The Stranger's Child Part 6

'I don't know what's put this into your head.'

'Well, there's his taste in art you know, he told me the sort of thing he collects. But mainly, I must admit, there's his tendency to manhandle your brother on every possible occasion.'

'Does he?' said George, with a frown of repudiation but also of dull recognition. 'He's certainly very generous to him.'

'My dear, the man must be the most arrant sodomite in Harrow.'

'A large claim!' said George, sparring a little for time.

'I just happened to catch an extraordinary moment, after dinner, when I'll swear the old monster tried to kiss him in the inglenook. They didn't know I could see them. Poor Hubert was most frightfully put out.'

George gasped and laughed. 'You call him old,' he said, 'though I believe he's not yet forty.' The Cecil-type shock of this, the lightly brutal worldliness, brought its own little train of resistance, concession and in this case amusing relief. Cecil was always right. And of course there was something perversely delightful in the situation. It was only later that he saw the hazard to his mother. 'Well, I'll be jiggered,' he said.

'Yes, indeed,' said Cecil, and gave him an odd hard look, as though he thought him a fool. Now they were pa.s.sing the gryphon-capped gate-piers of Stanmore Hall, a mansion almost as imposing as Corley Court; Cecil glanced in across the lawns, but if he had any feelings of curiosity he repressed them. He was smooth and unseeing after his little triumph about Harry. The Sawles barely knew the Hadleighs; their friends in the top end of the village were Mrs Wye, who took in sewing, and the Cattos, who bred show-birds in a straggle of huts and runs behind their cottage people dear to George since childhood, but useless and even embarra.s.sing for present purposes. He saw the deeply familiar paths and pavements, trees, walls and white-railed fences with renewed alertness, half-loving and half-critical, and longed for Cecil, with his poet's eye, to give them his blessing.

'Well, this is the first pond,' he said, pulling him up by the muddy slipway where a small wild girl in a cloth hat was submerging a toy boat.

Cecil looked across the circle of brown water and green duckweed with a pursed, absent smile. 'I don't think even I could take my clothes off here,' he said, 'right next to these people's cottages, and so on.'

'Oh, we're not swimming here,' said George. 'I've got somewhere much more pretty, and indeed private, in mind for that.'

'Have you, Georgie?' said Cecil, with a mixture of fondness and sauciness, and suspicion, since he liked to make the plans himself.

'I have. There are three ponds here; I dare say the village lads will be swimming in the big one, beyond those trees, if you'd like to have a look at them . . . ?'

Cecil peered pityingly at the little girl, who was perhaps too young to think sailing better than sinking; while the wooden block of the boat kept bobbing up and the sodden triangle of sail struggled to right itself. 'As it happens,' he said, distantly, 'I only want to look at you,' and then turned to smile at George, so that the remark seemed to have curved in the air, to have set out towards some more obvious and perhaps deserving target, and then swooped wonderfully home.

They went on across the open field towards the woods, no longer arm in arm, Cecil again a little ahead, in his habitual fashion, so that the lovely certainty of a minute before seemed vaguely called in question. The tiny separation felt to George like a foretaste of what would happen next morning. He planned to go down to the station in the van with Cecil, but was fl.u.s.tered and miserable already when he tried to picture it, there would be no time, no chance . . . Really everything rode on this last afternoon. 'Wait for me!' he said.

