The Stranger's Child (30 page)

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen your father this morning,’ said George.

Wilfrid thought about how to answer this. He said, ‘We don’t see Daddy in the mornings.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Well, not as a rule. You see, he’s writing his book.’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said George. ‘Well, that’s the most important thing, isn’t it.’

Wilfrid didn’t agree to this exactly. He said, ‘He’s writing a book about the War.’

‘Not like his other book, then,’ said Madeleine, who with her head back and her glasses on the end of her nose was gaping at the shelves above her.

‘Not at all,’ said Wilfrid. ‘It’s about Sergeant Bronson.’

‘Oh yes . . .’ said George vaguely. ‘So he tells you about it? How exciting . . .’

The constraints of strict truth felt more threateningly present in this room full of old learning. He wandered off to the centre table with a smile, keeping his answer. ‘Uncle George,’ he said, ‘do you like Uncle Revel’s pictures?’

‘Oh, very much, old boy. Not that I’ve seen very many of them. He’s still very young, you know,’ said George, looking less green now than pink. ‘You know he’s not really an uncle, don’t you?’

‘I know,’ said Wilfrid. ‘He’s an honourable uncle.’

‘Well, ha, ha! . . . Well, yes, that’s right.’

‘You mean an
honorary
uncle,’ said Madeleine.

‘Oh,’ said Wilfrid, ‘yes . . .’

‘I expect you mean both, don’t you, Wilfie,’ said George, and smiled at him understandingly. Wilfrid knew his father couldn’t stomach Aunt Madeleine, and he felt this gave him licence to hate her too. She hadn’t brought him a present, but as a matter of fact that wasn’t it at all. She never said anything nice, and when she tried to it turned out to be horrible. Now she tucked in her chin and gave him her pretend smile, staring at him over her glasses. He leant on the table, and opened and shut the hinged silver ink-well, several times, making its nice loud clopping noise. Aunt Madeleine winced.

‘I suppose this is where Granny does her book tests, isn’t it,’ she said, wrinkling her nose, her smile turning hard.

‘I’m sure the child doesn’t know about that,’ said Uncle George quietly.

‘Actually, I’m learning reading with Nanny,’ said Wilfrid, abandoning the table and going off towards the corner of the room, where there was a cupboard with some interesting old things in.

‘Jolly good,’ said George. ‘So what are you reading now? Why don’t we read something together?’ Wilfrid felt his uncle’s grateful relief at the idea of a book – he was already sitting down in one of the slippery leather chairs.

‘Corinna’s reading
The Silver Charger
,’ he said.

‘Isn’t that a bit hard for you?’ said Madeleine.

‘Daphne loved that book,’ said George. ‘It’s a children’s book.’

‘I’m not reading it,’ said Wilfrid. ‘I don’t really want to read now, Uncle George. Have you seen this card machine?’ He opened the cupboard, and got the card machine out very carefully, but still banging it against the door. He carried it over and handed it to his uncle, who had assumed a slightly absent smile.

‘Ah, yes . . . jolly good . . .’ Uncle George wasn’t very clever at understanding it, he had it round the wrong way. ‘Quite a historic object,’ he said, ready to hand it back.

‘What is it?’ said Madeleine, coming over. ‘Oh, yes, I see . . . Historic indeed. Quite useless now, I fear!’

‘I like it,’ said Wilfrid, and something struck him again, by his uncle’s knee, with his aunt bending over him, with her smell like an old book. ‘Uncle George,’ he said, ‘why don’t you have any children?’

‘Well, darling,’ said Uncle George, ‘we just haven’t got round to it yet.’ He peered at the machine with new interest; but then went on, ‘You know, Auntie and I are both very busy at our university. And to be absolutely honest with you, we don’t have a very great deal of money.’

‘Lots of poor people have babies,’ Wilfrid said, rather bluntly, since he knew his uncle was talking nonsense.

‘Yes, but we want to bring up our little boys and girls in comfort, with some of the lovely things in life that you and your sister have, for instance.’

Madeleine said, ‘Remember, George, you need to finish those remarks for the Vice-Chancellor.’

‘I know, my love,’ said George, ‘but it’s so much pleasanter conversing with our nephew.’

