The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [201]
In a minute, however, he had to move his things for a woman and two children to sit down, she nagging at them distractedly, her own face taut with worry, and when the train began to move again he found the romance of the journey from London, which they knew nothing about, had been left behind for ever, and a period of compromise and cohabitation had begun. Paul kept his briefcase on the table, leaving little room for the boy to spread his colouring book. His dislike of children, with their protean ability to embarrass him, seemed to focus in his scowl over The Short Gallery, which he rather brandished in their faces. The fact that he was about to conduct an interview of enormous importance to his own book, and therefore to his future life, was squeezing and trapping him like the onset of some illness undetectable to anyone else. If what George had said was right, then Paul’s conversations with Daphne, today and again tomorrow, were bound to be a peculiar game, in which he would have to pretend not to know the thing he was most hoping to get her to own up to.
He looked through the first chapter again, which was her “portrait” of Cecil:
On this fine June night, which was to be the last time I saw him, Cecil took me to Jenner’s for a Spartan supper of the kind which seems to a love-struck girl to be a perfect love-feast. Pea soup, I remember, and a leg of chicken, and a strawberry blancmange. Neither of us, I think, cared a hoot what we ate. It was the chance to be together, under the magic cloak of our own strong feelings, out of the noise of war, that counted above all. When we had done we walked the streets for an hour, down to the Embankment, watching the light pass on the broad stretches of the river. The next day, Cecil was to re-embark for France, and the mighty thrust that we knew was coming. He didn’t ask me then—it was to be in his last letter, a few days later—if I would marry him, but the evening air seemed charged with the largest questions. Our talk, meanwhile, was of simple and happy things. He saw me into a cab which would take me to my train at Marylebone, and my last sight of him was against the great black columns of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, waving his cap, and then turning abruptly away into the future we both imagined with such excitement, and such dread.
Perhaps it was just a reflection of his own habits, but Paul didn’t believe anyone remembered all the courses of a meal they’d eaten four years ago, much less sixty-four; whereas (again perhaps reflecting his own fairly limited experience) they always remembered having sex. The worrying air of cliché and unreality about the whole of this scene was only heightened by the leg of chicken and the strawberry blancmange, which in some way Paul didn’t like to think about seemed to stand in for the blandly concealed truth of a night spent at the Valances’ Marylebone flat—even the naming of the station was a cover. And what, come to that, of Cecil preparing for a “mighty thrust”?
Chewing his lip, Paul examined Daphne’s photo on the back flap of the jacket. She appeared three-quarter length, in a plain dark suit and blouse and a single string of pearls, looking out with a half-smile and a certain generalized charm, caused perhaps by her not having her glasses on. Immediately behind her was an archway, through which a grand hall and staircase could dimly be made out. When you looked very closely at her face you saw it was a subtly worked blur, silvery smooth from touching up around the eyes and under the chin; the photographer had taken fifteen or twenty years off her. The whole thing gave the impression of a