Cecil slowed and turned and smiled so widely and yet so privately that George felt almost faint with rea.s.surance. 'I hardly can wait,' Cecil said, and kept smiling; then they went on, side by side, with a funny tongue-tied singleness of purpose. George was aware of his own breathing, his own pulse, as the ragged line of oaks rose up in front of them. His feelings absorbed him so completely that he seemed to float towards them, weak with excitement, across a purely symbolic landscape. Away to their right a middle-aged couple whom he didn't recognize were also approaching the woods, with a pair of snuffling and bickering spaniels. He took them in exactly, but with no sense of their reality. The woman wore a bright blue blouse, and a low brown hat with a feather in it; the man, in country flannels, had a b.u.t.ton-topped cap like Cecil's, and raised his stick in amiable greeting. George nodded and quickened his pace, in a rush of guilt and exultation. He would easily be able to avoid these people. Other walkers were so predictable. There was a riding trail that ran for a mile or more along the wood's edge; and other tracks led on from glade to glade across the whole breadth of the Common. Thinner pathways, under lower branches, had been made by the deer. George ducked in through one of these, a tight green tunnel through the oak and beech saplings, and Cecil was obliged to follow, with an odd sort of cough of surrender. 'I can tell you know the way,' he said.

The truth was that George had played in these woods for years, with his brother and sister, but just as often, since he was big enough, alone. There were half-a-dozen tall trees he had worked out, through long hours of held breath and anxious daring, how to climb without help; there were hiding places and burial places. To show them to Cecil was to admit to something very far from Cambridge, and the Society. He stood up in the small clearing at the tunnel's end, and reached back to help Cecil and get in his way as he came up behind him.

Cecil stifled his usual yelp of a laugh and patted George's side and held his forearm in a tight grip, to keep him at a distance but not to let him go. He seemed to be listening, his head raised and eyes warily sliding, his posture self-conscious. They heard the dogs barking and bothering each other, close by. For a second or two the blue of the woman's blouse could be seen among the leaves, and the man called out 'Mary! Mary!', which George thought was the woman's name but then she called it too. There was something unaccountably funny about a dog called Mary, perhaps it was after the Queen, and he giggled to himself as he stood, with his arm burning from Cecil's grip; though that was nothing to the tantalized ache in the back of his thighs and the thick of his chest at Cecil's muscular closeness, his shushing lips, the blatant evidence of his arousal. George was breathing half-forgetfully, in sighs, while his heart raced. They heard the dogs yelping again, a bit further off, and the notes, though not the words, of the couple talking, the strange flat tone of marriage. Cecil took a few cautious steps across the leafy floor, still gripping George at arm's length, peering round. They were very close to the wood's edge below the green translucent fringe of beech leaves you could see the open field. Still, Cecil was being a little absurd if Mary's owners thought of them at all it would be their silence that puzzled them, their abrupt disappearance that seemed queer.

'Let's go a bit further,' said Cecil. George sighed and followed behind him, rubbing his wrist with an air of grievance. He saw that this little mime of prudence, air of woodcraft, had just been Cecil's way of getting on top and taking control of a scene which George for once had planned. Well, they were dreams as much as plans, memories mixed up with wild ideas for things they'd not yet done, perhaps could never do. Cecil, under other circ.u.mstances, was bold to the point of recklessness. George let him go ahead, pushing springy branches aside, barely bothering to hold them back for his friend, as if he could look after himself. It was all so new, the pleasure flecked with its opposite, with little hurts and contradictions that came to seem as much a part of love as the clear gaze of acceptance. He watched Cecil's back, the loose grey linen jacket, dark curls twisting out under the brim of his cap, with a momentary sense of following a stranger. He couldn't think what to say, his yearning coloured with apprehension, since Cecil was demanding and at times almost violent. Now they'd emerged by the huge fallen oak that George could have led him to by a much quicker path. It had come down in the storms several winters ago and he had watched it sink over time on the shattered branches beneath it, like a great gnarled monster protractedly lying down, bedding down in its own rot and wreckage. Cecil stopped and shrugged with pleasure, slipped off his jacket and hung it on the upraised claw above him. Then he turned and reached out his hands impatiently.

