The Stranger's Child (9 page)

‘Harry must be doing awfully well . . .’ But at this Elspeth’s pride seemed to knit up tight and in getting up to return her coffee cup she effectively swept the matter of her brother’s prospects aside. Freda said, artificially, she felt, ‘And your dress, dear, I’ve been wanting to ask – is it from our splendid Madame Claire?’

Elspeth wrinkled her nose in pretended apology – ‘Lucille,’ she said.

‘Ah, well!’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Elspeth, ‘I can’t deny Harry keeps me in fine style.’

‘No, indeed!’ said Freda, with a quickly spreading feeling she’d been put in her place. Of course Elspeth might have been hinting that he would do the same for his wife, but Freda was fairly clear she was saying she hadn’t a chance.

There was the sound of a door opening, and Daphne said, ‘Ah, here come the gentlemen.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Freda, looking up at the group as they reappeared, with their funny discreet smiles. It was as if they had reached a decision, but were not at liberty to reveal what it was. Harry deferred to Cecil in the doorway, and then waited a few moments to defer to Hubert as well: he came in with an arm lightly round his shoulders, as if to thank and reassure him. Huey had drunk more than usual, and had a hot, uncertain look, the host to three men cleverer than himself. ‘Now then . . .’ he was saying, surely as glad as his father would have been to have got through that part of the evening. ‘Now then, how are we going to do this?’

There was a brief discussion of where Cecil was going to be, and how the chairs should be rearranged. George said wasn’t it frightfully hot in the room, and opened the french windows. ‘Shall we all sit outside?’ said Daphne.

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Freda. There were hazards enough in the reading as it was. She watched Harry, hoping that in the shunting back of the chairs he would sit by her. He took up a small armchair in a masterful hug, with a pleasant effect of tension in his well-trousered legs as he lifted it out of the way. A rough semi-circle was formed in front of the window. Cecil set a lamp on a small table, actually outside, on the brick path, and a chair beside it. It was a miniature theatre. The lamp lit up the shrubs, the leaning hollyhocks and little lightless Chinese lanterns immediately behind him, but made everything else beyond and above seem the more thickly dark.

‘Since someone so kindly asked,’ said Cecil, with a confident glance at Harry, ‘I’ll read a poem or two of mine
before
scaling the heights of, er, Mount Tennyson.’ He sat down, with a copy of the
Granta
held out under the lamp at arm’s length. ‘I hope it won’t seem immodest to read a poem about Corley. The place seems to call poems forth – somehow!’ Varied murmurs of indulgence and respect were heard. Cecil raised his chin, and his eyebrows, and then, as if addressing a gathering, or rather congregation, of a hundred or so people, began: ‘The lights of home! the lights of home! / Clear through a mile of glimmering park, / The glooming woods, the scented loam, / Scarce seen beneath the horse’s feet / As through the Corley woods I beat / My happy pathway through the dark.’ The effect was so far from modest, Cecil chanting the words like a priest, and with so little suggestion of their meaning, that Freda found herself completely at a loss as to what he was talking about. Her eyes went straight to Daphne, who was grinning and blinking with the sudden need to master her feelings. Hubert looked pretty astonished for several seconds, then quickly assumed a cunning frown, as if measuring it against other readings he’d heard. Harry and Elspeth, more truly accustomed to literary soirées, maintained calmly appreciative near-smiles. George had turned so as to look straight into the garden, and his face was hidden; was it just the lamplight that made his ears burn red?

Freda took a furtive fortifying swig from her glass, and smiled approvingly in Cecil’s direction. The same thing always happened when she was read to, even when the reading was a more thoughtful and quiet one: at first she could barely take it in, as if nonplussed by her own concentration; then she settled and focused; then after ten minutes or so it seemed to be going on and on, Cecil’s voice had its own patterns, everyone’s did, that carried on more or less the same up the hills and down the dales of the poems, so that the words themselves all came to seem the same. ‘The footings of the fawn among the fern’ – she saw what he meant, but it made her want to giggle. ‘Love comes not always in by the front door,’ said Cecil, in his most homiletic tone. She let her head fall back and peeped abstractedly at Harry’s profile, stern but fine, and his strong left leg jutting out, jumping unconsciously with his pulse. Had he perhaps been injured, heart-wounded, in some earlier romance? She thought that must be it. One couldn’t imagine adoring him, exactly; but he was rich, and generous with it, she came back to that, his touching sweetness to Hubert: few ‘got’ poor Huey, as Harry did. But there was something difficult about him, no doubt – his singleness was perhaps a warning as much as an invitation. She looked away with a wistful smile. Nothing had been said about the scale of this event; as each probable limit was reached and passed without any remark of surprise or prediction Freda grew restless, and then, the opposite of restless, when she closed her eyes to try and savour the sense and not have actually to look at Cecil, and the warm electric rush of noises, the confident stride of whole new situations with all their pre-existing logic, talking with Miriam Cosgrove on a beach in Cornwall, they had to pack, there was so little time before the train pulled out, and they mistook the way to the hotel, they were hopelessly lost, and then, was it just a silence that had woken her, with its own queer tension, and she sat up and reached again for her empty glass. ‘Perfectly marvellous,’ she muttered, now slightly giddy as well as bleary. She forced herself awake. ‘A memorable evening!’

