The Stranger's Child

  He finished as fast as he could, and listened – awful to pull the great clanking flush during Mrs Keeping’s opening bars. But no, they were still laughing. They must all be as drunk as he was by now. He hung about in the shadow of the door from the hall, there were two empty seats, but in the middle of rows, there was a burst of laughter which he thought for a mad second was aimed at him, and he slipped in pink-faced at the side of the room and stood against the wall, behind a row of dining chairs. Here he could see everything – but so too could everyone see him. There were two or three others standing, and at the back of the room the french windows were still open, with further guests gathered outside in what already looked like darkness. Mrs Keeping was erect in front of the piano, hands clasped, in the posture of a child reciting. He didn’t take in what she was saying. Peter was at the end of the front row, smiling at his hands, or at the floor; Mrs Jacobs in the middle of the row, the place of honour, sipping at her drink and blinking up at her daughter with delighted reproach as the surprise got under way. Paul smiled anxiously himself, and when everyone laughed he laughed too. ‘Now mother is awfully fond of music,’ Mrs Keeping said, ‘so we thought we’d better humour her by playing some.’ Laughter again – he looked at Mrs Jacobs, enjoying the collective sense of treasuring and teasing her; a woman just behind her exclaimed, ‘Dear Daphne,’ and people laughed at that too. Mrs Keeping pulled her black wrap around her upper arms and pushed back her shoulders – ‘So, to start with, her favourite composer.’

  ‘Aha . . . !’ said Mrs Jacobs, with an accepting smile, though perhaps a tiny uncertainty as to who that would turn out to be.

  ‘Chopin?’ said one old boy to the woman beside him.

  ‘You’ll see soon enough!’ said Mrs Keeping. She sat down on the piano stool, and then looked round. ‘We can’t run to the original, I fear, so this is a paraphrase by Liszt.’ There was a murmur of humorous apprehension. ‘It’s very hard!’ She fixed the music on the stand with a furious glare, and then she was off.

  She could really play, couldn’t she? – that was Paul’s first feeling. He looked around hastily at the others, with a bashful grin on his face. Was it Chopin? He saw them all deciding, staring at each other, frowning or nodding, some leaning to whisper. There was a noiseless sigh, a wave of collective recognition and relief that almost made the music itself unimportant: they’d got it. He didn’t want to show that he hadn’t. He had never seen anyone play the piano seriously and at close range, and it locked him into a state of mesmerized embarrassment, made worse by the desire to conceal it. There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had, and there was the sight of Mrs Keeping in action, the plunges and stabs of her bare arms up and down the keyboard. She wasn’t a large woman – it was only her presence that was crushing. Her little hands looked brave and comical as they stretched and rumbled and tinkled. She rocked and jumped from one buttock to the other, in her stiff red dress, her black wrap slipping – it twitched and drooped behind her as she moved, with a worrying life of its own. The riveting, but almost unwatchable, thing was her profile, powdered and severe, shaken by twitches and nods, like tics only just kept under control. He stared, smiling tightly, and covering his mouth and chin pensively with his hand.

  Mrs Jacobs looked self-conscious too, but in a happy way, her head on one side. Her own responses were almost a part of the performance. The over-active first section of the music had ended, and now a slow tune came in, with a definite air, even on a first hearing, of being what they were waiting for. Mrs Jacobs raised and then dropped her right hand in greeting to it, and shook her head slowly as it went on. Paul thought she was probably very drunk – he felt the glow of his friendly understanding with her, from that first evening; though he somehow saw that to her being drunk had its whole long sentimental history, whereas to him it was a freakish novelty. Somewhere at the back there was a frail bit of humming and a little giggle when someone shushed. Then here came the song again, and as his eyes slid over the heads of the audience to find Peter he found Peter turned sideways and looking back at him, and the rapid pressure on his own heart and the glow of his face were fitted by the music, like a theme tune: they both smiled just in the moment of turning away.

  After that Paul looked around casually, to see if anyone had seen; he watched Julian, also standing, on the other side, pink with drink and the comical effort to look sober. Jenny sat just beside him, with a similar frown of critical concentration, pinned in beside a large old man with a farmer’s face and a mass of white hair, and politely ignoring the loud dejected noise of his breathing. Paul turned with a remote smile, as if transported by the music, and found Mr Keeping, standing at the back, pressed against the red velvet curtains, and staring intently at his wife, also with a hint of a smile, his unreadable mask. She was on display, physical and passionate, and Paul realized he would never see Mr Keeping himself in quite the same way again. Then his gaze dropped to the woman seated in front of him – the clasp of her necklace, the label at the neck of her dress turned out . . . Anne-Marie Paris London – he read it upside-down. When she twitched her head at a sudden loud chord the tips of her hair tickled his fingers. She glanced round, apology just ruffled by accusal. A little later she murmured something to her husband, who absorbed it with a quick tutting nod. Paul had a strange and intense apprehension, for three or four seconds that might have been a long tranced minute, of this unknown woman’s life, that would never cross with his again, and the hypnotic detail of her label showing, which she herself was unaware of.

