The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [71]
“I was very young,” said Daphne quietly, wishing more than ever that Mrs. Riley wasn’t occupying her desk, toying with her fountain pen, and observing the conversation, in her disappointed and reducing way: now she said almost slyly,
“You must have been a mere girl, my dear.”
“Yes, I was.”
“She was very susceptible,” Freda explained, “weren’t you, Daphne?”
“Thank you, Mother!”
“And then he wrote his most famous poem for you, you must have been swept off your feet,” said Mrs. Riley, enjoying the picture.
“No, he did,” said Freda.
Daphne said, “Well … he wrote it for all of us, really, didn’t he.” She felt vaguely amazed now by the whole business of the poem, by the awkward memory of what it had once meant to her. She would never have been allowed to keep it to herself. That morning she knew it was the most precious thing she had ever been given, and even then she had felt it being taken away from her. Everyone had wanted a part of it. Well, now they had it, they were welcome to it; if she tried to claim it back it was only as mortifying evidence of her first infatuation. Sometimes she acted her role: when people found out the story, and gloated over her, she agreed what a very lucky young lady she had been; but where possible she went on to say that she no longer cared. Within a week she had learned from George that other people were reading it. It appeared in New Numbers, a good deal rewritten. Then, when Cecil died, it was quoted by Churchill himself, in The Times. She had just lent the famous autograph book to Sebby Stokes; it was a bit greasy and frayed, the other entries before it and after it looking sweetly strait-laced and proper in comparison. But the poem itself … “It’s entered the language, hasn’t it,” she said.
“It’s a bit of a jingle,” said Freda, which Daphne had heard her say before.
“You must be awfully proud,” Mrs. Riley insisted.
“Well, you know,” said Freda.
Mrs. Riley shook her head. “I can’t help wondering what Cecil would think of us all talking about him like this.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’d be pleased to find he was still the centre of attention,” said Daphne.
“Cecil was awfully fond of Cecil!” said Freda. “If you know what I mean.”
Mrs. Riley looked round for a second before saying, rather archly, “Does your mother-in-law still get messages from him, I wonder?”
“Not any more,” said Daphne. “Anyway, it was all nonsense, all that, and all very sad.”
“What’s that, dear?”
“Oh, nothing, Mother … Louisa’s book tests, you remember.”
“Oh, that, yes …,” said Freda with a little stricken look. “So sad.”
“I’m sure it must be nonsense,” said Mrs. Riley, “but I’ve always thought it would be fun to try.”
“I don’t think fun comes into it very much,” said Freda, frankly bemused.
“We could try and get through to old Cecil …,” said Mrs. Riley jauntily. But here the door opened and with an effect both tactful and inescapable Sebby Stokes came in.
“Dear Mrs. Sawle …,” he said, smiling and cushioning his formality.
“Oh, well!” Freda said, with a humorous tremor, reaching for her handbag.
Daphne watched her mother cross the room, saw her distinctly, her comic note of bravery, knowing she was watched, flustered but making a go of it, an amenable guest in her daughter’s house. There was a little stoop of humility as she passed through the door, into the larger but darker library beyond, a hint of frailty, an affectation of bearing more than her fifty-nine years, a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted. Daphne saw what was sturdy and capable and truthful in the mother she’d always known, the bigger woman, morally big, that no one else but George perhaps could see; and at the same time she saw exactly how shaken and vulnerable she was. She was a grieving mother herself, though in the hierarchy of mourning here her grief was largely overlooked. Sebby glanced back with an abstracted nod as he pulled the door to. The dry click of the lock seemed oddly momentous.