The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [41]
Or could that be what kissing was really about? It seemed more like some childish dare, to stick your tongue into someone else’s mouth, and took a good deal of forbearance on their part, even if they liked you a lot. Alas there was no one she could ask. If she brought it up with her mother she would instantly grow suspicious. Could Hubert conceivably have kissed a woman like that? Maybe George, if he did have a girl, had had a go at it. She imagined asking him, and the secret fact of it having happened with his best friend made the idea slyly amusing.
What she was almost conscious of not thinking of was the way he had rubbed himself rhythmically against her. All her feelings were fixed on the easier, and after all rather comic, liberties of licking her mouth and feeling her bottom.
Later she found she had slept, and the dream she had just come out of kept its magic as she lay with open eyes in the deep grey dark. Then she thought she had been a silly child before. “Child, child,” he had called her, and that’s what she was. She thought about what Cecil had actually said, how it had been so wonderful getting to know her, and she flopped on to her back and wondered quite coolly if he had fallen in love with her. She gazed at the shadowy zone of the ceiling, the first powdery gleam of light above the curtains, as a sort of image of her own innocence. What evidence was there? Cecil had a very particular way of looking at her, even when others were present, of holding her eye at moments in their talk, so that another unspoken conversation seemed also to be going on. She had never known such a thing before, the boldness and the absolute privateness as well. It was still rather awful that Cecil had gone behind George’s back like that, but she felt a certain thrilled complacency at the choice he had secretly made. And of course he had to do it like this, his love had to be concealed, and it had to come out. There was something very touching as well as alarming in Cecil’s passion. Now she leapt forgivingly over the muddle in the garden, and thought of the life they would share together. Would he want to do that kind of thing again? Not when they were married, presumably. And another perspective of lighted spaces opened before her: she saw herself sitting down to dinner beneath the jelly-mould domes, or anyway compartments, of Corley Court.
She slept unusually late, slept on with only a momentary murmur and swallow through the rustling and bumping on the landing, the fact of voices downstairs; and when she at last came up into fuddled life her little clock said a quarter to nine. After that, and a further helpless three minutes of gaping sleep, she found she had attuned to something, to the loss of something she was amazed to find she had already grown used to, the noise of Cecil in the house. Of course he had gone! There was a thinness in the air that told her, in the tone of the morning, the texture of the servants’ movements and fragments of talk. And all her plans for him were thwarted, the witty thing she was going to say to him, as he climbed into Horner’s van … It would be weeks, perhaps months, before she saw him again. Moaning with a lover’s pangs, as well as with a certain sulky relief at this tragic postponement, she thrust herself out of bed, and on to her instantly tender right foot.
In the thick of her solitary breakfast, with the maid looking in once a minute to see if she’d finished, there was George coming past the window, back home from the station and seeing Cecil off. He had a bleak, faraway look which annoyed her the moment she saw it and felt its meaning. It was a time of reckoning for him—his guest, his first one ever, had left, and now the family could take him back and tell him, more or less, what they thought. He would be moody and delicate, unsure who to side with. And then she remembered her book. Oh, what had Cecil done with it? Had he written in it? Where had he put it? She was suddenly sick with anger at Jonah for packing it