Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Cheerio…’ Mr Keeping sat down, still in his bank manager’s suit, which made his own large g-and-t look slightly surreal.

‘Cheers,’ said Jenny.

‘What are you drinking, child?’ said Mrs Jacobs.

‘Oh, cider, Granny…’

‘I didn’t know you liked cider.’

‘Well, I don’t particularly, but I’m not allowed spirits yet, and one has to get drunk on something, doesn’t one.’

‘I suppose one does …’ said Mrs Jacobs, as if weighing up a completely new theory.

‘Paul’s just started at the bank this week, Daphne,’ said Mr Keeping. ‘He’s joined us from Wantage.’

‘Oh, I love Wantage,’ said Mrs Jacobs; and after a moment, ‘In fact I once ran away to Wantage.’

‘Oh, Mother, really,’ said Mrs Keeping.

‘Just for a night or two, when your father was being especially beastly.’ Paul had never heard anyone speak like this, and couldn’t say at first if it was real or theatrical, truly sophisticated or simply embarrassing. He glanced at Mrs Keeping, who was smiling tightly and batting her eyelids with contained impatience. ‘I took you and Wilfie under my wing and drove like hell to Wantage. We stayed with Mark for a day or two. Mark Gibbons, you know,’ she said to Paul, ‘the marvellous painter. We stayed with him till the heat died down.’

‘Anyway,’ muttered Mrs Keeping, drawing on her cigarette.

‘We did, darling. You’re probably too young to remember.’ She sounded slightly wounded, but used to being so.

‘You didn’t know how to drive, Mother,’ Mrs Keeping went on brightly, but unable to stop herself.

‘Of course I could drive…’

Mrs Keeping blew out smoke with a hard humorous expression. ‘We needn’t bore Mr Bryant with our family nonsense,’ she said.

Paul, in the first nice giddiness of a very strong gin-and-tonic, smiled, ducked his head, showed he didn’t mind the mild bewilderment at unexplained names and facts. As often with older people he was both bored and unaccountably involved at the same time. ‘No, no,’ he said, and grinned at Mr Keeping, who surveyed the whole scene with quizzical composure. The evening had swollen to a shape entirely unimagined an hour before.

‘You see, I think our family is jolly interesting,’ said Mrs Jacobs. ‘I think you underestimate its interest. You should take more pride in it.’ She reached down beside her chair and brought up her bag, the large tapestry bag with wooden jaws that Paul had seen earlier. She started going through it.

Mrs Keeping sighed and was more conciliatory. ‘Well, I am proud of one or two of them, Mother, you know that very well. Cecil’s not exactly my cup of tea, but my father, for all his… oddities, has moments of genius.’

‘Well, he’s certainly very clever,’ said Mrs Jacobs, brows lightly furrowed over her bag. Paul had the impression of a small-scale chaos of papers, powder compacts, glasses cases, pills. She stopped for a moment and looked up at him, her hand in the bag marking her place. ‘Jenny’s grandfather was a marvellous painter, too. You may have heard of him, Revel Ralph? No… he was, well, he was very different from Mark Gibbons. I suppose you’d say more decorative.’

‘I think Mark’s a bit over the hill, Granny,’ said Jenny.

‘Well, possibly, my dear, since he’s almost as old as me.’ Paul knew how old this was, of course, but didn’t know if it was a secret. ‘You probably think Revel’s hopelessly old hat too.’

Jenny made a moue and raised her eyebrows as if to say she could reach her own negative judgements. ‘No, I like Grandpa’s things. I find them rather piquant , actually. Particularly the late ones.’ Again Paul was amused and impressed by the confidence of her views. She spoke with a small frown as if she was at Oxford already. He said, ‘Is he… not still alive?’

‘He was killed in the War,’ said Mrs Keeping, with a quick shake of the head, stubbing out her cigarette.

‘Well, he was extraordinarily brave,’ said Mrs Jacobs. ‘He had two tanks blown up under him, and he was running to reach a third one when a shell got him.’ Her cigarette was in one hand, her lighter in the other, but she went on, before anyone else could, ‘He was a hero, actually. He got a posthumous gong, you know…’

‘What became of that, Granny?’ said Jenny in a more docile tone.

