The Stranger's Child

by Alan Hollinghurst

  She pondered for a minute, and he thought she might say something about him herself. ‘Of course they’ve made him an honorary fellow, haven’t they,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Yes, they have. We’re talking about your father,’ Daphne said, as Wilfrid came back in.

  ‘Oh . . . !’ said Wilfrid, with a surprising cold grimace.

  ‘Not Wilfie’s favourite person,’ said Daphne.

  When Wilfrid had gone out again, there was swiftly a new atmosphere, of involuntary intimacy, as if Paul were a doctor and about to ask her to undo her blouse. He checked the tape again. Daphne had a look of conditional resignation. He cleared his throat and looked at his notes, his plan, designed to make the whole thing more like a conversation, and for both of them more convincing. Still, it sounded more stilted than he’d meant: ‘I was wondering about the way you wrote your memoirs, er, The Short Gallery, as a set of portraits of other people, rather than one of yourself.’ He was afraid she couldn’t see his respectful smile.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Her head went back an inch. No doubt the shadowy question of his review of that book lurked somewhere beyond the actual question – beyond all of them. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘I mean’ – Paul laughed – ‘why did you do it like that? Of course, I remember when I first met you you said you were writing your memoirs then, so I know it occupied you for a long time. That was thirteen years ago!’

  ‘No, it did,’ said Daphne. ‘Much longer than that, even.’

  ‘And may I just say that I admired the book a great deal.’

  ‘Oh – that’s kind of you,’ she said, pretty drily. ‘Well, I suppose the main reason was that I was lucky enough to know a lot of people more talented and interesting than myself.’

  ‘Of course, in a way I wish you’d written more about yourself.’

  ‘Well, there’s a certain amount that gets in, I hope.’ She squinted at the tape-recorder, aware it was capturing this flannel, and her reaction to it. ‘I was very much brought up in the understanding that the men all around me were the ones who were doing the important things. A lot of them wrote their own memoirs, or, you know, their lives are being written about now – there’s this new life of Mark Gibbons that’s going to come out.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard about it,’ Paul said; Karen had got the proofs – unindexed, but a quick read through had produced only passing references to Daphne; Daphne, it seemed, had them too.

  ‘The publisher sent it. Wilfrid’s been reading it to me, because I can’t read any more. But of course she’s got all sorts of things wrong.’

  ‘Were you consulted for that book?’

  ‘Oh yes, the woman wrote to me. But really, I put it all in my own book – everything I thought worth saying about Mark, who was a dear friend, of course.’

  ‘Well, I know,’ said Paul, and looked at her rather cannily; but it was instantly clear from her hard half-smile that no confessions about bearing his child were remotely on the cards. ‘I remember meeting him at your seventieth.’

  ‘Ah, do you . . .’ – she accepted this. ‘Yes, he must have been there. Isn’t it awful, I’ve forgotten,’ she said, and smiled more sweetly, as if she’d just seen a good way out of his future questions.

  ‘Well, of course I’m hoping not to get it wrong,’ said Paul, ‘with your help!’ He sipped a little of the weak coffee. It struck him that if Daphne had helped her a bit more, the biographer of Mark Gibbons might not have made the mistakes that she was now deploring. It was a recurrent little knot of self-defeating resistance that perhaps all biographers of recent subjects had to confront and undo. People wouldn’t tell you things, and then they blamed you for not knowing them – unless they were George Sawle, of course, where the flow of secrets had been so disinhibited as to be almost unusable. Still, Daphne was an old lady, of whom he was reasonably fond, and he said gently, ‘I suppose you wanted to put the record straight a bit, though.’

  ‘Well, a bit – about “Two Acres” and things, you see. In the poem I’m merely referred to as “you”. And of course in Sebby Stokes’s thing I’m “Miss S.”!’

  Paul laughed sympathetically, half-embarrassed by his own new suspicion that the ‘you’ of the poem was really George. ‘There’s more about you in . . . Sir Dudley’s book.’

  ‘Yes . . . but then he’s always so down on everybody.’

  ‘I was surprised by how little he says about Cecil.’

  ‘I know . . .’ – she sounded amiable but bored at once by talk of Black Flowers.

  ‘I suppose Cecil must have been the first real writer you’d met.’

