The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [85]
By the time they went into dinner Daphne’s mood was one of nonsensical amusement veering into breathless semi-alarm at not knowing what was going on. She thought she had better bring out Colonel Fountain before the mad atmosphere of the evening engulfed them all. After the fish was served she asked him clearly about Cecil, and heard her words cantering on into a sudden general silence—her voice sounded not quite her own. The Colonel was sitting halfway along the table, on Louisa’s right, and glanced around keenly, almost challengingly, as he spoke, as if at a briefing of a different kind. Those looking at him found themselves watching Louisa as well, who took on a solemn and anxious expression, her eyes fixed on the silver salt-cellar in front of her. It was not the story of Cecil’s death, thank heavens, but of the famous occasion when he’d won his MC, bringing back three of his wounded men under fire. The Colonel outlined the situation in large terms, enlisting the salt-cellar as a German machine-gun post. The more detailed account he gave of the episode itself was done with honour and a sense of conviction somehow heightened by his reticent manner; but Daphne—and possibly others round the table—had a disappointing sense that he no longer distinguished it clearly from a dozen such episodes. He had written a splendid letter to Louisa at the time, and of course recommended Cecil for his medal, and his form of words now was very close to those ten-year-old accounts. Perhaps Dudley and Mark, who had been in similar “shows,” envisaged it more freshly. Daphne’s eye roamed round the room as Colonel Fountain spoke. It was the room she had associated most with Cecil, from the day they’d first met, and now it looked at its exotic best, with candles reflected in the angled mirrors and in the dim gold leaf of the jelly-mould domes overhead. At the far end, in the glow of an electric lamp, hung the Raphael portrait of a bonneted young man. “I don’t know quite how he did it,” the Colonel said. “The mist had pretty well cleared—he was horribly exposed.” She knew Revel loved the room as much as she did, and she took her time to let her eyes come to rest on him, when he seemed immediately to know, and glanced up at her.
The rest of dinner passed in the blur of three successive wines, but Dudley, though drunker, was making a better effort not to be rattled. Daphne had decided she must ration the number of times she looked pointedly at Revel, and she soon felt he had come to a similar agreement with himself—it was amusing, and then threatened to become awkward. Sebby naturally was questioned a certain amount about the miners and his answers gave them all the feeling they were at the heart of the crisis without anything much being revealed at all. Mark was more provoked by this than the others, and had clearly taken against Sebby altogether. He talked a good deal of unnecessary rot, or sense that sounded like rot, about his experience growing up behind a butcher’s shop in Reading, until Dudley, who was the only person who could, said, “You really must learn, Mark dear, not to look down on those who have grown up without your own disadvantages,” and a big licensed laugh ran round the table. To Daphne it was hauntingly like the early days of their marriage, the trance of pleasure and purely happy expectation that Dudley could cast her into. He gleamed in the candlelight and the certainty of his own handsomeness. Then she found her reawakened longing focused on Revel’s thin artistic fingers lying loosely spread on the tablecloth, as though waiting for someone to pick them up. And then already it was time for the ladies to withdraw—the easy but decisive initiative in which she still felt, on a night like this, a callow usurper of her mother-in-law.
When the men came through, Colonel Fountain’s driver was fetched out from the servants’ dining-room—they were setting off straight away to Aldershot. Daphne saw him off from the front doorstep, feeling terribly squiffy and incoherent. She shook the Colonel’s hand between