The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [7]
“You know Queen Adelaide used to live there,” said Hubert, with a quick frown to show he didn’t want to make a big thing of it.
“So I gather,” said Cecil, his glass empty already.
“Later I believe it was a very excellent hotel,” said Mrs. Kalbeck.
“And now a school,” said Hubert, with a bleak little snuffle.
“A sad fate!” said Daphne.
Jesus Christ! thought George, though all he came out with as he crossed the room was a sort of distracted chuckle. He poured himself the last of the bottle of Pommery, and glanced into the window, where the lamplit room was reflected, idealized and doubled in size, spread invitingly across the dark garden. His hand was trembling, and he kept his back to them as he picked up the fullish glass, steadying it with the other hand. It was impossible to imagine such a weakness in Cecil, and a consciousness of this added subtly to George’s shame. He turned and looked at them, and they seemed all to be looking at him, as if they had gathered at his request, and were waiting for his explanation. All he had intended was a quiet family supper, to introduce his friend. Of course he hadn’t reckoned on old Kalbeck, who seemed to think “Two Acres” itself was a hotel—it was really the limit how she’d fished, in her cunning oblivious way, for an invitation to stay on, his mother magnanimously lending her a wrap and dabbing her in her own familiar Coty scent. Now he watched with horror as she questioned Cecil about the Dolomites, her head on one side; her great brown teeth made her smiles both gauche and menacing. But a minute or two later Cecil was yarning with her in German, and almost making a virtue of her presence. Cecil, of course, lived in Berkshire: there was little danger of Frau Kalbeck turning up just before meals at Corley Court. He spoke German nicely, keeping an amused pedantic eye on the slowly approaching end of his sentences. When the maid announced dinner, Mrs. Kalbeck made it seem like an unexpected intrusion on their happy meeting of minds.
“Will you sit here, Mrs. Kalbeck,” Hubert was saying, standing by his chair at the head of the table and smiling thinly as he watched them find their places. George smiled too, a little disconcerted from his glass of champagne. He felt a twinge of shame and regret at having no father, and forever having to make do. Perhaps it was just the memory of Corley, with its enormous oriental dining-room, that made the present party seem cramped and airless. Cecil stooped as he entered the room, in a possibly unconscious gesture to the cosiness of scale at “Two Acres.” A father like Cecil’s set a reassuring tone for a dinner, being very rich and an authority on shorthorn cattle. He had immense grey side-whiskers, brushed outwards, and themselves like a pair of brushes. Hubert was twenty-two, and wore a soft red moustache; he went to an office every day by train. This of course was what their own father had done, and George tried to picture him in Hubert’s chair, ten years older than when he’d seen him last; but the image was blurred and unavailing, like any much-handled memory, the pale blue eyes soon lost among the flowers and candles crowding the table.
Even so, his mother was very pretty, and really a great beauty compared to Lady Valance, “The General,” as Cecil and his brother called her, or sometimes “The Iron Duke,” on account of her very faint resemblance to the first Duke of Wellington. Tonight Freda was wearing her amethyst drops, and her red-gold hair seemed to glimmer, like the candle-lit wine in her glass. The General naturally was a strict teetotaller—and now George wondered if Cecil himself had been shocked to see his hostess drinking before dinner? Well, he’d have to get used to it. They were doing things in their best festive style for him, the napkins belaboured into lilies, the small silver items, bowls and boxes of uncertain use, polished up and set down between the glasses and candle-sticks. George reached forward and moved slightly to the left a vase of white roses and trailing ivy that obstructed