The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [45]
She heard the car stop outside, the swift jangle of the bell, footsteps and then voices. “Is Lady Valance in?” “I believe she’s in the morning-room, madam. Shall I—” “Oh, I won’t disturb her.” “I can tell her”—Wilkes giving her a clear chance to do the right thing. “No, don’t bother. I’ll go straight through to the office.” “Very good, madam.” It was a small contest of wills, in which the subtle but hamstrung Wilkes was trounced by the forthright Mrs. Riley. A minute later he came in to cast an eye at the fire, and said, “Mrs. Riley has come, my lady. She went through to the office, as she calls it.”
“Thank you, I heard her,” said Daphne, looking up and lightly covering the page with her sleeve. She shared a moment’s oddly intimate gaze with Wilkes. “I expect she had her plans with her?”
“She appeared to, madam.”
“These plans!” said Daphne. “We’re not going to know ourselves soon.”
“No, madam,” said Wilkes, passing his white-gloved hand into the black mitten that was kept in the log-basket. “But they are still only plans.”
“Hmm. You mean they may not come off?”
Wilkes smiled rather strictly as he lodged a small branch on the top of the pyre, and controlled the ensuing tumble of ash and sparks. “Perhaps not fully, madam, no; and in any case, not … irreversibly.” He went on confidentially, “I understand Lady Valance is with us on the dining-room.”
“Well, she’s rarely an advocate for change,” said Daphne a little drily, but with respect for the butler’s old allegiances. With two Lady Valances in the house, there were niceties of expression which even Wilkes was sometimes tripped up by. “Though last night she claimed to find the new drawing-room ‘very restful.’ ” She turned back to what she had written, and Wilkes, after a few more testing pokes at the fire, went out of the room.
“Perhaps best not to come this weekend—we have a houseful with much family &c (my mother)—on top of which Sebby Stokes is coming down to look at Cecil’s poems. It will be somewhat of a ‘Cecil weekend,’ and you would barely get a word in! Though perhaps”—but here the bracket clock whirred and then hectically struck eleven, its weights spooling downwards at the sudden expense of energy. She had to sit for a moment, when the echo had vanished, to repossess her thoughts. Other clocks (and now she could hear the grandfather in the hall chime in belatedly) showed a more respectful attitude to telling the hour. They struck, all through the house, like attentive servants. Not so that old brass bully the morning-room clock, which banged it out as fast as it could. “Life is short!” it shouted. “Get on with it, before I strike again!” Well, it was their motto, wasn’t it: Carpe Diem! She thought better of her “perhaps,” and signed off blandly, “Love from us both, Duffel.”
She took her letter into the hall, and stood for a moment by the massive oak table in the middle of the room. It seemed to her suddenly the emblem and essence of Corley. The children tore round it, the dog got under it, the housemaids polished it and polished it, like votaries of a cult. Functionless, unwieldy, an obstacle to anyone who crossed the room, the table had a firm place in Daphne’s happiness, from which she feared it was about to be prised by force. She saw again how imposing the hall was, with its gloomy panelling and Gothic windows, in which the Valance coat of arms was repeated insistently. Would those perhaps be allowed to stay? The fireplace was designed like a castle, with battlements instead of a mantelpiece and turrets on either side, each of which had a tiny window, with shutters that opened and closed. This had come in for particular sarcasm from Eva Riley—it was indeed hard to defend, except by saying foolishly that one loved it. Daphne went to the drawing-room door, put her fingers on the handle, and then flung it open as though hoping to surprise someone other than herself.
The off-white dazzle of it, on a bright April morning, was undeniably effective. It was