Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Somehow he couldn’t take the house in; but he would take photographs, so as to see it all later. He wandered up to a small window in the side wall, a shadowy kitchen, a steel sink just in front of him, a door open beyond into a brighter space. The little translucent mill set in the pane span round fitfully when he breathed on it. The feeling he’d had, that the house might still somehow be lived in, left him completely. It was empty, and therefore in a way his; he felt a lurching certainty that he could and should get into it. Then as he stepped back he saw high up under the eaves the badge-shaped red-and-white box of a burglar alarm, Albion Security, which was a challenge he didn’t mean to take up. It looked new and alert and immune to the plea made by the books in his briefcase that he was only here to research the life of a poet. He went round the corner on to the front drive, just a narrow strip in front of the house; the horrible fence, with its creosote smell, concealed him completely from the road. A short brick path ran up to the front door. On the door-frame at chest height was a small oblong box with three circular holes in it, a wire trailing from one of them. So at some stage, before this latest degradation, ‘Two Acres’ had been divided up, three flats, probably – like almost every house in London. Well, there were sixty years unaccounted for, since the day the Sawle family had relinquished the place. Paul wondered dimly how it had been done – new bathrooms, fire-doors; his eyes ran over the black gleam of the little upstairs windows; who had got Daphne’s room, had the room where Cecil slept become a living-room, another kitchen?

Paul spent ten minutes at the house, magnetized but baffled, drawn to each window in turn. He looked out all the time for something detachable, and small enough to join the books in his bag. Not a flower-pot, or twig, but something that had been there unquestionably since before the First World War. A rusty horseshoe over the front door had swung sideways on its nail, the luck spilling out – he could reach it easily, but he didn’t like to; he pushed it up straight, but in a second it dropped back again. There were overgrown flower-beds in front of the windows, such as burglars leave footprints in, and he leant in across them. Beneath the visor of his hand he stared into the shadowy spaces, where electric sockets and dark lines and squares on the wallpaper were now the sole decoration. A big room on the garden side with french windows must have been the sitting-room. He could just about imagine Cecil flirting with Daphne in front of the brick fireplace. A square of worn and stained beige carpet covered part of the parquet floor. At the end of the room he could make out a shadowy alcove, under a huge oak beam, and he thought he saw what might have been romantic and even beautiful about it; but when he stepped away, and roamed off through the long grass to take some more photographs, he thought the house looked rather a hulk. He saw now that something had been knocked down – there was a broad black arrow on the brickwork where a roof must have abutted. A new bathroom window had been punched through the wall, out of line with everything else. You could strip all the romance from a place if you were determined enough, even the romance of decay. He’d had the idea that he would find things more or less as they had been in 1913 – more deeply settled in, of course, discreetly modernized, tastefully adapted, but the rockery still there, the ‘glinting spinney’ a beautiful wood, and the trees where the hammock had been slung still bearing the ridges of the ropes in their bark. He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired. It would live up to its fame. But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds.

Cecil Valance’s earliest known writing was a short composition produced for his mother when he was six years old. It was faithfully reproduced in the Memoir by Sebastian Stokes that prefaced the 1926 Collected Poems :

VII April MCCMLXXXXCVII

ALL ABOUT ME

My Name is CECIL TEUCER VALANCE. Teucer was a Famous Soldier he was a Grate Archer and Cecil was a Famous Lord by the way. My Father is called Sir Edwin Valance (2nd Bt) and my grashious Mother is known to all as Lady Valance. She has a beautifull red dress which made Lady Adleen extreemly jelous to see it. My home is called Corley Court in Berkshire, if you don’t know it It is one of the Grate Houses of that county. Oh if you meet a small boy calling himself Dudley Valance it is probably my small brother. He can be trying I shoud probally tell you here and now. On Monday on the Farm I saw IX new carves – they are the Sweetest Things on theyre wobbly legs. To-day we were all stuned by the news Lord PORTSCATHO has been killed in a explosin he was only XXXX XLIIV. My poor Father was very nearly in Tears at the sad news. I have had quit a bad caugh but am considerably recovered. Today I have red ‘How Rain is Made’ in the Home ‘Cyclopaidea’ and quit a fair number of Poems for my age as Nanny likes to say, among them ‘The Brook’ by LORD TENNOSYN, I am Determined to learn all IX of its verses, it is one of the best know of all poems of course. I emitted to say I am something of A Poet, this year I have written no fure than VII Poems ‘humbly deadicated’ to my Mother (Lady Valance).

What that same Lady Valance took to be Cecil’s last communications were described by Dudley Valance in his autobiography Black Flowers (1944):

My mother, who never wasted time (except, of course, other people’s), was nonetheless much involved in attempts to converse with the spirit-world. Her belief that Cecil might be reached and spoken to preoccupied her with the mingled gloom and determination of some hopeless love affair. Though notably reserved, as a rule, in her personal feelings, she allowed her tender yearnings for contact with the ‘other side’ to be seen by her family and by one or two friends with surprising candour. She was not perhaps likely to be embarrassed by emotions founded in her duty and suffering as the mother of a fallen hero. It was in the library at Corley that she undertook many lengthy and bewildering ‘book-tests’, upon a system taught to her by a clergyman in Croydon, and through the agency of Mrs Leland Aubrey, a notorious medium of the time, who mined the pitiful hopes of well-connected mourners for twenty years after the War. Mrs Leland Aubrey was herself under the ‘control’ of a spirit called Lara, a Hindoo lady some three hundred years old, so it will be seen that the chain of communication was by no means direct. This remoteness, however, with its clear resemblance to a game of Chinese Whispers, was the very thing claimed in its favour by my mother, who had absorbed it as a point of doctrine from her medium and from the clergyman, a very high authority with her. It was precisely because Mrs Aubrey had never been to Corley, had had no contact with its occupants, possessed no knowledge of the library there or of the disposition of any of the rooms, that she was seen as least susceptible to any kind of improper suggestion, and least capable of any kind of fraud. Her very remoteness argued for her probity. It was a bold advancement of the confidence-trickster’s art, bold but also subtle: since when this point of doctrine was absorbed it gave licence to the wildest and most arcane forms of self-delusion. Any message of such impeccable provenance must of necessity be meaningful, and the random scraps thrown up by the tests were raked over by my mother for esoteric messages as keenly as the entrails of a fowl by some ancient divinator. That act of interpretation was a responsibility that fell solely to her, or to her occasional companions in these sessions, its further beauty, to a woman as private as my mother, being that the message itself was apparently quite unknown to the medium, who merely indicated to her where it was to be found. It was as if she had opened a letter from her dead son which Mrs Aubrey had chanced to deliver.