‘Since someone so kindly asked,’ said Cecil, with a confident glance at Harry, ‘I’ll read a poem or two of mine before scaling the heights of, er, Mount Tennyson.’ He sat down, with a copy of the Granta held out under the lamp at arm’s length. ‘I hope it won’t seem immodest to read a poem about Corley. The place seems to call poems forth – somehow!’ Varied murmurs of indulgence and respect were heard. Cecil raised his chin, and his eyebrows, and then, as if addressing a gathering, or rather congregation, of a hundred or so people, began: ‘The lights of home! the lights of home! / Clear through a mile of glimmering park, / The glooming woods, the scented loam, / Scarce seen beneath the horse’s feet / As through the Corley woods I beat / My happy pathway through the dark.’ The effect was so far from modest, Cecil chanting the words like a priest, and with so little suggestion of their meaning, that Freda found herself completely at a loss as to what he was talking about. Her eyes went straight to Daphne, who was grinning and blinking with the sudden need to master her feelings. Hubert looked pretty astonished for several seconds, then quickly assumed a cunning frown, as if measuring it against other readings he’d heard. Harry and Elspeth, more truly accustomed to literary soirées, maintained calmly appreciative near-smiles. George had turned so as to look straight into the garden, and his face was hidden; was it just the lamplight that made his ears burn red?
Freda took a furtive fortifying swig from her glass, and smiled approvingly in Cecil’s direction. The same thing always happened when she was read to, even when the reading was a more thoughtful and quiet one: at first she could barely take it in, as if nonplussed by her own concentration; then she settled and focused; then after ten minutes or so it seemed to be going on and on, Cecil’s voice had its own patterns, everyone’s did, that carried on more or less the same up the hills and down the dales of the poems, so that the words themselves all came to seem the same. ‘The footings of the fawn among the fern’ – she saw what he meant, but it made her want to giggle. ‘Love comes not always in by the front door,’ said Cecil, in his most homiletic tone. She let her head fall back and peeped abstractedly at Harry’s profile, stern but fine, and his strong left leg jutting out, jumping unconsciously with his pulse. Had he perhaps been injured, heart-wounded, in some earlier romance? She thought that must be it. One couldn’t imagine adoring him, exactly; but he was rich, and generous with it, she came back to that, his touching sweetness to Hubert: few ‘got’ poor Huey, as Harry did. But there was something difficult about him, no doubt – his singleness was perhaps a warning as much as an invitation. She looked away with a wistful smile. Nothing had been said about the scale of this event; as each probable limit was reached and passed without any remark of surprise or prediction Freda grew restless, and then, the opposite of restless, when she closed her eyes to try and savour the sense and not have actually to look at Cecil, and the warm electric rush of noises, the confident stride of whole new situations with all their pre-existing logic, talking with Miriam Cosgrove on a beach in Cornwall, they had to pack, there was so little time before the train pulled out, and they mistook the way to the hotel, they were hopelessly lost, and then, was it just a silence that had woken her, with its own queer tension, and she sat up and reached again for her empty glass. ‘Perfectly marvellous,’ she muttered, now slightly giddy as well as bleary. She forced herself awake. ‘A memorable evening!’
‘I’ll read you my favourite section,’ said Cecil, and took a preoccupied sip from his tumbler – was it water he was drinking, or whisky? ‘Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway – ’
‘Oh, yes, I love this one,’ said Freda, over-compensating; her daughter glanced furiously at her.
‘The tender blossom flutter down – ’
‘Ah…’
‘Unloved, that beech will gather brown, / This maple burn itself away.’ Large gestures of his raised right arm took in the garden beyond him.
Feeling suddenly delightfully awake, Freda smiled round, gave an almost conspiratorial look to Harry, who nodded, very slightly, but pleasantly. Elspeth glanced down, having noticed. It was a beautiful poem, beautiful and sad. ‘Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair, / Ray round with flames her disk of seed…’ Again she could imagine it more sensitively read – or did she mean less sensitively? – anyway, without a certain atmosphere of Westminster Abbey. Poor Huey was fast asleep; it might have been a great pitiless sermon. She wondered if she could poke him discreetly or otherwise get at him, and felt another giggle hiding in her consternation. Oh, let him sleep. Her other two children, in supporting postures, flanked the stage, George subtly reflecting Cecil’s importance, while Daphne’s silly face was tense with the desire to respond. Freda could tell she wasn’t taking a word of it in.
Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star;
and once more Cecil’s long and powerful fingers, commanding their attention, twisted in front of him, throwing his face into dramatic shadow -
Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
Or into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove -
here he glanced upwards with a surprising note of comic disadvantage, but carried on determinedly -
Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger’s child -
the first hesitant drops, like soft footsteps or tactful throat-clearings, had quickly gained confidence, a rush of pattering had begun, and Cecil too, no stranger to the elements, was rushing through, raising his voice just when he needed to bring the poem to rest: he went on emphatically,
As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills -
but now all of them were getting up to move the lamp and close the windows and his last words rose against the settling roar of the rain in a determined shout.
10
Hubert woke early, with a sharp ache above his left eye, where a number of oppressive thoughts seemed to have gathered and knotted. His pyjamas were twisted and damp with sweat. Social life, though it had its importance, often left him confused and even physically out of sorts. The rain on the roof had got him off to sleep, and then woken him again to his own heat. He had a muddled apprehension of people moving about, his mother had restless nights, and now, as he dozed and woke again, his worries about her wove their way through his uneasy recall of moments at dinner and afterwards. Then the sun rose with merciless brilliance. Like Cecil Valance, Hubert hated to waste time, but unlike Cecil he was sometimes at a loss to know quite what to do with it. He decided he must go to early Communion, and leave the rest of the party to go to Matins without him. Twenty minutes later he closed the front gate and set off down the hill with an air of sulky rectitude. It had turned into a fresh, still morning; the great vale of northern Middlesex lay before him, with the answering heights of Muswell Hill rising mistily beyond, but he searched in vain for his usual sober pleasure in belonging here.
He paid scant attention to the service, conducted by Mr Barstow, the laborious curate; but it gave him a measure of satisfaction to sit in his pew, and to kneel on the hard carpet of the sanctuary steps. Afterwards he walked home through the Priory, and was still quite warm from the climb when he joined the others at breakfast. Cecil was talking, in his trying, amusing way, and though Hubert greeted them all properly, and asked them if they’d slept well, he sensed that Cecil had taken charge.