The Stranger's Child Page 4

  A womanizer . . . ! The word lay, sinuous and poisonous, in the shadowy borders of Daphne’s vocabulary. For a moment she pictured it, and behind it a vaguer image still, of a man dancing with a woman in a low-cut dress. The drunkenness of her own evening was lurchingly intensified in this imaginary room, where it was really the woman she saw, and certainly not Hubert, who was quite the most awkward figure when it came to dancing. A strange silence fell, in which she heard her own pulse in her ear. Part of her, she realized, needed to learn more. Then, ‘What is it, Daphne?’ said George.

  ‘Oh, are you here?’ she said, and she pushed on, under the low branches that screened the hammock on that side. ‘I’ve left my books out here, in the dew.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t seen them,’ said George, and she heard the hammock rope shift and creak against the tree.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t have seen them, of course, because it’s the night.’ She laughed mockingly and slid her foot forward over the invisible ground. ‘But I know where they are. I can picture them.’

  ‘All right,’ said George.

  She edged forward again, and could just make out the slump of the hammock as it tilted and steadied. Again, she stooped to pat the grass, and half fell forward, startled and amused by her own tipsiness. ‘Isn’t Cecil with you?’ she said artfully.

  ‘Ha . . . !’ said Cecil softly, just above her, and pulled on his cigar – she looked up and saw the scarlet burn of its tip and beyond it, for three seconds, the shadowed gleam of his face. Then the tip twitched away and faded and the darkness teemed in to where his features had been, while the sharp dry odour floated wide.

  ‘Are you both in the hammock!’ She stood up straight, with a sense that she’d been tricked, or anyway overlooked, in this new game they were making up. She reached out a hand for the webbing, where it fanned towards their feet. It would be very easy, and entertaining, to rock them, or even tip them out; though she felt at the same time a simple urge to climb in with them. She had shared the hammock with her mother, when she was smaller, and being read to; now she was mindful of the hot cigar. ‘Well, I must say,’ she said. The cigar tip, barely showing, dithered in the air like some dimly luminous bug and then glowed into life again, but now it was George’s face that she saw in its faint devilish light. ‘Oh, I thought it was Cecil’s cigar,’ she said simply.

  George chortled in three quick huffs of smoke. And Cecil cleared his throat – somehow supportively and appreciatively. ‘So it was,’ said George, in his most paradoxical tone. ‘I’m smoking Cecil’s cigar too.’

  ‘Oh really . . .’ said Daphne, not knowing what tone to give the words. ‘Well, I shouldn’t let Mother find out.’

  ‘Oh, most young men smoke,’ said George.

  ‘Oh, do they?’ she said, deciding sarcasm was her best option. She watched, pained and tantalized, as the next glow showed up a hint of Cecil’s cheeks and watchful eyes through a fading puff of smoke. Quite without warning The Flying Dutchman began again, startlingly loud through the open windows.

  ‘God! What’s that, the third time . . . !’ said George.

  ‘Lord,’ said Cecil. ‘They are keen.’

  ‘It’s Kalbeck, of course,’ George said, as though to exonerate the Sawles themselves from such obsessive behaviour. ‘God knows what the Cosgroves must think.’

  ‘Mother loved Wagner long before she met Mrs Kalbeck,’ said Daphne.

  ‘We all love Wagner, darling. But he’s quite repetitious enough on his own account without playing the same record ten times.’

  ‘It’s Senta’s Ballad,’ Daphne said, not immune to it herself this third time, in fact suddenly more moved by it out in the open, as if it were in the air itself, a part of nature, and wanting them all to listen and share in it. The orchestra sounded better from here, like a real band heard at a distance, and Emmy Destinn seemed even more wild and intense. For a moment she pictured the lit house behind them as a ship in the night. ‘Cecil,’ she said fondly, using his name for the first time, ‘I expect you understand the words.’

  ‘Ja, ja, clear as mud,’ said Cecil, with a friendly though disconcerting snort.

