Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Freda raised her chin and grinned at them.

‘Enjoying your walk, Mother?’ said Madeleine.

‘It’s been rather lovely’ – she looked up at them with the raffish twinkle of a parent dwarfed by her children.

‘I didn’t know you liked walking,’ said Madeleine, suspiciously.

Freda said, ‘There’s a lot you don’t know, my dear,’ and then looked at her own words with a touch of surprise.

‘You’ve had your little chat with Sebby,’ said George.

‘Yes, yes’ – she dismissed it.

‘All right?’

‘Well, I really had nothing to say.’

George gave a little purse-lipped smile, and gazed around at the woods. ‘No, I suppose not.’ And then, ‘Are you going back to the house?’

‘I’m very much ready for a cup of tea.’

‘We’ll come with you.’

As they walked they looked at the house, and it seemed to Freda they were each thinking of something they might say about it. Their self-consciousness focused on it, with an air of latent amusement and concern, but for at least a minute none of them spoke. Freda glanced up at George and wondered if the incident that was gnawing at her self-possession was equally present to him. In the nine years since, it had never once been mentioned; bland evasiveness had slowly assumed the appearance of natural forgetfulness.

‘Oh, have you looked at the tomb?’ said Madeleine, as they went through the white gate and into the garden.

‘Well, I’ve seen it before,’ said Freda. She disliked the tomb very much – for strong but again not quite explicable reasons.

‘Quite splendid, isn’t it.’

‘Yes, it is!’

‘I was thinking about poor old Huey,’ said George, in this at least chasing her own thoughts.

‘Oh, I know…’

‘We must go, darling,’ said George, taking his mother’s arm with what felt to her like extravagant forgiveness.

‘To France…?’

‘We’ll go this summer, during the long vac.’

‘Well, I’d love that,’ said Freda, gripping George to her, then glancing almost shyly at Madeleine. It seemed to her a mystery, another of the great evasions whose nothingness filled her life, that they hadn’t been already.

She left them in the hall, and went up to her room, freshly, nearly tearfully, preoccupied with Hubert. Really his death should have put all these other worries in proportion. The heavy ache of loss was quickened by a touch of indignation. She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well. That Huey wasn’t clever or beautiful, had never met Lytton Strachey or written a sonnet or climbed anything higher than an apple-tree – all this she was somehow forced to acknowledge at each tentative mention of his name to Cecil’s mother. She took off her hat, sat down, and attended rather violently to her hair.

She knew it was pointless, heartless, to begrudge Louisa the consolation of having been with Cecil at the end, the aristocratic reach across the Channel that had brought him back, when tens of thousands of others were fated to stay there till doomsday. Daphne said it was the reason the old lady resisted moving out of the big house: she wanted to stay where she could visit her son every day. Freda was picturing Huey, back at ‘Two Acres’, on his last leave – and now the tears welled up and she dropped the comb and fiddled in her sleeve for her handkerchief. In the letters that were sent to her after his death, they had spoken of the wood where he had fallen, trying to take a machine-gun post that was concealed in it: Ivry Wood. Over and over in those weeks she had looked out across her own modest landscape, her own little birch-wood, with a rending sense that Huey would never set foot there again. Almost impossible to grasp, on that first day, that he’d been buried already in France – under shell-fire, they said, with a reading from Revelations. Already he’d been put away for ever, out of the air. And whenever she thought of it, and pictured Ivry Wood, it was her own little spinney she saw, for want of anything better, strangely translated to northern France, and Huey running into it, into the desultory spray of the guns.

Later he had been reburied, and she had photographs of the grave, and of the interment itself. A padre in a white surplice, under an umbrella, men firing a salute. Well, now at last George would take her, and Daphne too perhaps, over to France, they would all go, and she would look at it. She had only been abroad once, before the War, when she and Clara made their pilgrimage to Bayreuth, two widows on the smutty ferry, the stifling trains with German soldiers singing in the next carriage. The thought of this new visit, of the resolute approach to the place, squeezed at her throat.

When Daphne was getting dressed that evening Dudley strolled in to her room and said, almost in a yawn, that he hoped Mark Gibbons wouldn’t take against Revel. ‘Oh,’ said Daphne, faintly puzzled but more concerned about dinner, and the horrors of the seating-plan, where she felt her skills as a hostess most exposed. ‘It seems to me Revel gets on with everyone.’ She slithered her pearl-coloured petticoat over her head, and smoothed it down with her palms, pleased to hear his name at such a moment. She would have him sit near, though not next to her. Naturally her mother must sit on Dudley’s right, but if Clara was tucked away safely in the middle was it better to have Eva or Madeleine on his left? Daphne thought she might well inflict Madeleine on him. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘there’s no urgent reason they should meet, is there?’ And then it came out that Dudley had asked Mark to dinner, and Flora, and also the Strange-Pagets – on the grounds that ‘we haven’t seen them for ages’.

‘Christ, you might have told me!’ said Daphne, feeling her colour flare up. ‘And the bloody S-Ps, of all people…’ She caught herself in the mirror, helpless in her underwear, her stockinged feet, her panic slightly comic to Dudley in the glinting freedom of the background. First and foremost she thought of the langoustines, already stretched by Revel’s arrival.

‘Oh, Duffel…’ said Dudley, frowning a little at the jet studs in his shirt-front. ‘Mark’s a marvellous painter.’

‘Mark may be a bloody genius,’ said Daphne, hurrying with her dress, ‘but he still has to eat.’

Dudley turned to her with that unstable mixture of indulgence and polite bewilderment and mocking distaste that she had come to know and dread and furiously resent. ‘Well Flora’s a vegetarian, Duffel, remember,’ he said: ‘just throw her some nuts and an orange and she’ll be as happy as a pig in shit.’ And he gave her his widest smile, his moist sharp dog-teeth making their old deplorable appeal, but horrible now as his trench language. Daphne thought she had better go down herself and see the cook. It would be one of those ghastly announcements that was all too clearly a plea.

Mark Gibbons, who had painted the large abstract ‘prison’ in the drawing-room, lived on a farm near Wantage with his half-Danish girlfriend Flora. Daphne liked him a good deal without ceasing to be frightened of him. He and Dudley had met in the army, a strangely intimate locking of opposites, it seemed to Daphne, Mark being a socialist and the son of a shopkeeper. He showed no interest in actually marrying Flora, and very little in dressing for dinner, which was the more immediate worry, with Louisa coming in, and Colonel Fountain, who’d been Cecil’s superior officer, driving over from Aldershot. Rattling down the back-stairs two at a time Daphne saw her seating-plan collapse in a jumble of incompatibilities, her husband and mother-in-law like repelling magnets. The Strange-Pagets at least were easier, a dull rather older couple with a lot of money and a country house of their own on the other side of Pusey. Dudley had known Stinker Strange-Paget since boyhood, and was defiantly loyal to him, treating his dim parochial gossip like the wisdom of some gnomic sage.