The Stranger's Child (7 page)

Then he pushed open the door, and saw at once he knew nothing, they’d told him nothing about what went on between bedtime and breakfast. It was like stepping into another house. Or else, he felt, as he took two or three short steps into the room, or else this Mr Cecil Valance was a lunatic; and at this thought he gave a sort of staring giggle. Well, he would have to wait for Veronica. The bed was all over the floor as if a fight had taken place in it. He looked at the shaving-water cold and scummy in the basin, the shaving-brush lying in a wet ring on top of the bookcase. He frowned at the clothes strewn over the floor and across the little armchair with a new and painful feeling that he’d known them in an earlier and happier time, when things were still going convincingly. And the roses were as good as dead – yes, Cecil must have knocked them over and then jammed the stems just anyhow into the vase with no water. Their heads had dropped after a few hours of neglect, and a patch on the patterned rug was dark and damp to the back of the hand. On the dressing-table the scribbled sheets of paper were more what Jonah had expected. ‘When you were there, and I away,’ Jonah read, ‘But scenting in the Alpine air the roses of an English May.’ Then he snatched up the shaving-brush and stared at the oily pool it had made.

Jonah went over to the waste-paper basket, as if routinely tidying a barely occupied room, and took out the handful of bits of paper. He saw one of them was written by George, and felt embarrassed on his behalf that his guest should have made such a mess. It was hard to read . . . ‘Veins’, it seemed to say, if that was how you spelt it: ‘Viens.’ The poetry notebook, that Jonah had been told never to touch, still lay within reach, on the bedside table. Later, he thought, he almost certainly would have a look at it.

‘I see he’s made himself at home,’ said Veronica from the door, and her competent tone cheered Jonah up. ‘Yes, Cook said he’ll make a mess but he’ll give you ten shillings – could be a guinea if you’re lucky.’

‘I expect so,’ said Jonah, as though used to such treatment, stuffing the bits of paper awkwardly into his trouser pocket. Then he couldn’t help smiling. ‘Cook said that?’

Veronica plucked the pillows off the bed. ‘Well, he’s an aristocrat,’ she said, with the air of someone who’d seen a few. ‘If they make a mess they can pay for it.’ She pulled the rucked bottom sheet tight and looked at it with a raised eyebrow and a strange twist of the mouth. ‘Well, Jonah, look what I see.’

‘Oh yes . . .’ said Jonah.

‘Your gentleman’s had a mission.’

‘Oh,’ said Jonah, with the same look of suppressed confusion.

Veronica glanced at him shrewdly but not unkindly. ‘You don’t know what that is, do you? A nocturnal mission, they call it. It’s something the young gentlemen are very much prone to.’ She tugged off the sheet with surprising strength, the mattress shuddering as it came free. ‘There you are, smell it, you can always tell.’

‘No, I won’t!’ said Jonah, feeling this wasn’t right, and colouring up at the sudden connection it made with a worry of his own.

‘Well, you’ll know all about it soon enough, my dear,’ said Veronica, who had just taken on in Jonah’s mind the character of someone alarmingly older and rather wicked. ‘Ah! Don’t you worry. You should see Mr Hubert’s. Have to change his sheets two or three times a week. Mrs S. knows – I mean, she didn’t say anything exactly, she just said, “Any marks or stains, Veronica, kindly change the boys’ sheets.” It’s a fact of nature, my dear, I’m afraid.’

Jonah busied himself picking up and folding clothes, unsure if the items that had been worn should be put back in the wardrobe or politely hidden somewhere else until Cecil left and they could be packed again; he couldn’t ask Veronica anything while her upsetting little speech was still burning his ears. Here was the cast-off dress-shirt from last night, a grey smear across its stiff white front, cigar ash perhaps, and the beautiful singlet and drawers, fine as ladies’ wear, now thoughtlessly stained in ways he wouldn’t be able to look into until later, when he was by himself. He took the wash-basin out of the room and across the landing and emptied it carefully into the lavatory. A thousand tiny bristles in a scum of soap still clung to the curved surface, and he stared at them, as he did at everything of Cecil’s, with an awful mixture of worry and pride.

Later he went out to the privy, and in the grey light through the frosted-glass square in the door he took out the rubbish from his pocket and sat turning it over, turning it round and reading the crossed-out words on it. He had a clear sense of giving way to ‘idle curiosity’, which was something Cook was very censorious about. The ripe collective stink beneath him, thinly smothered with coke ash from the kitchen, made his actions feel more furtive and wicked. He wasn’t quite sure even why he was doing it. The gentlemen’s talk was different from normal talk, and George was different too, now his friend was here . . . ‘A hammock in the shade’, Jonah made out. ‘A larch tree at your head and at your feet a pussy willow.’ He was slow to make the connection with anything he knew, and it was only when he’d read a bit more that the uneasy recognition dawned on him. Mr Cecil was writing about their own hammock, which Jonah himself had helped Mr Hubert to sling up at the start of the summer. He wondered what he was going to say about it. ‘A birch tree at your feet, And overhead a weeping willow’ – he couldn’t make up his mind! Then written up the edge of the page, ‘As wood-lice chew willows, So do mites bite pillows!’ – this was crossed out, with a wavy line. The muddled worry that he was saying something shocking, that there might be mites in the bedding here, in Mrs Sawle’s best goose pillows, took a moment to rise and fade. He remembered it was poetry, but wasn’t sure if that made it more or less likely to be true. Another piece of paper had been torn in half, and he held the two edges together, wondering if Wilkes ever did anything like this, when he emptied his master’s waste-paper basket.

here there was a very dense crossing out, as if not only Cecil’s words but his very ideas had had to be obliterated. Jonah heard the well-known scrape of the scullery door and footsteps on the brick path – and in a moment the bulk of a large person outside (Cook, was it, or Miss Mustow?) cut off his light, and now his hand shook as the latch was rattled and he fumbled the papers back into his pocket. ‘Just a minute!’ he called out, wondering for a second if he should throw the bits of paper down into the privy, but then thinking better of it.

