Dudley’s sneering had been edgily reined in. George had met Stokes once before, in Cambridge, when they’d all gone out in a punt, Cecil clearly exciting his guest by his lordly thrust and toss of the pole and intermittent recital of sonnets. Stokes seemed not to remember that George had been of the party, and George didn’t remind him, when the talk turned to their Cambridge days. He felt undeniably uneasy, and drank several glasses of champagne, in the hope they would relax him, but they had only made him hot and giddy, while the dining-room itself, with its gaudy décor, its mirrors and gilding, had appeared to him more ghastly than ever, like some funereal fairground. Of course one indulged the dead, wrote off their debts; one forgave them as one lamented them; and Cecil had been mightily clever and fearless, no doubt, and had broken many hearts in his short life. But surely no one but Louisa could want a new memorial to him, ten years after his passing? Here they all were, submissively clutching their contributions. A dispiriting odour, of false piety and dutiful suppression, seemed to rise from the table and hang like cabbage-smells in the jelly-mould domes of the ceiling.
As he crossed the hall, the door under the stairs was shoved open by Wilkes, with the surprising look, for just a second, of a man who has a life of his own.
‘Ah, sir . . . !’ said Wilkes, turning to catch the door, the age-old benignity back at once like a faint blush.
‘Thanks so much, Wilkes,’ said George. And since he had him there, ‘I hope you’re well.’
‘
Very
well, thank you, sir, very well indeed,’ as if made even fitter by George’s solicitude.
‘I’m so glad.’
‘I trust you’re well, too, sir; and Mrs Sawle . . .’
‘Oh, yes, both frightfully busy and burdened with work, you know, but, thank you, pretty well.’
George and Wilkes were both holding the door, while Wilkes gazed at him with his usual flattering lack of impatience, of any suggestion that a moment before he had been rushing elsewhere. ‘It’s good to see you back at Corley, sir.’ Though it struck George that Wilkes’s mastery of implicit moral commentary was conveyed in the same smooth phrase.
He frowned and said, ‘We don’t get down as often as we should like.’
‘It’s possibly not very convenient for you,’ allowed Wilkes, letting his hand drop.
‘Well, not terribly,’ George said.
‘I know Lady Valance is especially pleased you’ve come, sir.’
‘Oh . . .’
‘I mean the old Lady, sir, particularly . . . though your sister, too, I’m sure!’
‘Oh, well it’s the least I could do for her,’ said George, with adequate conviction, he felt.
‘Since you and Captain Valance were such great friends.’
‘Well, yes,’ said George quickly, and rather sternly, over his own incipient blush. ‘Though goodness, it all feels a world ago, Wilkes.’ He looked around the hall, with a kind of weary marvelment that it was still there, the armorial windows, the brightly polished ‘hall chairs’ no one would dream of sitting on, the vast brown canvas of a Highland glen, with long-horned cattle standing in the water. He remembered looking at this painting on his first visit, and Cecil’s father telling him it was ‘a very fine picture’, and what sort of cows they were. Cecil was behind him, not quite touching, a latent heat; he had said something, ‘That’s MacArthur’s herd, isn’t it, Pa?’ – his interest as smooth and confident as his deceit; the old boy had agreed, and they’d gone into lunch, Cecil’s hand just for a moment in the small of his guest’s back. ‘Of course I remember it all,’ said George, and even working it up a bit in his embarrassment: ‘I always remember that Scottish picture.’ The picture itself could hardly have been duller, but it was eloquent of something – the drinking cattle seemed almost to embody Sir Edwin’s artless unawareness of what his son got up to.
‘Ah, yes, sir,’ said Wilkes, to show it meant something, surely rather different, to him too. ‘Sir Edwin cared greatly for “The Loch of Galber”. He often said he preferred it to the Raphael.’
‘Yes . . .’ said George, not sure if Wilkes’s eyebrows, raised in amiable remembrance, acknowledged the general opinion about the Raphael. ‘I was thinking, Wilkes, Mr Stokes should have a word with you about Cecil while he’s here.’
‘Oh, it hasn’t been suggested, sir.’
‘Really? You probably knew him better than anybody.’
‘It’s true, sir, in some ways I did,’ said Wilkes modestly, and with something else in his hesitancy, a hazy vision of all the people who nursed the illusion of ‘knowing’ Cecil best of all.
‘Lady Valance made it clear at luncheon that she wants a full picture of his childhood years,’ said George, with a hint of pomp. ‘She has a poem he wrote when he was only three, I believe . . .’
Wilkes’s pink, attentive face absorbed the idea of this new kind of service, which would evidently be a very delicate one. ‘Of course I have numerous memories,’ he said, rather doubtfully.
‘Cecil always spoke of you with the greatest . . . admiration, you know,’ said George, and then put in the word he’d just dodged, ‘and affection, Wilkes.’
Wilkes murmured half-gratefully, and George looked down for a moment before saying, ‘My own feeling is that we should tell Mr Stokes all we can; it’s for him to judge what details to include.’
‘I’m sure there’s nothing I wouldn’t be happy to tell Mr Stokes, sir,’ said Wilkes, with a geniality close to reproach.
‘No, no,’ said George, ‘no, I’m sure . . .’ – and again he felt a little flustered by this courteous saunter round an unmentionable truth. ‘But I mustn’t keep you!’ And with a snuffle and a little bow, which seemed unintentionally to mimic the butler himself, and made George colour suddenly again, he turned through the door, which he closed softly behind him, and started down the long passage.
