Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Paul was very unhappy about Dr Nigel Dupont, but he didn’t know what to do about him. He couldn’t help thinking he must be the unknown person Daphne had met at the party in Bedford Square, the sinister ‘nice young man’ who’d been asking her all about Cecil. ‘Sussex’ presumably meant Sussex University, not merely that Dr Dupont lived somewhere in that county. He would be an ambitious young academic, an Englishman presumably, but with an incalculable element of Gallic arrogance and appetite for theory. Could he be writing a life of Cecil too? There were a number of obvious ways of finding out, but Paul was unable to take any of them. He saw himself at another party, being introduced to his rival, at which point the scenario halted and dithered in the mists of his ignorance and worry. He had a sense of the ‘ever-intriguing Cecil’ actively encouraging both biographers, as if through ‘Lara’ herself, in a spirit of mischief and self-importance.

At Tooting Graveney they lived on first-name terms with the dead. Karen, Paul’s landlady and would-be accomplice in what she called ‘the Cecil job’, worked at Peel’s Bookshop in Putney, and read a lot of things in drab-looking but exclusive bound proofs long before they were published. In his nine months as her lodger he’d grown used to daily gossip about Leonard and Virginia, Lytton and Morgan and the rest, whom she spoke of almost as personal friends; Duncan and Vanessa strayed into the conversation as easily as customers into the shop. It seemed a teenage meeting with Frances Partridge had set her off on a craze for Bloomsbury, and as books on the subject now came out about once a month she lived in an addictive state of constantly renewed expectation. Cecil hadn’t been strictly Bloomsbury, of course, but he’d known most of the Cambridge branch, and Karen clearly thought it a great stroke of luck to have his biographer as a lodger. She mothered him, and took a solemn interest in the ‘job’ (whose appeal to Paul was precisely that it wasn’t one); and Paul himself, who liked to preserve a certain mystery around his work, none the less shared almost everything with her. Karen’s kitchen became the nerve-centre for the project, and many plans and speculations were explored over the wandering vines of the William Morris tablecloth and the second bottle of Rioja. He enjoyed her admiring interest, looked forward to telling her things that otherwise only went in his diary, and worried intermittently that she was coming to see the job as a joint effort.

In the strange week after Christmas, Paul got home early from the library and saw that a letter with a Spanish stamp had come for him. Karen had propped it on the hall table, in a way that suggested great restraint in not opening it herself. There it was, with a typed address, his name misspelt. He took it to the kitchen to open it neatly. He saw now that it would say one of two things, and his knife seemed to dawdle even as it snicked it open.

El Almazán

Sabasona

Antequera

Dear Mr Bryan

My husband is unwell, and has asked me to reply to your letter of November 26. He is very sorry, but he will not be able to see you. As you may know, we live in Spain for much of the year, and my husband is rarely in London.

Yours sincerely,

Linette Valance

For a moment he felt oddly embarrassed, and was glad Karen wasn’t here to see it. It was unquestionably a blow: so much depended on Dudley, and his locked bureau of family papers. He put the letter back in the envelope, and a few minutes later got it out again, with an excited feeling that he couldn’t quite remember it; but it seemed to say more or less what he’d thought it had before. Unless, perhaps, something else was conveyed by its very perfunctoriness? Even a rejection was a communication, after all – the letter, sparse and snooty though it was, yielded a small charge of contact. In a way, it was an adjunct to the family archive itself. He left it lying on the kitchen table as he boiled the kettle and prepared the teapot. At each inspection it looked just a little less disheartening. It was a brush-off, which needed to be brief to be effective, but wasn’t it also a bit feeble? A strong response would have been to say, ‘Sir Dudley Valance refuses to see you, and furthermore is implacably opposed to your writing the life of his brother, Captain Cecil Valance MC.’ No such veto was even hinted at. He started to feel that Linette herself didn’t think it was over yet. There was almost something defeatist in it, a mere delaying gesture in the face of the inevitable. The objections given, that they were ‘rarely in London’ and in Spain ‘for much of the year’, were vague and obviously not insuperable – was there not very nearly a suggestion that they didn’t want to be a nuisance to Paul himself? And he started to wonder if he couldn’t somehow arrange to get out to Antequera and talk to them there, rather than troubling them on their rare and brief visits to London. His commitment in doing so would certainly impress them, even move them, and he began to see a warm and subtle friendship developing, of the kind that would be life-blood to his book.

Later on, upstairs in his room and writing up the arrival of the letter in his diary, Paul sat back and stared out of the window with a sudden pang of sympathy for the poor old Valances, a moment of insight that he felt at once was of the essence of being a biographer. What he’d taken as snootiness was surely a sign of their acute vulnerability, something the upper classes were often at pains to conceal from the lower ones. Dudley was under the weather, and at eighty-four finding the prospect of meeting strangers a strain – for all he knew Paul might be just another hack, it was quite understandable; and Linette herself, half-comprehendingly taking instruction from a sick man, had written in haste before returning to his bedside to nurse him. A conversation with Paul, when it actually happened, might be a huge and happy relief to both of them. He decided that over the coming days he would write another letter, more personal and accommodating, and building on the warm contact that was now established between them.

The first interview Paul conducted for the book had been with someone whose very survival seemed a little uncanny, one of the servants at ‘Two Acres’ at the time when Cecil had first visited the Sawles. On the phone, the old boy said he was jiggered if he knew how Paul had tracked him down, and Paul read him the passage in Cecil’s letter to Freda Sawle where he said he wanted to ‘kidnap young Jonah at the station and demand an impossible ransom’. ‘What’s that?’ said old Jonah indignantly, as if he thought Paul himself was making some improper suggestion; he was very deaf. Paul said, ‘You’ve got an unusual name!’ George had footnoted the reference punctiliously: ‘Jonah Trickett (b. 1898), the “boy” at “Two Acres”, who had been detailed to act as CV’s valet; employed by FS from 1912 to 1915, when enlisted with Middlesex Regiment. From 1919 gardener and chauffeur to H. R. Hewitt (see also below, p137, 139n).’ Paul wasn’t sure he’d understood, on the phone, what the proposed visit was about. He agreed to let him come, though still sounded vaguely offended that anyone could think it necessary. ‘You’re one of the few people left alive who remember Cecil Valance!’ Paul said. That of course was the uncanny thing: there were thousands of eighty-one-year-olds, but surely no one else left in the world who had handled the intimate effects of this poet who had died in 1916, helped him to dress and undress and done whatever it was for him that a valet did. ‘Oh, yes? Ah well,’ said the sharp old voice, ‘whatever you say…’ as if catching a first glimpse of his own potential importance in the story.