  ‘She’s a mad girl in love with a man she’s never seen,’ said George, ‘and the man is under a curse and can only be redeemed by a woman’s love. And she rather fancies being that woman. There you are.’

  ‘One feels no good will come of it,’ said Cecil.

  ‘Oh, but listen . . .’ said Daphne.

  ‘Would you like a go?’ said Cecil.

  Daphne, taking in what she’d just been told about Senta, leant on the rope. ‘In the hammock . . . ?’

  ‘On the cigar.’

  ‘Really . . .’ murmured George, a little shocked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so!’

  Cecil took an exemplary pull on it. ‘I know girls aren’t meant to have them.’

  Now the lovely tune was pulsing through the garden, full of yearning and defiance and the heightened effect of beauty encountered in an unexpected setting. She really didn’t want the cigar, but she was worried by the thought of missing a chance at it. It was something none of her friends had done, she was pretty sure of that.

  ‘No, it is a fine song,’ said Cecil, and she heard how his words were a little slurred and careless. Now the cigar was being passed to George again.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I mean, yes, please.’

  She leant on George and felt the whole hammock shudder, and held his arm firmly to take the item, taboo and already slightly disgusting, from between his thumb and forefinger. By now she could half-see the two boys squashed together, rather absurd, drunk of course, but also solid and established, like a long-ago memory of her parents sitting up in bed. She had the smell of the thing near her face, almost coughed before she tasted it, and then pinched her lips quickly round it, with a feeling of shame and duty and regret.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, thrusting it away from her and coughing harshly at the tiny inrush of smoke. The bitter smoke was horrible, but so was the unexpected feel of the thing, dry to the fingers but wet and decomposing on the lips and tongue. George took it from her with a vaguely remorseful laugh. When she’d coughed again she turned and did a more unladylike thing and spat on the grass. She wanted the whole thing out of her system. She was glad of the dark, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Beyond her, in the friendly familiar house, Emmy Destinn was still singing, in noble ignorance of Daphne’s behaviour.

  ‘Want another puff?’ said Cecil, as though satisfied with her reaction to the first.

  ‘I think not!’ said Daphne.

  ‘You’ll like the second one much more.’

  ‘That seems unlikely.’

  ‘And the third one will be better still.’

  ‘And before you know where you are,’ said George, ‘you’ll be strolling through Stanmore with a pongy old cheroot clamped between your teeth.’

  ‘Don’t I detect Miss Sawle’s cigar?’ said Cecil facetiously.

  ‘That would never happen,’ said Daphne.

  But she was really very happy after all, standing there, peering somewhat speculatively into the smoky darkness. ‘Is ginger brandy considered a strong drink?’ she was saying. It must be the drink that gave this lovely spontaneity to things, so that she spoke or moved without deciding to do so.

  ‘Oh dear, Daph,’ said George. And before she knew what she’d done, she was heaving herself, gasping and laughing, onto the near end of the hammock, where the boys’ feet were.

  ‘Mind out!’ said George. ‘That’s my foot . . .’

  ‘You’ll break the blasted thing,’ said Cecil.

  ‘For God’s sake . . . !’ said George, tilting sideways in the effort to leap out, and in a second she was jolted on to the ground, Cecil was tumbling, his foot caught her, rather hard, between the ribs.

  ‘Ow!’ she said, and then ‘ow . . .’ but she despised the shock and fright; she was laughing again as the boys reach
ed awkwardly for each other, and then she let herself be pulled up. She knew she had heard her shawl tearing as she fell, and that this was one part of the escapade she would not get away with; but again she didn’t terribly care.

  ‘Perhaps we should go in,’ said Cecil, ‘before something truly scandalous happens.’

  They shepherded each other out on to the lawn, with little pats and murmurs. George spent a moment tucking his shirt in and getting his trousers straight. ‘At Corley, of course, you have a smoking-room,’ he said. ‘This sort of thing could never happen.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Cecil solemnly. Emmy Destinn had finished, and in her place Daphne saw the figure of her mother coming to the lighted window and peering vainly out.

