The Stranger's Child

by Alan Hollinghurst

  From his seat Rob had a view along the front row in profile, unmistakably members of the family, as well as people who were due to speak: he recognized Sarah Barfoot, Nigel Dupont and Desmond, Peter’s husband. Rob had had a fling with Desmond himself, ten or twelve years ago, and looked at him now with that eerie awareness of the unforeseen that lurks beneath the reassurances of any reunion. The other readers could be identified perhaps from the list. Dr James Brooke he didn’t know at all. At the far end was a man of about sixty, with a long nose and glasses on a string, looking over the typed sheets he was going to read from. He seemed somehow outside the nervous but supportive mood of the rest of the team, his own nerves perhaps concealed behind his frown and the sudden impatient glare he turned on the audience behind him; then he saw someone he knew, and gave a curt but humorous nod. Rob thought this must be Paul Bryant, the biographer.

  Rob’s neighbour said, ‘How old was he?’ getting out her reading glasses.

  He looked at the front of the card with its small black-and-white photo and the words ‘PETER ROWE – 9 OCTOBER 1945–8 JUNE 2008 – A CELEBRATION’. ‘Um – sixty-two.’ The photo was more typical than flattering, Peter at a party, making a point, with a glass of wine in his hand. At these memorials great fondness was often shown for the foibles of the deceased. Rob found it brought back immediately the sound of Peter’s voice, plummy, funny, carrying – a sound which Peter himself had been very fond of.

  ‘You probably knew him well.’

  ‘Not really, I’m afraid. I mean, I grew up on his TV series, but I only got to know him much later.’

  ‘I loved those, didn’t you.’

  ‘We did a lot of business with him . . . Sorry, I should say, I’m a book-dealer,’ and here Rob reached in his suit pocket for the little translucent case and presented her with his business card: Rob Salter, Garsaint.com, Books and Manuscripts.

  ‘Aha! very good . . .’ She peered at it.

  ‘He had a great art library.’

  ‘I imagine so. Is that your field?’

  ‘We’re mainly post-1880 – literature, art and design.’

  She tucked the card in her handbag. ‘You don’t do French books, I suppose?’

  ‘We can search for specific things, if you need them.’ He shrugged pleasantly. ‘We can find you anything you want.’

  ‘Mm, I may well have to call on you.’

  ‘Now that all information is retrievable . . .’

  ‘Quite a thought, isn’t it,’ she said, and here she fished out her own card, rubbed at the corners, and with a private phone-number inked in: Professor Jennifer Ralph, St Hilda’s College, Oxford. ‘There you are.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ said Rob, ‘yes, indeed . . . Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, I think?’

  ‘How clever of you.’

  ‘I’ve sold several copies of your book.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, delighted but dry – ‘which one?’

  But here a horrible lancing whine was heard from the speakers, as the tall figure of Nigel Dupont approached and ducked grinningly away from the microphone. Then he approached again, and had said no more than ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ when again the savage noise leapt into the room and echoed off the walls and ceiling. Though it wasn’t his fault, it made him look a bit of a fool, which he plainly wasn’t used to. He swept his strikingly blond forelock back with a distracted hand. When the problem had been more or less sorted out, all he said, squinting at a text on his iPhone, was, ‘I’m sure you’ll understand, there will be a slight delay, Peter’s sister’s held up by traffic.’

  ‘The famous Dupont, I presume,’ said Jennifer, quite loudly, as talk resumed. ‘We are honoured.’

  ‘I know . . .’ said Rob. Dupont had a long unseasonally suntanned face with almost invisible rimless glasses, and a suit that in itself conveyed the sheer superiority of a well-endowed chair at a Southern Californian university.

  ‘And do you know by any chance the name of the man at the far end – with the, um, green tie?’ said Jennifer, picking his least personal identifying feature.

  ‘Well, I think,’ said Rob, ‘it must be Paul Bryant, mustn’t it, who writes all those biographies – there was that one that caused all the fuss about the Bishop of Durham.’

  Jennifer nodded slowly. ‘Good . . . god . . . yes, it is! I can’t have seen him for forty years.’

