Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

What seems first to have happened was this: my mother received a letter (a real one, with a penny-halfpenny stamp on it) from the clergyman in Croydon, who had himself lost a son in the War, claiming that during a sitting with Mrs Leland Aubrey, at which he had received book-tests from his dead boy, Lara had also transmitted a message which was evidently from Cecil, and intended for his mother, Lady Valance. Might he have her permission to forward the test to her? A request can rarely have fallen on readier ears; and doubtless the impression of a longed-for miracle was just what the medium and the parson had calculated. My mother had already shown some interest in spiritualism, and in the year after Cecil’s death had even attended a number of séances at the house of Lady Adeline Strange-Paget, mother of my great friend Arthur, whose younger brother had been drowned at Gallipoli; these had left her with clear misgivings, but also perhaps with a sense of avenues still unexplored. The medium on that occasion was an associate of Mrs Aubrey’s and was later indicted on several charges of blackmail. But it turned out too that the parson’s son had been in the Royal Berkshire Regiment, and had been drafted into Cecil’s company in the weeks before the Somme offensive; he had outlived Cecil by a mere three days. In letters home the boy had written of his love and admiration for my brother. In many cases soldiers who had served with Cecil had written to my parents after his death, or the soldiers’ own parents had sent letters of condolence containing tributes from the letters of their sons, themselves now dead, to the officer they had admired. The parson from Croydon, however, stored up his tribute, until a time when he could use it to greater profit.

This first test my parents performed alone, but I can speak from direct experience of their later repetitions. The general form of a book-test was that Mrs Aubrey would go into a trance, in which Lara would communicate with Cecil, the result being taken down on the spot by the clergyman, since a trance very naturally impeded the medium’s capacity to write for herself. The message would then be sent to my mother, who would at once act upon its instructions. She kept all these messages, in the same place as she kept Cecil’s letters, regarding them as merely a further phase of their correspondence. This is a sample, and one at which my wife and I happened also to be present.

Lara speaking. ‘This is a message for Cecil’s mother. It is in the library. When you go in it is on a short shelf on the left, before the corner, the third shelf up from the floor, the seventh book. Cecil says it is a green book, it has green on it or in it. Page 32 or 34, a page with very little printed on it, but what there is makes a particular message for her. He wants to tell her that he loves her and is always with her.’

This final sentence, which appeared with minor variations at the end of most of the messages, was clearly added by the medium as a kind of insurance. The rest of the message, just as typically, created the impression of something exact while containing various ambiguities. There were, for instance, three doors into the library, the principal one from the hall, and two smaller ones, leading into the drawing-room on one side and the morning-room on the other. The instructions therefore might have led to three quite different locations. The morning-room was my mother’s own sanctum, and she had little doubt that Cecil envisaged her entering the library from that side. My father, who often in the evenings came into the library from the drawing-room, would naturally have taken the diametrically opposite view; but in this, as in so many things, he tended to give precedence to my mother. On the present occasion, I recall there was some uncertainty, none the less. The directions to the short shelf on the left and before the corner were very generous, since the first corner was at the far end of the room. On each slip my mother wrote the name of the book and its author, and the quotation itself. Here she has put: ‘Short shelf. The 7th book, Wingfield’s “Charity” – has no green. On trying on far side (enter from Dr-Room) “History of Lancashire” by Bunning, no green on it. On entering from Hall, 7th book, counting from the right, “The Silver Charger” by E. Manning GREENE, page 34 has only, “it could be said that the knight was returned, and all well about him, save that his heart went out in the night to his dear ones left behind.” A true message from Cecil.’ In this careful record her natural honesty is shown as clearly as her credulity; the phrase ‘counting from the right’ shows her awareness that books are normally counted from the left, but her conviction at the outcome is undimmed. Even her square, rather unformed, hand seems eloquent to me now of her stubbornness and innocence. Beneath this she has written, as always, ‘Present:’ and each witness has put his signature, as if subscribing to the larger truth of the proceedings. ‘Louisa Valance. Edwin Valance. Dudley Valance. Daphne Valance. 23rd March 1918.’ (On the matter of my father’s participation, it was notable that Lara’s messages never referred to him – until, once this fact had been commented on in a telephone conversation, the following week brought one expressly for him.)

