The Stranger's Child Read online

  Now he unbuckled straps and lifted tissue-paper with hesitant fingers. Though he needed help, he was glad he was alone. The case had been packed by some expert servant, by Wilkes himself perhaps, and seemed to Jonah to call for some similar skill in the unpacking. There was an evening suit with two waistcoats, one black and one fancy, and then under the tissue-paper three dress-shirts and a round leather box for the collars. Jonah saw himself in the wardrobe mirror as he carried the clothes across the room, and saw his shadow, from the lamp on the bedside table, go rearing across the slope of the ceiling. George said Wilkes had done a particular thing, which was to take away all his loose change when he arrived and wash it for him. Jonah wondered how he was going to get the change off Cecil without asking for it or appearing to steal it. It occurred to him that George might possibly have been joking, but with George these days, as even Mrs Sawle had said, it was hard to tell.

  In the second case there were clothes for cricket and swimming, and a number of soft, coloured shirts which Jonah thought were unusual. He spaced them out equally on the available shelves, like a display in a draper’s. Then there was the body linen, fine as a lady’s, the drawers ivory-coloured, vaguely shiny, catching on the roughness of his thumb before he stroked them flat again. He listened for a moment for the tone of the talk downstairs, then took the chance he had been given to unfold a pair and hold them up against his round young face so that the light glowed through them. The pulse of excitement beating under his anxiety made the blood rush into his head.

  The lid of the case was heavy; it had two wide pockets in it, closed with press-studs, and holding books and papers. Jonah took these out with a little more confidence, knowing from George that his guest was a writing man. He himself could write neatly, and could read almost anything, given the time. The handwriting, in the first book Jonah opened, was very bad, and ran uphill at an angle, with the gs and ys tangling the lines together. This appeared to be a diary. Another book, rubbed at the corners like the cash-book in the kitchen, had what must be poems in it. ‘Oh do not smile on me if at the last’ Jonah made out, the words quite large, but then after a few lines, where the crossing-out began, getting smaller and scratchier, sloping away across the page until they were crowded and climbing over each other in the bottom right-hand corner. There were dog-eared bits of paper tucked in, and an envelope addressed to ‘Cecil Valance Esqre, King’s College’ in the careful writing which he knew at once to be George’s. He heard rapid steps on the stairs and Cecil calling out, ‘Hallo, which is my room?’

  ‘In here, sir,’ said Jonah, pushing the letter back and quickly squaring up the books on the table.

  ‘Aha, are you my man?’ said Cecil, suddenly possessing the room.

  ‘Yes, I am, sir,’ said Jonah, with a momentary sense of betrayal.

  ‘I shan’t need you much,’ Cecil said, ‘in fact you can leave me alone in the morning,’ taking off his jacket at once and passing it to Jonah, who hung it up in the wardrobe without touching on the stained elbows. He planned to come back later, when they were having dinner, and deal with the dirty clothes unseen. He was going to be very much involved with all Cecil’s things until Monday morning. ‘Now, what shall I call you?’ said Cecil, almost as if choosing from a list in his head.

  ‘I’m Jonah, sir.’

  ‘Jonah, eh . . . ?’ The name sometimes led to remarks, and Jonah started rearranging the books on the table, unsure if they showed in some way that he’d looked inside them. After a moment Cecil said,‘Now those are my poetry notebooks. You must make sure you never touch them.’

  ‘Very well, sir,’ said Jonah. ‘Did you want them unpacked, then?’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s all right,’ said Cecil fair-mindedly. He tugged his tie off, and started unbuttoning his shirt. ‘Been with the family long?’

  ‘Since last Christmas, sir.’

  Cecil smiled vaguely, as if he’d forgotten the question by the time it was answered, and said, ‘Funny little room, isn’t it.’ Since Jonah didn’t answer, he added, ‘Rather charming, though, rather charming,’ with his yap of a laugh. Jonah had the strange feeling of being intimate with someone who was simultaneously unaware of him. In a way it was what you looked for, as a servant. But he had never been kept in talk in any of the other, smaller, bedrooms. He peered respectfully at the floor, feeling he mustn’t be caught looking at Cecil’s naked shoulders and chest. Now Cecil took out the change from his pocket and slapped it on the wash-stand; Jonah glanced at it and bit his cheek. ‘And will you run me a bath,’ said Cecil, undoing his belt and wriggling his hips to make his trousers fall down.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Jonah, ‘at once, sir,’ and slipped past him with a pang of relief.