  The door beside him into the hall was propped open, and now and then he heard a clatter of plates or a forgetful raised voice from the kitchen, where the women from the Bell were washing up. The front door was open too, and by moments cool air with a distant smell of firs to it ran in and then ebbed away. There was the quiet section, the theme tune again – he didn’t dare look at Peter – and he heard the jingle of something on Roger’s collar, unconcernedly out of tune and time, as he nosed round on the edge of the drive. Then there were footsteps on the gravel, stopping uncertainly, but an unselfconscious few words of greeting to the dog, which barked uncertainly itself a couple of times. Paul thought of a policeman, for some reason, and then of Sir Dudley Valance, with his war wound, whom he now seemed to be slightly obsessed by. There was a throat-clearing, a light knock, several people looked round, with the lively interest of an audience in any disturbance . . . Paul made a cringing face and slipped out into the hall.

  ‘Ah, hullo – good evening . . . !’ – a man peering in, too absorbed in the moment to lower his voice, and giving at once a sense of awkwardness, in his tight brown suit. ‘I’m fearfully late – but I didn’t want to miss it.’ A posh, silvery voice, with, not a stammer but pauses between phrases. Paul came out on to the doorstep, and shook his hand firmly and without exactly encouraging him, he thought. Surely this wasn’t Sir Dudley. They nodded at each other, as though they were both in a bit of a fix.

  ‘We’re just having . . . some music,’ said Paul tactfully, with a hesitation of his own.

  ‘Ah!’ No, this man was about fifty, but with something boyish in his wide bony face as he turned his head and listened. Paul looked at the tufts of badly cut hair, thick and greying around a sun-blistered bald patch. ‘Well, yes indeed,’ he said, ‘and Senta’s . . . Ballad, always her favourite.’ They heard the music grow very emphatic and loud, Paul pictured Mrs Keeping shaking herself to pieces, and then at once there was applause. He thought someone else might come out and help.

  ‘Will you . . . ?’ – he gestured into the hall.

  ‘Yes – thank you.’ Now they could talk normally. ‘Hello, Barbara!’ said the man. One of the women had come out from the kitchen.

  ‘Hello, Wilfrid,’ she said. ‘You’ve missed your dinner.’

  ‘That – doesn’t matter,’ said the man, again with his air of monkish simplicity and tiny hesitation.


  ‘We weren’t sure we’d be seeing you,’ said Barbara, with the same odd lack of respect. ‘Mrs K’s got a concert on so you’ll have to be quiet.’

  ‘I know – I know,’ said Wilfrid, frowning a little at Barbara’s tone.

  ‘Would you like to go in?’ said Paul. He watched the man watching the people inside, one or two faces turned, while Mrs Keeping was announcing the next item. His brown suit must once have been someone else’s, all three buttons done up, the sleeves short, and the trousers too, and a sense of large square objects trapped in tight pockets. Paul wondered if the other guests knew him and a scene was about to occur that he would be blamed for.

  ‘Is she going on long?’ said Wilfrid, pleasantly but as if out of earshot. There were one or two more curious glances.

  ‘I don’t really know . . .’ said Paul, detaching himself.

  ‘Have you had something to eat?’ said Barbara, softening a little. ‘Or do you want to come into the kitchen?’

  ‘I think perhaps . . .’ – Wilfrid gazed at her and flinched. ‘Is it an awful bore?’

  ‘Ah, that’s all right.’

  ‘I got a lift into Stanford, and then the bus, then I walked up.’

  ‘Well, you must be hungry,’ said Paul, adopting the condescending tone. He could hear Peter saying something, in his Oxford voice, making them laugh, and he realized that something had happened, and the voice was now a trigger to jolts of excitement and anxiety that ran through him and made him half-unaware of anything else that was going on. The music began. Wilfrid followed Barbara, but turned in the doorway, came back to the hall table, took a small parcel in shiny red paper out of his pocket and added it to the base of the pile. When he had gone, Paul looked at the label: ‘Happy Birthday Mummy, Love Wilfrid.’

  The little puzzle of this didn’t hold him long. He leant in the doorway to listen, or at least to watch Peter play. This must be the Mozart, surely. He thought there was something daft but also impressive and mysterious about big clever Peter stooped over this dainty but tedious piece of music and giving it his fullest attention. The large hands that had recently stroked his knee under the table were now hopping and pecking around on the deep end of the keyboard, in a remarkable show of fake solemnity. Mrs Keeping was having more fun up at the other end, making Peter look like an anxious but courtly attendant; her nods and grimaces now seemed like slightly impatient instructions to him, or tight-lipped confirmation that he had or hadn’t got something right. And turning the page was a bit of a worry, with both players busy at once. After a minute Paul noticed that Peter did any pedalling that was called for, and got interested in his legs as much as his hands. Mrs Keeping’s legs jumped as she played, and Peter’s occasional toeing of a pedal was like a courteous version of the footsie he’d just been playing with him under the table. Paul was warmed by this secret, and admiring of Peter, and jealous that he couldn’t play with him himself. At the end he applauded loudly, and made a point of making the very last clap, as they used to at school.