I have spoken facetiously, but out of distaste, for there was an atmosphere, indescribable but unforgettable, in the library on these occasions; and one that came increasingly to linger, so that even at other times it seemed to darken the air in that already gloomy chamber. It was not at all, to my sense, that of a supernatural presence, but rather of hopes, and therefore fears, painfully laid bare. In a way it was the library I would most have liked to do away with, when I remodelled the house; the air of bogus method, of wilful tampering with broken hearts, seemed to haunt its dark alcoves and peer forth from the little carved faces on the book-shelves. You may think it strange, and weak-willed in me not to have broached the matter directly with my mother; to which I can only say that in all probability you never knew her.

There were other friends, no doubt, who acquiesced and even looked hopefully on the outcome of this psychical quackery – Lady Adeline, old Brigadier Aston at Uffington, who had lost all three of his boys. But my wife and I quickly came to deplore the hold Mrs Aubrey had over my mother. Interspersed with evidently random book-tests came others so pointedly specific as to arouse suspicion in us (though in my mother, of course, only heightened conviction). One week the test led us to a Westminster Review with a poem of Cecil’s own in it, and the lines, ‘When you were there, and I away / But scenting in the Alpine air the roses of an English May’ – a poem written in fact to a Newnham girl he was keen on, but to my mother’s eye a perfectly adequate parable of the afterlife. Another gave her a line from Swinburne (a poet she hadn’t previously approved of), ‘I will go back to the great sweet mother’; she didn’t seem to mind that the great sweet mother in question was the English Channel. She was accustomed to receiving answers to her questions and satisfaction of her demands; had it not been so pathetic I might have been more moved to laughter at the spectacle of her determination, brought face to face with the meaningless results of these latterday sortes Virgilianae . My wife was once so bold as to ask her mother-in-law why, if Cecil had wanted to tell her ‘Love is love alway’, he had not simply said as much to Lara, rather than putting her through the paper-chase in the library? It was one of a number of remarks taken by the older lady to typify the younger one’s unsuitability as the future mistress of Corley.

My wife and I, who lived at Naughton’s Cottage until my father’s death, were naturally unable to measure, even less control, these activities. But our suspicions grew, and for a while threatened to corrupt the whole character of domestic life at Corley, already under great strain from the War. Mrs Aubrey was clever enough to fire a number of blanks (one test led unequivocally to a page of quadratic equations, which even my mother’s best efforts could not bring out right). But the incidence of gratifying bromide grew so high that we began to wonder whether there were not some accomplice within the house, a maid or footman confirming the location of certain volumes. On occasion the book in question was out of its normal run – a fact interpreted no doubt as proof of Cecil’s absolute up-to-dateness and all-seeing eye. I enlisted Wilkes, who had risen to be butler during the War, and who I knew was above reproach, but his discreet enquiries among the staff led nowhere. I don’t know if I am more embarrassed or proud of a trick I played myself. I had learned to use my limp in various ways, so as to get what I wanted or simply to get in the way. On this occasion, seizing the letter from my mother, I lurched off as fast as I could down the room, rather as an eager shop assistant might run for a packet of tea, and concealing the shelves from her view I called out ‘The fourth book, Mamma, on the second shelf’ whilst taking at random a volume from the shelf above. I have forgotten the volume, but will always remember the sentence: ‘Its want of volitary powers led inevitably to its extirpation’, the subject being, I believe, the Giant Moa: ‘What does he mean ?’ worried my mother, faced with this bleakly Darwinian pronouncement from my brother. Ah, had Cecil been able to fly, how different things might have been!