  Rob was amused by her half-abstracted, half-mocking gaze across the room. ‘How did you come to know him?’

  ‘Hmm? Well,’ said Jennifer, sliding down a little in her chair, as though to hide from Bryant but also to enter a more confidential phase with Rob, ‘years ago he wrote one of his books, his first one, actually – which also caused a good deal of fuss – about my . . . sort of great-uncle.’ She shook away the unnecessary explanation.

  ‘Yes . . . that was Cecil Valance?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Your great-uncle was Cecil Valance . . .’ said Rob, marvelling, almost teasing.

  ‘Well’ – she snatched a breath, and he saw her in her College room, in a trying tutorial on Mallarmé or some other subject beyond the student’s reach: ‘I mean, do you really want to know?’

  ‘Very much,’ said Rob, quite truthfully, and with a sense now it would be rather annoying when the event started. He’d been a student when the Valance biography came out, and he remembered reading extracts from it in a Sunday paper, and enjoying the atmosphere of revelations without being specially interested in the people involved.

  ‘My grandmother,’ said Jennifer, ‘was married to Cecil’s brother Dudley Valance, who was also a writer, rather forgotten now.’

  ‘Well, Black Flowers,’ said Rob.

  ‘Exactly – I mustn’t forget you’re a bookseller! But anyway she left him, and married my grandfather, the artist Revel Ralph.’

  ‘Yes – absolutely,’ said Rob, seeing her quick raised eyebrow.

  ‘Now my father worked mainly in Malaya, he was very big in rubber, but I was sent to school in England, of course, and in the holidays I often stayed with my aunt Corinna, who was Dudley’s daughter. That was when I met Peter, by the way. He played duets with her. She was a very fine pianist – could have been a concert pianist.’

  ‘I see,’ said Rob, distracted by the image of her father in rubber, though the lewd subtext flickered only as an encouraging smile. ‘How interesting.’

  ‘Well it is interesting,’ said Jennifer drily, tucking in her chin, ‘but according to Paul Bryant everything I’ve just told you is untrue. Let me see . . . My aunt wasn’t really Dudley’s daughter, but Cecil’s, Dudley was gay, though he managed to father a son with my grandmother, and my father’s father wasn’t Revel Ralph, who really was gay, but a painter called Mark Gibbons. I may be simplifying a bit.’

  Rob grinned and nodded, not taking all of this in. ‘And this wasn’t the case?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, who knows?’ said Jennifer. ‘Paul was something of a fantasist, we all knew that. But it caused a fair old stink at the time. Dudley’s wife even tried to take out an injunction against it.’

  ‘Yes, of course’ – it was that sense he’d had of the old guard trying and failing to close ranks.

  ‘Do you remember? And of course it cast my poor grandmother in rather an unenviable light.’

  ‘Yes, I see that.’

  ‘She’d been married three times as it was, and now he was claiming that two of her three children hadn’t been sired by her husbands, and also, did I mention that Cecil had had an affair with her brother? Yup, that too.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Rob, who couldn’t quite see where Jennifer stood on the subject. She seemed to deplore Paul Bryant, but wasn’t exactly disputing what he’d said. Her droll academic tone had something county in it too, a little snobbish reserve she hadn’t wholly wanted to disown. ‘I presume she wasn’t still alive?’

  ‘Mm, well she was, I’m afraid, though extremely old, and virtually blind, so there was no chance of her actually reading it. Everyone tried to keep it from h
er.’ Jennifer flinched with her evident sense of the humour as well as the horror of the situation. ‘Though as I’m sure you know there will always be one very dear friend who feels they have to put you in the picture. I think it sort of finished her off. As it happened she’d written a rather feeble book of her own about her affair with Uncle Cecil, so it was a bit of a shock to be told he’d also had an affair with her brother.’

  ‘Well, outing gay writers was all the rage then, of course.’

  ‘Well, fine,’ she said, with a candid shake of the head. ‘If that’s all it had been . . .’

  Rob looked at her as he found the title. ‘England Trembles,’ he said. Long out of print, though an American paperback had surfaced later – he could see the photo of Valance on the front – ‘Sensational!’ – Times of London – something like that.

