The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [215]
IN THE MORNING, bright and early, Lady Caroline Messent rang to invite her to tea. The phone at Olga was fixed to the kitchen wall, Caroline perhaps having pictured Olga herself as habitually in that room, and standing more or less to attention when she spoke to her. “I can’t, my dear,” said Daphne, “I’ve got this young man coming back.”
“Oh, do put him off,” said Caroline in her droll scurry of a voice. “Who is he?”
“He’s called—he’s interrogating me, I’m like a prisoner in my own home.”
“Darling …,” said Caroline, allowing that for the present at least it was Daphne’s home. “I wouldn’t stand for it. Is he from the gas board?”
“Oh, much worse.” Daphne steadied herself against the worktop which she could dimly see was a dangerous muddle of dirty dishes, half-empty bottles and pill-packets. “He turned up yesterday—he’s like the Kleeneze man.”
“You mean hawking?”
“He says I met him at Corinna and Leslie’s, but I have absolutely no recollection of it.”
“Oh, I see …,” said Caroline, as if now siding slightly with the intruder. “But what does he want?”
Daphne sighed heavily. “Smut, essentially.”
“Smut?”
“He’s trying to write a book about Cecil.”
“Cecil? Oh, Valance, you mean? Yes, I see.”
“You know, I’ve already written all about it.”
Caroline paused. “I suppose it was only a matter of time,” she said.
“Hmm? I don’t know what he’s got into his head. He’s insinuating, if you know what I mean. He’s more or less saying that I didn’t come clean in some way in my book.”
“No, that must be awfully annoying.”
“Well, less awfully, more bloody, actually, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson said to my father.”
“So funny, that,” said Caroline.
“Really Cecil means nothing to me—I was potty about him for five minutes sixty years ago. The significant thing about Cecil, as far as I’m concerned,” said Daphne, half-hearing herself go on, “is that he led to Dud, and the children, and all the grown-up part of my life, which naturally he had no part in himself!”
“Well, tell that to your Kleeneze man, darling,” said Caroline, evidently thinking Daphne protested too much.
“I suppose I should.” And she saw there was a little shameful reluctance to do so, and thus reduce even further her interest for the young man. It struck her suddenly that Caroline must already know him. “I’m fairly sure he was at your launch party,” she said. “Paul Bryant.”
“You don’t mean the young man from … was it Canterbury … one of the red-bricks.”
“He might be, I suppose. He used to work in the bank with Leslie.”
“Ah, no. But there certainly was a clever young man, you’re quite right, doing something on Cecil’s poetry.”
“No, I know who you mean, I can’t remember his name. I’ve dealt with him already. This is another young man.”
“Mm, my dear, it’s obviously Cecil’s moment,” said Caroline.
10
NEXT MORNING Paul sat in his hotel room, going over his notes, with a coffee tray beside him: the pitted metal pot with the untouchable handle, the lipsticked cup, the bowl of white sugar in soft paper tubes which he emptied serially into the three strong cupfuls he took, getting quickly excited and overheated. On a plate with a doily were five biscuits, and though he’d only just had breakfast he ate them all, the types so familiar—the Bourbon, the sugared Nice, the rebarbative ginger-nut, popped in whole—that he was touched for a moment by a sense of the inseparable poverty and consistency of English life, as crystallized in the