The Stranger's Child [electronic resource] :

Título:

The Stranger's Child [electronic resource] :

Autor:

Hollinghurst, Alan.

Descripción:

From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of -- The Stranger’s Child This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Editor:

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,

Fecha:

2011

Formato digital:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Idioma:

Inglés

Resumen

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty: a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century

In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate--a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance--to his family's modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne's autograph album will change their and their families' lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried--until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.

Rich with Hollinghurst's signature gifts--haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism-- The Stranger's Child is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made.

This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Reseñas (6)

Reseña de Publisher's Weekly

Hollinghurst, author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty, published seven years ago, stakes his claim for Most Puckishly Bemused English Novelist with this rambunctious stepchild to the mannered satires of Henry Green, E.M. Forster, and especially Evelyn Waugh. Fancy young George Sawle returns from Cambridge in 1913 to his family estate of Two Acres in the company of the dashing poet Cecil Valance, secretly his lover. Cecil enjoys success and popularity wherever he goes, and George's precocious sister, Daphne, falls under his spell. To her he gives a poem about Two Acres, a work whose reputation will outlive Cecil, for he is fated to perish in WWI. Hollinghurst then jumps ahead to Daphne's marriage to Cecil's brother Dudley and commences the series of generation-spanning indiscretions and revisionist biographies that complicate Cecil's legacy: he is variously a rebel, a tedious war poet, and, possibly, the father of Daphne's daughter. Time plays havoc with fashions, relationships, and sexual orientation; the joke is on the legions of memoirists, professors, and literary treasure hunters whose entanglements with eyewitnesses produce something too fickle and impermanent to be called legend. Hollinghurst's novel, meanwhile, could hardly be called overserious, but nearly 100 years of bedroom comedy is a lot to keep up with, and the author struggles at times to maintain endless amusement over the course of the five installments that make up this book. But convolution is part of the point. A sweet tweaking of English literature's foppish little cheeks by a distinctly 21st-century hand. Longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Reseña de Booklist

That Hollinghurst won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty wouldn't surprise even a reader new to him. If the previous book stimulated as well as this new one does, it must have deserved all its praise. Nevertheless, Hollinghurst's at-once sharp, humorous, and poignant social satires he is a literary child of the great English novelist E. M. Forster strike many readers, experienced or new, as old-fashioned. This slow-building narrative visits various time periods between the year just prior to the outbreak of WWI and the present, as changing social attitudes namely, a liberalizing of legal and cultural views toward homosexuality only increase the critical attention paid to English poet Cecil Valance (Cecil Vyse was a character in Forster's A Room with a View). This young, beautiful, and talented poet was lost in the trenches of the Great War (shades of Rupert Brooke?). Valance's close involvement with the Sawle family George Sawle was a college buddy of Cecil's (and more, a la the two male protagonists in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited), and after the war, George's sister married Cecil's brother is made common knowledge by a celebrated poem Cecil wrote to . . . whom? George? Cecil's impact, familial and literary, leaves a legacy inspirational to some and uncomfortable to others. . HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A first printing of 75,000 indicates the publisher's expectations that this novel will follow its predecessor into popular and critical esteem.--Hooper, Bra. Copyright 2010 Booklist

