The Stranger's Child

  ‘Ah, yes!’ said Paul, laughing nervously, and not sure where Blackheath was – he pictured something like the New Forest. He saw that just behind them in the edge of the flower-bed, the broken trough was sitting, its end apparently cemented back on and hidden by some quickly arranged nasturtiums; on his hand too the graze had scabbed and been picked back to pink. He said to Peter, ‘Jenny says you’re playing tonight.’ It was magical as well as completely straightforward having him just a foot away. He had a commonplace smell of smoke mixed with some unusual aftershave that made Paul confusedly imagine being held by him and kissed on the top of his head.

  ‘I could have done with a run-through too, god knows,’ Peter said. ‘We bashed through it at school, but she’s ten times as good as me.’

  ‘I shouldn’t smoke if I’m singing,’ said Sue, opening her little evening bag.

  Peter squashed his own cigarette under foot before getting out his lighter for her. ‘I don’t know the Bliss songs,’ he said.

  ‘I’m only doing the Valance,’ said Sue. ‘Mm, thanks . . . It’s Five Songs opus something, but we’re just doing the one, thank god.’

  ‘Aha . . . ! Which poem, I wonder?’

  ‘I expect you’ll know – it’s about a hammock. He’s supposed to have written it for Daphne . . . apparently!’

  ‘I must ask her about Cecil Valance,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve just been doing him with my Fifth Form.’

  ‘Well, you should. She seems to think he wrote pretty well everything for her.’

  ‘Do you think she’d come and talk to the boys?’

  ‘She might, I suppose. I don’t know if she’s ever been back to Corley, has she? It will all be in the famous memoirs, of course.’

  ‘Oh, is she writing them?’ said Peter, putting his hand on Paul’s arm for a long moment, as if not to lose him, with talk about strangers, and surely conveying something rather more. In fact, Paul said,

  ‘She’s been writing them for yonks.’

  ‘Oh, you know about it,’ said Sue.

  ‘Well, a bit . . .’ – and then: ‘Isn’t it the poem that starts, “A larch tree at your head, and at your feet / A weeping willow”?’

  ‘You do know,’ said Sue again, sounding slightly put out.

  ‘I’d better get you to talk to the Fifth Form!’ said Peter, the hint of mockery in his tone dissolving in his long, brown-eyed gaze, as if he too felt excitements teeming softly around and ahead of them. It was a look of a kind Paul had never had before, and in his happiness and alarm he found he had completely finished his drink.

  ‘Well, supper, perhaps,’ said Sue, in a way that made Paul think she’d become aware of something.

  ‘May we join you, sir?’ said Peter.

  George Sawle’s sunburnt face settled into a vague smile as he gestured at the chairs. In the shade, or by now the midge-haunted shadow, of the weeping beech, it was the most secluded of the supper-tables. The old boy seemed almost to be hiding. ‘I’m Daphne’s brother,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I know who you are,’ said Peter, with his suggestive chuckle, putting down his plate next to him. ‘I’m Peter Rowe. I teach at Corley Court.’

  ‘Oh, goodness . . . !’ said old Sawle, in a tone that suggested there was a lot to be said on the subject, if one were ever to get round to it. Paul grinned but didn’t know if it would be right to say what an honour it was to meet him. He’d sometimes seen John Betjeman in Wantage but had never actually met an author before. The Everyday History, with its old-fashioned pictures of strip-farming and horse-drawn transport, had come out some time before the War. It was slightly magical that G. F. Sawle and Madeleine Sawle should even be alive, much less battering round the country in an Austin Princess. Paul sat down next to Peter – it seemed this was what they were doing, it was so absurdly new and easy, and he was trying to keep his head as they sallied around together. This large glass of white wine was clearly going to help. ‘We met earlier – I’m Paul Bryant.’ The chair lurched and sank slightly under him in the rough grass.

  ‘Yes, indeed . . .’ said Sawle, nodding and then pulling a little shyly at the longer white tufts of beard under his chin. He quizzed the salmon and new potatoes on their plates through his thick-lensed spectacles.

  ‘Are you not eating, Professor?’ said Peter.

  ‘Ah, my wife, I believe . . .’ said Sawle, and after a moment looked round. ‘Here she comes . . . !’ There seemed to be some fleeting invitation to find them comical as a couple, in their devotion or their eccentricity.

