The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [21]
“No, I won’t!” said Jonah, feeling this wasn’t right, and colouring up at the sudden connection it made with a worry of his own.
“Well, you’ll know all about it soon enough, my dear,” said Veronica, who had just taken on in Jonah’s mind the character of someone alarmingly older and rather wicked. “Ah! Don’t you worry. You should see Mr. Hubert’s. Have to change his sheets two or three times a week. Mrs. S. knows—I mean, she didn’t say anything exactly, she just said, ‘Any marks or stains, Veronica, kindly change the boys’ sheets.’ It’s a fact of nature, my dear, I’m afraid.”
Jonah busied himself picking up and folding clothes, unsure if the items that had been worn should be put back in the wardrobe or politely hidden somewhere else until Cecil left and they could be packed again; he couldn’t ask Veronica anything while her upsetting little speech was still burning his ears. Here was the cast-off dress-shirt from last night, a grey smear across its stiff white front, cigar ash perhaps, and the beautiful singlet and drawers, fine as ladies’ wear, now thoughtlessly stained in ways he wouldn’t be able to look into until later, when he was by himself. He took the wash-basin out of the room and across the landing and emptied it carefully into the lavatory. A thousand tiny bristles in a scum of soap still clung to the curved surface, and he stared at them, as he did at everything of Cecil’s, with an awful mixture of worry and pride.
Later he went out to the privy, and in the grey light through the frosted-glass square in the door he took out the rubbish from his pocket and sat turning it over, turning it round and reading the crossed-out words on it. He had a clear sense of giving way to “idle curiosity,” which was something Cook was very censorious about. The ripe collective stink beneath him, thinly smothered with coke ash from the kitchen, made his actions feel more furtive and wicked. He wasn’t quite sure even why he was doing it. The gentlemen’s talk was different from normal talk, and George was different too, now his friend was here … “A hammock in the shade,” Jonah made out. “A larch tree at your head and at your feet a pussy willow.” He was slow to make the connection with anything he knew, and it was only when he’d read a bit more that the uneasy recognition dawned on him. Mr. Cecil was writing about their own hammock, which Jonah himself had helped Mr. Hubert to sling up at the start of the summer. He wondered what he was going to say about it. “A birch tree at your feet, And overhead a weeping willow”—he couldn’t make up his mind! Then written up the edge of the page, “As wood-lice chew willows, So do mites bite pillows!”—this was crossed out, with a wavy line. The muddled worry that he was saying something shocking, that there might be mites in the bedding here, in Mrs. Sawle’s best goose pillows, took a moment to rise and fade. He remembered it was poetry, but wasn’t sure if that made it more or less likely to be true. Another piece of paper had been torn in half, and he held the two edges together, wondering if Wilkes ever did anything like this, when he emptied his master’s waste-paper basket.
Within that thronging singing woodland round
Two blessed acres of English ground,
And leading roaming by its outmost edge
Beneath a darkling cypress myrtle privet hedge
With hazel-clusters hung above
We’ll walk the secret long dark wild dark path of love
Whose secrets none shall ever hear
Twixt set of sun late last rook and Chaunticleer.
Love as vital as the spring
And secret as—XXX (something!)
Hearty, lusty, true and bold,
Yet shy to have its honour told—
here there was a very dense crossing out, as if not only Cecil’s words but his very ideas had had to be obliterated. Jonah heard the well-known scrape of the scullery door and footsteps on the brick path—and in a moment the bulk of a large person outside