'That was very good,' muttered Cecil, already standing up then walking off for a few paces as he roughly straightened his clothes. He stood looking over the low dense screen of brambles, smiled mildly at a squirrel, cricked his neck both sides, ran a hand through his hair. He had a way of distancing himself at once, and seemed almost to counter the bleak little minute of irrational sadness by pretending that nothing had happened. His words might have followed a merely adequate meal, his thoughts already on something more important. He squared his shoulders, smiled and snuffled. The squirrel twitched its brown tail, scrabbled up its branch, watched him again. Perhaps it had watched his whole performance. It seemed to be applauding, with its tiny hands. George, still lying in the leaves, watched them both. He was amazed each time by Cecil's detachment, unsure if it was a virtue or a lack. Perhaps Cecil thought it rather poor form of George to be so shaken by the experience. The tender comedy of George's recovery, the invalidish wince and protesting groan at his ravishment, were ignored. Once in college he had been back at his desk within a minute, with a paper to finish, and seemed almost vexed when he turned a while later to find George still lying there, as he was now, spent but tender, and longing for the patient touch and simple smile of shared knowledge.

'Funny little creature,' said Cecil whimsically.

'Oh . . . thank you,' said George.

'Not you,' said Cecil, raising his chin and mimicking the rodent's spasms of nibbling.

George gave a rueful laugh, and sat forward with his hands round his knees. He wanted Cecil to know how he felt, but he feared that what he felt was wrong; and even so, to tell him would be to praise him, since he had produced this wild effect in him. 'Help me up, sir,' he said.

Cecil came back and took his raised hands and pulled him up. And he wasn't so distant they kissed, for a second or two, long enough for rea.s.surance but not to get anything started again.

The streams ran down at two or three places in the woods, threading and pooling and dropping again, among the huge roots of the oaks. They were hardly noisy, you came on them by surprise, just when you heard their busy trickling. They brought down leaves that caught and gathered on twigs and roots to make little grey-gold dams, with clear pools behind them. At a low point, by the wood's edge, two streams ran into one behind the dike of a fallen tree, silted and half-submerged, and made a bigger pond; in high summer it could be too shallow for bathing, but the recent rains had filled it up again.

'The lowest pond is deeper than it looks,' said George.

'Aha . . .' said Cecil.

'If you want to have a dip . . . ?' He felt he shouldn't show how much he wanted him naked again, and then he would get it. The weekend so far had been hobbled and hampered by dropped trousers and half-unb.u.t.toned shirts.

'You go first, and report on conditions,' Cecil said.

George gave him a sideways smile, ready but a little disappointed. 'All right,' he said; and he started to unlace his shoes.

'Do it slowly,' said Cecil. 'And keep looking at me.' He went over to the great oak above the pond, scanning its twisted and bulbous trunk for footholds, then in five seconds scrambled up to the low landing where it divided, and eased himself out on his bottom a short way along a broad almost horizontal branch. He sat there, suddenly owning the wood as much as George had believed himself to do. 'I can see you,' he said.

'And I can see you,' said George, unb.u.t.toning the top of his shirt and then pulling it over his head.

'I said slowly,' said Cecil.

George was slower, accordingly, when it came to his trousers. He found a certain shyness clouding his desire to please. Cecil maintained a provoking half-smile, arousal masked in amus.e.m.e.nt. 'You're like some shy sylvan creature,' he said, 'unused to the prying eyes of men. Perhaps you're a hamadryad.'

'Hamadryads are female,' said George, 'which I think you can see I'm not.'

'I still can't really see. You look a bit like a hamadryad to me. I expect you live in this oak tree I'm sitting in.'

George folded his trousers loosely and laid them on an old stump; but he turned away to slip off his white drawers, and saw with a twinge of regret that they were stained with mud from the tussle ten minutes earlier. 'Oh, you are shy,' said Cecil, almost crossly. George glanced over his shoulder, and forgot his anxiety about the mud in the larger strangeness of his nakedness, in the dappled woods, where any other walker could see him, and with Cecil, in his shirt and trousers and shoes, watching him steadily. He stepped down carefully across the dead leaves and oak mast towards the loose ellipse of water. The day was warm, but in and out of the patchy sunlight he shivered at the air on his back. He saw he was excited by the part he was playing, the new little scene of obedience, in which none the less his own worth and beauty were enhanced. It was something to know you were what Cecil wanted more than anything. He crouched down, still with his back to him, and peered into the water, which was brownish, loamy, stirred gently and continuously by the little rill that fell into it. Sunlight sparkled on the far side, twenty feet away. He slid a leg through the cold surface, and at once, when he felt the gripping chill of the water, flung himself in too. He circled and steadied and gasped out, 'It's delicious!'

