The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [87]
Mark, who was as tight as Dudley, immediately seized hold of Daphne, and they shimmied off at a lively stagger across the hall; she felt Mark’s warm but undiscriminating interest in her as a member of the opposite sex, they were both breathless with laughter and then Mark bumped quite hard into the table and almost fell over, still holding on to her. She freed herself, and looked around at the others, Madeleine virtually in hiding, doubled up behind the pianola, as if looking for something she’d dropped, and George pretending to praise Dudley’s playing with a keen facetious grin, entirely ignored by Dudley himself. Of course she wanted to dance with Revel, but he, quite reasonably, she supposed, had presented his hand to Flo, and moved off with her very confidently, steering as if by magic past the various hazards of hall chairs, plant-stands and the grandfather clock. Daphne only half-followed them, then she saw Revel smiling at her over Flo’s shoulder in a perfectly open way from which, none the less, she felt allowed to draw something quite private. The roll came to an end, and Dudley jumped up to choose a replacement, which turned out to be the other foxtrot he always played. He had no ear for music, but was obsessively attached to these two numbers, or at least to playing them, with a staring pretence that anyone who really did care for music would love them too. So Daphne took hold of Stinker, with a certain mischievous determination, and he bumped along beside her and somewhat on top of her, gasping, “Oh, my dear girl, you’re too fast for me …” In a moment Dudley started singing raucously as he pedalled, “Oh, the lights of home! … the lights of home! and a place I can call my own!”
“What’s that?” shouted Stinker over his shoulder, trying boldly to wriggle out of dancing.
“What? You can’t be so Philistine. It’s a lovely song by my brother Cecil”—and he pounded on, jamming the words in to the rhythm nonsensically, and soon with tears of laughter running down his cheeks. Above him the large unapprehending cows in “The Loch of Galber” gazed on. The roll came to an end.
“Goodness, I’m hot after all that,” said Stinker, and murmuring extravagantly about what tremendous fun it all was he steered his way back into the drawing-room. Cautious clinking and crashing could be heard and the hoarse gasp of the gazogene; then the pianola started up again. “Come on, Stinker!” shouted Dudley, “it’s the ‘Hickory-Dickory Rag’—your favourite!”
“Come on, Stinker!” cried Tilda, with exceptional high spirits, so that people laughed at her a little, but then immediately joined her, “Come on, we’re starting!”—Flo was darting around already, and Eva, taking the man’s part, seized her shoulders and trotted her briskly down the room, head jerking up and down like a hen in a new kind of move she seemed to have designed herself. The women’s beads could just be heard, rattling against each other. “Oh!” said Tilda, “oh, my golly!” She followed them with a wide-eyed smile that Daphne had never seen before, something touching and comical in her pleasure, gazing at each of the others to see if they shared it; she peered almost cunningly at George, whose own smile was broad but slightly strained, and suddenly she had hooked his arm round her somehow, and they were moving off together, Tilda doing some intent little back-kicks and George, with shouts of “Whoops!” and “Oh, my word!” randomly trying something similar. “Oh, do come on, Stinker!” shouted Dudley again, rocking from side to side like a cyclist on a steep hill as he worked at the treadles, something mad and relentless in his grin. “Stinker!” shouted Mark, “Stinker-winker!” But Stinker resisted all these calls, and a minute later Daphne saw him wander past the window with a tumbler in his