Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Do you have jelly-mould domes?’ she wanted to know.

‘At Corley?’ said Cecil. ‘As a matter of fact, we do.’ He said the word ‘Corley’ as other men said ‘England’ or ‘The King’, with reverent briskness and simple confidence in his cause.

‘What are they,’ Daphne said, ‘exactly?’

‘Well, they’re perfectly extraordinary,’ said Cecil, unfolding his lily, ‘though not I suppose strictly domes.’

‘They’re sort of little compartments in the ceiling, aren’t they,’ said George, feeling rather silly to have bragged to the family about them.

Hubert murmured abstractedly and stared at the parlourmaid, who had been brought in to help the housemaid serve dinner, and was taking round bread-rolls, setting each one on its plate with a tiny gasp of relief.

‘I imagine they’re painted in fairly gaudy colours?’ Daphne said.

‘Really, child,’ said her mother.

Cecil looked drolly across the table. ‘They’re red and gold, I think – aren’t they, Georgie?’

Daphne sighed and watched the golden soup swim from the ladle into Cecil’s bowl. ‘I wish we had jelly-mould domes,’ she said. ‘Or compartments.’

‘They might look somewhat amiss here, old girl,’ said George, pulling a face at the oak beams low overhead, ‘in the Arts and Crafts ambience of 2A.’

‘I do wish you wouldn’t,’ said his mother. ‘You make us sound like a flat above a shop.’

Cecil smiled uncertainly, and said to Daphne, ‘Well, you must come to Corley and see them for yourself.’

‘There, Daphne!’ said her mother, in reproach and triumph.

‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’ asked Mrs Kalbeck, perhaps already envisaging the visit.

‘There are only two of us, I’m afraid,’ said Cecil.

‘Cecil has a younger brother,’ said George.

‘Is he called Dudley?’ said Daphne.

‘He is,’ Cecil admitted.

‘I believe he’s very handsome,’ said Daphne, with new confidence.

George was appalled to find himself blushing. ‘Well…’ said Cecil, taking a first moody sip of soup, but, thank heavens, not looking at him. In fact anyone would have said that Dudley was extremely good-looking, but George was ashamed to hear his own words repeated back to Cecil. ‘A younger brother can be something of a bane,’ Cecil said.

Hubert nodded and laughed and sat back as if he’d made a joke himself.

‘Dud’s awfully satirical, wouldn’t you say, Georgie?’ Cecil went on, giving him a sly look over the white roses.

‘He works on your mother’s patience,’ said George with a sigh, as though he’d known the family for years, and aware too that this repeated ‘Georgie’, never used by his own family, was showing him to them in a novel light.

‘Is your brother at Cambridge also?’ asked George’s mother.

‘No, he’s at Oxford, thank heavens.’

‘Oh, really, which college?’

‘Now, which one is it?’ said Cecil. ‘I think it’s called something like… Balliol ?’

‘That certainly is one of the Oxford colleges,’ said Hubert.

‘Well, that’s it, then,’ said Cecil. George sniggered and gazed with nervous admiration at his pondering face, above the high starched collar and lustrous black tie, the sparkle of his dress-studs in the candlelight, and felt a quick knock against his foot under the table. He gasped and cleared his throat but Cecil was turning with a bland smile to Mrs Kalbeck, and then as Hubert started to say something idiotic George felt the sole of Cecil’s shoe push against his ankle again quite hard, so that the secret mischief had something rougher in it, as often with Cecil, and after a few testing and self-conscious seconds George regretfully edged his foot out of the way. ‘I’m sure you’re absolutely right,’ said Cecil, with another solemn shake of the head. The fact that he was already mocking his brother made George queasily excited, as if some large shift of loyalties was about to be demanded of him, and he soon got up to deal with the wine for the fish, which the maids were hopelessly dim about.

Mrs Kalbeck tackled a small trout with her customary relish. ‘Do you hunt?’ she asked Cecil, in a square, almost jaunty way, rather as though she were always on a horse herself.

‘I get out with the VWH now and then,’ said Cecil, ‘though I’m afraid my father doesn’t approve.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘He breeds livestock, you see, and has a tender feeling for creatures.’

‘Well, how very sweet,’ said Daphne, shaking her head with dawning approval.

Cecil held her eye with that affable superiority that George could only struggle to emulate. ‘As he doesn’t ride to hounds, he’s gained the reputation locally of being a great scholar.’ She smiled as if mesmerized by this, clearly having no idea what he meant.

George said, ‘Well, Cess, he is something of a scholar.’

‘Indeed he is,’ said Cecil. ‘He’s seen his Cattle Feeds and Cattle Care go into a fourth edition, the most successful literary production of the Valance family by far.’

‘ So far, you mean,’ said George.

‘And does your mother share his views on hunting?’ asked Mrs Sawle teasingly, perhaps not sure whom to side with.

‘Oh, Lord, no – no, she’s all for killing. She likes me to get out with a gun when I can, though we keep it from my papa as much as possible. I’m quite a fair shot,’ said Cecil, and with another sly glance round in the candlelight, to see that he had them all: ‘The General sent me out with a gun when I was quite small, to kill a whole lot of rooks that were making a racket – I brought down four of them…’

‘Really…?’ said Daphne, while George waited for the next line -

‘But I wrote a poem about them the following day.’

‘Ah! well…’ – again, they didn’t quite know what to think; while George quickly explained that the General was what they called Cecil’s mother, feeling keenly embarrassed both by the fact and by the pretence that he hadn’t told them this before.

‘I should have explained,’ said Cecil. ‘My mother’s a natural leader of men. But she’s a sweet old thing once you get to know her. Wouldn’t you say, George?’

George thought Lady Valance the most terrifying person he’d ever met, dogmatic, pious, inexcusably direct, and immune to all jokes, even when explained to her; her sons had learned to treasure her earnestness as a great joke in itself. ‘Well, your mother devotes most of her time and energy to good works, doesn’t she,’ George said, with wary piety of his own.

With the serving of the main course and a new wine, George suddenly felt it was going well, what had loomed as an unprecedented challenge was emerging a modest success. Clearly they all admired Cecil, and George’s confidence in his friend’s complete mastery of what to say and do outran his terror of his doing or saying something outrageous, even if simply intended to amuse. At Cambridge Cecil was frequently outrageous, and as for his letters – the things he wrote in letters appeared dimly to George now as a troupe of masked figures, Pompeian obscenities, hiding just out of view behind the curtains, and in the shadows of the inglenook. But for the moment all was well. Rather like the deep in Tennyson’s poem, Cecil had many voices… George’s toe sought out his friend’s now and again, and was received with a playful wriggle rather than a jab. He worried about his mother drinking too much, but the claret was a good one, much commended by Hubert, and a convivial mood, of a perceptibly new kind for ‘Two Acres’, suffused the whole party. Only his sister’s stares and grins at Cecil, and her pert way of putting her head on one side, could really annoy him. Then to his horror he heard Mrs Kalbeck say, ‘And I understand you and George are members of an ancient society!’