The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [36]
Daphne stopped three yards off and looked at them. “This is nice,” she said. “There’s something funny about you.”
“Oh …”—the two boys gaped comically at each other, patted themselves, George tense with worry that something else funny might show. Surely Cecil’s whole person glowed with unmentionable lust; but Daphne simply gaped back at him, and then looked away in the warm uncertainty of being teased. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. It was very strange, and in its way reassuring, that she couldn’t work out the obvious thing.
“What an exceptionally pretty hat, if I may say so,” said Cecil, as they started back together up the path.
Daphne looked up at him with an idiotic smile. “Oh, thank you, Cecil!” she said. “Thank you.” And as they walked on: “Yes, I’ve received any number of compliments on this hat.”
To George it was entirely irksome having Daphne with them for the walk home—twenty minutes that he and Cecil might have spent alone. He wondered what further chances they would have before the van came in the morning. After supper, perhaps, they might slip outside for a cigar. And of course they could start very early indeed and walk to the station, and Jonah could go in the van with Cecil’s bags. He thought intently about how to propose these arrangements, only sharing in the chatter with a tone of wan good cheer. Wherever they paused to let one another go ahead through a gap in the undergrowth George patted Cecil, and sometimes Cecil abstractedly patted him back. Soon they left the woods by a different path, and then they were out in the lane … a high load of straw creaking past on a wagon, a motor-car caught behind it, banging and fuming. It seemed to him Cecil was taking quite unnecessary interest in Daphne, bending to her, shielding her as they scooted past the smelly car; but he had a picture too of his own silly jealousy, scuffing along behind this comical couple, the tall dark athlete with his ears curled outwards by an oversized boater and the little girl in a bright red hat trotting eagerly beside him.
And there, already, was the steep red roof of “Two Acres,” the low wall, the front gate, the row of dark-leaved cherry-trees outside the dining-room window. The front door stood open, in the summer way, into the shadowy hall. Beyond it, the garden door too stood open, the afternoon light glinting softly on polished oak, a china bowl—one could pass right through the house, like a breeze. Over the door was the nailed-up horseshoe, and beneath it the old palm cross. George felt the unseen jostling of different magics, varying systems of good luck. It was something extraordinary they were doing, he and Cecil, a mad vertiginous adventure. On the hall-stand hung Hubert’s irreproachable bowler, and their father’s old billycock hat that was always left there, as if he might return or, having returned, feel the need to go out again. Cecil looked round, with George’s boater in his hand, and tossed it with a slight spin through the air so that it landed on a free peg. “Ha!” he said, with a little smirk of satisfaction at George and at himself. George found his hand was trembling as he hung up Cecil’s cap beside it.
12
“CECIL, you’ve performed a miracle,” said Daphne.
“My dear girl …,” said Cecil complacently.
“You’ve turned water into wine.”
“Well,” murmured Hubert, with a quick glance at his mother, “a special occasion.”
“We not infrequently have wine on Sunday,” said George.
“A very sad occasion,” said their mother, shaking her head as she raised her glass. “We can’t have Cecil drinking water on his last night with us. Whatever would he think.”
“I should think you jolly insensitive,” said Cecil, knocking back his glass of hock.
“Indeed!” said Daphne, who was still forced to keep their normal Sunday commons. Sunday was Cook’s night off, and they had sat down to a bare supper of jellied chicken and salad. They had given up the festive style, there was a sense of looking ahead—after the champagne and Tennyson of their earlier dinners,