‘I know, Daddy,’ said Wilfrid, and stood yearningly by his father’s knee, almost as if he might be going to lay his hand on it.
4
After breakfast the next day Daphne appeared in the nursery, just as Mrs Copeland was getting the children ready for a walk: ‘No, Wilfrid, not those white trousers, you’ll be all over mud.’
‘Mud will be all over me, you mean, Nanny,’ he said.
‘Mother, we’re walking to Pritchett’s farm,’ said Corinna, with a stoical wince as Mrs Copeland pulled a band over her hair.
‘Don’t worry, Nanny,’ said Daphne, ‘I’ll take them myself. We’ve got photographers.’
‘Indeed, my lady!’ said Nanny, with a keen smile and a hint of pique, scanning her charges with a sharper eye. ‘Shall we be in the papers again, then?’
‘Well, we shall,’ Daphne wanted to say, ‘not you’, but she made do with, ‘It’s the Sketch, I think.’
Mrs Copeland tugged a little harder at Corinna’s hair. ‘My sister in London sent Sir Dudley’s picture from the Daily Mail.’
‘I fear publicity is all a part of being a successful writer,’said Daphne, ‘these days! No, leave those trousers on, my duck – we’ll just be sitting about in the garden.’
Wilfrid frowned at her bravely for a moment, but then turned and went to the window as if suddenly remembering something outside. ‘Wilfrid was promised to see the new foal,’ said Corinna, in a pitying, almost mocking voice, ‘and the little chicks in the incubator,’ but she was touched already by the strange contagion of grief, and when a wail went up from the window she started to crumple too, which was worse for her because of the loss of status. She didn’t make much noise, but she attended to her doll’s overnight bag with a swollen face, jamming in the parasol and the tiny red cardigan.
‘Oh, are you bringing Mavis, darling?’ said Daphne. Corinna nodded vigorously but didn’t risk speaking.
‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ said Nanny smugly.
‘Oh, Wilfie, don’t cry,’ said Daphne, picturing the new foal nuzzling its mother and then running off with a nervy sense of untested liberty; but she hardened herself: ‘You don’t want to look all blotchy in the paper.’
‘I don’t want to be in the paper,’ said Wilfrid tragically, his back still turned. Again, Daphne saw the sense of this, but she said,
‘My duck, what a thing to say. You’ll be famous. You’ll be there with Bonzo the Dog, think of that. All over England people will be asking themselves’ – here she ran over and snatched him up with a grunt and a slight stagger at his six-year-old weight – “Who is that lucky, lucky little boy?” ’
But Wilfrid seemed to find that idea even more upsetting than the missed muddy walk.
Out among the maze-like hedges and commas of lawn in the flower-garden, Daphne saw him brighten and perhaps forget. After half a minute his dragging sorrow had a skip in it, there was a glance of reconciliation, a further ten seconds of remembered sorrow, rather formal and conscious, and then the surely unselfconscious surrender to the game of the paths. Gravel, or flagged, or narrow strips of grass, the paths curled between hedges, flanked the long borders, or opened into circles that had nearly identical statues in them, and presented a further compass of decisions, on which the children rarely tried to agree. Now Corinna marched ahead, down the main grass walk that was flanked with clematis grown along chains, dipping and rising between tall posts – in a week or two it would be a blaze of white, like the route of a wedding. She clutched, not Mavis, but Mavis’s red leather reticule. Wilfie avoided the processional way – he cantered around to left and right, talking in an odd private voice, sometimes sounding furious with himself or with some imaginary friend or follower. ‘Come along, my darling, let’s see what those fish are up to,’ said Daphne.
A pool of dumb goldfish struck her as a wan consolation for the hot breath and smells and squelch of a farmyard, and Wilfie himself, when they all arrived at the central pond, took a bit of encouraging to focus on it. ‘Can they all be under that leaf?’ said Daphne. The pool was ringed by a flagged path, and then four stone seats between high rose arches, thick with red and dark green leaves and only the tips of one or two buds as yet showing pink or white. Daphne sat down, with a passive conventional sense that it would make a good place for a photograph.
‘Mother, is Sebby coming here?’ said Corinna, setting her case on the bench between them.
‘I don’t know, darling,’ said Daphne, glancing round. ‘He’s talking to your father.’
‘What on earth is Uncle Sebby doing?’ said Wilfrid.
‘He’s not Uncle Sebby,’ said Corinna, with a giggle.
‘No, ducky, he’s not…’ Poor Wilfie was haunted and puzzled by phantom uncles. Uncle Cecil at least was in the house, in a highly idealized marmoreal form, and was often invoked, but Uncle Hubert was mentioned so rarely that he barely existed for him – she wasn’t sure that he had ever even seen his picture. All he had to go on, for uncles, was an occasional appearance by Uncle George, with his long words. When most uncles no longer existed, it was natural to co-opt one or two who did.
‘Well, you see,’ said Daphne, ‘it’s been decided that there’s going to be a book of all Uncle Cecil’s poems, and Sebby’s come down to talk to your father about it, and Granny V, and well, talk to everybody really.’
‘Why?’ said Wilfrid.
‘Well… there’s to be a memoir, you know… the story of Uncle Cecil’s life, and Granny V wants Sebby to write it. So he needs to talk to all the people who knew him.’
Wilfrid said nothing, and started on a game, and a minute later, staring into the pond, said, ‘A memoir…!’ under his breath, as if they all knew it was a mad idea.
‘Poor Uncle Cecil,’ said Corinna, in one of her calculated turns of piety. ‘What a great man he was!’
‘Oh… well…’ said Daphne.
‘And so handsome.’
‘No, he was,’ Daphne allowed.
‘Was he more handsome than Daddy, would you say?’
‘He had enormous hands,’ said Daphne, looking round at the first bark of the dog, which must mean Dudley, and everyone coming.
‘Oh, Mother!’
‘He was a great climber, you know. Always clambering up the Dolomites or somewhere.’
‘What’s the Dolomites?’ said Wilfrid, stirring the fishpond tentatively with a short stick.
‘It’s mountains,’ said Corinna, as Rubbish busied in through the rose arch behind them, went rather fast round half the circle, and came back, nose low and lively over the flagstones, scruffy grey tail flickering. Wilfrid pointed his wet stick bravely at him and Corinna commanded, ‘Rubbish!’ but Rubbish only gave them a perfunctory sniff; it was almost hurtful to the children how little they counted for in the dog’s stark system of command and reward, though a relief too, of course. ‘Bad dog!’ said Wilfrid. Sometimes Rubbish explored by himself, sometimes he joined you flatteringly for the outset of a walk and then doubled off on business of his own, but mainly he was Dudley’s running herald, hounded himself by his own shouted name. Daphne waited for the shouts, ignoring the dog, and rather disliking it; but no shouts came and in a minute Rubbish, oddly polite, stepping forward and stopping, gave a long cajoling whine, and when she looked round there was Revel under the arch.
He made a little picture of himself, in its frame. ‘My dear,’ said Daphne, ‘you made it!’ as though she’d encouraged him rather than put him off. She felt she put a hint of warning in her welcome, in the look she gave him, which searched his charming sharp little face for signs of distress. He almost ignored her, bit his lip in mock-penitence, while his dark eyes went from one child to the other. He made everything depend on them – he was the opposite of the dog. ‘Rubbish told me I’d find you here,’ he said, coming forward to kiss Corinna on the silky top of her hair, pulling Wilfie quickly against his thigh, while the dog barked brusquely and then, its duty done, trotted back towards the house without looking round.