The Stranger's Child (10 page)
Hubert sat back and smoothed his moustache down over his mouth in vexation. He felt his letter wasn’t going well. He looked briefly at the photograph of his father that hung above the bookcase, and wondered if he had ever had to deal with a similar problem. It was very hard, when you did get a friend, who was so ready to help, and then this happened. And then not knowing exactly what it was that was happening. He felt he must say something before Harry took him out for a run to St Albans in the car. Still not sure if he would actually send the letter, he closed it anyway, with a touch of coolness, ‘Yours ever Hubert.’ Remembering an idea he had had, which he hoped might not offend Harry, and might even be thought to have a certain elegance, he added: ‘PS, I wondered last night whether a simple H might not do just as well, on the cigarette-case, as standing for us both – ’
Then he thought he’d better start the whole letter again.
They left the garden through the front gate and went up the lane towards the Common, Cecil instinctively leading the way. ‘So what did you really do while we were flopping and droning?’ said George. He’d found the hour at church, away from Cecil, unexpectedly painful.
‘Oh, much the same,’ said Cecil. ‘I flopped on the lawn; and I droned to the parlour-maid.’
‘Little Veronica?’
‘Poor child, yes. We assessed the chances of a war with Germany.’
‘I’m sure she was a fund of pertinent views.’
‘She seemed to think it was on the cards.’
‘Oh, dear!’
‘I fear little Veronica is rather smitten with me.’
‘Darling Cecil, not everyone at “Two Acres” is in love with you, you know,’ said George, and smiled with private satisfaction and a hint of mistrust. He did wonder if Cecil hadn’t been almost too much of a success.
‘She’s an attractive young girl,’ said Cecil, in his most reasonable tone.
‘Is she?’
‘Well, to me.’ Cecil gave him a bland smile. ‘But then I don’t share your fastidious horror at the mere idea of a cunt.’
‘No, indeed,’ said George drily, though a blush quickly followed. His face was hot and stiff. He saw how easily Cecil could spoil the walk, the day, the weekend altogether, if he wanted to, with his airy aggressions. ‘She is only sixteen,’ he said.
‘Exactly,’ said Cecil, but relented, and put his arm through George’s, and pulled him to him tightly as they strode along. ‘Weren’t you possessed by the wickedest thoughts when you were sixteen?’
‘I never had a wicked thought at all till I met you,’ said George. ‘Or at least until I saw you, staring at me so brazenly, and longingly, across the lawn.’ This was a favourite scene or theme for both of them, their little myth of origins, its artificiality a part of its erotic charm. ‘Little did I know that one day you would be my Father.’ Here they were by Miss Nichols’s cottage. George straightened himself, knowing they would be seen, but not sure what impression he wanted to create. He felt a half-hearted desire to startle Miss Nichols, but in the event merely raised his hat and shook it in a feebly cavalier way.
‘You looked so perfectly . . . suitable,’ said Cecil, with a sudden drop of the arm and quick sharp squeeze of George’s bottom.
‘Is that what you call it?’ said George, wriggling free and looking quickly round.
‘I wouldn’t say your brother Hubert was particularly suitable.’
‘No,’ said George firmly.
‘Though one can’t help being just a little in love with his moustache.’
‘Don’t go on about it,’ said George. ‘You’re only saying it because I said Dudley had splendid legs. I’m not sure anyone’s ever admired poor Hubert. Besides, he’s a womanizer through and through.’ And they both laughed like mad again, and somehow amorously, at the silliness of their slang. George felt a wave of happiness rise through him. Then Cecil said,
‘I’m afraid you’re wrong about that, though.’
‘About what?’
Cecil glanced round. ‘I would say your brother Hubert has one very ardent admirer – in the person of Mr Harry Hewitt.’
‘What, Harry? Don’t be idiotic. Harry’s after my mother.’
‘I know that’s the idea. Your sister’s worried sick about it. But I promise you she needn’t be.’
‘I don’t know what’s put this into your head.’
‘Well, there’s his taste in art – you know, he told me the sort of thing he collects. But mainly, I must admit, there’s his tendency to manhandle your brother on every possible occasion.’
‘Does he?’ said George, with a frown of repudiation but also of dull recognition. ‘He’s certainly very generous to him.’
