Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Mm,’ said Wilfrid. Daphne couldn’t quite make it out; she saw the great bill of a bird.

‘It’s chapter eight,’ said Corinna. Did she think that she ought to have a drawing too? Perhaps, tomorrow, Revel could be asked to make her one, if he wouldn’t mind – he might even draw her likeness…

‘ “So Lord Pettifer climbed into his carriage,” ’ Daphne read, rather cautiously in the dim light, ‘ “which was all of gold… with two handsome footmen in scarlet livery with gold braid, and the coachman in his great cockled hat – cocked hat – and the green” – I’m so sorry! – “the great coat of arms of the Pettifers of Morden emblazoned upon the doors. The snow had begun to fall, very gently and silently, and its soft white flakes sat – settled – for a moment on the manes of the four black horses and on the gold… panaches of the footmen’s hats” – oh lawks, I remember them – or how do we say it? – panaches , French…’ She looked up over the edge of the book at Revel, who was a dark column against the low light, perhaps a little impatient with her performance. He was a man of the theatre, after all; it was just that reading aloud brought out how much you’d had to drink. ‘ “ ‘I shall return before dusk on Sunday!’ said Lord Pettifer. ‘Pray tell Miranda, my ward, to prepare… herself.’ ” ’ She wasn’t sure how much feeling to put into the speeches; and in fact at that moment there was a snort from Corinna’s bed, and Daphne saw that her mouth had opened, and she was already asleep. She peered hopefully at Wilfrid, who was gazing at her clearly, though he couldn’t have had the least idea what was going on. ‘Well, I’ll just read a little bit more, shall I?’ she said. And lowering her voice she read on, skipping a fair bit, through the wonderful description of Lord Pettifer’s journey to Dover through the falling snow, which she hadn’t read since she was a girl. How quaint it looked – part of her didn’t want to read it like this, distracted by Revel, stumbling over the words; but partly she kept it up out of simple disquiet about stopping. ‘ “In the distance they saw the lights of a lonely house – that she could never return,” ’ read Daphne, turning over two pages at once, and taking a moment to realize. She glanced at Wilfrid, then carried on, quite at a loss as to what was happening herself. He smiled distantly, as if to say now it made sense, and to thank her politely, and turned away from the light and pulled up his knees under the covers, which she felt she could take as a sign to stop.

When they were outside in the passage again, things were both more urgent and more awkward. She felt it might go wrong if it wasn’t acted on quickly, it would wither on the stem in a horrible embarrassment of delay and indecision. But then Revel put his arms round her lightly. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘Nanny…!’

‘Oh…’

‘Let’s go down.’

‘Really?’ said Revel. ‘If you like.’ For the first time she had a sense that she could wound him, she could add to his other hurts; though he pressed his little flinching frown into a look of concern for her.

‘No, you’ll see,’ she said, and kissed him quickly on the cheek. She led him round, through the L-shaped top passage and out on to the top of the main stairs, with their sudden drama, the gryphons or whatever they were with their shields and raised glass globes of light descending beneath them. She thought, the glare of publicity .

‘They’re wyverns,’ she said, ‘I think,’ as they went down.

‘Ah,’ said Revel, as if he had indeed asked.

In the enormous mirror on the first-floor landing there they went, figures in a story, out of the light into the shadow. She thought she was calmer now but then she started gossiping under her breath, ‘My dear, I simply have to tell you what Tilda Strange-Paget said’ – she peered round – ‘about Stinker!’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Revel, half-listening, like someone driving.

‘I’m not at all sure I should. But apparently he’s got another woman, tucked away.’

Revel chuckled. ‘Mm, I wonder where he, um, tucks her.’ He slowed and turned outside the door of his room. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, how can one be sure…’

‘No, I mean…’ He looked from her to the door. What she wanted was so simple and she felt suddenly lost. She had an odd, quite superhuman sensation of hearing her mother’s breathing in her room, and then an image of Clara in hers, miles away, and Dudley of course, but she couldn’t think of that.

‘No, not here,’ she said; and taking him on she went round the corner. A single lamp burnt on a table for the guests, and when she opened the linen-room door it flung a great shadow up like a wing across the ceiling. ‘Will you come in here?’ She was solemn but she giggled too.

