The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [39]
This seemed as good as never to Daphne. “No, I suppose.”
“Get Georgie to bring you over.”
They moved on, towards the dark outline of the rockery, which at night might truly have been taken for a greater and more distant outcrop. Daphne said, huskily casual, “I imagine I could come by myself.”
“Would your mother allow that?”
“I am quite grown up, you know,” said Daphne.
Cecil said nothing. He pressed forward with his usual confidence; she thought she should say, “There’s a step there”—she half-yelled it as he stumbled and lurched down hard on his right leg, caught himself but pulled her with him, and then lurched again to save her and grip her.
“Oh Christ, are you all right?”
“I’m fine …!”—wincing where he’d trodden heavily on the edge of her foot.
“Whenever we go out, we seem to end up taking a tumble, don’t we!”
“I know!”
“And now I’ve lost my dratted cigar.”
They were face to face, her heart still lively from the shock, and he put his arms round her waist and pulled her against him, so that she had to turn her cheek to his cold lapel. He moved a hand up and down on her back, over the warm tweed of George’s jacket. “Blasted steps …,” he said.
“I’m all right,” said Daphne. She rather dreaded looking at her shoe, when they got in, but Cecil was at a disadvantage, and she knew at once that he could never be blamed for anything. She said quietly, “I can’t think how those steps got there”; then went one better, “Those bloody steps!”
Cecil gave a sigh of a laugh across her hair. “Oh child, child …,” he said, with a softness and a sadness she had never heard before, even from her mother. “What are we going to do?”
Daphne eased herself a fraction freer. She wanted to play her part, felt the privilege of Cecil’s attention—it was awfully nice being held so tightly by him—but there was something in his tone that worried her. “Well, I suppose you’re going to have to pack.”
“Hah …,” said Cecil, again with a strange despairing note, like his poetry voice.
“I think … shall we go back in?”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Can you keep a secret, Daph?”
“As a rule,” said Daphne.
“Let’s keep this a secret.”
“All right.” She wasn’t sure if she understood. Falling over a step wasn’t much of a secret, but Cecil was clearly embarrassed by it.
His hands relaxed slightly, and travelled down almost to her bottom as he smiled and murmured, “You know, it’s been splendid getting to know you.”
“Oh … well …,” she said, somehow paralysed by his hands. “That’s what we’re all saying about you. There’s never been anything like it!”
He bent his head and kissed her on the forehead, like sending her to bed, but then the tip of his nose moved down her cheek and he kissed her beside her mouth, in his cigar breath, and then, completely without expression, on her lips. “There,” he said.
“Cecil, don’t be silly,” she said, “you’ve been drinking,” and he tilted his face sideways and pushed his open mouth over hers, and worked his tongue against her teeth in a quite idiotic and unpleasant way. She pushed herself half-free of him; she was alarmed but kept her composure, even laughed rather sarcastically.
“You don’t mind if I kiss you?” said Cecil dreamily.
“I don’t call that kissing, Cecil!” she said.
“Mm …?” said Cecil. “What would you call kissing, then, Daphne?” his tone dopy and mocking, slightly annoyed, tugging her back into his grasp like a dancer with a mere flourish of his suddenly inescapable strength. “More something like this?”—and he started again, just darting his lips all over her face, like a tormenting game, allowing her to dodge and turn her head a little but holding her so tightly about the waist that she was quite hurt by the hard shape of the cigar case in his trouser pocket thrusting against her stomach. She found she was giggling, in quick shallow breaths, and before she could help it they’d turned into hot little sobs, and then a hushed wail of childlike surrender and failure.
“Hello …?” It was George, back from the Cosgroves’, coming to look for them,