Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘You mean on this one occasion you really thought he’d do the right thing.’

‘Stupidly, we did,’ said Wilfrid, and there seemed little more to say after that; though a good deal for Paul to think about.

Now the sun had sunk among the black cloud-bars to the west, and the back of the village huddled clear but bleak in the neutral light of the early evening. Chicken-runs, garden sheds, heaps of garden refuse thrown over the hedge all year long; a car on bricks, a greenhouse painted white, the jostle of tall TV aerials against the cold sky. Paul pictured his street in Tooting and the lit red buses with a shiver of longing. It was what Peter used to call his nostalgie du pavé, the panicky longing for London. ‘Oh, my dear,’ he would say, in Wantage or Foxleigh, ‘I’m not dying here.’

When they got back to the bungalow, Paul said ‘Thanks so much, I should probably push off now,’ but to his surprise Daphne said, ‘Have a drink first.’ She made her way, holding on to table and chair, to the corner of the room where on a crowded surface there was a cluster of bottles with an ice-bucket, phials of Tabasco and bitters, all the paraphernalia of the cocktail hour. Wilfrid was sent out to the garage to get ice from the freezer. ‘He knows we need it, and then he makes such a face!’ said Daphne. ‘G-and-t?’ Paul said yes, and smiled at the thought of the time he’d first met her, over the same drink, when he’d sat in the garden trying not to look up her skirt. Daphne opened a tonic bottle with a practised snap, the tonic fizzing out round the top and dripping down her wrist. ‘Have you got it?’ she said, as Wilfrid returned with the silver plastic bucket. ‘Oh, look, it’s all an enormous lump, you’ll have to break it up, I can’t possibly use this. Really, Wilfrid!’ – making a half-hearted comedy out of her annoyance for the sake of their guest.

When they were settled, Daphne came back with a genial but purposeful look to the new book on Mark Gibbons that she’d been reading, which she said again wasn’t good at all, and anyway half the point of Mark was lost if the pictures were in black-and-white. (Paul guessed she meant Wilfrid had been reading it to her, but as usual his agency was somehow elided.) She said it was funny how some people emerged from the great backward and abyss while others were wholly forgotten. Mark had had a sort of handy-man, called Dick Mint, who was a bit of a character, fixed the car, looked after the garden, and was often to be found sitting in Mark’s kitchen at Wantage jawing endlessly with his employer. A pretty fair bore, actually, but he had his remarks: he thought the Post-Impressionists were something to do with the GPO. Perhaps, what? twenty people in the whole world knew him, hardly a household name. Lived in a caravan. And now, thanks to this book, thousands of people, probably, were going to know about him – he’d become a character on a world stage. People in America would know about him. Whereas the woman who came in, whose name Daphne thought was Jean, who did all the washing and cleaning, wasn’t mentioned at all – in fact nobody now thought of her from one year to the next.

‘I must read the Mark Gibbons book,’ Paul said, wishing he’d had the tape-recorder on through this spiel.

‘Really I shouldn’t bother,’ said Daphne.

Paul laughed. ‘This must happen to you quite a lot.’

‘Mm?’

‘You must know a lot of people whose lives have been written.’

‘Yes, or they turn up in someone else’s, you know.’

‘Like you, yourself, indeed, Mummy!’ said Wilfrid.

‘The thing is, they all get it wrong.’ She’d now got back into that irritable mood that she clearly enjoyed.

‘The best ones don’t, perhaps,’ said Paul.

‘They take against people,’ said Daphne, ‘or someone they talk to bears a grudge, and tells them things that aren’t right. And they put it all in as if it was gospel!’ This was obviously meant as a warning, but was said as if it had completely slipped her mind that he was writing a biography himself. She glowed, chin tucked in, eyes turned on him but, as he had to remind himself, barely seeing him; though a tremor of contact seemed to pass between them through the quivering heat of the electric fire.

‘Well…!’ Paul paused respectfully. The first rush of the gin seemed to present him with a view of all the things it was in his grasp to ask her, the numerous doubts and rumours and aspersions he had heard, about her and her family. Did she have any idea what had gone on between George and Cecil, for instance? Did Wilfrid himself know the theory that his sister was Cecil’s child? He had to tread carefully, but he saw more clearly than ever that the writer of a life didn’t only write about the past, and that the secrets he dealt in might have all kinds of consequences in other lives, in years to come. With Wilfrid present, knocking back an orange squash, he could hardly say or ask anything intimate; though Daphne too was more open and cheerful after a drink – it might have been worth trying.

Still, something warned Paul not to accept a second gin, and at seven o’clock he asked if he could call a taxi. Daphne smiled firmly at this, and Wilfrid said he’d be happy to drive him into Worcester in the Renault.

‘I really don’t want to make you turn out at night,’ Paul said, his courteous demurral covering a natural nervousness about the car as well as the driver.

‘Oh, I like to take her out for a spin,’ said Wilfrid, so that for a moment Paul thought Daphne was coming too. ‘It’s not good for her just to… stand in the drive from one week to the next.’

Daphne stood up, and hanging on to the large oak chest got across the room with a new air of warmth and enthusiasm. ‘Where do you live?’ she said, almost as if thinking of a return visit.

‘I live in Tooting Graveney.’

‘Oh, yes… Is that near Oxford?’

‘Not really, no… It’s near Streatham.’

‘Streatham, oh!’ – even this seemed rather a lark.

They now shook hands. ‘Well, thank you so much.’ It was perhaps a moment to call her Daphne, but he held off till their second session. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, same time.’

Paul wondered afterwards if it was a true misunderstanding or a bit of Dudleyesque fooling. She halted by the door into the hall, head cocked in confusion. ‘Oh, are you coming back?’ she said.

‘Oh… well’ – Paul gasped. ‘I think that was… what we agreed!’ He’d got nothing out of her today, but was resignedly treating it as a warm-up for the real explorations the following afternoon.

‘What are we doing tomorrow, Wilfrid?’

‘I should be surprised if we were doing anything very much,’ said Wilfrid, in a way that made Paul wonder whether all his patient simplicities weren’t perhaps a very cool kind of sarcasm.

In the Renault it was rather as if a child drove an adult, both of them pretending that it wasn’t worrying or surprising. It emerged that the dip-switch was broken, so that they had either to crawl along on side-lights, the hedges looming dimly above them, or to be flashed at by on-coming motorists blinded by the headlights on full beam. Wilfrid coped with both things with his usual whimsical patience. Paul didn’t want to distract him, but when they got on to the main road he said, ‘I hope I’m not tiring your mother.’

‘I think she’s enjoying it,’ Wilfrid said; and with a glance in the mirror, as if to check she wasn’t there, ‘She likes telling a story.’

Paul very much wished she would tell him a story. He said, ‘I’m afraid it was all so long ago.’

‘There are things she won’t talk about… I hope we can trust you on that,’ said Wilfrid, with an unexpected note of solidarity after his earlier grumbling about her.