  4

  Hubert forwent his bath that evening, and had what he felt was an unsatisfactory wash in his room. He wanted their guest to admire the house, and took some pleasure in hearing the tremendous splashes coming from next door; but he frowned as well, as he tied his tie in the mirror, at the virtual certainty that the sacrifice of his own half-hour in the tub would go unrecognized.

  Having some time to spare, he went downstairs to the gloomy little room by the front door, which had been his father’s office, and where Hubert too liked to write his letters. In truth he had very little private correspondence, and was dimly aware of not having the knack of it. When there was a letter to write, he did it with businesslike promptness. Now he sat down at the oak desk, fished his new gift from his dinner-jacket pocket, and laid it on the blotter with faint unease.

  He took a sheet of headed paper from a drawer, dipped his pen in the pewter ink-well and wrote, in a rolling, backward-leaning hand:

  My dear old Harry –

  I can never thank you enough for the silver cigarette case. It’s an absolute ripper, Harry old boy. I have told no one about it yet but will hand it round after dinner & just watch their faces! You are too generous, I’m sure no one ever had such a friend Harry. Well, it is nearly dinner-time, & we have a young friend of George’s staying, a poet! You will meet him tomorrow, when you come over, he looks the part I must say though I have read not a word from his pen! Tons of thanks, Harry old boy, & best love from yours ever,

  Hubert.

  Hubert turned the paper over on the blotter and thumped it tenderly with his fist. By writing large he had got the final few words on to the third side of the small folded sheet, which was a sign one hadn’t merely written dutifully; the letter ran on pleasantly, and reading it over again he felt satisfied with the touches of humour. He tucked it into an envelope, wrote ‘Harry Hewitt Esq., Mattocks, Harrow Weald’ and ‘By Hand’ in the corner, and placed it on the tray in the hall for Jonah to take over in the morning. He stood looking at it for a moment, struck by the solemn rightness of living just here, and of Harry living where he did, and of letters passing between them with such noble efficiency.

  5

  George was the last to come down, and even so he stopped on the stairs for a minute. They were almost ready. He saw the housemaid cross the hall with a salt-cellar, caught the odour of cooked fish, heard Cecil’s high overriding laugh, and felt the chill of his own act of daring, bringing this man into his mother’s house. Then he thought of what Cecil had said to him in the park, in the half-hour they had made for themselves by pretending he’d missed his train, and felt his scalp, his shoulders, his whole spine prickle under the sweeping, secret promise. He tiptoed down and slipped into the drawing-room with a nearly dizzy-making sense of the dangers ahead. ‘Ah, George,’ murmured his mother, with a hint of reproach; he shrugged and smirked slightly as if his only offence had been to keep them waiting. Hubert, with his back to the empty grate, had ensnared them all in talk about local transport. ‘So you were stranded at Harrow and Wealdstone, eh?’ He beamed over his raised champagne glass, as proud of the rigours of life in Stanmore as he was of the blessings.

  ‘Didn’t matter a bit,’ said Cecil, catching George’s eye and smiling curiously.

  ‘As a wit
once said, it sounds like some medieval torture. Harrow and wealdstone – can’t you just see it!’

  ‘Oh, spare me the wealdstone!’ said Daphne.

  ‘We’re devoted to Harrow and Wealdstone, whatever a wit may have said,’ said his mother.

  George stood for a moment with his hand pressed flat against Cecil’s lower back and gazed into his friend’s glass. He wiggled his fingers to play the secret notes of apology and promise. ‘Well the Valance motto,’ Cecil said, ‘is “Seize the Day”. We were brought up not to waste time. You’d be amazed what one can find to do, even at a suburban railway station.’ He gave them all his happiest smile, and when Daphne said, ‘What sort of things do you mean?’ he carried on smiling as if he hadn’t heard her.

