The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [44]
“Well, child …!” her mother said, and gave Daphne a strange, eager look. “What excitements.”
“Everyone can see it when I’ve finished reading it,” said Daphne. “People seem to be forgetting that it’s my book.”
“Well, of course, dear,” said her mother, going round the table and opening a window as if to show she had other useful things to do; and then, “You’ve obviously made quite an impression … on him”—not using Cecil’s name, out of some awful delicacy. She gave Daphne a teasing glance that had something new to it—a sense of girding herself for some welcome parental obligation.
“Mother, he was only here for three nights,” said George, almost crossly. “All Cecil has done, with his customary generosity, is to write a poem about our house as a thank-you for the visit.”
“I know, dear,” said their mother, with a little flinch at her two prickly children. “He’s been most generous to Jonah too.”
George got up, and went to the window, and looked out in the manner of someone who wants to say something firm but difficult. “The poem’s really nothing to do with Daphne.”
“Isn’t it?” said Daphne, shaking her head. Wasn’t it? It was there, she had seen it at once, the lovers’ kiss in the shadows, telling their secrets; but of course she couldn’t say that to either of them. “I suppose I should be sorry he didn’t write a poem for you.”
George’s pitying look was focused on the cherry-trees outside. “As a matter of fact, he has written a poem for me.”
“Oh, George, you never said,” said their mother. “You mean just now?”
“No, no—last term sometime—it really doesn’t matter.”
“Well!” said their mother, trying to maintain a tone of bewildered amusement. “Rather a fuss about a poem.”
“There’s no fuss, darling,” said George, now in a brightly patient tone.
“It’s too lovely to have a poem written for you at all, in my view.”
“I quite agree!” said Daphne, and the feeling that everything was being spoiled welled up inside her.
“I’m beginning to feel very sorry that I mentioned it. If Cecil’s visit has to end in this kind of childish bickering.”
“Oh, read it if you want to!” said Daphne, pursing her lips against tears, and flapping through the book to give it to her open at the right page. Her mother looked at her sharply, and after a moment, and quite gently, took it from her.
“Thank you … now if the girl could run for my glasses.” And when Veronica came back, their mother sat down at the dining-table and addressed herself, with a quizzical but sporting look, to the poem that had just been written about her house.
TWO
Revel
Man must say farewell
To parents now,
And to William Tell,
And Mrs. Cow.
—Edith Sitwell,
“Jodelling Song”
1
FROM WHERE SHE SAT, in the window of the morning-room, the two figures seemed to hurry towards each other. Above the long hedge at the end of the formal garden, a man’s head, jerking with the lurch of a limp, moved impatiently along. “Rubbish!” he shouted. “Rubbish!” Whilst away to the right, between the hazily green horse-chestnuts of the park, a shiny beige car was approaching, its windscreen flashing in the sun.
“D,” she wrote, and hesitated, with her nib on the paper. Not “Darling,” so “Dear” certainly, and then another pause, which threatened to turn into a blot, before she added “est”: “Dearest Revel.” One went up and down the scale with people—certainly among their set there were startling advances in closeness, which sometimes were followed by coolings just as abrupt. Revel, though, was a family friend, the superlative quite proper. “It is too awful about David,” she went on, “and you have all my sympathy”—but she thought, what one really needed was a scale below “Dear,” since often one had no time whatever for the