After that it was his turn to watch Cecil, a readier and more practised undresser. Cecil's way was just to be out of his things with a tug and a wiggle and a kick. He pranced down the leafy slope like a satyr, sun-burnt and sinewy, calves and forearms darkly hairy. Then he leapt into the little pond almost on top of George, drowned him for a second or two, their legs tangling violently as George gripped at him, frightened and excited. He wanted to calm Cecil and keep him. They circled each other, spitting out water, laughing, the surface settling and bubbling. Underneath, their feet kicked branches, stirred up leaves and slime. Cecil reached for him, had an arm round his shoulder, then closed with him inexorably underwater.

They lay out to dry for a few last minutes at the edge of the wood, where the sun shone in under the high fringe of leaves. The field beyond had already been ploughed, and the tussocky gra.s.s of the headland was faded and trampled. The small stream that trickled down from the pool where they'd swum ran away behind them through a long ditch thick with brambles, its noise hardly louder than the miscellaneous birdsong. George had put his drawers back on, but Cecil spread out still naked, raised on his elbows, frowning lightly at his own body. George loved the confident display, and was vaguely, half-pleasurably, alarmed by it; he thought of the spaniel called Mary, and looked across the curve of the wood's edge half-expecting to see the blue blouse and hear the dry chatter of the couple on the breeze. He looked back almost shyly at Cecil he felt he would never stop taking him in. He loved the beautiful rightness of his bearing, that everyone saw, and he loved all the things that fell short of beauty, or redefined it, things generally hidden, the freckled shoulders swollen with muscle, knees knotty with sinew, black body-hair streaked flat, dark blemishes of the summer's mosquito-bites fading on his arms and neck. Behind him rose the dim pillars and dappled shadow of the woodlands, 'the Common', which to George was the magical landscape of his own solitude. This was the man who had entered it, unaware of its secrets: he had quickly surveyed it and possessed it; now here he was, stretched out full length in front of it. Here he was, rolling over with an absent-minded stare and settling on top of him, twitching experimentally as he squashed him, big trickles of cold water running suddenly off his hair into George's wincing and gasping face.

It was the hat that he saw first, over Cecil's shoulder, while his friend moved rhythmically on top of him: red and white, distant, but clearly on the move, above the bracken, where the woodland curved out round the far edge of the field. 'No, no . . . !' he tried to draw up his knees, pushed at Cecil with his fists, tried to twist and topple him.

'No . . . ?' said Cecil, sneering and panting in his face.

'No, don't, Cess no! Stop!' jerking his head up to see more clearly.

'Yes . . . ?' said Cecil, more rakishly now.

'It's my sister coming down the path.'

'Oh, Christ . . .' said Cecil, slumping, then rolling off him pretty smartly. 'Has she seen us?'

'I don't know . . . I don't think so.' George sat up and rolled over at the same time, reaching for his trousers. Cecil's own clothes were further off, and required a quick soldier-like scramble, white b.u.t.tocks wriggling through the gra.s.s.

'No harm in a sun-bath, is there?' he said. 'Where is she?' For the moment the red hat had disappeared. He pulled on his silk drawers, and then sat back, insouciant, but flushed and still notably excited.

'Best get your trousers on,' said George.

'Just been having a bathe . . .' said Cecil.

'Even so . . .' said George sharply, the sense of a very tricky moment still thick about him.