‘My dear, the man must be the most arrant sodomite in Harrow.’
‘A large claim!’ said George, sparring a little for time.
‘I just happened to catch an extraordinary moment, after dinner, when I’ll swear the old monster tried to kiss him in the inglenook. They didn’t know I could see them. Poor Hubert was most frightfully put out.’
George gasped and laughed. ‘You call him old,’ he said, ‘though I believe he’s not yet forty.’ The Cecil-type shock of this, the lightly brutal worldliness, brought its own little train of resistance, concession and in this case amusing relief. Cecil was always right. And of course there was something perversely delightful in the situation. It was only later that he saw the hazard to his mother. ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered,’ he said.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Cecil, and gave him an odd hard look, as though he thought him a fool. Now they were passing the gryphon-capped gate-piers of Stanmore Hall, a mansion almost as imposing as Corley Court; Cecil glanced in across the lawns, but if he had any feelings of curiosity he repressed them. He was smooth and unseeing after his little triumph about Harry. The Sawles barely knew the Hadleighs; their friends in the top end of the village were Mrs Wye, who took in sewing, and the Cattos, who bred show-birds in a straggle of huts and runs behind their cottage – people dear to George since childhood, but useless and even embarrassing for present purposes. He saw the deeply familiar paths and pavements, trees, walls and white-railed fences with renewed alertness, half-loving and half-critical, and longed for Cecil, with his poet’s eye, to give them his blessing.
‘Well, this is the first pond,’ he said, pulling him up by the muddy slipway where a small wild girl in a cloth hat was submerging a toy boat.
Cecil looked across the circle of brown water and green duckweed with a pursed, absent smile. ‘I don’t think even I could take my clothes off here,’ he said, ‘right next to these people’s cottages, and so on.’
‘Oh, we’re not swimming here,’ said George. ‘I’ve got somewhere much more pretty, and indeed private, in mind for that.’
‘Have you, Georgie?’ said Cecil, with a mixture of fondness and sauciness, and suspicion, since he liked to make the plans himself.
‘I have. There are three ponds here; I dare say the village lads will be swimming in the big one, beyond those trees, if you’d like to have a look at them . . . ?’
Cecil peered pityingly at the little girl, who was perhaps too young to think sailing better than sinking; while the wooden block of the boat kept bobbing up and the sodden triangle of sail struggled to right itself. ‘As it happens,’ he said, distantly, ‘I only want to look at you,’ and then turned to smile at George, so that the remark seemed to have curved in the air, to have set out towards some more obvious and perhaps deserving target, and then swooped wonderfully home.
They went on across the open field towards the woods, no longer arm in arm, Cecil again a little ahead, in his habitual fashion, so that the lovely certainty of a minute before seemed vaguely called in question. The tiny separation felt to George like a foretaste of what would happen next morning. He planned to go down to the station in the van with Cecil, but was flustered and miserable already when he tried to picture it, there would be no time, no chance . . . Really everything rode on this last afternoon. ‘Wait for me!’ he said.
Cecil slowed and turned and smiled so widely and yet so privately that George felt almost faint with reassurance. ‘I hardly can wait,’ Cecil said, and kept smiling; then they went on, side by side, with a funny tongue-tied singleness of purpose. George was aware of his own breathing, his own pulse, as the ragged line of oaks rose up in front of them. His feelings absorbed him so completely that he seemed to float towards them, weak with excitement, across a purely symbolic landscape. Away to their right a middle-aged couple whom he didn’t recognize were also approaching the woods, with a pair of snuffling and bickering spaniels. He took them in exactly, but with no sense of their reality. The woman wore a bright blue blouse, and a low brown hat with a feather in it; the man, in country flannels, had a button-topped cap like Cecil’s, and raised his stick in amiable greeting. George nodded and quickened his pace, in a rush of guilt and exultation. He would easily be able to avoid these people. Other walkers were so predictable. There was a riding trail that ran for a mile or more along the wood’s edge; and other tracks led on from glade to glade across the whole breadth of the Common. Thinner pathways, under lower branches, had been made by the deer. George ducked in through one of these, a tight green tunnel through the oak and beech saplings, and Cecil was obliged to follow, with an odd sort of cough of surrender. ‘I can tell you know the way,’ he said.
