Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘No, I meant – I believe Sir Dudley is involved in the sherry world, isn’t he.’

‘Oh, I see… And Julian – well Julian’s the artistic one. He’s very creative.’

Paul could tell from her tone, which was also fond, but final, that he shouldn’t ask what form this creativity took. He felt his own secret interest in Julian as a sixth-former might somehow burn through. Daphne said, ‘Why, have you met Dudley?’

‘Yes, I have,’ said Paul simply, with no idea as yet what line to take about him. He told her a bit about the Oxford conference, in what felt to him a very fair-minded way, and finding he had already somehow both censored and excused Dudley’s crushing put-down over the phone; as an anecdote it had a value that went some way to compensate for the further talk they had never had. ‘He was quite controversial. He said that war poems, being written at the time, were usually not much good, “inept and amateurish” I think were his words; whereas the great war writing was all in prose, and appeared ten years later – or more in his case, of course.’

‘That sounds like Dudley.’

‘He wouldn’t say anything much about Cecil.’

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,