Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Well, you startled me,’ said George equably.

‘Oh! Hmm, my apologies…’ Stokes walked around the tomb with a firmer expression, frank but respectful, so that now you couldn’t tell what he thought. ‘Quite a fine piece of work, don’t you think? May I call you George? – it seems to be the style here now, and one hates to appear stuffy!’

‘Of course,’ said George, ‘I wish you would,’ and then wondered if he was meant to call Stokes Sebby, which seemed an unwarranted jump into familiarity with a man so much older and so oddly, almost surprisingly, distinguished.

‘It’s not a bad likeness, by any means,’ Stokes said. ‘Often I’m afraid they don’t quite get them if they haven’t known them. I’ve seen some very hand-me-down efforts.’

‘Yes…’ said George, out of courtesy, but feeling, now the subject was being aired, more critical and proprietary. ‘Of course I didn’t see him later on,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t quite feel I’ve found him here.’ He drew his fingers thoughtfully down Cecil’s arm, and glanced for an abstracted moment at the marble hands, which lay idly on his tunicked stomach, almost touching, the hands of a sleeper. They were small and neat, somewhat stylized and square, in what was clearly the Professor’s way. They were the hands of a gentleman, or even of a large child, untested by labour or use. But they were not the hands of Cecil Valance, mountaineer, oarsman and seducer. If the Captain’s neat head was a well-meant approximation, his hands were an imposture. George said, ‘And of course the hands are quite wrong.’

‘Yes?’ said Stokes, with a momentary anxiety, and then, a little reluctantly, ‘No, I think you’re right,’ a sense of their unequal intimacies in the air.

‘But when did you last see him yourself, I wonder?’

‘Oh… well…’ Stokes looked at him: ‘It must have been… ten days before he was killed?’

‘Oh, well, there you are…’

‘He was on leave unexpectedly, you know, and I invited him to dine at my club.’ Stokes said this in a natural, practical tone, but it was clear the invitation had meant a great deal to him.

‘How was he?’

‘Oh, he was splendid. Cecil was always splendid.’ Stokes smiled for a moment at the marble figure, which certainly seemed to encourage this view. George felt, as he had with Wilkes, that the older man’s words lightly censured some suspected impropriety in his own. ‘Of course I first met him in a punt ,’ said Stokes, while George’s pulse quickened at the chance for disclosure, a diverting little episode.

‘You came to Cambridge…’ he said, neutrally, with a quiet sense of the chance flowing away. There had been four or five of them in the punt, Ragley and Willard certainly, both now dead, and someone else George couldn’t see. His own focus, like Sebby’s evidently, had been on the figure with the pole at the rear.

‘Lady Blanchard’s son, Peter, had asked me down to meet Cecil, and meet some of the new poets.’

‘Of course…’ said George, ‘yes, Peter Blanchard…’

‘Peter Blanchard was full of Cecil.’

‘Yes, wasn’t he just…’ said George, looking away, distantly bewildered to think how jealous of Blanchard he’d been. The absolute torments of those days, the flicker of gowns in stairwells, the faces glimpsed as curtains were closed, seemed now like distant superstitions. What could any such emotions mean years later, and when their objects were dead? Stokes gave him a quick uncertain glance, but pushed on humorously,

‘I can’t remember them all now. There was a young man who never said a word, and who had the job of keeping the champagne cold.’

‘Did he have the bottles on strings in the water…?’ said George, now feeling terribly foolish, in retrospect as well as in the present moment. The bottles used to knock against the hull with each forward thrust of the boat; when you loosened the wire the corks went off like shots into the overhanging willows.

‘Exactly so,’ said Stokes, ‘exactly so. It was a splendid day. I’ll never forget Cecil reading – or not reading, reciting – his poems. He seemed to have them by heart, didn’t he, so that they came out like talk; but in quite a different voice, the poet’s voice. It was distinctly impressive. He recited “Oh do not smile on me” – though one could hardly help it, of course!’

‘No, I’m sure,’ said George, blushing abruptly and turning away. He peered at the altar, beyond its polished brass rail, as though he had found something interesting. Was he doomed to glow like a beacon throughout the whole weekend?

‘But you were never one of the poets?’

‘What…? Oh, never written a line,’ said George, over his shoulder.

‘Ah…’ – Stokes murmured behind him. ‘But you have the satisfaction of having inspired, or occasioned, or anyway in some wise brought about perhaps his most famous poem.’

George turned – they were rather penned in in this space between the tomb and the altar. The question was laboriously genial but he ran over it again carefully. ‘Oh, if you mean “Two Acres”,’ he said. ‘Well that of course was written for my sister.’

Stokes smiled vaguely at him and then at the floor. It was as if a mist of delicacy had obscured the subject. ‘Of course I must ask Lady Valance – Daphne – about that when we talk this afternoon. Do you not see yourself in the lines, what is it? “I wonder if there’s any man more / Learned than the man of Stanmore”?’

George laughed warily. ‘Guilty as charged,’ he said – though he knew ‘learned’ had not been Cecil’s original choice of epithet. ‘You know he wrote it first in Daphne’s autograph book.’

‘I have it,’ said Stokes, with the brevity that lay just beyond his delicacy; and then, ‘She must have felt she’d got rather more than she bargained for,’ with a surprising laugh.

‘Yes, doesn’t it go on,’ said George. He himself felt sick of the poem, though still wearily pleased by his connection with it; bored and embarrassed by its popularity, therefore amused by its having a secret, and sadly reassured by the fact that it could never be told. There were parts of it unpublished, unpublishable, that Cecil had read to him – now lost for ever, probably. The English idyll had its secret paragraphs, priapic figures in the trees and bushes… ‘Well, Daphne can tell you the story,’ he said, with his usual disavowal of it.

Stokes said, in a most tactful tone, ‘But you and Cecil were clearly… very dear friends,’ the tact being a continued sympathy for his loss, of course, but suggesting to George some further, not quite welcome, sympathy, of a subtler kind.

‘Oh, for a while we were terrific pals.’

‘Do you recall how you met?’

‘Do you know, I’m not sure.’

‘I suppose in College…’

‘Cecil was very much a figure in College. It was flattering if he took an interest. I think I’d won… oh, one of our essay prizes. Cecil took a keen interest in the younger historians…’

‘Quite so, I imagine,’ said Stokes, with perhaps a passing twinkle at George’s tone.

‘I’m not really able to talk about it,’ said George, and saw Stokes’s ghost of a smile stiffen with repressed curiosity. ‘But still… you must know about the Society, I imagine.’

‘Ah, I see, the Society…’

‘Cecil was my Father.’ It was striking, and useful, how one set of secrets nested inside another.

‘I see…’ said Stokes again, with the usual faint drollery of an Oxford man about Cambridge customs. Still, the exchange of esoteric fact was very much his line, and his face softened once more into a ready reflector of hints and allusions. ‘So he…’