Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Stanmore Hill began like a village street, but soon opened out into a long straight climb out of town, already cheerless in the November afternoon. He passed a large pub, the Abercorn Arms, which was mentioned in one of the handful of letters from Cecil to George that survived: the boys had had a pint there themselves. Paul saw the appeal of it, as part of his research, but he felt self-conscious entering pubs alone and pressed on up the road. Boys is what they had been, of course, George only half Paul’s present age when he met Cecil, and yet they seemed to occupy their lives with a peculiar unselfconscious authority Paul had never felt in his own. Towards the top of the hill there was a small weather-vaned clock-tower on a stable block, half-covered by trees, and though he felt sure it couldn’t be ‘Two Acres’, it seemed in some incoherent way like a promise of it.

After that the road flattened out and on the far side was a long black pond, surrounded by scruffy trees, and the beginning of Stanmore Common. He saw a woman walking a dog, a white poodle that looked alarmingly too big, and since they were the only walkers about, Paul felt conspicuous. He turned down a side-road, thinking that he could have asked her, and for ten or fifteen minutes he wandered round a modest little network of lanes that none the less had something mysterious about them, the sun lowish already among the nearly bare trees, further murky ponds, woodlands sloping away on the far side, and here and there, half-hidden by hedges and fences and large gardens, a number of houses. He wished he was more expert at looking at houses, and knowing how old they were. George Sawle said ‘Two Acres’ was red-brick, and had been built in the 1880s; his father had bought it from its first owner in 1890; his mother had sold it in 1920. Paul checked each name as he passed: ‘The Kennels’… ‘Old Charlocks’… ‘Jubilee Cottage’. Could he have missed it? He thought of the tests he had just read about in an earlier letter of Cecil’s, from his first weeks at Marlborough, where he had had to prove to a senior boy that he knew where things were and the meaning of ridiculous names. ‘I got them all,’ Cecil told his mother, ‘except for Cotton’s kish, and for this it is Daubeny who must have forty lashes, for failing to instil this vital fact in my teeming brain. I fear you will think this unjust.’

He was almost back at the main road and here was the woman with the poodle coming towards him. She gave him a quick hard smile, a man roaming round with a briefcase in the afternoon. ‘You look lost,’ she said.

‘I’m okay now,’ said Paul, nodding at the road ahead. ‘Thanks so much!’ And then, ‘Well, actually,’ when she had passed him, ‘sorry… I’m looking for a house called “Two Acres”.’

She half-stopped and turned, the dog pulling her on. ‘ Two Acres? No… I don’t know it. Are you sure it’s round here?’

‘Pretty sure,’ said Paul. ‘A famous poem was written about it.’

‘Mm, not a poetry reader, I’m afraid.’

‘I thought you might have heard of it.’

‘Stop it, Jingo! No…’ she frowned back to him, ‘I mean, two acres is quite big, you realize.’

‘Well… yes,’ Paul agreed.

‘We have a third of an acre, and believe me that takes a good deal of work.’

‘I suppose in the old days…’ said Paul.

‘Oh, well in the old days… Jingo – Jingo! – mad dog! I’m so sorry… Who lives in this house you’re looking for?’

‘That I don’t know,’ said Paul, the intimate and whimsical nature of his quest exposed, as he’d known it would be if he stooped to asking anyone. It seemed beyond the woman, too: she winced at his briefcase, which must hold the reason for his search, which she wasn’t going to ask – some rep or agent no doubt.

‘Well, good luck,’ she said, as if seeing she had wasted her time. And as she went on, ‘Try the other side of the hill!’

Which Paul did, going down a narrow road that was perhaps a private driveway – there seemed to be a new development of houses whose roofs he could see further down the slope. The lane turned a corner, running for thirty yards under a tall dark larch-lap fence that gave off, even on this chilly day, a dim scent of creosote. Just behind it, a house stood, only the long ridge of its roof and two tall chimneys visible. At the far end, gates, of the same height and material as the fence, chained and padlocked; but allowing, through the narrow gap between hinge and frame, a one-eyed view of a weedy bit of gravel and a downstairs window of the house, disconcertingly close. After this, a dense screen of leylandii, much taller than the fence, ran back from the road, cutting close to the corner of the house itself, and shielding it from the tarmacked drive beyond, at the head of which was a big display board, with an artist’s impression of another red-roofed house, and the words ‘Old Acres – Six Executive Homes, Two Remaining’.

The small dislocation in the name was dreamlike for him, though almost meaningless in the light of day. He supposed to have kept ‘Two Acres’ would only have brought home to the executives just how tiny their properties were; perhaps ‘Old Acres’ lent atmosphere to the still raw-looking properties packed in at artful angles to each other among trees which must be survivors from the Sawles’ garden. To those who knew, it preserved a word, at least, of the old order. But he saw already that the ‘airy-chambered garden’ had gone; and even the house itself, which Paul had no doubt was the house, seemed resistant to being looked at. He got out his camera from his bag and crossing the lane took a picture of the fence.

This wasn’t quite enough. Going back, he stared concernedly at the entranceway of the house before ‘Two Acres’, ‘Cosgroves’, a drive curving out of sight behind rhododendrons, the house itself too far off to keep a watch on its gate. As he strolled in he was smiling mildly, the smooth compulsion of the trespasser just hedged by a far-fetched pretence that he was lost. His movements felt almost involuntary, though everything about him was alert. On his right a wide lawn opened out, dead leaves drifted by the wind into ridges and spirals. An empty teak seat, a stone table. A blue sack wrapping a plant he took for a moment for a stooping person. The boundary with ‘Two Acres’ on this side was a dense run of shrubbery, and then a wall of old firs, bulging and decrepit, pressing down on an ancient wooden garage and a little tar-roofed potting-shed with cobwebbed windows. He caught the sound though not the words of a woman’s voice, somewhere outside but in monologue, as if on the telephone. The space between garage and shed gave him cover, he slid between them, and then going at a squat and for a yard or two on hands and knees, shielding his face with his briefcase, he pushed through the dense harsh fronds between the trunks of the firs, and emerged, scratched and dishevelled, in the back garden of ‘Two Acres’ itself.

He stood where he was for a minute, and looked round. He felt almost comically cheated but his excitement worked over and around his disappointment, with cunning persistence. There was little enough to see. The defensive wall of conifers turned a corner and cut across behind the house as well, robbing it of a last glimpse of the trees beyond and below, which must be the parkland of Bentley Priory. The enclosed space was dead and already sunless. The short slope of tangled grass, dead thistles and nettles had a track through it of the kind a fox might make – Paul saw it would live undisturbed here, the house condemned by its own urge for privacy. Taken by a sudden urge, territorial as much as physical, he turned his back on the house, put down his briefcase, and had a short fierce piss into the long grass.