The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst Page B

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 buttocks wriggling through the grass.
    ‘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 – buttoning his shirt he ran through facial expressions suggestive of