He was a substantial man of about forty-eight to fifty, with shoulders, waist and hips all knocking forty-four. The dinner jacket sat on him with the ease of a second skin, and when he shot his cuffs occasionally he did so without affectation, showing off noticeably well manicured hands.
He had tidy grey-brown hair, straight eyebrows, narrow nose, small firm mouth, rounded freshly shaven chin, and very high unwrinkled lower eyelids, which gave him a secret, shuttered look.
A neat enclosed face like a mask, with perhaps something rotten underneath. You could almost smell it across the dinner table. I guessed, rather fancifully, that he knew too much about too many vices. But on top he was smooth. Much too smooth. In my book, a nasty type of phony. I listened to him talking to Viola.
‘…So when Doria and I got to New York I looked up those fellows in that fancy crystal palace on First Avenue and got them moving. You have to give the clothes-horse diplomats a lead, you know, they’ve absolutely no initiative of their own. Look, I told them, unilateral action is not only inadvisable, its impracticable. But they are so steeped in their own brand of pragmatism that informed opinion has as much chance of osmosing as mercury through rhyolite…’
Viola was nodding wisely while not understanding a word. The pretentious rigmarole floated comfortably over her sensible head and left her unmoved. But its flashiness seemed to me to be part of a gigantic confidence trick: one was meant to be enormously impressed. I couldn’t believe that Charles had fallen under his spell. It was impossible. Not my subtle, clever, cool-headed father-in-law. Mr van Dysart, however, hung on every word.
By the end of the soup his wife at the other end of the table could contain her curiosity no longer. She put down her spoon, and with her eyes on me said to Charles in a low but clearly audible voice, ‘Who is that?’
All the heads turned towards him, as if they had been waiting for the question. Charles lifted his chin and spoke distinctly, so that they should all hear the answer.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is my son-in-law.’ His tone was light, amused, and infinitely contemptuous; and it jabbed raw on a nerve I had thought long dead. I looked at him sharply, and his eyes met mine, blank and expressionless.
My gaze slid up over and past his head to the wall behind him. There for some years, and certainly that morning, had hung an oil painting of me on a horse going over a fence at Cheltenham. In its place there was now an old-fashioned seascape, brown with Victorian varnish.
Charles was watching me. I looked back at him briefly and said nothing. I suppose he knew I wouldn’t. My only defence against his insults long ago had been silence, and he was counting on my instant reaction being the same again.
Mrs van Dysart leaned forward a little, and with waking malice murmured, ‘Do go on, Admiral.’
Without hesitation Charles obeyed her, in the same flaying voice. ‘He was fathered, as far as he knows, by a window cleaner on a nineteen-year-old unmarried girl from the Liverpool slums. She later worked, I believe, as a packer in a biscuit factory.’
‘Admiral, no!’ exclaimed Mrs van Dysart breathlessly.
‘Indeed yes,’ nodded Charles. ‘As you might guess, I did my best to stop my daughter making such an unsuitable match. He is small, as you see, and he has a crippled hand. Working class and undersized… but my daughter was determined. You know what girls are.’ He sighed.
‘Perhaps she was sorry for him,’ suggested Mrs van Dysart.
‘Maybe,’ said Charles. He hadn’t finished, and wasn’t to be deflected. ‘If she had met him as a student of some sort, one might have understood it… but he isn’t even educated. He finished school at fifteen to be apprenticed to a trade. He has been unemployed now for some time. My daughter, I may say, has left him.’
I sat like stone, looking down at the congealed puddle at the bottom of my soup dish, trying to loosen the clamped muscles in my jaw, and to think straight. Not four hours ago he’d shown concern for me and had drunk from my cup. As far as I could ever be certain of anything, his affection for me was genuine and unchanged. So he must have a good reason for what he was doing to me now. At least I hoped so.
I glanced at Viola. She hadn’t protested. She was looking unhappily down at her place. I remembered her embarrassment out in the hall, and I guessed that Charles had warned her what to expect. He might have warned me too, I thought grimly.
Not unexpectedly, they were all looking at me. The dark and beautiful Doria Kraye raised her lovely eyebrows and in a flat, slightly nasal voice, remarked, ‘You don’t take offence, then.’ It was half-way to a sneer. Clearly she thought I ought to take offence, if I had any guts.
‘He is not offended,’ said Charles easily. ‘Why should the truth offend?’
‘Is it true then,’ asked Doria down her flawless nose, ‘that you are illegitimate, and all the rest?’
I took a deep breath and eased my muscles.
‘Yes.’
There was an uncomfortable short silence. Doria said, ‘Oh,’ blankly, and began to crumble her bread.
On cue, and no doubt summoned by Charles’ foot on the bell, the manservant came in to remove the plates, and conversation trickled back to the party like cigarette smoke after a cancer scare.
I sat thinking of the details Charles had left out: the fact that my twenty-year-old father, working overtime for extra cash, had fallen from a high ladder and been killed three days before his wedding day, and that I had been born eight months later. The fact that my young mother, finding that she was dying from some obscure kidney ailment, had taken me from grammar school at fifteen, and because I was small for my age had apprenticed me to a racehorse trainer in Newmarket, so that I should have a home and someone to turn to when she had gone. They had been good enough people, both of them, and Charles knew that I thought so.
The next course was some sort of fish smothered in mushroom coloured sauce. My astronaut’s delight, coming at the same time, didn’t look noticeably different, as it was not in its pot, but out on a plate. Dear Mrs Cross, I thought fervently, I could kiss you. I could eat it this way with a fork, single-handed. The pots needed to be held; in my case inelegantly hugged between forearm and chest; and at that moment I would have starved rather than take my left hand out of my pocket.
Fluffy Mrs van Dysart was having a ball. Clearly she relished the idea of me sitting there practically isolated, dressed in the wrong clothes, and an object of open derision to her host. With her fair frizzy hair, her baby-blue eyes and her rose pink silk dress embroidered with silver, she looked as sweet as sugar icing. What she said showed that she thoroughly understood the pleasures of keeping a whipping boy.
‘Poor relations are such a problem, aren’t they?’ she said to Charles sympathetically, and intentionally loud enough for me to hear. ‘You can’t neglect them in our position, in case the Sunday papers get hold of them and pay them to make a smear. And it’s especially difficult if one has to keep them in one’s own house… one can’t, I suppose, put them to eat in the kitchen, but there are so many occasions when one could do without them. Perhaps a tray upstairs is the best thing.’
‘Ah, yes,’ nodded Charles smoothly, ‘but they won’t always agree to that.’
I half choked on a mouthful, remembering the pressure he had exerted to get me downstairs. And immediately I felt not only reassured but deeply interested. This, then, was what he had been so industriously planning, the destruction of me as a man in the eyes of his guests. He would no doubt explain why in his own good time. Meanwhile I felt slightly less inclined to go back to bed.
I glanced at Kraye, and found his greenish-amber eyes steady on my face. It wasn’t as overt as in Mrs van Dysart’s case, but it was there: pleasure. My toes curled inside my shoes. Interested or not, it went hard to sit tight before that loathsome, taunting half-smile. I looked down, away blotting him out.