Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Tell Mark to stop singing,’ said Daphne to Flo, who seemed to get the point. On a still night every word would be audible in Louisa’s bedroom.

‘You coming out, Dud?’ said George, still panting a bit, and letting his high spirits run on over his brother-in-law.

‘Eh…? Oh – no, no,’ said Dudley, swivelling round on the stool, and then back again to reach for his drink. ‘No, no – you all go out. I’m going to stop in and read.’

‘Oh…’ said Tilda, still breathless and delighted. Dudley stood up with a fixed but already absent smile, shuffled sideways and dropped back on to the edge of the stool, which shot away across the bare floor – he lunged for the edge of the keyboard as he fell, George jumped from the flying cut-glass tumbler, and Daphne started forward but merely snatched his elbow as he thumped heavily backwards, with a furious shout of ‘Watch out!’ as if someone else was behaving dangerously. ‘Oh!’ said Tilda again. He lay there for several seconds, then sat up like the Dying Gaul, leaning on one hand, staring at the floor as though only just containing his patience, then raised his other hand, whether for help or to ward help off it was hard to tell. Daphne found herself gasping with alarm and pity and almost giggling with childish hilarity.

‘No, I’m perfectly all right,’ said Dudley, and sprang up quite smartly, in the soldier-like way he still had, though unsteady for a moment as he gained his feet. A wince of pain was covered by a sarcastic laugh at the whole situation. His shirt-front and lapel were wet with whisky.

‘Are you sure, old man?’ said George. Dudley didn’t answer or even look at him, but crossed the hall with uncertain dignity, flung open the door and disappeared into the cow-passage, the door swinging loudly shut behind him.

‘You go on out,’ said Daphne to the others. With a familiar resolve she went after Dudley, but with a newer sense looming beyond it that it wasn’t just repetition, it was getting much worse.

She found him in the washroom, and his dripping face as he raised it from the basin was alarmingly red. The veins in his temples stood out as if he’d been throttled. But when he had dried himself and sleeked back his hair the colour receded and he looked almost normal. Daphne thought of various futile reproaches and suggestions. She watched him dab at his lapel with the damp towel and then throw it on the floor, as he always did. Then she found he was smiling at her in the mirror, just a moment of doubt as he hooked her glance, the old trick he did without thinking. ‘Oh my god, Duff’ – he turned and lurched into her, his teeth moist and gleaming, his arms went heavily round her shoulders not her waist, he was kissing her and kissing her, squashing and probing as though to get at something; she didn’t know what if anything she gave: all she got from it herself was a compounded sequence of discomforts, the sour flare of drink and cigars into her face. He hadn’t done this for ages, it was like a violent little visit from the days when they still made love. He stood back, shaking her lightly, encouragingly, like a good old friend, then he was limping off, head down, head up, with the oblivious sense of a new mission, the unspoken agreements of the demented and the drunk. ‘Come on, Duffel,’ he called over his shoulder as he opened the door into the hall. She stood where she was, and watched the door swing closed again behind him.

‘Oh, my dear, isn’t Dudley joining us?’ said Eva, when she got out on to the flagged path.

‘No, he can’t,’ said Daphne, with some satisfaction, pulling her wrap round her. ‘You know, he doesn’t go out at night.’

‘What, not at all?’ said Eva. ‘How very funny of him…’ She sounded archly suspicious, and then Daphne wondered if Eva had in fact been out at night with Dudley, though she could hardly think when.

‘You know, he doesn’t talk about it, but it’s one of his things.’

‘Oh, is it one of his things.’

‘Dud not coming out?’ said Mark, suddenly behind them, and now with a hand round her waist – round both their waists.

‘He doesn’t, darling, as you know,’ said Daphne; and then she explained, for Eva’s benefit, and trying to ignore Mark’s quite purposeful grasp for a moment: ‘It’s a thing from the War, as a matter of fact. I probably shouldn’t say…’ – and on the hard path, finding her way in the long spills of light from the drawing-room windows, which only deepened the shadows, she made a little mime of her hesitation. ‘You know, it was a great friend of his who was killed in the War. Shot dead by a sniper right beside him. They’d seen him in the moonlight, you see, and that’s why he can never bear moonlight.’

‘Oh Lord,’ said Eva.

Daphne stopped. ‘He heard the shot and he saw the black flower open on the boy’s brow, and he was dead, right beside him.’ She’d rather muffed the story, which Dudley told, on very rare occasions, with a shaking hand and choked throat, and which wasn’t really hers to tell. She felt the horror as well as the rather striking poetry of it all so keenly that she hardly knew if she was Dudley’s protector or betrayer – she seemed inextricably to be both. ‘And then of course Cecil, you know…’

‘Oh, was he killed in the moonlight too?’ said Eva.

‘Well, no, but a sniper, it all connects up,’ said Daphne. In truth, other people’s traumas were hard to bear steadily in mind.

In a minute Mark left them – she saw him running at a crouch behind the low hedges to ambush Tilda and Flo, who were walking together between the moonlit chains of clematis. She didn’t much want to be alone with Eva; she looked around for Revel, whom she could hear laughing with George nearby… still, it presented an opportunity. ‘I was never sure,’ she murmured, ‘well you’ve never said, you know, but about Mr Riley.’

‘Oh, my dear…’ said Eva, with a quiet smoky laugh, amused as well as embarrassed.

‘I don’t mean to pry.’

‘About old Trev…? There’s not a very great deal to say.’

‘I mean, is he not still alive?’

‘Oh yes, good lord… though he’s, you know, a fair age.’

‘I see,’ said Daphne. Of course no one knew how old Eva was herself. ‘I thought perhaps he’d been killed in the War.’

‘Not a bit,’ said Eva. She sounded cagey but somehow excited. Bare-bosomed nymphs raised their arms above them as they turned, by some silent consensus, into the path towards the fishpond. There was no colour, but the garden seemed more and more on the brink of it in the moonlight, as if dim reds and purples might shyly reveal themselves amongst the grey. Daphne turned and looked back at the house, which appeared at its most romantic. The moon burned and slid from window to window as they walked.

‘So: Trevor …’ she said, after a minute. ‘And you’re not divorced or anything.’ It was slyly amusing to stick at the question, and after quite a lot of drinks you didn’t care so much about good manners.

‘Not actually,’ said Eva, ‘no.’ Daphne supposed she must have married him for money. She saw Trevor Riley as a man who owned a small factory of some kind. Maybe the War, far from killing him, had made him a fortune. She found Eva slipping her arm through hers, and with her other hand giving the long-fringed scarf she was wearing a further twist round her neck – she felt the silky fringe brush her cheek as it whisked round. Eva shivered slightly, and pulled Daphne against her. ‘I do think marriage is often a fearful nuisance, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Well…! I really don’t know.’

‘Mm?’ said Eva.

‘Well, it’s something that sometimes has to be endured, I dare say.’

‘Indeed,’ said Eva, with a throb of grim humour.