Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

Paul nearly greeted him, gasped and suppressed a smile as he went past; his heart was racing at the sudden opportunity – he turned and then stood near him, at an angle, as though waiting for someone else. Awful of course if it wasn’t him; but no, the wide, hawkish face was unmistakable, stretched rather than furrowed by age, the full mouth a little thinner and down-turned, impressive dark eyes staring ahead, grey hair sleeked back into curls around the collar. Paul stepped aside to look at the glassed-in notice-boards, over which his own slightly smirking face floated in reflection. The old man remained immobile, only poking now and then at the flagstones with the rubber tip of his stick. He was evidently someone for whom arrangements had always been made. Paul cleared his throat and paced around, choosing his words. Through the inner window of the lodge, before the dark wall of pigeon-holes, he could see a woman talking to the porter. Surely, Linette – with thick stiff hair, an improbable auburn, mingling with the upturned collar of her fox-fur jacket. A hard, good-looking face, thoroughly made up, and a manner he knew at once, from its tight smiles and frowns, of getting people to do things. The porter made a brief phone-call, and then came out, opening the door for her, and bringing her suitcase. ‘Good evening, Sir Dudley! The Master’s coming down himself to meet you’ – a flourish in which Paul heard a doubling-up of respect, of everyday loyalty to the Master and deference to the visitor. Linette had now made an approach impossible, and Paul went to look for his imaginary friend by the gate on to Broad Street. He could hear the tone but not quite the words of the muttered conversation between the Valances. In front of him, students cycling past, university life rattling on although it was the vacation. In a minute there were calls and wheezy laughs behind him, and as Paul turned round he saw a tiny grey-haired man in a gown come whirling up the steps from the quad and greet his guests – not exactly as old friends but on the footing of some clear shared understanding, which seemed to smile out of his keen, rather spiritual face. Sir Dudley said, ‘You needn’t have come down yourself,’ in a voice of chuffing, almost supercilious grandeur, and his wife said, ‘Good evening, Master!’ which for all its submissiveness showed she had got what she wanted.

Off they went, the Master offering Sir Dudley an arm on the steps. ‘What year did you go down?’ he said, and Paul heard, ‘Nineteen fourteen, you see… I never took my degree… I got married…’ Lady Valance laughed for the Master, as though to show how little this lack of a degree had mattered, and perhaps to indulge the mention of this earlier marriage. Well, they must have been together for fifty years themselves, after the mere nine or ten with Daphne, whom Paul thought of now more fondly. What a contrast – he pictured her in her shabby mac and hat, in the place of this highly preserved woman, who still moved with the dawdling strut of a model. Paul watched them from the steps. Now two muscular boys in white rowing shorts burst out from a doorway, and slowed and ran on the spot to let the Master and his guests go by; then they were off, coming up past Paul in a rush and out through the gate into the street. For once it was the old man who held his interest, and seemed in fact almost miraculous, from the lordly jabs of his stick to the yap of his vowels. As they went off through an arch on the far side of the quad, Dudley still visibly a casualty of the Battle of Loos, other less palpable things seemed to hover about him, which were famous phrases of his brother, in Georgian Poetry , or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations . Paul felt, in some idiotic but undeniable way, that he had very nearly seen Cecil himself.

He went on, as planned, along Broad Street, to look at the bookshops. The rowing boys had already vanished into the thickening light of the late afternoon – the sun in the west struck right along the street, and dazzled the people who were coming towards him, leaving him, a mere looming silhouette, free to examine them closely. As he loitered around the biography table in Blackwell’s, picking up the expensive new books and looking at their indexes and acknowledgements, he had Dudley’s hunched but handsome figure on his mind, and was starting to hear answers to his questions in that extraordinary voice. Paul thought he would like his own acknowledgements page to begin with thanks to his subject’s brother, ideally perhaps by that stage ‘the late Sir Dudley Valance’, who ‘gave so generously of his time’ and ‘made his archives available without questions or conditions’. The author of this new life of Percy Slater had even been ‘welcomed warmly into the family home’ – something Paul now sensed was less likely to happen in his case.

He had always opened such books at the grey-black seams that marked the inserts of pictures. His daydreams for his own book often dwelt on this last, almost decorative addition to the work – the quickly passed-over photos of unappealing forebears, the birthplace or childhood residence, the subject sharpening into focus in his teens, the momentarily confusing captions – lower right , opposite , over -, one or two of the pictures thought worthy of a full page, the defining portraits. Would Dudley ever make such things available to him? Paul felt some kind of subterfuge might be necessary. Percy Slater had lived into his seventies so there was all the proliferation of wives and children, snapshots from Kenya and Japan, a late picture in doctoral robes of this very university, chatting to Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor. None of that for Cecil, of course, just a photograph of his tomb, perhaps.

And there, at the end of the table, in a sober brown jacket with the title in red and yellow, was The Letters of Evelyn Waugh , a book with an aura, it seemed to Paul, and fat with confidence of its own interest – he looked at something else first, just to savour and focus his anticipation, and then after a minute casually picked up the heavy volume and hopped backwards through the index in his now systematic way – Valance, then Sawle, then Ralph. Two mentions of Dudley, one of Cecil, which turned out to be in the footnote identifying Dudley as ‘younger brother of the First World War poet’. He coveted it, but the price, £15, a week’s rent – hardly possible. A familiar but still extraordinary calm came over him. He made his way into the History department, chose a huge book on medieval England, itself part of a massively scholarly series, pale blue wrappers, Clarendon Press, price £40, and a minute later took it off upstairs. In his bag he had a compliments slip from Jake at the TLS , with his name on and the scribbled message, ‘800 words by end of March’, and he tucked it into the front of the book as he went. Stopping at a mezzanine where Classics were displayed, he got out his notebook to write down a title, and squatting down to a low shelf behind a table he pencilled three or four page numbers and a question-mark on the fly-leaf of his volume of Plantagenet history. From here it was a further turn of the stairs up to the secondhand department, where he asked the bearded young man if they bought review copies in good condition. The Plantagenets were given a quick glance, the review-slip almost subliminally noted, the book checked for any devaluing marginalia. ‘We can only offer half-price,’ said the man. ‘Oh, really?’ said Paul, chewing his cheek – ‘well, okay, fine, I guess, if that’s your standard practice. Sorry… let me just take that review-slip…’ The item was written in a ledger, the book itself translated to a trolley of new acquisitions, and two clean £10 notes handed over. A few minutes later he strolled back into college with The Letters of Evelyn Waugh in his briefcase and a happy surplus of £5 in his back pocket.