Well, she wasn’t naive, she knew perfectly well that the upper classes could behave appallingly. Perhaps George should be told what his precious friend was really like. Though perhaps she would keep it to herself, with the choice then of bringing out the facts on some later occasion. It soon seemed more adult not to make a fuss. She started thinking about Lord Pettifer in
With each retelling, the story, with its kernel of scandal, made her heart race a fraction less, and its imagined impact on George, or her mother, or Olive Watkins, their fury and bewilderment, grew stronger in compensation. Daphne felt the warm flood of the story surge through her and grip her whole person; but each time the wave seemed a little weaker than the time before, and her reasonable relief at this gradual change was coloured with a tinge of indignation.
Or could that be what kissing was really about? It seemed more like some childish dare, to stick your tongue into someone else’s mouth, and took a good deal of forbearance on their part, even if they liked you a lot. Alas there was no one she could ask. If she brought it up with her mother she would instantly grow suspicious. Could Hubert conceivably have kissed a woman like that? Maybe George, if he did have a girl, had had a go at it. She imagined asking him, and the secret fact of it having happened with his best friend made the idea slyly amusing.
What she was almost conscious of not thinking of was the way he had rubbed himself rhythmically against her. All her feelings were fixed on the easier, and after all rather comic, liberties of licking her mouth and feeling her bottom.
Later she found she had slept, and the dream she had just come out of kept its magic as she lay with open eyes in the deep grey dark. Then she thought she had been a silly child before. ‘Child, child’ he had called her, and that’s what she was. She thought about what Cecil had actually said, how it had been so wonderful getting to know her, and she flopped on to her back and wondered quite coolly if he had fallen in love with her. She gazed at the shadowy zone of the ceiling, the first powdery gleam of light above the curtains, as a sort of image of her own innocence. What evidence was there? Cecil had a very particular way of looking at her, even when others were present, of holding her eye at moments in their talk, so that another unspoken conversation seemed also to be going on. She had never known such a thing before, the boldness and the absolute privateness as well. It was still rather awful that Cecil had gone behind George’s back like that, but she felt a certain thrilled complacency at the choice he had secretly made. And of course he had to do it like this, his love had to be concealed, and it had to come out. There was something very touching as well as alarming in Cecil’s passion. Now she leapt forgivingly over the muddle in the garden, and thought of the life they would share together. Would he want to do that kind of thing again? Not when they were married, presumably. And another perspective of lighted spaces opened before her: she saw herself sitting down to dinner beneath the jelly-mould domes, or anyway compartments, of Corley Court.
She slept unusually late, slept on with only a momentary murmur and swallow through the rustling and bumping on the landing, the fact of voices downstairs; and when she at last came up into fuddled life her little clock said a quarter to nine. After that, and a further helpless three minutes of gaping sleep, she found she had attuned to something, to the loss of something she was amazed to find she had already grown used to, the noise of Cecil in the house. Of course he had gone! There was a thinness in the air that told her, in the tone of the morning, the texture of the servants’ movements and fragments of talk. And all her plans for him were thwarted, the witty thing she was going to say to him, as he climbed into Horner’s van… It would be weeks, perhaps months, before she saw him again. Moaning with a lover’s pangs, as well as with a certain sulky relief at this tragic postponement, she thrust herself out of bed, and on to her instantly tender right foot.
In the thick of her solitary breakfast, with the maid looking in once a minute to see if she’d finished, there was George coming past the window, back home from the station and seeing Cecil off. He had a bleak, faraway look which annoyed her the moment she saw it and felt its meaning. It was a time of reckoning for him – his guest, his first one ever, had left, and now the family could take him back and tell him, more or less, what they thought. He would be moody and delicate, unsure who to side with. And then she remembered her book. Oh, what had Cecil done with it? Had he written in it? Where had he put it? She was suddenly sick with anger at Jonah for packing it with Cecil’s other books. Even now it would be trapped unbeknownst between other books in his suitcase, in a crowd of other cases on Harrow and Wealdstone station.
‘Oh, Veronica,’ she said.
‘Sorry, miss!’ said Veronica.
‘No, not that,’ said Daphne. ‘Did you see, did Mr Valance leave anything for me, my autograph book, I mean?’
‘Oh, no, miss.’ And knotting her duster in a pretence of interest, ‘Is that the one with the vicar in?’
‘What…?’ said Daphne. ‘Well, it has a number of important men in it.’ She didn’t quite trust Veronica, who was more or less her own age, and treated her more or less like a fool.
‘I’ll ask, miss, shall I?’ Veronica said. But then George looked round the door, gave a rueful smile, and said,
‘Cecil says goodbye.’ He hovered there, feeling the atmosphere, seeming uncertain whether to share the subject of Cecil any further with his sister.
‘I’m afraid I slept somewhat badly,’ said Daphne, aware of her own adult tone. ‘And then I must have overslept…’
‘He was up fearfully early,’ said George. ‘You know Cecil!’
‘Perhaps Mr George has got it, miss,’ said Veronica.
‘Oh, really, it doesn’t matter,’ said Daphne, and coloured at the disclosure of her private worry.
‘Got what?’ said George, with an anxious look of his own.
So Daphne had to say to him, ‘I wondered if Cecil had found a chance to write in my little album, that’s all.’
‘I expect he wrote something or other. Cess is rarely at a loss for words.’
‘I expect he’s left it somewhere,’ Daphne said, and spread some butter on her toast, though really her smothered anxiety had squeezed up her appetite to nothing. She looked at her brother with a cold smile. ‘So what are you doing today, George?’ she said, conscious of denying him a talk on the obvious subject.
‘Eh? Oh, I’ll find something,’ he said, with a hint of pathos. He was leaning against the doorpost, neither in nor out, the maid sidling past him back into the hall. Daphne saw him decide to speak, and as he started airily, ‘No, it was a shame Cecil couldn’t stay longer…’ she said. ‘I’ve invited Olive for tea tomorrow, I haven’t seen her since they got back from Dawlish.’ She knew Olive Watkins was small beer after Cecil, and Dawlish after the Dolomites, and she felt ashamed and almost sad as well as defiant in mentioning her. But she couldn’t indulge George in his present mood. It rubbed up too closely against her own.
‘Oh, have you…’ said George, startled and bored. Daphne saw she’d produced a particular kind of family atmosphere, and that itself was depressing after the wider horizons of Cecil’s visit. Also, she really wanted her book back, to show Olive whatever it was that Cecil had written. This had been her main purpose in asking her to tea.
Then Veronica, with her own bored persistence, looked back in and said, ‘I asked Jonah, miss. He’s having a look.’
‘Thank you,’ said Daphne, feeling oppressed now by the public nature of the search.
‘Jonah’s looking in his room now. I mean he’s looking in Mr Valance’s room!’
And George, without saying anything more, drifted away, and then Daphne heard him going, rather stealthily she thought, upstairs as well, two at a time. She told herself, without fully believing it, that probably, after all, Cecil would have put nothing but his name and the date.
A minute later George came back down, with Jonah at his heels, and Daphne’s mauve album open in his hands. ‘My word, sis…’ he said abstractedly, turning the page and continuing to read; ‘he’s certainly done you proud!’
‘What is it?’ said Daphne, pushing back her chair but determined to keep her dignity, almost to seem indifferent. Not just his name, then: she could see it was much, much more – now that the book was here, open, in the room, she felt quite frightened at the thought of what might come out of it.
