The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [40]
Cecil loosened his grip, sighed acceptingly, though the little snigger he gave her seemed to say he hadn’t given up. He looked round, over the top of the bushes, to see who it was, perhaps he too thought it was George, and again she felt the special subject of her own secret with Cecil. They both had to be careful: she’d been frightened by him, but she still had a sense that he would know what to do. “We’re over here,” she said, her voice clotted with crying.
“Are you all right?”
“I fell down the blasted step,” said Cecil in a drawl. “I seem to have trodden on your sister.”
Hubert stood there, in silhouette, conveying an indignant but undecided impression. “Can you walk?” he said, very distinctly, as though speaking over the telephone.
“Of course I can walk, we’re just coming in.”
“It’s really a bit dark for rambling round,” Hubert said.
“That was the point,” said Cecil. “We were studying the stars.”
Hubert peered upwards doubtfully. “It’s a bit cloudy for that,” he said, and turned back to the house.
DAPHNE LAY FIRST on one side, then on the other side, tired out by her thoughts and kept alert by them too. Her right foot throbbed impressively in evidence, and was already bruising.
Sometimes she drifted sideways into near-unconsciousness, but woke at once with a sprint of the heart at the thought of Cecil’s closeness, his strength and his breath. His body was exceptionally hard, his breath warm, moist and bitter.
Cecil was drunk, of course, she’d seen two bottles of wine emptied at dinner, the hock it was, with the black German lettering. Daphne knew what drink did to people, and after Friday night, and her own tipsy episode with the ginger brandy, she knew something more about the strange freedoms of drinkers. They were intriguing, but unnecessary, and the truth was they were generally somewhat revolting. Afterwards one didn’t talk about them, out of the vague sense of shame that attached to them. One sobered up. Cecil would surely have a headache in the morning, but he would get over it. Her mother was often absurd at bedtime, but perfectly sensible again by breakfast. It would probably be a mistake to make too much of it.
And yet the whole thing showed Cecil in a very poor light, or half-light … so much of their dealings had happened in the dark, and if she saw him at all it was by the glow of a cigar end or the faint glimmer of the suburban night. When he’d come he’d put them all on their mettle by his sheer distinction, his cutting voice, his cleverness and money. And now, as she rolled on to her other side in excited despair of ever sleeping, she wondered just what George would say if he were told the extraordinary unwholesome thing his friend had tried to do. And she went through it all in her mind again, in the order it had happened, to savour the shock of it properly.
Well, she wasn’t naïve, she knew perfectly well that the upper classes could behave appallingly. Perhaps George should be told what his precious friend was really like. Though perhaps she would keep it to herself, with the choice then of bringing out the facts on some later occasion. It soon seemed more adult not to make a fuss. She started thinking about Lord Pettifer in The Silver Charger, and, her mind chasing and confirming and losing the story in the vivid fragments of memory, she wandered off through lighted rooms into the welcoming jabber of dreams but then almost grunted herself awake, and lurched at once into a seventh or eighth rehearsal of her own story, in the garden with Cecil Valance.
With each retelling, the story, with its kernel of scandal, made her heart race a fraction less, and its imagined impact on George, or her mother, or Olive Watkins, their fury and bewilderment, grew stronger in compensation. Daphne felt the warm flood of the story surge through her and grip her whole person; but each time the wave seemed a little weaker than the time before, and her reasonable