The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [50]
Daphne smiled, as if trying not to, while the quick unmeaning use of the word revel lodged and sank in her, a momentary regret; she went on, “It’s really rather a hovel she lives in, I mean clean of course, but so tiny and dark. It’s just down the hill from where my mother used to live.” Still, she knew she had been right to tell Revel not to come.
“And where you grew up, Duffel,” said Dudley, as if his wife were getting airs. “The famous ‘Two Acres.’ ”
“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Riley. “What was it …? ‘Two blessèd acres of English ground!’ ”
“Indeed!” said Dudley.
“I suppose that was Cecil’s most famous poem, wasn’t it?” said Mrs. Riley.
“I’m not sure,” said Daphne, with another little frown. There was perhaps something reassuring after all about Eva Riley’s long bare legs. A clever woman aiming to seduce a rich man right under his wife’s nose would surely wear something more discreet, and dissembling. Daphne looked away, and out through the window at the garden, already losing colour in the early spring evening. At the top of the central section of each window the Valance coat of arms appeared, with the motto beneath it on a folded strip in Gothic letters. The gaudy little shields looked cheerfully at odds with the cold modernity of the room.
Dudley sipped piously at his cocktail, and said, “I can’t help feeling slightly mortified that my brother Cecil, heir to a baronetcy and three thousand acres, not to mention one of the ugliest houses in the south of England, should be best remembered for his ode to a suburban garden.”
“Well,” said Daphne stoutly, and not for the first time, “it was quite a lovely garden. I hope you’re not going to say things like that to Sebby Stokes.” She watched Mrs. Riley’s heavy-lidded smile indulge them both. “Or indeed to my poor mother. She’s very proud of that poem. Besides Cecil wrote far more poems about Corley, masses of them, as you well know.”
“Castle of exotic dreams,” said Dudley, in an absurd Thespian tone, “mirrored in enamelled streams …”—but sounding in fact quite like Cecil’s “poetry voice.”
“I’m sure even Cecil never wrote anything so awful as that,” said Daphne. And Dudley, excited by mockery of anything that others held dear, grinned widely at Eva Riley, showing her, like a flash of nakedness, his glistening dog-teeth. Mrs. Riley said, very smoothly, jabbing her cigarette out in the ashtray,
“I’m surprised your mother didn’t marry again.”
“The General, dear god!” said Dudley.
“No … Lady Valance’s mother,” said Eva Riley.
“It never seemed to come up, somehow … I’m not sure she’d have wanted it,” said Daphne, suppressing, in a kind of ruffled dignity, her own uncomfortable thoughts on the subject.
“She’s a pretty little thing. And she must have been widowed rather young.”
“Yes—yes, she was,” said Daphne, absently but firmly; and looked to Dudley to change the subject. He lit a cigarette, and steadied a heavy silver ashtray on the arm of his chair. It was one of over a hundred items that he had had stamped on the bottom: Stolen from Corley Court. Up in his dressing-room he kept a pewter mug of no great value with Stolen from Hepton Castle invitingly engraved on its underside, and he had followed the practice back at Corley, overseeing the work himself with fierce determination.
“When’s the Stoker getting here?” he said, after a bit.
“Oh, not till quite late, not till after dinner,” said Daphne.
“I expect he’s got some extremely important business to attend to,” said Dudley.
“There’s some important meeting, something about the miners, you know,” said Daphne.
“You don’t know Sebastian Stokes,” Dudley told Mrs. Riley. “He combines great literary sensitivity with a keen political mind.”
“Well, of course I’ve heard of him,” said Mrs. Riley, rather cautiously. In Dudley’s talk candour marched so closely with satire that the uninitiated could often only stare and laugh uncertainly at his pronouncements. Now Mrs. Riley leant forward to take a new cigarette from the malachite box on the low table.
“You don’t need to lose any sleep about the miners with Stokes