‘I’ll read you my favourite section,’ said Cecil, and took a preoccupied sip from his tumbler – was it water he was drinking, or whisky? ‘Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway – ’

‘Oh, yes, I love this one,’ said Freda, over-compensating; her daughter glanced furiously at her.

‘The tender blossom flutter down – ’

‘Ah . . .’

‘Unloved, that beech will gather brown, / This maple burn itself away.’ Large gestures of his raised right arm took in the garden beyond him.

Feeling suddenly delightfully awake, Freda smiled round, gave an almost conspiratorial look to Harry, who nodded, very slightly, but pleasantly. Elspeth glanced down, having noticed. It was a beautiful poem, beautiful and sad. ‘Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair, / Ray round with flames her disk of seed . . .’ Again she could imagine it more sensitively read – or did she mean less sensitively? – anyway, without a certain atmosphere of Westminster Abbey. Poor Huey was fast asleep; it might have been a great pitiless sermon. She wondered if she could poke him discreetly or otherwise get at him, and felt another giggle hiding in her consternation. Oh, let him sleep. Her other two children, in supporting postures, flanked the stage, George subtly reflecting Cecil’s importance, while Daphne’s silly face was tense with the desire to respond. Freda could tell she wasn’t taking a word of it in.

and once more Cecil’s long and powerful fingers, commanding their attention, twisted in front of him, throwing his face into dramatic shadow –

here he glanced upwards with a surprising note of comic disadvantage, but carried on determinedly –

the first hesitant drops, like soft footsteps or tactful throat-clearings, had quickly gained confidence, a rush of pattering had begun, and Cecil too, no stranger to the elements, was rushing through, raising his voice just when he needed to bring the poem to rest: he went on emphatically,

but now all of them were getting up to move the lamp and close the windows and his last words rose against the settling roar of the rain in a determined shout.

Hubert woke early, with a sharp ache above his left eye, where a number of oppressive thoughts seemed to have gathered and knotted. His pyjamas were twisted and damp with sweat. Social life, though it had its importance, often left him confused and even physically out of sorts. The rain on the roof had got him off to sleep, and then woken him again to his own heat. He had a muddled apprehension of people moving about, his mother had restless nights, and now, as he dozed and woke again, his worries about her wove their way through his uneasy recall of moments at dinner and afterwards. Then the sun rose with merciless brilliance. Like Cecil Valance, Hubert hated to waste time, but unlike Cecil he was sometimes at a loss to know quite what to do with it. He decided he must go to early Communion, and leave the rest of the party to go to Matins without him. Twenty minutes later he closed the front gate and set off down the hill with an air of sulky rectitude. It had turned into a fresh, still morning; the great vale of northern Middlesex lay before him, with the answering heights of Muswell Hill rising mistily beyond, but he searched in vain for his usual sober pleasure in belonging here.

He paid scant attention to the service, conducted by Mr Barstow, the laborious curate; but it gave him a measure of satisfaction to sit in his pew, and to kneel on the hard carpet of the sanctuary steps. Afterwards he walked home through the Priory, and was still quite warm from the climb when he joined the others at breakfast. Cecil was talking, in his trying, amusing way, and though Hubert greeted them all properly, and asked them if they’d slept well, he sensed that Cecil had taken charge.

‘I slept almost troublingly well,’ said Cecil, showing by his frown at his boiled egg that he expected a laugh; then went on where he’d been interrupted, ‘No, I shall leave that to you, if you don’t mind.’

‘You know Cecil’s a pagan, Mother,’ said George.

‘Cecil worships the dawn,’ said Daphne.

‘I see . . .’ said their mother, with the strained brightness of her early mornings.

Cecil said, ‘I confess I was relieved when Georgie told me Stanmore church was a roofless ruin.’

‘He may not have mentioned,’ said Hubert, ‘but there’s a first-rate new church bang next door to it. I can recommend it.’

‘I think I rather prefer the ruined one,’ said Daphne experimentally.

‘Really, child,’ said her mother, pouring tea into her cup with a wandering hand. ‘Well, we will have to go without you.’

‘Oh . . . !’

‘Cecil, I mean, not you.’

‘You know we had rather hoped to show you off to the village,’ said George.

‘Daphne will repeat the sermon for you over lunch,’ said his mother.

‘And what will Cecil do while we’re at church?’ asked Daphne.

Cecil gave a hesitant smile, and then rather mumbled, ‘Oh, I expect I’ll have a look at a poem.’

‘There,’ said Daphne; and George too looked vindicated.

Hubert, feeling a little queasy, poured out a cup of coffee and stood up. ‘I hope you won’t mind,’ he said, ‘if I excuse myself,’ and he left the room with the clear feeling that no one did. He crossed the hall and went into his father’s office, and closed the door.

He looked gloomily out of the little leaded casement, that was half-obscured by leaves; and went on,

Here he paused again, and then, with a firmness belied by his flinching expression, inserted ‘and dislike’ after ‘shun’; he turned his full stop into a comma, and went on: