The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [133]
“I didn’t catch your name,” said Sue Jacobs.
“Oh, Paul Bryant,” said Paul, with the queer little effort of clarity and breathless laugh that always came with saying who he was. And Peter nodded, “Paul … yes”—of course, he’d only just found out his name.
“We’ll have supper in a minute,” said Corinna, “and then bring everyone in for the concert.” She rested a black-gloved hand on Sue Jacobs’s forearm. “Is that all right, love?”
“Absolutely!” said Sue, and grinned back, as if trying to match Corinna’s abnormal good humour.
“Are you playing too?” said Paul, not able to look at Peter yet.
“I’m singing,” said Sue, her smile vanishing as Corinna moved off. “I’d hoped for a run-through, but we had a hellish drive down.” He saw that she was older than he’d thought, perhaps forty, but lean and energetic and somehow competitive.
“Where do you live?”
“Mm?—in Blackheath. Right on the other side. We could perfectly well have had the party there, rather than dragging everyone down into darkest Berkshire.”
“But you couldn’t?” said Peter.
“Corinna wanted it here, and what Corinna wants … Sorry, I’m Daphne’s step-daughter,” she said to Paul. “She married my father.” She made this sound rather a regrettable turn of events.
“Ah, yes!” said Paul, laughing nervously, and not sure where Blackheath was—he pictured something like the New Forest. He saw that just behind them in the edge of the flower-bed, the broken trough was sitting, its end apparently cemented back on and hidden by some quickly arranged nasturtiums; on his hand too the graze had scabbed and been picked back to pink. He said to Peter, “Jenny says you’re playing tonight.” It was magical as well as completely straightforward having him just a foot away. He had a commonplace smell of smoke mixed with some unusual aftershave that made Paul confusedly imagine being held by him and kissed on the top of his head.
“I could have done with a run-through too, god knows,” Peter said. “We bashed through it at school, but she’s ten times as good as me.”
“I shouldn’t smoke if I’m singing,” said Sue, opening her little evening bag.
Peter squashed his own cigarette under foot before getting out his lighter for her. “I don’t know the Bliss songs,” he said.
“I’m only doing the Valance,” said Sue. “Mm, thanks … It’s Five Songs opus something, but we’re just doing the one, thank god.”
“Aha …! Which poem, I wonder?”
“I expect you’ll know—it’s about a hammock. He’s supposed to have written it for Daphne … apparently!”
“I must ask her about Cecil Valance,” said Peter. “I’ve just been doing him with my Fifth Form.”
“Well, you should. She seems to think he wrote pretty well everything for her.”
“Do you think she’d come and talk to the boys?”
“She might, I suppose. I don’t know if she’s ever been back to Corley, has she? It will all be in the famous memoirs, of course.”
“Oh, is she writing them?” said Peter, putting his hand on Paul’s arm for a long moment, as if not to lose him, with talk about strangers, and surely conveying something rather more. In fact, Paul said,
“She’s been writing them for yonks.”
“Oh, you know about it,” said Sue.
“Well, a bit …”—and then: “Isn’t it the poem that starts, ‘A larch tree at your head, and at your feet / A weeping willow’?”
“You do know,” said Sue again, sounding slightly put out.
“I’d better get you to talk to the Fifth Form!” said Peter, the hint of mockery in his tone dissolving in his long, brown-eyed gaze, as if he too felt excitements teeming softly around and ahead of them. It was a look of a kind Paul had never had before, and in his happiness and alarm he found he had completely finished his drink.
“Well, supper, perhaps,” said Sue, in a way that made Paul think she’d become aware of something.
“MAY WE JOIN YOU, sir?” said Peter.
George Sawle’s sunburnt face settled into a vague smile as he gestured at the chairs. In the shade, or by now the midge-haunted shadow, of the weeping beech,