‘And where you grew up, Duffel,’ said Dudley, as if his wife were getting airs. ‘The famous “Two Acres”.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Riley. ‘What was it…? “Two blessèd acres of English ground!” ’
‘Indeed!’ said Dudley.
‘I suppose that was Cecil’s most famous poem, wasn’t it?’ said Mrs Riley.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Daphne, with another little frown. There was perhaps something reassuring after all about Eva Riley’s long bare legs. A clever woman aiming to seduce a rich man right under his wife’s nose would surely wear something more discreet, and dissembling. Daphne looked away, and out through the window at the garden already losing colour in the early spring evening. At the top of the central section of each window the Valance coat of arms appeared, with the motto beneath it on a folded strip in Gothic letters. The gaudy little shields looked cheerfully at odds with the cold modernity of the room.
Dudley sipped piously at his cocktail, and said, ‘I can’t help feeling slightly mortified that my brother Cecil, heir to a baronetcy and three thousand acres, not to mention one of the ugliest houses in the south of England, should be best remembered for his ode to a suburban garden.’
‘Well,’ said Daphne stoutly, and not for the first time, ‘it was quite a lovely garden. I hope you’re not going to say things like that to Sebby Stokes.’ She watched Mrs Riley’s heavy-lidded smile indulge them both. ‘Or indeed to my poor mother. She’s very proud of that poem. Besides Cecil wrote far more poems about Corley, masses of them, as you well know.’
‘Castle of exotic dreams,’ said Dudley, in an absurd Thespian tone, ‘mirrored in enamelled streams…’ – but sounding in fact quite like Cecil’s ‘poetry voice’.
‘I’m sure even Cecil never wrote anything so awful as that,’ said Daphne. And Dudley, excited by mockery of anything that others held dear, grinned widely at Eva Riley, showing her, like a flash of nakedness, his glistening dog-teeth. Mrs Riley said, very smoothly, jabbing her cigarette out in the ashtray,
‘I’m surprised your mother didn’t marry again.’
‘The General, dear god!’ said Dudley.
‘No… Lady Valance’s mother,’ said Eva Riley.
‘It never seemed to come up, somehow… I’m not sure she’d have wanted it,’ said Daphne, suppressing, in a kind of ruffled dignity, her own uncomfortable thoughts on the subject.
‘She’s a pretty little thing. And she must have been widowed rather young.’
‘Yes – yes, she was,’ said Daphne, absently but firmly; and looked to Dudley to change the subject. He lit a cigarette, and steadied a heavy silver ashtray on the arm of his chair. It was one of over a hundred items that he had had stamped on the bottom: Stolen from Corley Court. Up in his dressing-room he kept a pewter mug of no great value with Stolen from Hepton Castle invitingly engraved on its underside, and he had followed the practice back at Corley, overseeing the work himself with fierce determination.
‘When’s the Stoker getting here?’ he said, after a bit.
‘Oh, not till quite late, not till after dinner,’ said Daphne.
‘I expect he’s got some extremely important business to attend to,’ said Dudley.
‘There’s some important meeting, something about the miners, you know,’ said Daphne.
‘You don’t know Sebastian Stokes,’ Dudley told Mrs Riley. ‘He combines great literary sensitivity with a keen political mind.’
‘Well, of course I’ve heard of him,’ said Mrs Riley, rather cautiously. In Dudley’s talk candour marched so closely with satire that the uninitiated could often only stare and laugh uncertainly at his pronouncements. Now Mrs Riley leant forward to take a new cigarette from the malachite box on the low table.
‘You don’t need to lose any sleep about the miners with Stokes in charge,’ said Dudley.
‘I’m sleeping like a top as it is,’ she said pertly, fiddling with a match.
Daphne took a warming sip of her gin and thought what she could say about the poor miners, if there had been any point to it at all. She said, ‘I think it’s rather marvellous of him to do all this about Cecil when the Prime Minister needs him in London.’
‘But he idolized Cecil,’ said Dudley. ‘He wrote his obituary in The Times, you know.’
