The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [73]
“Well, I’m glad you think it’s all right.” And then, “Tell me truly, don’t you ever find it just a teeny bit depressing having Cecil lying around next door—don’t you sometimes just want to forget about all that, really? I have to say I’m thoroughly sick of the War, and I think a lot of people feel the same.”
“Oh, I like having him there,” said Daphne, not quite truthfully, but seeing with a little run of the pulse another channel for her larger resentment of Eva to push into. “You see, I lost a brother too, though no one ever remembers that.”
“Darling, I’d no idea.”
“No, well, how could you have,” said Daphne grudgingly.
“You mean in the War …”
“Yes, a bit later than Cecil. There weren’t any articles about it in The Times.”
“Won’t you tell me about him?”
“Well, he was a dear,” said Daphne. She pictured her mother, beyond the heavy oak doors of the library, and keeping the whole matter to herself.
Eva sat down, as if to pay more solemn attention, and threw back the loose cushion to make a space beside her, but Daphne preferred to remain on her feet. “What was he called?”
“Oh … Hubert. Hubert Sawle. He was my elder brother.” She felt the odd prickly decorum of telling Eva but very little of the solemn heartache which she hoped none the less to convey. When she went to the window, it seemed that Revel had gone; her spirits sank for a moment, but then she saw him again, talking to George—their heads and shoulders could be seen as they moved slowly away among the hedges. Now George stopped him and they laughed together. A twinge of jealous irritation went through her. “No, Hubert was very much our mainstay, as my father had died young.”
“He wasn’t married, then?”
“No, he wasn’t … He did get very close to a girl, from Hampshire …”
“Oh …?”
Daphne turned back into the room. “Anyway, nothing happened.”
“A lot of brave girls were left high and dry by the War,” said Eva, in a strange defiant tone. Then, with a little gasp, “I hope I didn’t upset your mother by what I said earlier about, you know, getting in touch with Cecil—I mean actually I do think it’s ridiculous, but of course I didn’t know about your brother.”
“I think she did go to a séance once, but it didn’t work for her.”
“No, well …”
Daphne found she didn’t want to talk about Louisa’s spiritualist obsession, which she and Dudley both deplored, to anyone outside the family; a feeling of loyalty was sharpened by her indignation at Eva’s mockery, which at the same time she perfectly understood. Then the bracket clock struck three-thirty, banishing all thought. “What a brute that thing is!” said Eva, with a tight shake of the head, as though to say even Daphne surely wouldn’t regret getting rid of it. Then she was saying, “No, your husband read me that bit in his new book, you know, about the famous book tests—awfully funny, isn’t it, actually, the way he does it—that’s what put it in my mind.”
“Oh, really …,” said Daphne, dawdlingly, though she knew her whole face was stiffening by the second, ungovernable, with hurt and indignation. “Will you excuse me for a moment,” and she turned and went out quickly into the hall, where the grandfather clock was now mellowly stating the time, and the clock in the drawing-room beyond, with no sense of the mortifying scrumple of her feelings as she hurried to the front door and out into the porch. She stood looking across the gravel, at the various trees, and up the long slope of the entrance drive, to the inner set of gates, with the whole blue Berkshire afternoon lying hidden beyond them. She puffed at the last half-inch of the cigarette with a certain revulsion, and then trod it under her heel on the doorstep. She wasn’t going to mention it to Dudley, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell Eva Riley herself that no one had ever seen a word of “his new book,” much less had awfully amusing bits