The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [93]
“You see how he adores you,” said Daphne, almost with a note of complaint, a breathless laugh. She gave him a long stare over the child’s head. Revel’s smiling coolness made her wonder for a moment more soberly if she was being played with. He went to the table and pulled out the diminutive child’s chair and sat down with his knees raised. He pretended drolly that life was always lived on this scale. She watched him, vaguely amused. The night-light made a study of his face as he worked quickly at a drawing. It seemed the very last moment of a smile lingered there in his teasing concentration. He used the children’s crayons as though they were all an artist could desire, and he was the master of them. Then with a louder snort Corinna had woken herself up and sat up and coughed uninhibitedly.
“Mother, what is it?” she said.
“Go back to sleep, my duck,” said Daphne, with a little shushing moue, affectionate but slightly impatient with her. The child’s hair was tousled and damp.
“No, Mother, what’s the matter?” she said. It was hard to tell if she was angry or merely confused, waking up to these unexpected figures in her room.
“Shush, darling, nothing,” said Daphne. “Uncle Revel and I came up to say goodnight.”
“He’s not Uncle Revel actually,” said Corinna; though Daphne felt this was not the only matter on which she might put her in the wrong. The child had a fearfully censorious vein; what she really meant was that her mother was drunk.
Revel looked over his shoulder, half-turned on the little chair. “We were wondering if we might still see that dance, if we asked very nicely,” he said, which actually wasn’t a very good idea.
“Oh, it’s too late for that,” said Corinna, “far too late,” as if they were the children pleading with her for some special concession. And getting out of bed she thumped across the room and went out to the lavatory. Daphne slightly dreaded her coming back and making more of a scene, allowing herself to say what she thought. If they all said what they thought … And now Wilfrid had woken again at the noise, with a furtive look, like an adult pretending not to have slept. She watched Revel finishing his drawing. There was the clank and torrent of the cistern, suddenly louder as the door was opened. But now Corinna seemed more balanced, more awake perhaps. She got back into bed with the little twitch of propriety that was part of her daylight character.
“Shall I just read you something, darling, and then you both go back to sleep,” Daphne said.
“Yes, please,” said Corinna, lying down and turning on her side, ready for both the reading and the sleeping.
Daphne looked by Wilfrid’s bed, then got up to see what books Corinna had. It was rather a bore, but they would be asleep again in a moment. “Are you reading The Silver Charger—how I adored that book … though I think I was a good deal older …”
“There you are, little one,” said Revel, getting up from the desk and holding his picture in front of Wilfrid to catch the light. The child pondered it, with a conditional sort of smile, against the pull of sleep. “I’ll put it over here, shall I?”
“Mm,” said Wilfrid. Daphne couldn’t quite make it out; she saw the great bill of a bird.
“It’s chapter eight,” said Corinna. Did she think that she ought to have a drawing too? Perhaps, tomorrow, Revel could be asked to make her one, if he wouldn’t mind—he might even draw her likeness …
“ ‘So Lord Pettifer climbed into his carriage,’ ” Daphne read, rather cautiously in the dim light, “ ‘which was all of gold … with two handsome footmen in scarlet livery with gold braid, and the coachman in his great cockled hat—cocked hat—and the green’—I’m so sorry!—‘the great coat of arms of the Pettifers of Morden emblazoned upon the doors. The snow had begun to fall, very gently and silently, and its soft white flakes sat—settled—for a moment on the manes of the four black horses and on the gold … panaches of the footmen’s hats’—oh lawks, I remember them—or how