Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Well…’ – Paul was torn between the discretion just requested of him and the wish to ask Wilfrid what he was talking about. ‘I obviously don’t want to say anything that would upset her – or any of the family.’ Might Wilfrid himself tell him things? Paul had no idea what he was capable of, mentally. He clearly loved his mother and more or less hated his father, but he might not be the ally Paul needed for his further prying into the dealings of the Sawles and Valances. If Corinna was really Cecil’s daughter, then Dudley’s shocking coolness towards her might have some deeper cause.

‘I don’t think you’re married, are you?’ Wilfrid asked, peering forward over the wheel into the muddled glare on the edge of Worcester.

‘No, I’m not…’

‘No, Mother thought not.’

‘Ah, yes… well, hmm.’

‘Poor old Worcester,’ said Wilfrid a minute later, as the car swerved through a sort of urban motorway right next to the Cathedral; up above, too close to see properly, reared floodlit masonry, the great Gothic tower. ‘How could they have butchered the old place like this?’ Paul heard this as a catch-phrase, saw mother and son on their trips into town coming out with it each time. ‘Right next to the Cathedral,’ said Wilfrid, craning out to encourage Paul to do the same, while the car wandered over into the fast lane – there was a massive blast on a horn, a lit truck as tall as the tower screeching behind them, then thundering past.

Turning left, and then passing staunchly through a No Entry sign, they travelled the length of a one-way street in the wrong direction, Wilfrid mildly offended by the rudeness of on-coming drivers, turned another corner, and there they were outside the front door of the Feathers. ‘Amazing,’ said Paul.

‘I know this old town backwards,’ said Wilfrid.

‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,’ said Paul, opening the door.

‘Shall I pick you up?’ said Wilfrid, with just a hint of breathlessness, Paul thought, a glimpse of excitement at having this visitor in their lives. But Paul insisted he was perfectly happy to get a Cathedral. He stood and watched as Wilfrid drove off into the night.

Daphne followed her regime as usual that evening – there was the hot milk, and then the tiny glass of cherry brandy, to take the sickening sleepy taste away. Her sleeping pill itself was swallowed with the last cooled inch of the milk, and after that a pleasant certainty that the day was wound up suffused her, well before the physical surrender to temazepam. Tonight the cherry brandy seemed to celebrate the fact. She said, ‘What time is he coming back?’ just to have it confirmed that it wasn’t till after lunch. Wilfrid started on the film that followed the News, but her macular thing made the telly both boring and upsetting. So she left him to it, going out of the room with a passing pat at his arm or shoulder, and made her way to the other end (in so far as Olga had another end) of the house.

Book at Bedtime this week was the autobiography of a woman – she couldn’t remember her name, or what exactly she’d been up to in Kenya last night when sleep had come with just enough warning for her to switch off the radio and the bedside light. On the dressing-table, an awful cheap white and gilt thing, stood the photographs she never really looked at, but she peered at them now, in her sidelong way, as she smeared on her face cream. Their interest seemed enhanced after the visit from the young man, and she was glad he hadn’t seen them. The one of her with Corinna and Wilfrid by the fishpond at Corley was her favourite – so small but clear: she turned it to the light with a creamy thumb. Who had taken it, she wondered?… The photo, known by heart, was the proof of an occasion she couldn’t remember at all. The Beaton photo of Revel in uniform was, pleasingly, almost famous: other portraits from the same session had appeared in books, one of them in her own book, but this exact photograph, with its momentary drop of the pose, the mischievous tongue-tip on the upper lip, was hers alone. A pictorial virtue, of the kind that Revel himself had taught her to understand, had been made of the hideous great-coat. His lean head and fresh-cropped poll were framed by the upturned collar – he looked like some immensely wicked schoolboy, though she knew if you looked closely you could see the fine lines round the eyes and the mouth that Beaton had touched out in the published images.

She woke in the dark out of dreams of her own mother, very nearly a nightmare; it was wartime and she was searching for her, going in and out of shops and cafés asking if anyone had seen her. Daphne never remembered her dreams, but even so she felt sure she had never dreamt about her mother before – she was a novelty, an intruder! It was bracing, disconcerting, amusing even, once she had felt for the switch at the neck of the lamp, and squinted at the time, and had a small drink of water. Freda had died in 1940, so the Blitz setting made almost too much sense. And no doubt talking to the young man, trying to cope with all his silly and rather unpleasant questions, had brought her back. In talking, she had only touched on her mother, whose actual presence in 1913 she could no longer see at all, but that must have been enough to set the old girl going, as if greedy for more attention. Daphne kept the light on for a while longer, with a barely conscious sense that in childhood she would have done the same, longing for her mother but too proud to call for her.

In the dark again she found she was at the tipping-point, relief at the closing-down of yesterday was ebbing irrecoverably, and already the dread of tomorrow (which of course was already today) was thickening like regret around her heart. Why on earth had she said he could come back? Why had she let him come at all, after that idiotic condescending piece about her book in the Listener , or perhaps the New Statesman ? He was only pretending to be a friend – something no interviewer, probably, had ever been. Paul Bryant… he was like some little wire-haired ratter, with his long nose and his tweed jacket and his bloody-minded way of going at things. Daphne turned over in a spasm of confused annoyance, at him and at herself. She didn’t know what was worse, the genial vague questions or the stern particular ones. He called him Cecil all the time, not as if he’d known him, exactly, but as if he could help him. ‘What was Cecil like?’ – what a stupid question… ‘When you say in your book he made love to you, what happened exactly?’ She’d said ‘Pass!’ to that one, rather good, as if she were on Mastermind . She thought tomorrow she would just say ‘Pass!’ to everything.

And Robin, too – there was a good deal of Robin this and that. She couldn’t think what he meant by sending him, recommending him; though then a shadowy understanding, grim, frivolous, almost wordless – the old thing that she didn’t even picture – turned over and after a minute lay down again at the side of her mind. As well as which, there was something else, which maybe was actually a blessing in its way, that for quite long stretches of the conversation young Paul Bryant had clearly not been listening to a word she said. He thought she couldn’t see him at all, reading something while she talked; then he hurried her along, or he came in suddenly with some completely irrelevant other thing. Maybe he thought he knew all the answers already, but in that case why ask questions? Of course he had it all on his blasted tape-recorder, but that didn’t exempt him from the normal courtesies. She thought in the morning she would ring up Robin at the office and give him a very hard time about it.

She turned over once more and settled with a spasm of self-righteousness; and was on the very edge of sleep again when the obvious idea that she could put Paul Bryant off altogether made her suddenly and beautifully alert. Wilfrid had taken him back to the Feathers, that fearful dump – she was glad he was staying there. He seemed to think it was quite the thing! Only two stars, he’d said, but very comfortable… She’d get her son to ring up for her first thing in the morning. She lay there, half-plotting, half-drowsing, imagining it, the afternoon without him, freedom tinged, but not irreparably spoilt, by guilt. She was pretty sure she had said he could come twice, and besides he had come from London specially. But why should she be put upon, at the age of eighty-three? She wasn’t at all well, she was having a lot of trouble with her eyes… She really mustn’t worry about it. He’d been through all Cecil’s letters to her, which he claimed were manipulative and self-pitying – perfectly true, perhaps, but then what more did he want from her? He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh. And she felt that if she did, Paul Bryant was hardly the person she would want to share it with.