Nevertheless, a minute later George was saying, ‘I suppose you’re right, Mad.’ A real anxiety started up in Wilfrid that he would be left alone with Aunt Madeleine. ‘You’ll be all right with Auntie, won’t you?’

‘Oh, please, Uncle George’ – Wilfrid felt the anxiety close in on him, but offset at once by a dreary feeling he couldn’t explain, that he was going to have to go through with whatever it was, and it didn’t really matter.

‘We’ll do something lovely later,’ said George, tentatively ruffling his nephew’s hair, and then smoothing it back down again. He turned in the doorway. ‘We can have your famous dance.’

When he’d gone, Madeleine rather seized on this.

‘Well, I can’t do it by myself,’ said Wilfrid, hands on hips.

‘Oh, I suppose you’d want music.’

‘I mean, can you play?’ Wilfrid asked, shaking his head.

‘I’m not awfully good!’ said Madeleine, pleasantly enough. They went out into the hall. ‘I suppose there’s always the pianola . . .’ But happily, the men had already wheeled it back down the cow-passage. Wilfrid didn’t want to play the pianola with her. Not meaning to initiate a game, he got under the hall table.

‘What are you doing, dear?’ said Aunt Madeleine.

‘I’m in my house,’ said Wilfrid. In fact it was a game he sometimes played with his mother, and he felt unfaithful to her but also a kind of security as he squatted down with the huge oak timbers almost touching his head. ‘You can come and visit me,’ he said.

‘Oh . . . ! Well, I’m not sure,’ said Madeleine, bending over and peering in.

‘Just sit on the table,’ said Wilfrid. ‘You have to knock.’

‘Of course,’ said Madeleine, with another of those glimpses of being a good sport that complicated the picture. She sat down obediently, and Wilfrid looked out past her swinging green shoes and the translucent hem of her skirt and petticoat. She knocked on the table and said loudly, ‘Is Mr Wilfrid Valance at home?’

‘Oh . . . I’m not quite sure, madam, I’ll go and look,’ said Wilfrid; and he made a sort of rhythmical mumbling noise, which conveyed very well what someone going to look might sound like.

Almost at once Aunt Madeleine said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask who it is?’

‘Oh God, madam, who is it?’ said Wilfrid.

‘You mustn’t say God,’ said his aunt, though she didn’t sound as if she minded very much.

‘Sorry, Aunt Madeleine, who is it, please?’

The proper answer to this, when he played with his mother, was, ‘It’s Miss Edith Sitwell’, and then they tried not to laugh. His father often laughed about Miss Sitwell, who he said sounded like a man and looked like a mouse. Wilfrid himself laughed about her whenever he could, though in fact he was rather afraid of her.

But Madeleine said, ‘Oh, can you tell Mr Wilfrid Valance that it’s Madeleine Sawle.’

‘Yes, madam,’ said Wilfrid, in a sort of respectful imitation of Wilkes. He ‘went away’ again, and took his time about it. He had a picture of his aunt’s face, smiling impatiently as she sat and waited on the hard table. A wild idea came to him that he would simply say he wasn’t at home. But then a shadow seemed to fall on it, it seemed lazy and cruel. But the game, which his aunt had failed to understand, really depended on the person pretending to be someone else. Otherwise you came to the end of it, and a feeling of boredom and dissatisfaction descended almost at once. Then his deep underlying longing for his mother rose in a wave, and the pain of thinking of her, and Uncle Revel drawing her, stiffened his face. It was a burningly important event from which he had been needlessly shut out. Madeleine suddenly said, ‘Wilfrid, will you be all right there for half a moment, I just have to go and do something.’

‘Oh, yes, all right,’ said Wilfrid; and he saw her slide and then jump the six inches down on to the floor, and her clumpy green shoes going off rather fast towards the stairs.

Wilfrid stayed under the table for ten minutes, in the odour of polish, feeling relief at first, and then the bleak little prickle of abandonment, and then a spreading and anxiously practical sense of the things he might now be able to do. The floorboards were faintly sticky with polish under the crepe rubber soles of his sandals. These unprepared freedoms in his closely minded life were exciting, but shadowed by worry that the system designed to protect him could so easily break down.

