The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [31]
“Yes, indeed,” said Cecil, and gave him an odd hard look, as though he thought him a fool. Now they were passing the gryphon-capped gate-piers of Stanmore Hall, a mansion almost as imposing as Corley Court; Cecil glanced in across the lawns, but if he had any feelings of curiosity he repressed them. He was smooth and unseeing after his little triumph about Harry. The Sawles barely knew the Hadleighs; their friends in the top end of the village were Mrs. Wye, who took in sewing, and the Cattos, who bred show-birds in a straggle of huts and runs behind their cottage—people dear to George since childhood, but useless and even embarrassing for present purposes. He saw the deeply familiar paths and pavements, trees, walls and white-railed fences with renewed alertness, half-loving and half-critical, and longed for Cecil, with his poet’s eye, to give them his blessing.
“Well, this is the first pond,” he said, pulling him up by the muddy slipway where a small wild girl in a cloth hat was submerging a toy boat.
Cecil looked across the circle of brown water and green duckweed with a pursed, absent smile. “I don’t think even I could take my clothes off here,” he said, “right next to these people’s cottages, and so on.”
“Oh, we’re not swimming here,” said George. “I’ve got somewhere much more pretty, and indeed private, in mind for that.”
“Have you, Georgie?” said Cecil, with a mixture of fondness and sauciness, and suspicion, since he liked to make the plans himself.
“I have. There are three ponds here; I dare say the village lads will be swimming in the big one, beyond those trees, if you’d like to have a look at them …?”
Cecil peered pityingly at the little girl, who was perhaps too young to think sailing better than sinking; while the wooden block of the boat kept bobbing up and the sodden triangle of sail struggled to right itself. “As it happens,” he said, distantly, “I only want to look at you,” and then turned to smile at George, so that the remark seemed to have curved in the air, to have set out towards some more obvious and perhaps deserving target, and then swooped wonderfully home.
They went on across the open field towards the woods, no longer arm in arm, Cecil again a little ahead, in his habitual fashion, so that the lovely certainty of a minute before seemed vaguely called in question. The tiny separation felt to George like a foretaste of what would happen next morning. He planned to go down to the station in the van with Cecil, but was flustered and miserable already when he tried to picture it, there would be no time, no chance … Really everything rode on this last afternoon. “Wait for me!” he said.
Cecil slowed and turned and smiled so widely and yet so privately that George felt almost faint with reassurance. “I hardly can wait,” Cecil said, and kept smiling; then they went on, side by side, with a funny tongue-tied singleness of purpose. George was aware of his own breathing, his own pulse, as the ragged line of oaks rose up in front of them. His feelings absorbed him so completely that he seemed to float towards them, weak with excitement, across a purely symbolic landscape. Away to their right a middle-aged couple whom he didn’t recognize were also approaching the woods, with a pair of snuffling and bickering spaniels. He took them in exactly, but with no sense of their reality. The woman wore a bright blue blouse, and a low brown hat with a feather in it; the man, in country flannels, had a button-topped cap like Cecil’s, and raised his stick in amiable greeting. George nodded and quickened his pace, in a rush of guilt and exultation. He would easily be able to avoid these people. Other walkers were so predictable. There was a riding trail that ran for a mile or more along the wood’s edge; and other tracks led on from glade to glade across the whole breadth of the Common.