The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [213]
She woke in the dark out of dreams of her own mother, very nearly a nightmare; it was wartime and she was searching for her, going in and out of shops and cafés asking if anyone had seen her. Daphne never remembered her dreams, but even so she felt sure she had never dreamt about her mother before—she was a novelty, an intruder! It was bracing, disconcerting, amusing even, once she had felt for the switch at the neck of the lamp, and squinted at the time, and had a small drink of water. Freda had died in 1940, so the Blitz setting made almost too much sense. And no doubt talking to the young man, trying to cope with all his silly and rather unpleasant questions, had brought her back. In talking, she had only touched on her mother, whose actual presence in 1913 she could no longer see at all, but that must have been enough to set the old girl going, as if greedy for more attention. Daphne kept the light on for a while longer, with a barely conscious sense that in childhood she would have done the same, longing for her mother but too proud to call for her.
In the dark again she found she was at the tipping-point, relief at the closing-down of yesterday was ebbing irrecoverably, and already the dread of tomorrow (which of course was already today) was thickening like regret around her heart. Why on earth had she said he could come back? Why had she let him come at all, after that idiotic condescending piece about her book in the Listener, or perhaps the New Statesman? He was only pretending to be a friend—something no interviewer, probably, had ever been. Paul Bryant … he was like some little wire-haired ratter, with his long nose and his tweed jacket and his bloody-minded way of going at things. Daphne turned over in a spasm of confused annoyance, at him and at herself. She didn’t know what was worse, the genial vague questions or the stern particular ones. He called him Cecil all the time, not as if he’d known him, exactly, but as if he could help him. “What was Cecil like?”—what a stupid question … “When you say in your book he made love to you, what happened exactly?” She’d said “Pass!” to that one, rather good, as if she were on Mastermind. She thought tomorrow she would just say “Pass!” to everything.
And Robin, too—there was a good deal of Robin this and that. She couldn’t think what he meant by sending him, recommending him; though then a shadowy understanding, grim, frivolous, almost wordless—the old thing that she didn’t even picture—turned over and after a minute lay down again at the side of her mind. As well as which, there was something else, which maybe was actually a blessing in its way, that for quite long stretches of the conversation young Paul Bryant had clearly not been listening to a word she said. He thought she couldn’t see him at all, reading something while she talked; then he hurried her along, or he came in suddenly with some completely irrelevant other thing. Maybe he thought he knew all the answers already, but in that case why ask questions? Of course he had it all on his blasted tape-recorder, but that didn’t exempt him from the normal courtesies. She thought in the morning she would ring up Robin at the office and give him a very hard time about it.
She turned over once more and settled with a spasm of self-righteousness; and was on the very edge of sleep again when the obvious idea that she could put Paul Bryant off altogether made her suddenly and beautifully alert. Wilfrid had taken him back to the Feathers, that fearful dump—she was glad he was staying there. He seemed to think it was quite the thing! Only two stars, he’d said, but very comfortable … She’d get her son to ring up for her first thing in the morning. She lay there, half-plotting, half-drowsing, imagining it, the afternoon without him, freedom tinged, but not irreparably spoilt, by guilt. She was pretty sure she had said he could come twice, and besides he had come from London specially.