Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

It was another great trek across Middlesex, twenty-seven stops to Edgware, the very end of the Northern line, a reassuring eternity steadily shrinking, Paul rehearsing the questions and imagining the answers, and the questions they prompted in turn. He had the suspicion Jonah wouldn’t volunteer much, he would have to bring him out, and then help him to discover what he really had to say. The prospect made him extremely nervous, as though he were going for an intervew himself. In his briefcase he had a letter from Peter Rowe that he hadn’t looked at this morning when it arrived, and he opened it now, with slight misgivings, in the wintry sunlight of the empty train. The envelope contained a postcard, which in Peter’s case was always an old painting of a preferably naked man, this time a St Sebastian by one of the millions of Italians Paul had never heard of; the message, in small brown italic, read:

Dearie! I distinctly felt an arrow go in, just under the heart, when I heard that you are writing the life of CTV. However, the agony is somewhat abated. That’s a book I always thought I would write myself, one day, though I’m not sure I could have done it as well as I know you will. Of course I feel I have a hand in it, from having led you one evening long ago to the Poet’s tomb. Wd love to talk about it with you – I have a few hunches about old C that might be worth exploring!

Sempre, P. ps my book out in March

Paul wished he hadn’t read it, since Peter’s handwriting alone, with its quick cultured command of any space it alighted on, crossed his feelings with anxiety. And the Sebastian too, a huge foreshortened hunk shackled to a tree, and not at all like Peter to look at, was still an eerie reminder of his life when Peter was in it, and that critical summer of 1967. Now he had a book of his own coming out, on Victorian churches, he was planning a TV programme as well as giving interval talks, apparently, on Radio 3. Paul thought of him with an uneasy mixture of envy, admiration and regret.

Arnold Close was a terrace of pebble-dashed cottages with playing-fields beyond. Paul approached the second house and unlatched the front gate with a new flinch of dread and determination. The little garden was all brown and tidied for winter, a few pink buds surviving the frost. He pretended not to look into the front room, where a lamp was on, framed photographs with their backs to him on the window-sill. The house seemed both watchful and defenceless. He hoped he would get something valuable out of it – and that in the process he would give it something back, an interest and distinction it didn’t know it had.

He lifted the knocker and dropped it with a mightier noise than he meant to. He was dully aware that the door, with its four thick bull’s-eye panes above the letter-box, was the same as his mother’s had been; and there was something vaguer, shouts and football whistles on the air, the meagre romance of suburbs petering out into country, that took him back to his Uncle Terry’s council house in Shrivenham. He knew little houses like this, almost knew the voice in the hall, and the shape looming and slipping in the curls of the glass. He felt the clutch of nerves, and set his face sternly when the door opened – a large middle-aged woman who kept her hand on the latch. ‘Oh, good afternoon… I’ve come to see Mr Trickett…’

‘And you are…?’

‘Paul Bryant!’

She nodded and stepped back. ‘Dad’s expecting you,’ she said, without exactly welcoming him herself. She was wearing a thick overcoat in a gloomy brown tartan pattern, and tight brown leather gloves. Paul sidled past her into the narrow hall, catching his look of polite apprehension in the mirror. The glamorous opening that he represented, putting her father in a book, seemed indifferent to her, or perhaps even undesirable. ‘Dad!’ she called out, as if knowing she wouldn’t be heard, ‘he’s here,’ and closing the door, she edged back past Paul and went into the front room. ‘Mr Bryant’s here,’ she said. ‘Now, will you be all right?’ Paul gulped a large breath and seemed to be sighing with gratification as he followed her into the room. The eagerness and charm, the smile confidently friendly but not hilarious, the note of respect with a hint of conspiracy – all this he hoped to sustain in his swoop towards the total stranger struggling up from his armchair with silvery head slightly cocked and the questioning look of a deaf person. ‘You’ll have to speak up,’ said the woman.

Paul shook his hand and said, ‘Hello, Mr Trickett!’ – he’d somehow forgotten about the deafness, and now he heard his own forced note.

‘Are you Paul?’ asked Mr Trickett, with a nervy laugh and again a bird-like way of looking for the answer.

‘That’s right,’ said Paul, finding of course that he was like a child to the old man, or like one of a number of confusing grandchildren. This too was annoying, but he would make the best of it. Jonah Trickett was small but broad-shouldered, with a wide friendly face very finely lined, and large blue eyes that seemed keener from listening as well as watching. He had a full head of hair and the perfect but impersonal dentures that give their own helpless eagerness to an old man’s face. Paul could see that as a boy he might have been appealing, he had something boy-like in him still. Now he lurched slightly as he moved.

‘I’ve got a new hip,’ he said, a half-embarrassed boast. ‘Take the young man’s coat, Gillian.’ His voice was a bit breathy, and like the road he lived in, London with a hint of country to it.

As he put down his briefcase and unbuttoned his coat Paul glanced round the room – some plates on the wall but no pictures, the photos in the window black-and-white weddings, and one more recent gathering in colour. The gas fire made the room disorientingly hot. On top of the TV was a photo of Jonah with a woman, who must surely be, or have been, his wife. Paul felt he should seem appreciative but not nosey, oddly the opposite of the case. ‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ said Gillian, taking his coat with her into the hall. When the front door slammed, he felt a horrible self-consciousness crawling over both of them, and he watched through the window with a paralysed smile as Gillian went up the path and closed the gate behind her. It was as if something intensely embarrassing had just been said. He supposed he need only stay twenty minutes if it didn’t work out. They sat down on either side of the gas fire, with a bowl of water on the hearth. The little bone pipes glowed and fluttered. He had a sense that the occasion had been prepared for: on the table beside Jonah there was a cardboard folder and his own letter under a coloured glass paperweight. He got out the tape-recorder, which had a mike on a stand, and took a minute or two to fit up; Jonah seemed to think this was a bit of a liberty as well as a novelty, but Paul said, ‘Every word you say is important to me,’ which he accepted with a wary smile. Paul pressed the Record button. ‘So how are you today?’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ said Jonah.

Karen, who had secretarial training, offered to transcribe the tape for Paul on her golfball typewriter, and after two tense evenings of sporadic clatter and the sound of men’s voices coming in five-second bursts from her room, incessantly stopped and replayed (his own voice not exactly his, and with its own unsuspected country burr), she came downstairs and handed over a thick sheaf of foolscap paper. ‘There were some bits I couldn’t be sure of,’ she said. ‘I’ve put guesses in brackets.’

‘Oh, okay,’ said Paul, smiling to suggest he wasn’t worried and quickly taking the document off on the search for his glasses. At a glance it seemed both professional and a serious problem. She had set it out in a narrow column, like a play-script, though the play itself would have been some absurdist ordeal of pauses and cross-purposes. ‘We still have the tapes, don’t we?’ Paul said. ‘We’ll keep everything like that for the archive.’