The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [229]
He spoke clearly, and rather stiffly, with a hint of reproof in his face for all the trivialities that had gone before. The nice square Nigerian diction, with its softened consonants and strong hard vowels, had been slowly effaced by London in the years since Rob had met him at a party and taken him home shivering in a taxi. He said how being Peter’s friend had been the greatest privilege of his life, and that being married to him for two years had been not only wonderfully happy but a celebration of everything Peter had believed in and worked for. He had always said how important the changes in the law in 1967 had been to him and to so many others like him, when he was a young man teaching at Corley Court, but that it was very imperfect, only a beginning, there were many more battles to be won, and the coming of civil partnerships for same-sex couples was a great development not just for them but for civil life in general. This was met by a few seconds of firm applause, and flustered but generally supportive looks among those who didn’t clap. Rob clapped, and Jennifer, surprised but willing, a moment later clapped too. It was good to see the gay subject, which after all had bubbled through Peter’s life more keenly and challengingly than it did in his own, brought home here under the gilded Corinthian capitals of a famous London club. There was a sort of yearning in some of the older faces not to be startled by it. Then Desmond said he was going to read a poem, and drew out a folded sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his pin-stripe suit. “Oh, do not smile on me if at the last / Your lips must yield their beauty to another …” Rob didn’t think he knew it, and felt the awkwardness of poetry in the mouths of people untrained to read it; then abruptly felt the reverse, the stiff poignancy of words which an actor would have made into a dubious show of technique. “Let yours be the blue eye, the laughing lips / That at the last and always smile on me.” Rob gave Jennifer a quizzical glance, she leant towards him and whispered behind her hand, “Uncle Cecil.”
ROB ESCORTED JENNIFER through the clearing and stacking of the chairs towards the crowd around the buffet table, Jennifer making confidential but fairly loud remarks about some of the speakers while Rob discreetly switched on his phone. “A shame about the sound,” she said. “That young man was absolutely hopeless!”
“I know …”
“You’d have thought they’d have something as basic as that sorted out.” Rob saw he had a text from Gareth. “I thought that Scotsman was awfully boring, didn’t you?”
see u 7 @ Style bar—cant wait! XxG
“He was rather …,” said Rob—distracted for a moment in the mental blush of disorientation, then pocketing his phone and glancing round. The blond man had attached himself to the group of leather queens. But the idea of picking him up, so simply initiated by a sly shared smile, didn’t wholly dissolve under the reminder of his imminent date with someone else.
There were rows and rows of white cups and saucers, for tea and coffee, but Jennifer said, “I’m having a drink,” and Rob, who never drank during the day, said, “I’m going to join you.” She picked up a glass of red with a quick shiver—and then, seeing platters of sandwiches already reduced to cress-strewn doilies, she pushed in between two other people waiting and built herself a little plateful of sausage rolls and chocolate fingers. She had the look of someone making the most of a day out—Rob thought the arrangements at St. Hilda’s College might be fairly spartan; and then a visit to London … She held her plate and glass expertly in one hand, and ate swiftly, almost greedily. He wondered what her emotional history had