The Stranger’s Child

pleasure. She sat on the window-seat with the shawl pulled round her and a mysterious smile on her face at the first intimacies of the ginger brandy. She’d had a real drink before, a half glass of champagne when Huey came of age, and once long ago she and George had done a small but rash experiment with Cook’s brandy. Like the music, a drink was marvellous as well as alarming. She was gripped by the girl’s eerie calls, Jo-ho-he, Jo- ho-he, which had a clear warning of tragedy to them; but at the same time she had a delicious sense of having nothing whatever to worry about. She looked casually at the others, her mother braced as if for the impact of salt waves, Mrs Kalbeck tilting her head in more mature appraisal. Daphne saw the beauty of being spontaneous, and had to hold back a number of things she suddenly felt like saying. She frowned at the Persian rug. There were two sections, which recurred; there was the wild storm music, where you saw the men hanging in the rigging, and then, when the storm was stilled, the most beautiful tune she’d ever heard came in, dropping and soaring, rapturous and free and yet intensely sad, and in either case somehow inevitable. She didn’t know what Senta was saying, beyond the recurrent sounding of the word Mann, but she sensed the presence of passionate love, and felt the air of legend, which had a natural hold on her. Emmy Destinn herself she saw as a wild waif with long dark hair, somehow marked out by her own peculiar name. Almost at once she sang a high note, the brass fell downstairs and Daphne ran over to lift the needle off the disc.

‘It is sadly shortened,’ said Mrs Kalbeck. ‘In truth there are two more strophes.’

‘Yes, dear, you said before,’ said Freda rather sharply; and then, softening as always, ‘There is only so much they can squeeze on to the record. To me it’s a marvel that they do that.’

‘Then shall we have it again?’ said Daphne, looking back at them.

‘Oh, why not!’ said her mother, in a tone of harmless female conspiracy, given more swagger by what Daphne saw as a small crowd of empty glasses. Mrs Kalbeck nodded in helpless agreement. Records were indeed marvels, but they were only tiny helpings from the ocean of music.

During the second helping Daphne moved very slowly across the room, picked up her glass and drained it, and put it down again with a complicated feeling of sadness and satisfaction that was thoroughly endorsed by Wagner’s restless ballad. She slipped out into the garden just as the music hurtled to its end. ‘Oh darling, should you?’ wailed her mother. It was simply that the lure of the other conspiracy, the one she had entered into with the boys in the wood, was so much more urgent than keeping company with the two old women. ‘There may be a dew-fall!’ said Freda, in a tone that suggested an avalanche.

‘I know,’ Daphne called back, seizing her excuse, ‘I’ve left Lord Tennyson out in the dew!’ Things seemed to come to her.

She went quickly past the windows of the house, and then stood still on the edge of the lawn. The grass was dry when she stooped and touched it – it was still too warm for dew. Warm and yet not warm. Seeing the house from outside she remembered her earlier twinge of loneliness, when the sun was setting and the lights came on indoors. She did have to find her books, which would be lying just where she’d left them, by the hammock. She wanted to prepare for the Tennyson reading that Cecil had proposed, she was already imagining it… ‘I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May…’, or, ‘ “The curse is come upon me!” cried the Lady of Shalott’… completely different, of course – she couldn’t decide. But where were the boys? The night seemed to have swallowed them up completely, leaving only the whispering of the breeze in the tree-tops. All she could see was vague silhouettes of black on grey, but the smells of the trees and the grass flooded the air. She felt that Nature was restoring itself in a secret flow of scent while people, most people, stayed heedlessly indoors. There were privet smells and earth smells and rose smells that she took in without naming them in her heady swoop across the lawn. Her heart was beating with the undeniable daring of being out here, and being slightly adrift, coming suddenly on the stone bench and stopping to peer around. Up above, the stars were gathering all the time, sliding out between high faint trails of cloud as though they had grown used to her. She heard a sort of moan, just ahead of her, quickly stifled, and a run of recognizable giggles; and of course that further smell, distinct from dry grass and vegetation, the gentlemanly whiff of Cecil’s cigar.

