Alan Hollinghurst: extract from The Stranger’s Child

George was the last to come down, and even so he stopped on the stairs for a minute. They were almost ready. He saw the housemaid cross the hall with a saltcellar, caught the odour of cooked fish, heard Cecil’s high overriding laugh, and felt the chill of his own act of daring, bringing this man into his mother’s house. Then he thought of what Cecil had said to him in the park, in the half-hour they made for themselves by pretending he’d missed his train, and felt his scalp, his shoulders, his whole spine prickle under the sweeping, secret promise. He tiptoed down and slipped into the drawing-room with a nearly dizzy-making sense of the dangers ahead.

“Ah, George,” murmured his mother, with a hint of reproach; he shrugged and smirked slightly as if his only offence had been to keep them waiting. Hubert, with his back to the empty grate, had ensnared them all in talk about local transport.

“So you were stranded at Harrow and Wealdstone, eh?” He beamed over his raised champagne glass, as proud of the rigours of life in Stanmore as he was of the blessings.

“Didn’t matter a bit,” said Cecil, catching George’s eye and smiling curiously.

“As a wit once said, it sounds like some medieval torture. Harrow and wealdstone – can’t you just see it!”

“Oh, spare me the wealdstone!” said Daphne.

“We’re devoted to Harrow and Wealdstone, whatever a wit may have said,” said his mother.

George stood for a moment with his hand pressed flat against Cecil’s lower back and gazed into his friend’s glass. He wiggled his fingers to play the secret notes of apology and promise. “Well the Valance motto,” Cecil said, “is 'Seize the Day’. We were brought up not to waste time. You’d be amazed what one can find to do, even at a suburban railway station.” He gave them all his happiest smile, and when Daphne said, “What sort of things do you mean?” he carried on smiling as if he hadn’t heard her.

“I gather you came up through the Priory,” said Hubert, genially determined to follow every step of his journey.

“Yes, indeed we did,” said Cecil, smoothly.

“You know Queen Adelaide used to live there,” said Hubert, with a quick frown to show he didn’t want to make a big thing of it.

“So I gather,” said Cecil, his glass empty already.

“Later I believe it was a very excellent hotel,” said Mrs Kalbeck.

“And now a school,” said Hubert, with a bleak little snuffle.

“A sad fate!” said Daphne.

Jesus Christ! thought George, though all he came out with as he crossed the room was a sort of distracted chuckle. He poured himself the last of the bottle of Pommery, and glanced into the window, where the lamplit room was reflected, idealised and doubled in size, spread invitingly across the dark garden. His hand was trembling, and he kept his back to them as he picked up the fullish glass, steadying it with the other hand.

It was impossible to imagine such a weakness in Cecil, and a consciousness of this added subtly to George’s shame. He turned and looked at them, and they seemed all to be looking at him, as if they had gathered at his request, and were waiting for his explanation.

All he had intended was a quiet family supper, to introduce his friend. Of course he hadn’t reckoned on old Kalbeck, who seemed to think “Two Acres” itself was a hotel – it was really the limit how she’d fished, in her cunning oblivious way, for an invitation to stay on, his mother magnanimously lending her a wrap and dabbing her in her own familiar Coty scent.

Now he watched with horror as she questioned Cecil about the Dolomites, her head on one side; her great brown teeth made her smiles both gauche and menacing. But a minute or two later Cecil was yarning with her in German, and almost making a virtue of her presence. Cecil, of course, lived in Berkshire: there was little danger of Frau Kalbeck turning up just before meals at Corley Court. He spoke German nicely, keeping an amused pedantic eye on the slowly approaching end of his sentences. When the maid announced dinner, Mrs Kalbeck made it seem like an unexpected intrusion on their happy meeting of minds.

“Will you sit here, Mrs Kalbeck,” Hubert was saying, standing by his chair at the head of the table and smiling thinly as he watched them find their places. George smiled too, a little disconcerted from his glass of champagne. He felt a twinge of shame and regret at having no father, and forever having to make do. Perhaps it was just the memory of Corley, with its enormous oriental dining room, that made the present party seem cramped and airless.

Cecil stooped as he entered the room, in a possibly unconscious gesture to the cosiness of scale at “Two Acres”. A father like Cecil’s set a reassuring tone for a dinner, being very rich and an authority on shorthorn cattle. He had immense grey side-whiskers, brushed outwards, and themselves like a pair of brushes. Hubert was 22, and wore a soft red moustache; he went to an office every day by train.

