Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

One had wondered from the start, of course, what Mrs Aubrey was getting out of it. It slowly became clear that she was in receipt of cheques for sums unmatched by even the most charitable of the causes my mother espoused. She had a rich old lady where she wanted her, a victim passionate to be duped. But then, by slight, almost deniable, degrees, my mother seemed to let the thing go; she mentioned it rarely, she grew somewhat furtive – not about the tests but about stopping the tests, with the implication that doubt had won out over painful desire. I suspect that by the time my father had his stroke they had completely stopped. The strange timorous delicacy imposed on others by a very forceful personality ensured that we did not ask. She herself recovered much of the humourless cheerfulness that had been so typical of her before the War. Her good works redoubled in mass and effort. With my father indisposed, the present-day concerns of a large estate consumed the energies lately devoted to the past. She was still careful to spend some minutes of each morning in the chapel, alone with her first-born; but grief itself perhaps had run its course.

Paul re-read this passage with a rather silly feeling of excitement, thinking how useful it might be to get some messages from Cecil for himself. An appendix in G. F. Sawle’s edition of Cecil’s Letters seemed to suggest the book-test slips still existed, in the Valance archive, which Paul imagined bundled haphazardly in a large locked bureau like the one in The Aspern Papers ; George gave them short shrift, but noted their significance as evidence of the spiritualist craze during and after the First World War. Paul’s copy of Black Flowers was the old red Penguin edition, 1957, and he peered again at the tiny author photo on the back: a shadowy sneer in a one-inch square. Beneath it there was a ramblingly circumstantial biographical note:

Sir Dudley Valance was born in 1895 at Corley Court in Berkshire, the younger son of Sir Edwin Valance, Bt., and educated at Wellington and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English Language and Literature, taking a First in Honour Moderations in 1913. On the outbreak of War he enlisted with the Wiltshire Regiment (Duke of Edinburgh’s), quickly rising to the rank of Captain, but after being wounded at the Battle of Loos in September 1915 was unable to return to active service. His experiences during the War are memorably recorded in the present volume, largely written in the 1920s, though not published until twenty years later. His first book, The Long Gallery , came out to great acclaim in 1922. A satirical country-house novel, in the tradition of Peacock, it cast a merrily merciless eye over three generations of the ancient Mersham family, and added such figures as the jingoistic General Sir Gareth ‘Jo-boy’ Mersham and his ‘artistic’ pacifist grandson Lionel to the great roll-call of British comic characters. On the death of his father in 1925, Dudley Valance succeeded to the baronetcy, his elder brother having been killed in the War. When war broke out again, Corley Court was requisitioned as a military hospital, and in 1946 Sir Dudley deemed it best to sell the family home. England he felt was a changed land, and thenceforth he and his wife have chosen to spend much of each year at their fortified sixteenth-century house near Antequera in Andalusia. A further volume of his memoirs, The Woods Decay , appeared in 1954. Sir Dudley Valance is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and President of British Friends of Sherry.

Paul imagined the meetings of these two groups had fairly similar trajectories. Of course he had nearly met Dudley, he remembered preparing to do so, at Daphne’s seventieth, out in the twilit lane, and his relief (apparently shared by everyone) when he failed to turn up. Now he was the person that he most wanted, or anyway needed, to talk to – he was considerably more frightened of him now he’d read his books, with their extended exasperated portrait of his mother and their puzzled coolness about Cecil himself, whom Dudley clearly thought very overrated. They were masculine books, in a way that seemed, from the viewpoint of the late 1970s, when so much was coming into the open, to be interestingly ‘gay’, in a suppressed English fashion – ‘deniable’, as Dudley would say. It was hard not to feel that his relations with the soldier whose death gave the book its title had been much more of a romance than his marriage to Daphne Sawle. The funny thing about the Penguin note was the mixture of cranky candour and evasion – of the two figures who really interested Paul, Cecil was only obliquely referred to, and the first Lady Valance might never have existed. It followed of course that their two children could not exist either. Even in the book itself they featured hardly at all. There was a sentence towards the end which began, almost comically, ‘By now the father of two children, I began to take a different view of the Corley entail’ – the first mention of Corinna and Wilfrid’s existence.

Dudley, naturally, was the first person Paul had written to, care of his agent, but the letter, like the one he had written soon after to Daphne, remained unanswered, creating a very uncertain mood. George Sawle needed to be approached, but Paul put off writing to him, out of muddled emotions of rivalry and inadequacy. At this stage of the project he had a sense of dotted items, an archipelago of documents, images, odd facts that fed his private belief that he was meant to write Cecil Valance’s Life. Sawle’s long-delayed edition of the Letters had done a lot of his work for him, in its drily scholarly way. Beside it on his bookshelf in Tooting Graveney stood his small collection of related items, some with a very thin but magical thread of connection; the books that only mentioned Cecil in a footnote gave him the strongest sense of uncovering a mystery. In front of him now he saw the torn and sellotaped wrapper of Winton Parfitt’s Sebastian Stokes: A Double Life ; the black quarto notebooks in which he’d transcribed in pencil the letters between Cecil and Elkin Mathews, the publisher of Night Wake , in the British Library; the strange stiff binding of a privately printed register of Kingsmen killed in the Great War, with its peculiar heady smell of gum. On a barrow in the Farringdon Road he had found a copy of Sir Edwin Valance’s Cattle Feeds and Cattle Care (1910), 25p, which he felt in its very intractability conveyed something almost mystical about his subject’s family. He also had ‘the Galleries’: Dudley’s novel of 1922, which certainly drew on the Valances for its deranged Mersham family, and of course Daphne’s recent memoir.

He had written to Winton Parfitt and asked him straightforwardly if he knew of material on Stokes’s dealings with Cecil that had come to light since his book had been published twenty years earlier. The subtitle A Double Life referred disappointingly to Stokes’s dual careers as man of letters and discreet Tory fixer; Parfitt nowhere revealed that his subject had been queer, or drew what seemed to Paul to be the obvious inference, that he had been in love with Cecil. His waffling memoir of the ‘joyous’ and ‘splendid’ young poet, doubtless highly acceptable to old Lady Valance, was also a surreptitious love-letter of his own. In fact Parfitt was as much of a diplomatic clam as old ‘Sebby’ himself, and the royal-blue jacket of his huge biography, covered with praise from the leading reviewers, was now among those features that make all second-hand bookshops look inescapably the same. There was something ‘splendid’ about the book – an ‘event’, a ‘milestone’, a ‘labour of love’ – and something inescapably dodgy and second rate. It seemed a kind of warning to Paul. Still, he had grown familiar with half-a-dozen pages of it. There was a short paragraph mentioning Stokes’s visit to the Valances to gather materials for the memoir, but it was overshadowed by the frantic negotiations preceding the General Strike. That weekend at Corley was something he planned to ask Daphne herself about, when he managed to speak to her: it seemed a pregnant moment, an unrepeatable Cecil-focused gathering at which he longed to have been present himself. Parfitt had written back promptly, from his Dorset manor-house, in a fine italic hand, to say he knew of nothing significant, but offering warm encouragement before slipping in, with ingenuous briskness, the awful final sentence: ‘You will no doubt be in touch with Dr Nigel Dupont, of Sussex, who has also written to me in connection with his work on the ever-intriguing Cecil.’