The Stranger's Child (11 page)

‘Funny little creature,’ said Cecil whimsically.

‘Oh . . . thank you,’ said George.

‘Not you,’ said Cecil, raising his chin and mimicking the rodent’s spasms of nibbling.

George gave a rueful laugh, and sat forward with his hands round his knees. He wanted Cecil to know how he felt, but he feared that what he felt was wrong; and even so, to tell him would be to praise him, since he had produced this wild effect in him. ‘Help me up, sir,’ he said.

Cecil came back and took his raised hands and pulled him up. And he wasn’t so distant – they kissed, for a second or two, long enough for reassurance but not to get anything started again.

The streams ran down at two or three places in the woods, threading and pooling and dropping again, among the huge roots of the oaks. They were hardly noisy, you came on them by surprise, just when you heard their busy trickling. They brought down leaves that caught and gathered on twigs and roots to make little grey-gold dams, with clear pools behind them. At a low point, by the wood’s edge, two streams ran into one behind the dike of a fallen tree, silted and half-submerged, and made a bigger pond; in high summer it could be too shallow for bathing, but the recent rains had filled it up again.

‘The lowest pond is deeper than it looks,’ said George.

‘Aha . . .’ said Cecil.

‘If you want to have a dip . . . ?’ He felt he shouldn’t show how much he wanted him naked again, and then he would get it. The weekend so far had been hobbled and hampered by dropped trousers and half-unbuttoned shirts.

‘You go first, and report on conditions,’ Cecil said.

George gave him a sideways smile, ready but a little disappointed. ‘All right,’ he said; and he started to unlace his shoes.

‘Do it slowly,’ said Cecil. ‘And keep looking at me.’ He went over to the great oak above the pond, scanning its twisted and bulbous trunk for footholds, then in five seconds scrambled up to the low landing where it divided, and eased himself out on his bottom a short way along a broad almost horizontal branch. He sat there, suddenly owning the wood as much as George had believed himself to do. ‘I can see you,’ he said.

‘And I can see you,’ said George, unbuttoning the top of his shirt and then pulling it over his head.

‘I said slowly,’ said Cecil.

George was slower, accordingly, when it came to his trousers. He found a certain shyness clouding his desire to please. Cecil maintained a provoking half-smile, arousal masked in amusement. ‘You’re like some shy sylvan creature,’ he said, ‘unused to the prying eyes of men. Perhaps you’re a hamadryad.’

‘Hamadryads are female,’ said George, ‘which I think you can see I’m not.’

‘I still can’t really see. You look a bit like a hamadryad to me. I expect you live in this oak tree I’m sitting in.’

George folded his trousers loosely and laid them on an old stump; but he turned away to slip off his white drawers, and saw with a twinge of regret that they were stained with mud from the tussle ten minutes earlier. ‘Oh, you are shy,’ said Cecil, almost crossly. George glanced over his shoulder, and forgot his anxiety about the mud in the larger strangeness of his nakedness, in the dappled woods, where any other walker could see him, and with Cecil, in his shirt and trousers and shoes, watching him steadily. He stepped down carefully across the dead leaves and oak mast towards the loose ellipse of water. The day was warm, but in and out of the patchy sunlight he shivered at the air on his back. He saw he was excited by the part he was playing, the new little scene of obedience, in which none the less his own worth and beauty were enhanced. It was something to know you were what Cecil wanted more than anything. He crouched down, still with his back to him, and peered into the water, which was brownish, loamy, stirred gently and continuously by the little rill that fell into it. Sunlight sparkled on the far side, twenty feet away. He slid a leg through the cold surface, and at once, when he felt the gripping chill of the water, flung himself in too. He circled and steadied and gasped out, ‘It’s delicious!’

After that it was his turn to watch Cecil, a readier and more practised undresser. Cecil’s way was just to be out of his things with a tug and a wiggle and a kick. He pranced down the leafy slope like a satyr, sun-burnt and sinewy, calves and forearms darkly hairy. Then he leapt into the little pond almost on top of George, drowned him for a second or two, their legs tangling violently as George gripped at him, frightened and excited. He wanted to calm Cecil and keep him. They circled each other, spitting out water, laughing, the surface settling and bubbling. Underneath, their feet kicked branches, stirred up leaves and slime. Cecil reached for him, had an arm round his shoulder, then closed with him inexorably underwater.

