The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [48]
“Frau Kalbeck, marvellous to see you again,” said Dudley, limping quickly but very heavily across to her, so that he seemed to be playing with her, aping her or just joining in, you couldn’t tell. “Please ignore my children.”
“Oh, but darling,” said their mother, “the children have asked to show the guests up to their rooms.”
Dudley swung round with what they called the “mad glint.” The mood thickened, in a familiar way. But he seemed to let them off by saying simply, “Oh, the little dears.”
Mrs. Kalbeck was awfully slow on the stairs. Wilfrid watched the rubber tip of each stick as it felt for its purchase on the shiny oak. “It is very dangerous,” he assured her. “I’ve fallen down here myself.” Being responsible for her, he found her interesting as well as frightening. He bobbed up and down the stairs beside her, encouraging and assessing her much slower progress. Corinna and Granny Sawle had gone on ahead, and he was worried, as always, about being late, and about what his father would say. “This house is Victorian,” he explained.
Mrs. Kalbeck chuckled amongst her sighs, and looked him in the face, levelly but sweetly. “And so am I, my dear,” she said, in her precise German voice, her large grey eyes casting a kind of spell on him.
“Do you like it then?” he said.
“This marvellous old house?” she said gaily, but peering past him up the polished stairs with anxious blankness.
“My father can’t warm to it,” said Wilfrid. “He’s going to change it all.”
“Well,” she said disappointingly, “if that’s what he wants to do.”
Mrs. Kalbeck had been put in the Yellow Room, at the far end of the house, and Wilfrid went a step or two ahead of her along the broad strip of carpet on the landing. They passed the open door of Granny Sawle’s room, where Corinna had already been given a present, a bright red scarf which she was looking at in the mirror. It was a cheerful irresistible room, and Wilfrid started to go into it, but then did resist, and walked on. The next door on the other side was his parents’ bedroom. “I’m afraid you’re not allowed in that room,” he said, “unless my parents ask you to go in, of course.” He was embarrassed that he didn’t exactly know Mrs. Cow’s name; though at the same time he enjoyed thinking of her by her rude name. He didn’t want to get too close to her black dress, and her smell, white flowers mixed up with something sour and unhappy. “Mrs. Ka …,” he said tentatively.
“Yes, Wilfrid.”
“My name’s not Vilfrid, you know, Mrs. Ka …!”
The old lady stopped and pursed her lips obediently. “Wil–frid,” she said, and coloured a little, which confused Wilfrid too for a moment. He looked away. “You were saying, Wil–frid, my dear …?” But of course he couldn’t say. He danced on, down the long sunlit landing, leaving her to catch up.
The door of the Yellow Room was open, and the maid Sarah, not one of his favourites, was standing over Mrs. Kalbeck’s old blue suitcase, going through its contents with a slightly comic expression. When Mrs. Kalbeck saw her, she lurched forward, almost fell as a rug slid away under her stick. “Oh, I can do that,” she said. “Let me do that!”
“It’s no trouble, madam,” said Sarah, smiling coolly.
Mrs. Kalbeck sat down heavily on the dressing-table stool, panting with indecision, though there was nothing she could do. “Those old things …,” she said, and looked quickly from the maid to Wilfrid, hoping he at least hadn’t seen them, and then back again, as they were carried ceremoniously towards an open wardrobe.
“Well, goodbye,” said Wilfrid, and withdrew from the room as if not expecting to meet her again.
On the landing, by himself, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that he should have said something. He trailed his fingers along the spines