  ‘I gather you came up through the Priory,’ said Hubert, genially determined to follow every step of his journey.

  ‘Yes, indeed we did,’ said Cecil, very smoothly.

  ‘You know Queen Adelaide used to live there,’ said Hubert, with a quick frown to show he didn’t want to make a big thing of it.

  ‘So I gather,’ said Cecil, his glass empty already.

  ‘Later I believe it was a very excellent hotel,’ said Mrs Kalbeck.

  ‘And now a school,’ said Hubert, with a bleak little snuffle.

  ‘A sad fate!’ said Daphne.

  Jesus Christ! thought George, though all he came out with as he crossed the room was a sort of distracted chuckle. He poured himself the last of the bottle of Pommery, and glanced into the window, where the lamplit room was reflected, idealized and doubled in size, spread invitingly across the dark garden. His hand was trembling, and he kept his back to them as he picked up the fullish glass, steadying it with the other hand. It was impossible to imagine such a weakness in Cecil, and a consciousness of this added subtly to George’s shame. He turned and looked at them, and they seemed all to be looking at him, as if they had gathered at his request, and were waiting for his explanation. All he had intended was a quiet family supper, to introduce his friend. Of course he hadn’t reckoned on old Kalbeck, who seemed to think ‘Two Acres’ itself was a hotel – it was really the limit how she’d fished, in her cunning oblivious way, for an invitation to stay on, his mother magnanimously lending her a wrap and dabbing her in her own familiar Coty scent. Now he watched with horror as she questioned Cecil about the Dolomites, her head on one side; her great brown teeth made her smiles both gauche and menacing. But a minute or two later Cecil was yarning with her in German, and almost making a virtue of her presence. Cecil, of course, lived in Berkshire: there was little danger of Frau Kalbeck turning up just before meals at Corley Court. He spoke German nicely, keeping an amused pedantic eye on the slowly approaching end of his sentences. When the maid announced dinner, Mrs Kalbeck made it seem like an unexpected intrusion on their happy meeting of minds.

  ‘Will you sit here, Mrs Kalbeck,’ Hubert was saying, standing by his chair at the head of the table and smiling thinly as he watched them find their places. George smiled too, a little disconcerted from his glass of champagne. He felt a twinge of shame and regret at having no father, and forever having to make do. Perhaps it was just the memory of Corley, with its enormous oriental dining-room, that made the present party seem cramped and airless. Cecil stooped as he entered the room, in a possibly unconscious gesture to the cosiness of scale at ‘Two Acres’. A father like Cecil’s set a reassuring tone for a dinner, being very rich and an authority on shorthorn cattle. He had immense grey side-whiskers, brushed outwards, and themselves like a pair of brushes. Hubert was twenty-two, and wore a soft red moustache; he went to an office every day by train. This of course was what their own father had done, and George tried to picture him in Hubert’s chair, ten years older than when he’d seen him last; but the image was blurred and unavailing, like any much-handled memory, the pale blue eyes soon lost among the flowers and candles crowding the table.

  Even so, his mother was very pretty, and really a great beauty compared to Lady Valance, ‘The General’, as Cecil and his brother called her, or sometimes ‘The Iron Duke’, on account of her very faint resemblance to the first Duke of Wellington. Tonight Freda was wearing her amethyst drops, and her red-gold hair seemed to glimmer, like the candle-lit wine in her glass. The General naturally was a strict teetotaller – and now George wondered if Cecil himself had been shocked to see his hostess drinking before dinner? Well, he’d have to get used to it. They were doing things in their best festive style for him, the napkins belaboured into lilies, the small silver items, bowls and boxes of uncertain use, polished up and set down between the glasses and candle-sticks. George reached forward and moved slightly to the left a vase of white roses and trailing ivy that obstructed his view of Cecil opposite. Cecil held his eye for a long moment – he felt the jolt of simultaneous danger and reassurance pass through him. Then he watched his friend blink slowly and turn to answer Daphne on his right.

  ‘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.’