Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

In the thick of her solitary breakfast, with the maid looking in once a minute to see if she’d finished, there was George coming past the window, back home from the station and seeing Cecil off. He had a bleak, faraway look which annoyed her the moment she saw it and felt its meaning. It was a time of reckoning for him – his guest, his first one ever, had left, and now the family could take him back and tell him, more or less, what they thought. He would be moody and delicate, unsure who to side with. And then she remembered her book. Oh, what had Cecil done with it? Had he written in it? Where had he put it? She was suddenly sick with anger at Jonah for packing it with Cecil’s other books. Even now it would be trapped unbeknownst between other books in his suitcase, in a crowd of other cases on Harrow and Wealdstone station.

‘Oh, Veronica,’ she said.

‘Sorry, miss!’ said Veronica.

‘No, not that,’ said Daphne. ‘Did you see, did Mr Valance leave anything for me, my autograph book, I mean?’

‘Oh, no, miss.’ And knotting her duster in a pretence of interest, ‘Is that the one with the vicar in?’

‘What…?’ said Daphne. ‘Well, it has a number of important men in it.’ She didn’t quite trust Veronica, who was more or less her own age, and treated her more or less like a fool.

‘I’ll ask, miss, shall I?’ Veronica said. But then George looked round the door, gave a rueful smile, and said,

‘Cecil says goodbye.’ He hovered there, feeling the atmosphere, seeming uncertain whether to share the subject of Cecil any further with his sister.

‘I’m afraid I slept somewhat badly,’ said Daphne, aware of her own adult tone. ‘And then I must have overslept…’

‘He was up fearfully early,’ said George. ‘You know Cecil!’

‘Perhaps Mr George has got it, miss,’ said Veronica.

‘Oh, really, it doesn’t matter,’ said Daphne, and coloured at the disclosure of her private worry.

‘Got what?’ said George, with an anxious look of his own.

So Daphne had to say to him, ‘I wondered if Cecil had found a chance to write in my little album, that’s all.’

‘I expect he wrote something or other. Cess is rarely at a loss for words.’

‘I expect he’s left it somewhere,’ Daphne said, and spread some butter on her toast, though really her smothered anxiety had squeezed up her appetite to nothing. She looked at her brother with a cold smile. ‘So what are you doing today, George?’ she said, conscious of denying him a talk on the obvious subject.

‘Eh? Oh, I’ll find something,’ he said, with a hint of pathos. He was leaning against the doorpost, neither in nor out, the maid sidling past him back into the hall. Daphne saw him decide to speak, and as he started airily, ‘No, it was a shame Cecil couldn’t stay longer…’ she said. ‘I’ve invited Olive for tea tomorrow, I haven’t seen her since they got back from Dawlish.’ She knew Olive Watkins was small beer after Cecil, and Dawlish after the Dolomites, and she felt ashamed and almost sad as well as defiant in mentioning her. But she couldn’t indulge George in his present mood. It rubbed up too closely against her own.

‘Oh, have you…’ said George, startled and bored. Daphne saw she’d produced a particular kind of family atmosphere, and that itself was depressing after the wider horizons of Cecil’s visit. Also, she really wanted her book back, to show Olive whatever it was that Cecil had written. This had been her main purpose in asking her to tea.

Then Veronica, with her own bored persistence, looked back in and said, ‘I asked Jonah, miss. He’s having a look.’

‘Thank you,’ said Daphne, feeling oppressed now by the public nature of the search.

‘Jonah’s looking in his room now. I mean he’s looking in Mr Valance’s room!’

And George, without saying anything more, drifted away, and then Daphne heard him going, rather stealthily she thought, upstairs as well, two at a time. She told herself, without fully believing it, that probably, after all, Cecil would have put nothing but his name and the date.

A minute later George came back down, with Jonah at his heels, and Daphne’s mauve album open in his hands. ‘My word, sis…’ he said abstractedly, turning the page and continuing to read; ‘he’s certainly done you proud!’

‘What is it?’ said Daphne, pushing back her chair but determined to keep her dignity, almost to seem indifferent. Not just his name, then: she could see it was much, much more – now that the book was here, open, in the room, she felt quite frightened at the thought of what might come out of it.

‘The gentleman left it in the room,’ said Jonah, looking from one to the other of them.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Daphne. George was blinking slowly and softly biting his lower lip in concentration. He might have been pondering how to break some rather awkward news to her, as he came and sat down across from her, placing the book on the table, then turning the pages back to start again. ‘Well, when you’ve finished,’ Daphne said tartly, but also with reluctant respect. What Cecil had written was poetry, which took longer to read, and his handwriting wasn’t of the clearest.

‘Goodness,’ said George, and looked up at her with a firm little smile. ‘I think you should feel thoroughly flattered.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Daphne. ‘Should I?’ It seemed George was determined to master the poem and its secrets before he let her see a word of it.

‘No, this is quite something,’ he said, shaking his head as he ran back over it. ‘You’re going to have to let me copy this out for myself.’

Daphne drained her teacup completely, folded her napkin, glanced across at the two servants, who were smiling stupidly at the successful retrieval of the book, and also formed a somewhat inhibiting audience to this agitating crisis in her life, and then said, as lightly as she could, ‘Don’t be such a tease, George, let me see.’ Of course it was a tease, the latest of thousands, but it was more than that, and she knew resentfully that George couldn’t help it.

‘Sorry, old girl,’ he said, and sat back at last, and slid the album towards her.

‘Thank you!’ said Daphne.

‘If you could see your face,’ said George.

She pushed her plate aside – ‘Will you take all this, please,’ to the maid; who did so, with gaping slowness, peering at the columns of Cecil’s black script as though they confirmed a rather dubious opinion she’d formed of him. ‘Thank you,’ said Daphne again sharply; and frowned and coloured, unable to take in a word of the poem. She had to find out at once what George meant, that she should be flattered. Was this it, the sudden helpless breaking of the news? Perhaps not, or George would have said something more. The harder she looked at it, the less she knew. Well, it was called, simply, ‘Two Acres’, and it ran on over five pages, both sides of the paper – she flicked back and forth.

‘Formally, it’s rather simple,’ said George, ‘for Cecil.’

‘Well, quite,’ said Daphne.

‘Just regular tetrameter couplets.’

‘That will be all,’ said Daphne, and waited while Veronica and Jonah went off. Really they were most irritating. She flicked further back for a moment, to the Revd Barstow, with his scholarly flourish, ‘B. A. Dunelm’; and then forward to Cecil, who had broken all the rules of an autograph book with his enormous entry, and made everyone else look so feeble and dutiful. It was unmannerly, and she wasn’t sure if she resented it or admired it. His writing grew smaller and faster as it sloped down the page. On the first page the bottom line turned up sideways at the end to fit in – ‘Chaunticleer’, she read, which was a definite poetry word, though she wasn’t precisely sure of its meaning.