‘It’s hardly foolish not to have known Cecil,’ said Daphne, with dry indulgence. So much of her own foolishness, she thought, stemmed from the fact that she had.
‘Well…’ said Mrs Riley, and she made a little grimace of reluctance, and went on, ‘Are you absolutely sure you wouldn’t rather I pushed off?’
‘Oh… Eva…’ said Daphne, with a gasp, ‘no, no,’ frowning and colouring uncomfortably in turn. ‘How could you?’
‘Are you sure? I feel like some ghastly “gate-crasher”, as they say.’ Daphne had an image of Mrs Riley’s smart little car smashing into the wrought-iron gates of Corley Court. ‘I’m not at all poetical. I’m not literary, like you are.’
‘Well…’
‘No, you are. You’re always reading, I’ve seen you. Well, you’re married to a writer, for heaven’s sake! I only ever read thrillers. I was frankly surprised’ – and she crossed the room again for her cigarette case – ‘you know, when your husband asked me to stay.’
‘Well…’ said Daphne awkwardly, ‘I dare say he wanted some light relief from all this talk about his brother.’
‘Oh, perhaps, I wonder…’ said Eva, not immediately adjusting herself to this role.
‘I mean we can’t talk about Cecil every minute of the day – we’d go mad! Do you think I might have one of your cigarettes?’
‘Oh, my dear, I didn’t know,’ said Eva, coming back, offering the case languidly, but with a sharp glance.
‘Thank you.’ Daphne was urging her blush to subside, with its clear disclosure of her mutinous feelings, and the proof it gave Mrs Riley of her own clever tactics. She struck a match, away from her, awkwardly, and held it out to Eva, hiding her nerves by moving it around absent-mindedly, so that Eva stooped and laughed. When they were both puffing, Eva looked at her frankly, with a hint of amusement as she angled her smoke sideways. She said, ‘Well, I’m glad you think it’s all right.’ And then, ‘Tell me truly, don’t you ever find it just a teeny bit depressing having Cecil lying around next door – don’t you sometimes just want to forget about all that, really? I have to say I’m thoroughly sick of the War, and I think a lot of people feel the same.’
‘Oh, I like having him there,’ said Daphne, not quite truthfully, but seeing with a little run of the pulse another channel for her larger resentment of Eva to push into. ‘You see, I lost a brother too, though no one ever remembers that.’
‘Darling, I’d no idea.’
‘No, well, how could you have,’ said Daphne grudgingly.
‘You mean in the War…’
‘Yes, a bit later than Cecil. There weren’t any articles about it in The Times.’
‘Won’t you tell me about him?’
‘Well, he was a dear,’ said Daphne. She pictured her mother, beyond the heavy oak doors of the library, and keeping the whole matter to herself.
Eva sat down, as if to pay more solemn attention, and threw back the loose cushion to make a space beside her, but Daphne preferred to remain on her feet. ‘What was he called?’
‘Oh… Hubert. Hubert Sawle. He was my elder brother.’ She felt the odd prickly decorum of telling Eva but very little of the solemn heartache which she hoped none the less to convey. When she went to the window, it seemed that Revel had gone; her spirits sank for a moment, but then she saw him again, talking to George – their heads and shoulders could be seen as they moved slowly away among the hedges. Now George stopped him and they laughed together. A twinge of jealous irritation went through her. ‘No, Hubert was very much our mainstay, as my father had died young.’
‘He wasn’t married, then?’
‘No, he wasn’t… He did get very close to a girl, from Hampshire…’
‘Oh…?’
Daphne turned back into the room. ‘Anyway, nothing happened.’
‘A lot of brave girls were left high and dry by the War,’ said Eva, in a strange defiant tone. Then, with a little gasp, ‘I hope I didn’t upset your mother by what I said earlier about, you know, getting in touch with Cecil – I mean actually I do think it’s ridiculous, but of course I didn’t know about your brother.’
‘I think she did go to a séance once, but it didn’t work for her.’
‘No, well…’
Daphne found she didn’t want to talk about Louisa’s spiritualist obsession, which she and Dudley both deplored, to anyone outside the family; a feeling of loyalty was sharpened by her indignation at Eva’s mockery, which at the same time she perfectly understood. Then the bracket clock struck three-thirty, banishing all thought. ‘What a brute that thing is!’ said Eva, with a tight shake of the head, as though to say even Daphne surely wouldn’t regret getting rid of it. Then she was saying, ‘No, your husband read me that bit in his new book, you know, about the famous book tests – awfully funny, isn’t it, actually, the way he does it – that’s what put it in my mind.’
‘Oh, really…’ said Daphne, dawdlingly, though she knew her whole face was stiffening by the second, ungovernable, with hurt and indignation. ‘Will you excuse me for a moment,’ and she turned and went out quickly into the hall, where the grandfather clock was now mellowly stating the time, and the clock in the drawing-room beyond, with no sense of the mortifying scrumple of her feelings as she hurried to the front door and out into the porch. She stood looking across the gravel, at the various trees, and up the long slope of the entrance drive, to the inner set of gates, with the whole blue Berkshire afternoon lying hidden beyond them. She puffed at the last half-inch of the cigarette with a certain revulsion, and then trod it under her heel on the doorstep. She wasn’t going to mention it to Dudley, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell Eva Riley herself that no one had ever seen a word of ‘his new book’, much less had awfully amusing bits of it read to them. Some occasion in his ‘office’, no doubt, over the plans. The awful undermining evidence that all her own scruples of loyalty to Louisa, to the family, weren’t actually shared by the head of the family himself. She felt foolish, in her simple high-mindedness, and furious much more than hurt. She touched her hair and her neck as though in front of a mirror and then she did what one always did at Corley, and went back in.
Eva looked glad to see her. She went on, ‘You know, I feel very fortunate to have met your husband’ – modest but also subtly possessive.
‘It’s silly of me,’ said Daphne, ‘I don’t quite know how you did.’ She knew what Dudley had said, of course.
‘Well, I fitted up Bobby Bannister’s place in Surrey, didn’t I, and he must have told… your husband about me. I rather think he gave him the whole idea for improving Corley.’
This was exactly Dudley’s version too, though the cool nerve of ‘improving’ made Daphne laugh. She said, ‘It’s become a bit of a thing with Dud – I think he’s doing it mainly to upset his mother.’
‘Oh, I do hope it’s rather more than that,’ said Eva. ‘I must say I love working here’ – and she gave Daphne a look of rather unnerving sweetness.
‘Well…’ Daphne went back towards the window to see where Revel and George had got to, but there was now no sign of them. Then there was the click of the library door, and Daphne turned, expecting her mother to be shown back in, amid reassuring murmurs and thanks – but it was Sebby alone, head cocked, with an apologetic half-smile. It seemed Freda had been shown out the other way, into the halclass="underline" this was oddly confounding for a second or two, as though she had vanished in some more permanent sense. ‘She seemed anxious about her friend,’ Sebby said.
‘Ah yes, I fear she’s not at all well.’ Daphne gave a bland nod to Eva and went in, and when he closed the door behind her, the click confirmed her earlier sense of the process: you watched for a bit, and then you were part of it. A slight awkwardness, at being a guest in her own house, coloured the first moments for both of them, but they smiled through it. ‘I feel rather like a doctor,’ said Sebby.