The Stranger's Child Read online

  ‘One day, we’ll see. I dare say we all will.’ She wanted to say she had overheard them last night, and to tell him they were wrong, he and George: Hubert wasn’t a womanizer at all, he was really intensely respectable. But she was frightened by this unknown subject, and worried that she might have misunderstood.

  ‘I don’t think George has a particular girlfriend?’ said Cecil, after a minute.

  ‘We all thought you would know,’ she said, and then regretted the suggestion that they’d been talking about him. Something in Cecil of course demanded to be talked about. She tore up a few blades of grass, and glanced at him, feeling still the great novelty and interest of his presence. He shifted in the deckchair, crossed his right ankle on his left knee, a glimpse of brown calf. He was wearing white canvas shoes, scuffed at the heel. It would be amusing if they could explain George to each other behind his back. She said, ‘We all thought there might be someone when he started getting letters; but of course they were from you!’

  Cecil looked both pleased and embarrassed by this, and glanced over his shoulder at the house. ‘But what about your mother, do you think?’ he said, in a sudden sensitive tone. ‘She’s still quite young, and really most attractive. She might marry again herself. She must have many admirers . . . ?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so!’ Daphne frowned and blushed at the question. It was one thing to talk about poor George’s prospects, quite another to ask about those of a middle-aged lady whom he hardly knew. It was most inappropriate; and besides, the last thing she wanted was a stepfather. She pictured Harry Hewitt standing on her father’s rockery – worse, ordering its demolition. Though actually, almost certainly, they would all have to move to Mattocks, with its peculiar pictures and statues. She sat looking at Cecil’s white shoes, and thinking rather hard. He didn’t press her for an answer. She saw it was a new kind of talk, that she wasn’t quite ready for, like certain books, which were in English obviously, but too grown-up for her to understand. He said,

  ‘I didn’t mean to pry. You know how Georgie and I and all our lot are devils for speaking candidly.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me it’s none of my business.’

  ‘Well, there’s a man who’s coming to dinner tonight that I think likes my mother a lot,’ she said, and a sense of betrayal discoloured the following seconds.

  ‘Is this Harry?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she said, feeling her shame still more.

  ‘The man who gave you the gramophone.’

  ‘Oh, yes, well he’s given us all kinds of things. He’s given Hubert a gun, and . . . lots of things. The Complete Works of Sheridan.’

  ‘I imagine Huey might appreciate some of these gifts rather more than others,’ said Cecil, again familiar and casual.

  ‘Well . . . He gave me a dressing set, with a scent bottle, which I’m not old enough for, and silver-backed brushes.’

  ‘He sounds like Father Christmas,’ said Cecil; and with a hint of boredom, looking round, ‘What a jolly fellow.’

  ‘Hmm. He’s very generous, I suppose, but he’s not a bit jolly. You’ll see.’ She glanced up at him, still strangely indignant both with him and with Harry, but he was gazing at the top of the spinney, where they’d met last night, as if at something much more intriguing. ‘He goes to Germany a great deal, he does import-export, you know. He brings us back things.’

  ‘And you think all these presents are his way of . . . paying court to your mamma,’ said Cecil.

  ‘I fear so.’

  Cecil’s splendid profile, the autocratic nose and slightly bulbous eye, seemed poised for judgement; but when he turned and smiled she felt the sudden return of his attention and kindness. ‘But, my dear child, you’ve no need to fear unless you think she returns his feelings.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know . . . !’ She was flustered, by having come so far, and by this unexpected word child, which was what her mother herself called her, quite naturally, though often with a hint of criticism. She had got it last night, once or twice, when she was trying to make Cecil feel at home and asking him questions. He must have heard her say it. Now she felt some not quite nice rhetorical advantage had been taken of her – he’d humbled her at the very moment he was meant to be cheering her up.

  Cecil smiled. ‘I tell you what. I’ll have a good look at him, as a total outsider, and let you know what I think.’

  ‘All right . . .’ said Daphne, not at all sure about this compromise.

  ‘Ah!’ said Cecil, sitting forward in his chair. George was coming across the lawn, his jacket hooked over his shoulder, and whistling cheerily. Then he stood looking down at them, with a question hidden somewhere in his smile.

