Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Help me with the machine, child.’

Freda swept across the room, brushing against the small round table with the photographs on it. She was wide-hipped and tightly corseted, and the gathered back of her dress twitched like a memory of a bustle. Daphne watched her for several abstracted seconds in which her mother’s form, known more deeply and unthinkingly than anything in her life, appeared like that of someone quite unknown to her, a determined little woman in front of her in a shop or at the theatre. ‘Well… I have a few letters to write!’ said Hubert. Mrs Kalbeck smiled at him blandly to show she’d still be there when he got back.

The gramophone, in its upright mahogany disguise, was a recent gift of their neighbour Harry Hewitt; apart from the handle sticking out on the right it looked just like a nice old Sheraton cabinet, and part of the fun of playing it to people was to raise the lid and open the drawers and reveal it for what it was. There was no visible horn, and the drawers were really doors, concealing the mysterious louvred compartment from which the music emerged.

Now her mother was stooping and pulling records out from the cupboard at the bottom, trying to find Senta’s Ballad. There were only a dozen records but of course they all looked the same and she didn’t have her spectacles.

‘Are we having the Hollander?’ said Mrs Kalbeck.

‘If Mother can find it,’ said Daphne.

‘Ah, good.’ The old woman sat back with a glass of cherry brandy and a patient smile. She had heard all their records several times, the John McCormack and the Nellie Melba, so the excitement was mixed with a sense of routine, which she seemed to find almost as pleasing.

‘Is this it…?’ said Freda, squinting at the difficult small type on the label.

‘Oh, let me do it,’ said Daphne, dropping down beside her and nudging her until she went away.

It was Daphne’s own favourite, because something she couldn’t describe took place inside her when she heard it, something quite different from the song from Traviata or ‘Linden Lea’. Each time, she looked forward to running again through the keen, almost painful novelty of these particular emotions. She set the disc on the mat, took another big sip from her glass, coughed shamefully, and then cranked up the handle as tight as it would go.

‘Careful, child…!’ said her mother, one hand reaching for the mantelpiece, eyes fixed as if about to sing herself.

‘She’s a strong girl,’ said Mrs Kalbeck.

Daphne lowered the needle and at once walked towards the window, to see if she could spot the boys outside.

The orchestra, they had all agreed, left much to be desired. The strings shrilled like a tin whistle, and the brass thumped like something being thrown downstairs. Daphne knew how to make allowances for this. She had heard a real orchestra at the Queen’s Hall, she had been taken to The Rhinegold at Covent Garden, where they’d had six harps as well as anvils and a giant gong. With a record you learned to ignore the shortcomings if you knew what this piping and thumping stood for.

When Senta started singing it was spellbinding – Daphne said this word to herself with a further shiver of pleasure. She sat on the window-seat with the shawl pulled round her and a mysterious smile on her face at the first intimacies of the ginger brandy. She’d had a real drink before, a half glass of champagne when Huey came of age, and once long ago she and George had done a small but rash experiment with Cook’s brandy. Like the music, a drink was marvellous as well as alarming. She was gripped by the girl’s eerie calls, Jo-ho-he, Jo-ho-he , which had a clear warning of tragedy to them; but at the same time she had a delicious sense of having nothing whatever to worry about. She looked casually at the others, her mother braced as if for the impact of salt waves, Mrs Kalbeck tilting her head in more mature appraisal. Daphne saw the beauty of being spontaneous, and had to hold back a number of things she suddenly felt like saying. She frowned at the Persian rug. There were two sections, which recurred; there was the wild storm music, where you saw the men hanging in the rigging, and then, when the storm was stilled, the most beautiful tune she’d ever heard came in, dropping and soaring, rapturous and free and yet intensely sad, and in either case somehow inevitable. She didn’t know what Senta was saying, beyond the recurrent sounding of the word Mann , but she sensed the presence of passionate love, and felt the air of legend, which had a natural hold on her. Emmy Destinn herself she saw as a wild waif with long dark hair, somehow marked out by her own peculiar name. Almost at once she sang a high note, the brass fell downstairs and Daphne ran over to lift the needle off the disc.

‘It is sadly shortened,’ said Mrs Kalbeck. ‘In truth there are two more strophes.’

‘Yes, dear, you said before,’ said Freda rather sharply; and then, softening as always, ‘There is only so much they can squeeze on to the record. To me it’s a marvel that they do that.’

‘Then shall we have it again?’ said Daphne, looking back at them.

‘Oh, why not!’ said her mother, in a tone of harmless female conspiracy, given more swagger by what Daphne saw as a small crowd of empty glasses. Mrs Kalbeck nodded in helpless agreement. Records were indeed marvels, but they were only tiny helpings from the ocean of music.

During the second helping Daphne moved very slowly across the room, picked up her glass and drained it, and put it down again with a complicated feeling of sadness and satisfaction that was thoroughly endorsed by Wagner’s restless ballad. She slipped out into the garden just as the music hurtled to its end. ‘Oh darling, should you?’ wailed her mother. It was simply that the lure of the other conspiracy, the one she had entered into with the boys in the wood, was so much more urgent than keeping company with the two old women. ‘There may be a dew-fall!’ said Freda, in a tone that suggested an avalanche.

‘I know,’ Daphne called back, seizing her excuse, ‘I’ve left Lord Tennyson out in the dew!’ Things seemed to come to her.

She went quickly past the windows of the house, and then stood still on the edge of the lawn. The grass was dry when she stooped and touched it – it was still too warm for dew. Warm and yet not warm. Seeing the house from outside she remembered her earlier twinge of loneliness, when the sun was setting and the lights came on indoors. She did have to find her books, which would be lying just where she’d left them, by the hammock. She wanted to prepare for the Tennyson reading that Cecil had proposed, she was already imagining it… ‘I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May…’, or, ‘ “The curse is come upon me!” cried the Lady of Shalott’… completely different, of course – she couldn’t decide. But where were the boys? The night seemed to have swallowed them up completely, leaving only the whispering of the breeze in the tree-tops. All she could see was vague silhouettes of black on grey, but the smells of the trees and the grass flooded the air. She felt that Nature was restoring itself in a secret flow of scent while people, most people, stayed heedlessly indoors. There were privet smells and earth smells and rose smells that she took in without naming them in her heady swoop across the lawn. Her heart was beating with the undeniable daring of being out here, and being slightly adrift, coming suddenly on the stone bench and stopping to peer around. Up above, the stars were gathering all the time, sliding out between high faint trails of cloud as though they had grown used to her. She heard a sort of moan, just ahead of her, quickly stifled, and a run of recognizable giggles; and of course that further smell, distinct from dry grass and vegetation, the gentlemanly whiff of Cecil’s cigar.