Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Oh… oh…’ said George, though at once it was a test above all for Cecil. He found his failure to look at him a reproach in itself.

After a moment, with an almost apologetic flinch, Cecil said, ‘Well, no harm in your knowing, I dare say.’

‘And since candour is our watch-word!’ George put in, glancing with lurking fury at his mother, who had been sworn to secrecy. Cecil must have seen, however, that a light-hearted embrace of the occasion was wiser than a haughty evasion.

‘Oh yes, absolute candour,’ he said.

‘I see…’ said Hubert, who clearly knew nothing about it. ‘And what are you candid about?’

Now Cecil did look at George. ‘Well that,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid we’re not allowed to tell you.’

‘Strict secrecy,’ said George.

‘That’s right,’ said Cecil. ‘In fact that’s our other watchword. You really shouldn’t have been told that we’re members. It’s a most serious breach’ – with the steel of a real displeasure glimpsed through his playful one.

‘Members of what?’ said Daphne, joining the game.

‘Exactly!’ said George, with almost too much relief. ‘There is no society. I trust you haven’t mentioned it to anyone else, Mother.’

She smiled hesitantly. ‘I think only Mrs Kalbeck.’

‘Oh, Mrs Kalbeck doesn’t count,’ said George.

‘Really, George…!’ – his mother almost tumbled her wineglass with the sweep of her sleeve. By luck, there was only a dribble left in it. George grinned at Clara Kalbeck. It was a teasing taste of candour itself, which at Cambridge overrode the principles of kindness and respect, but perhaps wasn’t readily understood here, in the suburbs.

‘No, you know what I mean,’ he said smoothly to his mother, and gave her a quick look, half smile, half frown.

‘The Society is a secret,’ said Cecil, patiently, ‘so that no one can make a fuss about wanting to get into it. But of course I told the General the minute I was elected. And she will have told my father, since she’s a great believer in candour herself. My grandfather was a member too, back in the forties. Many distinguished people were.’

‘We have nothing to do with politics, however,’ said George, ‘or worldly fame. We’re thoroughly democratic.’

‘That’s right,’ said Cecil, with a note of regret. ‘Many great writers have been members, of course.’ He looked down, blinking modestly, and at the same time, sitting forward, gave George a vicious kick under the table. ‘I’m so sorry!’ he said, since George had yelped, and before anyone could quite understand what had happened the talk jumped on to other things, leaving George with a sense of guilty resentment, and beyond it a mysterious vision of screens, as of one train moving behind another, the large collective secret of the Society and the other unspeakable one still surely hidden from view.

By the time the pudding was brought in George was longing for dinner to be over, and wondering how soon he could politely arrange to get Cecil to himself again. He and Cecil ate everything with rapacious speed, while the others were surely dawdling wilfully and whimsically with their food. In the later phases of a meal, he well knew, his mother might go into trances of decoy and delay, a shivering delight in the mere fact of being at table, playful pleadings for a further drop of wine. After that, half an hour over port would be truly intolerable. Hubert’s friendly banalities were as wearing as Daphne’s prying prattle – ‘This will interest you,’ he would say, before launching into a bungled account of something everyone knew already. Perhaps tonight, being so few, they could all get up together; or would Cecil think that very bad form? Was he hideously bored? Or was he, just possibly, completely happy and at ease, and puzzled and even embarrassed by George’s evident desire to get through the meal and away from his family as soon as possible? When his mother pushed back her chair and said, ‘Shall we…?’ with a guarded smile at Mrs Kalbeck, George glanced at Cecil, and found him smiling back – a stranger might have thought amiably, but George knew it as a look of complete determination to get his way. As soon as the three females had passed through into the hall, Cecil nodded nicely to Hubert and said, ‘I have a horrible habit, anathema to polite society, which can only decently be pursued out of doors, under cover of darkness.’

Hubert smiled anxiously at this unexpected confession, whilst producing from his pocket a silver cigarette case which he laid rather bashfully on the table. Cecil in turn drew out the leather sheath that held, like two cartridges in a gun, a brace of cigars. They seemed almost shockingly designed for an exclusive session à deux . ‘But my dear fellow,’ said Hubert, with a note of perplexity, and a shy sweep of the hand to show that he was free to do as he pleased.

‘No, really, I couldn’t possibly fug up in so -’ Cecil was caught for a second – ‘so intimate a setting. Your mother would think very ill of me. It would be all over the house. Even at Corley, you know, we’re fearfully strict about it,’ and he fixed Hubert with a wicked little smile, to suggest this was an exciting moment for him as well, a chance to break with convention whilst still somehow doing the right thing. George wasn’t sure Hubert did see it quite like that, and not waiting for any further accommodations on his part, he said, ‘We’ll have a proper jaw tomorrow night, Huey, when Harry comes.’

‘Well, of course we will,’ said Hubert. He seemed only lightly offended, puzzled but perhaps relieved, acquiescent already to the pact between the Cambridge men. ‘You’ll see we don’t stand on ceremony here, Valance! You go and make as much stink as you like outside, and I’ll… I’ll just shuffle through and have a gasper with the ladies.’ And he flourished his cigarette case at them with an air of cheerful self-sufficiency.

After leaving the dining-room Daphne went upstairs and came back down in her mother’s crimson shawl with black tassels, and with a feeling of doing things that were only just allowed. She saw the housemaid glance at her in what she sensed was a critical way. Coffee and liqueurs had been brought in, and Daphne asked absent-mindedly for a small glass of ginger brandy, which her mother passed to her with a raised eyebrow and the mocking suppression of a smile. Hubert, standing on the hearth-rug, was fiddling with a cigarette case, tapping a cigarette on the lid, and flexing his face as if about to complain, or make a joke, or anyhow say something, which never came. Cecil, apparently not wanting to pollute the house, had seized the moment to open the french windows and take his cigar outside; and George had followed. Mrs Kalbeck sat down in her armchair with a preoccupied smile, and hummed one of her familiar leitmotifs as she looked over the various bottles. Everyone seemed to be quite drunk. To Daphne the lesson of these grown-up dinners was the way they went at the drinks, and what happened when they’d done so. She didn’t mind the general increase in friendliness and noise, and people saying what they thought, even if some of the things George thought were quite strange. What troubled her was when her mother got flushed and talked too much, a development that the others, who were drunk themselves, seemed not to mind. The Welsh came out in her voice in a slightly embarrassing way. If they had music she tended to cry. Now she said, ‘Shall we have some music? I was going to play Cecil my Emmy Destinn.’

‘Well, the window’s open,’ said Daphne, ‘he’ll hear it outside.’ She felt drawn to the garden herself, and had put on the shawl with a vague romantic view to going out.