Reseña de New York Review of Books

Scholars and relatives wrestle with the legacy of a Rupert Brooke-like writer in Alan Hollinghurst's novel. ALAN HOLLINGHURST'S novels - a distinguished body of work, both daring and fastidious - have often set out to see Britain's modern, decriminalized gay life against the dangers and excitements of earlier decades. "The Swimming Pool Library" to take one example, showed its uninhibited young protagonist, William Beckwith, making up his mind whether or not to write the biography of the much older and necessarily more furtive Lord Nantwich. The decision-making allowed one era to resonate against the other, in a novel whose contemporary narrative voice allowed older gay literary sensibilities, like E.M. Forster's and Ronald Firbank's, to enter through echo and allusion. Hollinghurst's fine new book, "The Stranger's Child" - the closest thing he has written to an old-fashioned chronicle novel - contains a whole hidden literary curriculum, out of which he has fashioned something fresh and vital. Underpinned with a range of styles that run from Iris Murdoch to William Trevor and back to Forster, the novel is divided into five parts that play out over five different decades. The production may occasionally feel a bit schematic, but a narrative this large and ambitious could scarcely remain standing without some visible scaffolding. "The Stranger's Child" is especially concerned - sometimes gravely, sometimes comically - with the effects of gay liberation on literary biography. Its characters are almost all ensnared by a figure who dies early in the book: magnetic young Cecil Valance, a kind of "upper-class Rupert Brooke," moderately gifted but probably "second-rate." Killed in 1916, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, he leaves behind a poem called "Two Acres" celebrating the verdant landscapes and snug domestic pleasures Britons want to believe they're fighting for. The specific parallels to Brooke are entertainingly drawn: Cecil's poem bears some resemblance to actual Brooke lyrics like "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" and "The Great Lover," and his mother, Louisa, nicknamed "The General," has touches of Brooke's own, who was known as "The Ranee." A London Times obituary, ghostwritten in part for Winston Churchill by the Brooke-besotted Edward Marsh, helped turn the real poet into a martyred paragon; Cecil Valance has the job done by a prime minister's secretary named Sebastian Stokes. Before his death at 27, Brooke was sexually confused and effortfulry charming. So, to some extent, is the fictional Cecil, though Hollinghurst performs the peculiar feat of making him more threedimensional than Brooke managed to be in life. The new analogue has an aggressive intensity, a slightly poisonous allure (his nickname is "Cess") that keeps a reader marching through the long literary afterlife soon constructed for him. The book opens with Cecil's three-night visit to the suburban home of his Cambridge chum and secret lover, George Sawle. The young men's attachment is innocently perceived by those around them to be just "the Cambridge way," and Cecil ends up returning the flirtations of George's 16-year-old sister, Daphne. It is in her autograph book that he writes an early draft of "Two Acres," and when Cecil dies in the war, George will remain jealous of both the poem and his sister, who can now claim a sort of precocious widowhood. In the second of its five parts, "The Stranger's Child" moves forward to 1926. We learn, via the sly withholding and indirection sometimes favored by Hollinghurst, that Daphne has in fact become Lady Valance - by marrying Cecil's brother, Dudley. Her own brother, balding and wed to a fellow historian named Madeleine, is now merely "Uncle George" to her children, still unable to let his onetime love for Cecil speak its name. Daphne is unhappy in her own way. Dudley Valance, traumatized by battlefield experience, is a difficult husband to say the least, driving his wife toward solace in drink and the affections of Revel Ralph, an artistic figure who seems to contain elements of the Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant. Cecil, meanwhile, has become "a cold white statue in the chapel" of Corley Court, the great Valance family home, where everyone gathers on the eve of the General Strike to impart their memories of him to Sebastian Stokes, who is preparing both a collected works and a memoir. As each files into the library for an interview ("This whole thing's getting rather like one of Agatha Christie's"), the carpets accumulate a static-electric current of eros, deception and longing. We learn that George's mother was shocked and disgusted when she found Cecil's long-ago letters to her son. Furious over "the mess Cecil Valence had made of her children," she has let George think she destroyed the correspondence, though in fact she finally couldn't bring herself to toss it onto a bonfire of autumn leaves. Hollinghurst extends the biographical drama and farce into three far-off years: 1967, 1980 and 2008. By the late '60s, Daphne has been married three times, is writing her own memoir and has become decidedly attached to a sense of herself as Cecil's surviving muse. George is retired from teaching but still married to Madeleine, who keeps stern watch over the sexual tendencies she knows he has always been reining in. Corley Court has become a school, with Cecil's tomb its "strangest feature." The dominant figure of the book's second half is born long after the poet's death in France. Paul Bryant first appears as a sympathetic, striving, literary-minded young man, class-bound to a bank teller's life when he should be at university. But his emerging capacities for ingratiation and chicanery gain him eventual success as the author of "England Trembles," a biography that outs Cecil and makes Bryant's name. Hollinghurst's evolving portrait of this publishing scoundrel - from a callow fellow we first root for to a boorish showoff with a comb-over - is an even stronger, more extended achievement than his creation of Cecil. From era to era, Hollinghurst remains, for the most part, wonderfully precise. He evokes Paul's bank routine with the same accuracy accorded his first forays into literary journalism. The "golf ball typewriter" arrives exactly on schedule, as do the novels of Ian Fleming and the autobiography of Diana Dors. At times this multigenerational story is almost over-realized ("Daphne's second husband's half-sister married my father's elder brother"), but Hollinghurst is the kind of writer who has always displayed a certain humor toward his own virtuosity. He generally works in what might be called a distant close third person, inhabiting his characters' perspectives without blinkering his own panoramic vision. The results are not unerring but the overall success is remarkable. The texture of the writing feels steadily satisfying, though this time out Hollinghurst seems to ration his customary bravura phrasing. Some trademark flourishes, like the adjectival personification that dapples page after page of his earlier novel "The Spell" ("stunned homeliness," "heedless privacy"), occur less frequently. The book is far less sexually graphic than some of his other novels, but this is after all a tale more concerned with the consequences of discretion than frankness. For all that, the novel has plenty of secrets to spill before it's finished. Daphne credibly ages into a figure out of Muriel Spark, tattered and ancient and not quite able to keep straight the various biographers still in pursuit of a man whose affections and importance she long needed to exaggerate. Among all Hollinghurst's sharply drawn characters, she best illustrates the biographical truth that sources can have a command equal to subjects. Thomas Mallon's novels include "Henry and Clara," "Fellow Travelers" and the forthcoming "Watergate." Killed at the Somme, a poet leaves behind a paean to the land Britons want to believe they're defending.