  ‘We’re all here!’ Daphne shouted. And in the darkness, under the millions of stars, with the boys on either side of her, she felt she could speak for them all; there was a hilarious safety that seemed a renewal of the pact they had made without speaking when Cecil arrived.

  ‘Well, hurry in,’ her mother said, in a hectic, ingenious tone. ‘I want Cecil to read to us.’

  ‘There you are,’ murmured Cecil, straightening his bow-tie. Daphne glanced up at him. George went responsibly ahead on the path, and as they followed behind him Cecil slipped his large hot hand around her, and left it there, just where he’d kicked her, until they reached the open french windows.

  7

  After breakfast next morning she found Cecil in a deckchair on the lawn, writing in a small brown book. She sat down too, on a nearby wall, keen to observe a poet at work, and just close enough to put him off; in a minute he turned and smiled and shut his book with the pencil in it. ‘What have you got there?’ he said.

  She was holding a small book of her own, an autograph album bound in mauve silk. ‘I don’t know if you can be prevailed upon,’ she said.

  ‘May I see?’

  ‘If you like you can just put your name. Though obviously . . .’

  Cecil’s long arm and blue-veined hand seemed to pull her to him. She presented the book with a blush and mixed feelings of pride and inadequacy. She said, ‘I’ve only been keeping it a year.’

  ‘So whom have you got?’

  ‘I’ve got Arthur Nikisch. I suppose he’s the best.’

  ‘Right-oh!’ said Cecil, with the delighted firmness that conceals a measure of uncertainty. She leant over the back of the deckchair to guide him to the page. He was like an uncle this morning, confidential without the least hint of intimacy. Last night’s rough-house, apparently, had never happened. She noticed again that smell he had, as if he’d always just got back from one of his rambles, or scrambles, which she pictured as fairly boisterous affairs. Oh, it was so typical of boys, they got on their dignity, they kept closing the door on some interesting scene they had let you witness a moment before. Though perhaps it was meant as a reproach to her, for last night’s foolery.

  ‘I got him when we went to The Rhinegold.’

  ‘Ah yes . . . He’s quite a big shot, isn’t he?’

  ‘Herr Nikisch? Well, he’s the conductor!’

  ‘No, I’ve heard of him,’ said Cecil. ‘You may as well know that I have a tin ear, by the way.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ said Daphne, and looked for a moment at Cecil’s left ear, which was brown and sunburnt on top. She said, ‘I should have thought a poet had a good ear,’ with a frown at the unexpected cleverness of her own words.

  ‘I can hear poems,’ said Cecil. ‘But all the Valances are tone-deaf, I’m afraid. The General’s almost queer about it. She went to The Gondoliers once, but she said never again. She thought it was never going to end.’

  ‘Well, she certainly wouldn’t like Wagner, in that case,’ said Daphne, rescuing a kindly superiority from her initial sense of disappointment. And still not quite sure she had got to the bottom of it, ‘Though you said you liked the gramophone last night.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t hate it, it’s just rather lost on me. I was enjoying the company.’ His ear coloured slightly at this, and she saw that perhaps she’d been given a compliment, and blushed a little herself. He said, ‘Did you care for the opera when you went?’

  ‘They had a new swimming apparatus for the Rhine-maidens, but I didn’t find it very convincing.’

  ‘It must be hard work swimming and singing at the same time,’ said Cecil, turning the page. ‘Now who’s this Byzantine fellow?’

  ‘That’s Mr Barstow.’

  ‘Should I know him?’

  ‘He’s the curate in Stanmore,’ said Daphne, unsure if they were both admiring the elaborate penwork.

  ‘I see . . . And now: Olive Watkins, you could read that at twenty paces.’

  ‘I didn’t really want to have her, as it’s supposed to be only adults, but she got me for hers.’ Underneath her signature Olive had written, with great force, ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed’, the indentations of the pen being readable on the following pages. ‘She has the best collection, certainly that I know,’ said Daphne. ‘She has Winston Churchill.’

  ‘My word . . .’ said Cecil respectfully.

  ‘I know.’

  Cecil turned a page or two. ‘But you’ve got Jebland, look. That’s special in another way.’