This of course was what their own father had done, and George tried to picture him in Hubert’s chair, 10 years older than when he’d seen him last; but the image was blurred and unavailing, like any much-handled memory, the pale blue eyes soon lost among the flowers and candles crowding the table.

Even so, his mother was very pretty, and really a great beauty compared to Lady Valance, “The General”, as Cecil and his brother called her, or sometimes “The Iron Duke”, on account of her very faint resemblance to the first Duke of Wellington. Tonight Freda was wearing her amethyst drops, and her red-gold hair seemed to glimmer, like the candlelit wine in her glass.

The General naturally was a strict teetotaller – and now George wondered if Cecil himself had been shocked to see his hostess drinking before dinner? Well, he’d have to get used to it. They were doing things in their best festive style for him, the napkins belaboured into lilies, the small silver items, bowls and boxes of uncertain use, polished up and set down between the glasses and candlesticks.

George reached forward and moved slightly to the left a vase of white roses and trailing ivy that obstructed his view of Cecil opposite. Cecil held his eye for a long moment – he felt the jolt of simultaneous danger and reassurance pass through him. Then he watched his friend blink slowly and turn to answer Daphne on his right.

“Do you have jelly-mould domes?” she wanted to know.

“At Corley?’ said Cecil. “As a matter of fact, we do.” He said the word “Corley” as other men said “England’ or “The King”, with reverent briskness and simple confidence in his cause.

“What are they,” Daphne said, “exactly?”

“Well, they’re perfectly extraordinary,” said Cecil, unfolding his lily, “though not I suppose strictly domes.”

“They’re sort of little compartments in the ceiling, aren’t they,” said George, feeling rather silly to have bragged to the family about them.

Hubert murmured abstractedly and stared at the parlourmaid, who had been brought in to help the housemaid serve dinner, and was taking round bread-rolls, setting each one on its plate with a tiny gasp of relief.

“I imagine they’re painted in fairly gaudy colours?” Daphne said.

“Really, child,” said her mother.

Cecil looked drolly across the table. “They’re red and gold, I think – aren’t they, Georgie?”

Daphne sighed and watched the golden soup swim from the ladle into Cecil’s bowl. “I wish we had jelly-mould domes,” she said. “Or compartments.”

“They might look somewhat amiss here, old girl,” said George, pulling a face at the oak beams low overhead, “in the Arts and Crafts ambience of 2A.”

“I do wish you wouldn’t,” said his mother. “You make us sound like a flat above a shop.”

Cecil smiled uncertainly, and said to Daphne, “Well, you must come to Corley and see them for yourself.”

“There, Daphne!” said her mother, in reproach and triumph.

“Do you have brothers and sisters?” asked Mrs Kalbeck, as if already envisaging the visit.

“There are only two of us, I’m afraid,” said Cecil.

“Cecil has a younger brother,” said George.

“Is he called Dudley?” said Daphne.

“He is,” Cecil admitted.

“I believe he’s very handsome,” said Daphne, with new confidence.

George was appalled to find himself blushing. “Well…” said Cecil, taking a first moody sip of soup, but, thank heavens, not looking at him. In fact anyone would have said that Dudley was extremely good-looking, but George was ashamed to hear his own words repeated back to Cecil. “A younger brother can be something of a bane,” Cecil said.

Hubert nodded and laughed and sat back as if he’d made a joke himself.

“Dud’s awfully satirical, wouldn’t you say, Georgie?” Cecil went on, giving him a sly look over the white roses.

“He works on your mother’s patience,” said George with a sigh, as though he’d known the family for years, and aware too that this repeated “Georgie”, never used by his own family, was showing him in a novel light.

“Is your brother at Cambridge also?” asked George’s mother.

“No, he’s at Oxford, thank heavens.”

“Oh, really, which college?”

“Now, which one is it?’ said Cecil. “I think it’s called something like… Balliol?”’

“That certainly is one of the Oxford colleges,” said Hubert.

“Well, that’s it, then,” said Cecil. George sniggered and gazed with nervous admiration at his pondering face, above the high starched collar and lustrous black tie, the sparkle of his dress-studs in the candlelight, and felt a quick knock against his foot under the table. He gasped and cleared his throat but Cecil was turning with a bland smile to Mrs Kalbeck, and then as Hubert started to say something idiotic George felt the sole of Cecil’s shoe push against his ankle again quite hard, so that the secret mischief had something rougher in it, as often with Cecil, and after a few testing and self-conscious seconds George regretfully edged his foot out of the way.

