The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [28]
“I’ll read you my favourite section,” said Cecil, and took a preoccupied sip from his tumbler—was it water he was drinking, or whisky? “Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway—”
“Oh, yes, I love this one,” said Freda, over-compensating; her daughter glanced furiously at her.
“The tender blossom flutter down—”
“Ah …”
“Unloved, that beech will gather brown, / This maple burn itself away.” Large gestures of his raised right arm took in the garden beyond him.
Feeling suddenly delightfully awake, Freda smiled round, gave an almost conspiratorial look to Harry, who nodded, very slightly, but pleasantly. Elspeth glanced down, having noticed. It was a beautiful poem, beautiful and sad. “Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair, / Ray round with flames her disk of seed …” Again she could imagine it more sensitively read—or did she mean less sensitively?—anyway, without a certain atmosphere of Westminster Abbey. Poor Huey was fast asleep; it might have been a great pitiless sermon. She wondered if she could poke him discreetly or otherwise get at him, and felt another giggle hiding in her consternation. Oh, let him sleep. Her other two children, in supporting postures, flanked the stage, George subtly reflecting Cecil’s importance, while Daphne’s silly face was tense with the desire to respond. Freda could tell she wasn’t taking a word of it in.
Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star;
and once more Cecil’s long and powerful fingers, commanding their attention, twisted in front of him, throwing his face into dramatic shadow—
Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
Or into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove—
here he glanced upwards with a surprising note of comic disadvantage, but carried on determinedly—
Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger’s child—
the first hesitant drops, like soft footsteps or tactful throat-clearings, had quickly gained confidence, a rush of pattering had begun, and Cecil too, no stranger to the elements, was rushing through, raising his voice just when he needed to bring the poem to rest: he went on emphatically,
As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills—
but now all of them were getting up to move the lamp and close the windows and his last words rose against the settling roar of the rain in a determined shout.
10
HUBERT WOKE EARLY, with a sharp ache above his left eye, where a number of oppressive thoughts seemed to have gathered and knotted. His pyjamas were twisted and damp with sweat. Social life, though it had its importance, often left him confused and even physically out of sorts. The rain on the roof had got him off to sleep, and then woken him again to his own heat. He had a muddled apprehension of people moving about; his mother had restless nights, and now, as he dozed and woke again, his worries about her wove their way through his uneasy recall of moments at dinner and afterwards. Then the sun rose with merciless brilliance. Like Cecil Valance, Hubert hated to waste time, but unlike Cecil he was sometimes at a loss to know quite what to do with it. He decided he must go to early Communion, and leave the rest of the party to go to Matins without him. Twenty minutes later he closed the front gate and set off down the hill with an air of sulky rectitude. It had turned into a fresh, still morning; the great vale of northern Middlesex lay before him, with the answering heights of Muswell Hill rising mistily beyond, but he searched in vain for his usual sober pleasure in belonging