The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [69]
George looked up at his wife, and then down again at Cecil, who seemed somehow to have turned into a piece of evidence, ambiguous but irreducible, lying between them. He had an almost physical sense of changing the subject as he turned away and said, “You know, old Valance has been quite bearable, so far.”
Madeleine smiled tightly. “So far. But then we have only been here for three hours.”
“I imagine it’s pretty galling for him to have this fuss kicked up about Cecil, all over again.”
“I don’t see why,” said Madeleine, naturally contrary.
“One sees the anniversaries stretching ahead for ever.”
“Dudley Valance is a very strange man. I think it very sad, if he’s jealous after all this time.”
“A bad war, of course.”
“Though you might think not so bad as Cecil’s. Louisa was just telling me about the death. How they went out to France themselves to see him.”
“Yes, he hung on, didn’t he, for several days …?” George had an idea that “Fell at Maricourt” was a sonorous formula, rather than the strict and messy truth.
“They got permission to bring his body back. I say ‘they,’ but I had the impression it was Louisa’s doing.”
“She’s not called the General for nothing.”
“One can sympathize with them wanting to see their son,” said Madeleine fairly.
“Well, of course, darling.”
“Though immediately one thinks of the thousands of parents who simply couldn’t do that.”
“Very true. My own dear mother, for instance.”
“Well, there you are,” said Madeleine, but as if arguing rather than agreeing—it was their way, their own odd intimacy, though charged now with something more anxious. “They brought him back here, and he was laid out in his own room, facing the rising sun.”
“Oh, god. What, in the coffin?” George pursed his lips against a horrified giggle.
“I wasn’t quite clear,” said Madeleine.
“No … Where was he hit exactly?”
“Well, I could hardly ask, could I. I suppose he might have been very disfigured.”
George saw how he’d been able to avoid such questions before; and had a certain sense, too, of Madeleine choosing her moment to raise them.
“I don’t think you’ve ever told me,” she said, “about when you heard the news.”
“Oh, didn’t I, Mad …?” George blinked, and frowned at the floor. His thoughts ran along the diagonals, the larger red lozenge of the tiles. Well, she’d asked him, and he must answer. “I do remember one or two things about it very well. I was up at Marston, of course, I remember it was very hot, and everyone was tired and tense about what was happening in France. Then after dinner I was called to the telephone. As soon as I heard it was Daphne, I felt quite sick with dread that something had happened to Hubert, and when it turned out to be Cecil, awful to say but I remember the news had to fight with a sort of upsurge of relief.” He glanced at his wife. “I remember blurting out, ‘But Huey’s all right!’ and old Daph saying, rather crossly, you know, ‘What …? Oh, Huey’s fine,’ and then, her exact words, ‘It’s beautiful Cecil who’s dead’—and then she sort of wailed into the telephone, an extraordinary sound I’ve never heard her make before or since.” George himself, looking at Madeleine, gave a weird gasp of a laugh. She looked back, showing in her blankly pondering face that she had other questions. “Beautiful Cecil is dead,” said George quietly again, in a tone of amused reminiscence. Well, he would never forget the words, or the sudden wild licence of grief so startling in someone as close as a sister. Even then he had resisted them, their sudden appeal to something shared but never said till now. In truth, more than most deaths that summer, Cecil’s death had seemed both quite impossible and numbly unsurprising. Within a week or so he had seen it as inevitable.
6
“DARLING: Piccadilly …,” said Mrs. Riley: “two cs?”
“Well, yes!” said Daphne.
“Oh, I think two,” said her mother, after a moment.
“I’m not entirely stupid,” said Mrs. Riley, “but there are one or two words …” She drew a bold line beneath the address, and smiled mischievously