‘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 fondly, using his name for the first time, ‘I expect you understand the words.’
‘Ja, ja, clear as mud,’ said Cecil, with a friendly though disconcerting snort.
‘She’s a mad girl in love with a man she’s never seen,’ said George, ‘and the man is under a curse and can only be redeemed by a woman’s love. And she rather fancies being that woman. There you are.’
‘One feels no good will come of it,’ said Cecil.
‘Oh, but listen…’ said Daphne.
‘Would you like a go?’ said Cecil.
Daphne, taking in what she’d just been told about Senta, leant on the rope. ‘In the hammock…?’
‘On the cigar.’
‘Really…’ murmured George, a little shocked.
‘Oh, I don’t think so!’
Cecil took an exemplary pull on it. ‘I know girls aren’t meant to have them.’
Now the lovely tune was pulsing through the garden, full of yearning and defiance and the heightened effect of beauty encountered in an unexpected setting. She really didn’t want the cigar, but she was worried by the thought of missing a chance at it. It was something none of her friends had done, she was pretty sure of that.
‘No, it is a fine song,’ said Cecil, and she heard how his words were a little slurred and careless. Now the cigar was being passed to George again.
‘Oh, all right,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘I mean, yes, please.’
She leant on George and felt the whole hammock shudder, and held his arm firmly to take the item, taboo and already slightly disgusting, from between his thumb and forefinger. By now she could half-see the two boys squashed together, rather absurd, drunk of course, but also solid and established, like a long-ago memory of her parents sitting up in bed. She had the smell of the thing near her face, almost coughed before she tasted it, and then pinched her lips quickly round it, with a feeling of shame and duty and regret.
‘Oh!’ she said, thrusting it away from her and coughing harshly at the tiny inrush of smoke. The bitter smoke was horrible, but so was the unexpected feel of the thing, dry to the fingers but wet and decomposing on the lips and tongue. George took it from her with a vaguely remorseful laugh. When she’d coughed again she turned and did a more unladylike thing and spat on the grass. She wanted the whole thing out of her system. She was glad of the dark, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Beyond her, in the friendly familiar house, Emmy Destinn was still singing, in noble ignorance of Daphne’s behaviour.
‘Want another puff?’ said Cecil, as though satisfied with her reaction to the first.
‘I think not!’ said Daphne.
‘You’ll like the second one much more.’
‘That seems unlikely.’
‘And the third one will be better still.’
‘And before you know where you are,’ said George, ‘you’ll be strolling through Stanmore with a pongy old cheroot clamped between your teeth.’
‘Don’t I detect Miss Sawle’s cigar?’ said Cecil facetiously.
‘That would never happen,’ said Daphne.
But she was really very happy after all, standing there, peering somewhat speculatively into the smoky darkness. ‘Is ginger brandy considered a strong drink?’ she was saying. It must be the drink that gave this lovely spontaneity to things, so that she spoke or moved without deciding to do so.
‘Oh dear, Daph,’ said George. And before she knew what she’d done, she was heaving herself, gasping and laughing, onto the near end of the hammock, where the boys’ feet were.
‘Mind out!’ said George. ‘That’s my foot…’
‘You’ll break the blasted thing,’ said Cecil.
‘For God’s sake…!’ said George, tilting sideways in the effort to leap out, and in a second she was jolted on to the ground, Cecil was tumbling, his foot caught her, rather hard, between the ribs.
‘Ow!’ she said, and then ‘ow…’ but she despised the shock and fright; she was laughing again as the boys reached awkwardly for each other, and then she let herself be pulled up. She knew she had heard her shawl tearing as she fell, and that this was one part of the escapade she would not get away with; but again she didn’t terribly care.
‘Perhaps we should go in,’ said Cecil, ‘before something truly scandalous happens.’
They shepherded each other out on to the lawn, with little pats and murmurs. George spent a moment tucking his shirt in and getting his trousers straight. ‘At Corley, of course, you have a smoking-room,’ he said. ‘This sort of thing could never happen.’