“I’m sure you’re absolutely right,” said Cecil, with another solemn shake of the head. The fact that he was already mocking his brother made George queasily excited, as if some large shift of loyalties was about to be demanded of him, and he soon got up to deal with the wine for the fish, which the maids were hopelessly dim about.

Mrs Kalbeck tackled a small trout with her customary relish. “Do you hunt?” she asked Cecil, in a square, almost jaunty way, rather as though she were always on a horse herself.

“I get out with the VWH now and then,” said Cecil, “though I’m afraid my father doesn’t approve.”

“Oh, really?”

“He breeds livestock, you see, and has a tender feeling for creatures.”

“Well, how very sweet,” said Daphne, shaking her head with dawning approval.

Cecil held her eye with that affable superiority that George could only struggle to emulate. “As he doesn’t ride to hounds, he’s gained the reputation locally of being a great scholar.” She smiled as if mesmerised by this, clearly having no idea what he meant.

George said, “Well, Cess, he is something of a scholar.”

“Indeed he is,” said Cecil. “He’s seen his Cattle Feeds and Cattle Care go into a fourth edition, the most successful literary production of the Valance family by far.”

“So far, you mean,” said George.

“And does your mother share his views on hunting?” asked Mrs Sawle teasingly, perhaps not sure whom to side with.

“Oh, Lord, no – no, she’s all for killing. She likes me to get out with a gun when I can, though we keep it from my papa as much as possible. I’m quite a fair shot,” said Cecil, and with another sly glance around in the candlelight, to see that he had them all: “The General sent me out with a gun when I was quite small, to kill a whole lot of rooks that were making a racket – I brought down four of them…”

“Really?” said Daphne, while George waited for the next line –

“But I wrote a poem about them the following day.”

“Ah! well…” – again, they didn’t quite know what to think; while George quickly explained that the General was what they called Cecil’s mother, feeling keenly embarrassed both by the fact and by the pretence that he hadn’t told them this before.

“I should have explained,” said Cecil. “My mother’s a natural leader of men. But she’s a sweet old thing once you get to know her. Wouldn’t you say, George?”

George thought Lady Valance the most terrifying person he’d ever met, dogmatic, pious, inexcusably direct, and immune to all jokes, even when explained to her; her sons had learned to treasure her earnestness as a great joke in itself. “Well, your mother devotes most of her time and energy to good works, doesn’t she,” George said, with wary piety of his own.

With the serving of the main course and a new wine, George suddenly felt it was going well, what had loomed as an unprecedented challenge was emerging a modest success. Clearly they all admired Cecil, and George’s confidence in his friend’s complete mastery of what to say and do outran his terror of his doing or saying something outrageous, even if simply intended to amuse.

At Cambridge Cecil was frequently outrageous, and as for his letters – the things he wrote in letters appeared dimly to George now as a troupe of masked figures, Pompeian obscenities, hiding just out of view behind the curtains, and in the shadows of the inglenook.

But for the moment all was well. Rather like the deep in Tennyson’s poem, Cecil had many voices… George’s toe sought out his friend’s now and again, and was received with a playful wriggle rather than a jab. He worried about his mother drinking too much, but the claret was a good one, much commended by Hubert, and a convivial mood, of a perceptibly new kind for “Two Acres”, suffused the whole party.

Only his sister’s stares and grins at Cecil, and her pert way of putting her head on one side, could really annoy him. Then to his horror he heard Mrs Kalbeck say, “And I understand you and George are members of an ancient society!”

“Oh… oh…” said George, though at once it was a test above all for Cecil. He found his failure to look at him a reproach in itself.

After a moment, with an almost apologetic flinch, Cecil said, “Well, no harm in your knowing, I dare say.”

“And since candour is our watchword!” George put in, glancing with lurking fury at his mother, who had been sworn to secrecy. Cecil must have seen, however, that a light-hearted embrace of the occasion was wiser than a haughty evasion.

“Oh yes, absolute candour,” he said.

“I see…” said Hubert, who clearly knew nothing about it. “What are you candid about?”

Now Cecil did look at George. “Well that,” he said, “I’m afraid we’re not allowed to tell you.”

“Strict secrecy,” said George.

“That’s right,” said Cecil. “In fact that’s our other watchword. You really shouldn’t have been told that we’re members. It’s a most serious breach” – with the steel of a real displeasure glimpsed through his playful one.

