The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [101]
The old lady’s left arm was pinned under her, but the hand was poking out: there it lay on the carpet, small and thick, humped and dimpled. Wilfrid stared at it, from his squatting position, then stood up and walked around her again. He was frightened that the hand might move, and also, oddly, almost sickeningly, tempted by it. Looking both ways, holding his breath, he bent down, reached his fingers towards it; then picked it up. In a second he dropped it, and clutched his own warm hands together, then thrust them into his armpits, in a way that he had. He stared at Mrs. Kalbeck’s dropped hand, and then in the second he turned away it stirred and retracted slightly, and lay back as it had been before.
On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going—not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down. Helplessly he marched to the door of his father’s study. It was the most unapproachable room in the house, a room of unrememberable size and everything in it, clock and fender and crackling waste-paper basket, dark with prohibitions. His father’s anger, unleashed last night, at the piano, had withdrawn into it, like a dragon to its lair. Wilfrid stood for a moment outside the door, and wiped his nose thoroughly on his sleeve. Though he was helpless, he was oddly lucid. He knew that to knock would introduce more suspense into the thing than anyone could bear, and risk bringing further wrath upon his head in advance; so, very tactfully, he turned the handle.
The room was unexpectedly dark, the heavy curtains almost closed, and he moved forward not really listening to the clock but with a sense that the spaces between its deep ticks were stretching, as if it was thinking of stopping. The stripe of light across the red carpet made the shadow even deeper, for the first few seconds. Wilfrid knew his father had headaches in the morning, and avoided the light, and this sent another wave of despairing apology over him. At the same time the one line of light showed up ridges and knots in the carpet, which itself had the half-strangeness of something in a dream—in a house where he knew all the carpets as territories, castles, jumping squares, there was this other room with a carpet he had never jumped on. For a long time they seemed not to see him, and as he stepped forward it was as if he still had a chance to step back—the first they would know of his presence would be the click of the door behind him. Nanny was turned away from him, lying with her legs up on the settee, and watching his father, on the other side of the band of light, by the fireplace. His father was still in his dressing-gown, and with his sword in his hand looked like a knight. The fender here was a castle, with brass battlements, and on the black hearthstone beyond it there was a wild heap of smashed plates—other curved splinters of china were scattered across the carpet too. Again Wilfrid took in the pattern: they were the thick French plates with a cockerel on them, the wedding present they all said was hideous and ghastly. Nanny heard him, and glanced round, she half sat up and hugged a cushion to her. “Captain,” she said.
“What is it?” said his father, turning to look at him, frowning, not angrily, exactly, but as if trying to make something out. He laid the sword down on the mantelpiece.
And Wilfrid knew he couldn’t say. He stepped further into the light. He hoped his own blotchy cheeks and sniffy nose were proof that something serious had happened, but there was no question of saying what. He said, “Oh, Daddy, I’ve just seen … Mrs. Cow.”
“Oh, yes,” said his father, at once visibly disappointed.
“I think she’s fallen over.”
His