The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [76]
Sebby smiled back rather furtively at this little irony. “Your letters to Cecil haven’t survived.”
“I do hope not!”
“I have the impression Cecil never kept letters, which is really rather trying of him.”
“He saw you coming, Sebby!” said Daphne, and laughed to cover the surprise of her own tone. He wasn’t used to teasing, but she wasn’t sure he minded it.
“Indeed!” Sebby rose, and looked for a book on the table. “Well, I don’t want to keep you too long.”
“Oh …! Well, you haven’t.” Perhaps she had rattled him after all, he thought she was simply being flippant.
“What I hope you might do,” said Sebby, “is to write down for me a few paragraphs, simply evoking dear Cecil, and furnishing perhaps an anecdote or two. A little memorandum.”
“A memorandum, yes.”
“And then if I may quote from the letters …”—she had a first glimpse of his impatience—the impersonal logic of even the most flattering diplomatist. Of course one had to remember that he was burdened with far more pressing things.
“I suppose that would be all right.”
“I expect to call you simply Miss S., unless you object”—which Daphne found after a mere moment’s fury she didn’t. “And now I might ask you just to run through ‘Two Acres’ with me, for any little insights you might give me—local details and so on. I didn’t like to press your mother.”
“Oh, by all means,” said Daphne, with a muddled feeling of relief and disappointment that Sebby had failed to press her too—but that was it, of course, she saw it now, and it was good not to have wasted time on it: he was going to say nothing in this memoir of his, Louisa was in effect his editor, and this weekend of “research,” for all its sadness and piquancy and interesting embarrassments, was a mere charade. He picked up the autograph album, the mauve silk now rucked and stained by hundreds of grubby thumbs, and leafed delicately through. There was something else in it for him, no doubt—a busy man wouldn’t make this effort without some true personal reason. Sebby too had been awfully fond of Cecil. She gazed up at the carved end of the nearest bookcase, and the stained-glass window beyond it, in a mood of sudden abstraction. The April brilliance that threatened the fire in the morning-room here threw sloping drops and shards of colour across the wall and across the white marble fireplace. They painted the blind marble busts of Homer and Milton pink, turquoise and buttercup. The colours seemed to warm and caress them as they slid and stretched. She pictured Cecil as he had been on his last leave; she had a feeling that when she met him that hot summer night he had just come from dinner with Sebby. Well, he was never going to know about that. For now, she had to come up with something more appropriate; something that she felt wearily had already been written, and that she had merely to find and repeat.
7
FREDA CROSSED THE HALL and started up the great staircase, stopping for a moment on each frighteningly polished tread, reaching up for the banister, which was too wide and Elizabethan in style to hold on to properly, more like the coping of a wall than a handrail. It must be nice for Daphne to have a coat of arms, she supposed—there it was, at each turn, in the paws of a rampant beast with a lantern on its head. She too had dreamt of that for her daughter, in the beginning, before she knew what she knew. Corley Court was a forbidding place—even in the sanctuary of her room the dark panelling and the Gothic fireplace induced a feeling of entrapment, a fear that something impossible was about to be asked of her. She closed the door, crossed the threadbare expanse of crimson carpet, and sat down at the dressing-table, close to tears with her confused relieved unhappy sense of not having said to Sebastian Stokes any of the things she could have said, and had known, in her heart, that she wouldn’t.
The one letter she’d shown him, her widow’s mite, she’d called it, was mere twaddle, a “Collins.” She saw his courteous but very quick eye running over it, his turning the page as if there