The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [62]
Beyond the coats was the sombre marble and mahogany washroom, and then the third room, with its towering cistern and high-up prison-like window. George locked the door with a remembered sense of refuge; and then with a gasp of confusion that the man he was hiding from was long dead.
On his way back along the passage he saw the charm of avoiding the party for a little longer, and decided to visit the chapel and look at Cecil’s effigy. On the occasion of Daphne and Dudley’s wedding, the tomb had been unfinished, a brick box that one had to go to left or right of. To tell the truth, he’d avoided looking at it. There had seemed to be some awful lurking joke that they were getting married over Cecil’s dead body. Now there was no one in the hall, no sound of voices, and he skirted the monstrous oak table and went out into the glassed-in arcade, half cloister, half conservatory, which ran along the side of the house to the chapel door. Here too everything seemed the same, everything old and old-fashioned, muddled and habitual, waiting no doubt for Mrs. Riley’s ruthless hand. Hard to bear in mind it was only fifty years old, younger than his own mother. It looked sunk in habit and history. Gothic plinths held up stone tubs of flowers; three brass chandeliers, crudely wired for electricity, hung to just above head-height; the floor was of diapered tiles, crimson and biscuit. George felt how the dark oak door of the chapel loomed, seemed to summon and dishearten the visitor with the same black stare. He gripped the cold ring of the handle, the latch shot up inside with a clack, and again he saw Cecil, bustling him through on that first afternoon, with a glance back over his shoulder, in case they were being followed—“This gloomy hole is the family chapel”—and holding him tightly round his upper arm. George had peeped about, in an excited muddle, trying to smother his awe in the required show of disdain for religion, while sensing none the less that Cecil would expect some sign of admiration at there being a chapel at all. Surely they were both rather thrilled by it. The chapel was tall for its modest size, the timber roof shadowy, the thwarted light through the stained-glass window giving the place, by afternoon, the atmosphere of the time just after sunset. Pale things glowed weakly, but others, tiles and tapestries, were dull until the eyes adjusted.
Now what he saw, among the grey shadows, was Cecil’s white figure, stretched out flat, and seeming to float above the floor. The sun had long since gone off the garish glass of the east window, and what daylight there was, oblique and qualified, seemed all to be gathered in Cecil. His feet pointed away, towards the altar. It was as if the chapel had been built for him.
George pushed the door to, without quite closing it, and stood by the first pew’s end, with a stern expression and a very slight feeling of fear. He was alone with his old pal again, almost as though he’d come into a hospital ward rather than a chapel, and was afraid of disturbing him, half-hoped to find him asleep and to slip away, having kept his word. That was a kind of visit he’d paid many times, in the War, and after, dreading to see what had happened to a fellow, afraid of the horror in his own face. Here there was a sickly smell of Easter lilies rather than disinfectant. “Hello, Cecil, old boy,” he said, pleasantly and not very loudly, with a dim echo, and then he laughed to himself in the silence that followed. They wouldn’t have to have an awkward conversation. He listened to the silence, chapel silence, with its faint penumbra of excluded sounds—birdsong, periodic rattle of the distant mower, soft thumps that were less the wind on the roof than the pulse in his ear.
Cecil was laid out in dress uniform, with rich attention to detail. The sculptor had fastened his attention on the cuff-badges,