Freda lifted her glass and surveyed the table with the open-minded smile of someone who has not been paying attention. But yes, indeed, it was Germany again, and now Harry said how ‘each day brings us one day nearer to the German war’ – a catch-phrase of his that was beginning to irritate her. ‘I’m in and out of Hamburg a good deal on business,’ he explained, ‘and I know what I’ve seen.’ Freda didn’t care at all for the idea of a German war, and felt impatient with Harry for predicting it so insistently; but Cecil seemed ready to fight at once – he said he would jump at the chance. It was touching, and slightly comical, to see George’s indecision. Anyone less inclined to fight it would be hard to imagine, but he was clearly reluctant to disappoint Cecil. ‘I suppose I would, would I? – if it came to it,’ he said.

‘Oh, no question, old chap,’ said Cecil, and managed, with a slow turn of the head, to give them all a look at his profile. He’d told them already how much he liked killing, and clearly Germans would represent an exciting advance on mere foxes, pheasants and ducks. Freda was glad Clara wasn’t here tonight: her brother, who seemed to be her only relative, was in the Kaiser’s army, though a clerical job of some kind, thank heavens. She said,

‘I’m not quite certain I want my boys getting hacked to pieces’ – in a droll tone, but the image startled them all, the boys themselves gleaming in the candlelight, Huey wiping his moustache with a white napkin. Huey said sternly but kindly,

‘Let us hope it doesn’t come to that, Mother.’

‘I think our boys are ready for a scrap,’ said Elspeth.

‘Yes, but you don’t have any boys to get in a scrap, my dear,’ said Freda. Elspeth was Harry’s spinster sister, and one had to wonder, if Harry were to marry, where Elspeth would go. She’d kept house for him for so many years that it was hard to imagine her in a house of her own. But she would have to go somewhere . . . But then,
Harry marry
, wasn’t there something absurd in the very phrase?

The pudding was a macédoine of fruits, the apples from the orchard. Cecil, on Freda’s right, ate quickly and without apparent pleasure, even with a vague air of annoyance. Disheartening for a hostess, but was it perhaps a sign of good breeding not to dwell on food? Something put in front of you by servants, something that stopped you talking, however briefly, about matters that were more important. George tonight was beside Cecil, and somehow teamed with him; now and then he put a hand on his sleeve and murmured to him under the louder talk all around, but Cecil’s preference was to speak to the whole table. Cecil too had been to Germany, and produced rather crushingly a good deal of information on the military and industrial side – much of it seemingly untranslatable. Freda, whose German was limited to heroic expressions of love, loyalty and revenge, and how to ask for a brandy and water, soon felt sad and somewhat squashed. Her Germany was hot, formal though not well organized, a maze of arrangements all shot through and redeemed for ever by the love of the Volsungs, the Forest Murmurs, and Wotan’s Farewell, the keenest ten minutes in the ten years of her widowhood. A shudder ran up her spine and her lower lip drew back at the thought of it.

An awkward seating, with Daphne facing the two boys, and flanked by Harry and Elspeth. Daphne looked crushed herself, but revived in a moment whenever Cecil turned his attention to her. Normally Harry brought a glow, almost at times a sparkle, to Hubert – he was the one among her friends who paid him the most attention; but this evening Huey seemed somewhat preoccupied – was he even a little jealous of Cecil’s evident fascination for Harry? Harry, who seemed to see all the new books, had a number of questions for him about Cambridge figures. ‘I wonder if you know young Rupert Brooke?’ he asked.

‘Oh, Rupert Brooke,’ said Freda, ‘what an Adonis!’

Cecil gave a snuffly smile as if at some rather basic misapprehension. ‘Oh, yes, I know Brooke,’ he said. ‘We used to see a lot of him in College, but now of course rather less.’

‘My mother thinks Rupert’s work rather advanced,’ said George.

‘Really, my dear?’ said Elspeth, with twinkling concern.

Freda thought it best not to protest – as a mother one had to play the fool from time to time. ‘I didn’t awfully care to read about his being sea-sick,’ she said, ‘to be perfectly honest.’

‘Oh, gobbets up I throw!’ said Daphne.

‘Thank you, child, I said I didn’t care for it.’ In fact it was one of their own silly catch-phrases, those puerile tags that reduced the family to weeping laughter but were strictly not for the outside world. Freda gave her daughter a sharp pinch of a frown, in part to stop herself smirking. She felt Cecil would be forming a very poor impression of all of them.

‘I’m no expert on poetry,’ said Hubert, with sweet redundancy, and seemed ready to head them off in another direction.

‘I’m less up to date with
English
poetry,’ said Elspeth.

Harry said, ‘I always enjoy Strachey’s pieces in the
Spectator
– you must know him, I suppose?’

Again, perhaps, was the boys’ Club in the air, that fearfully important ‘Conversazione Society’ she wasn’t allowed to mention? ‘We do see Lytton from time to time,’ Cecil said, with an air of discretion.

‘Now he’s awfully clever,’ said Elspeth.

‘Who’s that, dear?’ said Freda.

‘Lytton Strachey – you must have seen his
Landmarks in French Literature
.’

‘Oh . . . I . . . ?’

‘Harry thought less highly of it than I did.’

‘I prefer a heavier ratio of fact to hot air,’ said Harry.

‘We all believe Lytton will do something brilliant one day,’ said Cecil suavely.

‘I don’t care for him,’ said George.

‘Now, why’s that, dear?’ said Freda mockingly, though she didn’t think she’d ever heard of this man Strachey before a minute ago.