He crawled out, over the thick oak stretcher of the table, stood up, and went slowly and indirectly towards the foot of the stairs. Without his aunt to license his escapade, he was in the random and irrational jurisdiction of his father. ‘Daddy I wasn’t,’ he said, as he climbed the stairs, ‘I wasn’t playing on the landing’ – and as each little wounded lie of a denial dropped behind unneeded, the growing sense of freedom was haunted by a blacker sense of guilt. The freedom seemed to stretch uncomfortably, like a held breath. He strolled along the wide landing, still talking inaudibly to himself, head dropping from side to side, in a guilty mime of being alone. Round the corner hung the Blue Lady, with her frightening eyes, and a picture of Scotland, also known as The Goat’s Bottom. A maid came out of a room and crossed to the back-stairs but magically without seeing him, and he got to the laundry-room door. The black china handle was large in his child’s hand, and slightly loose in the door, so that it joggled betrayingly as he turned it and the door creaked quickly open, outwards across the landing, and swung wide if you didn’t hold it, to bang against the chair beside it.

When he opened the door again he was pretending that not long had passed. The clock in the hall was sounding, far away, down below, quarter past, half past, quarter to, though the hour itself hung undisclosed in the grey light of the landing window. He looked both ways with a sense of dread that had been magically banished in the laundry-room itself, and a tense tactical excitement at the prospect of the long corridor and the stairs. His dread was partly still guilt and partly a different kind of awkward feeling, that maybe no one had missed him. It seemed best to take the other back-stairs, at the far end of the main landing, and get round to the nursery that way, and then simply insist he had been there all along. He closed the laundry-room door, with cautious control of the handle, and went along by the wall and looked round the corner.

Mrs Cow was lying face down, her right hand loosely gripping her stick, which had pushed the long Persian runner up in a wave against the legs of a small table, knocking off the little bronze huntsman, who also lay on his face on the floor, with his pike sticking out. Her other stick was some feet away, as if she’d tossed it in a sudden spasm or attempt to ward something off, and her left arm was trapped under her at an angle that would have been painful for a conscious person. Wilfrid stared, looked away, approached very cautiously, heel to toe in his sandals, not wanting to be heard, least of all by the old lady herself. Then he said ‘Oh, Mrs Cow . . . ?’ – almost absently, as if starting on some question that would come to him if he kept talking: the point was to get the adult person’s attention and keep it. Part of him knew of course that she wouldn’t answer, would never answer a question again, in her wilful German voice. But something advised him to pretend politely, for a little while more, that she was still up to a chat. He came round her head, which was turned sideways, her left cheek to the carpet; and saw her right eye, hooded, half-open. Therefore not looking at him, but seeming to be part of her speechless search for something out of range, something that might have helped her. Trembling, slightly but uncontrollably, he squatted down and turned his own head sideways to try to meet her gaze, which in a normal person would have brought about a flicker of engagement. He saw how her mouth, also half-open, had let out a small slick of saliva, its shine fading as it darkened the red of the carpet.

The old lady’s left arm was pinned under her, but the hand was poking out: there it lay on the carpet, small and thick, humped and dimpled. Wilfrid stared at it, from his squatting position, then stood up and walked around her again. He was frightened that the hand might move, and also, oddly, almost sickeningly, tempted by it. Looking both ways, holding his breath, he bent down, reached his fingers towards it; then picked it up. In a second he dropped it, and clutched his own warm hands together, then thrust them into his armpits, in a way that he had. He stared at Mrs Kalbeck’s dropped hand, and then in the second he turned away it stirred and retracted slightly, and lay back as it had been before.

On the stairs he was crying so much he hardly saw where he was going – not a mad boo-hoo but wailing sheets of tears, shaken into funny groans by the bump of each step as he hurried down. Helplessly he marched to the door of his father’s study. It was the most unapproachable room in the house, a room of unrememberable size and everything in it, clock and fender and crackling waste-paper basket, dark with prohibitions. His father’s anger, unleashed last night, at the piano, had withdrawn into it, like a dragon to its lair. Wilfrid stood for a moment outside the door, and wiped his nose thoroughly on his sleeve. Though he was helpless, he was oddly lucid. He knew that to knock would introduce more suspense into the thing than anyone could bear, and risk bringing further wrath upon his head in advance; so, very tactfully, he turned the handle.