Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Daphne was supposed to have a good memory, and this reputation sustained her uneasily in face of the thousands of things she couldn’t remember. People had been amazed by what she’d dredged up for her book, but much of it, as she’d nearly admitted to Paul Bryant, was – not fiction, which one really mustn’t do about actual people, but a sort of poetical reconstruction. The fact was that all the interesting and decisive things in her adult life had happened when she was more or less tight: she had little recall of anything that occurred after about 6.45, and the blur of the evenings, for the past sixty years and more, had leaked into the days as well. Her first problem, in doing her book, had been to recall what anyone said; in fact she had made up all the conversations, based (if one was strictly truthful) on odd words the person almost certainly had said, and within about five, or at the outside ten, years of the incident recorded. Was this just her failing? Now and then people gave her the most astonishing reports of what she had said, drolleries they would never forget, and rather gratifying to her – though perhaps these should be treated with comparable suspicion? Sometimes she knew for sure that they were mixing her up with someone else. She had probably taken too long with her memoirs. Basil had encouraged her, told her quite freely to write all about Revel, and Dudley before him, ‘significant figures!’ he’d said, self-mockingly. But it had taken thirty years to bring it off, over which time she’d naturally forgotten a great deal that she’d known very well when she started out. If she’d kept a diary it would have been different, but she never had, and her experience as a memoirist, if typical, couldn’t help but throw the most worrying light over half the memoirs that were written. Certain of her incidents were tied indubitably to Berkshire or Chelsea, but a host of others took place against a general-purpose scenery, as in some repertory theatre, of drinks-tray and mirrors and chintz-covered sofas, blending all social life into one staggeringly extended run.

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books about music and art – she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were a thing people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle: looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene: a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the streets outside – a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.

She woke to find grey light spreading above the curtains, and made a wary assessment of the time. These early wakings were anxious countings of loss and gain – was it late enough not to mind being woken? Might it still be early enough to lay a presentable claim on more sleep? With the coming on of spring one was more defenceless. Five-fifty: not too bad. And as soon as she wondered about whether she had to go to the loo she found she did. Out of bed, into slippers, dressing-gown on over pyjamas – she was glad she couldn’t see herself in the mirror as more than a blurred bundle. Light on, out past Wilfrid’s door, the click of the loose parquet, but it wouldn’t wake him. He had the large capacity for sleep of a child. She had a picture, not much changed in fifty years, of his head on the pillow, and nothing ever happening to him, at least that she knew of. And now there was this Birgit, with her shadowy plans. Poor Wilfrid was so naïve that he couldn’t see the woman for the fortune-hunter she was – and what a fortune!… Daphne tutted as she groped her way through the shadowy cupboard in which the wash-basin and lavatory were like surreal intrusions in a mountain of rubbish.

In the morning, bright and early, Lady Caroline Messent rang to invite her to tea. The phone at Olga was fixed to the kitchen wall, Caroline perhaps having pictured Olga herself as habitually in that room, and standing more or less to attention when she spoke to her. ‘I can’t, my dear,’ said Daphne, ‘I’ve got this young man coming back.’

‘Oh, do put him off,’ said Caroline in her droll scurry of a voice. ‘Who is he?’

‘He’s called – he’s interrogating me, I’m like a prisoner in my own home.’

‘Darling…’ said Caroline, allowing that for the present at least it was Daphne’s home. ‘I wouldn’t stand for it. Is he from the gas board?’

‘Oh, much worse.’ Daphne steadied herself against the worktop which she could dimly see was a dangerous muddle of dirty dishes, half-empty bottles and pill-packets. ‘He turned up yesterday – he’s like the Kleeneze man.’

‘You mean hawking?’

‘He says I met him at Corinna and Leslie’s, but I have absolutely no recollection of it.’

‘Oh, I see…’ said Caroline, as if now siding slightly with the intruder. ‘But what does he want?’

Daphne sighed heavily. ‘Smut, essentially.’

‘Smut?’

‘He’s trying to write a book about Cecil.’

‘Cecil? Oh, Valance, you mean? Yes, I see.’

‘You know, I’ve already written all about it.’

Caroline paused. ‘I suppose it was only a matter of time,’ she said.

‘Hmm? I don’t know what he’s got into his head. He’s insinuating, if you know what I mean. He’s more or less saying that I didn’t come clean in some way in my book.’

‘No, that must be awfully annoying.’

‘Well, less awfully, more bloody, actually, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson said to my father.’

‘So funny, that,’ said Caroline.

‘Really Cecil means nothing to me – I was potty about him for five minutes sixty years ago. The significant thing about Cecil, as far as I’m concerned,’ said Daphne, half-hearing herself go on, ‘is that he led to Dud, and the children, and all the grown-up part of my life, which naturally he had no part in himself!’

‘Well, tell that to your Kleeneze man, darling,’ said Caroline, evidently thinking Daphne protested too much.

‘I suppose I should.’ And she saw there was a little shameful reluctance to do so, and thus reduce even further her interest for the young man. It struck her suddenly that Caroline must already know him. ‘I’m fairly sure he was at your launch party,’ she said. ‘Paul Bryant.’

‘You don’t mean the young man from… was it Canterbury… one of the red-bricks.’

‘He might be, I suppose. He used to work in the bank with Leslie.’

‘Ah, no. But there certainly was a clever young man, you’re quite right, doing something on Cecil’s poetry.’

‘No, I know who you mean, I can’t remember his name. I’ve dealt with him already. This is another young man.’

‘Mm, my dear, it’s obviously Cecil’s moment,’ said Caroline.

Next morning Paul sat in his hotel room, going over his notes, with a coffee tray beside him: the pitted metal pot with the untouchable handle, the lipsticked cup, the bowl of white sugar in soft paper tubes which he emptied serially into the three strong cupfuls he took, getting quickly excited and overheated. On a plate with a doily were five biscuits, and though he’d only just had breakfast he ate them all, the types so familiar – the Bourbon, the sugared Nice, the rebarbative ginger-nut, popped in whole – that he was touched for a moment by a sense of the inseparable poverty and consistency of English life, as crystallized in the Peek Frean assortment box. He sat back in his chair as he munched and levelled a look at his own industrious jaw movements in the mirror; and a less comfortable sensation came over him. The fact was he had never watched himself eating, and was astonished at his forceful, rodent-like look, the odd sag of his neck on one side as he chewed, the working flicker of his temples. This must be what his company was like to others, what Karen faced each night over dinner, and the realization made him run down pensively, stop chewing mid-biscuit and then start up again as if to catch himself unawares. He wasn’t at all sure he would want to confide his own secrets to such a man.