Guardian Review

Hollinghurst's captivating book is a country house novel that begins in the late summer of 1913. Cecil Valance is a mediocre Georgian poet of broad sexual tastes, who, in the course of a short visit, drinks too much, worships the dawn, repeatedly ravishes the love-struck younger son of the house, roughly kisses the daughter Daphne by the rockery, and then writes a poem praising these "Two blessed acres of English ground". When Cecil dies during the war, the poem is extolled by Churchill, and becomes famous as an evocation of a country on the brink of a great change. The rest of the novel is set at intervals between 1926 and 2008 and the story is a sort of ironic meditation on the evolution of literary memory. It shows how the poem and the original incident behind it are mythologised, and the myth is made official. Flawlessly executed though the book is, it has rather less bite than its predecessors; this is a more recognisable creation, pastiching the classic styles of the past, and retooling them to reflect present-day concerns. - Theo Tait Hollinghurst's captivating book is a country house novel that begins in the late summer of 1913. - Theo Tait.

Kirkus Review

The Line of Beauty, 2004, etc.). Cecil Valance is a poet of terrific talent who, according to a guest in a comfortably English countryside house, is "not so good as Swinburne or Lord Tennyson." In his defense, he is still young. In the defense of everyone he meets, he is irresistible, a Lord Byron with sensitive appetites and a definite awareness of the effect he has on those he meets. George Sawle, scion of the modest manor, is awestruck. So is his sister, Daphne, who melts whenever Cess is around, even taking a puff on a cigar. But Cecil is the real deal as a poet of the Sassoon/Graves/Brooke school, as we learn on reading a heavily edited scrap of paper retrieved from a wastebasket: "Love as vital as the spring / And secret as -- XXX (something!)." War is looming, and Cecil, who professes to like hunting out in the fields, seems pleased at the prospect of trying his skills out on the Kaiser's boys. Alas, things don't work out as planned. Generations pass, and Cecil Valance's poems are firmly in the canon, especially a little one left as a commemoration to the Sawle family, with a carefully structured reference to kisses that might pass between the lips of lovers of any old gender. Now a biographer, working with the clues, is making the claim that Valance belongs in the canon not just of modernist British poetry, but of gay literature as well--a claim that, though seemingly well defended, stirs up controversy. Does it matter? Not to Cecil, poor fellow, "laid out in dress uniform, with rich attention to detail." And perhaps not to those left behind, now gone themselves or very nearly so. But yes, it matters, and such is the stuff of biography. How do we know the truth about anyone's life? Hollinghurst's carefully written, philosophically charged novel invites us to consider that question.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

This story's core takes place on the eve of World War I. George Sawle invites his friend Cecil Valance to visit for the weekend. Valance is heir to the estate of Corley Court and a budding poet. Before his visit is over, Cecil pens a poem in the autograph book of George's sister. As the story progresses, the reader finds that Cecil died during the war and the poem has become famous. George's sister has married Cecil's brother and is now Lady Valance. Owing to three more time jumps, the details surrounding the poem become both more and less clear. VERDICT Man Booker Prize winner Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty) crafts a multidimensional story that captures the essence and selectivity of love, fame, human memory, and history. An excellent reading is given by James Daniel Wilson. ["This generously paced, thoroughly satisfying novel will gladden the hearts of Anglophile readers," read the review of the New York Times best-selling Knopf hc, LJ 9/1/11.-Ed.]-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Extractos

