‘Dudley dear, where’s Mrs Riley?’ said Daphne coolly.
‘Oh lord…’ said Dudley, the mad glint showing for a second through his puzzled tone. ‘Robbie, run and look for Mrs Riley’ – and as Robbie went swiftly away, ‘She may be just too busy…’
‘Is that Mrs Eva Riley, sir?’ said Jerry Goldblatt, with a cunning glance at the house. ‘The interior decorator?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Dudley, ‘Mrs Riley, the famous interior decorator of the Carousel Restaurant,’ as if writing the copy for the Sketch as well.
‘That is a stroke of luck, Sir Dudley,’ said Goldblatt.
Daphne saw that Dudley had got almost everything he wanted; he’d rescued a stylish, amusing and important party from the jaws of the other one that bored him to madness, and posed it, for as long as the camera’s flashes lasted, for the world to see. Sebby Stokes in fact declined to join in, suspecting that he shouldn’t be seen playing croquet while the nation stood on the brink of a general strike; he shrewdly told Goldblatt he would be ‘working on Cabinet papers in the library’. George, quite new to the world of publicity, acted up determinedly, followed Revel’s instructions for new poses, and whisked the children along in a hectic and rather touching show of affection. He seemed to like Revel – perhaps the little friction in their views on St Pancras Station had excited him. Madeleine, with the unhappy solidarity of the shy, had perched beside Clara, and in effect opted out of the photographs. As for Revel himself, Daphne saw that she needn’t have worried, in fact there was almost some further friction in his eagerness to direct arrangements himself. ‘Well… yes…’ said Dudley, frowning, ‘no, no, my dear, you’re the designer!’ – shaking his head none the less in slight bafflement, while Jerry Goldblatt pleaded, ‘If I could just have Lady Valance and the kiddies?’ Then Eva Riley arrived, her long legs white in sheeny stockings, almost laughably fashionable, a pearl-coloured cloche hat pulled down tight on her black bob. ‘Do you really need me?’ she wailed, and Jerry Goldblatt called back that he certainly did.
Revel and Daphne had their picture taken together, back by the fishpond. They stood on either side of a rose arch, each with one arm raised like a dancer to gesture at the view beyond it. Daphne laughed to show she was not an actress, not certainly a dancer, and looked across at Revel, who kept a straighter face. She felt her laughter had a touch of panic to it. She had an apprehensive image of next week’s Sketch on the morning-room table, and their silly faces vying for attention with the antics of Bonzo the Dog.
5
At the end of lunch George slipped out from the dining-room and set off for a distant lavatory, treasuring the prospect of four or five minutes alone. He felt stifled already by the subject of Cecil, and by the thought of a further twenty-four hours devoted to his brilliance, bravery and charm. What things they all found themselves saying. Perhaps in certain monasteries, or in finishing schools, the conversation at meals was as strictly prescribed. The General threw up a topic, and the rest of them batted it gingerly to and fro, with Sebastian Stokes as umpire; even Dudley’s sneering had been edgily reined in. George had met Stokes once before, in Cambridge, when they’d all gone out in a punt, Cecil clearly exciting his guest by his lordly thrust and toss of the pole and intermittent recital of sonnets. Stokes seemed not to remember that George had been of the party, and George didn’t remind him, when the talk turned to their Cambridge days. He felt undeniably uneasy, and drank several glasses of champagne, in the hope they would relax him, but they had only made him hot and giddy, while the dining-room itself, with its gaudy décor, its mirrors and gilding, had appeared to him more ghastly than ever, like some funereal fairground. Of course one indulged the dead, wrote off their debts; one forgave them as one lamented them; and Cecil had been mightily clever and fearless, no doubt, and had broken many hearts in his short life. But surely no one but Louisa could want a new memorial to him, ten years after his passing? Here they all were, submissively clutching their contributions. A dispiriting odour, of false piety and dutiful suppression, seemed to rise from the table and hang like cabbage-smells in the jelly-mould domes of the ceiling.
As he crossed the hall, the door under the stairs was shoved open by Wilkes, with the surprising look, for just a second, of a man who has a life of his own.
‘Ah, sir…!’ said Wilkes, turning to catch the door, the age-old benignity back at once like a faint blush.
‘Thanks so much, Wilkes,’ said George. And since he had him there, ‘I hope you’re well.’
‘Very well, thank you, sir, very well indeed,’ as if made even fitter by George’s solicitude.
‘I’m so glad.’
‘I trust you’re well, too, sir; and Mrs Sawle…’
‘Oh, yes, both frightfully busy and burdened with work, you know, but, thank you, pretty well.’
George and Wilkes were both holding the door, while Wilkes gazed at him with his usual flattering lack of impatience, of any suggestion that a moment before he had been rushing elsewhere. ‘It’s good to see you back at Corley, sir.’ Though it struck George that Wilkes’s mastery of implicit moral commentary was conveyed in the same smooth phrase.
He frowned and said, ‘We don’t get down as often as we should like.’
‘It’s possibly not very convenient for you,’ allowed Wilkes, letting his hand drop.
‘Well, not terribly,’ George said.
‘I know Lady Valance is especially pleased you’ve come, sir.’
‘Oh…’
‘I mean the old Lady, sir, particularly… though your sister, too, I’m sure!’
‘Oh, well it’s the least I could do for her,’ said George, with adequate conviction, he felt.
‘Since you and Captain Valance were such great friends.’
‘Well, yes,’ said George quickly, and rather sternly, over his own incipient blush. ‘Though goodness, it all feels a world ago, Wilkes.’ He looked around the hall, with a kind of weary marvelment that it was still there, the armorial windows, the brightly polished ‘hall chairs’ no one would dream of sitting on, the vast brown canvas of a Highland glen, with long-horned cattle standing in the water. He remembered looking at this painting on his first visit, and Cecil’s father telling him it was ‘a very fine picture’, and what sort of cows they were. Cecil was behind him, not quite touching, a latent heat; he had said something, ‘That’s MacArthur’s herd, isn’t it, Pa?’ – his interest as smooth and confident as his deceit; the old boy had agreed, and they’d gone into lunch, Cecil’s hand just for a moment in the small of his guest’s back. ‘Of course I remember it all,’ said George, and even working it up a bit in his embarrassment: ‘I always remember that Scottish picture.’ The picture itself could hardly have been duller, but it was eloquent of something – the drinking cattle seemed almost to embody Sir Edwin’s artless unawareness of what his son got up to.
‘Ah, yes, sir,’ said Wilkes, to show it meant something, surely rather different, to him too. ‘Sir Edwin cared greatly for “The Loch of Galber”. He often said he preferred it to the Raphael.’
‘Yes…’ said George, not sure if Wilkes’s eyebrows, raised in amiable remembrance, acknowledged the general opinion about the Raphael. ‘I was thinking, Wilkes, Mr Stokes should have a word with you about Cecil while he’s here.’
‘Oh, it hasn’t been suggested, sir.’
‘Really? You probably knew him better than anybody.’
‘It’s true, sir, in some ways I did,’ said Wilkes modestly, and with something else in his hesitancy, a hazy vision of all the people who nursed the illusion of ‘knowing’ Cecil best of all.
‘Lady Valance made it clear at luncheon that she wants a full picture of his childhood years,’ said George, with a hint of pomp. ‘She has a poem he wrote when he was only three, I believe…’