  ‘Oh, yes, well as I said in the book, he was the most famous person I had met before I was married, though he wasn’t actually terribly famous at the time. I mean, he’d had poems here and there, but he hadn’t yet published a book or anything.’

  ‘Night Wake wasn’t till 1916, was it, only a few months before he was killed?’

  ‘That’s probably right,’ said Daphne. ‘And then after that of course he emerged as quite an important figure.’

  ‘But you’d read some of his poems before you met him?’

  ‘I think one or two.’

  ‘So to you he would have been a glamorous figure before you’d even set eyes on him.’

  ‘We were all quite curious to meet him.’

  ‘What do you remember about his first visit to “Two Acres”? Why don’t you just tell me about that.’

  She tucked in her chin. ‘Well, he arrived,’ she said, as if resolved to tackle the question squarely.

  ‘He arrived at 5.27,’ said Paul.

  ‘Did he . . . ? Yes.’

  ‘I think . . . your brother . . . must have met him.’

  ‘Well, of course he had.’

  ‘No . . . ! I mean, he was at the station.’

  ‘Oh, quite possibly.’

  ‘Do you remember when you first saw Cecil yourself?’

  ‘Well, it would have been then.’

  ‘And did you feel an immediate attraction to him?’

  ‘Well, he was very striking, you know. I was only sixteen . . . very innocent . . . well, we all were in those days – I’d certainly never had a boyfriend, or anything like that – I was a great reader, I read romantic novels, but I had no knowledge of romance myself – and a lot of poetry, of course, Keats, and Tennyson we all loved . . .’ – Paul saw her easing into a routine, something sweet and artificial in her voice. He let her run on, his own face abstracted and impatient as he saw the shape of his next question, a rather tougher one. When she seemed to have finished, and turned to pick up her coffee, he said,

  ‘Can I ask you, what did you think about your brother’s friendship with Cecil?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ she huffed over her mug. ‘Well, it was very unusual.’

  ‘In what way?’ said Paul, with a small shake of the head.

  ‘Mm? He’d never had a friend before, poor George. I think we were all rather tickled when he suddenly produced one.’

  Paul grinned at this with the reluctant sense of kinship that sometimes ghosted his interviews. ‘And could you see why they were such friends? Did they seem very close?’

  Again Daphne sighed out, as if to say she might as well be candid. ‘I think it was just a clear case of old-fashioned’ – she paused and sipped – ‘well, hero-worship, really, wasn’t it? George was very young for his age, emotionally. I suppose Cambridge brought him out a bit.’ She winced. ‘To be honest, George has always been a bit of a cold fish.’

  Paul played for a pondering moment or two with even more candid phrases, but looking at her he was doubtful, and frightened of disgusting her. He said, ‘I just wondered if you felt he was jealous of your affair with Cecil?’

  ‘George? No, no;’ and as if not satisfied with her earlier put-down, or feeling that by now it didn’t matter anyway, ‘George never exactly had normal human emotions, you see. I don’t know why. And I dare say it hasn’t done him any harm – life’s
probably much simpler without them, though a bit dull, wouldn’t you think!’ Paul pictured George with the half-naked Cecil on the roof at Corley, and smiled distantly, at a loss as to how much of this she believed or expected him to believe; and to how much she might quite willingly have forgotten. ‘If you’d come a few years ago, I’d have suggested you go and talk to him, but I’m afraid he’s rather lost it now – up top, you know. I think poor Madeleine has quite a struggle with him.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Paul.

  ‘No, he’d have been a useful person for you to talk to. I don’t mean to suggest he was ever a bore, by the way. He was an intellectual, he was always the brains of the family.’

  Paul let a moment pass, while he looked at his papers, his little mime of being an interviewer, which seemed more for his own benefit than for hers. ‘Do you mind if I ask you – you say in the book that it was, well, a love-affair – you and Cecil, I mean . . . !’

  ‘Well, indeed.’

  ‘You wrote to each other, but did you see each other?’

  ‘Didn’t I say . . . ? No, we saw each other fairly often, I think.’

  ‘The War, I suppose, intervened.’

  ‘Well, the War, quite. We didn’t see each other so often then.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to work out from the Letters when he was in England – he signed up almost at once, September 1914.’

