The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [60]
5
AT THE END of lunch George slipped out from the dining-room and set off for a distant lavatory, treasuring the prospect of four or five minutes alone. He felt stifled already by the subject of Cecil, and by the thought of a further twenty-four hours devoted to his brilliance, bravery and charm. What things they all found themselves saying. Perhaps in certain monasteries, or in finishing schools, the conversation at meals was as strictly prescribed. The General threw up a topic, and the rest of them batted it gingerly to and fro, with Sebastian Stokes as umpire; even Dudley’s sneering had been edgily reined in. George had met Stokes once before, in Cambridge, when they’d all gone out in a punt, Cecil clearly exciting his guest by his lordly thrust and toss of the pole and intermittent recital of sonnets. Stokes seemed not to remember that George had been of the party, and George didn’t remind him, when the talk turned to their Cambridge days. He felt undeniably uneasy, and drank several glasses of champagne, in the hope they would relax him, but they had only made him hot and giddy, while the dining-room itself, with its gaudy décor, its mirrors and gilding, had appeared to him more ghastly than ever, like some funereal fairground. Of course one indulged the dead, wrote off their debts; one forgave them as one lamented them; and Cecil had been mightily clever and fearless, no doubt, and had broken many hearts in his short life. But surely no one but Louisa could want a new memorial to him, ten years after his passing? Here they all were, submissively clutching their contributions. A dispiriting odour, of false piety and dutiful suppression, seemed to rise from the table and hang like cabbage-smells in the jelly-mould domes of the ceiling.
As he crossed the hall, the door under the stairs was shoved open by Wilkes, with the surprising look, for just a second, of a man who has a life of his own.
“Ah, sir …!” said Wilkes, turning to catch the door, the age-old benignity back at once like a faint blush.
“Thanks so much, Wilkes,” said George. And since he had him there, “I hope you’re well.”
“Very well, thank you, sir, very well indeed,” as if made even fitter by George’s solicitude.
“I’m so glad.”
“I trust you’re well, too, sir; and Mrs. Sawle …”
“Oh, yes, both frightfully busy and burdened with work, you know, but, thank you, pretty well.”
George and Wilkes were both holding the door, while Wilkes gazed at him with his usual flattering lack of impatience, of any suggestion that a moment before he had been rushing elsewhere. “It’s good to see you back at Corley, sir.” Though it struck George that Wilkes’s mastery of implicit moral commentary was conveyed in the same smooth phrase.
He frowned and said, “We don’t get down as often as we should like.”
“It’s possibly not very convenient for you,” allowed Wilkes, letting his hand drop.
“Well, not terribly,” George said.
“I know Lady Valance is especially pleased you’ve come, sir.”
“Oh …”
“I mean the old Lady, sir, particularly … though your sister, too, I’m sure!”
“Oh, well it’s the least I could do for her,” said George, with adequate conviction, he felt.
“Since you and Captain Valance were such great friends.”
“Well, yes,” said George quickly, and rather sternly, over his own incipient blush. “Though goodness, it all feels a world ago, Wilkes.” He looked around the hall, with a kind of weary marvelment that it was still there, the armorial windows, the brightly polished “hall chairs” no one would dream of sitting on, the vast brown canvas of a Highland glen, with long-horned cattle standing in the water. He remembered looking at this painting on his first visit, and Cecil’s father telling him it was “a very fine picture,” and what sort of cows they were. Cecil was behind him, not quite touching,