Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘I suppose he’ll be publishing it somewhere,’ said George, ‘the Westminster Review or somewhere.’

‘Do you think?’ said Daphne, as levelly as she could, but with a quick strong feeling that the poem was hers after all. Cecil hadn’t just written it here, in her book, by chance. She was still trying to see if it said things about her personally, or if it was simply about the house – and the garden:

The Jenny nettle by the wall,

That some the Devil’s Play-thing call -

that was a conversation she’d had with him – now quite simply turned into poetry. Her father had called stinging nettles Devil’s Play-things, it was what they called them in Devon. She felt thrilled, and a little bewildered, at being in on the very making of a poem, and at something else magical, like seeing oneself in a photograph. What else would be revealed?

The book left out beneath the trees,

Read over backwards by the breeze.

The spinney where the lisping larches

Kiss overhead in silver arches

And in their shadows lovers too

Might kiss and tell their secrets through.

Again the minutely staggered and then breathtaking merging of word, image and fact. She was really going to have to read this somewhere apart, in private. ‘I think it would be most appropriate to read this in the garden,’ she said, getting up and feeling very slightly sick; but just then her mother appeared in the doorway, with her heavy morning face, and her bright morning manner. In fact her manner was flustered; there was something behind her smile. Word must already have got through. Beyond her Veronica loitered, the informer.

‘Well, child…!’ her mother said, and gave Daphne a strange, eager look. ‘What excitements.’

‘Everyone can see it when I’ve finished reading it,’ said Daphne. ‘People seem to be forgetting that it’s my book.’

‘Well, of course, dear,’ said her mother, going round the table and opening a window as if to show she had other useful things to do; and then, ‘You’ve obviously made quite an impression… on him’ – not using Cecil’s name, out of some awful delicacy. She gave Daphne a teasing glance that had something new to it – a sense of girding herself for some welcome parental obligation.

‘Mother, he was only here for three nights,’ said George, almost crossly. ‘All Cecil has done, with his customary generosity, is to write a poem about our house as a thank-you for the visit.’

‘I know, dear,’ said their mother, with a little flinch at her two prickly children. ‘He’s been most generous to Jonah too.’

George got up, and went to the window, and looked out in the manner of someone who wants to say something firm but difficult. ‘The poem’s really nothing to do with Daphne.’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Daphne, shaking her head. Wasn’t it? It was there, she had seen it at once, the lovers’ kiss in the shadows, telling their secrets; but of course she couldn’t say that to either of them. ‘I suppose I should be sorry he didn’t write a poem for you.’

George’s pitying look was focused on the cherry-trees outside. ‘As a matter of fact, he has written a poem for me.’

‘Oh, George, you never said,’ said their mother. ‘You mean just now?’

‘No, no – last term sometime – it really doesn’t matter.’

‘Well!’ said their mother, trying to maintain a tone of bewildered amusement. ‘Rather a fuss about a poem.’

‘There’s no fuss, darling,’ said George, now in a brightly patient tone.

‘It’s too lovely to have a poem written for you at all, in my view.’

‘I quite agree!’ said Daphne, and the feeling that everything was being spoiled welled up inside her.

‘I’m beginning to feel very sorry that I mentioned it. If Cecil’s visit has to end in this kind of childish bickering.’

‘Oh, read it if you want to!’ said Daphne, pursing her lips against tears, and flapping through the book to give it to her open at the right page. Her mother looked at her sharply, and after a moment, and quite gently, took it from her.

‘Thank you… now if the girl could run for my glasses.’ And when Veronica came back, their mother sat down at the dining-table and addressed herself, with a quizzical but sporting look, to the poem that had just been written about her house.

From where she sat, in the window of the morning-room, the two figures seemed to hurry towards each other. Above the long hedge at the end of the formal garden, a man’s head, jerking with the lurch of a limp, moved impatiently along. ‘Rubbish!’ he shouted. ‘Rubbish!’ Whilst away to the right, between the hazily green horse-chestnuts of the park, a shiny beige car was approaching, its windscreen flashing in the sun.

‘D’, she wrote, and hesitated, with her nib on the paper. Not Darling, so ‘Dear’ certainly, and then another pause, which theatened to turn into a blot, before she added ‘est’: ‘Dearest Revel’. One went up and down the scale with people – certainly among their set there were startling advances in closeness, which sometimes were followed by coolings just as abrupt. Revel, though, was a family friend, the superlative quite proper. ‘It is too awful about David,’ she went on, ‘and you have all my sympathy’ – but she thought, what one really needed was a scale below ‘Dear’, since often one had no time whatever for the person one was warmly embracing on the page: ‘Untrustworthy Jessica’, ‘Detestable Mr Carlton-Brown’.

She heard the car stop outside, the swift jangle of the bell, footsteps and then voices. ‘Is Lady Valance in?’ ‘I believe she’s in the morning-room, madam. Shall I-’ ‘Oh, I won’t disturb her.’ ‘I can tell her’ – Wilkes giving her a clear chance to do the right thing. ‘No, don’t bother. I’ll go straight through to the office.’ ‘Very good, madam.’ It was a small contest of wills, in which the subtle but hamstrung Wilkes was trounced by the forthright Mrs Riley. A minute later he came in to cast an eye at the fire, and said, ‘Mrs Riley has come, my lady. She went through to the office, as she calls it.’

‘Thank you, I heard her,’ said Daphne, looking up and lightly covering the page with her sleeve. She shared a moment’s oddly intimate gaze with Wilkes. ‘I expect she had her plans with her?’

‘She appeared to, madam.’

‘These plans!’ said Daphne. ‘We’re not going to know ourselves soon.’

‘No, madam,’ said Wilkes, passing his white-gloved hand into the black mitten that was kept in the log-basket. ‘But they are still only plans.’

‘Hmm. You mean they may not come off?’

Wilkes smiled rather strictly as he lodged a small branch on the top of the pyre, and controlled the ensuing tumble of ash and sparks. ‘Perhaps not fully, madam, no; and in any case, not… irreversibly.’ He went on confidentially, ‘I understand Lady Valance is with us on the dining-room.’

‘Well, she’s rarely an advocate for change,’ said Daphne a little drily, but with respect for the butler’s old allegiances. With two Lady Valances in the house, there were niceties of expression which even Wilkes was sometimes tripped up by. ‘Though last night she claimed to find the new drawing-room “very restful”.’ She turned back to what she had written, and Wilkes, after a few more testing pokes at the fire, went out of the room.

‘Perhaps best not to come this weekend – we have a houseful with much family &c (my mother) – on top of which Sebby Stokes is coming down to look at Cecil’s poems. It will be somewhat of a “Cecil weekend”, and you would barely get a word in! Though perhaps’ – but here the bracket clock whirred and then hectically struck eleven, its weights spooling downwards at the sudden expense of energy. She had to sit for a moment, when the echo had vanished, to repossess her thoughts. Other clocks (and now she could hear the grandfather in the hall chime in belatedly) showed a more respectful attitude to telling the hour. They struck, all through the house, like attentive servants. Not so that old brass bully the morning-room clock, which banged it out as fast as it could. ‘Life is short!’ it shouted. ‘Get on with it, before I strike again!’ Well, it was their motto, wasn’t it: Carpe Diem! She thought better of her ‘perhaps’, and signed off blandly, ‘Love from us both, Duffel.’