The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [82]
SEBBY STOKES CAME DOWN FIRST, and Daphne, who’d popped in to the drawing-room for a gin and lemon, was caught for several minutes in distracted conversation with him, a certain warm relief none the less creeping in from the drink. Their earlier chat in the library was a coloured shadow, an attempted intimacy that would never be repeated. She perched on a window-seat, glancing out on to the gravel, where any moment cars would appear. She had done what she could, she must relax. Sebby seemed still to be talking about Cecil, whom she’d forgotten for a moment was the pretext for this whole party. Wasn’t this what would happen to all of them, remembrance forgotten in the chaos of other preoccupations? “I’ve been reading all the letters your mother-in-law received from Cecil’s men.”
“Aren’t they splendid!” said Daphne.
“By George, they loved him,” said Sebby, in what she felt was an odd tone. She looked at him, standing stiffly with his glass and his cigarette, such a sleek and perfect embodiment of how to behave, and again she saw what she had glimpsed that afternoon, that he had loved him, and would do anything for his good name. She said, mildly but mischievously,
“We had splendid letters about my brother too. Though I suppose they’re always likely to be splendid, aren’t they. No one ever wrote and said, ‘Captain Valance was a beast.’ ”
“No, indeed …,” said Sebby, with a twitch of a smile.
“What are you going to call the book, just Poems, I suppose?”
“Or Collected Poems, I think. Louisa favours The Poetical Works of, which your husband feels is too Mrs. Hemans.”
“For once I think he’s right,” said Daphne. And then there was a warning drone like a plane in the distance and in a moment a brown baker’s van, which was Mark and Flo’s form of conveyance, came roaring and throbbing down the drive.
“He finds it so useful for his paintings!” Daphne found herself explaining, shouting gaily, and feeling she really wasn’t ready for this evening at all. When Mark clambered out from the cab in a full and proper dinner-suit, she felt so relieved that she kissed both George and Madeleine, who had just come in, and were not expecting it. Behind them in the hall was her mother, and then Revel looking at the fireplace while Eva Riley stuck her head out of one of the turret windows. “Absurd!” she was saying. “Too sickening!” Well, it was quite a party, it had been set in motion, and Daphne was gamely pretending to drive it—it was understandable surely if she felt slightly sick herself as it gathered speed. Her mother said quietly that Clara was very tired, and had asked for supper in her room—Daphne felt it was bound to happen, yet a further change to the seating-plan, but she merely told Wilkes, and asked him to sort it out. Then she went and got another gin.
It turned out that Mark knew Eva Riley already, which was a good thing and also vaguely irritating. He called her “old girl” or “Eva Brick” in his cheerful, slightly menacing way. This pre-existing friendship was put on display, and even exaggerated, in front of the other guests. They had a number of acquaintances in common, none of them known personally to anyone else, and Mark kept up conversation about these fascinating absent people with a certain determination, as if aping some polite convention: “What’s old Romilly up to?” he asked, and then, “How did you find Stella?”
“Oh, she was on killing form,” said Eva, with her secretive smile, perhaps even a little embarrassed. Mark’s painting, hanging so prominently in the room,