Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘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.