The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [100]
“Oh, yes, all right,” said Wilfrid; and he saw her slide and then jump the six inches down on to the floor, and her clumpy green shoes going off rather fast towards the stairs.
Wilfrid stayed under the table for ten minutes, in the odour of polish, feeling relief at first, and then the bleak little prickle of abandonment, and then a spreading and anxiously practical sense of the things he might now be able to do. The floorboards were faintly sticky with polish under the crepe rubber soles of his sandals. These unprepared freedoms in his closely minded life were exciting, but shadowed by worry that the system designed to protect him could so easily break down.
He crawled out, over the thick oak stretcher of the table, stood up, and went slowly and indirectly towards the foot of the stairs. Without his aunt to license his escapade, he was in the random and irrational jurisdiction of his father. “Daddy, I wasn’t,” he said, as he climbed the stairs, “I wasn’t playing on the landing”—and as each little wounded lie of a denial dropped behind unneeded, the growing sense of freedom was haunted by a blacker sense of guilt. The freedom seemed to stretch uncomfortably, like a held breath. He strolled along the wide landing, still talking inaudibly to himself, head dropping from side to side, in a guilty mime of being alone. Round the corner hung the Blue Lady, with her frightening eyes, and a picture of Scotland, also known as “The Goat’s Bottom.” A maid came out of a room and crossed to the back-stairs but magically without seeing him, and he got to the laundry-room door. The black china handle was large in his child’s hand, and slightly loose in the door, so that it joggled betrayingly as he turned it and the door creaked quickly open, outwards across the landing, and swung wide if you didn’t hold it, to bang against the chair beside it.
WHEN HE OPENED the door again he was pretending that not long had passed. The clock in the hall was sounding, far away, down below, quarter past, half past, quarter to, though the hour itself hung undisclosed in the grey light of the landing window. He looked both ways with a sense of dread that had been magically banished in the laundry-room itself, and a tense tactical excitement at the prospect of the long corridor and the stairs. His dread was partly still guilt and partly a different kind of awkward feeling, that maybe no one had missed him. It seemed best to take the other back-stairs, at the far end of the main landing, and get round to the nursery that way, and then simply insist he had been there all along. He closed the laundry-room door, with cautious control of the handle, and went along by the wall and looked round the corner.
Mrs. Cow was lying face down, her right hand loosely gripping her stick, which had pushed the long Persian runner up in a wave against the legs of a small table, knocking off the little bronze huntsman, who also lay on his face on the floor, with his pike sticking out. Her other stick was some feet away, as if she’d tossed it in a sudden spasm or attempt to ward something off, and her left arm was trapped under her at an angle that would have been painful for a conscious person. Wilfrid stared, looked away, approached very cautiously, heel to toe in his sandals, not wanting to be heard, least of all by the old lady herself. Then he said “Oh, Mrs. Cow …?”—almost absently, as if starting on some question that would come to him if he kept talking: the point was to get the adult person’s attention and keep it. Part of him knew of course that she wouldn’t answer, would never answer a question again, in her wilful German voice. But something advised him to pretend politely, for a little while more, that she was still up to a chat. He came round her head, which was turned sideways, her left cheek to the carpet; and saw her right eye, hooded, half-open. Therefore not looking at him, but seeming to be part of her speechless search for something out of range, something