  ‘Yes, well he loved the War.’

  ‘So he was out in France by December, and then only home quite rarely on leave, until he – until he was killed, eighteen months later.’

  ‘That must be right, yes,’ said Daphne, with a small cough of impatience.

  Paul said, in a tactical tone, but with a quick apologetic smile, ‘Can I jump forward to the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Oh, yes . . .’ she gasped, as if momentarily dizzy.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Well, again . . .’ She shook her head, as if to say that she’d have liked to help. ‘I think it was all very much as I said in my little book.’

  So Paul read out, rather skimmingly, the passage he’d read on the train earlier, which she listened to with an air of curiosity as well as mild defiance. Again he wasn’t sure how to do it: how did you ask an eighty-three-year-old woman if someone had – he hardly liked to say it even to himself. And if Cecil had got her pregnant – well, of course she could get the whole thing off her chest at last, in a tearful rush of relief, but something told Paul it wasn’t going to happen in the present atmosphere. Still, when he looked up, it seemed she was moved by her own words. ‘Well, there you are!’ she said, and shook her head again. It was one of those disorienting moments, all too common in Paul’s life, when he saw he’d missed something, and thinking back he still couldn’t see what had triggered the very quick change of emotion in the other person. He wondered if she was about to cry. Socially awkward, but wonderful for the book if the trick had worked and he’d stirred some brand new memory; he glanced at the patient revolution of the tape. Then he saw he’d got it wrong again – or else she was brusquely shutting him out from her unexpected turn of feeling. She said, ‘To tell the truth I sometimes feel I’m shackled to old Cecil. It’s partly his fault, for getting killed – if he’d lived we would just have been figures in each other’s pasts, and I don’t suppose anyone would have cared two hoots.’

  ‘Oh, I think they might have done . . . !’ – was he teasing her or reassuring her? ‘I understand you were planning to get married?’

  ‘Well . . . Even if we had I don’t imagine it would have been a great success.’

  ‘There’s the letter where he says, “will you be my widow?” ’ Paul thought it wasn’t tactful, even now, to mention the fact, exposed by the Letters, that Cecil had also asked Margaret Ingham to be his widow on the very same day. ‘But I suppose he was rather . . . fickle, perhaps?’

  ‘Well, of course he was. But the thing you have to understand is that Cecil made you feel you were at the absolute centre of his universe.’ And at this Paul felt both pity and a hint of envy.

  Quite soon it was time for the customary, necessary, and often useful visit to the loo – a welcome escape into privacy, a gape in the mirror, and a chance to pry unobserved into the subject’s habits and attitude to hygiene and sense of humour. At Olga perhaps a touch of mad humour showed in the junk that had been piled and propped in the gloomy and mouldy-smelling little room. Behind the door there was a stack of pictures with cracked glass and a folding card-table, and under the basin the long box of a croquet set with JACOBS stencilled on the lid. Opposite the basin his shoulder brushed a large murky painting in a fancy gilt frame with various bits chipped off: it showed a pale young man with a black hat and a snooty expression, and was streaked across as though someone had tried to clean it with a muddy sponge. The lavatory, which could never have been a bright room, was made all the gloomier by Virginia creeper which covered the lower part of the frosted-glass window and had forced its way in through the opening top light, a long strand feeling its way across the wall, above a stack of large objects covered in a tablecloth. Paul hardly liked to use the loo itself, dark as peat below the water-line, and with what Peter Rowe used to call a lesbian seat, that had to be held up. Under the tablecloth it turned out there were wine boxes, sealed with brittle yellow Sellotape, which might be worth exploring on a later visit. Along the wall beside the loo books and magazines were stacked several feet high. On top was the issue of the Tatler with Daphne’s interview in it, and a six-year-old Country Life with a feature on Staunton Hall, ‘the home of Lady Caroline Messent’ – he supposed they must be kept there for some small ritual of reassurance. The books were like a jumble sale in which you might find something – it was clearly either Daphne or Wilfrid’s habit to mark their place each time with a torn-off sheet of toilet-paper. The cohabitation of mother and son oppressed Paul here more than he could explain. He sat down for a minute, and looked sideways at the titles. And there, just above floor level, and tricky to prise out, was Black Flowers, in its dust-jacket, torn and stained, but the first edition, 1944, on cheap wartime paper, signed: ‘For Wilfrid, Dudley Valance’. It was too stark and sad and valuable to leave here, and Paul placed it where he would be able to get it later. He washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror to assess his progress and give himself a quick pep-talk, slightly thrown by the murky sneer of the young man in the frame behind him.

