The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [51]
“I’m sleeping like a top as it is,” she said pertly, fiddling with a match.
Daphne took a warming sip of her gin and thought what she could say about the poor miners, if there had been any point to it at all. She said, “I think it’s rather marvellous of him to do all this about Cecil when the Prime Minister needs him in London.”
“But he idolized Cecil,” said Dudley. “He wrote his obituary in The Times, you know.”
“Oh, really …?” said Mrs. Riley, as if she’d read it and wondered.
“He did it to please the General, but it came from the heart. A soldier … a scholar … a poet … etc., etc., etc. … etc. … and a gentleman!” Dudley knocked back his drink in a sudden alarming flourish. “It was a wonderful send-off; though of course largely unrecognizable to anyone who’d really known my brother Cecil.”
“So he didn’t really know him,” said Mrs. Riley, still treading warily, but clearly enjoying the treacherous turn of the talk.
“Oh, they met a few times. One of Cecil’s bugger friends had him down to Cambridge, and they went in a punt and Cecil read him a sonnet, you know, and the Stoker was completely bowled over and got it put in some magazine. And Cecil wrote him some high-flown letters that he put in The Times later on, when Cecil was dead …” Dudley seemed to run down, and sat gazing, with eyebrows lightly raised, as if at the unthinkable tedium of it all.
“I see …,” said Mrs. Riley, with a coy smirk, and then looked across at Daphne. “I don’t suppose you ever knew Cecil, Lady Valance?” she said.
“Me, oh good lord yes!” said Daphne. “In fact I knew him long before I met Dud—,” but at that moment the door was opened by Wilkes and her mother came in, hesitantly it seemed, since she was waiting for her friend, on her two slow sticks, to cross the hall, and Clara herself was in distracted conversation with Dudley’s mother, who came in briskly just behind her.
“My husband, you could fairly say, disliked music,” said Louisa Valance. “It wasn’t that he hated it, you understand. He was in many ways an unduly sensitive man. Music made him sad.”
“Music is sad, yes,” said Clara, looking vaguely harassed. “But also, I think—”
“Come in, come and sit,” said Daphne, with a rescuing smile at Clara’s shabby sparkle, the old black evening dress tight under the arms, the old black evening bag, that had been to the opera long before the War, swinging around the stick in her left hand as she thrust forward into the room. The Scottish boy, handsome as a singer himself in his breeches and evening coat, brought forward a higher chair for her, and propped her sticks by it once she’d sat down. Eva and Dudley seemed lightly mesmerized by the sticks, and gazed at them as if at rude survivals from a culture they thought they had swept away. The boy hovered discreetly, smiled and acted with proper impersonal charm. He was the first appointment Wilkes had made under Daphne’s rule at Corley, and in some incoherent and almost romantic way she thought of him as her own.
“Sebastian hasn’t arrived?” said Louisa.
“Not yet,” said Daphne. “Not till after dinner.”
“We have so much to talk about,” said Louisa, with buoyant impatience.
“Ah, Mamma …,” said Dudley, coming towards her as if to kiss her, but stopping a few feet off with a wide grin.
“Good evening, my dear. You knew I was coming in.”
“Well, I hoped so, Mamma, of course. Now what would you like to drink?”
“I think a lemonade. It’s quite spring-like today!”
“Isn’t it,” said Dudley. “Let’s celebrate.”
Louisa gave him the dry smile that seemed partly to absorb and partly to deflect his sarcasms, and looked away. Her eyes lingered on Mrs. Riley’s legs, then switched for reassurance to Daphne’s, and her face, not naturally tactful, seemed frozen for five seconds in the forming and suppressing of a “remark.” She was standing, perhaps by design, beneath her own portrait, which in a way made remarks superfluous. This was the house she had ruled for forty years. She was gaunter now about the brow than when she’d been painted, sharper about the chin. Her hair had gone from russet