It was a strange sensation, this passage. He went along it with the natural rights of a guest, a slightly tipsy adult free to do as he pleased, but breathless at once with the reawoken feelings of his first visit, thirteen years before. Nothing had changed: the dim natural light, the school-like smell of polish, the long row of portraits of almost rectangular bulls and cows. He was dismayed to find himself blushing so soon and so much. He wondered anxiously if Wilkes, a valet in those days, who had been so helpful and tactful with him, and always somehow to hand, hadn’t also been present, unremembered, in other scenes. Had he come and gone, silently, unnoticed? Was it indeed part of a very good valet’s duties to spy, to read letters, to go through waste-paper baskets, the more fully to know his master’s thoughts and anticipate his needs? Would that increase or diminish his respect for his master? Was it not said, by one of the French aphorists, that great men rarely seemed great to their valets? And it was here, where you turned the corner, that Cecil had grabbed him and kissed him, in his very first minutes at Corley, while showing him where to wash his hands. Kissed him in his imperious way, with a twist of aggression. George’s heart jumped and raced, for a moment, remembering. The kiss, together with the tension of arrival at a country house and his own keen desire to impress and deceive Cecil’s parents, had made George suddenly mad with worry. He had struggled with Cecil, who was proud of his strength. The cloakroom was thick with coats, as if a meeting or a concert were going on next door, and Cecil pushed him against them, lifting a tall stiff mackintosh off its peg – it toppled slowly over them and put a comical kind of stop to things, for the time being.
Beyond the coats was the sombre marble and mahogany washroom, and then the third room, with its towering cistern and high-up prison-like window. George locked the door with a remembered sense of refuge; and then with a gasp of confusion that the man he was hiding from was long dead.
On his way back along the passage he saw the charm of avoiding the party for a little longer, and decided to visit the chapel and look at Cecil’s effigy. On the occasion of Daphne and Dudley’s wedding, the tomb had been unfinished, a brick box that one had to go to left or right of. To tell the truth, he’d avoided looking at it. There had seemed to be some awful lurking joke that they were getting married over Cecil’s dead body. Now there was no one in the hall, no sound of voices, and he skirted the monstrous oak table and went out into the glassed-in arcade, half cloister, half conservatory, which ran along the side of the house to the chapel door. Here too everything seemed the same, everything old and old-fashioned, muddled and habitual, waiting no doubt for Mrs Riley’s ruthless hand. Hard to bear in mind it was only fifty years old, younger than his own mother. It looked sunk in habit and history. Gothic plinths held up stone tubs of flowers; three brass chandeliers, crudely wired for electricity, hung to just above head-height; the floor was of diapered tiles, crimson and biscuit. George felt how the dark oak door of the chapel loomed, seemed to summon and dishearten the visitor with the same black stare. He gripped the cold ring of the handle, the latch shot up inside with a clack, and again he saw Cecil, bustling him through on that first afternoon, with a glance back over his shoulder, in case they were being followed – ‘This gloomy hole is the family chapel’ – and holding him tightly round his upper arm. George had peeped about, in an excited muddle, trying to smother his awe in the required show of disdain for religion, while sensing none the less that Cecil would expect some sign of admiration at there being a chapel at all. Surely they were both rather thrilled by it. The chapel was tall for its modest size, the timber roof shadowy, the thwarted light through the stained-glass window giving the place, by afternoon, the atmosphere of the time just after sunset. Pale things glowed weakly, but others, tiles and tapestries, were dull until the eyes adjusted.
Now what he saw, among the grey shadows, was Cecil’s white figure, stretched out flat, and seeming to float above the floor. The sun had long since gone off the garish glass of the east window, and what daylight there was, oblique and qualified, seemed all to be gathered in Cecil. His feet pointed away, towards the altar. It was as if the chapel had been built for him.
George pushed the door to, without quite closing it, and stood by the first pew’s end, with a stern expression and a very slight feeling of fear. He was alone with his old pal again, almost as though he’d come into a hospital ward rather than a chapel, and was afraid of disturbing him, half-hoped to find him asleep and to slip away, having kept his word. That was a kind of visit he’d paid many times, in the War, and after, dreading to see what had happened to a fellow, afraid of the horror in his own face. Here there was a sickly smell of Easter lilies rather than disinfectant. ‘Hello, Cecil, old boy,’ he said, pleasantly and not very loudly, with a dim echo, and then he laughed to himself in the silence that followed. They wouldn’t have to have an awkward conversation. He listened to the silence, chapel silence, with its faint penumbra of excluded sounds – birdsong, periodic rattle of the distant mower, soft thumps that were less the wind on the roof than the pulse in his ear.
Cecil was laid out in dress uniform, with rich attention to detail. The sculptor had fastened his attention on the cuff-badges, the captain’s square stars, the thin square flower of the Military Cross. The buttons shone dully in their strange new light, brass transmuted into marble. Who was it . . . ? George stooped to read the name, which was dashingly signed along the edge of the cushion: ‘Professor Farinelli’ – dashing and a touch pedantic too. The effigy lay on a plain white chest, with less readable lettering, Gothic and plaited, running right round it in a long band:
CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC
CAPTAIN 6TH BATT ROYAL BERKSHIRE REGT
BORN APRIL 13 1891FELL AT MARICOURT JULY 1 1916CRAS INGENS ITERABIMUS AEQUOR
. It was a thoroughly dignified piece of work, in fact magnificently proper. It struck George, as the chapel itself had on that first day, as a quietly crushing assertion of wealth and status, of knowing what to do. It seemed to place Cecil in some floating cortège of knights and nobles reaching back through the centuries to the Crusades. George saw them for a moment like gleaming boats in a thousand chapels and churches the length of the land. He gripped Cecil’s marble boot-caps, and waggled them sulkily; his hand waggled, the boot-caps eternally not. Then he edged round to look at the dead man’s face.