7
Freda crossed the hall and started up the great staircase, stopping for a moment on each frighteningly polished tread, reaching up for the banister, which was too wide and Elizabethan in style to hold on to properly, more like the coping of a wall than a handrail. It must be nice for Daphne to have a coat of arms, she supposed – there it was, at each turn, in the paws of a rampant beast with a lantern on its head. She too had dreamt of that for her daughter, in the beginning, before she knew what she knew. Corley Court was a forbidding place – even in the sanctuary of her room the dark panelling and the Gothic fireplace induced a feeling of entrapment, a fear that something impossible was about to be asked of her. She closed the door, crossed the threadbare expanse of crimson carpet, and sat down at the dressing-table, close to tears with her confused relieved unhappy sense of not having said to Sebastian Stokes any of the things she could have said, and had known, in her heart, that she wouldn’t.
The one letter she’d shown him, her widow’s mite, she’d called it, was mere twaddle, a ‘Collins’. She saw his courteous but very quick eye running over it, his turning the page as if there still might be something of interest on the other side, but of course there was not. He’d sat there, like the family doctor, he’d said, though to her he was a figure of daunting importance, toughness and suppleness, someone who spoke every day with Sir Herbert Samuel and Mr Baldwin. He was charming but his charm was the charm of diplomacy, charm designed not only to please but to save time and get things done; it was hardly the unconscious charm of a trusted friend. She had felt very foolish, and the pressure of what she was not going to say drove even the simplest conversation out of her mind. She did say that Cecil had made a terrible mess in his room, and it had sounded petty of her, to say such a thing of a poet and a hero who had won the Military Cross. She alluded, in addition, to his ‘liveliness’ and the various things he had broken – widow’s mites, again, pathetic grievances. What she couldn’t begin to say was the mess Cecil Valance had made of her children.
She waited a minute and then got up her handbag and opened it – inside was a bulging manila envelope torn and folded around a bundle of other letters… She couldn’t really bear to look at them again. She ought simply to have destroyed them, when she’d found them, during the War. But something had kept her back – there was a great bonfire going, all the autumn leaves, she went out and opened it with a fork, a red and grey winking and smouldering core to it, she could have dropped the commonplace-looking packet in without a soul knowing or caring. That was what she told George she had done; but in fact she couldn’t do it. Was it reverence, or mere superstition? They were letters written by a gentleman – that surely in itself meant little or nothing; and by a poet, which gave them a better right to immortality, but which needn’t have swayed her. Disgusted by her own unresolved confusion, she tugged out the bundle on to the dressing-table and stared at it. Cecil Valance’s impatient handwriting had a strange effect on her, even now; for a year and more it had come dashing and tumbling into her house, letters to George, then letters to Daphne, and the bloody, bloody poem, which she wished had never been written. The letters to Daphne were splendid enough to turn a young girl’s head, though Freda hadn’t liked their tone, and she could see that Daphne had been frightened by them as much as she was thrilled. Of course she was out of her depth with a man six years older, but then he was out of his depth too: they were horrible posturing letters in which he seemed to be blaming the poor child for something or other that was really his own failing. And yet Freda had not discouraged him – it seemed to her now she’d been out of her depth as well. And perhaps, who knew, it would all have turned out all right.
It was the letters to George, hidden at once, destroyed for all the rest of the family knew, mentioned only breezily – ‘Cess sends his love!’: they had turned out to be the unimagined and yet vaguely dreaded thing. There they had lain, in his room, all the time that George was away in the army – ‘intelligence’, planning, other matters she couldn’t be told about. Those endless summer evenings at ‘Two Acres’, just her and Daphne – she would drift through the boys’ rooms, take down their old school-books, fold and brush their unused clothes, tidy the drawers of the little bureau beside George’s bed, all the childish clutter, the batched-up postcards, the letters… Without even touching them now, her mind saw certain phrases, saw them twisting dense and snakelike in the heart of the bundle. Well, she wouldn’t read them ever again, there was no need to put herself through that. Letters from King’s College, Cambridge, from Hamburg, Lübeck, old Germany before the War, Milan; letters of course from this very house. She edged them back into the brown envelope, which tore open a little more and was now next to useless. Then she tidied her hair, made her face look no less worried with a few more dabs of powder, and set off once again down the long landing to Clara’s room.
Clara had had her fire made up, and sat beside it, dressed as if ready to be taken somewhere, but without her shoes on: her brown-stockinged legs, which gave her such pain, were propped on a bulging pile of cushions.
‘Have you had your chat?’ she said.
‘Yes. It was nothing much.’
‘Mm, you were very quick,’ said Clara, in that half-admiring, half-critical tone that Freda had grown so used to.
She said, ‘One doesn’t want to waste his time,’ in her own murmur of suppressed impatience. ‘Have they been looking after you?’ She bustled round the room as though doing so herself, then went restlessly to the window. ‘Would you like to go outside? I’ve made enquiries and they’ve still got Sir Edwin’s old bath-chair, if you want it. They can get it out for you.’
‘Oh, no, Freda, thank you very much.’
‘I’m sure that handsome Scotch boy would be happy to give you a push.’
‘No, no, my dear, really!’
If she wouldn’t be pushed, in any sense, there was little to be done. Freda knew they both wanted to go home, though Clara obviously couldn’t say so, and from Freda it would have been a pitiful admission. She missed her daughter, and loved her grandchildren, but visits to Corley were generally unhappy affairs. Even the cocktail hour lost something of its normal promise when cocktails themselves had such alarming effects on their host.
‘Shall we hear Corinna play the piano,’ Clara said, ‘before we go?’
‘This evening, I think – Dudley’s promised them.’
‘Oh, in that case,’ said Clara.