The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [211]
“Well …!” Paul paused respectfully. The first rush of the gin seemed to present him with a view of all the things it was in his grasp to ask her, the numerous doubts and rumours and aspersions he had heard, about her and her family. Did she have any idea what had gone on between George and Cecil, for instance? Did Wilfrid himself know the theory that his sister was Cecil’s child? He had to tread carefully, but he saw more clearly than ever that the writer of a life didn’t only write about the past, and that the secrets he dealt in might have all kinds of consequences in other lives, in years to come. With Wilfrid present, knocking back an orange squash, he could hardly say or ask anything intimate; though Daphne too was more open and cheerful after a drink—it might have been worth trying.
Still, something warned Paul not to accept a second gin, and at seven o’clock he asked if he could call a taxi. Daphne smiled firmly at this, and Wilfrid said he’d be happy to drive him into Worcester in the Renault.
“I really don’t want to make you turn out at night,” Paul said, his courteous demurral covering a natural nervousness about the car as well as the driver.
“Oh, I like to take her out for a spin,” said Wilfrid, so that for a moment Paul thought Daphne was coming too. “It’s not good for her just to … stand in the drive from one week to the next.”
Daphne stood up, and hanging on to the large oak chest got across the room with a new air of warmth and enthusiasm. “Where do you live?” she said, almost as if thinking of a return visit.
“I live in Tooting Graveney.”
“Oh, yes … Is that near Oxford?”
“Not really, no … It’s near Streatham.”
“Streatham, oh!”—even this seemed rather a lark.
They now shook hands. “Well, thank you so much.” It was perhaps a moment to call her Daphne, but he held off till their second session. “I’ll see you tomorrow, same time.”
Paul wondered afterwards if it was a true misunderstanding or a bit of Dudleyesque fooling. She halted by the door into the hall, head cocked in confusion. “Oh, are you coming back?” she said.
“Oh … well”—Paul gasped. “I think that was … what we agreed!” He’d got nothing out of her today, but was resignedly treating it as a warm-up for the real explorations the following afternoon.
“What are we doing tomorrow, Wilfrid?”
“I should be surprised if we were doing anything very much,” said Wilfrid, in a way that made Paul wonder whether all his patient simplicities weren’t perhaps a very cool kind of sarcasm.
In the Renault it was rather as if a child drove an adult, both of them pretending that it wasn’t worrying or surprising. It emerged that the dip-switch was broken, so that they had either to crawl along on side-lights, the hedges looming dimly above them, or to be flashed at by on-coming motorists blinded by the headlights on full beam. Wilfrid coped with both things with his usual whimsical patience. Paul didn’t want to distract him, but when they got on to the main road he said, “I hope I’m not tiring your mother.”
“I think she’s enjoying it,” Wilfrid said; and with a glance in the mirror, as if to check she wasn’t there, “She likes telling a story.”
Paul very much wished she would tell him a story. He said, “I’m afraid it was all so long ago.”
“There are things she won’t talk about … I hope we can trust you on that,” said Wilfrid, with an unexpected note of solidarity after his earlier grumbling about her.
“Well …”—Paul was torn between the discretion just requested of him and the wish to ask Wilfrid what he was talking about. “I obviously don’t want to say anything that would upset