Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘It will do her absolutely no harm,’ said Mrs Keeping. ‘She’s going up to Oxford next term and she does nothing but sit and read. Her parents are in Malaya, which is why she’s stuck with us’ – with a fairly clear suggestion she felt they were stuck with her. She moved off across the lawn, chin raised already, calling out.

Jenny Ralph took Paul off to the far side of the garden, and through a rustic arch into the sunless corner that sheltered the compost-heap and a cobweb-windowed shed. At first she treated him with the nervous snootiness of a child to an unknown servant. ‘You should find whatever you need in there,’ she said, watching him edge in among the clutter of the shed. The mower blocked the way, its bin caked at the rim with dung-like clots of dried grass. He reached over for a spade and kicked a loosely propped stack of canes that spilled and clattered ungraspably in every direction. There was a stifling smell of creosote and two-stroke fuel. ‘It’s rather hell in there,’ said Jenny from outside. She had a notably posh voice, but casual where her aunt was crisp. The accent was more striking, more revealing, in a young person. She sounded mildly fed up with it, but with no real intention of abandoning it.

‘No, it’s fine,’ Paul called back. He covered the awkwardness he felt with a girl in a brisk bit of business, passing out the spade, some old plastic sacks – he must be five or six years older than her, but the advantage felt frail. Her poor skin and the oily shine of her dark curly hair were signs of the troubles he’d hardly emerged from himself. The fact that she wasn’t especially pretty, though in some ways a relief, seemed also to put some subtly chivalrous pressure on him. He emerged, a trowel in his raised hand, just a little satirical.

‘I don’t suppose you want to be doing this for a minute,’ Jenny said, with a slyly commiserating smile. ‘I’m afraid they’re always getting people involved.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said Paul.

‘You know it’s a test. Aunt Corinna’s always testing people, she can’t help it. I’ve seen it masses of times. I don’t just mean on the piano, either.’

‘Oh, have you?’ said Paul, amused by her frankness, which seemed original and upper-class too. He looked out nervously as they came on to the lawn. Aunt Corinna was in the far corner, inspecting a sagging trellis and, quite possibly, lining up further tasks or tests for him. Beside her a large weeping beech-tree spread awkwardly but romantically, a table sheltered under its skirts.

‘You know she should have been a concert pianist. That’s what everyone says, at least; I don’t know if it’s actually true. I mean anyone can say they should have been something. Anyway now she teaches the piano. She gets fantastic results, of course, though you can see the children are simply terrified of her. Julian says she’s a sadist,’ she said, a touch self-consciously.

‘Oh…!’ said Paul, with a frown and disparaging laugh and then, from the mention of anything taboo, a sure-fire, searching blush. Sometimes they ebbed unnoticed, sometimes kept coming, self-compounding. He stooped and half-hid himself spreading the plastic sacks on the grass. ‘So Julian’s her younger son,’ he said, still with his back to her.

‘Oh, John wouldn’t say that, he’s far too square.’

‘So Julian isn’t square…?’

‘What’s Julian? Julian’s sort of… elliptical.’ They both laughed. ‘Have I embarrassed you?’ said Jenny.

‘Not at all,’ said Paul, recovering. ‘The whole of your family’s new to me, you see. I’m from Wantage.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Jenny – as if this was in fact a bit of a drawback. ‘Well, they’re rather a nightmare to sort out… the old lady you met over there is my grandmother.’

‘You mean Mrs Jacobs?’

‘Yes, she married again when my father was quite small. She’s been married three times.’

‘Goodness.’

‘I know… She’s about to be seventy, and we’re going to have a huge enormous party.’

Paul started gingerly unearthing the plants from the trough – they trembled under this further assault on their dignity. He stood them, in their trailing tangle of earth and roots, on the old Fisons sack. Soft clots of some kind of manure, loosely forked into the soil, were still slightly slimy. ‘I hope I’m doing this right,’ he said.

‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Jenny, who like the others was watching but not exactly paying attention.

‘So your aunt said you’re going up to Oxford.’ He tried to disguise his envy, if that’s what it was, in a genial avuncular tone.

‘Did she. Yes, I am.’

‘What are you going to study?’

‘I’m reading French at St Anne’s.’ She made it sound beautifully exclusive, the rich simplicity of the proper nouns. He had taken his mother all round Oxford, gaping at the colleges, as a kind of masochistic treat for both of them before he went off to Loughborough to train for the bank; but they hadn’t bothered with the women’s colleges. ‘Julian’s applying to Univ this year.’

‘Mm, so you might be there together.’

‘Which would be rather fab,’ said Jenny.

When he’d dug out all the earth he rocked the trough with both hands and it moved more readily. Still, he laughed at the second looming failure. ‘Here goes,’ he said, and squatted down again. Over the lawn he saw Mrs Keeping bearing down, with her keen sense of timing. With a violent force that in the moment itself seemed almost comical he heaved up the great stone object and with a stifled shout he lodged it on its other block, on the edge of it at least, but the job was done. ‘Aha!’ said Mrs Keeping, ‘we’re getting there at last,’ and as he held it steady and smiled almost devotedly up at her he felt it turn under his hand; if he hadn’t jumped back in the second it slipped and fell it would have crushed his foot – the block underneath had lurched over, and now the trough itself, massive and unmoving, lay sideways on the grass. ‘Oh god, are you all right?’ said Jenny, gripping his arm with a welcome note of hysteria. Mrs Keeping herself made a kind of panting noise. ‘Now we’re jiggered,’ she said. ‘Oh look,’ said Jenny, ‘your hand’s bleeding.’ How it had happened he didn’t know, and it was only now she said it that it began to hurt, a dull deep pang in the ball of the thumb and needle-like stinging of the grazed flesh. He supposed the pain had been held in check by the knowledge, so far his alone, that the trough had cracked in two.

Ten minutes later he found himself – clown, hero, victim, he couldn’t tell which – in a low garden chair with a large gin-and-tonic in his right hand. His left hand was impressively bandaged, the fingers hard to move in their tight sheath. Mrs Keeping, with a smirk of remorse, had bandaged it herself, the remorse turning steadily more aggressive as the long strip of stuff was bound tighter and tighter. Now the family glanced at his hand with concern and regret and a touch of self-satisfaction. Paul, tongue-tied, reached out to scratch Roger the Jack Russell, who had come round to the back of the house and was sitting panting in one of the broad purple cushions of aubrietia which spread over the flagstones. Mr Keeping was in the drawing-room, fixing drinks for the others; he called out through the french windows, ‘Your usual, darling?’

‘Absolutely!’ said Mrs Keeping, with a tight little laugh and shake of the head, as if to say she’d earned it. She perched on the wooden bench, and tore at the cellophane on a packet of Kensitas.

‘And what about Daphne?’

‘Gin and It!’ shouted Mrs Jacobs, as if taking part in a game.

‘Large one?’

‘Vast!’

Paul and Jenny laughed at this, but Mrs Keeping gave a barely amused grunt. Mrs Jacobs was sitting facing Paul, and between them was a low metal-framed table with a mosaic top. Over the rim of the table he had, if he wanted it, a direct view into the beige-coloured mysteries of her underwear. In her shapeless sundress and wide floppy hat she had an air of collapse, but her expression was friendly and alert, if ready, with age and perhaps a degree of deafness, to let one or two things slip past her. She wore large glasses with clear lower rims and tops like tawny eyebrows. When her drink was set in front of her on the mosaic table, she gave it a keen but illusionless smile, as if to say she knew what would become of it. Her smile showed surprisingly brown teeth – a smoker’s smile that went with the smoky catch in her voice. ‘Well, cheers!’