  ‘What is that thing you’re always whistling?’ said Daphne.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said George. ‘It’s a song my gyp sings, “When I sees you, my heart goes boomps-a-daisy”.’

  ‘Really . . . ! I’d have thought if you had to whistle, you’d have chosen something nice,’ and seeing a chance to bring them all back to the subject of last night – ‘such as The Flying Dutchman, for instance.’

  George pressed his hand to his heart and started on the lovely part of Senta’s Ballad, staring at her with his eyebrows raised and slowly shaking his head, as if to throw his own self-consciousness over to her. He had a sweet high swooping whistle, but he put in so much vibrato he made the song sound rather silly, and soon he couldn’t keep his lips together and the whistle became a breathy laugh.

  ‘Hah . . .’ muttered Cecil, seeming slightly uncomfortable, standing up and slipping his notebook into his jacket pocket. Then, with a cold smile, ‘No . . . I can’t whistle, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, with your tin ear!’ said Daphne.

  ‘I’m just going to take this precious book inside,’ he said, holding up Daphne’s little album. And they watched him cross the lawn and go in by the garden door.

  ‘So what were you talking about to Cess?’ said George, looking down at her again with his funny smile.

  She picked over the grass in front of her, in a teasing delay. Her first thought, surprisingly strong, was that her own relations with Cecil, going on quite independently of George’s, if not entirely satisfactorily, must be kept as secret as possible. She felt there was something there, which mustn’t be exposed to reason or mockery. ‘We were talking about you, of course,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ said George, ‘that must have been interesting.’

  Daphne gave a soft snort at this. ‘If you must know, Cecil was asking if you had any particular girlfriends.’

  ‘Oh,’ said George, more airily this time, ‘and what did you say?’ – he had started blushing, and turned away in a vain attempt to conceal the fact. Now he was gazing off down the garden, as if he’d just noticed something interesting. It was quite unexpected, and it even took Daphne, with her sisterly intuition, a few moments to understand, and then shout out,

  ‘Oh, George, you have!’

  ‘What . . . ? Oh nonsense . . .’ George said. ‘Be quiet!’

  ‘You have, you have!’ said Daphne, feeling at once how the joy of discovery was shadowed by the sense of being left behind.

  8

  Once the gentlemen had gone out, Jonah set off upstairs, and was almost at the top when he found he’d forgotten Mr Cecil’s shoes, and turned back to get them. But just then he heard voices in the hall below. They must have gone into the study for a minute, to the right of the front door: now they were by the hall-stand, getting their hats. Jonah stood where he was, not hiding, but in the shadows, on the turn of the stair.

  ‘Is this one yours?’ Cecil said.

  ‘Oh, you ass,’ said George. ‘Come on, let’s get out. I’ll bring this, I think, just in case.’

  ‘Good idea . . . How do I look?’

  ‘You look quite decent, for once. Jonah must be doing all right for you.’

  ‘Oh, Jonah’s a dream,’ said Cecil. ‘Did I tell you, I’m taking him back to Corle
y with me.’

  ‘Oh no, you don’t!’ There was a little tussle that Jonah couldn’t see, giggling and gasping, voices under their breath, ‘. . . ow! . . . for God’s sake, Cecil . . .’ and then the noise of the front door opening. Jonah went up three steps and peeped out of the little window. Cecil vaulted the garden gate, and George seemed to think about it, just for a moment, and then opened it and went out. Cecil was already some way down the lane.

  Jonah waited a minute longer where he was, looking up the last three stairs and across the landing towards the spare-room door. Jonah’s a dream – what a way they talked . . . though it must mean things were going all right, he was doing it all convincingly. He didn’t think Mrs Sawle would let Cecil take him away, and he certainly didn’t want to leave home. He’d been into Harrow, of course, many times, and Edgware, and once to the Alexandra Palace to hear the organ . . . He went on up. The landing was dark, with its oak panelling and thick Turkey carpet, but the bedrooms were flung open so as to air and were full of light. He could hear Veronica, the housemaid, in Mr Hubert’s room, her grunts as she shook and thumped the pillows; she talked to herself, in a pleasant, businesslike mutter, ‘. . . there you are . . . up we go . . . thank you very much . . .’. Jonah felt he had understood something, they had decided he was ready. He looked forward to straightening the room and taking his time with Cecil’s things, examining the buttons and pockets in more detail. He would never have said it to anyone downstairs, but he thought if he learned valeting it could be a job for him, in a year or two’s time. One day, perhaps, he would let Mr Cecil, or someone very like him, take him away after all.

