Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

‘Oh, god yes,’ said Robin, suddenly disgusted by his cigarette, stubbing it out and folding it under his thumb in the ashtray. ‘Basil wasn’t hopeless like that, he was much more conventional. I imagine Daphne felt she’d had enough of temperamental artists.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He was a businessman – he had a small factory that made something, I can’t remember what, a sort of… washer or something.’

‘Right.’

‘Anyway, he went bust. He had a daughter from an earlier marriage, and they went to live with her. I think it was all rather a nightmare.’

‘Oh, yes, Sue.’

‘Sue, exactly…’ said Robin, with a cautious smile. ‘You seem to know most of the family.’

‘Well…’ said Paul. ‘They’re not actually all that useful when it comes to Cecil. But it’s good to know they’re on my side.’ He found he had stood up, smiling, as if to go, and only then said, with a pitying shake of the head, ‘I mean, what do you think really went on between Daphne and Cecil?’

Robin laughed drily, as if to say there were limits. Paul knew already that information was a form of property – people who had it liked to protect it, and enhance its value by hints and withholdings. Then, perhaps, they could move on to enjoying the glow of self-esteem and surrender in telling what they knew. ‘Well,’ he said, and went slightly pink, under the pressure of his own discretion.

‘I mean, would you like to have a drink some time? I don’t want to bother you now.’ Paul thought a discreet encounter, something with almost the colour of a date, might appeal to Robin. He saw, because it was a habit he had himself, elsewhere, how his eyes paused a fraction of a second in each upward or sideways sweep at the convergence of his black-jeaned legs. But Robin hesitated, as if to grope round some other obstacle.

‘You see, I don’t drink during Lent,’ he said. ‘But after that…’ – with a suggestion he drank like a fish through the rest of the liturgical year. ‘Ah, Jake…’ and there was Jake again, standing behind them, with the twinkle of someone detecting a secret.

‘I hope I’m not breaking something up.’

‘Not a bit,’ said Robin suavely.

‘I’ll give you a ring if I may,’ said Paul, ‘- after Easter!’

Jake led Paul back to have his books entered in the system, an unfollowable procedure of typed slips and cards. ‘I’ve just had a word with the Editor,’ he said. ‘We wondered if you’d be interested in covering this for us?’ He passed him a sheet of paper – ‘Ignore that stuff at the top’: two other names with question-marks and phone-numbers, heavily inked over during phone-calls surely, which as surely had not borne fruit. ‘You’d have to stay overnight – it would just be seven hundred words for the Commentary pages.’ It was hard to take in, Balliol College, Oxford, a conference, dinner, the Warton Professor of English… a shiver of panic went through him, which he turned into a breathy laugh.

‘Well, if you think I’d be right for it.’

‘You’re not a Balliol man, are you?’

‘Ooh, no!’ said Paul with a little shudder. ‘Not I. Well, thank you – ah, I see, Dudley Valance is speaking.’

‘That’s partly what made me wonder – I didn’t know he was still alive.’

‘Not in good health, I’m afraid,’ said Paul.

‘You must know him…’

‘A bit, you know… He and Linette live in Spain for most of the year.’ He felt the prickle of the uncanny again, the secret sign, the reasserted intention that he should write his book. There were times in one’s life that one only knew as one passed through them, the decisive moments, when one saw that the decisions had been taken for one.

Jake walked him to the door of the office and they stood talking there a little longer, but had to move aside for a big fat boy in jeans and a T-shirt pushing a trolley stacked high with tightly bound bales of newsprint; he threw one down with a pleasant thump on to the floor. ‘Read all about it!’ he said, and watched with a curious cynical smile as they reacted.

‘Ah, yes… now…’ said Jake, showing off, but charmingly, to entertain his guest. One or two others got up and circled, looking for scissors, a sharp knife, and ignoring the delivery boy, who wheeled back into the corridor, still smiling thinly. In a moment the plastic tape was snipped, and the top copy plucked up and turned and presented to Paul with a casual flourish: ‘For you!’ – the new TLS – Friday’s TLS , ready two days early, ‘hot off the press’ someone said, enjoying his reactions, though in fact the paper was cool to the touch, even slightly damp. There was a cursory checking, in which Paul politely shared – that pictures had come out, that a last-minute correction had been made – while an enviable sense of professional satisfaction seemed to fill the air and then (since this momentous occurrence was a weekly routine) to fade almost at once as people went back to their desks and focused again on issues weeks and months ahead. Paul said goodbye to Jake, and went away with the clear idea of more such meetings already in his mind.

On the way along the dreary corridor he turned off into the Gents and had only just unzipped when he heard the yawn of the door behind him and a second later a half-pleased, half-embarrassed ‘Aha…!’ He glanced round. Slightly disconcertingly, Robin Gray didn’t follow the normal etiquette but came to the urinal right next to Paul’s, leaving three further stalls untenanted. There was a droll murmur and frowning fidget as he got himself going, a certain sturdiness of stance, as if on a rolling ship, and a quick candid gaze, friendly but businesslike, at Paul’s own progress on the other side of the porcelain partition. Then looking ahead, he said, ‘You were quite right, by the way, in what you said earlier.’

‘Oh… really?’ said Paul, glancing at him, a little confused. ‘What was that?’

‘About Cecil Valance and boys.’

Now it was Paul’s turn to say, ‘Aha!… Well, I thought it must be.’

Robin tucked in his chin, with his air of heavily flagged discretion. ‘Not for now, I think.’ He gave a cough of a laugh. ‘But I believe you’ll find it amusing. Well, I’ll tell you all about it when we meet.’ And with that plump promise he zipped himself up and went back to the office.

Paul sauntered down the broad stairs and into the lobby of the Times building with a smile on his face. He had A Funny Kind of Friendship in his briefcase and a feeling of something much funnier – the first sense of a welcome from the literary family, of curtains held back, doors opening into half-seen rooms full of oddities and treasures that seemed virtually normal to the people who lived in them. In the long lobby, belatedly gleaming with afternoon light, low tables between leather armchairs were spread with copies of today’s Times , and Sun , and the three Times supplements, thrilling evidence of what went on upstairs. He nodded goodbye as he passed the uniformed receptionist. The revolving door from the street brought in a courier in helmet and whistling leggings, red URGENT stickers on the packet in his hand; Paul stepped into the still-revolving quadrant and emerged on to the pavement with a graciously busy half-smile at the passers-by who would never have access to these mysteries. He kept his copy of the day-after-tomorrow’s TLS under his arm, which he wanted very much to be seen with. He didn’t think the people in the street here were getting the point of it – but back in the North Reading-Room of the British Library he felt it might stir a good deal of envy and conjecture.

Paul trotted down the long stone staircase and out into the quad with a preoccupied frown and a curious feeling of imposture. Though old enough to be a don, he was visited in waves by the nervous ignorance of a freshman. He skirted the lawn respectfully, beneath ranged Gothic windows, clutching his briefcase and picturing the evening to come, with its sequence of challenges, drinks in the Senior Common Room, dinner in Hall, social contacts and collisions all the more daunting for the tacit codes that college life was steeped in. But at some point, he was almost sure, tonight or perhaps tomorrow, he would get his chance. Of course it was still possible the old boy wouldn’t turn up; at the age of eighty-four he had excuses readily to hand. With excited foreboding Paul pictured his dark autocratic face, as he knew it from photographs, and when he went up the three steps into the gatehouse there he was – under the arch, by the porter’s lodge, in a dark overcoat, leaning on a stick.