The truth was that George had played in these woods for years, with his brother and sister, but just as often, since he was big enough, alone. There were half-a-dozen tall trees he had worked out, through long hours of held breath and anxious daring, how to climb without help; there were hiding places and burial places. To show them to Cecil was to admit to something very far from Cambridge, and the Society. He stood up in the small clearing at the tunnel’s end, and reached back to help Cecil and get in his way as he came up behind him.
Cecil stifled his usual yelp of a laugh and patted George’s side and held his forearm in a tight grip, to keep him at a distance but not to let him go. He seemed to be listening, his head raised and eyes warily sliding, his posture self-conscious. They heard the dogs barking and bothering each other, close by. For a second or two the blue of the woman’s blouse could be seen among the leaves, and the man called out ‘Mary! Mary!’, which George thought was the woman’s name but then she called it too. There was something unaccountably funny about a dog called Mary, perhaps it was after the Queen, and he giggled to himself as he stood, with his arm burning from Cecil’s grip; though that was nothing to the tantalized ache in the back of his thighs and the thick of his chest at Cecil’s muscular closeness, his shushing lips, the blatant evidence of his arousal. George was breathing half-forgetfully, in sighs, while his heart raced. They heard the dogs yelping again, a bit further off, and the notes, though not the words, of the couple talking, the strange flat tone of marriage. Cecil took a few cautious steps across the leafy floor, still gripping George at arm’s length, peering round. They were very close to the wood’s edge – below the green translucent fringe of beech leaves you could see the open field. Still, Cecil was being a little absurd – if Mary’s owners thought of them at all it would be their silence that puzzled them, their abrupt disappearance that seemed queer.
‘Let’s go a bit further,’ said Cecil. George sighed and followed behind him, rubbing his wrist with an air of grievance. He saw that this little mime of prudence, air of woodcraft, had just been Cecil’s way of getting on top and taking control of a scene which George for once had planned. Well, they were dreams as much as plans, memories mixed up with wild ideas for things they’d not yet done, perhaps could never do. Cecil, under other circumstances, was bold to the point of recklessness. George let him go ahead, pushing springy branches aside, barely bothering to hold them back for his friend, as if he could look after himself. It was all so new, the pleasure flecked with its opposite, with little hurts and contradictions that came to seem as much a part of love as the clear gaze of acceptance. He watched Cecil’s back, the loose grey linen jacket, dark curls twisting out under the brim of his cap, with a momentary sense of following a stranger. He couldn’t think what to say, his yearning coloured with apprehension, since Cecil was demanding and at times almost violent. Now they’d emerged by the huge fallen oak that George could have led him to by a much quicker path. It had come down in the storms several winters ago and he had watched it sink over time on the shattered branches beneath it, like a great gnarled monster protractedly lying down, bedding down in its own rot and wreckage. Cecil stopped and shrugged with pleasure, slipped off his jacket and hung it on the upraised claw above him. Then he turned and reached out his hands impatiently.
‘That was very good,’ muttered Cecil, already standing up – then walking off for a few paces as he roughly straightened his clothes. He stood looking over the low dense screen of brambles, smiled mildly at a squirrel, cricked his neck both sides, ran a hand through his hair. He had a way of distancing himself at once, and seemed almost to counter the bleak little minute of irrational sadness by pretending that nothing had happened. His words might have followed a merely adequate meal, his thoughts already on something more important. He squared his shoulders, smiled and snuffled. The squirrel twitched its brown tail, scrabbled up its branch, watched him again. Perhaps it had watched his whole performance. It seemed to be applauding, with its tiny hands. George, still lying in the leaves, watched them both. He was amazed each time by Cecil’s detachment, unsure if it was a virtue or a lack. Perhaps Cecil thought it rather poor form of George to be so shaken by the experience. The tender comedy of George’s recovery, the invalidish wince and protesting groan at his ravishment, were ignored. Once in college he had been back at his desk within a minute, with a paper to finish, and seemed almost vexed when he turned a while later to find George still lying there, as he was now, spent but tender, and longing for the patient touch and simple smile of shared knowledge.