The Stranger's Child

by Alan Hollinghurst

  It was funny how Paul had been turned on by Cecil’s tomb, and by the fact of Corley having been his home. Cecil’s brother, of course, had stayed on here for thirty years more, till the military took over. It was surely good luck in the end that all the Victorian work was boxed in – there was nothing for the army to ruin. Dudley Valance’s hatred for the house was what had preserved it. It would be worth trying to talk to him about the early days, about Cecil as a boy. In Black Flowers he dealt very coolly with his brother – there was quite a sarcastic tone to some of it. Still, what a subject, two writers growing up in this astonishing place, the whole age that had built it riding for a fall. Perhaps he should seize the day himself, and start gathering materials, talking to people like old Daphne Jacobs who still remembered Cecil, and had loved him, and apparently been loved back.

  Were people interested in Cecil? How did he rank? Undeniably a very minor poet, who just happened to have written lines here and there that had stuck . . . But his life was dramatic as well as short, and now everyone was mad about the First World War – the Sixth Form all learned ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by heart, and they liked the Valance war poems he had shown them. There was something a little bit queer about several of these poems; something he suspected in Dudley, too. Dudley seemed if anything the queerer one, with his intense devotion to the man he called Billy Prideaux, who’d been shot beside him on a night recce, and seemed to have triggered a nervous breakdown, powerfully but obscurely described in his book.

  Peter came back to the stone bench by the fishpond and lit a cigarette. Cecil’s letters would be the thing to get a look at – Peter hoped his charm had worked last week on George Sawle, who must have all sorts of useful memories. Interesting what he’d said about Lytton Strachey too, and this book that was about to come out. Was the era of hearsay about to give way to an age of documentation? He looked at the house, as if it enshrined the mystery and in its Victorian way imposed the task. Was he up to writing a biography? It would take a much more orderly existence than any he’d managed so far . . . It was odd, it often struck him, being here in the country with these eighty children and a group of adults he would never have chosen as friends. But it would be at least a symbolic advantage, if he were to write the book. The stars thickened in the outer sky and the sinking moon threw the steep black profile of the roof into Gothic relief. It was windless and warm, the near-stasis of an ideal English summer. It all looked very good for the Open Day. He got up and strolled back towards the house in the nice tired mood of prospective exertion.

  What was that? A hand stroked the back of his neck as the shadow of a tall brick chimney high above the Headmaster’s window wobbled and shifted. A kite-like form detached itself, and moved with dreamy-looking wariness across the sloping upper leads; five seconds later another, hesitant but committed, and making it seem that the inky shadow might harbour many more of them. They were strangely antique, these two figures, of uncertain size and height, and seemed to flow like oily shadows themselves, in dressing-gowns left open like cloaks. They crept from chimney-stack to chimney-stack, towards the higher slope of the chapel roof, with its crowning spirelet still far above their heads. Once or twice Peter could hear very faintly the patter or slither of their slippered feet.

  FOUR

  Something of a Poet

  Mrs Failing found in his remains a sentence that puzzled her. ‘I see the respectable mansion. I see the smug fortress of culture. The doors are shut. The windows are shut. But on the roof the children go dancing for ever.’

  E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey, chapter 12

  1

  The rain wasn’t much, but the wind was wild, and he hurried round the square with his brolly held low in front of him and half-blocking his view. The plane trees roared in the dark overhead, and wide wet leaves shot past him or pressed blindly against his coat. In his left hand he had his briefcase, black leather, streaked by the rain. He’d been reading poetry in the library, in the dwindling evening crew. When the dark-haired man, called R. Simpson, who seemed to be working on Browning’s plays, started packing up, he had packed up too; but at the street-door, in the downpour, Simpson had hurried right, while he had gone left, in the usual muddle of gloom and relief, towards the Underground. He found the tussle with the weather oddly satisfying.

