Dudley swung round with what they called the ‘mad glint’. The mood thickened, in a familiar way. But he seemed to let them off by saying simply, ‘Oh, the little dears.’
Mrs Kalbeck was awfully slow on the stairs. Wilfrid watched the rubber tip of each stick as it felt for its purchase on the shiny oak. ‘It is very dangerous,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve fallen down here myself.’ Being responsible for her, he found her interesting as well as frightening. He bobbed up and down the stairs beside her, encouraging and assessing her much slower progress. Corinna and Granny Sawle had gone on ahead, and he was worried, as always, about being late, and about what his father would say. ‘This house is Victorian,’ he explained.
Mrs Kalbeck chuckled amongst her sighs, and looked him in the face, levelly but sweetly. ‘And so am I, my dear,’ she said, in her precise German voice, her large grey eyes casting a kind of spell on him.
‘Do you like it then?’ he said.
‘This marvellous old house?’ she said gaily, but peering past him up the polished stairs with anxious blankness.
‘My father can’t warm to it,’ said Wilfrid. ‘He’s going to change it all.’
‘Well,’ she said disappointingly, ‘if that’s what he wants to do.’
Mrs Kalbeck had been put in the Yellow Room, at the far end of the house, and Wilfrid went a step or two ahead of her along the broad strip of carpet on the landing. They passed the open door of Granny Sawle’s room, where Corinna had already been given a present, a bright red scarf which she was looking at in the mirror. It was a cheerful irresistible room, and Wilfrid started to go into it, but then did resist, and walked on. The next door on the other side was his parents’ bedroom. ‘I’m afraid you’re not allowed in that room,’ he said, ‘unless my parents ask you to go in, of course.’ He was embarrassed that he didn’t exactly know Mrs Cow’s name; though at the same time he enjoyed thinking of her by her rude name. He didn’t want to get too close to her black dress, and her smell, white flowers mixed up with something sour and unhappy. ‘Mrs Ka…’ he said tentatively.
‘Yes, Wilfrid.’
‘My name’s not Vilfrid, you know, Mrs Ka…!’
The old lady stopped and pursed her lips obediently. ‘Wil-frid,’ she said, and coloured a little, which confused Wilfrid too for a moment. He looked away. ‘You were saying, Wil-frid, my dear…?’ But of course he couldn’t say. He danced on, down the long sunlit landing, leaving her to catch up.
The door of the Yellow Room was open, and the maid Sarah, not one of his favourites, was standing over Mrs Kalbeck’s old blue suitcase, going through its contents with a slightly comic expression. When Mrs Kalbeck saw her, she lurched forward, almost fell as a rug slid away under her stick. ‘Oh, I can do that,’ she said. ‘Let me do that!’
‘It’s no trouble, madam,’ said Sarah, smiling coolly.
Mrs Kalbeck sat down heavily on the dressing-table stool, panting with indecision, though there was nothing she could do. ‘Those old things…’ she said, and looked quickly from the maid to Wilfrid, hoping he at least hadn’t seen them, and then back again, as they were carried ceremoniously towards an open wardrobe.
‘Well, goodbye,’ said Wilfrid, and withdrew from the room as if not expecting to meet her again.
On the landing, by himself, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that he should have said something. He trailed his fingers along the spines of the books in the bookcase as he passed, producing a low steady ripple. He covered his unease with a kind of insouciance, though no one was watching. He’d done what he’d been told, he’d been extremely kind to Mrs Cow, but his worry was more wounding and obscure: that he’d been told to do it by someone who knew it was wrong, and yet pretended it wasn’t. Three toes on his father’s left foot had been blown off by a German shell, and the man he had learned to call Uncle Cecil was a cold white statue in the chapel downstairs, because of a German sniper with a gun. Wilfrid ran down the corridor, in momentary freedom from any kind of adult, his fear of being late overruled by a blind desire to hide – ran past his grandmother’s room and round the corner, till he got to the linen-room, and went in, and closed the door.
3
‘Have a drink, Duffel,’ said Dudley genially, rather as if she were another guest.
‘We’re having Manhattans,’ said Mrs Riley.
‘Oh…’ said Daphne, not quite looking at either of them, but crossing the room with a good-tempered expression. She still felt distinctly odd, like the subject of an experiment, whenever she came into the ‘new’ drawing-room; and having Mrs Riley herself in the room only made her feel odder. ‘Should we wait for Mother and Clara?’
‘Oh, I don’t know…’ said Dudley. ‘Eva looked thirsty.’
Mrs Riley gave her quick smoky laugh. ‘How do you know Mrs… um -?’ she said.
‘Mrs Kalbeck? She was our neighbour in Middlesex,’ said Daphne, making a moody survey of the bottles on the tray; and though she loved Manhattans, and had loved Manhattan itself, when they’d gone there for Dudley’s book, she set about mixing herself a gin and Dubonnet.
Mrs Riley said, ‘She seems rather… um…’ making a game of her own malice.
‘Yes, she’s a dear,’ said Daphne.
‘She’s certainly an enormous asset at a house party,’ said Dudley.
Daphne gave a pinched smile and said, ‘Poor Clara had a very hard war,’ which was what her mother often said in her friend’s defence, and now sounded almost as satirical as Dudley’s previous remark. She’d never been fond of Clara, but she pitied her, and since they both had brothers who’d been killed in the War, felt a certain kinship with her.
‘Just wait till she starts singing the Ride of the Valkyries,’ Dudley said.
‘Oh, does she do that,’ said Mrs Riley.
‘Well, she loves Wagner,’ said Daphne. ‘You know she took my mother to Bayreuth before the War.’
‘Poor thing…’ said Mrs Riley.
‘She’s never quite recovered,’ said Dudley in a tactful tone, ‘has she, Duffel, your mother, really?’
Mrs Riley chuckled again, and now Daphne looked at her: yes, that was how she chuckled, head back an inch, upper lip spread downwards, a huff of cigarette-smoke: a more or less tolerant gesture as much as a laugh.
‘I don’t rightly know,’ said Daphne, frowning, but seeing the point of keeping her husband in a good humour. A certain amount of baiting of the Sawles would have to be allowed this weekend. She came over with her drink, and dropped into one of the low grey armchairs with a trace of a smirk at its continuing novelty. She thought she’d never seen anything so short, for evening wear, as Eva Riley’s dress, only just on the knee when she sat, or indeed anything so long as her slithering red necklace, doubtless also of her own design. Well, her odd flat body was made for fashion, or at least for these fashions; and her sharp little face, not pretty, really, but made up as if it were, in red, white and black like a Chinese doll. Designers, it seemed, were never off duty. Curled across the corner of a sofa, her red necklace slinking over the grey cushions, Mrs Riley was a sort of advertisement for her room; or perhaps the room was an advertisement for her. ‘I know this weekend has been consecrated to Cecil,’ Daphne said, ‘but actually I’m glad that Clara was persuaded to come. She has no one, really, except my mother. It will mean so much to her. Poor dear, you know she hasn’t even got electricity.’
Dudley snorted delightedly at this. ‘She’ll revel in the electrical fixtures here,’ he said.
Daphne smiled, as if trying not to, while the quick unmeaning use of the word revel lodged and sank in her, a momentary regret; she went on, ‘It’s really rather a hovel she lives in, I mean clean of course, but so tiny and dark. It’s just down the hill from where my mother used to live.’ Still, she knew she had been right to tell Revel not to come.