The Stranger's Child Read online

  ‘You don’t mind if I kiss you?’ said Cecil dreamily.

  ‘I don’t call that kissing, Cecil!’ she said.

  ‘Mm . . . ?’ said Cecil. ‘What would you call kissing, then, Daphne?’ his tone dopy and mocking, slightly annoyed, tugging her back into his grasp like a dancer with a mere flourish of his suddenly inescapable strength. ‘More something like this?’ – and he started again, just darting his lips all over her face, like a tormenting game, allowing her to dodge and turn her head a little but holding her so tightly about the waist that she was quite hurt by the hard shape of the cigar case in his trouser pocket thrusting against her stomach. She found she was giggling, in quick shallow breaths, and before she could help it they’d turned into hot little sobs, and then a hushed wail of childlike surrender and failure.

  ‘Hello . . . ?’ It was George, back from the Cosgroves’, coming to look for them, surely? Childish timid relief mixed almost at once with pride. But no, it was Huey, in a funny voice, apologetic but actually rather cross. ‘I say . . .’

  Cecil loosened his grip, sighed acceptingly, though the little snigger he gave her seemed to say he hadn’t given up. He looked round, over the top of the bushes, to see who it was, perhaps he too thought it was George, and again she felt the special subject of her own secret with Cecil. They both had to be careful, she’d been frightened by him, but she still had a sense that he would know what to do. ‘We’re over here,’ she said, her voice clotted with crying.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I fell down the blasted step,’ said Cecil in a drawl. ‘I seem to have trodden on your sister.’

  Hubert stood there, in silhouette, conveying an indignant but undecided impression. ‘Can you walk?’ he said, very distinctly, as though speaking over the telephone.

  ‘Of course I can walk, we’re just coming in.’

  ‘It’s really a bit dark for rambling round,’ Hubert said.

  ‘That was the point,’ said Cecil. ‘We were studying the stars.’

  Hubert peered upwards doubtfully. ‘It’s a bit cloudy for that,’ he said, and turned back to the house.

  Daphne lay first on one side, then on the other side, tired out by her thoughts and kept alert by them too. Her right foot throbbed impressively in evidence, and was already bruising.

  Sometimes she drifted sideways into near-unconsciousness, but woke at once with a sprint of the heart at the thought of Cecil’s closeness, his strength and his breath. His body was exceptionally hard, his breath warm, moist and bitter.

  Cecil was drunk, of course, she’d seen two bottles of wine emptied at dinner, the hock it was, with the black German lettering. Daphne knew what drink did to people, and after Friday night, and her own tipsy episode with the ginger brandy, she knew something more about the strange freedoms of drinkers. They were intriguing, but unnecessary, and the truth was they were generally somewhat revolting. Afterwards one didn’t talk about them, out of the vague sense of shame that attached to them. One sobered up. Cecil would surely have a headache in the morning, but he would get over it. Her mother was often absurd at bedtime, but perfectly sensible again by breakfast. It would probably be a mistake to make too much of it.

  And yet the whole thing showed Cecil in a very poor light, or half-light . . . so much of their dealings had happened in the dark, and if she saw him at all it was by the glow of a cigar end or the faint glimmer of the suburban night. When he’d come he’d put them all on their mettle by his sheer distinction, his cutting voice, his cleverness and money. And now, as she rolled on to her other side in excited despair of ever sleeping, she wondered just what George would say if he were told the extraordinary unwholesome thing his friend had tried to do. And she went through it all in her mind again, in the order it had happened, to savour the shock of it properly.

  Well, she wasn’t naïve, she knew perfectly well that the upper classes could behave appallingly. Perhaps George should be told what his precious friend was really like. Though perhaps she would keep it to herself, with the choice then of bringing out the facts on some later occasion. It soon seemed more adult not to make a fuss. She started thinking about Lord Pettifer in The Silver Charger, and her mind chasing and confirming and losing the story in the vivid fragments of memory she wandered off through lighted rooms into the welcoming jabber of dreams but then almost grunted herself awake, and lurched at once into a seventh or eighth rehearsal of her own story, in the garden with Cecil Valance.