  Paul looked out and saw Madeleine Sawle stepping warily across the patio with a plate in each hand, and then working towards them among the white-clothed tables where other guests were bagging seats and saying, ‘My dear, of course you may . . . !’ to the people they had just been trying to avoid. The whole social tone was new to him, the top notes of the upper class above a more general mix, with one or two loud local voices, and he was glad to be hidden away here, under the raised flounce of the old beech-tree. He felt the evening’s quickening swell of good luck, and with it the usual suspicion that it was all a mistake – surely any minute Mrs Keeping would send him back to stand by the gate.

  ‘We’re tucked under this obliging tree, dear, just as you suggested,’ said George Sawle, very clearly, as Madeleine set down the plates with a flicker of a frown, and opened her bag to take out the cutlery she’d transported in it. Paul was struck again by the bold oddity of the red ear-rings flanking her square mannish face. ‘You’ve met, um . . .’

  Paul and Peter introduced themselves – Peter smiled and said ‘Peter Rowe’, warmly and almost forgivingly, as if it were a delightful fact Mrs Sawle might perhaps have been expected to know. ‘I’m Paul Bryant,’ said Paul, and felt he made a slenderer claim. She tilted her head – of course she was rather deaf.

  ‘Peter . . . and Paul,’ she said, with amiable sternness. Paul was pleased at the coupling, though he felt like a school-child under her gaze. He wondered if the Sawles themselves had children. She seemed very much the helpmeet of the Everyday History, something industrious and educational about her. Paul saw them toiling together in an oak-beamed interior, with perhaps a hand-loom of their own in the background. Otherwise he knew nothing about who she was or what she had done. He thought it was a bit odd that the Sawles were hiding away here, and not joining the rest of the family for dinner. ‘Are you old friends?’

  ‘Oh, we are,’ said Peter, ‘we met about fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘Well, a couple of weeks . . .’ Paul said, laughing, slightly put out.

  ‘Of Daphne’s, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry – not yet,’ said Peter, ‘though of course I’m hoping to be.’ He smiled his way broadly through these bits of silliness, and Paul found his admiration for him wrapped up with just a tinge of embarrassment. ‘I like her enormously’ – and at the same moment, as he sat forward to start eating, Paul felt Peter’s knee push roughly against his own and stay there, almost as though he thought it was a strut of the table. His heart was beating as he edged his knee away, just an inch. Peter’s moved with it, he shifted forwards a bit in his chair to keep the contact more easily. His smile showed he was enjoying that as well as everything else. The warmth transfused from leg to leg and quickly travelled on up to lovely but confusing effect – Paul hunched forward himself and spread his napkin in his lap. He felt a hollow ache, a kind of stored and treasured hunger, in his chest and down his thighs. He found his hand was shaking, and he had another big gulp from his glass, smiling thinly as if in a trance of respectful pleasure at the company and the occasion.

  ‘Oh, Daphne . . . well, of course,’ Madeleine Sawle was saying, and gave Peter a sparring look as she settled next to her husband, leaving an empty chair between herself and Paul. ‘You’re not in the theatre?’ she said.

  ‘It sometimes feels like it,’ said Peter, ‘but no, I’m a schoolmaster.’

  ‘He teaches at Corley, dear,’ said George.

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ said Mr
s Sawle, and tutted as she spread her napkin and checked her husband’s readiness to start eating. ‘I’ve not been to Corley in forty years. I expect it makes a rather better school than it did a private house.’

  ‘Ghastly pile,’ said the Professor.

  ‘Ooh . . . !’ said Peter, flushing slightly in humorous protest, which Sawle didn’t notice.

  ‘We used to go there, of course,’ said Mrs Sawle, ‘when Daphne was married to Dudley, as I expect you know.’

  ‘Not a very happy time,’ said the Professor, in a blandly confidential tone.

  ‘It wasn’t a very happy time,’ said Mrs Sawle, ‘or I fear a very happy marriage,’ and gave a firm smile at her plate.

  Peter said, ‘I’ve just been reading the Stokes memoir of Cecil Valance – it strikes me you must have known him, sir.’

  ‘Oh, I knew Cecil,’ said Sawle.

