Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

He took a sheet of headed paper from a drawer, dipped his pen in the pewter ink-well and wrote, in a rolling, backward-leaning hand:

My dear old Harry -

I can never thank you enough for the silver cigarette case. It’s an absolute ripper, Harry old boy. I have told no one about it yet but will hand it round after dinner & just watch their faces! You are too generous, I’m sure no one ever had such a friend Harry. Well, it is nearly dinner-time, & we have a young friend of George’s staying, a poet! You will meet him tomorrow, when you come over, he looks the part I must say though I have read not a word from his pen! Tons of thanks, Harry old boy, & best love from yours ever,

Hubert.

Hubert turned the paper over on the blotter and thumped it tenderly with his fist. By writing large he had got the final few words on to the third side of the small folded sheet, which was a sign one hadn’t merely written dutifully; the letter ran on pleasantly, and reading it over again he felt satisfied with the touches of humour. He tucked it into an envelope, wrote ‘Harry Hewitt Esq., Mattocks, Harrow Weald’ and ‘By Hand’ in the corner, and placed it on the tray in the hall for Jonah to take over in the morning. He stood looking at it for a moment, struck by the solemn rightness of living just here, and of Harry living where he did, and of letters passing between them with such noble efficiency.

George was the last to come down, and even so he stopped on the stairs for a minute. They were almost ready. He saw the housemaid cross the hall with a salt-cellar, caught the odour of cooked fish, heard Cecil’s high overriding laugh, and felt the chill of his own act of daring, bringing this man into his mother’s house. Then he thought of what Cecil had said to him in the park, in the half-hour they had made for themselves by pretending he’d missed his train, and felt his scalp, his shoulders, his whole spine prickle under the sweeping, secret promise. He tiptoed down and slipped into the drawing-room with a nearly dizzy-making sense of the dangers ahead. ‘Ah, George,’ murmured his mother, with a hint of reproach; he shrugged and smirked slightly as if his only offence had been to keep them waiting. Hubert, with his back to the empty grate, had ensnared them all in talk about local transport. ‘So you were stranded at Harrow and Wealdstone, eh?’ He beamed over his raised champagne glass, as proud of the rigours of life in Stanmore as he was of the blessings.

‘Didn’t matter a bit,’ said Cecil, catching George’s eye and smiling curiously.

‘As a wit once said, it sounds like some medieval torture. Harrow and wealdstone – can’t you just see it!’

‘Oh, spare me the wealdstone!’ said Daphne.

‘We’re devoted to Harrow and Wealdstone, whatever a wit may have said,’ said his mother.

George stood for a moment with his hand pressed flat against Cecil’s lower back and gazed into his friend’s glass. He wiggled his fingers to play the secret notes of apology and promise. ‘Well the Valance motto,’ Cecil said, ‘is “Seize the Day”. We were brought up not to waste time. You’d be amazed what one can find to do, even at a suburban railway station.’ He gave them all his happiest smile, and when Daphne said, ‘What sort of things do you mean?’ he carried on smiling as if he hadn’t heard her.

‘I gather you came up through the Priory,’ said Hubert, genially determined to follow every step of his journey.

‘Yes, indeed we did,’ said Cecil, very smoothly.

‘You know Queen Adelaide used to live there,’ said Hubert, with a quick frown to show he didn’t want to make a big thing of it.

‘So I gather,’ said Cecil, his glass empty already.

‘Later I believe it was a very excellent hotel,’ said Mrs Kalbeck.

‘And now a school,’ said Hubert, with a bleak little snuffle.

‘A sad fate!’ said Daphne.

Jesus Christ! thought George, though all he came out with as he crossed the room was a sort of distracted chuckle. He poured himself the last of the bottle of Pommery, and glanced into the window, where the lamplit room was reflected, idealized and doubled in size, spread invitingly across the dark garden. His hand was trembling, and he kept his back to them as he picked up the fullish glass, steadying it with the other hand. It was impossible to imagine such a weakness in Cecil, and a consciousness of this added subtly to George’s shame. He turned and looked at them, and they seemed all to be looking at him, as if they had gathered at his request, and were waiting for his explanation. All he had intended was a quiet family supper, to introduce his friend. Of course he hadn’t reckoned on old Kalbeck, who seemed to think ‘Two Acres’ itself was a hotel – it was really the limit how she’d fished, in her cunning oblivious way, for an invitation to stay on, his mother magnanimously lending her a wrap and dabbing her in her own familiar Coty scent. Now he watched with horror as she questioned Cecil about the Dolomites, her head on one side; her great brown teeth made her smiles both gauche and menacing. But a minute or two later Cecil was yarning with her in German, and almost making a virtue of her presence. Cecil, of course, lived in Berkshire: there was little danger of Frau Kalbeck turning up just before meals at Corley Court. He spoke German nicely, keeping an amused pedantic eye on the slowly approaching end of his sentences. When the maid announced dinner, Mrs Kalbeck made it seem like an unexpected intrusion on their happy meeting of minds.

‘Will you sit here, Mrs Kalbeck,’ Hubert was saying, standing by his chair at the head of the table and smiling thinly as he watched them find their places. George smiled too, a little disconcerted from his glass of champagne. He felt a twinge of shame and regret at having no father, and forever having to make do. Perhaps it was just the memory of Corley, with its enormous oriental dining-room, that made the present party seem cramped and airless. Cecil stooped as he entered the room, in a possibly unconscious gesture to the cosiness of scale at ‘Two Acres’. A father like Cecil’s set a reassuring tone for a dinner, being very rich and an authority on shorthorn cattle. He had immense grey side-whiskers, brushed outwards, and themselves like a pair of brushes. Hubert was twenty-two, and wore a soft red moustache; he went to an office every day by train. This of course was what their own father had done, and George tried to picture him in Hubert’s chair, ten years older than when he’d seen him last; but the image was blurred and unavailing, like any much-handled memory, the pale blue eyes soon lost among the flowers and candles crowding the table.

Even so, his mother was very pretty, and really a great beauty compared to Lady Valance, ‘The General’, as Cecil and his brother called her, or sometimes ‘The Iron Duke’, on account of her very faint resemblance to the first Duke of Wellington. Tonight Freda was wearing her amethyst drops, and her red-gold hair seemed to glimmer, like the candle-lit wine in her glass. The General naturally was a strict teetotaller – and now George wondered if Cecil himself had been shocked to see his hostess drinking before dinner? Well, he’d have to get used to it. They were doing things in their best festive style for him, the napkins belaboured into lilies, the small silver items, bowls and boxes of uncertain use, polished up and set down between the glasses and candle-sticks. George reached forward and moved slightly to the left a vase of white roses and trailing ivy that obstructed his view of Cecil opposite. Cecil held his eye for a long moment – he felt the jolt of simultaneous danger and reassurance pass through him. Then he watched his friend blink slowly and turn to answer Daphne on his right.