  With each retelling, the story, with its kernel of scandal, made her heart race a fraction less, and its imagined impact on George, or her mother, or Olive Watkins, their fury and bewilderment, grew stronger in compensation. Daphne felt the warm flood of the story surge through her and grip her whole person; but each time the wave seemed a little weaker than the time before, and her reasonable relief at this gradual change was coloured with a tinge of indignation.

  Or could that be what kissing was really about? It seemed more like some childish dare, to stick your tongue into someone else’s mouth, and took a good deal of forbearance on their part, even if they liked you a lot. Alas there was no one she could ask. If she brought it up with her mother she would instantly grow suspicious. Could Hubert conceivably have kissed a woman like that? Maybe George, if he did have a girl, had had a go at it. She imagined asking him, and the secret fact of it having happened with his best friend made the idea slyly amusing.

  What she was almost conscious of not thinking of was the way he had rubbed himself rhythmically against her. All her feelings were fixed on the easier, and after all rather comic, liberties of licking her mouth and feeling her bottom.

  Later she found she had slept, and the dream she had just come out of kept its magic as she lay with open eyes in the deep grey dark. Then she thought she had been a silly child before. ‘Child, child’ he had called her, and that’s what she was. She thought about what Cecil had actually said, how it had been so wonderful getting to know her, and she flopped on to her back and wondered quite coolly if he had fallen in love with her. She gazed at the shadowy zone of the ceiling, the first powdery gleam of light above the curtains, as a sort of image of her own innocence. What evidence was there? Cecil had a very particular way of looking at her, even when others were present, of holding her eye at moments in their talk, so that another unspoken conversation seemed also to be going on. She had never known such a thing before, the boldness and the absolute privateness as well. It was still rather awful that Cecil had gone behind George’s back like that, but she felt a certain thrilled complacency at the choice he had secretly made. And of course he had to do it like this, his love had to be concealed, and it had to come out. There was something very touching as well as alarming in Cecil’s passion. Now she leapt forgivingly over the muddle in the garden, and thought of the life they would share together. Would he want to do that kind of thing again? Not when they were married, presumably. And another perspective of lighted spaces opened before her: she saw herself sitting down to dinner beneath the jelly-mould domes, or anyway compartments, of Corley Court.

  She slept unusually late, slept on with only a momentary murmur and swallow through the rustling and bumping on the landing, the fact of voices downstairs; and when she at last came up into fuddled life her little clock said a quarter to nine. After that, and a further helpless three minutes of gaping sleep, she found she had attuned to something, to the loss of something she was amazed to find she had already grown used to, the noise of Cecil in the house. Of course he had gone! There was a thinness in the air that told her, in the tone of the morning, the texture of the servants’ movements and fragments of talk. And all her plans for him were thwarted, the witty thing she was going to say to him, as he climbed into Horner’s van . . . It would be weeks, perhaps months, before she saw him again. Moaning with a lover’s pangs, as well as with a certain sulky relief at this tragic postponement, she thrust herself out of bed, and on to her instantly tender right foot.

  In the thick of her solitary
breakfast, with the maid looking in once a minute to see if she’d finished, there was George coming past the window, back home from the station and seeing Cecil off. He had a bleak, faraway look which annoyed her the moment she saw it and felt its meaning. It was a time of reckoning for him – his guest, his first one ever, had left, and now the family could take him back and tell him, more or less, what they thought. He would be moody and delicate, unsure who to side with. And then she remembered her book. Oh, what had Cecil done with it? Had he written in it? Where had he put it? She was suddenly sick with anger at Jonah for packing it with Cecil’s other books. Even now it would be trapped unbeknownst between other books in his suitcase, in a crowd of other cases on Harrow and Wealdstone station.

  ‘Oh, Veronica,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry, miss!’ said Veronica.

  ‘No, not that,’ said Daphne. ‘Did you see, did Mr Valance leave anything for me, my autograph book, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, no, miss.’ And knotting her duster in a pretence of interest, ‘Is that the one with the vicar in?’

