Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Well – indeed,’ said the General, perhaps less on top of the younger brother’s work, or uneasy with its tone about army life in general. As a cultured person from the world of action and power, General Colthorpe, with his long intellectual face and keen inescapable eye, was so imposing that Dudley himself began to look rather pansy and decadent in comparison, with his beautiful cuff-links and his silver-headed stick, and the grey curls over his collar at the back. The General frowned apologetically. ‘I was wondering – there’s not been a Life, I think, has there?’

Paul’s heart began to race, and he blushed at the naming of this still half-secret desire. ‘Well…!’ said Martin, and smiled across at him.

‘Of Sizzle, no,’ said Dudley. ‘There’s really not enough there. George Sawle did a very thorough job on the Letters a few years back – almost too thorough, dug out a lot of stuff about the girlfriends and so on: my brother had a great appetite for romantic young women. Anyway, I gave Sawle a free hand – he’s a sound fellow, I’ve known him for years.’ Dudley looked around with a hint of caution in this academic setting. ‘And of course there’s the old memoir, you know, that Sebby Stokes did – perfectly good, shows its age a bit, but it tells you all the facts.’

This left Paul in a very absurd position. He sat forward, and had just started to say, ‘As a matter of fact, Sir Dudley, I was wondering-’ when Linette reappeared, alone, at the far end of the room.

‘Ah, there you are…’ Dudley called out, with an odd mixture of mockery and relief.

Linette came towards them, in her still fascinating way, pleased to be looked at, smiling as if nursing something just a little too wicked to say. The General stood up, and then one or two others, half-ashamed not to have thought of it. Linette knew she had to speak, but hesitated appealingly. ‘Darling, the… Senior Dean’s just been showing me the most marvellous… what would one call it…?’ – she smiled uncertainly.

‘I don’t know, my love.’

She gave a pant of a laugh. ‘It was a sort of… very large… very lovely…’ – she raised a hand, which described it even more vaguely.

‘Animal, vegetable or mineral,’ said Dudley.

‘Now you’re being horrid,’ she said, with a playful pout, so that Paul felt admitted for a second to a semi-public performance, such as friends might see on the patio or whatever it was in Antequera: it was a little embarrassing, but carried off by their quite unselfconscious confidence of being a fascinating couple. ‘I was going to say, I hope they’re not tiring you, but now I rather hope they are!’

‘Lady Valance,’ said General Colthorpe, offering his chair.

‘Thank you so much, General, but I’m really rather tired myself.’ She looked across at Dudley with teasing reproach. ‘Don’t you think?’ she said.

‘You go, my love, I’m going to sit and jaw a bit longer with these good people’ – again the courtesy unsettled by the flash of a smile, like a sarcasm; though perhaps he really did want to make the most of this rare occasion to talk with young readers and scholars; or perhaps, Paul thought, as Martin jumped up to conduct her back to the Master’s lodgings, what Dudley really wanted was another large whisky.

The next morning Paul woke to the sound of a tolling bell, with a hangover that felt much worse for the comfortless strangeness of Greg Hudson’s room. He lay with a knuckle pressed hard against the pain in his forehead, as if in intensive thought. All he thought about was last night, in startling jumps and queasy circlings of recollection. He felt contempt for his juvenile weakness as a drinker, pitted against the octogenarian’s glassy-eyed appetite and capacity. He remembered with a squeezing of the gut the moment when he found himself talking about Corinna, and Dudley’s stare, at a spot just beyond Paul’s right shoulder, which he’d mistaken at first for tender gratitude, even a sort of bashful encouragement, but which turned out after twenty-five seconds to be the opposite, an icy refusal of any such intimacy. Thank god Martin the young English don had come back at that point. And yet at the end, perhaps because of the drink, there had been something forthright and friendly, hadn’t there, in the way they’d parted? On the doorstep of the Master’s lodgings, under the lamp, Dudley’s wincing gloom broken up in a grin, a seizing of the moment, an effusive goodnight: Paul could hear it now – no one had spoken to him since, and the sound of the words remained available, unerased. ‘Yes, see you in the morning!’ If he could get round Linette, there might be a chance of another conversation, with the tape running. Most of the other things Dudley had said last night he’d completely forgotten.

When he got out of bed, Paul was lurchingly surprised to find Greg’s unwashed jock-strap and one or two other intimate items scattered across the floor, but the awful blurred recollections of his late-night antics were overwhelmed by the need to get to the lavatory; which he did just in time. After he’d been sick, in one great comprehensive paragraph, he felt an almost delicious weakness and near-simultaneous improvement; his headache didn’t vanish, but it lightened and receded, and when he shaved a few minutes later he watched his face reappearing in stripes with a kind of proud fascination.

Dudley didn’t come to breakfast in hall, of course, so at 9.20 Paul went down to the phone at the foot of the staircase and dialled the extension of the lodgings. He felt still the oddly enjoyable tingle of weakness and disorientation. The phone was answered by a helpful secretary, and almost at once Dudley was saying, in a nice gentlemanly way, and with perhaps a hint of tactical frailty to pre-empt any unwelcome request, ‘Dudley Valance…?’

‘Oh, good morning, Sir Dudley – it’s Paul…!’ It was simply the sort of contact he had dreamed of.

There was a moment’s thoughtful and potentially worrying silence, and then a completely charming ‘Paul, oh, thank god…’

‘Ah…!’ – Paul laughed with relief, and after a second Dudley did the same. ‘I hope this isn’t too early to call you.’

‘Not at all. Good of you to ring. I’m sorry, for a ghastly moment just then I thought it was Paul Bryant .’

Paul didn’t know why he was sniggering too, as the colour rushed to his face and he looked round quickly to check that no one could see or hear him. ‘Oh… um…’ It was as bad as something overheard, a shocking glimpse of himself – and of Dudley too: he saw in a moment the intractable delicacy of the problem, the shouldering of the insult was the exposure of the gaffe… and yet already he was blurting out, ‘Actually it is Paul Bryant, um…’

‘Oh, it is ,’ said Dudley, ‘I’m so sorry!’ with a momentary bleak laugh. ‘How very unfortunate!’

Still too confused to feel the shock fully, Paul said incoherently, ‘I won’t trouble you now, Sir Dudley. I’ll see you at your lecture.’ And he hung up the phone again and stood staring at it incredulously.

It was during General Colthorpe’s talk on Wavell that Paul suddenly understood, and blushed again, with the indignant but helpless blush of foolish recognition. Very discreetly, under the desk, he got out Daphne Jacobs’s book from his briefcase. It was somewhere in the passage on Dudley’s exploits as a practical joker, those efforts she retailed as classics of wit and cleverly left it to the reader to wonder at their cruelty or pointlessness. As before, he felt General Colthorpe was watching him particularly, and even accusingly, from behind his lectern, but with infinite dissimulation he found the place, her account of her first visit to Corley, and looking up devotedly at the General between sentences he read the now obvious description of Dudley taking a telephone call from his brother: