Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

JT: I think he met him at college. I don’t know much about that.

PB: You didn’t mix much with the Sawle children yourself?

JT: Good grief, no! ( laughs wheezily ) No, no, it wasn’t like that at all.

PB: Did you know Daphne was ( inaudible ) with Cecil?

JT: Well, I don’t recall. We didn’t know about that.

PB: ( pauses ) What hours did you work, do you remember?

JT: Well, I do, I worked six till six, I remember that very well.

PB: But you didn’t sleep at the house?

JT: I went back home. Then up every morning at five! We didn’t mind it, you know! [And here Jonah had gone on, with what seemed to Paul like relief, to a detailed description of a servant’s day – a day in which the principal figures in Paul’s story were oddly seen as mere ineffectual walk-ons.]

When Jonah got out his photo album the taped record became too cryptic altogether for Karen. Paul listened, fast-forwarded for ten seconds, cut in again – murmurs, grunts and rueful laughs like the sounds of some intimacy from which he was now bizarrely excluded. He had stooped over Jonah in his armchair, staying his hand sometimes as he turned the pages. It was a shared task, each of them somehow guiding the other, Jonah still puzzled and touchy about the undue interest Paul was taking in it all. ‘Well, there’s not much to it,’ he said, which was true in a way, though as always the ‘not much’ stared out like a provocation. Those old snapshots, two inches by three – the few Paul had seen of himself as a child were almost as small. Jonah hovered over them and partly concealed them with the oblong magnifying glass he used for reading the paper, the miniature faces swelling and darting as he muttered comments on one or two of them. There was a group photo of the staff at ‘Two Acres’, it must be just before the War, Jonah grinning in a work-coat buttoned at the neck, standing between two taller maids in caps and aprons, with a huge-bosomed woman behind them, who sure enough was the cook; Paul really didn’t recognize the door and window behind, but Jonah was unmistakeable, and so glowingly pretty that the older Jonah seemed to grow self-conscious on his behalf; at sixteen he had a look of being happy in his place as well as slyly curious about what lay outside it. Then there were several of the family. ‘So that was their mother? May I?’ Paul said – steadying the glass: a sturdy-looking woman with a wide appealing face and the guesswork smile that went with shortsightedness. He saw a lot of Daphne in her, not the teenager of the photos but Daphne as he knew her, older than her mother had been then. ‘Freda looks very nice.’ ‘Yes, well,’ said Jonah, ‘she was all right,’ though now her weakness, as he had called it, seemed to swim to the surface under the lens – Hubert Sawle, balding and responsible, standing next to her, surely knew about it too. They had the indefinable air of figures in an ongoing crisis, which their smiles didn’t quite expect to conceal. ‘What about George? – ah, yes, that must be him.’ George played up to the camera, pointing at Daphne, or posing just behind her with a silly face. Daphne herself had the vulnerable look of a girl hoping to get away for longer than five minutes with the pretence of being grown-up. She sat smiling graciously under a large hat with a silk flower on the side. Then George crept up, like a villain in a silent film, and made her jump. ‘Now is that…? I’ve got an idea,’ said Jonah, and let Paul take the glass again and square it over the cornermost snap – two young men almost level with the ground in deckchairs, George in a boater, the other’s face cast in primitive photographic shadow by the brim of his hat, save for a gleam of a nose and a smile. ‘That’s your young man, I think, isn’t it?’ said Jonah – really it could have been anybody, but Paul said, ‘Yes, of course it is…!’ and when he had done so he tingled at the certainty that it was.

He hadn’t expected Jonah to have such a hoard; it seemed the mysterious but omnipresent Harry Hewitt had given Hubert a camera, and Hubert had kept on dutifully taking snapshots and presenting them to all and sundry. Jonah showed him a photograph of the two men together; under the glass his square brown fingers half-hid what he was pointing out. ‘I see… yes…’ – Hubert was quite different here, peeping at the camera, a cigarette held uncertainly just by his trouser-pocket, while beside him, with an arm round his shoulder, as if escorting him towards some challenge he had been shyly avoiding, stood a darker, rather older man, very smartly dressed, with a long gaunt face, large ears, and a wide moustache drawn out into uncertain points. ‘So that was the man you worked for after the War…’ There was something so evidently gay about the photograph that the question sounded insinuating to himself, and perhaps to Jonah too. Later on he found the place in the transcript where he’d come back to questions about Hewitt.

