The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [210]
“But then he never much cared for my sister,” Wilfrid said, “so though bad, it wasn’t perhaps … surprising.”
“No, I see …”
“Though sometimes there’s something … almost surprising in a person being so completely true to type.”
“You mean on this one occasion you really thought he’d do the right thing.”
“Stupidly, we did,” said Wilfrid, and there seemed little more to say after that; though a good deal for Paul to think about.
Now the sun had sunk among the black cloud-bars to the west, and the back of the village huddled clear but bleak in the neutral light of the early evening. Chicken-runs, garden sheds, heaps of garden refuse thrown over the hedge all year long; a car on bricks, a greenhouse painted white, the jostle of tall TV aerials against the cold sky. Paul pictured his street in Tooting and the lit red buses with a shiver of longing. It was what Peter used to call his nostalgie du pavé, the panicky longing for London. “Oh, my dear,” he would say, in Wantage or Foxleigh, “I’m not dying here.”
When they got back to the bungalow, Paul said, “Thanks so much, I should probably push off now,” but to his surprise Daphne said, “Have a drink first.” She made her way, holding on to table and chair, to the corner of the room where on a crowded surface there was a cluster of bottles with an ice-bucket, phials of Tabasco and bitters, all the paraphernalia of the cocktail hour. Wilfrid was sent out to the garage to get ice from the freezer. “He knows we need it, and then he makes such a face!” said Daphne. “G-and-t?” Paul said yes, and smiled at the thought of the time he’d first met her, over the same drink, when he’d sat in the garden trying not to look up her skirt. Daphne opened a tonic bottle with a practised snap, the tonic fizzing out round the top and dripping down her wrist. “Have you got it?” she said, as Wilfrid returned with the silver plastic bucket. “Oh, look, it’s all an enormous lump, you’ll have to break it up, I can’t possibly use this. Really, Wilfrid!”—making a half-hearted comedy out of her annoyance for the sake of their guest.
When they were settled, Daphne came back with a genial but purposeful look to the new book on Mark Gibbons that she’d been reading, which she said again wasn’t good at all, and anyway half the point of Mark was lost if the pictures were in black-and-white. (Paul guessed she meant Wilfrid had been reading it to her, but as usual his agency was somehow elided.) She said it was funny how some people emerged from the great backward and abyss while others were wholly forgotten. Mark had had a sort of handy-man, called Dick Mint, who was a bit of a character, fixed the car, looked after the garden, and was often to be found sitting in Mark’s kitchen at Wantage jawing endlessly with his employer. A pretty fair bore, actually, but he had his remarks: he thought the Post-Impressionists were something to do with the GPO. Perhaps, what? twenty people in the whole world knew him, hardly a household name. Lived in a caravan. And now, thanks to this book, thousands of people, probably, were going to know about him—he’d become a character on a world stage. People in America would know about him. Whereas the woman who came in, whose name Daphne thought was Jean, who did all the washing and cleaning, wasn’t mentioned at all—in fact nobody now thought of her from one year to the next.
“I must read the Mark Gibbons book,” Paul said, wishing he’d had the tape-recorder on through this spiel.
“Really I shouldn’t bother,” said Daphne.
Paul laughed. “This must happen to you quite a lot.”
“Mm?”
“You must know a lot of people whose lives have been written.”
“Yes, or they turn up in someone else’s, you know.”
“Like you, yourself, indeed, Mummy!” said Wilfrid.
“The thing is, they all get it wrong.” She’d now got back into that irritable mood that she clearly enjoyed.
“The best ones don’t, perhaps,” said Paul.
“They take against