Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Now what he saw, among the grey shadows, was Cecil’s white figure, stretched out flat, and seeming to float above the floor. The sun had long since gone off the garish glass of the east window, and what daylight there was, oblique and qualified, seemed all to be gathered in Cecil. His feet pointed away, towards the altar. It was as if the chapel had been built for him.

George pushed the door to, without quite closing it, and stood by the first pew’s end, with a stern expression and a very slight feeling of fear. He was alone with his old pal again, almost as though he’d come into a hospital ward rather than a chapel, and was afraid of disturbing him, half-hoped to find him asleep and to slip away, having kept his word. That was a kind of visit he’d paid many times, in the War, and after, dreading to see what had happened to a fellow, afraid of the horror in his own face. Here there was a sickly smell of Easter lilies rather than disinfectant. ‘Hello, Cecil, old boy,’ he said, pleasantly and not very loudly, with a dim echo, and then he laughed to himself in the silence that followed. They wouldn’t have to have an awkward conversation. He listened to the silence, chapel silence, with its faint penumbra of excluded sounds – birdsong, periodic rattle of the distant mower, soft thumps that were less the wind on the roof than the pulse in his ear.

Cecil was laid out in dress uniform, with rich attention to detail. The sculptor had fastened his attention on the cuff-badges, the captain’s square stars, the thin square flower of the Military Cross. The buttons shone dully in their strange new light, brass transmuted into marble. Who was it…? George stooped to read the name, which was dashingly signed along the edge of the cushion: ‘Professor Farinelli’ – dashing and a touch pedantic too. The effigy lay on a plain white chest, with less readable lettering, Gothic and plaited, running right round it in a long band: CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC CAPTAIN 6TH BATT ROYAL BERKSHIRE REGT BORN APRIL 13 1891 FELL AT MARICOURT JULY 1 1916 CRAS INGENS ITERABIMUS AEQUOR. It was a thoroughly dignified piece of work, in fact magnificently proper. It struck George, as the chapel itself had on that first day, as a quietly crushing assertion of wealth and status, of knowing what to do. It seemed to place Cecil in some floating cortège of knights and nobles reaching back through the centuries to the Crusades. George saw them for a moment like gleaming boats in a thousand chapels and churches the length of the land. He gripped Cecil’s marble boot-caps, and waggled them sulkily; his hand waggled, the boot-caps eternally not. Then he edged round to look at the dead man’s face.

His first polite thought was that he must have forgotten what Cecil looked like, in the ten years and more since he’d been in a room with him alive. But no, of course, the long curved nose… the wide cheekbones… the decisive mouth: they were surely what he remembered. Naturally the rather bulbous eyes were closed, the hair short and soldierly, as it must have been latterly, pushed back flat about a central parting. The nose had grown somehow mathematical. The whole head had an air of the ideal that bordered on the standardized; it simplified, no doubt, in some acceptable accord between the longings of the parents and the limits of the artist’s skill. The Professor had never set eyes on Cecil – he must have worked from photographs, chosen by Louisa, which only told their own truth. Cecil had been much photographed, and doubtless much described; he was someone who commanded description, which was a rareish thing, most people going on for years on end with not a word written down as to what they looked like. And yet all these depictions were in a sense failures, just as this resplendent effigy was… So George reasoned for half a minute, looking over the polished features, the small seamed cushions of the closed eyes that once had seen right into him; thinking already what phrases he would use when he spoke to Louisa about it; whilst he tried to hold off some other unexpected sadness – not that he had lost Cecil, but that some longing of his own, awakened by the day and the place, some occult opportunity of meeting him again, had been so promptly denied.

None the less, he thought he would sit for a minute or two, in the flanking pew – he couldn’t quite have said why; but when he was there he dropped his forehead to his raised hand, leant forward slightly and prayed, in a vague, largely wordless way, a prayer of images and reproaches. He looked up, on a level now with Cecil’s sleeping form, the obdurate nose pointing roofwards, the soldierly commonplace of the body, posed perhaps by some artist’s model, not completely unlike Cecil, not a runt or a giant, but not Cecil in any particular way. And pictures of the particular Cecil rose towards him, naked and dripping on the banks of the Cam, or trotting through the Backs in his rugger bags and clattering studs, white and unassailable before a match, filthy and bloody after it. They were beautiful images, but vague as well with touching and retouching. He had others, more magical and private, images less seen than felt, memories kept by his hands, the heat of Cecil, the hair-raising beauty of his skin, of his warm waist under his shirt, and the trail of rough curls leading down from his waist. George’s praying fingers spread in a tentative caress of recollection. And then of course the celebrated… the celebrated membrum virile , unguessed for ever beneath the marble tunic, but once so insistently alive and alert… How Cecil went on about it, pompously and responsibly – it might have been the Magna Carta from the way he talked of it. Absurd but undeniable, even now, so that the colour came to George’s face and he thought of Madeleine, as a kind of remedy, though it didn’t seem to work like that, in fact didn’t seem to work at all.

George dropped his head again, rather wondering about this probing of old feelings. It was awful that Cecil was dead, he’d been wonderful in many ways, and who knew what he might not have gone on to do for English poetry. Yet the plain truth was that months went past without his thinking of him. Had Cecil lived, he would have married, inherited, sired children incessantly. It would have been strange, in some middle-aged drawing-room, to have stood on the hearthrug with Sir Cecil, in blank disavowal of their mad sodomitical past. Was it even a past? – it was a few months, it was a moment. And then might there have been another moment, in the study one night, which Cecil now occupied as surely as his father had done, some instinctual surrender to the old passion, George bald and professorial, Cecil haggard and scarred? Could passion survive such changes? The scene was undeniably fantastic. Did he take off his glasses? Perhaps Cecil by then had glasses too, a monocle that dropped between them just as their lips approached. Only young men kissed, and even then not frequently. He saw the charming troublesome face of Revel Ralph, and pictured himself in the same tense proximity with him, with a sudden canter of the heart of a kind he had almost forgotten.

There was the sharp moan of the door on its hinges, and Sebby Stokes stepped in, with his quiet official air, gleam of high white collar and silvery head. He pushed the door almost closed, as George had done, and came forward – clearly he thought he was alone, for these first few moments, and for George, half-hidden by the tomb, his unguarded expression had an odd, almost comic interest. Stokes surely felt the slight but unusual thrill of his imminent encounter with Cecil. George saw more clearly something feminine and nervous in his walk and glance; but there was something else too in the set of his mouth, his frown of appraisal – something hard and impatient, not glimpsed at all in the infinite diplomacy of his social manner. George stood up abruptly and enjoyed his jump of alarm, and humorous recovery, in which a trace of irritation lingered for a minute. ‘Ah! Mr Sawle… You startled me.’