The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [181]
“Mmm.” Robin looked at him keenly. “So you knew Corinna, did you?”
“Oh, very much so,” said Paul, noting as if from the corner of his eye how indulgently he thought of her now that she wasn’t there to expose him and put him down; she’d become a useful element in his own plans. “That was how I met Daphne, you see. I worked under Leslie Keeping for several years.”
“Oh, you were in the bank,” said Robin, “I see,” and squared his lighter and cigarette-packet on the table, as if making some subtle calculation. “I wonder if you were there when Leslie died?”
“No, I’d already left.”
“Right, right.”
“But I heard all about it, of course.” It was the most grimly sensational piece of news that Paul had had anything to do with, and he felt, for all its horror, a keen attachment to it.
“All that hit Daphne very hard, of course.”
“Well, of course …” Paul waited respectfully. “I first met them all in 1967,” he said, “though I’m not sure Daphne remembered that when I saw her again.”
“Her memory is certainly somewhat … um … tactical,” said Robin.
Paul giggled, “Yes, I see … but I wondered, she’s not living by herself, is she?”
“No, no—her son Wilfrid, from her first marriage—do you know?—is living with her.”
“I do know Wilfrid,” said Paul, and instantly pictured his strange determined amorous dance in the Corn Hall at Foxleigh, the first and last time he’d met him. He couldn’t see him being a very practical nurse or housekeeper. “And what about her son by her second marriage?” Robin shook his head rapidly, a sort of shudder. “Okay …!” Paul laughed. “And the Keeping boys, they don’t see her?”
“Oh, John’s far too busy,” said Robin, firmly but perhaps ironically. “And you know Julian has become a drop-out …”—with an air of marvelling hearsay, like a magistrate. “Of course before long, Wilfrid will inherit the title.”
“Yes, of course …”
“He’ll be the fourth baronet.” They looked ponderingly at each other, then laughed in minor embarrassment as if at some misunderstanding. Paul felt there was a certain sexual undertone to the chat, even to the way they’d quickly got off on this topic amid the business of the office.
“To be absolutely frank—,” said Robin, and here he did reach for his cigarettes, and kept Paul waiting uneasily while he lit one and inhaled and fixed him again with a blue gaze over the top of his spectacles, “I think Daphne was rather put out by your review of her book in the New Statesman.” He sounded a bit stern about it himself. “She felt you’d rather gone for her.”
“Oh, no!” said Paul, with a guilty face, though a prickle of pride at his own sharpness very slightly offset the lurching feeling he’d been tactless and clumsy. “The piece was heavily cut, I did tell her that.”
“I’m sure.”
“They took out a lot of the nice things I said.” He pictured her in the taxi to Paddington, and heard her saying how some reviewers had been horrid. To pretend she hadn’t seen his review seemed now to be dignified good manners of a crushingly high order. She had managed to reproach him and excuse him all at the same time. “It was supposed to be a bit of a fan letter.”
“I’m not sure it read like that,” said Robin. “Though you were by no means the worst.”
“I certainly wasn’t.” (“Unhappy fantasies of a rejected wife” had been Derek Messenger’s verdict in the Sunday Times.)
Robin sipped at his coffee and drew on his cigarette, as if measuring regrets and pondering possibilities. He was indefinably in his element, and Paul sensed it was a stroke of luck to have met him, and if he could get him on his side he might get Daphne too. “I must say, I enjoyed the book,” Robin said, with a further head-shake of frankness.
“No, I enjoyed it too. There were things I wanted to know more about, of course …” Paul gave him an almost sly smile, but asked something harmless first: “I’m not clear really who Basil Jacobs was.”
“Oh, Basil”—Robin sounded impatient himself with this tame question. “Well, Basil was certainly the nicest of her husbands, though in a way as … as hopeless as the others.”
“Oh, dear! Was Revel Ralph