  After this there was a very odd piece, which Paul thought from the awful grin on Peter’s face must be someone’s idea of a joke. The time after the concert, and all the momentous things that were waiting to happen then, weighed so heavily on Paul that he couldn’t concentrate. He sensed Peter’s own little knack for being embarrassing and hoped he wasn’t making a fool of himself now. And in a moment it was all over, and they were standing up and bowing, the applause now full of laughter, warm-hearted but with something provisional in it too, so perhaps the joke still needed to be explained to them as well. Peter’s gaze swept across the room and he seemed almost to lick Paul with his conceited smile, nodding, chuckling, tongue on lip.

  This still wasn’t the end, of course, and Paul hardly knew if he was happy or relieved when Corinna sat down again at the piano, Peter withdrew to the front row and Sue Jacobs came forward, with a rather furious expression, to sing ‘The Hammock’ by Bliss. It was strange knowing the words so well, and he tried to follow them against what seemed to him the quite pointless interference of the music. The peculiar things a singer did with words, the vowels that turned into other vowels under the strain of a high note, made it all harder and weirder. Picturing the poem, somehow written across the air, was also an escape from watching Sue herself, her bared teeth and humorous roving glare at one person after another in the audience. ‘And every sleeping garden flower, Immortal in this mortal hour.’ All Paul knew about Bliss was that he was the Master of the Queen’s Music, but he found it hard to imagine Her Majesty enjoying this particular offering. At the end Mrs Jacobs got up and kissed them both, and clapped in the air to reignite the general applause. She appeared to be moved, but Paul thought he saw that under the general requirement to be so she was finding it rather a strain.

  As people started talking and stood up, Paul caught Peter’s eye and comic grimace, and grinned back as if to say how marvellous he’d been. What he was actually going to say he had no idea – he dodged out to the kitchen to get a glass. When he came back and joined the group round Mrs Jacobs he hardly dared look at him, distracted with nerves and longing and a sense of unshirkable duty about what he imagined was going to happen next.

  A few minutes later they were crossing the garden, bumping lightly as they made way for each other between the tables where candles were still burning in jars; some had guttered, there was a veil of mystery, of concealed identity, over the guests who had come back out and were drinking and chatting under the stars. A cake had been cut up and was being taken round, with paper napkins. ‘I thought you were going to talk to the old girl all night,’ said Peter.

  ‘Sorry!’ – Paul reaching for but not touching his arm.

  ‘Now let’s see. The garden’s quite big, isn’t it.’

  ‘Oh, it is,’ said Paul. ‘There’s a part at the back I think we really must explore.’ He felt he’d never been so witty or so terrified.

  ‘We loved what you played!’ said a woman passing them on her way back to the house.

  ‘Oh, thank you . . . !’ – the skein of celebrity made their little sortie more conspicuous and perhaps odd. Away from the lights now, Peter appeared both intimate and alien, a figure sensed by touch more than sight. Someone had put a Glenn Miller record on the stereogram, and the music filtered out among the trees with a tenuous air of romance. They passed the weeping beech – ‘Hmm, not here, I think,’ said Peter, with his air, reassuring and fateful, of having a fairly clear plan.

  ‘I think this part of the garden is most attractive.’ Paul kept up the game, turning warily in the dark under the rose arch into the unkempt corner where the shed and compost were. He was speaking too as if he knew what he was doing, or was going to do. Surely it was time just to seize Peter but something about the dark kept them apart as naturally as it promised to bring them together.

  He half-saw Peter fling open the shed door, with rakish impatience, and heard the clatter of canes, ‘Oh, shit! Oh shit . . .’ a sense of the shed like a booby-trap. ‘Mm, it’s rather hell in there,’ Paul said, giggling at his own drollery more than he could quite explain. He was drunk, it was one of the hilarious uncorrectable disasters of being drunk. Now Peter was stooping and furiously thrusting and jamming the tumbled canes back in and failing to get the door shut. He shut it; at once it creaked open again. ‘I should leave it,’ said Paul.

  He’d brushed against Peter uncertainly as he giggled; now Peter’s hand was round his neck, their faces close together in the spidery light through bushes, their eyes unreadable, a huddle of smiles and sighs, and then they kissed, smoke and metal, a weird mutual tasting, to which Paul gave himself with a shudder of disbelief. Peter pressed against him, with a slight squirming stoop to fit himself to him, the instant and unambiguous fact of his erection more shocking than the taste of his mouth. In the fierce close-up and the near-dark Paul saw only the curve of Peter’s head, his hair in silhouette and the ragged crown of bushes beyond, black against the night sky. He took his cue from
his movements, tried to mimic him, but the sudden stifling violence of another man’s wants, all at once, instinctive and mechanical, was too much for him. He twisted his head in Peter’s two-handed grasp, tried to turn it to a humorous wistful nuzzle against his chin, his chest. ‘What an amazing party,’ he heard himself say. ‘I’m so glad Mrs Keeping asked me to help with the parking.’