  ‘What . . . ?’ said Daphne. ‘Well, it has a number of important men in it.’ She didn’t quite trust Veronica, who was more or less her own age, and treated her more or less like a fool.

  ‘I’ll ask, miss, shall I?’ Veronica said. But then George looked round the door, gave a rueful smile, and said,

  ‘Cecil says goodbye.’ He hovered there, feeling the atmosphere, seeming uncertain whether to share the subject of Cecil any further with his sister.

  ‘I’m afraid I slept somewhat badly,’ said Daphne, aware of her own adult tone. ‘And then I must have overslept . . .’

  ‘He was up fearfully early,’ said George. ‘You know Cecil!’

  ‘Perhaps Mr George has got it, miss,’ said Veronica.

  ‘Oh, really, it doesn’t matter,’ said Daphne, and coloured at the disclosure of her private worry.

  ‘Got what?’ said George, with an anxious look of his own.

  So Daphne had to say to him, ‘I wondered if Cecil had found a chance to write in my little album, that’s all.’

  ‘I expect he wrote something or other. Cess is rarely at a loss for words.’

  ‘I expect he’s left it somewhere,’ Daphne said, and spread some butter on her toast, though really her smothered anxiety had squeezed up her appetite to nothing. She looked at her brother with a cold smile. ‘So what are you doing today, George?’ she said, conscious of denying him a talk on the obvious subject.

  ‘Eh? Oh, I’ll find something,’ he said, with a hint of pathos. He was leaning against the doorpost, neither in nor out, the maid sidling past him back into the hall. Daphne saw him decide to speak, and as he started airily, ‘No, it was a shame Cecil couldn’t stay longer . . .’ she said. ‘I’ve invited Olive for tea tomorrow, I haven’t seen her since they got back from Dawlish.’ She knew Olive Watkins was small beer after Cecil, and Dawlish after the Dolomites, and she felt ashamed and almost sad as well as defiant in mentioning her. But she couldn’t indulge George in his present mood. It rubbed up too closely against her own.

  ‘Oh, have you . . .’ said George, startled and bored. Daphne saw she’d produced a particular kind of family atmosphere, and that itself was depressing after the wider horizons of Cecil’s visit. Also, she really wanted her book back, to show Olive whatever it was that Cecil had written. This had been her main purpose in asking her to tea.

  Then Veronica, with her own bored persistence, looked back in and said, ‘I asked Jonah, miss. He’s having a look.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Daphne, feeling oppressed now by the public nature of the search.

  ‘Jonah’s looking in his room now. I mean he’s looking in Mr Valance’s room!’

  And George, without saying anything more, drifted away, and then Daphne heard him going, rather stealthily she thought, upstairs as well, two at a time. She told herself, without fully believing it, that probably, after all, Cecil would have put nothing but his name and the date.

  A minute later George came back down, with Jonah at his heels, and Daphne’s mauve album open in his hands. ‘My word, sis . . .’ he said abstractedly, turning the page and continuing to read; ‘he’s certainly done you proud!’

  ‘What is it?’ said Daphne, pushing back her chair but determined to keep her dignity, almost to seem indifferent. Not just his name, then: she could see it was much, much more – now that the book was here, open, in the room, she felt quite frightened at the thought of what might come out of it.

  ‘The gentleman left it in the room,’ said Jonah, looking from one to the other of them.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Daphne. George was blinking slowly and softly biting his lower lip in concentration. He might have been pondering how to break some rather awkward news to her, as he came and sat down across from her, placing the book on the table, then turning the pages back to start again. ‘Well, when you’ve finished,’ Daphne said tartly, but also with reluctant respect. What Cecil had written was poetry, which took longer to read, and his handwriting wasn’t of the clearest.

  ‘Goodness,’ said George, and looked up at her with a firm little smile. ‘I think you should feel thoroughly flattered.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Daphne. ‘Should I?’ It seemed George was determined to master the poem and its secrets before he let her see a word of it.

  ‘No, this is quite something,’ he said, shaking his head as he ran back over it. ‘You’re going to have to let me copy this out for myself.’