  After dusk in Bedford Square you could see into the high first-floor windows of publishers’ offices, the walls of bookshelves and often a huddle of figures at a glaringly lit party. Such a party was going on now, at the front door below a few guests were leaving, and the bright rectangle widened and narrowed as they slipped out into the night, laughing and exclaiming about the weather. A couple emerged, heads lowered, and behind them he saw a small figure, an old woman surely, framed in the doorway as she buttoned her coat, secured her hat, hung her bag on her arm, and then, as she stepped out on to the pavement, pushed up a flimsy umbrella, which the wind snatched instantly and jerked upwards inside-out behind her head. Her words whipped back to him distinctly, ‘Oh bugger it!’ He saw her grappling with the thing as he drew nearer, his own umbrella swerving and struggling in the face of the wind. She staggered a little, more or less righted it, and moved quickly away, almost stumbling, though a spoke stuck up at a hopeless angle, the pink fabric flared loose, there was a lull and then a sudden slam of wind which wrenched the brolly out of her hands and off into the road, where it skidded and then leapt away in long hops between the parked cars. Of course he should help her, run after it, but she seemed, with a certain reckless good sense, to have given the thing up. She turned for a moment, glint of street-lamp on glasses, then ducked back into the wind, the rain now only a kind of roaring dampness, and as she hurried on Paul felt such a twisting stab of anxious excitement that he hid behind his umbrella for ten seconds, not knowing what to do. He slowed down, almost as though to let her get away; then pulled himself together. Trudging forward against the wind she seemed alarmingly vulnerable, to the weather, to the London night, and also to him. Why had no one come with her, or seen her to a cab? It was with a sort of ache he came up behind her, the painful comedy of having her for a further ten seconds, fifteen seconds, within arm’s reach, her red felt hat pulled down tight and her white hair beneath it tugging in clumps in the storm. There was a pink silk scarf around her neck, and her mac was shabby, the collar darkened. He picked up very faintly its musty, perennial smell, before he swept his umbrella up and then down between her and the gale. ‘There you are . . .’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘isn’t it awful,’ walking on, with a quick doubtful glance at him but perhaps a touch of reassurance too.

  ‘You shouldn’t be out in this, Mrs Jacobs,’ he said, very capably.

  ‘The rain’s pretty well stopped, I think.’

  Paul grinned, perhaps rather stared at her. ‘Where are you going?’ He felt buoyant with his nerves and his own, perhaps unshared, sense of hilarity in the meeting. He slowed his step to hers.

  ‘Were you at the party?’ she said, with a slightly sentimental look, as if still savouring it.

  Before he could think better of it, he said, ‘Yes, I was, but I didn’t get a chance to speak to you.’

  ‘Caroline has so many young friends . . .’ she made sense of it for herself. He could see she’d had quite a bit to drink – the grip of the drink at these parties and the nonsense you talked: then you came hurtling out, parched and light-headed and you hoped not alone. Night had fallen while you drank. He was straightforward, though still teasing her for some reason:

  ‘Do you remember me, Mrs Jacobs?’

  She said, as if she’d been waiting a long time patiently for this question, and without looking at him, ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Why should you!’ he said. ‘We haven’t seen each other for a good ten years . . .’

  ‘Ah, well,’ she said, relieved but still non-committal.

  ‘No, it’s Paul – Paul Bryant. I used to be in the bank at Foxleigh. I came to your . . . your big birthday party,
all those years ago.’ That perhaps wasn’t tactful.

  ‘Oh, did you,’ and then Mrs Jacobs gave a strange gasp, or grunt – Paul saw it too late, like a hazard in the black gleam of the pavement just ahead. Could they chat on casually around that double tragedy? It was also perhaps an opportunity, for sympathy, for showing that he knew her story and she could trust him. ‘Yes, indeed,’ she said.

  ‘I was so very sorry to hear about . . . Corinna, and . . .’

  She almost stopped, put a hand on his sleeve, perhaps in silent thanks, though there was something corrective in it too. She looked up at him. ‘You couldn’t find me a taxi, I suppose, could you?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Paul, chastened as if by several reminders at once, but relieved he could be of service. Above them towered the grey bulk of the new YMCA, and beyond it there was the glitter and hiss of traffic in the Tottenham Court Road. ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘I have to get to Paddington.’

