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By Root 1245 0

was too much to explain, and now a housemaid was coming along the top landing with a baby, no, a hot-water bottle wrapped in a shawl. “You’re so sweet to the children,” Daphne said loudly, “they’ll be thrilled to see you,” giving the servant an absent-minded nod as she came past and thinking all would be explained by this, her virtue as a mother touchingly asserted after the frightful racket from downstairs. “If they’re not asleep, of course, I mean!” She kissed her raised forefinger and pushed open the door with preposterous caution. Then she had the drama of the light behind her for a minute, before they both came in and Revel closed the door with a muffled snap. Now a sallow night-light glowed from the table and heaped large shadows on the beds and up the walls. “No, Wilfie darling, you go back to sleep,” she said. She peered down at him uncertainly in the stuffy gloom—he had stirred and groaned but was not perhaps awake … then across at Corinna, by the window, who looked less than lovely, flat on her back, head arched back on the pillow and snoring reedily. “If only she could see herself,” murmured Daphne, in wistful mockery of her ceremonious child.

“If only we could see ourselves …,” said Revel. “I mean, I expect if you saw me …”

“Mm,” said Daphne, leaning back, almost feeling with her shoulders to where he was, feeling his left hand slip lightly round her waist, confident but courteous and staying only a moment. “Mm … well, there you have them!”—stepping aside in a way that felt dance-like, a promise to return. She muttered into her wineglass as she swigged. “Not a terribly pretty picture, I’m afraid.” She felt a run of trivial apology opening up in front of her, the children perhaps not pleasing to Revel. He must be aware of the smell of the chamber-pot, she seemed to see Wilfie’s yellow tinkle. “Of course their father never looks at them—when they’re asleep, I mean—well, as little as possible at other times—when they’re awake!—they can’t contrive to be picturesque at all times of the day and night—” She shook her head and sipped again, turned back to Revel. Revel was picking up Roger, Wilfie’s brown bear, and frowning at the creature in the pleasant quizzical way of a family doctor: then he looked at her with the same snuffly smile, as if it didn’t matter what she said. Her own mention of Dudley hung oddly in the half-light of the top-floor room.

She went round to the far side of Wilfrid’s little bed, set her glass down on the bedside table, peered down at him, then perched heavily on the side of the bed. His wide face, like a soft little caricature of his father, all mouth and eyes. She thought of Dudley kissing her just now, in the cow-passage, all her knowledge of him that had to be kept from a child, their child, facing blankly upwards, one cheek in shadow, the other in the gleam of the night-light. She didn’t want to think of her husband at all, but his kiss was still there, in her lips, bothering away at her. She gently straightened and smoothed and straightened again the turned-over top of Wilfrid’s sheet. Dudley had a way of trapping you, he stalked your conscience, his maddest moments were also oddly tactical. And then of course he was pitiable, wounded, haunted—all that. Wilfrid’s head twitched, his eyelids opened and closed and he turned his whole body in a sudden convulsion to the right, then in a second or two he thumped back again, murmured furiously and lay the other way. He had bad dreams that were sometimes spooled out for her, formless descriptions, comically earnest, too boring to do more than pretend to listen to. He claimed to dream about Sergeant Bronson, which Daphne deplored and felt very slightly jealous of. She leant over him and straddled him with her arm, as if to keep him to herself, to say he was spoken for. “Uncle Revel,” said Wilfrid sociably.

“Hello, old chap!” whispered Revel, smiling down at him, setting Roger down safely by the pillow. “We didn’t mean to wake you up.”

Wilfrid gave him a look of unquestioning approval and then his eyes closed and he swallowed and pursed his