  Daphne drained her teacup completely, folded her napkin, glanced across at the two servants, who were smiling stupidly at the successful retrieval of the book, and also formed a somewhat inhibiting audience to this agitating crisis in her life, and then said, as lightly as she could, ‘Don’t be such a tease, George, let me see.’ Of course it was a tease, the latest of thousands, but it was more than that, and she knew resentfully that George couldn’t help it.

  ‘Sorry, old girl,’ he said, and sat back at last, and slid the album towards her.

  ‘Thank you!’ said Daphne.

  ‘If you could see your face,’ said George.

  She pushed her plate aside – ‘Will you take all this, please,’ to the maid; who did so, with gaping slowness, peering at the columns of Cecil’s black script as though they confirmed a rather dubious opinion she’d formed of him. ‘Thank you,’ said Daphne again sharply; and frowned and coloured, unable to take in a word of the poem. She had to find out at once what George meant, that she should be flattered. Was this it, the sudden helpless breaking of the news? Perhaps not, or George would have said something more. The harder she looked at it, the less she knew. Well, it was called, simply, ‘Two Acres’, and it ran on over five pages, both sides of the paper – she flicked back and forth.

  ‘Formally, it’s rather simple,’ said George, ‘for Cecil.’

  ‘Well, quite,’ said Daphne.

  ‘Just regular tetrameter couplets.’

  ‘That will be all,’ said Daphne, and waited while Veronica and Jonah went off. Really they were most irritating. She flicked further back for a moment, to the Revd Barstow, with his scholarly flourish, ‘B. A. Dunelm’; and then forward to Cecil, who had broken all the rules of an autograph book with his enormous entry, and made everyone else look so feeble and dutiful. It was unmannerly, and she wasn’t sure if she resented it or admired it. His writing grew smaller and faster as it sloped down the page. On the first page the bottom line turned up sideways at the end to fit in – ‘Chaunticleer’, she read, which was a definite poetry word, though she wasn’t precisely sure of its meaning.

  ‘I suppose he’ll be publishing it somewhere,’ said George, ‘the Westminster Review or somewhere.’

  ‘Do you think?’ said Daphne, as levelly as she could, but with a quick strong feeling that the poem was hers after all. Cecil hadn’t just written it here, in her book, by chance. She was still trying to see if it said things about her personally, or if it was simply about the house – and the
garden:

  The Jenny nettle by the wall,

  That some the Devil’s Play-thing call –

  that was a conversation she’d had with him – now quite simply turned into poetry. Her father had called stinging nettles Devil’s Play-things, it was what they called them in Devon. She felt thrilled, and a little bewildered, at being in on the very making of a poem, and at something else magical, like seeing oneself in a photograph. What else would be revealed?

  The book left out beneath the trees,

  Read over backwards by the breeze.

  The spinney where the lisping larches

  Kiss overhead in silver arches

  And in their shadows lovers too

  Might kiss and tell their secrets through.

  Again the minutely staggered and then breathtaking merging of word, image and fact. She was really going to have to read this somewhere apart, in private. ‘I think it would be most appropriate to read this in the garden,’ she said, getting up and feeling very slightly sick; but just then her mother appeared in the doorway, with her heavy morning face, and her bright morning manner. In fact her manner was flustered; there was something behind her smile. Word must already have got through. Beyond her Veronica loitered, the informer.

  ‘Well, child . . . !’ her mother said, and gave Daphne a strange, eager look. ‘What excitements.’

  ‘Everyone can see it when I’ve finished reading it,’ said Daphne. ‘People seem to be forgetting that it’s my book.’

  ‘Well, of course, dear,’ said her mother, going round the table and opening a window as if to show she had other useful things to do; and then, ‘You’ve obviously made quite an impression . . . on him’ – not using Cecil’s name, out of some awful delicacy. She gave Daphne a teasing glance that had something new to it – a sense of girding herself for some welcome parental obligation.

  ‘Mother, he was only here for three nights,’ said George, almost crossly. ‘All Cecil has done, with his customary generosity, is to write a poem about our house as a thank-you for the visit.’