They lay out to dry for a few last minutes at the edge of the wood, where the sun shone in under the high fringe of leaves. The field beyond had already been ploughed, and the tussocky grass of the headland was faded and trampled. The small stream that trickled down from the pool where they’d swum ran away behind them through a long ditch thick with brambles, its noise hardly louder than the miscellaneous birdsong. George had put his drawers back on, but Cecil spread out still naked, raised on his elbows, frowning lightly at his own body. George loved the confident display, and was vaguely, half-pleasurably, alarmed by it; he thought of the spaniel called Mary, and looked across the curve of the wood’s edge half-expecting to see the blue blouse and hear the dry chatter of the couple on the breeze. He looked back almost shyly at Cecil – he felt he would never stop taking him in. He loved the beautiful rightness of his bearing, that everyone saw, and he loved all the things that fell short of beauty, or redefined it, things generally hidden, the freckled shoulders swollen with muscle, knees knotty with sinew, black body-hair streaked flat, dark blemishes of the summer’s mosquito-bites fading on his arms and neck. Behind him rose the dim pillars and dappled shadow of the woodlands, ‘the Common’, which to George was the magical landscape of his own solitude. This was the man who had entered it, unaware of its secrets: he had quickly surveyed it and possessed it; now here he was, stretched out full length in front of it. Here he was, rolling over with an absent-minded stare and settling on top of him, twitching experimentally as he squashed him, big trickles of cold water running suddenly off his hair into George’s wincing and gasping face.

It was the hat that he saw first, over Cecil’s shoulder, while his friend moved rhythmically on top of him: red and white, distant, but clearly on the move, above the bracken, where the woodland curved out round the far edge of the field. ‘No, no . . . !’ – he tried to draw up his knees, pushed at Cecil with his fists, tried to twist and topple him.

‘No . . . ?’ said Cecil, sneering and panting in his face.

‘No, don’t, Cess – no! Stop!’ – jerking his head up to see more clearly.

‘Yes . . . ?’ said Cecil, more rakishly now.

‘It’s my sister – coming down the path.’

‘Oh, Christ . . .’ said Cecil, slumping, then rolling off him pretty smartly. ‘Has she seen us?’

‘I don’t know . . . I don’t think so.’ George sat up and rolled over at the same time, reaching for his trousers. Cecil’s own clothes were further off, and required a quick soldier-like scramble, white buttocks wriggling through the grass.

‘No harm in a sun-bath, is there?’ he said. ‘Where is she?’ For the moment the red hat had disappeared. He pulled on his silk drawers, and then sat back, insouciant, but flushed and still notably excited.

‘Best get your trousers on,’ said George.

‘Just been having a bathe . . .’ said Cecil.

‘Even so . . .’ said George sharply, the sense of a very tricky moment still thick about him.

‘A bit of a rough-house . . . ?’ Cecil smirked at him. ‘And anyway, what was it? – only a bit of Oxford Style, Georgie, hardly the real thing.’

‘Trousers!’ said George.

Cecil tutted, but said, ‘Well, perhaps you’re right. We can’t have your sister exposed to my
membrum virile
.’

‘I feel a gentleman would have put that the other way round,’ said George.

‘What can you mean?’ said Cecil. ‘I’m a gentleman to the tip of my . . . toes’ – and he pulled on his trousers crouchingly, peering across the undergrowth. ‘I can’t see the darned girl,’ he said.

‘It was definitely her. She has a hat I would know half a mile off.’

‘What, a sort of sou’wester?’

‘It’s a red straw hat, with a white silk flower on the side.’

‘It sounds frightful.’

‘Well, she likes it. And the main thing is it shows up.’

‘If she does, you mean . . .’

George was trying and re-trying various phrases in his head – buttoning his shirt he ran through facial expressions suggestive of bafflement and surprise at his sister’s questions. ‘Well, perhaps she didn’t see us . . .’ he said, after a minute.

Cecil looked at him narrowly. ‘You didn’t invent this sighting of your sister, did you, Georgie, just to put me off a bit of Oxford with you? Because you know that sort of trick never, ever works.’

‘No, my darling Cess, I did not,’ with momentary anger. ‘For heaven’s sake, I’m losing you tomorrow, I want as much of you as . . . as I can manage.’

