The Stranger’s Child

‘I think that’s a lot of nonsense,’ said Elspeth.

‘What is, dear?’

‘You know,’ said Elspeth.

‘Do you mean they talk about women?’ said Daphne.

‘They must know some very amusing women, in that case,’ said Freda, as another burst of laughter was heard. She had a disquieting sense of Harry, who was always so solemn with her, taking quite another character when the ladies were absent. She said, ‘Frank always said the secret was they didn’t want to bore us, but didn’t mind boring themselves. He always hurried them through. He wanted to get back to the women.’ The thought was intensely poignant.

Daphne said, with a pretence of indifference, ‘Do you have many dinner parties of your own, Miss Hewitt?’

‘At Mattocks? Oh, not a great many, no,’ said Elspeth. ‘Poor Harry is so extremely busy, and of course he’s often away.’

‘So you dine in solitary splendour, poor thing!’ said Freda. ‘In that palace…’

‘I can’t say I mind,’ said Elspeth drily.

‘Among all your marvellous pictures,’ said Daphne, slightly overdoing it, Freda felt. She said,

‘Harry must be doing awfully well…’ But at this Elspeth’s pride seemed to knit up tight and in getting up to return her coffee cup she effectively swept the matter of her brother’s prospects aside. Freda said, artificially, she felt, ‘And your dress, dear, I’ve been wanting to ask – is it from our splendid Madame Claire?’

Elspeth wrinkled her nose in pretended apology – ‘Lucille,’ she said.

‘Ah, well!’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Elspeth, ‘I can’t deny Harry keeps me in fine style.’

‘No, indeed!’ said Freda, with a quickly spreading feeling she’d been put in her place. Of course Elspeth might have been hinting that he would do the same for his wife, but Freda was fairly clear she was saying she hadn’t a chance.

There was the sound of a door opening, and Daphne said, ‘Ah, here come the gentlemen.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Freda, looking up at the group as they reappeared, with their funny discreet smiles. It was as if they had reached a decision, but were not at liberty to reveal what it was. Harry deferred to Cecil in the doorway, and then waited a few moments to defer to Hubert as well: he came in with an arm lightly round his shoulders, as if to thank and reassure him. Huey had drunk more than usual, and had a hot, uncertain look, the host to three men cleverer than himself. ‘Now then…’ he was saying, surely as glad as his father would have been to have got through that part of the evening. ‘Now then, how are we going to do this?’

There was a brief discussion of where Cecil was going to be, and how the chairs should be rearranged. George said wasn’t it frightfully hot in the room, and opened the french windows. ‘Shall we all sit outside?’ said Daphne.

‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Freda. There were hazards enough in the reading as it was. She watched Harry, hoping that in the shunting back of the chairs he would sit by her. He took up a small armchair in a masterful hug, with a pleasant effect of tension in his well-trousered legs as he lifted it out of the way. A rough semi-circle was formed in front of the window. Cecil set a lamp on a small table, actually outside, on the brick path, and a chair beside it. It was a miniature theatre. The lamp lit up the shrubs, the leaning hollyhocks and little lightless Chinese lanterns immediately behind him, but made everything else beyond and above seem the more thickly dark.

‘Since someone so kindly asked,’ said Cecil, with a confident glance at Harry, ‘I’ll read a poem or two of mine before scaling the heights of, er, Mount Tennyson.’ He sat down, with a copy of the Granta held out under the lamp at arm’s length. ‘I hope it won’t seem immodest to read a poem about Corley. The place seems to call poems forth – somehow!’ Varied murmurs of indulgence and respect were heard. Cecil raised his chin, and his eyebrows, and then, as if addressing a gathering, or rather congregation, of a hundred or so people, began: ‘The lights of home! the lights of home! / Clear through a mile of glimmering park, / The glooming woods, the scented loam, / Scarce seen beneath the horse’s feet / As through the Corley woods I beat / My happy pathway through the dark.’ The effect was so far from modest, Cecil chanting the words like a priest, and with so little suggestion of their meaning, that Freda found herself completely at a loss as to what he was talking about. Her eyes went straight to Daphne, who was grinning and blinking with the sudden need to master her feelings. Hubert looked pretty astonished for several seconds, then quickly assumed a cunning frown, as if measuring it against other readings he’d heard. Harry and Elspeth, more truly accustomed to literary soirees, maintained calmly appreciative near-smiles. George had turned so as to look straight into the garden, and his face was hidden; was it just the lamplight that made his ears burn red?

