Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Oh, Daphne… well, of course,’ Madeleine Sawle was saying, and gave Peter a sparring look as she settled next to her husband, leaving an empty chair between herself and Paul. ‘You’re not in the theatre?’ she said.

‘It sometimes feels like it,’ said Peter, ‘but no, I’m a schoolmaster.’

‘He teaches at Corley, dear,’ said George.

‘Oh, goodness,’ said Mrs Sawle, and tutted as she spread her napkin and checked her husband’s readiness to start eating. ‘I’ve not been to Corley in forty years. I expect it makes a rather better school than it did a private house.’

‘Ghastly pile,’ said the Professor.

‘Ooh…!’ said Peter, flushing slightly in humorous protest, which Sawle didn’t notice.

‘We used to go there, of course,’ said Mrs Sawle, ‘when Daphne was married to Dudley, as I expect you know.’

‘Not a very happy time,’ said the Professor, in a blandly confidential tone.

‘It wasn’t a very happy time,’ said Mrs Sawle, ‘or I fear a very happy marriage,’ and gave a firm smile at her plate.

Peter said, ‘I’ve just been reading the Stokes memoir of Cecil Valance – it strikes me you must have known him, sir.’

‘Oh, I knew Cecil,’ said Sawle.

‘You knew him very well, George,’ said Mrs Sawle. ‘That was the last time we were there, to meet Sebastian Stokes, when he was getting his materials together.’

‘Mm, I remember all too clearly,’ said old Sawle. ‘Dudley got us pie-eyed and we danced all night in the hall.’

Mrs Sawle said, ‘It was on the very eve of the General Strike! I remember we talked of little else.’

‘Do you know this book?’ Peter said, jiggling his knee now and moving his calf too against Paul’s.

‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Paul, finding it very hard to concentrate on talking or eating; he felt sure the Sawles must be able to see what was going on; and anyway, he might know ‘Soldiers Dreaming’ by heart, but they came at things from another angle here, out of a world of family gossip and connections. He held his leg firm against Peter’s, which seemed to matter more. He reached out again and drank solemnly from his glass to cover his confusion, thinking at the same time he shouldn’t drink so fast, but feeling too there was something fated and irresistible about it. Across the party, half-hidden by the trailing fronds of the tree above, candles had started to flicker, at each little table, against the half-light. In a minute, young Julian appeared, as if raising a curtain, with a lit white candle in a jar held in front of him. ‘Here you are, Great-Uncle George!’ he said, reaching over Madeleine’s shoulder to put the jar on the table, his own sleek face, brown eyes, glossy fringe, lit up by the quickly settling flame. Paul felt a new pressure of attention in Peter’s knee, as they all gazed up fondly at him. ‘Are you all right out here – you should be in with Gran,’ he said. His voice, at seventeen, still had a boy’s rawness. He stood smiling at them with that cheerful little consciousness of behaving well, to his worthy old relations, and light-heartedly clinging to his decorum after quite a few drinks.

‘Oh, we don’t expect special treatment, you know,’ said George Sawle in a gently ironic voice.

‘I don’t know if it’s just me,’ said Peter smoothly, watching Julian go, ‘but I thought that Stokes thing was almost unreadable.’

Sawle gave a cluck of a laugh. ‘Deplorable publication altogether.’

‘Oh, I’m glad I’m not wrong.’

‘What…!’ – old Sawle looked at Peter with some enviable shared understanding. It was a whole way of talking that had Oxford and Cambridge in it, to Paul’s ears.

‘There hasn’t been a proper Life, has there?’ Peter said.

‘I don’t suppose there’s enough for a full biography,’ Sawle said. ‘To be perfectly honest, I have old Cecil somewhat on my conscience.’

‘Well, you’ve no need to, George,’ said his wife.

Sawle cleared his throat. ‘I’m supposed to have turned in an edition of his letters quite some time ago.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Peter.

‘Well, Louisa asked me originally, oh goodness, some time after the War – his mother.’

‘She must have lived to a great age, then?’ Peter said.

‘Well, she was in her eighties, I suppose,’ said Sawle, with the faint touchiness of someone getting on himself. ‘She was a very difficult woman. She made a sort of cult of Cecil. There was a very awkward occasion when I was asked down, it was rather like when the poems were being done, to talk about it all. She wasn’t living at Corley Court any more by then, she’d moved to a house in Stanford-in-the-Vale. I went for the weekend. “Let’s lay them all out, and decide what ought to go in,” she said. Of course no editor could work under such conditions. I knew I’d have to wait till she was dead.’

‘Wait as long as you like, dear,’ said Mrs Sawle. ‘You expect too much of yourself. And I can’t believe anyone’s crying out for these letters.’

‘Oh, some of them are marvellous – the War letters, love. But Louisa had no idea of course of the sort of thing Cecil wrote in letters to his men friends.’

‘Is there some quite racy stuff?’

Sawle gave a fond apologetic look to his wife, but didn’t exactly answer. ‘I think all sorts of stuff’s going to come out, don’t you. I was talking just now to someone about Strachey.’

‘You must have known him too, I suppose?’ Peter said.

‘Oh, a bit, you know.’

‘Didn’t really care for Strachey, did you, George?’ said Madeleine Sawle, again looking quizzically over her husband’s food.

‘There’s this young chap… Hopkirk.’ Sawle looked at her.

‘Holroyd,’ she said.

‘Who’s about to tell all about old Lytton.’

‘Oh, I can’t wait,’ said Peter.

‘Mark Holroyd,’ said Madeleine firmly.

‘He came to see me. Very young, charming, clever, and extremely tenacious’ – Sawle laughed as though to admit he’d been got the better of. ‘I don’t suppose I helped him much, but it seems he’s got some people to agree to the most amazing revelations.’

‘Quite a tale, by all accounts!’ said Madeleine, with a grim pretence of enthusiasm.

‘I think if people ever do get to learn the real details of what went on among the Bloomsbury Group,’ Sawle said, ‘they’ll be pretty astonished.’

‘We barely knew that world,’ said Madeleine.

‘Well, we were in Birmingham, dear,’ said Sawle.

‘We still are!’ she said.

‘Mm, I was just thinking,’ said Peter, ‘that if this Bill goes through next week it could open the way for a lot more frankness.’

Paul, who hadn’t been able to discuss the Bill with anybody, felt the grip of the crisis again, but less upsettingly than in the drive with Jenny. ‘Yes… indeed,’ he said quite calmly, and looking up in the candlelight he felt (though of course you could never really measure it) he was blushing much less than on that occasion.

‘Oh, Leo Abse’s Bill, you mean,’ said Sawle, in an abstracted tone, and perhaps to avoid the charged phrase ‘Sexual Offences’. He seemed fixed on some distant and subtle calculation. ‘It could certainly change the atmosphere, couldn’t it’ – with a tiny suggestion that prominent and public though it was it had better not be mentioned in front of his wife. He picked up with a little apologetic gasp from where he had been a minute before – ‘No, to go back to Cecil, I came to feel all his rather wilful behaviour was really an attempt to do one of two things – either to appease his mother or to get as far away from her as possible. Going to war was the perfect combination.’