  Then he pushed open the door, and saw at once he knew nothing, they’d told him nothing about what went on between bedtime and breakfast. It was like stepping into another house. Or else, he felt, as he took two or three short steps into the room, or else this Mr Cecil Valance was a lunatic; and at this thought he gave a sort of staring giggle. Well, he would have to wait for Veronica. The bed was all over the floor as if a fight had taken place in it. He looked at the shaving-water cold and scummy in the basin, the shaving-brush lying in a wet ring on top of the bookcase. He frowned at the clothes strewn over the floor and across the little armchair with a new and painful feeling that he’d known them in an earlier and happier time, when things were still going convincingly. And the roses were as good as dead – yes, Cecil must have knocked them over and then jammed the stems just anyhow into the vase with no water. Their heads had dropped after a few hours of neglect, and a patch on the patterned rug was dark and damp to the back of the hand. On the dressing-table the scribbled sheets of paper were more what Jonah had expected. ‘When you were there, and I away,’ Jonah read, ‘But scenting in the Alpine air the roses of an English May.’ Then he snatched up the shaving-brush and stared at the oily pool it had made.

  Jonah went over to the waste-paper basket, as if routinely tidying a barely occupied room, and took out the handful of bits of paper. He saw one of them was written by George, and felt embarrassed on his behalf that his guest should have made such a mess. It was hard to read . . . ‘Veins’, it seemed to say, if that was how you spelt it: ‘Viens.’ The poetry notebook, that Jonah had been told never to touch, still lay within reach, on the bedside table. Later, he thought, he almost certainly would have a look at it.

  ‘I see he’s made himself at home,’ said Veronica from the door, and her competent tone cheered Jonah up. ‘Yes, Cook said he’ll make a mess but he’ll give you ten shillings – could be a guinea if you’re lucky.’

  ‘I expect so,’ said Jonah, as though used to such treatment, stuffing the bits of paper awkwardly into his trouser pocket. Then he couldn’t help smiling. ‘Cook said that?’

  Veronica plucked the pillows off the bed. ‘Well, he’s an aristocrat,’ she said, with the air of someone who’d seen a few. ‘If they make a mess they can pay for it.’ She pulled the rucked bottom sheet tight and looked at it with a raised eyebrow and a strange twist of the mouth. ‘Well, Jonah, look what I see.’

  ‘Oh yes . . .’ said Jonah.

  ‘Your gentleman’s had a mission.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jonah, with the same look of suppressed confusion.

  Veronica glanced at him shrewdly but not unkindly. ‘You don’t know what that is, do you? A nocturnal mission, they call it. It’s something the young gentlemen are very much prone to.’ She tugged off the sheet with surprising strength, the mattress shuddering as it came free. ‘There you are, smell it, you can always tell.’

  ‘No, I won’t!’ said Jonah, feeling this wasn’t right, and colouring up at the sudden connection it made with a worry of his own.

  ‘Well, you’ll know all about it soon enough, my dear,’ said Veronica, who had just taken on in Jonah’s mind the character of someone alarmingly older and rather wicked. ‘Ah! Don’t you worry. You should see Mr Hubert’s. Have to change his sheets two or three times a week. Mrs S. knows – I mean, she didn’t say anything exactly, she just said, “Any marks or stains, Veronica, kindly change the boys’ sheets.” It’s a fact of nature, my dear, I’m afraid.’