'A bit of a rough-house . . . ?' Cecil smirked at him. 'And anyway, what was it? only a bit of Oxford Style, Georgie, hardly the real thing.'

'Trousers!' said George.

Cecil tutted, but said, 'Well, perhaps you're right. We can't have your sister exposed to my membrum virile.'

'I feel a gentleman would have put that the other way round,' said George.

'What can you mean?' said Cecil. 'I'm a gentleman to the tip of my . . . toes' and he pulled on his trousers crouchingly, peering across the undergrowth. 'I can't see the darned girl,' he said.

'It was definitely her. She has a hat I would know half a mile off.'

'What, a sort of sou'wester?'

'It's a red straw hat, with a white silk flower on the side.'

'It sounds frightful.'

'Well, she likes it. And the main thing is it shows up.'

'If she does, you mean . . .'

George was trying and re-trying various phrases in his head b.u.t.toning his shirt he ran through facial expressions suggestive of bafflement and surprise at his sister's questions. 'Well, perhaps she didn't see us . . .' he said, after a minute.

Cecil looked at him narrowly. 'You didn't invent this sighting of your sister, did you, Georgie, just to put me off a bit of Oxford with you? Because you know that sort of trick never, ever works.'

'No, my darling Cess, I did not,' with momentary anger. 'For heaven's sake, I'm losing you tomorrow, I want as much of you as . . . as I can manage.'

'Well . . . good,' said Cecil, faintly abashed, standing up and stretching, then reaching down again to help him up.

When they were back in their shoes and jackets, Cecil said, 'Allow me,' and as he kissed him quickly on the lips he s.n.a.t.c.hed off their two hats and switched them round, c.o.c.king George's boater on his own damp curly head, and whisking his green tweed cap on to George's bigger, rounder bonce it perched there in a way he clearly found amusing. They scrambled up, past the pond, the little trickling stream, its noise quickly lost. George started talking quite loudly about College matters, virtually nonsense, but as they regained the path they had caught the stride of two friends out walking, with the woods to themselves. When they spotted Daphne, it was clear that in her solitary way she was doing the same, pretending to be merely out for some air, but hoping above all to find them and tag along. She knew enough not to search for them openly. Where the path she had been following crossed their own she turned down demurely towards them, red hat among the bushes, like a girl in a fairytale. George felt furious with her, but felt also the need for exceptional tact. Something in her demeanour told him that she hadn't seen them in the gra.s.s. Cecil called out, 'Daphne!' and waved pleasantly. Daphne looked up in surely genuine surprise, waved back, and hurried towards them. 'What do you think?' muttered Cecil.

'I think we're fine,' said George. 'Anyway, she knows nothing about these things.' His anxiety was not that she'd have known what they were doing, but that in her general astonishing innocence she wouldn't have had the first idea. He saw her talking to their mother about it, and their mother taking a colder and cannier guess.

'Miss Sawle . . . !' said Cecil, raising his borrowed boater as she approached.

'Daphne!' said George and touched the peak of Cecil's cap, with a facetious smile.

Daphne stopped three yards off and looked at them. 'This is nice,' she said. 'There's something funny about you.'

'Oh . . .' the two boys gaped comically at each other, patted themselves, George tense with worry that something else funny might show. Surely Cecil's whole person glowed with unmentionable l.u.s.t; but Daphne simply gaped back at him, and then looked away in the warm uncertainty of being teased. 'Well, I don't know,' she said. It was very strange, and in its way rea.s.suring, that she couldn't work out the obvious thing.

'What an exceptionally pretty hat, if I may say so,' said Cecil, as they started back together up the path.

Daphne looked up at him with an idiotic smile. 'Oh, thank you, Cecil!' she said. 'Thank you.' And as they walked on: 'Yes, I've received any number of compliments on this hat.'

