The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [14]
“Oh, are you here?” she said, and she pushed on, under the low branches that screened the hammock on that side. “I’ve left my books out here, in the dew.”
“Well, I haven’t seen them,” said George, and she heard the hammock rope shift and creak against the tree.
“No, you wouldn’t have seen them, of course, because it’s the night.” She laughed mockingly and slid her foot forward over the invisible ground. “But I know where they are. I can picture them.”
“All right,” said George.
She edged forward again, and could just make out the slump of the hammock as it tilted and steadied. Again, she stooped to pat the grass, and half fell forward, startled and amused by her own tipsiness. “Isn’t Cecil with you?” she said artfully.
“Ha …!” said Cecil softly, just above her, and pulled on his cigar—she looked up and saw the scarlet burn of its tip and beyond it, for three seconds, the shadowed gleam of his face. Then the tip twitched away and faded and the darkness teemed in to where his features had been, while the sharp dry odour floated wide.
“Are you both in the hammock!” She stood up straight, with a sense that she’d been tricked, or anyway overlooked, in this new game they were making up. She reached out a hand for the webbing, where it fanned towards their feet. It would be very easy, and entertaining, to rock them, or even tip them out; though she felt at the same time a simple urge to climb in with them. She had shared the hammock with her mother, when she was smaller, and being read to; now she was mindful of the hot cigar. “Well, I must say,” she said. The cigar tip, barely showing, dithered in the air like some dimly luminous bug and then glowed into life again, but now it was George’s face that she saw in its faint devilish light. “Oh, I thought it was Cecil’s cigar,” she said simply.
George chortled in three quick huffs of smoke. And Cecil cleared his throat—somehow supportively and appreciatively. “So it was,” said George, in his most paradoxical tone. “I’m smoking Cecil’s cigar too.”
“Oh really …,” said Daphne, not knowing what tone to give the words. “Well, I shouldn’t let Mother find out.”
“Oh, most young men smoke,” said George.
“Oh, do they?” she said, deciding sarcasm was her best option. She watched, pained and tantalized, as the next glow showed up a hint of Cecil’s cheeks and watchful eyes through a fading puff of smoke. Quite without warning The Flying Dutchman began again, startlingly loud through the open windows.
“God! What’s that, the third time …!” said George.
“Lord,” said Cecil. “They are keen.”
“It’s Kalbeck, of course,” George said, as though to exonerate the Sawles themselves from such obsessive behaviour. “God knows what the Cosgroves must think.”
“Mother loved Wagner long before she met Mrs. Kalbeck,” said Daphne.
“We all love Wagner, darling. But he’s quite repetitious enough on his own account without playing the same record ten times.”
“It’s Senta’s Ballad,” Daphne said, not immune to it herself this third time, in fact suddenly more moved by it out in the open, as if it were in the air itself, a part of nature, and wanting them all to listen and share in it. The orchestra sounded better from here, like a real band heard at a distance, and Emmy Destinn seemed even more wild and intense. For a moment she pictured the lit house behind them as a ship in the night. “Cecil,” she said fondly, using his name for the first time, “I expect you understand the words.”
“Ja, ja, clear as mud,” said Cecil, with a friendly though disconcerting snort.
“She’s a mad girl in love with a man she’s never seen,” said George, “and the man is under a curse and can only be redeemed by a woman’s love. And she rather fancies being that woman. There you are.”
“One feels no good will come of it,” said Cecil.
“Oh, but listen …,” said Daphne.
“Would you like a go?” said Cecil.
Daphne, taking in what she’d just been told about Senta, leant on the rope. “In the hammock …?”
“On the cigar.”
“Really …,” murmured George, a little shocked.
“Oh, I don’t think