• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1071 0

Paul felt Peter’s knee push roughly against his own and stay there, almost as though he thought it was a strut of the table. His heart was beating as he edged his knee away, just an inch. Peter’s moved with it, he shifted forwards a bit in his chair to keep the contact more easily. His smile showed he was enjoying that as well as everything else. The warmth transfused from leg to leg and quickly travelled on up to lovely but confusing effect—Paul hunched forward himself and spread his napkin in his lap. He felt a hollow ache, a kind of stored and treasured hunger, in his chest and down his thighs. He found his hand was shaking, and he had another big gulp from his glass, smiling thinly as if in a trance of respectful pleasure at the company and the occasion.

“Oh, Daphne … well, of course,” Madeleine Sawle was saying, and gave Peter a sparring look as she settled next to her husband, leaving an empty chair between herself and Paul. “You’re not in the theatre?” she said.

“It sometimes feels like it,” said Peter, “but no, I’m a school-master.”

“He teaches at Corley, dear,” said George.

“Oh, goodness,” said Mrs. Sawle, and tutted as she spread her napkin and checked her husband’s readiness to start eating. “I’ve not been to Corley in forty years. I expect it makes a rather better school than it did a private house.”

“Ghastly pile,” said the Professor.

“Ooh …!” said Peter, flushing slightly in humorous protest, which Sawle didn’t notice.

“We used to go there, of course,” said Mrs. Sawle, “when Daphne was married to Dudley, as I expect you know.”

“Not a very happy time,” said the Professor, in a blandly confidential tone.

“It wasn’t a very happy time,” said Mrs. Sawle, “or I fear a very happy marriage,” and gave a firm smile at her plate.

Peter said, “I’ve just been reading the Stokes memoir of Cecil Valance—it strikes me you must have known him, sir.”

“Oh, I knew Cecil,” said Sawle.

“You knew him very well, George,” said Mrs. Sawle. “That was the last time we were there, to meet Sebastian Stokes, when he was getting his materials together.”

“Mm, I remember all too clearly,” said old Sawle. “Dudley got us pie-eyed and we danced all night in the hall.”

Mrs. Sawle said, “It was on the very eve of the General Strike! I remember we talked of little else.”

“Do you know this book?” Peter said, jiggling his knee now and moving his calf too against Paul’s.

“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Paul, finding it very hard to concentrate on talking or eating; he felt sure the Sawles must be able to see what was going on; and anyway, he might know “Soldiers Dreaming” by heart, but they came at things from another angle here, out of a world of family gossip and connections. He held his leg firm against Peter’s, which seemed to matter more. He reached out again and drank solemnly from his glass to cover his confusion, thinking at the same time he shouldn’t drink so fast, but feeling too there was something fated and irresistible about it. Across the party, half-hidden by the trailing fronds of the tree above, candles had started to flicker, at each little table, against the half-light. In a minute, young Julian appeared, as if raising a curtain, with a lit white candle in a jar held in front of him. “Here you are, Great-Uncle George!” he said, reaching over Madeleine’s shoulder to put the jar on the table, his own sleek face, brown eyes, glossy fringe, lit up by the quickly settling flame. Paul felt a new pressure of attention in Peter’s knee, as they all gazed up fondly at him. “Are you all right out here—you should be in with Gran,” he said. His voice, at seventeen, still had a boy’s rawness. He stood smiling at them with that cheerful little consciousness of behaving well, to his worthy old relations, and light-heartedly clinging to his decorum after quite a few drinks.

“Oh, we don’t expect special treatment, you know,” said George Sawle in a gently ironic voice.

“I don’t know if it’s just me,” said Peter smoothly, watching Julian go, “but I thought that Stokes thing was almost unreadable.”

Sawle gave a cluck of a laugh. “Deplorable