The Stranger's Child Page 3

  ‘Indeed he is,’ said Cecil. ‘He’s seen his Cattle Feeds and Cattle Care go into a fourth edition, the most successful literary production of the Valance family by far.’

  ‘So far, you mean,’ said George.

  ‘And does your mother share his views on hunting?’ asked Mrs Sawle teasingly, perhaps not sure whom to side with.

  ‘Oh, Lord, no – no, she’s all for killing. She likes me to get out with a gun when I can, though we keep it from my papa as much as possible. I’m quite a fair shot,’ said Cecil, and with another sly glance round in the candlelight, to see that he had them all: ‘The General sent me out with a gun when I was quite small, to kill a whole lot of rooks that were making a racket – I brought down four of them . . .’

  ‘Really . . . ?’ said Daphne, while George waited for the next line –

  ‘But I wrote a poem about them the following day.’

  ‘Ah! well . . .’ – again, they didn’t quite know what to think; while George quickly explained that the General was what they called Cecil’s mother, feeling keenly embarrassed both by the fact and by the pretence that he hadn’t told them this before.

  ‘I should have explained,’ said Cecil. ‘My mother’s a natural leader of men. But she’s a sweet old thing once you get to know her. Wouldn’t you say, George?’

  George thought Lady Valance the most terrifying person he’d ever met, dogmatic, pious, inexcusably direct, and immune to all jokes, even when explained to her; her sons had learned to treasure her earnestness as a great joke in itself. ‘Well, your mother devotes most of her time and energy to good works, doesn’t she,’ George said, with wary piety of his own.

  With the serving of the main course and a new wine, George suddenly felt it was going well, what had loomed as an unprecedented challenge was emerging a modest success. Clearly they all admired Cecil, and George’s confidence in his friend’s complete mastery of what to say and do outran his terror of his doing or saying something outrageous, even if simply intended to amuse. At Cambridge Cecil was frequently outrageous, and as for his letters – the things he wrote in letters appeared dimly to George now as a troupe of masked figures, Pompeian obscenities, hiding just out of view behind the curtains, and in the shadows of the inglenook. But for the moment all was well. Rather like the deep in Tennyson’s poem, Cecil had many voices . . . George’s toe sought out his friend’s now and again, and was received with a playful wriggle rather than a jab. He worried about his mother drinking too much, but the claret was a good one, much commended by Hubert, and a convivial mood, of a perceptibly new kind for ‘Two Acres’, suffused the whole party. Only his sister’s stares and grins at Cecil, and her pert way of putting her head on one side, could really annoy him. Then to his horror he heard Mrs Kalbeck say, ‘And I understand you and George are members of an ancient society!’

  ‘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.

  6

  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.

  ‘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.

  She went a few steps towards the clump of trees where the hammock was slung. She didn’t know if she’d been seen. It was oddly like the minute of uncertainty before, in the wood, when Cecil had just arrived, and she couldn’t tell if she was spying. Now, though, it was far too dark for spying. She heard Cecil say something funny about a moustache, ‘quite an adorable moustache’; George murmured something and Cecil said, ‘I suppose he wears it to make himself look older, but of course it has just the opposite effect, he looks like a boy playing hide and seek.’ ‘Hmm . . . I’m not sure anyone’s seeking especially,’ said George. ‘Well . . .’ said Cecil, and there was a little stifled rumpus of giggles and grunts that went on for ten seconds, till George said, rather loudly, gasping for breath, ‘No, no, besides, Hubert’s a womanizer through and through.’