  ‘You knew him very well, George,’ said Mrs Sawle. ‘That was the last time we were there, to meet Sebastian Stokes, when he was getting his materials together.’

  ‘Mm, I remember all too clearly,’ said old Sawle. ‘Dudley got us pie-eyed and we danced all night in the hall.’

  Mrs Sawle said, ‘It was on the very eve of the General Strike! I remember we talked of little else.’

  ‘Do you know this book?’ Peter said, jiggling his knee now and moving his calf too against Paul’s.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Paul, finding it very hard to concentrate on talking or eating; he felt sure the Sawles must be able to see what was going on; and anyway, he might know ‘Soldiers Dreaming’ by heart, but they came at things from another angle here, out of a world of family gossip and connections. He held his leg firm against Peter’s, which seemed to matter more. He reached out again and drank solemnly from his glass to cover his confusion, thinking at the same time he shouldn’t drink so fast, but feeling too there was something fated and irresistible about it. Across the party, half-hidden by the trailing fronds of the tree above, candles had started to flicker, at each little table, against the half-light. In a minute, young Julian appeared, as if raising a curtain, with a lit white candle in a jar held in front of him. ‘Here you are, Great-Uncle George!’ he said, reaching over Madeleine’s shoulder to put the jar on the table, his own sleek face, brown eyes, glossy fringe, lit up by the quickly settling flame. Paul felt a new pressure of attention in Peter’s knee, as they all gazed up fondly at him. ‘Are you all right out here – you should be in with Gran,’ he said. His voice, at seventeen, still had a boy’s rawness. He stood smiling at them with that cheerful little consciousness of behaving well, to his worthy old relations, and light-heartedly clinging to his decorum after quite a few drinks.

  ‘Oh, we don’t expect special treatment, you know,’ said George Sawle in a gently ironic voice.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s just me,’ said Peter smoothly, watching Julian go, ‘but I thought that Stokes thing was almost unreadable.’

  Sawle gave a cluck of a laugh. ‘Deplorable publication altogether.’

  ‘Oh, I’m glad I’m not wrong.’

  ‘What . . . !’ – old Sawle looked at Peter with some enviable shared understanding. It was a whole way of talking that had Oxford and Cambridge in it, to Paul’s ears.

  ‘There hasn’t been a proper Life, has there?’ Peter said.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s enough for a full biography,’ Sawle said. ‘To be perfectly honest, I have old Cecil somewhat on my conscience.’

  ‘Well, you’ve no need to, George,’ said his wife.

  Sawle cleared his throat. ‘I’m supposed to have turned in an edition of his letters quite some time ago.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Peter.

  ‘Well, Louisa asked me originally, oh goodness, some time after the War – his mother.’

  ‘She must have lived to a great age, then?’ Peter said.

  ‘Well, she was in her eighties, I suppose,’ said Sawle, with the faint touchiness of someone getting on himself. ‘She was a very difficult woman. She made a sort of cult of Cecil. There was a very awkward occasion when I was asked down, it was rather like when the poems were being done, to talk about it all. She wasn’t living at Corley Court any more by then, she’d moved to a house in Stanford-in-the-Vale. I went for the weekend. “Let’s lay them all out, and decide what ought to go in,” she said. Of course no editor could work under such conditions. I knew I’d have to wait till she was dead.’

  ‘Wait as long as you like, dear,’ said Mrs Sawle. ‘You expect too much of yourself. And I can’t believe anyone’s crying out for these letters.’

  ‘Oh, some of them are marvellous – the War letters, love. But Louisa had no idea of course of the sort of thing Cecil wrote in letters to his men friends.’

  ‘Is there some quite racy stuff?’

  Sawle gave a fond apologetic look to his wife, but didn’t exactly answer. ‘I think all sorts of stuff’s going to come out, don’t you. I was talking just now to someone about Strachey.’

  ‘You must have known him too, I suppose?’ Peter said.

  ‘Oh, a bit, you know.’

  ‘Didn’t really care for Strachey, did you, George?’ said Madeleine Sawle, again looking quizzically over her husband’s food.

  ‘There’s this young chap . . . Hopkirk.’ Sawle looked at her.

  ‘Holroyd,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s about to tell all about old Lytton.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t wait,’ said Peter.

