Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘I should explain, Robin knows everyone,’ said Jake, but just then he was called to the phone at the far end of the office, leaving the two of them in their unexpected new relation. They went into the semi-privacy of Robin’s cubicle, where he set down his coffee on the desk; unlike the others he kept a china cup and saucer, and there was a degree of order in the books, a parade of Loeb classics, archaeology, ancient history. On the radiator a brown towel and swimming-trunks were spread out to dry. There was a strong sense of a bachelor life, of rigorous routine. Robin shifted papers from a second chair. ‘I’m the ancient history editor,’ he said, ‘which everyone thinks is very apt.’ Paul smiled cautiously as he sat down; beside him was a shelf of Debrett’s and Who’s Who , and those eerily useful volumes of Who Was Who , giving the hobbies and phone-numbers of the long dead. Late one night he and Karen had rung Sebastian Stokes himself: a moment’s silence and then the busily negative drone of non-existence. Of course you had to convert the old exchanges to the new numbers – they might have got it wrong. ‘Don’t lean back in that chair, by the way, or you’ll land on the floor.’

‘I was a bit worried about… Daphne ,’ Paul said, sitting forward, making his own thoughtful claim on knowing her. ‘No one seemed to be looking after her.’

‘I’m sure you were kind to her,’ said Robin, a touch cautiously.

‘Well, I didn’t do much… you know… Have you known her a long time?’

Robin stared and grunted as if at the effort it would take to explain properly, and at last said, very slowly, ‘Daphne’s second husband’s half-sister married my father’s elder brother.’

‘Right… right! … so…’ – Paul gazed at the world beyond the dirty window, the top floor of a pub across the Gray’s Inn Road.

‘So Daphne is my step-aunt by marriage.’

‘Exactly,’ said Paul. ‘Well I’m very glad to meet you. You see, I’m hoping to interview her, but she hasn’t replied to a letter I sent her in November, which is three months ago now…’

‘Well, you know she’s been ill,’ said Robin, tucking his chin in again.

Paul winced. ‘I was afraid that might be the reason.’

‘She has this macular problem.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘It means she can’t really see – her sight’s very bad. And as you may know she also has emphysema.’

‘Doesn’t that come from smoking?’

‘I fear they both do,’ said Robin, with a sigh at his own ashtray.

‘Is she getting better?’

‘Well, I’m not sure one ever really gets better.’

Paul had a sickening feeling she might smoke herself to death before he’d had a chance to speak to her. ‘I was surprised to see she still smoked, after Corinna… you know.’

‘Mmm.’ Robin looked at him keenly. ‘So you knew Corinna, did you?’

‘Oh, very much so,’ said Paul, noting as if from the corner of his eye how indulgently he thought of her now that she wasn’t there to expose him and put him down; she’d become a useful element in his own plans. ‘That was how I met Daphne, you see. I worked under Leslie Keeping for several years.’

‘Oh, you were in the bank,’ said Robin, ‘I see,’ and squared his lighter and cigarette-packet on the table, as if making some subtle calculation. ‘I wonder if you were there when Leslie died?’

‘No, I’d already left.’

‘Right, right.’

‘But I heard all about it, of course.’ It was the most grimly sensational piece of news that Paul had had anything to do with, and he felt, for all its horror, a keen attachment to it.

‘All that hit Daphne very hard, of course.’

‘Well, of course…’ Paul waited respectfully. ‘I first met them all in 1967,’ he said, ‘though I’m not sure Daphne remembered that when I saw her again.’

‘Her memory is certainly somewhat… um… tactical,’ said Robin.

Paul giggled, ‘Yes, I see… but I wondered, she’s not living by herself, is she?’

‘No, no – her son Wilfrid, from her first marriage – do you know? – is living with her.’

‘I do know Wilfrid,’ said Paul, and instantly pictured his strange determined amorous dance in the Corn Hall at Foxleigh, the first and last time he’d met him. He couldn’t see him being a very practical nurse or housekeeper. ‘And what about her son by her second marriage?’ Robin shook his head rapidly, a sort of shudder. ‘Okay…!’ Paul laughed. ‘And the Keeping boys, they don’t see her?’

‘Oh, John’s far too busy,’ said Robin, firmly but perhaps ironically. ‘And you know Julian has become a drop-out …’ – with an air of marvelling hearsay, like a magistrate. ‘Of course before long, Wilfrid will inherit the title.’

‘Yes, of course…’

‘He’ll be the fourth baronet.’ They looked ponderingly at each other, then laughed in minor embarrassment as if at some misunderstanding. Paul felt there was a certain sexual undertone to the chat, even to the way they’d quickly got off on this topic amid the business of the office.

‘To be absolutely frank – ’ said Robin, and here he did reach for his cigarettes, and kept Paul waiting uneasily while he lit one and inhaled and fixed him again with a blue gaze over the top of his spectacles, ‘I think Daphne was rather put out by your review of her book in the New Statesman .’ He sounded a bit stern about it himself. ‘She felt you’d rather gone for her.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Paul, with a guilty face, though a prickle of pride at his own sharpness very slightly offset the lurching feeling he’d been tactless and clumsy. ‘The piece was heavily cut, I did tell her that.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘They took out a lot of the nice things I said.’ He pictured her in the taxi to Paddington, and heard her saying how some reviewers had been horrid. To pretend she hadn’t seen his review seemed now to be dignified good manners of a crushingly high order. She had managed to reproach him and excuse him all at the same time. ‘It was supposed to be a bit of a fan letter.’

‘I’m not sure it read like that,’ said Robin. ‘Though you were by no means the worst.’

‘I certainly wasn’t.’ (‘Unhappy fantasies of a rejected wife’ had been Derek Messenger’s verdict in the Sunday Times .)

Robin sipped at his coffee and drew on his cigarette, as if measuring regrets and pondering possibilities. He was indefinably in his element, and Paul sensed it was a stroke of luck to have met him, and if he could get him on his side he might get Daphne too. ‘I must say, I enjoyed the book,’ Robin said, with a further head-shake of frankness.

‘No, I enjoyed it too. There were things I wanted to know more about, of course…’ Paul gave him an almost sly smile, but asked something harmless first: ‘I’m not clear really who Basil Jacobs was.’

‘Oh, Basil’ – Robin sounded impatient himself with this tame question. ‘Well, Basil was certainly the nicest of her husbands, though in a way as… as hopeless as the others.’

‘Oh, dear! Was Revel Ralph hopeless too?’

Robin pulled on his cigarette as if to steady himself. He said, ‘Revel was completely impossible.’

Paul grinned – ‘Really? You can’t have known him, surely.’

‘Well…’ Robin toyed with this flattery; ‘I was born in 1919, so you can work it out.’

‘Mm, I see!’ said Paul, which he didn’t altogether – was Robin claiming to have tangled with Revel himself? Revel was only forty-one when he was killed, so doubtless still pretty active, as it were, and Robin he could see just about as a naughty young soldier – it was too much to ask about.