Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

What was that? A hand stroked the back of his neck as the shadow of a tall brick chimney high above the Headmaster’s window wobbled and shifted. A kite-like form detached itself, and moved with dreamy-looking wariness across the sloping upper leads; five seconds later another, hesitant but committed, and making it seem that the inky shadow might harbour many more of them. They were strangely antique, these two figures, of uncertain size and height, and seemed to flow like oily shadows themselves, in dressing-gowns left open like cloaks. They crept from chimney-stack to chimney-stack, towards the higher slope of the chapel roof, with its crowning spirelet still far above their heads. Once or twice Peter could hear very faintly the patter or slither of their slippered feet.

The rain wasn’t much, but the wind was wild, and he hurried round the square with his brolly held low in front of him and half-blocking his view. The plane trees roared in the dark overhead, and wide wet leaves shot past him or pressed blindly against his coat. In his left hand he had his briefcase, black leather, streaked by the rain. He’d been reading poetry in the library, in the dwindling evening crew. When the dark-haired man, called R. Simpson, who seemed to be working on Browning’s plays, started packing up, he had packed up too; but at the street-door, in the downpour, Simpson had hurried right, while he had gone left, in the usual muddle of gloom and relief, towards the Underground. He found the tussle with the weather oddly satisfying.

After dusk in Bedford Square you could see into the high first-floor windows of publishers’ offices, the walls of bookshelves and often a huddle of figures at a glaringly lit party. Such a party was going on now, at the front door below a few guests were leaving, and the bright rectangle widened and narrowed as they slipped out into the night, laughing and exclaiming about the weather. A couple emerged, heads lowered, and behind them he saw a small figure, an old woman surely, framed in the doorway as she buttoned her coat, secured her hat, hung her bag on her arm, and then, as she stepped out on to the pavement, pushed up a flimsy umbrella, which the wind snatched instantly and jerked upwards inside-out behind her head. Her words whipped back to him distinctly, ‘Oh bugger it!’ He saw her grappling with the thing as he drew nearer, his own umbrella swerving and struggling in the face of the wind. She staggered a little, more or less righted it, and moved quickly away, almost stumbling, though a spoke stuck up at a hopeless angle, the pink fabric flared loose, there was a lull and then a sudden slam of wind which wrenched the brolly out of her hands and off into the road, where it skidded and then leapt away in long hops between the parked cars. Of course he should help her, run after it, but she seemed, with a certain reckless good sense, to have given the thing up. She turned for a moment, glint of street-lamp on glasses, then ducked back into the wind, the rain now only a kind of roaring dampness, and as she hurried on Paul felt such a twisting stab of anxious excitement that he hid behind his umbrella for ten seconds, not knowing what to do. He slowed down, almost as though to let her get away; then pulled himself together. Trudging forward against the wind she seemed alarmingly vulnerable, to the weather, to the London night, and also to him. Why had no one come with her, or seen her to a cab? It was with a sort of ache he came up behind her, the painful comedy of having her for a further ten seconds, fifteen seconds, within arm’s reach, her red felt hat pulled down tight and her white hair beneath it tugging in clumps in the storm. There was a pink silk scarf around her neck, and her mac was shabby, the collar darkened. He picked up very faintly its musty, perennial smell, before he swept his umbrella up and then down between her and the gale. ‘There you are…’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘isn’t it awful,’ walking on, with a quick doubtful glance at him but perhaps a touch of reassurance too.

‘You shouldn’t be out in this, Mrs Jacobs,’ he said, very capably.

‘The rain’s pretty well stopped, I think.’

Paul grinned, perhaps rather stared at her. ‘Where are you going?’ He felt buoyant with his nerves and his own, perhaps unshared, sense of hilarity in the meeting. He slowed his step to hers.

‘Were you at the party?’ she said, with a slightly sentimental look, as if still savouring it.

Before he could think better of it, he said, ‘Yes, I was, but I didn’t get a chance to speak to you.’

‘Caroline has so many young friends…’ she made sense of it for herself. He could see she’d had quite a bit to drink – the grip of the drink at these parties and the nonsense you talked: then you came hurtling out, parched and light-headed and you hoped not alone. Night had fallen while you drank. He was straightforward, though still teasing her for some reason:

‘Do you remember me, Mrs Jacobs?’

She said, as if she’d been waiting a long time patiently for this question, and without looking at him, ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Why should you!’ he said. ‘We haven’t seen each other for a good ten years…’

‘Ah, well,’ she said, relieved but still non-committal.

‘No, it’s Paul – Paul Bryant. I used to be in the bank at Foxleigh. I came to your… your big birthday party, all those years ago.’ That perhaps wasn’t tactful.

‘Oh, did you,’ and then Mrs Jacobs gave a strange gasp, or grunt – Paul saw it too late, like a hazard in the black gleam of the pavement just ahead. Could they chat on casually around that double tragedy? It was also perhaps an opportunity, for sympathy, for showing that he knew her story and she could trust him. ‘Yes, indeed,’ she said.

‘I was so very sorry to hear about… Corinna, and…’

She almost stopped, put a hand on his sleeve, perhaps in silent thanks, though there was something corrective in it too. She looked up at him. ‘You couldn’t find me a taxi, I suppose, could you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Paul, chastened as if by several reminders at once, but relieved he could be of service. Above them towered the grey bulk of the new YMCA, and beyond it there was the glitter and hiss of traffic in the Tottenham Court Road. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘I have to get to Paddington.’

‘Oh, you’re not living in London any more?’

‘I think there’s a train at about ten to nine.’

Now the rain started pattering on the umbrella. They were by the bright doorway of the Y, young men coming out, with a glow of self-worth about them, putting up hoods, making a dash for it. ‘Would you like to wait here – I’ll find you a cab.’ Under the light he saw more plainly how shabby she was. She wore a lot of powder, over a face that now appeared both gaunt and pouchy. The rain had splashed her brownish stockings and her scuffed court shoes. The workings of time were sordid, slightly frightening to him, and he steadied himself with the thought of what she had been long ago. These glowing and darting boys coming out of the gym and the sauna had no idea of her interest. He spoke to her loudly and charmingly to show them she was worth it. She was a Victorian, she had seen two wars, and she was the sister-in-law, in a strange posthumous way, of the poet he was writing about. To Paul her natural habitat was an English garden, not a gusty defile off the Tottenham Court Road. Poems had been written for her, and set to music. She remembered intimacies that by now were nearly legendary. Whether she remembered Paul, however, he couldn’t tell.