Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘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.

Within that thronging singing woodland round

Two blessed acres of English ground,

And leading roaming by its outmost edge

Beneath a darkling cypress myrtle privet hedge

With hazel-clusters hung above

We’ll walk the secret long dark wild dark path of love

Whose secrets none shall ever hear

Twixt set of sun late last rook and Chaunticleer.

Love as vital as the spring

And secret as – XXX (some thing!)

Hearty, lusty, true and bold,

Yet shy to have its honour told -

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.