The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [217]
Paul thought again about George and Cecil on the roof, the whole rich difficult range of unspoken testimony, in images and implications. Surely Dudley was hinting here at something he couldn’t possibly have said outright?
Daphne, two or three years younger, was more open and at ease, and spoke her mind in a manner that sometimes startled my mother but habitually delighted me. She had grown up with two elder brothers of her own, and was used to their spoiling. I was thrown together with her by the somewhat exclusive nature of George and Cecil’s pursuits, and our own relations were at first fraternal; it was clear that she idolized Cecil, but to me she was an amusingly artless companion, unaffected by the family view of me as, if not a black, then certainly a greyish sheep. She loved to talk, and her face lit up with amusement at the simplest pleasantries. To her Corley Court was less a matter for the social historian than a vision out of some old romance. Its inhuman aspects were part of its charm. The stained glass windows that kept out the light, the high ceilings that baffled all attempts at heating, the barely penetrable thickets of overladen tables, chairs and potted palms that filled the rooms, were invested with a kind of magic. “I should like very much to live in a house like this,” she said, on the occasion of that first visit. Four years later she was married in the chapel at Corley, and in due course, if for a limited span, was herself the mistress of the house.
Paul decided hotels were hardly the best place to work. All around there was noise—a late riser above had pulled the bath-plug and the waste fell with an unembarrassed frothing and gargling sound through a pipe apparently inches from his desk; the maid had come in twice, even though check-out wasn’t till eleven; baffled but unbeaten, she toiled in the hallway with the hoover or went up and down opening and slamming the doors; in a room immediately to his left, and previously unsuspected, some sort of business meeting had got under way, with periodic laughter and the rambling voice of a man addressing them, a completely meaningless phrase now and then discernible through the thin wall. Paul sat back with a yelp of frustration; yet he saw the scene had already a kind of anecdotal quality, and he wrote it up too in his diary, as a reminder of the biographer’s difficult existence.
When he got back to Olga, just before two o’clock, he found the front door open and heard Wilfrid’s voice coming from the kitchen, speaking more regularly and emphatically than usual. Even so, he couldn’t make out at first what he was saying. He felt he’d chanced on something awkwardly private. There was a sense of possible crisis. Rather than ring the bell, Paul stepped into the hall and gripping his briefcase stood leaning forward with an apologetic expression. It dawned on him that Wilfrid was reading to his mother. “ ‘Ah hammer … dryers ever seen,’ ” he seemed to say. For a dislocated second Paul couldn’t place it; then of course he knew. Are Hamadryads ever seen / Between the dancing veils of green …? He was reading “Two Acres” for her, and she was making a grumbling noise or coming in on the words herself as if to say the reading was hardly necessary; it was a sort of briefing perhaps for her second day’s interview, and Paul found something reassuring in that—and something oddly touching in the reversal of roles, son reading to mother. “ ‘Or pause, then take the hidden turn, / The path amid—’ ” “ ‘The path amid the hip-high fern,’ ” Daphne came in. “You don’t read it at all well.”
“Perhaps you would rather I didn’t?” said Wilfrid in his usual tone of dry forbearance.
“Poetry, I mean, you have no idea how to read poetry. It’s not the football results …”
“Well,