  ‘He’s my other best,’ Daphne admitted. ‘He only sent it me the week before his propeller broke. I’ve learned that you can’t wait with airmen. They’re not like other autographs. That’s how Olive lost Stefanelli.’

  ‘And does Olive have Jebland?’

  ‘No, she does not,’ said Daphne, trying to subdue the note of triumph to one of respect for the dead aviator.

  ‘I see it’s rather morbid,’ said Cecil. ‘You make me feel a little anxious.’

  ‘Oh, everyone else in it is still alive!’

  Cecil closed the book. ‘Well, leave it with me, and I promise I’ll think something up before I go.’

  ‘Do feel free to write some occasional verse.’ She came round the chair and stood looking at him full-face. He was fingering his own book again as he squinted up at her, smiling tensely against the light. She felt the momentary advantage she had over him, and gazed with a novel kind of licence at his parted lips and his strong brown neck where it emerged from his soft blue shirt. He was surely writing a poem now, the pencil was waiting in the cruck of the notebook. She felt she couldn’t ask about it. But nor could she let him alone. She said, ‘Have you seen over the garden?’

  ‘D’you know, I have. I rambled right round it with Georgie, first thing.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘Oh, long before you were up. I went and tipped him out of bed.’

  ‘I see . . .’

  ‘I’m a pagan, you see, and I worship the dawn. I’m trying to instil the cult in your brother.’

  ‘I wonder how you’ll get on.’ Cecil closed his eyes languidly as he smiled, so that she had a further sense of screened-off mysteries. ‘Perhaps tomorrow you could tip me out of bed too.’

  ‘Do you think your mother would approve?’

  ‘Oh, she won’t mind.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see.’

  ‘I could show you all kinds of things.’ She felt the grass with her hand before sitting down beside Cecil’s chair. ‘I can’t believe George showed you the whole of “Two Acres”.’

  ‘Well, possibly not . . .’ said Cecil, with a quick snigger.

  Daphne peered encouragingly at the view – the neat parched lawn, the little tor of the rockery, the line of dark firs that hid the Cosgroves’ potting-shed and motor-garage. To her the ‘Two’ in her house’s name had always been reassuring, a quietly emphatic boast to schoolfriends who lived in a town or a terrace, the proof of a generous over-provision. But in Cecil’s presence she felt the first shimmer of uncertainty. Sitting side by side, she hoped to make him share her view, but wondered if she hadn’t started sharing his instead. She said, ‘You know, the rockery was my father’s contribution.’

  ‘He must have put a good deal of work into it,’ said Cecil.

&
nbsp; ‘Yes, he worked terribly hard at it. Those large red stones came all the way from Devon – which of course he did!’

  ‘They will be a strange geological conundrum to later ages,’ said Cecil.

  ‘Yes, I suppose they will.’

  ‘They will be like the monoliths of Stonehenge.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Daphne, sensing teasing where she’d hoped for something better. She pressed on, ‘My father wasn’t artistic like my mother, but she gave him a free hand with the rockery. In a way it’s his monument.’

  Cecil stared at it with a chastened expression. ‘I suppose you don’t really remember your father,’ he said. ‘You must have been too young.’

  ‘Oh, I remember him quite well.’ She nodded up at him. ‘He used to come home from work, and have his Old Smuggler while I was in the bath.’

  ‘You mean he drank whisky in the bathroom?’

  ‘Yes, while he was telling me a story. We had a nanny of course, who used to bath me. Frankly, I think we had rather more money then, than we have now.’

  Cecil gave her the fleeting wince of merely abstract sympathy that she’d noticed already when it came to money or servants. ‘I can’t imagine my father doing that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, your father doesn’t go to work, does he.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Cecil, and giggled attractively.

  ‘Of course Huey works very hard. My mother says one of us needs to get married.’

  ‘Well, I’ve no doubt you will,’ said Cecil, his dark eyes holding hers and his eyebrow rising slightly for emphasis and a hint of amusement, so that her heart thumped and she hurried on,