  ‘Oh, you’re not living in London any more?’

  ‘I think there’s a train at about ten to nine.’

  Now the rain started pattering on the umbrella. They were by the bright doorway of the Y, young men coming out, with a glow of self-worth about them, putting up hoods, making a dash for it. ‘Would you like to wait here – I’ll find you a cab.’ Under the light he saw more plainly how shabby she was. She wore a lot of powder, over a face that now appeared both gaunt and pouchy. The rain had splashed her brownish stockings and her scuffed court shoes. The workings of time were sordid, slightly frightening to him, and he steadied himself with the thought of what she had been long ago. These glowing and darting boys coming out of the gym and the sauna had no idea of her interest. He spoke to her loudly and charmingly to show them she was worth it. She was a Victorian, she had seen two wars, and she was the sister-in-law, in a strange posthumous way, of the poet he was writing about. To Paul her natural habitat was an English garden, not a gusty defile off the Tottenham Court Road. Poems had been written for her, and set to music. She remembered intimacies that by now were nearly legendary. Whether she remembered Paul, however, he couldn’t tell.

  It took five minutes to get a cab on the main road, and signal it round to where she was standing. Running back to her, seeing her expression, anxious but somehow inattentive, he knew he would go with her to Paddington, and on the way he would make an arrangement to see her again. He spoke to the driver, and then strode across with the brolly to bring her to the car. ‘The silly thing is,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure I’ve the fare for the cab.’

  ‘Ah!’ Paul said, almost sternly, ‘don’t worry,’ wondering if he could in fact afford this. ‘Anyway, I’m coming with you.’ And adopting a bland, unhearing expression he more or less pushed her into the taxi, and went round the other side to get in himself. He supposed they had fifteen minutes.

  They settled, rather tensely, the cabby kept up talk through the partition about the diabolical weather, till Paul sat forward and shut the screen. He glanced at Mrs Jacobs for approval, though she seemed for a moment, in the underwater gloom of the cab, to be ignoring him. Her soft face was oddly haggard in the running shadows and gleams.

  Paul said, ‘I can’t get over just bumping into you like that.’

  ‘I know . . .’ It was a struggle for her between being grateful, embarrassed and, he sensed, somewhat offended.

  The cab had a food-like smell of earlier occupants, and the seat was still slippery from their wet clothes. He unbuttoned his coat, sat at an angle, with one leg drawn up, eager but casual. She had the transparent aura of old age, was notable and ignorable at the same time. She had her bag on her knee, both gloved hands on top of it. It wasn’t the same bag of twelve years earlier, but another, closely related, with the family trait of being shapelessly bulky – too bulky, really, to count as a handbag. It admitted as much in its helpless slump. He said, ‘So how have you been?’ – giving the question a solicitous, tentative note. He thought it was three years since Corinna’s death, and Leslie Keeping’s suicide.

  ‘Mm, very well, really. Considering, you know . . . !’ – a dry chuckle, quite like the old days, though her face retained its look of anxiety and preoccupation. She wiped the window beside her ineffectively and peered out, as if to check where they were going.

  ‘But you’re not living in London? I think the last time I saw you, you were in . . . Blackheath?’

  ‘Ah, yes. No, I’ve moved, I’ve moved back to the country.’

  ‘You don’t miss London?’ he said amiably. He wanted to find out where she lived, and sensed already a certain resistance to telling him. She merely sighed, peered at the blotted world outside, sat forward to push down the window a crack, though in a moment the throb of the engine shivered it shut. ‘I’ve been in London myself for three years now.’

  She tucked in her chin. ‘Well you’re young, aren’t you. London’s fine when you’re young. I liked London fifty years ago.’

  ‘Well, I know,’ said Paul. In some absurd way her account in her book of living in Chelsea with Revel Ralph had coloured his own sense of what London life might offer: freedom, adventure, success. ‘I got out of the bank, you see. I think I always really wanted to be a writer.’

  ‘Ah, yes . . .’

  ‘It seems to be going quite well, I’m pleased to say.’

