The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [64]
George dropped his head again, rather wondering about this probing of old feelings. It was awful that Cecil was dead, he’d been wonderful in many ways, and who knew what he might not have gone on to do for English poetry. Yet the plain truth was that months went past without his thinking of him. Had Cecil lived, he would have married, inherited, sired children incessantly. It would have been strange, in some middle-aged drawing-room, to have stood on the hearthrug with Sir Cecil, in blank disavowal of their mad sodomitical past. Was it even a past?—it was a few months, it was a moment. And then might there have been another moment, in the study one night, which Cecil now occupied as surely as his father had done, some instinctual surrender to the old passion, George bald and professorial, Cecil haggard and scarred? Could passion survive such changes? The scene was undeniably fantastic. Did he take off his glasses? Perhaps Cecil by then had glasses too, a monocle that dropped between them just as their lips approached. Only young men kissed, and even then not frequently. He saw the charming troublesome face of Revel Ralph, and pictured himself in the same tense proximity with him, with a sudden canter of the heart of a kind he had almost forgotten.
There was the sharp moan of the door on its hinges, and Sebby Stokes stepped in, with his quiet official air, gleam of high white collar and silvery head. He pushed the door almost closed, as George had done, and came forward—clearly he thought he was alone, for these first few moments, and for George, half-hidden by the tomb, his unguarded expression had an odd, almost comic interest. Stokes surely felt the slight but unusual thrill of his imminent encounter with Cecil. George saw more clearly something feminine and nervous in his walk and glance; but there was something else too in the set of his mouth, his frown of appraisal—something hard and impatient, not glimpsed at all in the infinite diplomacy of his social manner. George stood up abruptly and enjoyed his jump of alarm, and humorous recovery, in which a trace of irritation lingered for a minute. “Ah! Mr. Sawle … You startled me.”
“Well, you startled me,” said George equably.
“Oh! Hmm, my apologies …” Stokes walked around the tomb with a firmer expression, frank but respectful, so that now you couldn’t tell what he thought. “Quite a fine piece of work, don’t you think? May I call you George?—it seems to be the style here now, and one hates to appear stuffy!”
“Of course,” said George, “I wish you would,” and then wondered if he was meant to call Stokes Sebby, which seemed an unwarranted jump into familiarity with a man so much older and so oddly, almost surprisingly, distinguished.
“It’s not a bad likeness, by any means,” Stokes said. “Often I’m afraid they don’t quite get them if they haven’t known them. I’ve seen some very hand-me-down efforts.”
“Yes …,” said George, out of courtesy, but feeling, now the subject was being aired, more critical and proprietary. “Of course I didn’t see him later on,” he admitted. “But I don’t quite feel I’ve found him here.” He drew his fingers thoughtfully down Cecil’s arm, and glanced for an abstracted moment at the marble hands, which lay idly on his tunicked stomach, almost touching, the hands of a sleeper. They were small and neat, somewhat stylized and square, in what was clearly the Professor’s way. They were the hands of a gentleman, or even of a large child, untested by labour or use. But they were not the hands of Cecil Valance, mountaineer, oarsman and seducer. If the Captain’s neat head was a well-meant approximation, his hands were an imposture. George said, “And of course the hands are quite wrong.”
“Yes?” said Stokes, with a momentary anxiety, and then,