Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Mm…?’ said Cecil. ‘What would you call kissing, then, Daphne?’ his tone dopy and mocking, slightly annoyed, tugging her back into his grasp like a dancer with a mere flourish of his suddenly inescapable strength. ‘More something like this?’ – and he started again, just darting his lips all over her face, like a tormenting game, allowing her to dodge and turn her head a little but holding her so tightly about the waist that she was quite hurt by the hard shape of the cigar case in his trouser pocket thrusting against her stomach. She found she was giggling, in quick shallow breaths, and before she could help it they’d turned into hot little sobs, and then a hushed wail of childlike surrender and failure.

‘Hello…?’ It was George, back from the Cosgroves’, coming to look for them, surely? Childish timid relief mixed almost at once with pride. But no, it was Huey, in a funny voice, apologetic but actually rather cross. ‘I say…’

Cecil loosened his grip, sighed acceptingly, though the little snigger he gave her seemed to say he hadn’t given up. He looked round, over the top of the bushes, to see who it was, perhaps he too thought it was George, and again she felt the special subject of her own secret with Cecil. They both had to be careful, she’d been frightened by him, but she still had a sense that he would know what to do. ‘We’re over here,’ she said, her voice clotted with crying.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I fell down the blasted step,’ said Cecil in a drawl. ‘I seem to have trodden on your sister.’

Hubert stood there, in silhouette, conveying an indignant but undecided impression. ‘Can you walk?’ he said, very distinctly, as though speaking over the telephone.

‘Of course I can walk, we’re just coming in.’

‘It’s really a bit dark for rambling round,’ Hubert said.

‘That was the point,’ said Cecil. ‘We were studying the stars.’

Hubert peered upwards doubtfully. ‘It’s a bit cloudy for that,’ he said, and turned back to the house.

Daphne lay first on one side, then on the other side, tired out by her thoughts and kept alert by them too. Her right foot throbbed impressively in evidence, and was already bruising.

Sometimes she drifted sideways into near-unconsciousness, but woke at once with a sprint of the heart at the thought of Cecil’s closeness, his strength and his breath. His body was exceptionally hard, his breath warm, moist and bitter.

Cecil was drunk, of course, she’d seen two bottles of wine emptied at dinner, the hock it was, with the black German lettering. Daphne knew what drink did to people, and after Friday night, and her own tipsy episode with the ginger brandy, she knew something more about the strange freedoms of drinkers. They were intriguing, but unnecessary, and the truth was they were generally somewhat revolting. Afterwards one didn’t talk about them, out of the vague sense of shame that attached to them. One sobered up. Cecil would surely have a headache in the morning, but he would get over it. Her mother was often absurd at bedtime, but perfectly sensible again by breakfast. It would probably be a mistake to make too much of it.

And yet the whole thing showed Cecil in a very poor light, or half-light… so much of their dealings had happened in the dark, and if she saw him at all it was by the glow of a cigar end or the faint glimmer of the suburban night. When he’d come he’d put them all on their mettle by his sheer distinction, his cutting voice, his cleverness and money. And now, as she rolled on to her other side in excited despair of ever sleeping, she wondered just what George would say if he were told the extraordinary unwholesome thing his friend had tried to do. And she went through it all in her mind again, in the order it had happened, to savour the shock of it properly.

Well, she wasn’t naïve, she knew perfectly well that the upper classes could behave appallingly. Perhaps George should be told what his precious friend was really like. Though perhaps she would keep it to herself, with the choice then of bringing out the facts on some later occasion. It soon seemed more adult not to make a fuss. She started thinking about Lord Pettifer in The Silver Charger , and her mind chasing and confirming and losing the story in the vivid fragments of memory she wandered off through lighted rooms into the welcoming jabber of dreams but then almost grunted herself awake, and lurched at once into a seventh or eighth rehearsal of her own story, in the garden with Cecil Valance.

With each retelling, the story, with its kernel of scandal, made her heart race a fraction less, and its imagined impact on George, or her mother, or Olive Watkins, their fury and bewilderment, grew stronger in compensation. Daphne felt the warm flood of the story surge through her and grip her whole person; but each time the wave seemed a little weaker than the time before, and her reasonable relief at this gradual change was coloured with a tinge of indignation.

Or could that be what kissing was really about? It seemed more like some childish dare, to stick your tongue into someone else’s mouth, and took a good deal of forbearance on their part, even if they liked you a lot. Alas there was no one she could ask. If she brought it up with her mother she would instantly grow suspicious. Could Hubert conceivably have kissed a woman like that? Maybe George, if he did have a girl, had had a go at it. She imagined asking him, and the secret fact of it having happened with his best friend made the idea slyly amusing.

What she was almost conscious of not thinking of was the way he had rubbed himself rhythmically against her. All her feelings were fixed on the easier, and after all rather comic, liberties of licking her mouth and feeling her bottom.

Later she found she had slept, and the dream she had just come out of kept its magic as she lay with open eyes in the deep grey dark. Then she thought she had been a silly child before. ‘Child, child’ he had called her, and that’s what she was. She thought about what Cecil had actually said, how it had been so wonderful getting to know her, and she flopped on to her back and wondered quite coolly if he had fallen in love with her. She gazed at the shadowy zone of the ceiling, the first powdery gleam of light above the curtains, as a sort of image of her own innocence. What evidence was there? Cecil had a very particular way of looking at her, even when others were present, of holding her eye at moments in their talk, so that another unspoken conversation seemed also to be going on. She had never known such a thing before, the boldness and the absolute privateness as well. It was still rather awful that Cecil had gone behind George’s back like that, but she felt a certain thrilled complacency at the choice he had secretly made. And of course he had to do it like this, his love had to be concealed, and it had to come out. There was something very touching as well as alarming in Cecil’s passion. Now she leapt forgivingly over the muddle in the garden, and thought of the life they would share together. Would he want to do that kind of thing again? Not when they were married, presumably. And another perspective of lighted spaces opened before her: she saw herself sitting down to dinner beneath the jelly-mould domes, or anyway compartments, of Corley Court.

She slept unusually late, slept on with only a momentary murmur and swallow through the rustling and bumping on the landing, the fact of voices downstairs; and when she at last came up into fuddled life her little clock said a quarter to nine. After that, and a further helpless three minutes of gaping sleep, she found she had attuned to something, to the loss of something she was amazed to find she had already grown used to, the noise of Cecil in the house. Of course he had gone! There was a thinness in the air that told her, in the tone of the morning, the texture of the servants’ movements and fragments of talk. And all her plans for him were thwarted, the witty thing she was going to say to him, as he climbed into Horner’s van… It would be weeks, perhaps months, before she saw him again. Moaning with a lover’s pangs, as well as with a certain sulky relief at this tragic postponement, she thrust herself out of bed, and on to her instantly tender right foot.