‘Well . . . good,’ said Cecil, faintly abashed, standing up and stretching, then reaching down again to help him up.

When they were back in their shoes and jackets, Cecil said, ‘Allow me,’ and as he kissed him quickly on the lips he snatched off their two hats and switched them round, cocking George’s boater on his own damp curly head, and whisking his green tweed cap on to George’s bigger, rounder bonce – it perched there in a way he clearly found amusing. They scrambled up, past the pond, the little trickling stream, its noise quickly lost. George started talking quite loudly about College matters, virtually nonsense, but as they regained the path they had caught the stride of two friends out walking, with the woods to themselves. When they spotted Daphne, it was clear that in her solitary way she was doing the same, pretending to be merely out for some air, but hoping above all to find them and tag along. She knew enough not to search for them openly. Where the path she had been following crossed their own she turned down demurely towards them, red hat among the bushes, like a girl in a fairytale. George felt furious with her, but felt also the need for exceptional tact. Something in her demeanour told him that she hadn’t seen them in the grass. Cecil called out, ‘Daphne!’ and waved pleasantly. Daphne looked up in surely genuine surprise, waved back, and hurried towards them. ‘What do you think?’ muttered Cecil.

‘I think we’re fine,’ said George. ‘Anyway, she knows nothing about these things.’ His anxiety was not that she’d have known what they were doing, but that in her general astonishing innocence she wouldn’t have had the first idea. He saw her talking to their mother about it, and their mother taking a colder and cannier guess.

‘Miss Sawle . . . !’ said Cecil, raising his borrowed boater as she approached.

‘Daphne!’ said George and touched the peak of Cecil’s cap, with a facetious smile.

Daphne stopped three yards off and looked at them. ‘This is nice,’ she said. ‘There’s something funny about you.’

‘Oh . . .’ – the two boys gaped comically at each other, patted themselves, George tense with worry that something else funny might show. Surely Cecil’s whole person glowed with unmentionable lust; but Daphne simply gaped back at him, and then looked away in the warm uncertainty of being teased. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said. It was very strange, and in its way reassuring, that she couldn’t work out the obvious thing.

‘What an exceptionally pretty hat, if I may say so,’ said Cecil, as they started back together up the path.

Daphne looked up at him with an idiotic smile. ‘Oh, thank you, Cecil!’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ And as they walked on: ‘Yes, I’ve received any number of compliments on this hat.’

To George it was entirely irksome having Daphne with them for the walk home – twenty minutes that he and Cecil might have spent alone. He wondered what further chances they would have before the van came in the morning. After supper, perhaps, they might slip outside for a cigar. And of course they could start very early indeed and walk to the station, and Jonah could go in the van with Cecil’s bags. He thought intently about how to propose these arrangements, only sharing in the chatter with a tone of wan good cheer. Wherever they paused to let one another go ahead through a gap in the undergrowth George patted Cecil, and sometimes Cecil abstractedly patted him back. Soon they left the woods by a different path, and then they were out in the lane . . . a high load of straw creaking past on a wagon, a motor-car caught behind it, banging and fuming. It seemed to him Cecil was taking quite unnecessary interest in Daphne, bending to her, shielding her as they scooted past the smelly car; but he had a picture too of his own silly jealousy, scuffing along behind this comical couple, the tall dark athlete with his ears curled outwards by an oversized boater and the little girl in a bright red hat trotting eagerly beside him.

And there, already, was the steep red roof of ‘Two Acres’, the low wall, the front gate, the row of dark-leaved cherry-trees outside the dining-room window. The front door stood open, in the summer way, into the shadowy hall. Beyond it, the garden door too stood open, the afternoon light glinting softly on polished oak, a china bowl – one could pass right through the house, like a breeze. Over the door was the nailed-up horseshoe, and beneath it the old palm cross. George felt the unseen jostling of different magics, varying systems of good luck. It was something extraordinary they were doing, he and Cecil, a mad vertiginous adventure. On the hall-stand hung Hubert’s irreproachable bowler, and their father’s old billycock hat that was always left there, as if he might return or, having returned, feel the need to go out again. Cecil looked round, with George’s boater in his hand, and tossed it with a slight spin through the air so that it landed on a free peg. ‘Ha!’ he said, with a little smirk of satisfaction at George and at himself. George found his hand was trembling as he hung up Cecil’s cap beside it.