Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Your great-uncle was Cecil Valance…’ said Rob, marvelling, almost teasing.

‘Well’ – she snatched a breath, and he saw her in her College room, in a trying tutorial on Mallarmé or some other subject beyond the student’s reach: ‘I mean, do you really want to know?’

‘Very much,’ said Rob, quite truthfully, and with a sense now it would be rather annoying when the event started. He’d been a student when the Valance biography came out, and he remembered reading extracts from it in a Sunday paper, and enjoying the atmosphere of revelations without being specially interested in the people involved.

‘My grandmother,’ said Jennifer, ‘was married to Cecil’s brother Dudley Valance, who was also a writer, rather forgotten now.’

‘Well, Black Flowers ,’ said Rob.

‘Exactly – I mustn’t forget you’re a bookseller! But anyway she left him, and married my grandfather, the artist Revel Ralph.’

‘Yes – absolutely,’ said Rob, seeing her quick raised eyebrow.

‘Now my father worked mainly in Malaya, he was very big in rubber, but I was sent to school in England, of course, and in the holidays I often stayed with my aunt Corinna, who was Dudley’s daughter. That was when I met Peter, by the way. He played duets with her. She was a very fine pianist – could have been a concert pianist.’

‘I see,’ said Rob, distracted by the image of her father in rubber, though the lewd subtext flickered only as an encouraging smile. ‘How interesting.’

‘Well it is interesting,’ said Jennifer drily, tucking in her chin, ‘but according to Paul Bryant everything I’ve just told you is untrue. Let me see… My aunt wasn’t really Dudley’s daughter, but Cecil’s, Dudley was gay, though he managed to father a son with my grandmother, and my father’s father wasn’t Revel Ralph, who really was gay, but a painter called Mark Gibbons. I may be simplifying a bit.’

Rob grinned and nodded, not taking all of this in. ‘And this wasn’t the case?’ he said.

‘Oh, who knows?’ said Jennifer. ‘Paul was something of a fantasist, we all knew that. But it caused a fair old stink at the time. Dudley’s wife even tried to take out an injunction against it.’

‘Yes, of course’ – it was that sense he’d had of the old guard trying and failing to close ranks.

‘Do you remember? And of course it cast my poor grandmother in rather an unenviable light.’

‘Yes, I see that.’

‘She’d been married three times as it was, and now he was claiming that two of her three children hadn’t been sired by her husbands, and also, did I mention that Cecil had had an affair with her brother? Yup, that too.’

‘Oh dear!’ said Rob, who couldn’t quite see where Jennifer stood on the subject. She seemed to deplore Paul Bryant, but wasn’t exactly disputing what he’d said. Her droll academic tone had something county in it too, a little snobbish reserve she hadn’t wholly wanted to disown. ‘I presume she wasn’t still alive?’

‘Mm, well she was, I’m afraid, though extremely old, and virtually blind, so there was no chance of her actually reading it. Everyone tried to keep it from her.’ Jennifer flinched with her evident sense of the humour as well as the horror of the situation. ‘Though as I’m sure you know there will always be one very dear friend who feels they have to put you in the picture. I think it sort of finished her off. As it happened she’d written a rather feeble book of her own about her affair with Uncle Cecil, so it was a bit of a shock to be told he’d also had an affair with her brother.’

‘Well, outing gay writers was all the rage then, of course.’

‘Well, fine,’ she said, with a candid shake of the head. ‘If that’s all it had been…’

Rob looked at her as he found the title. ‘ England Trembles ,’ he said. Long out of print, though an American paperback had surfaced later – he could see the photo of Valance on the front – ‘Sensational!’ – Times of London – something like that.

‘ England Trembles ,’ said Jennifer, ‘exactly…’ turning down the corners of her mouth in a rather French expression of indifference. ‘The thing was-’

A loud purring sound, a preparatory burble of self-pleasure, rose above the talk, and then ‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much, my name’s Nigel Dupont…’

‘Ah – ’ Rob winced.

‘There’s quite a story about Master Bryant as well,’ said Jennifer, with a rapid nod and grimace of a promise to carry on with it later. ‘All was not as it seemed…’ Rob sat back, smiling appreciatively, but amused too to be reserving judgement on the matter.

It seemed Dupont had been asked by the family to be a sort of MC for the occasion – he assumed the role with evident willingness and natural authority and just a hint of allowable muddle, as if to remind them he was good-naturedly helping out. ‘So, we’re all here,’ he said, peering down with a smile of exaggerated patience at the confused figure of Peter’s sister, red-faced from a horrible rush across London, still settling her bags and papers in the front row. Then, the smile running across the rows, ‘I’m aware many people in this very splendid room knew… er, Peter far better than I did, and we’ll be hearing from some of them in a moment. Peter was a hugely popular guy, with a huge variety of friends. I can see many different types of people here’ – surveying the room humorously, with his expat’s eye, and producing confusion and even laughter in persons suddenly considering what type they might belong to – ‘and perhaps this gathering of his friends can best be thought of as the last of Peter’s famous parties, at which one might meet anyone from a duke to a… to a DJ, a bishop to a barrow-boy’ – Dupont perhaps suggesting a certain loss of touch with contemporary English life; the bishop in the second row smiled tolerantly. ‘Many friendships of course were initiated at those parties. I know some of my own best work might never have been done if it hadn’t been for meetings brought about by, um… Peter.’ He reflected for a moment – it seemed he was going to speak without notes, which created its own small tension of latent embarrassment and renewed relief when he went on. Peter’s name itself seemed constantly about to elude him. ‘However, for now, Terence – Peter’s father – has suggested I say a few words about the period when I first knew him, when he was in his early twenties, and I was a tender twelve years old.’ Dupont smiled distantly and high-mindedly at this memory as the vaguely disturbing sound of what he had said sank in – Rob glanced across the room, and caught a tall fair-haired man smiling too, and smiling at Rob specifically through his more general air of amusement. Rob thought he might have seen him around, but his cataloguing mind couldn’t yet place him. He looked down, and saw that Jennifer, beneath her own air of polite attention, was discreetly drawing on the back of the service card with a propelling pencil: an expert little sketch of Professor Dupont.

‘For a brief period, just over three years, Peter taught at a prep-school in Berkshire called Corley Court. It was his first proper job – I believe he had worked in the men’s department at Harrods for a few months before, which was what gave him his first taste for London – life in the inside leg as he used to call it! He had come down from Oxford with a decent second, but true academic endeavour was never going to be Peter’s Fach .’ Dupont gazed complacently at the tiers of leather-bound books, while a frown of uncertainty about what he’d just said passed through the audience. ‘He had a passion for knowledge, of course, but he wasn’t a specialist – which was just as well at Corley, where he had to teach everything, except I think math, and sport. Corley Court was a High Victorian country house of a kind then much reviled, though Peter was fascinated by it from the start. It had been built by a man called Eustace Valance, who had made his fortune from grass seed, and been created a baronet on the strength of it. His son was also an agriculturalist, but his two grandsons, Cecil and Dudley, were both in their ways to become quite well-known writers.’ Here Rob looked at Jennifer, who gave a little nod as she strengthened the boyish curl of Dupont’s forelock.