The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [212]
“I don’t think you’re married, are you?” Wilfrid asked, peering forward over the wheel into the muddled glare on the edge of Worcester.
“No, I’m not …”
“No, Mother thought not.”
“Ah, yes … well, hmm.”
“Poor old Worcester,” said Wilfrid a minute later, as the car swerved through a sort of urban motorway right next to the Cathedral; up above, too close to see properly, reared floodlit masonry, the great Gothic tower. “How could they have butchered the old place like this?” Paul heard this as a catch-phrase, saw mother and son on their trips into town coming out with it each time. “Right next to the Cathedral,” said Wilfrid, craning out to encourage Paul to do the same, while the car wandered over into the fast lane—there was a massive blast on a horn, a lit truck as tall as the tower screeching behind them, then thundering past.
Turning left, and then passing staunchly through a No Entry sign, they travelled the length of a one-way street in the wrong direction, Wilfrid mildly offended by the rudeness of on-coming drivers, turned another corner, and there they were outside the front door of the Feathers. “Amazing,” said Paul.
“I know this old town backwards,” said Wilfrid.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Paul, opening the door.
“Shall I pick you up?” said Wilfrid, with just a hint of breathlessness, Paul thought, a glimpse of excitement at having this visitor in their lives. But Paul insisted he was perfectly happy to get a Cathedral. He stood and watched as Wilfrid drove off into the night.
9
DAPHNE FOLLOWED HER REGIME as usual that evening—there was the hot milk, and then the tiny glass of cherry brandy, to take the sickening sleepy taste away. Her sleeping pill itself was swallowed with the last cooled inch of the milk, and after that a pleasant certainty that the day was wound up suffused her, well before the physical surrender to temazepam. Tonight the cherry brandy seemed to celebrate the fact. She said, “What time is he coming back?” just to have it confirmed that it wasn’t till after lunch. Wilfrid started on the film that followed the News, but her macular thing made the telly both boring and upsetting. So she left him to it, going out of the room with a passing pat at his arm or shoulder, and made her way to the other end (in so far as Olga had another end) of the house.
Book at Bedtime this week was the autobiography of a woman—she couldn’t remember her name, or what exactly she’d been up to in Kenya last night when sleep had come with just enough warning for her to switch off the radio and the bedside light. On the dressing-table, an awful cheap white and gilt thing, stood the photographs she never really looked at, but she peered at them now, in her sidelong way, as she smeared on her face cream. Their interest seemed enhanced after the visit from the young man, and she was glad he hadn’t seen them. The one of her with Corinna and Wilfrid by the fishpond at Corley was her favourite—so small but clear: she turned it to the light with a creamy thumb. Who had taken it, she wondered? … The photo, known by heart, was the proof of an occasion she couldn’t remember at all. The Beaton photo of Revel in uniform was, pleasingly, almost famous: other portraits from the same session had appeared in books, one of them in her own book, but this exact photograph, with its momentary drop of the pose, the mischievous tongue-tip on the upper lip, was hers alone. A pictorial virtue, of the kind that Revel himself had taught her to understand, had been made of the hideous great-coat. His lean head and fresh-cropped poll were framed by the upturned collar—he looked like some immensely wicked schoolboy, though she