‘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.
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.
5
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.
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