The Stranger's Child (60 page)

Chewing his lip, Paul examined Daphne’s photo on the back flap of the jacket. She appeared three-quarter length, in a plain dark suit and blouse and a single string of pearls, looking out with a half-smile and a certain generalized charm, caused perhaps by her not having her glasses on. Immediately behind her was an archway, through which a grand hall and staircase could dimly be made out. When you looked very closely at her face you saw it was a subtly worked blur, silvery smooth from touching up around the eyes and under the chin; the photographer had taken fifteen or twenty years off her. The whole thing gave the impression of a good-looking, even marriageable woman of means in a setting whose splendour needed only to be hinted at. It was hard to relate her to the bedraggled old figure he’d rescued in the street. None the less, the suggestion that the other persona existed was subtly unnerving.

At Worcester he was suddenly cheerful to be on the move; he queued for a taxi, the first one he had taken since their joint journey the previous November: Cathedral Cars. He mustered a breezy tone with the driver as they left the city and the meter started flickering in cheerful green increments. He thought he would enjoy the small country roads more on the way back – as yet he was looking straight through the barns and hedges to the imagined scene he had set up at Olga. They came into Staunton St Giles, past the lodge-gates of a big house and then along a wide unattractive street of semi-detached council houses; a war memorial, with a church beyond, a village shop and Post Office, a pub, the Black Bear, where he almost felt like stopping first, but it was a minute or two from closing time. ‘Do you know where Olga is?’ Paul asked the driver.

‘Ooh, yes,’ he said, as if Olga were a well-known local character. A handsome stone house, the Old Vicarage, came by, a run of old cottages looking much more pleased with themselves than the rest of the village, a nice place for Daphne to spend her final years. The taxi slowed and turned down a side lane, and pulled up unexpectedly by the gate of a decrepit-looking bungalow. ‘Twelve pounds exactly,’ said the driver.

Paul waited till the taxi had turned the corner, then he walked a short way along the lane and took four or five photos of the bungalow, over the low garden wall, a documentary task that held off for a minute his heavy-hearted embarrassment at the state of the place. He came back, hiding the camera in his briefcase until later, when he’d worked out whether Daphne would mind being photographed herself. Sometimes, after the subjective indulgence of an interview, people found the crude fact of a photograph too jarring and intrusive.

The name OLGA was fashioned out of wrought iron, on the wrought-iron gate. Paul stepped in over the weedy gravel, and gazed round at the neglected garden, the grass tall and green in the roof-gutters, the dead climbing rose left swaying over the porch, an old Renault 12 with a rusty dent in the offside wing and green moss growing along the rubber sills of the windows. Two or three stripes of the lawn had been mown, perhaps a week ago, and the mower abandoned where it stood. The flower-beds were full of last year’s dead leaves. It all made him more flinchingly apprehensive about what he was going to find once he got indoors. He pressed the bell, a sleepy ding-dong that then repeated, all by itself, as if showing some impatience the caller might have hoped to conceal, and saw his face scarily distorted in the rippled glass of the front door; he seemed to run forward into their lives in waves. It was Wilfrid Valance who answered. He was just as Paul had remembered, and also, after thirteen more years of bumbling along as he was, alarmingly different, a wide-faced child with furrowed cheeks, and one defiant central tuft of grey hair fronting the bald plateau above. ‘How
are
you?’ said Paul.

‘Mm, you found us all right,’ said Wilfrid, with a twitch of a smile but not meeting his eye. Paul thought he saw that his visit was quite an occasion.

‘Well, just about . . .’ he said meaninglessly and handed over his coat and scarf. The hall was tiny, with other glass-panelled doors opening off it – a look of sixties brightness that had already become obscurely depressing. ‘And how is your mother?’ For a moment he felt a kind of awe, repressed till now, at being about to see her, the survivor, the friend of the long dead. And a twinge of something like envy at the thought of the friendship they might have had themselves if he hadn’t been a biographer.

‘Oh, she’s . . .’ – Wilfrid shook his head and grinned; Paul remembered his hesitations, like a suppressed stammer, in the middle of sentences, but this time the rest of the statement wasn’t forthcoming.