  ‘England Trembles,’ said Jennifer, ‘exactly . . .’ turning down the corners of her mouth in a rather French expression of indifference. ‘The thing was—’

  A loud purring sound, a preparatory burble of self-pleasure, rose above the talk, and then ‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much, my name’s Nigel Dupont . . .’

  ‘Ah – ’ Rob winced.

  ‘There’s quite a story about Master Bryant as well,’ said Jennifer, with a rapid nod and grimace of a promise to carry on with it later. ‘All was not as it seemed . . .’ Rob sat back, smiling appreciatively, but amused too to be reserving judgement on the matter.

  It seemed Dupont had been asked by the family to be a sort of MC for the occasion – he assumed the role with evident willingness and natural authority and just a hint of allowable muddle, as if to remind them he was good-naturedly helping out. ‘So, we’re all here,’ he said, peering down with a smile of exaggerated patience at the confused figure of Peter’s sister, red-faced from a horrible rush across London, still settling her bags and papers in the front row. Then, the smile running across the rows, ‘I’m aware many people in this very splendid room knew . . . er, Peter far better than I did, and we’ll be hearing from some of them in a moment. Peter was a hugely popular guy, with a huge variety of friends. I can see many different types of people here’ – surveying the room humorously, with his expat’s eye, and producing confusion and even laughter in persons suddenly considering what type they might belong to – ‘and perhaps this gathering of his friends can best be thought of as the last of Peter’s famous parties, at which one might meet anyone from a duke to a . . . to a DJ, a bishop to a barrow-boy’ – Dupont perhaps suggesting a certain loss of touch with contemporary English life; the bishop in the second row smiled tolerantly. ‘Many friendships of course were initiated at those parties. I know some of my own best work might never have been done if it hadn’t been for meetings brought about by, um . . . Peter.’ He reflected for a moment – it seemed he was going to speak without notes, which created its own small tension of latent embarrassment and renewed relief when he went on. Peter’s name itself seemed constantly about to elude him. ‘However, for now, Terence – Peter’s father – has suggested I say a few words about the period when I first knew him, when he was in his early twenties, and I was a tender twelve years old.’ Dupont smiled distantly and high-mindedly at this memory as the vaguely disturbing sound of what he had said sank in – Rob glanced across the room, and caught a tall fair-haired man smiling too, and smiling at Rob specifically through his more general air of amusement. Rob thought he might have seen him around, but his cataloguing mind couldn’t yet place him. He looked down, and saw that Jennifer, beneath her own air of polite attention, was discreetly drawing on the back of the service card with a propelling pencil: an expert little sketch of Professor Dupont.

  ‘For a brief period, just over three years, Peter taught at a prep-school in Berkshire called Corley Court. It was his first proper job – I believe he had worked in the men’s department at Harrods for a few months before, which was what gave him his first taste for London – life in the inside leg as he used to call it! He had come down from Oxford with a decent second, but true academic endeavour was never going to be Peter’s Fach.’ Dupont gazed complacently at the tiers of leather-bound books, while a frown of uncertainty about what he’d just said passed through the audience. ‘He had a passion for knowledge, of course, but he wasn’t a specialist – which was just as well at Corley, where he had to teach everything, except I think math, and sport. Corley Court was a High Victorian country house of a kind then much reviled, though Peter was fascinated by it from the start. It had been built by a man called Eustace Valance, who had made his fortune from grass seed, and been created a baronet on the strength of it. His son was also an agriculturalist, but his two grandsons, Cecil and Dudley, were both in their ways to become quite well-known writers.’ Here Rob looked at Jennifer, who gave a little nod as she strengthened the boyish curl of Dupont’s forelock.

  ‘You probably all know lines of Cecil’s by heart,’ he went on, smiling along the densely packed rows and eliciting again a mixture of resistance and eagerness; it was as though he might ask any one of them to quote the lines they knew. ‘He was a first-rate example of the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many greater masters. “All England trembles in the spray / Of dog-rose in the front of May” . . . “Two blessèd acres of English ground” ’ – he looked almost teasingly at them, as though he were a prep-school master himself. ‘Some of you perhaps know that I went on to edit Cecil Valance’s poems, a project that might never have come about had it not been for Peter’s early encouragement.’ And he nodded slowly, as if at the providential nature of this. Rob had forgotten this fact, which linked Jennifer and Dupont in the sort of unexpected way he liked.

