Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Now, let me see…’ – there was a definite sense that neither of us knew what we were going to find. He supported himself lightly on my arm, stooping across in front of me to peer at particular pictures, so that his bald head and beard blocked my view, though he nattered on as if I could see what he was looking at. The albums go right back to late-Victorian sepia portraits of his parents’ families (Freda Sawle was half-Welsh, apparently, her uncle a well-known singer). GFS was easily distracted, squinting to read the inscriptions in white ink, puzzling things out and correcting himself, breathing in hot gasps over the page. I said I believed Hubert had had a camera. ‘Quite so. I remember Harry Hewitt gave it to him.’ Here was old HH again – I wondered what GFS’s line on him would be. ‘HH was a v rich man, who lived in Harrow Weald. He was in import/export, glass and china and so on, with Germany. Some people thought he was a spy.’ Me: ‘But he wasn’t?’ GFS squeezed my arm and giggled: ‘I don’t think so. He was queer, you know, he was in love with my brother Hubert, who was killed in the War.’ But Hubert didn’t reciprocate? ‘Hubert wasn’t at all that way himself. He was very shy. HH kept giving him expensive presents, which became emb for him.’ I said hadn’t C known HH? ‘They met when C was staying at 2A one time, and became friends of a sort.’ Was HH in love with C too? ‘Probably not, he was very loyal – he wanted someone to protect and help. C had too much money for HH to fancy him.’ Would C have flirted with him? ‘More than likely’ (laughed).

‘Now, here we are, Simon!’ A number of pictures of ‘poor old C’ – the best of them already in the Letters, the one of C in shorts with a rugger ball, looking furious: ‘You can see what marvellous legs he had!’ Me: ‘I’d like to reproduce that one.’ GFS: ‘Where would you do it?’ Me: ‘In the book I’m writing about C.’ GFS: ‘Oh, yes, I think you should. What a good idea. You know there’s never been a book about him. I’m glad you’re going to do that, it will be quite an eye-opener.’ There was a little group at 2A, on the lawn with the house behind, so that I could recognize it, C and D and GFS and a large old woman in black. ‘That was a German woman who lived near us – my mother took pity on her. She was at the Wagner festival in Germany when the War broke out, and she couldn’t get back to England. Her house was smashed up by the local people. When she came back after the war my mother sort of took her under her wing. We all rather dreaded her, though probably she was perfectly all right. Now, here’s C and me – that’s an interesting picture, though my wife doesn’t think it’s very good of me.’ I leant forward to look at it, GFS resting his hand on my shoulder. ‘That’s at Corley Court – you could get out on to the roof.’ After a moment I recognized the place exactly, from the two or three times Peter took me up there. I said, ‘You could climb up through the laundry-room.’ GFS: ‘Yes, that was it, you see.’ It showed C and GFS, leaning against a chimney, C with no shirt on, GFS with his shirt half undone, looking bashful but excited. A tiny photo, of course, but clear – C’s strong wiry body, bit of black hair on his chest, and running down his stomach, one arm raised against the chimney with biceps standing up sharp. He is smiling in a sneering sort of way, and looks much older than GFS, who always seems v self-conscious in the presence of a camera. He was quite handsome at 20 – odd glimpse of his white hairless chest: he looks like a schoolboy beside C. Me: ‘Who took it, I wonder?’ GFS: ‘I wonder too. Possibly my sister’ – which might help explain GFS’s look of confusion, if she’d just caught them at it. It gave me my first real idea of C’s body, and because the camera was like an intruder I suddenly felt what it must have been like to come into his presence – my subject! Very odd, and even a bit of a turn-on – as GFS seemed to feel, too: ‘I look positively debauched there, don’t I?’ he said. I said, ‘And were you?’ and felt his hand, rubbing my back encouragingly, move down not quite absent-mindedly to just above my waist. He said, ‘I’m afraid I probably was, you know.’

The atmosphere was now rather tense, and I glanced at him to see how conscious he was of it himself. ‘In what way, would you say?’ (shifting away a bit, but not wanting to startle him). He kept looking at the picture, breathing slowly but heavily, as if undecided: ‘Well, you know, in the normal ways,’ which I suppose was quite a good answer. I said something like, ‘Well, I don’t blame you!’ ‘Awful, isn’t it? I was quite a dish back then! And look at me now’ – turning his face to mine with a jut of his bearded chin while his hand moved down again in a determined little rubbing motion on to my bum.

So there we were, me and the famous (co-)author of An Everyday History of England , looking me in the eye with who knows what memories and conjectures, his hand appreciatively cupping my backside. I laughed awkwardly, but held his gaze for a moment, with a sort of curiosity and a sure sense now that C had touched him like this, nearly 70 years ago, and that probably I’d brought this on myself by freeing these memories in him. Also, that it didn’t matter in the least, this book-lined room was a place I was shortly going to leave, and leave him in, even the house itself would revert to the house I’d imagined for them before, a real Tudor house full of historical artefacts. I pictured the painstaking doodle I did round his name and Madeleine’s name on the title-page of their book when I was twelve or so; and now for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, and wondered how I would take it – I almost wanted him to, in a way – but he looked down, and as he did so I thought suddenly, well, this is a history I’m going to write. I went on politely, ‘And what about all C’s letters to you? You said they were lost?’ He said, ‘Yes, you see, I couldn’t say exactly what happened. My mother destroyed them, she burned almost all of them. By the way’ – his hand still clutching my left buttock, but now more as if he needed it for support than for any fun he was getting out of it – ‘better not mention this to my wife.’ It wasn’t at all clear what the ‘this’ referred to. ‘All right,’ I said, and he let go. GFS: ‘Oh, they were a great loss, a loss to literature. Though fairly hair-raising, some of them!’

As soon as we’d sat down again MS came in and said she was going to ring for a minicab. We went out into the hall. MS insisted on ringing herself: reading glasses, the number looked up in an old address book, an impatient tone when she got through. She frowned into the mirror as she spoke, admiring her own no-nonsense handling of the person she kept mishearing. ‘Twenty minutes!’ she said; so there was a strange gap to fill. She said, ‘I hope you’ll use your judgement about what my husband said to you?’ I thought what a scary teacher she must have been; said I hoped so too. ‘Really I shouldn’t have let him see you, he’s very confused.’ I said he probably knew more about C than anyone alive. MS: ‘And I’m afraid I have to ask you, did he give you anything to take away – any documents or anything?’ I said I’d taken nothing apart from notes, but he had promised to lend me photos for the book. She looked at me very squarely, which of course I can deal with; then she considered my briefcase, but at this point the study door opened and GFS came wandering out. ‘Oh, hello!’ he said – looked very interested to see me. ‘Paul’s just going, dear,’ said MS (a first slip into first-name terms). ‘Yes, yes…’ – he has quite a cunning smile for covering up about things which are obviously just at the edge of (very recent) memory, a tone of forbearance towards her, almost. MS: ‘Did you enjoy your chat, George?’ GFS: ‘Oh, very much, dear, yes,’ with a look at me that could have been a stealthy attempt to work out who I was or a much more mischievous mental replay of feeling me up. MS: ‘And what did you talk about? I don’t suppose you remember.’ GFS: ‘Oh, you’d be surprised.’ Then he proposed the potter round the garden, which MS allowed, though I was a bit more anxious, after the incident indoors. But clearly my polite pretence that nothing had happened was soon rendered meaningless by his forgetting that anything had. ‘Have a look at the tadpoles, George,’ she said. Which we duly did, MS watching from the window the whole time. ‘Wriggly little buggers,’ GFS called them.