To George it was entirely irksome having Daphne with them for the walk home twenty minutes that he and Cecil might have spent alone. He wondered what further chances they would have before the van came in the morning. After supper, perhaps, they might slip outside for a cigar. And of course they could start very early indeed and walk to the station, and Jonah could go in the van with Cecil's bags. He thought intently about how to propose these arrangements, only sharing in the chatter with a tone of wan good cheer. Wherever they paused to let one another go ahead through a gap in the undergrowth George patted Cecil, and sometimes Cecil abstractedly patted him back. Soon they left the woods by a different path, and then they were out in the lane . . . a high load of straw creaking past on a wagon, a motor-car caught behind it, banging and fuming. It seemed to him Cecil was taking quite unnecessary interest in Daphne, bending to her, shielding her as they scooted past the smelly car; but he had a picture too of his own silly jealousy, scuffing along behind this comical couple, the tall dark athlete with his ears curled outwards by an oversized boater and the little girl in a bright red hat trotting eagerly beside him.

And there, already, was the steep red roof of 'Two Acres', the low wall, the front gate, the row of dark-leaved cherry-trees outside the dining-room window. The front door stood open, in the summer way, into the shadowy hall. Beyond it, the garden door too stood open, the afternoon light glinting softly on polished oak, a china bowl one could pa.s.s right through the house, like a breeze. Over the door was the nailed-up horseshoe, and beneath it the old palm cross. George felt the unseen jostling of different magics, varying systems of good luck. It was something extraordinary they were doing, he and Cecil, a mad vertiginous adventure. On the hall-stand hung Hubert's irreproachable bowler, and their father's old billyc.o.c.k hat that was always left there, as if he might return or, having returned, feel the need to go out again. Cecil looked round, with George's boater in his hand, and tossed it with a slight spin through the air so that it landed on a free peg. 'Ha!' he said, with a little smirk of satisfaction at George and at himself. George found his hand was trembling as he hung up Cecil's cap beside it.

12.

'Cecil, you've performed a miracle,' said Daphne.

'My dear girl . . .' said Cecil complacently.

'You've turned water into wine.'

'Well,' murmured Hubert, with a quick glance at his mother, 'a special occasion.'

'We not infrequently have wine on Sunday,' said George.

'A very sad occasion,' said their mother, shaking her head as she raised her gla.s.s. 'We can't have Cecil drinking water on his last night with us. Whatever would he think.'

'I should think you jolly insensitive,' said Cecil, knocking back his gla.s.s of hock.

'Indeed!' said Daphne, who was still forced to keep their normal Sunday commons. Sunday was Cook's night off, and they had sat down to a bare supper of jellied chicken and salad. They had given up the festive style, there was a sense of looking ahead after the champagne and Tennyson of their earlier dinners, the table tonight seemed tactfully to prepare them for the prose of Monday morning.

'Yes, we'll be sorry to see you go, old chap,' said George.

'Such a pity . . .' said his mother, with an uncertain little smile at Daphne.

Daphne in turn peered at George, who did look oddly wretched she knew the way his face went stiff with feeling, just as she knew his irritable frown when he found he was being stared at. 'You'll be back in Cambridge in a fortnight,' she said.

'Oh, I think we'll get by,' said Cecil absently.

Daphne said, 'I mean, George is all right, but we won't see Cecil for ages, perhaps never again!'

Cecil seemed pleased by this histrionic claim, and his dark eyes held hers as he laughed, and said, 'You must come to Cambridge too. Mustn't she, Georgie?'

'Oh, rather . . .' said George dully.

'Hmm . . .' said Daphne.

'No, of course you must,' said George in a sincere tone; though she knew that George didn't want her in Cambridge, 'tagging along', breaking in on his important discussions with Cecil, and all the other things she was p.r.o.ne to do.

'You might all come up for the French play,' said Cecil.

'I suppose so,' said Daphne, though she felt she heard in this general invitation a note that she hadn't suspected before, the note of a general boredom.

'What are you doing?' said her mother.