‘The gentleman left it in the room,’ said Jonah, looking from one to the other of them.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Daphne. George was blinking slowly and softly biting his lower lip in concentration. He might have been pondering how to break some rather awkward news to her, as he came and sat down across from her, placing the book on the table, then turning the pages back to start again. ‘Well, when you’ve finished,’ Daphne said tartly, but also with reluctant respect. What Cecil had written was poetry, which took longer to read, and his handwriting wasn’t of the clearest.
‘Goodness,’ said George, and looked up at her with a firm little smile. ‘I think you should feel thoroughly flattered.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Daphne. ‘Should I?’ It seemed George was determined to master the poem and its secrets before he let her see a word of it.
‘No, this is quite something,’ he said, shaking his head as he ran back over it. ‘You’re going to have to let me copy this out for myself.’
Daphne drained her teacup completely, folded her napkin, glanced across at the two servants, who were smiling stupidly at the successful retrieval of the book, and also formed a somewhat inhibiting audience to this agitating crisis in her life, and then said, as lightly as she could, ‘Don’t be such a tease, George, let me see.’ Of course it was a tease, the latest of thousands, but it was more than that, and she knew resentfully that George couldn’t help it.
‘Sorry, old girl,’ he said, and sat back at last, and slid the album towards her.
‘Thank you!’ said Daphne.
‘If you could see your face,’ said George.
She pushed her plate aside – ‘Will you take all this, please,’ to the maid; who did so, with gaping slowness, peering at the columns of Cecil’s black script as though they confirmed a rather dubious opinion she’d formed of him. ‘Thank you,’ said Daphne again sharply; and frowned and coloured, unable to take in a word of the poem. She had to find out at once what George meant, that she should be flattered. Was this it, the sudden helpless breaking of the news? Perhaps not, or George would have said something more. The harder she looked at it, the less she knew. Well, it was called, simply, ‘Two Acres’, and it ran on over five pages, both sides of the paper – she flicked back and forth.
‘Formally, it’s rather simple,’ said George, ‘for Cecil.’
‘Well, quite,’ said Daphne.
‘Just regular tetrameter couplets.’
‘That will be all,’ said Daphne, and waited while Veronica and Jonah went off. Really they were most irritating. She flicked further back for a moment, to the Revd Barstow, with his scholarly flourish, ‘B. A. Dunelm’; and then forward to Cecil, who had broken all the rules of an autograph book with his enormous entry, and made everyone else look so feeble and dutiful. It was unmannerly, and she wasn’t sure if she resented it or admired it. His writing grew smaller and faster as it sloped down the page. On the first page the bottom line turned up sideways at the end to fit in – ‘Chaunticleer’, she read, which was a definite poetry word, though she wasn’t precisely sure of its meaning.
‘I suppose he’ll be publishing it somewhere,’ said George, ‘the
‘Do you think?’ said Daphne, as levelly as she could, but with a quick strong feeling that the poem was hers after all. Cecil hadn’t just written it here, in her book, by chance. She was still trying to see if it said things about her personally, or if it was simply about the house – and the garden:
The Jenny nettle by the wall,
That some the Devil’s Play-thing call -
that was a conversation she’d had with him – now quite simply turned into poetry. Her father had called stinging nettles Devil’s Play-things, it was what they called them in Devon. She felt thrilled, and a little bewildered, at being in on the very making of a poem, and at something else magical, like seeing oneself in a photograph. What else would be revealed?
The book left out beneath the trees,
Read over backwards by the breeze.
The spinney where the lisping larches
Kiss overhead in silver arches
And in their shadows lovers too
Might kiss and tell their secrets through.
Again the minutely staggered and then breathtaking merging of word, image and fact. She was really going to have to read this somewhere apart, in private. ‘I think it would be most appropriate to read this
‘Well, child…!’ her mother said, and gave Daphne a strange, eager look. ‘What excitements.’
‘Everyone can see it when I’ve finished reading it,’ said Daphne. ‘People seem to be forgetting that it’s my book.’
‘Well, of course, dear,’ said her mother, going round the table and opening a window as if to show she had other useful things to do; and then, ‘You’ve obviously made quite an impression… on him’ – not using Cecil’s name, out of some awful delicacy. She gave Daphne a teasing glance that had something new to it – a sense of girding herself for some welcome parental obligation.
‘Mother, he was only here for three nights,’ said George, almost crossly. ‘All Cecil has done, with his customary generosity, is to write a poem about our house as a thank-you for the visit.’
‘I know, dear,’ said their mother, with a little flinch at her two prickly children. ‘He’s been most generous to Jonah too.’
George got up, and went to the window, and looked out in the manner of someone who wants to say something firm but difficult. ‘The poem’s really nothing to do with Daphne.’
‘Isn’t it?’ said Daphne, shaking her head. Wasn’t it? It was there, she had seen it at once, the lovers’ kiss in the shadows, telling their secrets; but of course she couldn’t say that to either of them. ‘I suppose I should be sorry he didn’t write a poem for you.’
George’s pitying look was focused on the cherry-trees outside. ‘As a matter of fact, he has written a poem for me.’
‘Oh, George, you never said,’ said their mother. ‘You mean just now?’
‘No, no – last term sometime – it really doesn’t matter.’
‘Well!’ said their mother, trying to maintain a tone of bewildered amusement. ‘Rather a fuss about a poem.’
‘There’s no fuss, darling,’ said George, now in a brightly patient tone.
‘It’s too lovely to have a poem written for you at all, in my view.’
‘I quite agree!’ said Daphne, and the feeling that everything was being spoiled welled up inside her.
‘I’m beginning to feel very sorry that I mentioned it. If Cecil’s visit has to end in this kind of childish bickering.’
‘Oh, read it if you want to!’ said Daphne, pursing her lips against tears, and flapping through the book to give it to her open at the right page. Her mother looked at her sharply, and after a moment, and quite gently, took it from her.
‘Thank you… now if the girl could run for my glasses.’ And when Veronica came back, their mother sat down at the dining-table and addressed herself, with a quizzical but sporting look, to the poem that had just been written about her house.
TWO