‘Oh, really…?’ said Mrs Riley, as if she’d read it and wondered.
‘He did it to please the General, but it came from the heart. A soldier… a scholar… a poet… etc., etc., etc… etc.… and a gentleman!’ Dudley knocked back his drink in a sudden alarming flourish. ‘It was a wonderful send-off; though of course largely unrecognizable to anyone who’d really known my brother Cecil.’
‘So he didn’t really know him,’ said Mrs Riley, still treading warily, but clearly enjoying the treacherous turn of the talk.
‘Oh, they met a few times. One of Cecil’s bugger friends had him down to Cambridge, and they went in a punt and Cecil read him a sonnet, you know, and the Stoker was completely bowled over and got it put in some magazine. And Cecil wrote him some high-flown letters that he put in The Times later on, when he was dead…’ Dudley seemed to run down, and sat gazing, with eyebrows lightly raised, as if at the unthinkable tedium of it all.
‘I see…’ said Mrs Riley, with a coy smirk, and then looked across at Daphne. ‘I don’t suppose you ever knew Cecil, Lady Valance?’ she said.
‘Me, oh good lord yes!’ said Daphne. ‘In fact I knew him long before I met Dud-’ but at that moment the door was opened by Wilkes and her mother came in, hesitantly it seemed, since she was waiting for her friend, on her two slow sticks, to cross the hall, and Clara herself was in distracted conversation with Dudley’s mother, who came in briskly just behind her.
‘My husband, you could fairly say, disliked music,’ said Louisa Valance. ‘It wasn’t that he hated it, you understand. He was in many ways an unduly sensitive man. Music made him sad.’
‘Music is sad, yes,’ said Clara, looking vaguely harassed. ‘But also, I think-’
‘Come in, come and sit,’ said Daphne, with a rescuing smile at Clara’s shabby sparkle, the old black evening dress tight under the arms, the old black evening bag, that had been to the opera long before the War, swinging around the stick in her left hand as she thrust forward into the room. The Scottish boy, handsome as a singer himself in his breeches and evening coat, brought forward a higher chair for her, and propped her sticks by it once she’d sat down. Eva and Dudley seemed lightly mesmerized by the sticks, and gazed at them as if at rude survivals from a culture they thought they had swept away. The boy hovered discreetly, smiled and acted with proper impersonal charm. He was the first appointment Wilkes had made under Daphne’s rule at Corley, and in some incoherent and almost romantic way she thought of him as her own.
‘Sebastian hasn’t arrived?’ said Louisa.
‘Not yet,’ said Daphne. ‘Not till after dinner.’
‘We have so much to talk about,’ said Louisa, with buoyant impatience.
‘Ah, Mamma…’ said Dudley, coming towards her as if to kiss her, but stopping a few feet off with a wide grin.
‘Good evening, my dear. You knew I was coming in.’
‘Well, I hoped so, Mamma, of course. Now what would you like to drink?’
‘I think a lemonade. It’s quite spring-like today!’
‘Isn’t it,’ said Dudley. ‘Let’s celebrate.’
Louisa gave him the dry smile that seemed partly to absorb and partly to deflect his sarcasms, and looked away. Her eyes lingered on Mrs Riley’s legs, then switched for reassurance to Daphne’s, and her face, not naturally tactful, seemed frozen for five seconds in the forming and suppressing of a ‘remark’. She was standing, perhaps by design, beneath her own portrait, which in a way made remarks superfluous. This was the house she had ruled for forty years. She was gaunter now about the brow than when she’d been painted, sharper about the chin. Her hair had gone from russet to ash, the red dress changed irreversibly to black. Every time she ‘came in’ from the set of rooms she now occupied, and where she often chose to dine alone, she moved with a perceptible shiver of shaken dignity, made all the clearer by the sunny bits of play-acting that accompanied it. ‘I do think you’ve been so clever, my dear,’ she said to Mrs Riley. ‘You’ve changed this room out of all recognition.’ At the corner of her eye she had the abstract painting, which so far she had affected not to have seen at all.