Paul thought again about George and Cecil on the roof, the whole rich difficult range of unspoken testimony, in images and implications. Surely Dudley was hinting here at something he couldn’t possibly have said outright?
Daphne, two or three years younger, was more open and at ease, and spoke her mind in a manner that sometimes startled my mother but habitually delighted me. She had grown up with two elder brothers of her own, and was used to their spoiling. I was thrown together with her by the somewhat exclusive nature of George and Cecil’s pursuits, and our own relations were at first fraternal; it was clear that she idolized Cecil, but to me she was an amusingly artless companion, unaffected by the family view of me as, if not a black, then certainly a greyish sheep. She loved to talk, and her face lit up with amusement at the simplest pleasantries. To her Corley Court was less a matter for the social historian than a vision out of some old romance. Its inhuman aspects were part of its charm. The stained glass windows that kept out the light, the high ceilings that baffled all attempts at heating, the barely penetrable thickets of overladen tables, chairs and potted palms that filled the rooms, were invested with a kind of magic. ‘I should like very much to live in a house like this,’ she said, on the occasion of that first visit. Four years later she was married in the chapel at Corley, and in due course, if for a limited span, was herself the mistress of the house.
Paul decided hotels were hardly the best place to work. All around there was noise – a late riser above had pulled the bath-plug and the waste fell with an unembarrassed frothing and gargling sound through a pipe apparently inches from his desk; the maid had come in twice, even though check-out wasn’t till eleven; baffled but unbeaten, she toiled in the hallway with the hoover or went up and down opening and slamming the doors; in a room immediately to his left, and previously unsuspected, some sort of business meeting had got under way, with periodic laughter and the rambling voice of a man addressing them, a completely meaningless phrase now and then discernible through the thin wall. Paul sat back with a yelp of frustration; yet he saw the scene had already a kind of anecdotal quality, and he wrote it up too in his diary, as a reminder of the biographer’s difficult existence.
When he got back to Olga, just before two o’clock, he found the front door open and heard Wilfrid’s voice coming from the kitchen, speaking more regularly and emphatically than usual. Even so, he couldn’t make out at first what he was saying. He felt he’d chanced on something awkwardly private. There was a sense of possible crisis. Rather than ring the bell, Paul stepped into the hall and gripping his briefcase stood leaning forward with an apologetic expression. It dawned on him that Wilfrid was reading to his mother. ‘ “Ah hammer… dryers ever seen”,’ he seemed to say. For a dislocated second Paul couldn’t place it; then of course he knew. Are Hamadryads ever seen / Between the dancing veils of green…? He was reading ‘Two Acres’ for her, and she was making a grumbling noise or coming in on the words herself as if to say the reading was hardly necessary; it was a sort of briefing perhaps for her second day’s interview, and Paul found something reassuring in that – and something oddly touching in the reversal of roles, son reading to mother. ‘ “Or pause, then take the hidden turn, The path amid-” ’ ‘ “The path amid the hip-high fern”,’ Daphne came in. ‘You don’t read it at all well.’
‘Perhaps you would rather I didn’t?’ said Wilfrid in his usual tone of dry forbearance.
‘Poetry, I mean, you have no idea how to read poetry. It’s not the football results…’
‘Well I’m sorry…’
‘The curfew tolls the knell of passing day: one; The ploughman homeward plods his weary way: nil,’ said Daphne, getting a bit carried away. ‘When I’m gone, you should get a job on the telly.’
‘Don’t… talk like that,’ said Wilfrid, and Paul, not seeing their faces, took a moment to realize it was not her mockery but the mention of her going that he was objecting to. And what indeed would he do then? Puzzled for a moment by his own muddled feelings of affection and irritation towards Daphne, Paul tiptoed back out again and rang the bell.
Exactly as yesterday, but with determined new warmth, Paul said to Wilfrid in the hall, ‘And how is your mother?’
‘I fear she didn’t sleep at all well,’ said Wilfrid, not meeting his eye; ‘you might keep it… pretty short today.’ Paul went into the sitting-room and set up the mike and looked over his notes with a clear sense they were blaming him for her bad night. But in fact when Daphne came through she seemed if anything rather more spry than yesterday. She made her way among the helpful obstacles of the room with the inward smile of an elderly person who knows they’re not done yet. He felt something had happened in the interim; of course she would have been thinking, reassessing her position as she lay awake, and he would have to find out as he went along if the spryness was a sign of compliance or resistance.
‘Rather a lovely day,’ she said as she sat down; and then cocking her head to check Wilfrid was still in the kitchen making coffee, ‘Has he been telling you about his popsy?’
‘Oh – well, I gathered…’ Paul smiled distractedly as he checked the tape-recorder.
‘I mean, he’s sixty! He can’t look after a lively young woman – he can hardly look after me!’
‘Perhaps she would look after him.’
But she gave a rather earthy chuckle at this. ‘He’s not a bad person, he wouldn’t hurt a fly, or even a flea probably, but he’s totally impractical. I mean look at this house! It’s a miracle I haven’t tripped over something and broken my leg; or my wrist; or my neck!’
‘Does she live locally?’
‘Thank god, no – she lives in Norway.’
‘Oh, I see…’
‘Birgit. She’s a pen-pal, didn’t he tell you that?’
‘Well, Norway’s a long way away.’
‘That’s not what Birgit thinks. Well, she’s got designs on him.’
‘Do you think?’
Daphne was quietly candid. ‘She wants to be the next Lady Valance. Ah, tea, Wilfie, how splendid!’
‘Coffee, you said, Mummy.’ She took it cautiously from the tray. ‘Shall I go over to Smiths’ for those things, then?’
‘No, no,’ she said, ‘stay and talk with us – it will be more fun for Mr Bryant, and you can help me out – I forget so much!’
‘Do call me Paul,’ said Paul, with a glare of a smile at Wilfrid – if he stayed it was certain Daphne would say nothing remotely interesting; he needed to be sent off on some sort of errand, but it was hard for Paul to know what.
‘Well, of course I’m very interested in… Paul’s great project.’
‘Well, I know you are.’ She sipped. ‘Mm, delicious.’
Paul wondered how to cope with this. As always he had plans, which as often proved impossible to follow, and he had never been good at improvising: he clung to the discarded plan still when he could. He reminded her about Corley Court, and the times he’d visited the house, and how he was hoping to go again, he’d written to the Headmaster; but she couldn’t be got to show any interest in the topic at all. ‘Do you have much from those days, I wonder?’ Paul said. Perhaps under the tablecloths and blankets in this room there were Valance heirlooms, little dusty things that Cecil might have owned and handled. The sense of the whole unexamined terrain of Cecil’s life lying so close and yet so stubbornly out of view came over him at times in waves of dreamlike opportunity and bafflement.
‘I didn’t get much. I got the Raphael.’