The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [102]
“No, Daddy,” said Wilfrid, feeling another wail rising in his chest at his father’s perversity. He said, “She can’t get up, you see, as a matter of fact.”
“Broken both her legs, has she?”
Wilfrid shook his head, but couldn’t say more, for fear of crying, which his father couldn’t stand.
“I wonder if I should look, Sir Dudley?” said Nanny, with odd reluctance, patting her hair. It was her day off, anyway: she probably didn’t want to be involved. Slowly, with the playful menace he brought to telling a story, Dudley turned his head, and stared at Wilfrid.
“I wonder if what you’re trying to tell me, Wilfrid,” he said, “is that Frau Kalbeck is dead?”
“Yes, Daddy, she is!” said Wilfrid, and in the relief of it he was very nearly grinning at just the same moment the saved-up tears poured out of him again.
“Of course she should never have come here,” said his father, still maddeningly unexcited, but no longer blaming Wilfrid himself, it seemed. He looked sharply at Nanny. “Upsetting my son like this.” And then he gave a surprising laugh. “Well, it’s taught her a lesson, what? She won’t be coming here again.”
Nanny stood behind Wilfrid, and laid her hands hesitantly on his shoulders. “Now, don’t cry, there’s a good boy,” she said. He struggled to obey her, as he wanted to, for a moment, but when he thought of the dead woman’s face again, and her hand moving by itself, it was all beyond him and over him like a wave.
“Run along to Wilkes’s room and telephone Dr. Wyatt, would you, Nanny?” said his father.
“At once, Sir Dudley,” said Nanny. Wilfrid of course would go with her, but she turned uncertainly at the door, and his father nodded and said,
“You stay here, old boy.”
So Wilfrid went to his father, and was pulled experimentally for a second or two against the heavy strange-scented skirts of the brocade dressing-gown. It was the touch of privilege, a feel of the luxurious concessions allowed when something awful had happened, and in the interesting surprise of it he at once stopped crying. Then they went together, snapping odd sharp fragments of china underfoot, to the window, and each drew back a curtain. Nothing was said about the dinner service; and his father already had the mischievous preoccupied look that sometimes announced a treat, an idea that had just surprised him and demanded to be shared. It was like the mad glint, but usually nicer. Staring into the garden, fixing his eye so hard on something that Wilfrid thought for a moment it must be the source of his amusement, he started to talk, too quietly and rapidly at first for him to follow—“The body was found—it lay on the ground—without a sound”—
“Oh, Skeleton, Daddy,” he said, and his father grinned tolerantly.
“—old fat Mrs. Cow—with her face like a sow—you won’t hear from her now”—he turned and walked excitedly round the room, Wilfrid had a distracted sense of how he really never noticed his father’s limp—“with her Wagner and Liszt—and her hair in a twist—and always pissed—like a terrible Hun—with a twelve-bore gun—what?—”
“Yes, Daddy …”
“—smelly old Valkyrie—rosewater talc-ery—came down to Corley—and said she was poorly—took it quite sorely …” A little flick of spit from his father’s mouth danced in the light as he turned. Wilfrid couldn’t follow or understand a lot of the words themselves, but the joy of improvisation caught at him as well as the sense of horror that his father’s poems always challenged you not to feel. He had got to the door and flung it open—“And that, young man,” he said, “is more than I’ve written of my book for the past six months.”
“Really, Daddy?” said Wilfrid, unable to decide from his father’s tone if this was