Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Later on, listening to the tapes, so muffled and unprofessional, and leafing back and forth through the embarrassing half-clarification of the transcript, Paul had a growing gnawing sense that he’d already lost something of great value, though he wasn’t quite sure how he’d done so, or even what it was. Did Jonah know more than he said about Cecil’s friendship with George? It was natural enough that he wouldn’t say, perhaps wouldn’t know how to say; and though he didn’t seem to have much patience for George, or Daphne either, he was hardly going to go on record with the sort of claim Paul was hoping for about people who were still alive, whom he hadn’t seen for sixty-five years… Obscurely related there was the matter of Cecil’s massive tip, more than a month’s wages, and doubled on his second visit. Why had he done that? Because he knew he had been a ‘horror’, perhaps – though what did that word really mean? And why did Jonah remember that, and almost nothing else? Paul wondered if Cecil had bought his silence about something – perhaps so effectively that he had indeed entirely forgotten it. Or was that the matter he had written to him about, at the Mill Hill barracks? Paul felt sick that he hadn’t simply taken that letter. Why on earth would an aristocratic young officer be writing to a private in another regiment? It was striking enough that Cecil had even mentioned Jonah to Freda – Paul knew from other such letters he’d read that upper-class people never mentioned servants, unless it was some figure of great age and eccentric dignity, like a butler or old nanny. And then what seemed to be a manuscript of ‘Two Acres’ itself, glimpsed like something in a dream and, at a glimpse, full of dreamlike variants.

The mortifying thing, as Paul had packed up his tape-recorder, put on his coat and been followed to the front door, was the lingering presence in the air, and in his own tight smile, of Jonah’s rebuff – his wheezy, regretful head-shake of insistence that no, he had no letter, nothing written by Cecil Valance at all; so that Paul had been trapped, in the moment he was leaving, in a kind of impasse. He must have looked shifty, even coyly wounded – some new narrowing of suspicion and rejection had seemed to enter Jonah’s blue eyes. Paul didn’t tell Karen any of this, but it had made the long journey back to Tooting Graveney more uncomfortable than the journey out.

‘Shove?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Fredegond Shove.’

‘Oh, yes!… um…’

‘It’s the Collected Poems .’

‘Aha…’

‘Or… wait a minute, what about this…’ – he handed Paul a precious-looking volume, in a black slipcase: A Funny Kind of Friendship: Letters of Sir Henry Newbolt to Sebastian Stokes. ‘Interest you at all?’

‘Well, actually …’. It just might be interesting, for his own research; and anything he took away could be sold, sooner or later.

‘Private press, we don’t have to do it.’

Paul balanced the stack of books he’d already chosen on the edge of a table scattered with sugar and ground coffee. Here the reek of Gitanes smoke was laced with that of sour milk. In cracked old mugs with comic logos, bluish crusts of mould were forming. The books table itself, ten volumes deep, had a broken leg propped up on other books that presumably would never be reviewed. The squalor was remarkable, but no one who worked here – young men in olive-green corduroy, good-looking women chatting on the phone about Yeats or Poussin – appeared to notice it. They sat in their low cubicles, walled in by rubbish, books and boxes, half-eaten meals, old clothes, and great slews of scrawled-over galley-proofs.

‘So – gay things,’ said Jake, rubbing his hands.

‘That’s right!’ said Paul, and was furious to find himself blushing.

‘We get quite a lot of those these days…’ Jake wore a wedding-ring, but he seemed very glad for Paul to be gay. He was the same age, younger perhaps, clearly proud of working at the TLS , and cheerfully corporate – ‘we do this’, ‘we had that’. Paul imagined sharing his cubicle, high up above the traffic, deciding the fate of books together. ‘Bloomsbury, I suppose…?’

‘Bloomsbury… First World War.’ Paul saw a promising mauve cover deep down, gay books keeping generally to that end of the spectrum, but when he dug it out it was a survey of historic thimbles, which wasn’t quite gay enough. ‘I think there’s a new volume of Virginia Woolf’s Letters coming up…’

‘Ah,’ said Jake, ‘yes, that’s gone, I’m afraid – Norman’s doing it.’

‘Ah, well…’ Paul flinched and nodded, as if at the evident justice of this commission, and wondered who the hell Norman could be; he felt Norman wasn’t his surname. So far Paul had had only two things in the paper, both very cut, and very far back, almost in the Classified section: a piece about Drink-water’s plays, and a regretful demolition of a novel by the retired diplomat Cedric Burrell. This caused a bit of a stir, as Burrell had immediately cancelled his subscription to the TLS , which he’d had since going up to Oxford in 1923. But no one seemed to mind, they were even rather pleased, and Jake had asked him to drop in and ‘look at the books’, if he was ever around. Paul let a day and a half pass before turning up.

‘Remind me what you’re working on?’

‘I’m writing a biography of Cecil Valance,’ said Paul firmly, and the claim sounded foolishly bold in this new setting. But one day, no doubt, his book would appear on the table in front of him. Someone would ask to do it. Maybe Norman would get a crack at it.

‘That’s right, “Two blessèd acres of English ground”.’

‘Among other things…’

‘Didn’t we have something on him recently?’

‘Oh, well the Letters , perhaps? That was a couple of years ago now…’

‘That must be it. So he was gay too, was he?’

‘Again… among other things.’

Again Jake was delighted. ‘They all were, weren’t they?’ he said.

Paul felt he should be a bit more cautious: ‘I mean, he did have affairs with women, but I have the feeling he really preferred boys. That’s one of the things I want to find out.’

An older man, in his fifties perhaps, with oiled black hair and a paisley bow-tie, had emerged from his cubicle to get coffee, and stayed looking at the new books and looking at Paul too, over his half-moon glasses, with a certain air of strategy. Jake said, ‘Robin, this is Paul Bryant, who’s been doing some things for us. Robin Gray.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Robin Gray, in a friendly patrician tone, tucking his chin in. He had the blue eyes of a schoolboy in the face of a don or a judge.

‘Paul’s writing about Cecil Valance, you know, the poet.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Robin glanced to left and right, as if at the enjoyable delicacy of the matter. ‘Indeed, I had heard…’

‘Oh, really?’ said Paul, smiling back, and feeling suddenly uneasy. ‘Goodness!’

Robin said, ‘I believe you bumped into Daphne Jacobs.’ And now he scratched his head, with an air almost of embarrassment.

‘Oh, yes…’ said Paul.

‘And who might Daphne Jacobs be?’ said Jake. ‘One of your golden oldies, Robin?’

Robin gave a curt laugh while still holding Paul’s eye. Paul felt he shouldn’t answer the question for him. He half-wondered himself what the answer would be. ‘Well,’ said Robin, ‘she is now the widowed Mrs Basil Jacobs, but once upon a time she was Lady Valance.’

‘Don’t tell me she was married to Cecil,’ said Jake.

‘Cecil!’ said Robin, as if Jake had a lot to learn. ‘No, no. She was the first wife of Cecil’s younger brother Dudley.’