‘Oh, I have it,’ said Mrs Jacobs, quickly puffing, ‘of course I have it.’ Paul wasn’t clear whom her indignation was aimed at. She gave him a look as if they were united against the others. ‘You know, people think he was flighty and gay and what-have-you, but in fact he could be quite fearless.’

‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘I’m sure…’ slightly mesmerized by her and already an admirer of this man he had never heard of a minute ago.

At the gate Paul turned and waved his bandaged hand but Jenny, who’d been told to see him out, had already vanished from the front step. Still, the small muscular contractions of pleasure and politeness remained almost unconsciously on his face as he swung and scuffed along the lane. He smiled at the view over the hedge, at the other front gardens, at the approaching Rover and then its driver, squinting in a rictus of his own against the evening sun, and making Paul feel again like an intruder, or now perhaps an absconder. The sun was still hot on his back. Among the trees the church clock chimed the quarter-hour once more – he checked his watch: 7.15 of course; the hour just gone had taken about twenty minutes, and some compensating sense made him wonder if it shouldn’t in fact be 8.15. Here he was in Church Walk. Here was the marketplace. He had never really touched spirits before, and the second gin-and-tonic, as wildly drinkable as the first, had brought him to a state of grinning elation just touched by notes of worry and confusion. He’d been talking and telling himself not to talk, things he normally avoided saying, about his father’s plane being shot down, and his mother’s illness, and even his exploits at school, things that must have made him sound childish and simple. But no one had seemed to mind. Now he wondered if Mr Keeping, who said very little, hadn’t thought him a fool – it was actually rather creepy of him to get Paul drunk and just sit there watching, with his unnerving smile. He imagined some sarcasm about it, in the office tomorrow. On the other hand, he felt he’d been quite a success with old Daphne Jacobs, who seemed grateful for a new listener, and he’d laughed and winced sympathetically at her stories without necessarily following them. He often found, when he concentrated really hard on what someone was saying, that nothing much went in. The intoxication was partly that of being in the home of people who knew writers, in this case quite famous ones. He was barely aware of Dudley Valance, but he quoted whole verses of Cecil Valance’s to the old lady, who smiled indulgently and then began to look slightly impatient. She had a soft uncanny light about her, somehow, from having been his lover – it turned out ‘Two Acres’ had been written specifically for her. She told Paul about it quite frankly, over the second Gin and It (whatever It was), and Jenny had said, ‘I think Uncle Cecil’s poems are awfully imperialist, Granny,’ which she pretended not to hear. In Vale Street he looked through the windows of the International Stores, closed and shadowy. Something shockingly sad caught at him – he was free, buoyant and squiffy, twenty-three years old, and he was entirely alone, with hours still before sunset and no one to share them with.

The way to his digs took him out of the town, past the closed and overgrown yards of the old goods station, past the new secondary modern school, hard and transparent in the evening sun. Then he crossed into Marlborough Gardens, which was a loop, or noose, with one exit on to the main road. From the pavement he saw people eating in kitchens, or finished already and out in the garden, mowing and watering. The houses were a strange economy that there wasn’t a word for, built in threes, two semis with the central house in common, like segments of a terrace. Mrs Marsh at least had an end house, with a view behind on to a field of barley. Her husband was a coach-driver, with odd hours, taking a party up to London, or sometimes away overnight on a run to Bournemouth or the Isle of Wight. Now she was in the front room with the curtains pulled against the sun and the box blaring – it was the start of Z-Cars . She had a pleasant way of not bothering her lodger – she turned her head and nodded; in the kitchen there was a ham salad for him under a cloth, and a redirected letter with a note saying ‘This came for you, Mrs Marsh’. Paul went upstairs two at a time, used the bathroom, which was where he felt most a stranger, among the couple’s shaving-soap and flannels, Mrs Marsh’s other things in the cabinet. The bathroom had a frosted glass panel in the door, which showed if it was occupied at night, and made going to the lavatory especially seem audible and almost visible and even vaguely culpable. Paul’s designated bath nights were Tuesday and Thursday: so tonight! Saturdays the bank worked through till one, then he would be off on the bus to Wantage, and his first week of work here would be over.