I She'd been lying in the hammock reading poetry for over an hour. It wasn't easy: she was thinking all the while about George coming back with Cecil, and she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was in a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face. Now the light was going, and the words began to hide among themselves on the page. She wanted to get a look at Cecil, to drink him in for a minute before he saw her, and was introduced, and asked her what she was reading. But he must have missed his train, or at least his connection: she saw him pacing the long platform at Harrow and Wealdstone, and rather regretting he'd come. Five minutes later, as the sunset sky turned pink above the rockery, it began to seem possible that something worse had happened. With sudden grave excitement she pictured the arrival of a telegram, and the news being passed round; imagined weeping pretty wildly; then saw herself describing the occasion to someone, many years later, though still without quite deciding what the news had been. In the sitting-room the lamps were being lit, and through the open window she could hear her mother talking to Mrs. Kalbeck, who had come to tea, and who tended to stay, having no one to get back for. The glow across the path made the garden suddenly lonelier. Daphne slipped out of the hammock, put on her shoes, and forgot about her books. She started towards the house, but something in the time of day held her, with its hint of a mystery she had so far overlooked: it drew her down the lawn, past the rockery, where the pond that reflected the trees in silhouette had grown as deep as the white sky. It was the long still moment when the hedges and borders turned dusky and vague, but anything she looked at closely, a rose, a begonia, a glossy laurel leaf, seemed to give itself back to the day with a secret throb of colour. She heard a faint familiar sound, the knock of the broken gate against the post at the bottom of the garden; and then an unfamiliar voice, with an edge to it, and then George's laugh. He must have brought Cecil the other way, through the Priory and the woods. Daphne ran up the narrow half-hidden steps in the rockery and from the top she could just make them out in the spinney below. She couldn't really hear what they were saying, but she was disconcerted by Cecil's voice; it seemed so quickly and decisively to take control of their garden and their house and the whole of the coming weekend. It was an excitable voice that seemed to say it didn't care who heard it, but in its tone there was also something mocking and superior. She looked back at the house, the dark mass of the roof and the chimney-stacks against the sky, the lamp-lit windows under low eaves, and thought about Monday, and the life they would pick up again very readily after Cecil had gone. Under the trees the dusk was deeper, and their little wood seemed interestingly larger. The boys were dawdling, for all Cecil's note of impatience. Their pale clothes, the rim of George's boater, caught the failing light as they moved slowly between the birch-trunks, but their faces were hard to make out. George had stopped and was poking at something with his foot, Cecil, taller, standing close beside him, as if to share his view of it. She went cautiously towards them, and it took her a moment to realize that they were quite unaware of her; she stood still, smiling awkwardly, let out an anxious gasp, and then, mystified and excited, began to explore her position. She knew that Cecil was a guest and too grown-up to play a trick on, though George was surely in her power. But having the power, she couldn't think what to do with it. Now Cecil had his hand on George's shoulder, as if consoling him, though he was laughing too, more quietly than before; the curves of their two hats nudged and overlapped. She thought there was something nice in Cecil's laugh, after all, a little whinny of good fun, even if, as so often, she was not included in the joke. Then Cecil raised his head and saw her and said, "Oh, hello!" as if they'd already met several times and enjoyed it. George was confused for a second, peered at her as he quickly buttoned his jacket, and said, "Cecil missed his train," rather sharply. "Well, clearly," said Daphne, who chose a certain dryness of tone against the constant queasy likelihood of being teased. "And then of course I had to see Middlesex," said Cecil, coming forward and shaking her hand. "We seem to have tramped over much of the county." "He brought you the country way," said Daphne. "There's the country way, and the suburban way, which doesn't create such a fine impression. You just go straight up Stanmore Hill." George wheezed with embarrassment, and also a kind of relief. "There, Cess, you've met my sister." Cecil's hand, hot and hard, was still gripping hers, in a frank, convivial way. It was a large hand, and somehow