The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [78]
“Have you had your chat?” she said.
“Yes. It was nothing much.”
“Mm, you were very quick,” said Clara, in that half-admiring, half-critical tone that Freda had grown so used to.
She said, “One doesn’t want to waste his time,” in her own murmur of suppressed impatience. “Have they been looking after you?” She bustled round the room as though doing so herself, then went restlessly to the window. “Would you like to go outside? I’ve made enquiries and they’ve still got Sir Edwin’s old bath-chair, if you want it. They can get it out for you.”
“Oh, no, Freda, thank you very much.”
“I’m sure that handsome Scotch boy would be happy to give you a push.”
“No, no, my dear, really!”
If she wouldn’t be pushed, in any sense, there was little to be done. Freda knew they both wanted to go home, though Clara obviously couldn’t say so, and from Freda it would have been a pitiful admission. She missed her daughter, and loved her grandchildren, but visits to Corley were generally unhappy affairs. Even the cocktail hour lost something of its normal promise when cocktails themselves had such alarming effects on their host.
“Shall we hear Corinna play the piano,” Clara said, “before we go?”
“This evening, I think—Dudley’s promised them.”
“Oh, in that case,” said Clara.
This bedroom, at the end of the house, looked out over an expanse of lawn towards the high red wall of the kitchen garden, beyond which the ridges of greenhouses gleamed in the sun. Not normally a walker, Freda dimly planned a little solitary “trudge” or “totter,” to calm her feelings—though she knew she might well be snared by some chivalrous fellow-guest. She was frightened of Mrs. Riley, and undecided on the charm of young Mr. Revel Ralph. “I might go out for a bit, dear,” she said over her shoulder. Clara made a sort of preoccupied grunt, as if too busy getting herself comfortable to take in what her friend was saying. “Apparently there’s a magnolia that has to be seen to be believed.” Now, from the direction of the formal garden, two brown-clad figures came slowly walking, George with his hands behind his back, and Madeleine with hers in the pockets of her mackintosh. Their hands seemed somehow locked away from any mutual use they might have been put to, and although the two of them were busily in conversation, George throwing back his head to lend weight to his pronouncements, they looked much more like colleagues than like a couple.
Standing at the window, Freda saw herself already crossing the grass, and saw for a reckless and inspired moment that having the letters with her she should give them back to George; perhaps that would prove to be the real achievement of this arduous visit. It would be a kind of exorcism, a demon cast out of her at last. Her heart was skipping from the double impact of the thought and the opportunity—almost too pressing, with too little space for reflection and stepping back. And then it was as if she saw the letters hurled furiously in the air, falling and blowing across the lawn between them, trapped underfoot by a suddenly game Louisa, fetched out from beneath the bushes by an agile Sebby Stokes. She remembered what she had always felt, that they couldn’t be let out—though the feeling now was subtly altered by the momentary vision of release. They were George’s letters, and he should have them, but to give them to him after all this time would be to show him that something was live that he had surely thought dead ten years ago.
“Well, I’ll get out for a bit, dear,” she said again. Now George and Madeleine had gone. Probably she could tell all this to Clara, who out of her difficult existence had garnered a good deal of wisdom; but in a way it was her wisdom that she feared—it might make her look, by contrast, a fool. No one else could possibly be told, since no one keeps other people’s secrets, and Daphne in particular must never know of