The sitting-room was stifling from a two-bar electric fire – a great thing like a fire-basket, with glowing fake coals showing dimly in the sunlight. There was a strong smell of burnt dust. Paul came in with a cheerful ‘Hello, Mrs Jacobs,’ determined not to show his shock at the state of the room. She was sitting almost with her back to him, in a wing-chair covered in shabby pink chintz. All around her was an astounding chaos of junk, so extreme that he knew he must simply ignore it. There was a worrying sense of the temporary grown permanent, piled-up objects adapting into furniture, covered by tablecloths and tipsily topped with lamps and vases and figurines.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, half-turning her head, but not looking at him, ‘Wilfrid’s put me right about you.’

‘Oh, yes . . . ?’ – he laughed cautiously: so she was tackling the question of his review straight off.

‘You’re not the pianist.’

‘No, I’m not – you’re quite right,’ said Paul.

‘I have an excellent memory, Mummy, as you know,’ said Wilfrid, as if still contradicting her. ‘The pianist was a big . . . handsome fellow.’

‘Oh, what was he called? that charming young man . . . so talented . . .’

Paul groped round this for a moment, almost as if struggling to remember himself. ‘Peter Rowe, do you mean?’

‘Peter – you see, I rather liked him.’

‘Oh, yes, well . . .’ murmured Paul, coming round in front of her; she didn’t seem interested in shaking hands. She was wearing a thick grey skirt and a blouse under a shabby sleeveless cardigan. She gave him a calculating look, perhaps only the result of her not seeing him properly. After the first awkward moments, he absorbed this as a likely hazard of the hours ahead.

‘What became of him, I wonder?’

‘Peter? Oh, he’s doing all right, I think,’ said Paul blandly. He was standing in the small area between the fire and a low coffee-table heaped with books and newspapers, it was almost like a childish dare as the back of his calves got hotter and hotter.

‘Of course he taught at Corley Court – he was extremely interested in that house, you know.’

‘Oh he was,’ said Wilfrid, with a shake of the head.

‘Extremely interested. He wanted to put back all the jelly-mould ceilings and what-have-you that Dudley did away with.’

‘During your time, of course,’ said Paul encouragingly, as if the interview had already started. He moved round towards the armchair facing hers, and got out the tape-recorder from his briefcase in a slightly furtive way.

‘You see, he’s the one I might have expected to be writing about Cecil,’ she said. ‘He was extremely interested in him, as well.’

‘What wasn’t he interested in!’ said Paul.

Daphne said, ‘I’m having a certain amount of trouble with my eyes,’ reaching on the little table beside her with its lamp and books. Could she still read, Paul wondered? He half-expected to see his own letters there.

‘Yes, so I gathered from
Robin
,’ he said, with a fond tone towards this mutual friend.

‘You didn’t block the drive, did you?’ said Daphne.

‘Oh . . . no – I got a taxi at Worcester station.’

‘Oh, you got a Cathedral. Aren’t they expensive?’ said Daphne, with a hint of satisfaction. ‘Can you find somewhere to sit? One day quite soon Wilfrid’s going to sort this room out, but until that day I fear we live in chaos and disorder. It’s funny to think I once lived in a house with thirty-five servants.’

‘Goodness . . . !’ said Paul, lifting a leather
Radio Times
folder and a heap of thick woollen socks, perhaps waiting to be darned, from the armchair. In her book he was sure she’d said twenty-five servants. He rigged up the microphone on top of the books on the coffee-table between them. ‘Why is this house called Olga, I wonder?’ he said, just to test the levels.

‘Ah! You see, Lady Caroline had it built for her old housekeeper,’ said Wilfrid in a pious tone, ‘whose name was Olga. She retired here . . . out of sight but not quite . . . out of reach.’

‘And now Lady Caroline lets it to you,’ said Paul, watching the bobbing red finger which dropped, as if by gravity, when no one spoke.

‘Well, we hardly pay a thing . . .’

Daphne chuckled narrowly. ‘What have you got there?’ she said.

‘I hope you don’t mind if I tape our conversation . . .’ Paul clicked the button and rewound.

