Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Oh, they were war poems, poems about his men, trench life. They were very… candid ,’ said Stokes frankly but airily, briefly searching George’s face.

‘Mm, I’d like to see them.’ (No, the coal fire was nonsense, some memory of his own – it must have been June, windows open on to the London night.)

Stokes nodded impatiently. ‘So indeed should I.’

‘Ah. He didn’t leave them with you.’

‘He said he’d send them,’ said Stokes, with a touch of petulance; and then, with an accepting snuffle, ‘but of course he went back to France without finding occasion to do so.’

‘He had other things on his mind,’ said George.

‘I’m sure he did…’ said Stokes, clearly not in need of a lesson.

‘And these poems weren’t among his effects?’ George had a sense of Stokes’s pretty formidable efficiency rattled by this lapse.

Stokes shook his head, and looked up quickly, almost furtively, at the groan of the door behind them. ‘Anyway… here is your wife!’

George turned and saw Madeleine step cautiously into the gloom. He raised a hand reassuringly and called, ‘Hello, Mad’ – the echoes reawoken.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said Madeleine. She came forward, adjusting her eyes to the shadows and perhaps to something else in the atmosphere. ‘Are you praying, or plotting?’

‘Neither,’ said George.

‘Both,’ said Stokes.

‘We’ve been communing with Cecil,’ said George.

‘Well, it’s Cecil I’ve come to see,’ said Madeleine, in her own tone, with its possible tremor of humour; George had seen people peer at her, trying to make it out. The two men stood silent and observant as she approached the effigy and looked it over, with her scholarly firmness of interest and her cool immunity to all aesthetic sensations. ‘Is it a good likeness?’ she said.

‘As it happens,’ said Stokes, ‘we weren’t quite able in the end to decide; were we, George? Is it Cecil, or is it, as it were, someone else?’ He had a slight air of taking sides and teasing Madeleine, which George entirely understood and keenly resented. He said,

‘I’m afraid I don’t think it’s him.’

Madeleine stood by the head of the tomb, with the straight-backed look of a senior nurse. Impossible to guess how much she knew; or even to know how much she guessed. ‘Was he not bigger?’ she said.

‘Oh… possibly…’ said George, coming over to face her across the body, with a clear, disingenuous desire to be open, casual, critical if need be. ‘But it’s not that.’

‘Not more muscular?’ said Madeleine, giving a glimpse perhaps of what she’d been encouraged to believe about the dead hero.

George stood, with his eyebrows raised, gently shaking his head… ‘What can I say? – just more alive, simply.’

‘Ha, yes,’ said Madeleine, and gave him a quick puzzled look. ‘Have you been having a useful discussion?’

‘Your husband has been moderately forthcoming,’ said Stokes. ‘Though I feel I haven’t finished with him yet.’

‘Sebastian has a great deal to do,’ said George, and laughed.

Stokes bowed his head with courteous humour. ‘Indeed, and I must get on – I’ve promised to interrogate your dear mother…’ And he went out, with that slight hardening of the face again at the prospect of further work and new calculations.

George looked up at his wife, and then down again at Cecil, who seemed somehow to have turned into a piece of evidence, ambiguous but irreducible, lying between them. He had an almost physical sense of changing the subject as he turned away and said, ‘You know, old Valance has been quite bearable, so far.’

Madeleine smiled tightly. ‘So far. But then we have only been here for three hours.’

‘I imagine it’s pretty galling for him to have this fuss kicked up about Cecil, all over again.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said Madeleine, naturally contrary.

‘One sees the anniversaries stretching ahead for ever.’

‘Dudley Valance is a very strange man. I think it very sad, if he’s jealous after all this time.’

‘A bad war, of course.’

‘Though you might think not so bad as Cecil’s. Louisa was just telling me about the death. How they went out to France themselves to see him.’

‘Yes, he hung on, didn’t he, for several days…?’ George had an idea that ‘Fell at Maricourt’ was a sonorous formula, rather than the strict and messy truth.

‘They got permission to bring his body back. I say they, but I had the impression it was Louisa’s doing.’

‘She’s not called the General for nothing.’

‘One can sympathize with them wanting to see their son,’ said Madeleine fairly.

‘Well, of course, darling.’

‘Though immediately one thinks of the thousands of parents who simply couldn’t do that.’

‘Very true. My own dear mother, for instance.’

‘Well, there you are,’ said Madeleine, but as if arguing rather than agreeing – it was their way, their own odd intimacy, though charged now with something more anxious. ‘They brought him back here, and he was laid out in his own room, facing the rising sun.’

‘Oh, god. What, in the coffin?’ George pursed his lips against a horrified giggle.

‘I wasn’t quite clear,’ said Madeleine.

‘No… Where was he hit exactly?’

‘Well, I could hardly ask, could I. I suppose he might have been very disfigured.’

George saw how he’d been able to avoid such questions before; and had a certain sense, too, of Madeleine choosing her moment to raise them.

‘I don’t think you’ve ever told me,’ she said, ‘about when you heard the news.’

‘Oh, didn’t I, Mad…?’ George blinked, and frowned at the floor. His thoughts ran along the diagonals, the larger red lozenge of the tiles. Well, she’d asked him, and he must answer. ‘I do remember one or two things about it very well. I was up at Marston, of course, I remember it was very hot, and everyone was tired and tense about what was happening in France. Then after dinner I was called to the telephone. As soon as I heard it was Daphne, I felt quite sick with dread that something had happened to Hubert, and when it turned out to be Cecil, awful to say but I remember the news had to fight with a sort of upsurge of relief.’ He glanced at his wife. ‘I remember blurting out, “But Huey’s all right!” and old Daph saying, rather crossly, you know, “What…? Oh, Huey’s fine,” and then, her exact words, “It’s beautiful Cecil who’s dead” – and then she sort of wailed into the telephone, an extraordinary sound I’ve never heard her make before or since.’ George himself, looking at Madeleine, gave a weird gasp of a laugh. She looked back, showing in her blankly pondering face that she had other questions. ‘Beautiful Cecil is dead,’ said George quietly again, in a tone of amused reminiscence. Well, he would never forget the words, or the sudden wild licence of grief so startling in someone as close as a sister. Even then he had resisted them, their sudden appeal to something shared but never said till now. In truth, more than most deaths that summer, Cecil’s death had seemed both quite impossible and numbly unsurprising. Within a week or so he had seen it as inevitable.

‘Darling: Piccadilly …’ said Mrs Riley: ‘two c s?’

‘Well, yes!’ said Daphne.

‘Oh, I think two,’ said her mother, after a moment.

‘I’m not entirely stupid,’ said Mrs Riley, ‘but there are one or two words…’ She drew a bold line beneath the address, and smiled mischievously at what she’d written. None of them knew what the letter was, but the address in Piccadilly seemed designed to make them wonder. They were in the morning-room, with its chintz and china, and a small fire disappearing in the sunlight. Freda gazed at the pale flames and said, as Daphne knew she would,