The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [74]
Eva looked glad to see her. She went on, “You know, I feel very fortunate to have met your husband”—modest but also subtly possessive.
“It’s silly of me,” said Daphne, “I don’t quite know how you did.” She knew what Dudley had said, of course.
“Well, I fitted up Bobby Bannister’s place in Surrey, didn’t I, and he must have told … your husband about me. I rather think he gave him the whole idea for improving Corley.”
This was exactly Dudley’s version too, though the cool nerve of “improving” made Daphne laugh. She said, “It’s become a bit of a thing with Dud—I think he’s doing it mainly to upset his mother.”
“Oh, I do hope it’s rather more than that,” said Eva. “I must say I love working here”—and she gave Daphne a look of rather unnerving sweetness.
“Well …” Daphne went back towards the window to see where Revel and George had got to, but there was now no sign of them. Then there was the click of the library door, and Daphne turned, expecting her mother to be shown back in, amid reassuring murmurs and thanks—but it was Sebby alone, head cocked, with an apologetic half-smile. It seemed Freda had been shown out the other way, into the hall: this was oddly confounding for a second or two, as though she had vanished in some more permanent sense. “She seemed anxious about her friend,” Sebby said.
“Ah yes, I fear she’s not at all well.” Daphne gave a bland nod to Eva and went in, and when he closed the door behind her, the click confirmed her earlier sense of the process: you watched for a bit, and then you were part of it. A slight awkwardness, at being a guest in her own house, coloured the first moments for both of them, but they smiled through it. “I feel rather like a doctor,” said Sebby.
“Mrs. Riley thought a detective,” said Daphne.
Sebby was hesitant but sure. “Really I hope no more than a well-meaning friend,” he said, and waited for Daphne to sit down. On the big table he had laid out the publications in which Cecil’s verses had appeared—a small pile of periodicals, the anthologies, Georgian Poetry, the Cambridge Poets, and the one book he’d published in his lifetime, Night Wake and Other Poems, in its soft grey paper covers easily dog-eared and torn. Another pile seemed to contain things in manuscript—there was her autograph book, given up this morning. Daphne was impressed, and again unsettled by the evidence of a clear procedure. She saw that she hadn’t prepared. This was because she hadn’t been able to, her mind wouldn’t fix on any of the things she knew she might say; she had had an unaccountable confidence that inspiration would come to her as soon as Sebby’s questions began. Now she regretted the past ten minutes spent sparring with Eva, when she could have been putting her thoughts in order.
“Forgive me for one moment,” Sebby said, turning to the table and starting to search through the pile of handwritten things. Daphne glimpsed her own letters from Cecil, which she had also dutifully surrendered—again she didn’t want to think about them. She looked at his stooped back and then at the long dim room beyond him. Though she was, as Eva had said, a reader, she had never exactly taken to the library—like Dudley’s study, which she never entered, it was a part of the house outside her sway. Sometimes she came in to look for a book, a novel from the great leather sets of Trollope or Dickens, or an old bound volume of Punch for Wilfie to work out the cartoons, but she couldn’t quite shake off the feeling of being a visitor, as if in a public library, with rules and fines. As the scene of her mother-in-law’s now “famous” book tests, too, it had an unhappy air. Of these Sebby