unfeeling; a hand more used to gripping oars and ropes than the slender fingers of sixteen-yearold girls. She took in his smell, of sweat and grass, the sourness of his breath. When she started to pull her fingers out, he squeezed again, for a second or two, before releasing her. She didn't like the sensation, but in the minute that followed she found that her hand held the memory of his hand, and half-wanted to reach out through the shadows and touch it again. "I was reading poetry," she said, "but I'm afraid it grew too dark to see." "Ah!" said Cecil, with his quick high laugh, that was almost a snigger; but she sensed he was looking at her kindly. In the late dusk they had to peer closely to be sure of each other's expressions; it made them seem particularly interested in each other. "Which poet?" She had Tennyson's poems, and also the Granta, with three of Cecil's own poems in it, "Corley," "Dawn at Corley" and "Corley: Dusk." She said, "Oh, Alfred, Lord Tennyson." Cecil nodded slowly and seemed amused by searching for the kind and lively thing to say. "Do you find he still holds up?" he said. "Oh yes," said Daphne firmly, and then wondered if she'd understood the question. She glanced between the lines of trees, but with a sense of other shadowy perspectives, the kind of Cambridge talk that George often treated them to, where things were insisted on that couldn't possibly be meant. It was a refinement of teasing, where you were never told why your answer was wrong. "We all love Tennyson here," she said, "at 'Two Acres.' " Now Cecil's eyes seemed very playful, under the broad peak of his cap. "Then I can see we shall get on," he said. "Let's all read out our favourite poems--if you like to read aloud." "Oh yes!" said Daphne, excited already, though she'd never heard Hubert read out anything except a letter in The Times that he agreed with. "Which is your favourite?" she said, with a moment's worry that she wouldn't have heard of it. Cecil smiled at them both, savouring his power of choice, and said, "Well, you'll find out when I read it to you." "I hope it's not 'The Lady of Shalott,' " said Daphne. "Oh, I like 'The Lady of Shalott.' " "I mean, that's my favourite," said Daphne. George said, "Well, come up and meet Mother," spreading his arms to shepherd them. "And Mrs. Kalbeck's here too," said Daphne, "by the way." "Then we'll try and get rid of her," said George. "Well, you can try . . . ," said Daphne. "I'm already feeling sorry for Mrs. Kalbeck," said Cecil, "whoever she may be." "She's a big black beetle," said George, "who took Mother to Germany last year, and hasn't let go of her since." "She's a German widow," said Daphne, with a note of sad realism and a pitying shake of the head. She found Cecil had spread his arms too and, hardly thinking, she did the same; for a moment they seemed united in a lightly rebellious pact. 2 While the maid was removing the tea-things, Freda Sawle stood up and wandered between the small tables and numerous little armchairs to the open window. A few high streaks of cloud glowed pink above the rockery, and the garden itself was stilled in the first grey of the twilight. It was a time of day that played uncomfortably on her feelings. "I suppose my child is straining her eyes out there somewhere," she said, turning back to the warmer light of the room. "If she has her poetry books," said Clara Kalbeck. "She's been studying some of Cecil Valance's poems. She says they are very fine, but not so good as Swinburne or Lord Tennyson." "Swinburne . . . ," said Mrs. Kalbeck, with a wary chuckle. "All the poems of Cecil's that I've seen have been about his own house. Though George says he has others, of more general interest." "I feel I know a good deal about Cecil Valance's house," said Clara, with the slight asperity that gave even her nicest remarks an air of sarcasm. Freda paced the short distance to the musical end of the room, the embrasure with the piano and the dark cabinet of the gramophone. George himself had turned rather critical of "Two Acres" since his visit to Corley Court. He said it had a way of "resolving itself into nooks." This nook had its own little window, and was spanned by a broad oak beam. "They're very late," said Freda, "though George says Cecil is hopeless about time." Clara looked tolerantly at the clock on the mantelpiece. "I think perhaps they are rambling around." "Oh, who knows what George is doing with him!" said Freda, and frowned at her own sharp tone. "He may have lost his connection at Harrow and Wealdstone," said Clara. "Quite so," said Freda; and for a moment the two names, with the pinched vowels, the throaty r, the blurred W that was almost an F, struck her as a tiny emblem of her friend's claim on England, and Stanmore, and her. She stopped to make adjustments to the framed photographs that stood in an expectant half-circle on a small round table. Dear Frank, in a studio