Words For Wednesday

I opened up The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst and fell in love with the first two paragraphs. I wanted to keep on reading – alas, I have a busy day tomorrow so the rest will have to wait…

She’d been lying in the hammock reading poetry for over an hour. It wasn’t easy: she was thinking gall the while about George coming back with Cecil, and she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was in a heal, with the book held tiringly above her face. Now the light was going, and the words began to hide among themselves on the pate. 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 of 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 around; imagined weeping pretty wildly; then say 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 rookery, 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. (pg. 3)

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