The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [107]
The problem was a stone trough on the far side of the lawn, which had somehow slipped or been pushed off one of the two squat blocks it sat on, earth strewn on the grass and a clump of disoriented wallflowers, orangey-black, leaning out and up. “I jolly well hope you can shift it,” said Mrs. Keeping, with a return of her unjolly tone, almost as though Paul had pushed it over himself. “I don’t want it falling on Roger,” she said.
Paul stooped down and gave the trough a preliminary heave. The only effect of this was to rock it very slightly on the skewed axis of the other block. “You don’t want to bring the whole thing down,” said Mrs. Keeping. She stood several yards away, perhaps to be clear of any such accident.
“No …,” said Paul; and then, “It’s quite heavy actually, isn’t it.”
“You’d stand a better chance with your jacket off.”
Paul obeyed, and seeing that Mrs. Keeping showed no intention of taking the jacket from him hung it on a lichenous garden seat nearby. Without the jacket he felt even less able, his skinny frame more exposed. “Right!” he said, and laughed rather fatuously. His hostess, as he tried to think of her, gave him a provisional sort of smile. He worked his hands in under the near corner of the trough, where it lay on the grass, but after a couple of hefts in the shuddering manner of a caber-tosser he could only raise it an inch and let it down again heavily just where it had been. He shook his head, and glanced across at the figures on the patio thirty yards off. Mr. Keeping had joined his mother-in-law and niece, and they were gazing generally in his direction as they talked but, perhaps from politeness, not showing any detailed interest. He felt simultaneously important and completely insignificant.
“You’re going to have to empty it, you know,” said Mrs. Keeping, as though Paul had been actively refusing to do this.
He saw a certain stoical humour was going to be necessary—a smiling surrender of his time and plans. “Have you got a spade, please?” he said.
“You’ll need something to put the soil on, of course. And do be careful with my wallflowers, won’t you,” she said, with a hint of graciousness now they’d come to such niceties. “Do you know, I’m going to get that girl involved.”
“Oh, I think I can manage …,” said Paul.
“It will do her absolutely no harm,” said Mrs. Keeping. “She’s going up to Oxford next term and she does nothing but sit and read. Her parents are in Malaya, which is why she’s stuck with us”—with a fairly clear suggestion she felt they were stuck with her. She moved off across the lawn, chin raised already, calling out.
Jenny Ralph took Paul off to the far side of the garden, and through a rustic arch into the sunless corner that sheltered the compost-heap and a cobweb-windowed shed. At first she treated him with the nervous snootiness of a child to an unknown servant. “You should find whatever you need in there,” she said, watching him edge in among the clutter of the shed. The mower blocked the way, its bin caked at the rim with dung-like clots of dried grass. He reached over for a spade and kicked a loosely propped stack of canes that spilled and clattered ungraspably in every direction. There was a stifling smell of creosote and two-stroke fuel. “It’s rather hell in there,” said Jenny from outside. She had a notably posh voice, but casual where her aunt was crisp. The accent was more striking, more revealing, in a young person. She sounded mildly fed up with it, but with no real intention of abandoning it.
“No, it’s fine,” Paul called back. He covered the awkwardness he felt with a girl in a brisk bit of business, passing out the spade, some old plastic sacks—he must be five or six years older than her, but the advantage felt frail. Her poor skin and the oily shine of her dark curly hair were signs of the troubles he’d hardly emerged from himself. The fact that she