It was dark, which was the beauty of it, and then the skylight was seen to glimmer – the moon, of course, throwing other shadows down into the well of the room. Again there was no colour, just the white gleam of the high-piled sheets on the shelves among realms of grey. ‘You can climb out at the top on to the roof,’ said Daphne.

‘Not now, I think,’ murmured Revel, and putting his hands on either side of her face he kissed her. She rocked in front of him for a moment before she put her arms round him, gripped the loose bulk of the dinner-jacket over his wiry unknown body. She let him kiss her, as though it were still reversible, a mere gambit, and then with a violent grunt of assent she started to kiss him back.

They kissed and kissed, Revel respectfully holding her and stroking her, a faint comedy of self-consciousness creeping into their murmurs and half-smiles between kisses, the little mimicking rhythms of the kisses themselves. Still, it was completely lovely, a forgotten pleasure, to be pleasing someone who sought simply to please you. She had never been kissed by two men in one evening before – well, she’d only been kissed by two or three men ever. The contrast, in so intimate a thing, was bewilderingly beautiful. The of course unmentioned fact, that it was men that Revel liked to kiss, made it the more flattering, though perhaps more unreal. Revel had something more than a man’s normal experience in all this, it shone in his mischievous eyes. Daphne couldn’t be sure, now it had finally started, that it was serious after all. But if it wasn’t serious, perhaps that would be its charm, its point. She stood away for a moment – in the monochrome gleam from the skylight she touched Revel’s face, his clever nose, his brow, his lips. He took her hand as she did so and kissed it. Then he kissed her again on her cheek. It was almost odd he didn’t push her further. She wondered now if he had ever kissed a woman before. She supposed when men kissed each other it was a pretty rough business; she didn’t quite like to think about it. She knew she must encourage Revel, without making him feel at all inadequate or in need of encouragement. He was younger than her, but he was a man. In some strange romantic way, to please him, she wished she could be a man herself. ‘We can do whatever you like, you know,’ she said, and then wondered, as he laughed, what she was letting herself in for.

Then for twenty minutes the world belonged to the birds. Thickly in the woods, and out on the High Ground, all through the gardens, on benches and bushes, and high up here among the roofs and chimneys, finches and thrushes, starlings and blackbirds were singing their songs to the daybreak all at once. Wilfrid opened his eyes, and in the greyish light he saw his sister, sitting up in bed, peering at her book. With a cautious turn of the head and a little steady concentration he worked out that it was half past six. There was something strange on the bedside table, that held his attention for a minute, with its shadowy glimmer, but he didn’t want to think about it. It made no sense, like a window where no window could ever be. He let his eyes close. The birdsong was so loud that after it had woken you it drove you back to sleep. Then, when you woke again, it was really day, and the birds by now were further off and much less important. You forgot all about them. He saw the door was half-open: Corinna had already gone to wash and he needed to ask her one or two things about the night, about the noises and music and coming and going that were tangled up with it like dreams. He turned over and there on the mantelpiece, propped up by the Toby jug, was Uncle Revel’s flamingo, standing on one leg, and giving him a crafty smile. A bit of the dream had stayed in the solid world, as a proof or a promise, and he slipped out of bed and took it down. Uncle Revel had been here, with his mother, laughing and joking, and he had done a drawing, very quickly, like a magic trick. Wilfrid took the drawing back to bed with him – of course the strange thing on the table, misleading him before with its magic gleam, was his mother’s wineglass, with the last bit of dark red wine still in it, and bits of black rust in the wine. He peered into the glass, and confusingly the sour smell was the smell of his mother’s latest kisses. He heard Nanny in her bedroom next door, the worrying creak of her floorboards, rattle of curtain-rings. She was talking to someone, it sounded like the maid Sarah. They came on to the landing. ‘Another of their wild nights,’ Nanny was saying. ‘God knows what they’ll be like this morning.’ Sarah groaned and laughed. ‘Duffel up here at god knows what time, with her young artist friend, to have a look at the little ones sleeping, she said. Of course, how can they sleep through that, it upsets them. They’ll be little horrors after a night like that.’