The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [13]
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.”
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