“Members of what?” said Daphne, joining the game.

“Exactly!” said George, with almost too much relief. “There is no society. I trust you haven’t mentioned it to anyone else, Mother.”

She smiled hesitantly. “I think only Mrs Kalbeck.”

“Oh, Mrs Kalbeck doesn’t count,” said George.

“Really, George!” – his mother almost tumbled her wineglass with the sweep of her sleeve. By luck, there was only a dribble left in it. George grinned at Clara Kalbeck. It was a teasing taste of candour itself, which at Cambridge overrode the principles of kindness and respect, but perhaps wasn’t readily understood here, in the suburbs.

“No, you know what I mean,” he said to his mother, and gave her a quick look, half smile, half frown.

“The Society is a secret,” said Cecil, patiently, “so that no one can make a fuss about wanting to get into it. But of course I told the General the minute I was elected. And she will have told my father, since she’s a great believer in candour herself. My grandfather was a member too, back in the Forties. Many distinguished people were.”

“We have nothing to do with politics, however,” said George, “or worldly fame. We’re thoroughly democratic.”

“That’s right,’ said Cecil, with a note of regret. “Many great writers have been members, of course.” He looked down, blinking modestly, and at the same time, sitting forward, gave George a vicious kick under the table. “I’m so sorry!’ he said, since George had yelped, and before anyone could quite understand what had happened the talk jumped on to other things, leaving George with a sense of guilty resentment, and beyond it a mysterious vision of screens, as of one train moving behind another, the large collective secret of the Society and the other unspeakable one still surely hidden from view.

By the time the pudding was brought in George was longing for dinner to be over, and wondering how soon he could politely arrange to get Cecil to himself again.

He and Cecil ate everything with rapacious speed, while the others were surely dawdling wilfully and whimsically with their food. In the later phases of a meal, he well knew, his mother might go into trances of decoy and delay, a shivering delight in the mere fact of being at table, playful pleadings for a further drop of wine. After that, half an hour over port would be truly intolerable. Hubert’s friendly banalities were as wearing as Daphne’s prying prattle – “This will interest you,” he would say, before launching into a bungled account of something everyone knew already.

Perhaps tonight, being so few, they could all get up together; or would Cecil think that very bad form? Was he hideously bored? Or was he, just possibly, completely happy and at ease, and puzzled and even embarrassed by George’s evident desire to get through the meal and away from his family as soon as possible?

When his mother pushed back her chair and said, “Shall we?” with a guarded smile at Mrs Kalbeck, George glanced at Cecil, and found him smiling back – a stranger might have thought amiably, but George knew it as a look of complete determination to get his way. As soon as the three females had passed through into the hall, Cecil nodded nicely to Hubert and said, “I have a horrible habit, anathema to polite society, which can only decently be pursued out of doors, under cover of darkness.”

Hubert smiled anxiously at this unexpected confession, whilst producing from his pocket a silver cigarette case which he laid rather bashfully on the table. Cecil in turn drew out the leather sheath that held, like two cartridges in a gun, a brace of cigars. They seemed almost shockingly designed for an exclusive session à deux. “But my dear fellow,” said Hubert, with a note of perplexity, and a shy sweep of the hand to show that he was free to do as he pleased.

“No, really, I couldn’t possibly fug up in so – ” Cecil was caught for a second – “so intimate a setting. Your mother would think very ill of me. It would be all over the house. Even at Corley, you know, we’re fearfully strict about it,” and he fixed Hubert with a wicked little smile, to suggest this was an exciting moment for him as well, a chance to break with convention while still somehow doing the right thing.

George wasn’t sure Hubert did see it quite like that, and not waiting for any further accommodations on his part, he said, “We’ll have a proper jaw tomorrow night, Huey, when Harry comes.”

“Well, of course we will,’ said Hubert. He seemed only lightly offended, puzzled but perhaps relieved, acquiescent already to the pact between the Cambridge men. “You’ll see we don’t stand on ceremony here, Valance! You go and make as much stink as you like outside, and I’ll… I’ll just shuffle through and have a gasper with the ladies.” And he flourished his cigarette case at them with an air of cheerful self-sufficiency.

• From The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst (Macmillan), published on July 1. To order for £18 plus £1.25 p&p call Telegraph Books Direct on 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

• Alan Hollinghurst will be talking about his new novel at Ways with Words on July 11 at 2.30pm. To book tickets, call 01803 867373 or go to wayswithwords.co.uk