  ‘So . . .’ Dupont paused, as if to recover his bearings, some clever little vanity again in the invitation to watch him improvise. Half the audience seemed seduced by it; others, older colleagues of Peter’s, friends of the family who had never heard of Dupont, and were yet to see the point of him, had the air of mildly offended blankness which is the default expression of any congregation. One or two, of course, would have read Dupont’s milestone works in Queer Theory, and perhaps be pleasantly surprised to find he could talk in straightforward English when necessary. Rob felt again he didn’t have to take a view, he looked humorously and enquiringly at Jennifer’s knee, and she offered her service card with her little down-turned smile: she had got Dupont exactly, in a sketch that was somewhere between a portrait and a cartoon. Rob gave an almost noiseless snort and as he looked across the rows again he found the tall blond man smiling at him and then blinking slowly before he turned away. Rob’s feeling it wasn’t proper to cruise at a memorial service was mixed with a feeling that Peter himself wouldn’t have minded. He looked aside and his gaze fell, with a kind of respectful curiosity, on Desmond, sitting very straight, but with his eyes fixed on Dupont’s black brogues. ‘So,’ Dupont was saying: ‘what . . . er, Peter used to call a “violently Victorian house”, and a poet of the First World War, with an interesting private life. We can see now that Corley Court was as seminal to Peter’s work, as it was to be to my own. His two ground-breaking series, Writers at War, for Granada, and The Victorian Dream, for BBC2, were in a way incubated in that extraordinary place, cut off from the outside world and yet’ – here he smiled persuasively at the beauty of his own thought – ‘bearing witness to it . . . in so many ways.’

  Rob’s eye ran on along the curve of the front row, where the later speakers were smiling at Dupont with polite impatience and anxiety. At the far end Paul Bryant was scribbling on his printed text, like someone at a debate. Peter’s father had a grief-stricken but curious look, as though he were still finding out important things about his son. The timing of the event, four months after Peter’s death, was surely not easy for him. But something else, both awkward and comic, was now becoming unignorable. Very slowly, Dupont’s loud purr, a kind of maximized intimacy filling the high-ceilinged room impartially from the two large speakers on stands, had been dwi
ndling to a sound of more modest reach, clearer at first, as the short masking echo was removed, then quieter altogether, as though a humble functionary were revealed working some splendid machine. He himself seemed to notice that his words weren’t coming back at him at quite the optimal volume. ‘When Peter drove some of us into Oxford in his car,’ he was saying, ‘the first thing he took us to see was Keble College chapel . . .’ –‘Can’t! hear!’ came a lordly shout from the back, enjoying its own petulance, and others more politely and helpfully joined in. Dupont looked down and found the microphone on its stand had drooped like a flower, and was now pointing at his crotch.

  Rob smiled at this, glanced over to the blond man, only to find him sharing a grin with one of the men in leather on the far side of the room. Faintly annoyed, Rob turned in his seat while the mike was sorted out, and gazed up at the shelves closest to him. He thought it must be a section where books by members were placed. A few famous names stood out, to the pride of the Club; other writers Rob had never heard of must dutifully and determinedly have given copies of everything they published – now fading, foxing, sunning, untouched surely, for decade after decade. He liked the effect of recession, of work proudly presented and immediately forgotten – hidden in full view, overlooked surely even by those members whose eyes swept over the shelves each day; it was the sort of shadowy terrain the well-armed book-dealer hunted in.

  ‘I could talk about Peter for hours,’ Dupont was saying, ‘but now let’s have some music.’ He stepped down from the podium and they listened to Janet Baker singing Mahler’s ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, so loudly that the system flared and crackled, and the young man in charge of the sound abruptly turned her down, and then, seeing the little searching smiles of some of the audience, turned her up again, grinning and tucking his hair behind his ears. Rob got out his fountain-pen and made a few notes of his own on the back of his service card.