The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [27]
“Since someone so kindly asked,” said Cecil, with a confident glance at Harry, “I’ll read a poem or two of mine before scaling the heights of, er, Mount Tennyson.” He sat down, with a copy of the Granta held out under the lamp at arm’s length. “I hope it won’t seem immodest to read a poem about Corley. The place seems to call poems forth—somehow!” Varied murmurs of indulgence and respect were heard. Cecil raised his chin, and his eyebrows, and then, as if addressing a gathering, or rather congregation, of a hundred or so people, began: “The lights of home! the lights of home! / Clear through a mile of glimmering park, / The glooming woods, the scented loam, / Scarce seen beneath the horse’s feet / As through the Corley woods I beat / My happy pathway through the dark.” The effect was so far from modest, Cecil chanting the words like a priest, and with so little suggestion of their meaning, that Freda found herself completely at a loss as to what he was talking about. Her eyes went straight to Daphne, who was grinning and blinking with the sudden need to master her feelings. Hubert looked pretty astonished for several seconds, then quickly assumed a cunning frown, as if measuring it against other readings he’d heard. Harry and Elspeth, more truly accustomed to literary soirées, maintained calmly appreciative near-smiles. George had turned so as to look straight into the garden, and his face was hidden; was it just the lamplight that made his ears burn red?
Freda took a furtive fortifying swig from her glass, and smiled approvingly in Cecil’s direction. The same thing always happened when she was read to, even when the reading was a more thoughtful and quiet one: at first she could barely take it in, as if nonplussed by her own concentration; then she settled and focused; then after ten minutes or so it seemed to be going on and on, Cecil’s voice had its own patterns, everyone’s did, that carried on more or less the same up the hills and down the dales of the poems, so that the words themselves all came to seem the same. “The footings of the fawn among the fern”—she saw what he meant, but it made her want to giggle. “Love comes not always in by the front door,” said Cecil, in his most homiletic tone. She let her head fall back and peeped abstractedly at Harry’s profile, stern but fine, and his strong left leg jutting out, jumping unconsciously with his pulse. Had he perhaps been injured, heart-wounded, in some earlier romance? She thought that must be it. One couldn’t imagine adoring him, exactly; but he was rich, and generous with it, she came back to that, his touching sweetness to Hubert: few “got” poor Huey, as Harry did. But there was something difficult about him, no doubt—his singleness was perhaps a warning as much as an invitation. She looked away with a wistful smile. Nothing had been said about the scale of this event; as each probable limit was reached and passed without any remark of surprise or prediction Freda grew restless, and then, the opposite of restless, when she closed her eyes to try and savour the sense and not have actually to look at Cecil, and the warm electric rush of noises, the confident stride of whole new situations with all their pre-existing logic, talking with Miriam Cosgrove on a beach in Cornwall, they had to pack, there was so little time before the train pulled out, and they mistook the way to the hotel, they were hopelessly lost, and then, was it just a silence that had woken her,