Freda took a furtive fortifying swig from her glass, and smiled approvingly in Cecil’s direction. The same thing always happened when she was read to, even when the reading was a more thoughtful and quiet one: at first she could barely take it in, as if nonplussed by her own concentration; then she settled and focused; then after ten minutes or so it seemed to be going on and on, Cecil’s voice had its own patterns, everyone’s did, that carried on more or less the same up the hills and down the dales of the poems, so that the words themselves all came to seem the same. ‘The footings of the fawn among the fern’ – she saw what he meant, but it made her want to giggle. ‘Love comes not always in by the front door,’ said Cecil, in his most homiletic tone. She let her head fall back and peeped abstractedly at Harry’s profile, stern but fine, and his strong left leg jutting out, jumping unconsciously with his pulse. Had he perhaps been injured, heart-wounded, in some earlier romance? She thought that must be it. One couldn’t imagine adoring him, exactly; but he was rich, and generous with it, she came back to that, his touching sweetness to Hubert: few ‘got’ poor Huey, as Harry did. But there was something difficult about him, no doubt – his singleness was perhaps a warning as much as an invitation. She looked away with a wistful smile. Nothing had been said about the scale of this event; as each probable limit was reached and passed without any remark of surprise or prediction Freda grew restless, and then, the opposite of restless, when she closed her eyes to try and savour the sense and not have actually to look at Cecil, and the warm electric rush of noises, the confident stride of whole new situations with all their pre-existing logic, talking with Miriam Cosgrove on a beach in Cornwall, they had to pack, there was so little time before the train pulled out, and they mistook the way to the hotel, they were hopelessly lost, and then, was it just a silence that had woken her, with its own queer tension, and she sat up and reached again for her empty glass. ‘Perfectly marvellous,’ she muttered, now slightly giddy as well as bleary. She forced herself awake. ‘A memorable evening!’

‘I’ll read you my favourite section,’ said Cecil, and took a preoccupied sip from his tumbler – was it water he was drinking, or whisky? ‘Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway – ’

‘Oh, yes, I love this one,’ said Freda, over-compensating; her daughter glanced furiously at her.

‘The tender blossom flutter down – ’

‘Ah…’

‘Unloved, that beech will gather brown, / This maple burn itself away.’ Large gestures of his raised right arm took in the garden beyond him.

Feeling suddenly delightfully awake, Freda smiled round, gave an almost conspiratorial look to Harry, who nodded, very slightly, but pleasantly. Elspeth glanced down, having noticed. It was a beautiful poem, beautiful and sad. ‘Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair, / Ray round with flames her disk of seed…’ Again she could imagine it more sensitively read – or did she mean less sensitively? – anyway, without a certain atmosphere of Westminster Abbey. Poor Huey was fast asleep; it might have been a great pitiless sermon. She wondered if she could poke him discreetly or otherwise get at him, and felt another giggle hiding in her consternation. Oh, let him sleep. Her other two children, in supporting postures, flanked the stage, George subtly reflecting Cecil’s importance, while Daphne’s silly face was tense with the desire to respond. Freda could tell she wasn’t taking a word of it in.

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

The brook shall babble down the plain,

At noon or when the lesser wain

Is twisting round the polar star;

and once more Cecil’s long and powerful fingers, commanding their attention, twisted in front of him, throwing his face into dramatic shadow -

Uncared for, gird the windy grove,

And flood the haunts of hern and crake;

Or into silver arrows break