JT: Mr Hewitt was a friend of the Sawles. He was a great friend of Mr Hubert. So I knew him already, in a way. He’d always been kind to me. He lived in Harrow Weald ( unclear: Paddocks? )

PB: I’m sorry?

JT: That’s what his house was called.

PB: Oh!

JT: Well, it’s an old folks’ home now. The old dears are in there! ( chuckles wheezily )

PB: Right. A big house, then.

JT: He was an art collector, wasn’t he, Harry Hewitt. I believe he left it all to a museum, would it be the Victoria and Albert Museum?

PB: He didn’t have children?

JT: Ooh no, no. He was a bachelor gentleman. He was always very generous to me.

Then, over the page, Jonah had changed his servant’s coat for lumpy serge and a too-large peaked cap, and in a line of recruits all taller than himself looked even younger than he had two years before, the smile of curiosity now a crooked look of childish worry. Paul straightened up, gazed down abstractedly for a minute at the neat old man with the album on his knee; then bent down again into his sharp clean odour of shaving-soap and hair-tonic.

In a minute, Jonah had to go to the loo, which was upstairs, and with his new hip was likely to take him a while. When he was safely halfway up, Paul stopped the tape, mooched across the room, glanced amiably through the window at the front garden and the lane, then lifted the paperweight from the folder on the table by Jonah’s chair, looked over his own letter again with interest, as it were from the recipient’s point of view, and with one finger raised the cardboard cover. Some brittle and sun-browned newspaper cuttings, words lost at the corners and folds, brown envelopes rubbed and softened with use. These must be Jonah’s demob papers. Then a prize certificate for carnations that he’d won in 1965. Then there was a folded review of a school play. A photograph from the local paper of what must be Gillian’s wedding. It struck him poor Jonah didn’t have enough treasures for separate folders – everything precious must be in here together. Paul leafed through the papers in loose groups. It was all just family stuff, of the most routine kind, very distant and pathetic, but put here ready perhaps, in the belief the interview was to be about Jonah’s own life. Then laying it all back again, and having a last look as he did so, Paul saw a large brown envelope addressed to Hubert Sawle Esq., ‘Two Acres’, the address struck through in ink: he lifted it out with a sudden heaviness of heart. Peering into it quickly but intently, half-pulling out the top two or three sheets, he saw letters, one signed H. O. Sawle, so perhaps these were just Jonah’s scraps and memorabilia from that time. ‘Wishing you good luck!’ – May 1915… in large backward-leaning writing. And then under it he found himself staring, in a sudden accusing rush of colour to his face, at a quite different hand, the hand he was only starting to know apart from all others, like the hand of a new lover. A tiny envelope, addressed to Pte J. Trickett, at the Middlesex Regiment barracks in Mill Hill. The large black postmark was smudged, but the year stood out, ‘1916’. Setting down the other papers, he was about to open it when he saw with astonishment that he had turned over something else in Cecil’s writing, several sheets of paper, torn in half, and covered in densely written and corrected verse. His fingers were trembling as he lifted the first one, which seemed to oscillate under his eyes like something out of focus. He knew it and he didn’t know it. He knew it so well that he couldn’t think what it was, and then when he understood he found it wasn’t what he knew. ‘Hearty, lusty, true and bold…’ The lavatory upstairs flushed, a sequence of muted sighs and whines spread through the plumbing system of the house; then he heard Jonah’s careful but not unduly slow tread coming down. It was a teetering five seconds of bewildered indecision. He squared up the papers, closed the folder, and set the paperweight back on top, calling up his mental photograph of how it had been before he touched it; he was completely confident it looked just as it had – even the paperweight was the right way round; but when Jonah came back in his eye seemed to go straight to it, and Paul wondered if the final impression wasn’t so meticulously accurate as to be in some way unconvincing.