She went a few steps towards the clump of trees where the hammock was slung. She didn’t know if she’d been seen. It was oddly like the minute of uncertainty before, in the wood, when Cecil had just arrived, and she couldn’t tell if she was spying. Now, though, it was far too dark for spying. She heard Cecil say something funny about a moustache, ‘quite an adorable moustache’; George murmured something and Cecil said, ‘I suppose he wears it to make himself look older, but of course it has just the opposite effect, he looks like a boy playing hide and seek.’ ‘Hmm… I’m not sure anyone’s seeking especially,’ said George. ‘Well…’ said Cecil, and there was a little stifled rumpus of giggles and grunts that went on for ten seconds, till George said, rather loudly, gasping for breath, ‘No, no, besides, Hubert’s a womanizer through and through.’

A womanizer…! The word lay, sinuous and poisonous, in the shadowy borders of Daphne’s vocabulary. For a moment she pictured it, and behind it a vaguer image still, of a man dancing with a woman in a low-cut dress. The drunkenness of her own evening was lurchingly intensified in this imaginary room, where it was really the woman she saw, and certainly not Hubert, who was quite the most awkward figure when it came to dancing. A strange silence fell, in which she heard her own pulse in her ear. Part of her, she realized, needed to learn more. Then, ‘What is it, Daphne?’ said George.

‘Oh, are you here?’ she said, and she pushed on, under the low branches that screened the hammock on that side. ‘I’ve left my books out here, in the dew.’

‘Well, I haven’t seen them,’ said George, and she heard the hammock rope shift and creak against the tree.

‘No, you wouldn’t have seen them, of course, because it’s the night.’ She laughed mockingly and slid her foot forward over the invisible ground. ‘But I know where they are. I can picture them.’

‘All right,’ said George.

She edged forward again, and could just make out the slump of the hammock as it tilted and steadied. Again, she stooped to pat the grass, and half fell forward, startled and amused by her own tipsiness. ‘Isn’t Cecil with you?’ she said artfully.

‘Ha…!’ said Cecil softly, just above her, and pulled on his cigar – she looked up and saw the scarlet burn of its tip and beyond it, for three seconds, the shadowed gleam of his face. Then the tip twitched away and faded and the darkness teemed in to where his features had been, while the sharp dry odour floated wide.

‘Are you both in the hammock!’ She stood up straight, with a sense that she’d been tricked, or anyway overlooked, in this new game they were making up. She reached out a hand for the webbing, where it fanned towards their feet. It would be very easy, and entertaining, to rock them, or even tip them out; though she felt at the same time a simple urge to climb in with them. She had shared the hammock with her mother, when she was smaller, and being read to; now she was mindful of the hot cigar. ‘Well, I must say,’ she said. The cigar tip, barely showing, dithered in the air like some dimly luminous bug and then glowed into life again, but now it was George’s face that she saw in its faint devilish light. ‘Oh, I thought it was Cecil’s cigar,’ she said simply.

George chortled in three quick huffs of smoke. And Cecil cleared his throat – somehow supportively and appreciatively. ‘So it was,’ said George, in his most paradoxical tone. ‘I’m smoking Cecil’s cigar too.’

‘Oh really…’ said Daphne, not knowing what tone to give the words. ‘Well, I shouldn’t let Mother find out.’

‘Oh, most young men smoke,’ said George.

‘Oh, do they?’ she said, deciding sarcasm was her best option. She watched, pained and tantalized, as the next glow showed up a hint of Cecil’s cheeks and watchful eyes through a fading puff of smoke. Quite without warning The Flying Dutchman began again, startlingly loud through the open windows.

‘God! What’s that, the third time…!’ said George.

‘Lord,’ said Cecil. ‘They are keen.’

‘It’s Kalbeck, of course,’ George said, as though to exonerate the Sawles themselves from such obsessive behaviour. ‘God knows what the Cosgroves must think.’

‘Mother loved Wagner long before she met Mrs Kalbeck,’ said Daphne.

‘We all love Wagner, darling. But he’s quite repetitious enough on his own account without playing the same record ten times.’

‘It’s Senta’s Ballad,’ Daphne said, not immune to it herself this third time, in fact suddenly more moved by it out in the open, as if it were in the air itself, a part of nature, and wanting them all to listen and share in it. The orchestra sounded better from here, like a real band heard at a distance, and Emmy Destinn seemed even more wild and intense. For a moment she pictured the lit house behind them as a ship in the night. ‘Cecil,’ she said