The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [79]
Back in her room she put on a hat, and made sure that the letters were safely stowed. It was absurd, but they had become her guilty secret, as they had once been George’s. She went down one of the back staircases, which she probably wasn’t supposed to, but she felt she would rather run into a housemaid than a fellow-guest. It led to something called the Gentlemen’s Lobby, with the smoking-room beyond, and a small door out on to the back drive. She skirted the end of the house, and then the end of the formal garden, which she’d had enough of. She had an idea of getting into the woods for half an hour, before tea. In a minute or two she was under the shade of the trees, big chestnuts already coming into flower, and the limes putting out small brilliant green shoots. She pushed back her hat and looked upward, giddy at the diamonds of sky among the leaves. Then she walked on, still unusually fast, and after a short while, stepping over twigs and beech mast, rather out of breath.
She started to think she shouldn’t go too far, and ducked her way out under the edge of the wood into the grassland of the Park. A long white fence divided the Park from the High Ground, and she drifted along by it for a moment or two in one of those intense unobserved dilemmas as to whether she should try to climb over it; that she was unobserved had first, very casually, to be checked. There were two slender iron rails, the upper at hip height, and a flat-topped post every six feet or so, to hold on to. She rehearsed the lifting of her skirt, with another look round, then quickly steadied her walking shoe on the lower rail, while gripping the upper one, but in the same second she knew that of course she couldn’t get over it, and she went on to the distant gate, in a flustered pretence of being in no particular hurry.
The High Ground had just been mown, and as soon as Freda had shut the gate behind her, she found the cuttings, still green and damp, were clinging to her shoes. And there they were again, George and Mad, crossing the far end of the enormous lawn, which must have been a good two acres in itself. She felt she had been ambushed by the very thing that she was hoping to avoid; but also perhaps that it was futile to try to avoid it. They kept to themselves, always talking, always walking; Freda sensed no one cared for them much, and George had always been somewhat shy and stiff—until (there it was again) Cecil had come on the scene. She had tried not to watch him at lunch, knowing what she knew: this weekend must be distinctly uncomfortable for him; she was surprised in a way that he’d come. Though if he had, in whatever fashion, loved Cecil … Now she saw the gleam on his glasses, his bald brow quite distinctive; they spotted her and said something to each other—then George waved. She hurried on for a moment, but no—she saw them so rarely … she stopped and picked up a black feather, its tip sheared off by the mower, then she turned and strolled slowly towards them, with a frown and smile, and awkward side-glances, and the air of nurturing an amusing remark.
The fact was that this whole business with the letters was kept alive by her own sense of guilt—dormant, forgettable, easily slept with for much of the time, but at moments like this crinkling everything she said to him into bright insincerity. She should never have read them; but once she’d found them, taken one from its envelope with a shifty but tender curiosity, and then read its astounding first page, she found she couldn’t stop. She wondered now at her own grim curiosity, her need to know the worst when surely she