Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Come on then,’ said Peter quietly, and they walked on with a new sense of purpose, surely, towards the massive old wreck of a tree which Peter thought of as a kind of Herne’s Oak. Beyond here was the line, invisible but potent as any prep-school law or prohibition, dividing the In-Bounds from the Out-of-Bounds Woods.

Peter dropped Paul in Marlborough Gardens, watched from behind the wheel as he let himself in, with a quick turn of the head in the lighted doorway but no wave. At a bedroom window a light already showed through unlined pink curtains; in a minute the bathroom light went on. He had a sense of the private but simple life of the household marked out in lights, and Paul reabsorbed into its routines, which both were and weren’t his own; relieved to be back, in a way, but glowing and inattentive surely with new knowledge. Peter wrestled the car into gear and made off with his usual air of helpless indiscretion round the loop of the Gardens.

He wondered if Paul might be too strange for him after all. It might be hard work having such a silent boyfriend, his reserve seemed like a judgement on you. Still, certainly worth holding on to him in the present dearth of opportunity. Someone else might not see the point of him at all – someone who hadn’t touched his hot sleek skin, felt his hesitations and his burning little stabs at letting go. He had a charming, slightly tapering cock, hard as a hat-peg, which he had clearly been astonished, and almost appalled, to see in the hands of someone other than himself, and then in the mouth. He had panted and giggled at the shock. And then quickly, afterwards, he started to fret – he let Peter hold him, and hold his hand, but he had a troubled look, as if he felt he had let himself down. They almost rushed, then, to get him back home; they parted with only a ‘See you soon’ and the darting, deniable kiss on the cheek in the insecure shadow of the car. Yet all these little awkwardnesses raised the game for Peter, and excited him more. It wasn’t at all like other affairs he had had, but he felt the same disorienting rush of insight, the roll and lift of some larger conveyance than a rattling Hillman Imp. On the main road back to Corley, with the windows down, a new smell blew in, the moist sweet night smell off the fields and trees, all the more mysterious when the nights were so short. The sun would be up a little after four: and find them both waking to their separate sense of how things had changed. Peter saw his thoughts drifting during lessons, and Paul with the paying-in books, preoccupied by his sensations, perched on his swivel stool in a distracting new awareness of being thought about and wanted.

He slowed and indicated to the empty road, and turned in through the gates to the heavier occluded darkness of the Park. The lights of home… the mile of scented darkness … The woods had grown up a lot, clearly, since Cecil’s day: now the lights of the school were hidden. That mile, too, was a purely poetical distance – or a social one, perhaps, designed to impress. It was one of Cecil’s many invitations to admire him, though not, presumably, to turn up at Corley Court in person. He appeared to the reader on fast-moving horse-back, this latter-day world of cheap cars and jet-planes superbly unimagined.

Between the White Horse downs and Radcot Bridge

Nothing but corn and copse and shadowed grazing,

Grey village spires and sleeping thatch, and stems

Of moon-faced mayweed under poplars gazing

Upon their moon-cast shadows in the Thames.

It was one of his better pre-war poems, though with that tendency to sonorous padding that spoiled almost everything he wrote if judged by the sternest standard.

Peter parked on the front gravel and made a poor attempt to shut the car door quietly. The moon was up, among streaky clouds, and before going in he walked round in front of the house, across the lawn by the fishpond, and back up the rise towards the gate into the High Ground. He seemed to stride through the complex calm of sexual gratification, borne along by running and looping images of what had happened – he saw himself enhancing it, warming it by little touches, then felt the countervailing cool of something like unease, the cool of loneliness. If Paul were with him still, they would make it better, do it over again. No doubt it was painful for anyone who was courting, but for two men… He stopped in front of the Ionic temple and peered into the deep shadow, oddly wary of the warm life caged invisibly there. Perhaps disturbed by him, a rabbit or hamster rustled and scratched, a budgie hopped and fluttered and tinkled its bell. He went on and stood by the gate, looking back, the moonlight and its shadows making the house insubstantial, for all its pinnacled bulk, as if half in ruin. The dorms were all dark but the light of the Headmaster’s television flickered inside the oriel window. The moon gleamed sharply on the pointed vane of the chapel roof, and on the dial of the stopped clock in the central gable, under the pale stone banner of the Valance motto, ‘Seize the Day’.

It was funny how Paul had been turned on by Cecil’s tomb, and by the fact of Corley having been his home. Cecil’s brother, of course, had stayed on here for thirty years more, till the military took over. It was surely good luck in the end that all the Victorian work was boxed in – there was nothing for the army to ruin. Dudley Valance’s hatred for the house was what had preserved it. It would be worth trying to talk to him about the early days, about Cecil as a boy. In Black Flowers he dealt very coolly with his brother – there was quite a sarcastic tone to some of it. Still, what a subject, two writers growing up in this astonishing place, the whole age that had built it riding for a fall. Perhaps he should seize the day himself, and start gathering materials, talking to people like old Daphne Jacobs who still remembered Cecil, and had loved him, and apparently been loved back.

Were people interested in Cecil? How did he rank? Undeniably a very minor poet, who just happened to have written lines here and there that had stuck… But his life was dramatic as well as short, and now everyone was mad about the First World War – the Sixth Form all learned ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by heart, and they liked the Valance war poems he had shown them. There was something a little bit queer about several of these poems; something he suspected in Dudley, too. Dudley seemed if anything the queerer one, with his intense devotion to the man he called Billy Prideaux, who’d been shot beside him on a night recce, and seemed to have triggered a nervous breakdown, powerfully but obscurely described in his book.

Peter came back to the stone bench by the fishpond and lit a cigarette. Cecil’s letters would be the thing to get a look at – Peter hoped his charm had worked last week on George Sawle, who must have all sorts of useful memories. Interesting what he’d said about Lytton Strachey too, and this book that was about to come out. Was the era of hearsay about to give way to an age of documentation? He looked at the house, as if it enshrined the mystery and in its Victorian way imposed the task. Was he up to writing a biography? It would take a much more orderly existence than any he’d managed so far… It was odd, it often struck him, being here in the country with these eighty children and a group of adults he would never have chosen as friends. But it would be at least a symbolic advantage, if he were to write the book. The stars thickened in the outer sky and the sinking moon threw the steep black profile of the roof into Gothic relief. It was windless and warm, the near-stasis of an ideal English summer. It all looked very good for the Open Day. He got up and strolled back towards the house in the nice tired mood of prospective exertion.