  Jonah busied himself picking up and folding clothes, unsure if the items that had been worn should be put back in the wardrobe or politely hidden somewhere else until Cecil left and they could be packed again; he couldn’t ask Veronica anything while her upsetting little speech was still burning his ears. Here was the cast-off dress-shirt from last night, a grey smear across its stiff white front, cigar ash perhaps, and the beautiful singlet and drawers, fine as ladies’ wear, now thoughtlessly stained in ways he wouldn’t be able to look into until later, when he was by himself. He took the wash-basin out of the room and across the landing and emptied it carefully into the lavatory. A thousand tiny bristles in a scum of soap still clung to the curved surface, and he stared at them, as he did at everything of Cecil’s, with an awful mixture of worry and pride.

  Later he went out to the privy, and in the grey light through the frosted-glass square in the door he took out the rubbish from his pocket and sat turning it over, turning it round and reading the crossed-out words on it. He had a clear sense of giving way to ‘idle curiosity’, which was something Cook was very censorious about. The ripe collective stink beneath him, thinly smothered with coke ash from the kitchen, made his actions feel more furtive and wicked. He wasn’t quite sure even why he was doing it. The gentlemen’s talk was different from normal talk, and George was different too, now his friend was here . . . ‘A hammock in the shade’, Jonah made out. ‘A larch tree at your head and at your feet a pussy willow.’ He was slow to make the connection with anything he knew, and it was only when he’d read a bit more that the uneasy recognition dawned on him. Mr Cecil was writing about their own hammock, which Jonah himself had helped Mr Hubert to sling up at the start of the summer. He wondered what he was going to say about it. ‘A birch tree at your feet, And overhead a weeping willow’ – he couldn’t make up his mind! Then written up the edge of the page, ‘As wood-lice chew willows, So do mites bite pillows!’ – this was crossed out, with a wavy line. The muddled worry that he was saying something shocking, that there might be mites in the bedding here, in Mrs Sawle’s best goose pillows, took a moment to rise and fade. He remembered it was poetry, but wasn’t sure if that made it more or less likely to be true. Another piece of paper had been torn in half, and he held the two edges together, wondering if Wilkes ever did anything like this, when he emptied his master’s waste-paper basket.

  Within that thronging singing woodland round

  Two blessed acres of English ground,

  And leading roaming by its outmost edge

  Beneath a darkling cypress myrtle privet hedge

  With hazel-clusters hung above

  We’ll walk the secret long dark wild dark path of love

  Whose secrets none shall ever hear

  Twixt set of sun late last rook and Chaunticleer.

  Love as vital as the spring

  And secret as – XXX (someth
ing!)

  Hearty, lusty, true and bold,

  Yet shy to have its honour told –

  here there was a very dense crossing out, as if not only Cecil’s words but his very ideas had had to be obliterated. Jonah heard the well-known scrape of the scullery door and footsteps on the brick path – and in a moment the bulk of a large person outside (Cook, was it, or Miss Mustow?) cut off his light, and now his hand shook as the latch was rattled and he fumbled the papers back into his pocket. ‘Just a minute!’ he called out, wondering for a second if he should throw the bits of paper down into the privy, but then thinking better of it.

  9

  Freda lifted her glass and surveyed the table with the open-minded smile of someone who has not been paying attention. But yes, indeed, it was Germany again, and now Harry said how ‘each day brings us one day nearer to the German war’ – a catch-phrase of his that was beginning to irritate her. ‘I’m in and out of Hamburg a good deal on business,’ he explained, ‘and I know what I’ve seen.’ Freda didn’t care at all for the idea of a German war, and felt impatient with Harry for predicting it so insistently; but Cecil seemed ready to fight at once – he said he would jump at the chance. It was touching, and slightly comical, to see George’s indecision. Anyone less inclined to fight it would be hard to imagine, but he was clearly reluctant to disappoint Cecil. ‘I suppose I would, would I? – if it came to it,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, no question, old chap,’ said Cecil, and managed, with a slow turn of the head, to give them all a look at his profile. He’d told them already how much he liked killing, and clearly Germans would represent an exciting advance on mere foxes, pheasants and ducks. Freda was glad Clara wasn’t here tonight: her brother, who seemed to be her only relative, was in the Kaiser’s army, though a clerical job of some kind, thank heavens. She said,