  ‘I’m so glad.’ She smiled anxiously. ‘We’re sure he is going to Paddington, aren’t we?’

  Paul entered into it as a little joke, leaning forward. Through a wiped arc he saw for a moment a blurred corner pub, a hospital entrance, all unrecognizable. ‘We’re fine,’ he said. ‘No, I’ve been doing a bit of reviewing. You may have seen a piece of mine in the Telegraph a couple of months ago . . .’

  ‘I don’t see the Telegraph, as a rule,’ she said, with droll relief more than regret.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Paul said, ‘but actually I think the books pages are as good as any.’ What he really wanted to know, but somehow couldn’t ask, was if she’d seen his review of The Short Gallery in the New Statesman, a paper he felt she was unlikely to take. He’d done it as a gesture of friendship, finding all that was best in the book, the tiny criticisms themselves clearly affectionate, the corrections of fact surely useful for any future edition. Whenever he reviewed a book he read all its other reviews as keenly as if he were the author of the book himself. Daphne’s memoir had been covered either by fellow survivors, some loyal, some sneering, or by youngsters with their own points to make; but a more or less open suggestion that she had made a good deal of it up hung over all of them. Paul blushed when he read about errors he had failed to spot, but drew a stubborn assurance of his own niceness from the fact of having been so gentle with her. His was much the best notice she had received. As he wrote it, he imagined her gratitude, phrased it for her in different ways and savoured it, and for weeks after the review appeared – rather cut, unfortunately, but its main drift still plain to see – he waited for her letter, thanking him, recalling their old friendship, and suggesting they meet up again, perhaps for lunch, which he pictured variously at a quiet hotel or in her own house in Blackheath, among the distracting memorabilia of her eighty-two years. In fact the only response had been a letter to the Editor from Sir Dudley Valance, pointing out a trifling error Paul had made in alluding to his novel The Long Gallery, on which Daphne’s title was a pawky in-joke. If even Sir Dudley, who lived abroad, saw the New Statesman, perhaps Daphne did too; or the publisher might have sent it on. Paul thought a certain well-bred reserve might have kept her from writing anything to a reviewer. She was pulling off her gloves. ‘You won’t mind if I have a cigarette?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Paul; and when she’d found one in her bag he took the lighter from her and gently held her arm for a second as she leant to the flame. The smoke soured the fetid air almost pleasantly. And at once, with the little shake of her head as she exhaled, her face, even the uptilted gleam of her glasses, seemed restored to how they had been twelve
years before. Encouraged, he said, ‘I’m very pleased to see you, because in fact I’m writing something about Cecil . . . Cecil Valance’ – with a gasp of a laugh, quickly deferential. He didn’t come out with the full scale of his plans. ‘Actually, I was about to write to you, and ask if I could come and see you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said, but quite nicely. She blew out smoke as if at something very distant. ‘I wrote a book myself, I don’t know if you saw that. I sort of put it all in there.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course!’ – he laughed again. ‘I reviewed it, in fact.’

  ‘Were you horrid?’ she said, with another touch of the droll tone he remembered.

  ‘No, I loved it. It was a rave.’

  ‘Some of them were stinkers.’

  He paused sympathetically. ‘I just felt it would be very valuable to be able to speak to you – of course I don’t want to be a nuisance. If you like, I’ll just come for an hour when it suits you.’

  She frowned and thought. ‘You know, I never pretended to be a wonderful writer, but I have known some very interesting people.’ Her quiet laugh now was slightly grim.

  Paul made a vague noise of indignant dismissal of all her critics. ‘Of course I saw your interview in the Tatler, but I thought there might be a bit more to say!’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Again she seemed both flattered and wary.

  ‘I don’t know if you’d prefer the morning or the afternoon.’

  ‘Mm?’ She didn’t commit herself to a time, or to anything really. ‘Who was that very nice young man at the party – I expect you know him? I can’t remember anyone’s name. He was asking me about Cecil.’ She seemed to take some slightly mischievous pleasure in this.

  ‘I hope he’s not writing about him!’

  ‘Well, I’m not at all sure he isn’t.’