‘Perhaps as well to get it right,’ said Daphne uncertainly. It was the tape-recorder’s odd insinuations of flattery and mistrust. Some people glanced at it as an awkward third person in the room, others were calmed by the just-detectable turning of the spool, some, like old Joan Valance, a second cousin of Cecil’s whom he’d tracked down in Sidmouth, were moved to gabbling relief at having so impartial and receptive an audience. Daphne fidgeted with her cushions. ‘I’ll have to be careful what I say.’

‘Oh, I hope not,’ with his ear to the idiotic tone of the playback.

‘Very careful.’

‘If you want to tell me anything off the record, you can: just say, and I’ll stop the tape.’

‘No, I don’t think I’ll be doing that,’ said Daphne, with a quick smile. ‘Aren’t we having any refreshments, Wilfrid?’

‘Well, if you care to ask for them . . .’

They both said coffee. ‘Bring us a couple of coffees, Wilfrid, and then find something useful to do. You could make a start on clearing up those things in the garage.’

‘Oh, that’s a very big job, Mummy,’ said Wilfrid, as if not so easily fooled.

When he had gone out of the room, she said, ‘It’s only a very big job because he will keep putting it off. Oh, he’s so . . . disorganized,’ and she shifted her cushion again, flinched and half-turned, the powder-and-smoke-smudged discs of her glasses blank for a second in the light. This irritable nervousness might be hard to deal with. Paul wanted to remind her of their old connections, but he was wary of mentioning Corinna. He said, just while they waited,

‘I was wondering, do you see much of John, and Julian, and Jenny?’ They sounded like characters in a children’s book.

‘We’re a bit cut off here, to be perfectly frank,’ she said. He saw she wouldn’t want to admit to feeling neglected.

‘What are they doing now?’ – with a glance at the red needle.

‘Well . . .’ She was slow to warm to the question. ‘Well, they’re all extremely busy, and successful, as you might expect. Jennifer’s a doctor – I mean, not an actual doctor, obviously. She’s teaching at Edinburgh, I think it’s Edinburgh. Wilfrid will put me right if it’s not.’

‘Teaching French literature?’

‘Yes . . . and John of course has his very successful wine business.’

‘He takes after his grandfather,’ said Paul, almost fondly.

‘His grandfather doesn’t have a wine business.’

‘No, I meant – I believe Sir Dudley is involved in the sherry world, isn’t he.’

‘Oh, I see . . . And Julian – well Julian’s the artistic one. He’s very creative.’

Paul could tell from her tone, which was also fond, but final, that he shouldn’t ask what form this creativity took. He felt his own secret interest in Julian as a sixth-former might somehow burn through. Daphne said, ‘Why, have you met Dudley?’

‘Yes, I have,’ said Paul simply, with no idea as yet what line to take about him. He told her a bit about the Oxford conference, in what felt to him a very fair-minded way, and finding he had already somehow both censored and excused Dudley’s crushing put-down over the phone; as an anecdote it had a value that went some way to compensate for the further talk they had never had. ‘He was quite controversial. He said that war poems, being written at the time, were usually not much good, “inept and amateurish” I think were his words; whereas the great war writing was all in prose, and appeared ten years later – or more in his case, of course.’

‘That sounds like Dudley.’

‘He wouldn’t say anything much about Cecil.’

She pondered for a minute, and he thought she might say something about him herself. ‘Of course they’ve made him an honorary fellow, haven’t they,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Yes, they have. We’re talking about your father,’ Daphne said, as Wilfrid came back in.

‘Oh . . . !’ said Wilfrid, with a surprising cold grimace.

‘Not Wilfie’s favourite person,’ said Daphne.

When Wilfrid had gone out again, there was swiftly a new atmosphere, of involuntary intimacy, as if Paul were a doctor and about to ask her to undo her blouse. He checked the tape again. Daphne had a look of conditional resignation. He cleared his throat and looked at his notes, his plan, designed to make the whole thing more like a conversation, and for both of them more convincing. Still, it sounded more stilted than he’d meant: ‘I was wondering about the way you wrote your memoirs, er,
The Short Gallery
, as a set of portraits of other people, rather than one of yourself.’ He was afraid she couldn’t see his respectful smile.