  Wilfrid, sensing his brief absence, had come back in and was edging round the end of the sitting-room, apparently looking for something. ‘And I really must ask you,’ Paul said in a rush, ‘if you still have the book with the manuscript of “Two Acres” in it. I’d love to see it.’

  ‘Well, you’re out of luck, I’m afraid,’ said Daphne.

  ‘You don’t have it?’

  She frowned almost crossly. ‘Where is it, Wilfrid?’

  ‘I believe it’s in London, Mother,’ said Wilfrid, peering into a large wicker basket on top of a pile of old curtains, ‘it’s gone to be photographed.’

  ‘It’s being photographed,’ she confirmed. ‘It’s extraordinarily delicate, well, it’s seventy years old, isn’t it? – nearly seventy.’

  ‘No, that’s a very good idea,’ Paul said. ‘Who’s doing it for you?’

  ‘I can’t remember his name – he’s doing the new edition of Cecil’s poems.’

  ‘Oh, well you’re in good hands,’ Paul said.

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘I think he’s called Dr Nigel Dupont.’

  ‘Exactly. He told me he feels a very personal connection with Cecil because he was at school at Corley.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘He got interested in him from seeing his tomb all the time in the chapel.’

  ‘How interesting,’ said Paul, as the heavy likelihood that Dupont had been a pupil of Peter’s closed sickeningly about him. ‘Did Nigel . . . um . . . come to see you?’

  ‘No, it was all very easy, we did it by mai
l.’

  ‘Recorded delivery,’ said Wilfrid.

  ‘He doesn’t give two pins about, you know, the biographical side,’ said Daphne, ‘he’s very much a textual editor, would you call it.’

  ‘Well, indeed.’

  ‘All the different editions and what have you.’

  ‘Fascinating . . .’ Paul edged back towards his chair. Outside, the afternoon was beginning to lower, late sunlight making the dirty windows opaque.

  ‘Well, it is rather fascinating. He says they’re full of mistakes. It was Sebby Stokes, you know, he messed around with them quite a bit, apparently, I suppose he thought he was improving them.’

  ‘Perhaps he was!’

  Daphne turned and said, ‘Why don’t you and Mr Bryant get out round the village.’

  ‘We don’t know that he wants to,’ Wilfrid said.

  ‘Walk down to the farm, you like that.’

  It was a bold distraction on Daphne’s part, cutting short the interview, but Paul had been hoping for a chance to talk to Wilfrid in private at some point. So out they went, Paul borrowing a large loose pair of old black wellingtons, which Wilfrid told him, once they’d got into the road, had ‘formerly belonged to Basil’.

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Paul, disliking the thought of wearing a dead man’s shoes; they dragged and clunked on the tarmac. ‘For some reason I hadn’t imagined he was so big . . .’ Later he thought it odd that Daphne had hung on to them, moved house with them. Wilfrid had put on a pair of mud-caked workman’s boots, and a kind of car-coat over his fleece. His big monkish head, with its tufts of grey hair, was bare.

  ‘This isn’t one of the attractive, picturesque villages,’ Wilfrid said. They strode back down the lane, past the shop with its steamed-up window, past the council houses, and then into another lane that ran up the side of some fenced-off parkland, ploughed fields on the other side. Away from the bungalow Wilfrid became both franker and more anxious; he said twice, ‘She can look after herself for half an hour.’

  ‘She’s lucky to have you,’ Paul said, sounding feebly polite.

  ‘Oh, she drives me potty!’ said Wilfrid, with a grin of guilty excitement. Now they mounted the verge to let a tractor and trailer go past, great clots of silage dropping off behind it into the lane. Wilfrid stared at the driver but didn’t greet him. Paul wasn’t sure what to say – he felt both mother and son were cheered up and somehow kept going by driving each other potty.