setting, with his hand on another small round table. Hubert in a rowing-boat and George on a pony. She pushed the two of them apart, to give Daphne more prominence. Often she was glad of Clara's company, and her unselfconscious willingness to sit, for long hours at a time. She was no less good a friend for being a pitiful one. Freda had three children, the telephone, and an upstairs bathroom; Clara had none of these amenities, and it was hard to begrudge her when she laboured up the hill from damp little "Lorelei" in search of talk. Tonight, though, with dinner raising tensions in the kitchen, her staying-put showed a certain insensitivity. "One can see George is so happy to be having his friend," said Clara. "I know," said Freda, sitting down again with a sudden return of patience. "And of course I'm happy too. Before, he never seemed to have anybody." "Perhaps losing a father made him shy," said Clara. "He wanted only to be with you." "Mm, you may be right," said Freda, piqued by Clara's wisdom, and touched at the same time by the thought of George's devotion. "But he's certainly changing now. I can see it in his walk. And he whistles a great deal, which usually shows that a man's looking forward to something . . .Of course he loves Cambridge. He loves the life of ideas." She saw the paths across and around the courts of the colleges as ideas, with the young men following them, through archways, and up staircases. Beyond were the gardens and river-banks, the hazy dazzle of social freedom, where George and his friends stretched out on the grass, or slipped by in punts. She said cautiously, "You know he has been elected to the Conversazione Society." "Indeed . . . ," said Clara, with a vague shake of the head. "We're not allowed to know about it. But it's philosophy, I think. Cecil Valance got him into it. They discuss ideas. I think George said they discuss 'Does this hearth-rug exist?' That kind of thing." "The big questions," said Clara. Freda laughed guiltily and said, "I understand it's a great honour to be a member." "And Cecil is older than George," said Clara. "I believe two or three years older, and already quite an expert on some aspect of the Indian Mutiny. Apparently he hopes to be a Fellow of the college." "He is offering to help George." "Well, I think they're great friends!" Clara let a moment pass. "Whatever the reason," she said, "George is blooming." Freda smiled firmly, as she took up her friend's idea. "I know," she said. "He's coming into bloom, at last!" The image was both beautiful and vaguely unsettling. Then Daphne was sticking her head through the window and shouting, "They're here!"--sounding furious with them for not knowing. "Ah, good," said her mother, standing up again. "Not a moment too soon," said Clara Kalbeck, with a dry laugh, as if her own patience had been tried by the wait. Daphne glanced quickly over her shoulder, before saying, "He's extremely charming, you know, but he has a rather carrying voice." "And so have you, my dear," said Freda. "Now do go and bring him in." "I shall depart," said Clara, quietly and gravely. "Oh, nonsense," said Freda, surrendering as she had suspected she would, and getting up and going into the hall. As it happened Hubert had just got home from work, and was standing at the front door in his bowler hat, almost throwing two brown suitcases into the house. He said, "I brought these up with me in the van." "Oh, they must be Cecil's," said Freda. "Yes, 'C. T. V.,' look. Do be careful . . ." Her elder son was a well-built boy, with a surprisingly ruddy moustache, but she saw in a moment, in the light of her latest conversation, that he hadn't yet bloomed, and would surely be completely bald before he had had the chance. She said, "And a most intriguing packet has come for you. Good evening, Hubert." "Good evening, Mother," said Hubert, leaning over the cases to kiss her on the cheek. It was the little dry comedy of their relations, which somehow turned on the fact that Hubert wasn't lightly amused, perhaps didn't even know there was anything comic about them. "Is this it?" he said, picking up a small parcel wrapped in shiny red paper. "It looks more like a lady's thing." "Well, so I had hoped," said his mother, "it's from Mappin's--," as behind her, where the garden door had stood open all day, the others were arriving: waiting a minute outside, in the soft light that spread across the path, George and Cecil arm in arm, gleaming against the dusk, and Daphne just behind, wide-eyed, with a part in the drama, the person who had found them. Freda had a momentary sense of Cecil leading George, rather than George presenting his friend; and Cecil himself, crossing the threshold in his pale linen clothes, with only his hat in his hand, seemed strangely unencumbered. He might have been coming in from his own garden. Excerpted from The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.