  ‘Mark Holroyd,’ said Madeleine firmly.

  ‘He came to see me. Very young, charming, clever, and extremely tenacious’ – Sawle laughed as though to admit he’d been got the better of. ‘I don’t suppose I helped him much, but it seems he’s got some people to agree to the most amazing revelations.’

  ‘Quite a tale, by all accounts!’ said Madeleine, with a grim pretence of enthusiasm.

  ‘I think if people ever do get to learn the real details of what went on among the Bloomsbury Group,’ Sawle said, ‘they’ll be pretty astonished.’

  ‘We barely knew that world,’ said Madeleine.

  ‘Well, we were in Birmingham, dear,’ said Sawle.

  ‘We still are!’ she said.

  ‘Mm, I was just thinking,’ said Peter, ‘that if this Bill goes through next week it could open the way for a lot more frankness.’

  Paul, who hadn’t been able to discuss the Bill with anybody, felt the grip of the crisis again, but less upsettingly than in the drive with Jenny. ‘Yes . . . indeed,’ he said quite calmly, and looking up in the candlelight he felt (though of course you could never really measure it) he was blushing much less than on that occasion.

  ‘Oh, Leo Abse’s Bill, you mean,’ said Sawle, in an abstracted tone, and perhaps to avoid the charged phrase ‘Sexual Offences’. He seemed fixed on some distant and subtle calculation. ‘It could certainly change the atmosphere, couldn’t it’ – with a tiny suggestion that prominent and public though it was it had better not be mentioned in front of his wife. He picked up with a little apologetic gasp from where he had been a minute before – ‘No, to go back to Cecil, I came to feel all his rather wilful behaviour was really an attempt to do one of two things – either to appease his mother or to get as far away from her as possible. Going to war was the perfect combination.’

  ‘Ah, yes . . .’ Paul glanced at George Sawle almost superstitiously. It wasn’t just that he’d known Lytton Strachey and Cecil Valance, but that he spoke so illusionlessly about them. Cecil loomed in the background for him, less as a poet than as some awkward piece of lumber in the family attic.

  ‘Dudley was a very different character,’ Sawle went on, ‘but equally under her spell. She appalled them and she fascinated them. He writes very well about her in his autobiography. I don’t know if you’ve read that?’

  Paul gazed, hardly bothering to shake his head, and Peter of course said, ‘I certainly have.’

  ‘Awfully good, isn’t it?’

  Paul said, ‘I wondered if he’d
be coming tonight, actually,’ with a certain confidence, but Sawle said almost brusquely,

  ‘I’d be astonished if he did.’

  And having said one thing, Paul thought he’d better immediately say the other thing he’d been nursing and rehearsing, ‘I wondered what you thought of Valance’s poetry, actually?’ looking from husband to wife, oracular sources. He felt he must be prepared for a tough answer; but in fact they seemed barely interested.

  Madeleine said, ‘I’m honestly not a poetry person.’

  The Professor seemed to muse a little longer, and said with regret, ‘It’s hard to say, when you remember them being written. They’re probably not much cop, are they?’

  Peter glanced rather sweetly at Paul, and at his tender question, but seemed unwilling to disagree with the Sawles; so Paul kept silent about how much they had always meant to him.

  ‘I don’t mean to say, incidentally,’ said Sawle, in his way of not letting others drive him off-course, ‘that Louisa wasn’t heart-broken by Cecil’s death – I’m sure she was. But she made the most of it . . . you know. They did, those women. The memorial volumes, the stained-glass windows. Cecil indeed got a marble tomb by some Italian sculptor.’

  ‘Well, I know . . .’ said Peter.

  ‘Of course you know all about it.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Paul.

  ‘Oh, at school,’ said Peter: ‘Cecil Valance is buried in the chapel.’

  ‘Really?’ said Paul, and gasped, the whole subject like a dream taking substance in the candle-lit bell of the beech-tree.

  ‘You must come and see him,’ said Peter, ‘if you like the poems; he’s rather splendid.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Paul, ‘I’d like to very much,’ his pop-eyed look of earnest gratitude covering his surprise as Peter’s hand, stroking the napkin in his lap, wandered as if unawares on to Paul’s thigh, and lay there lightly for several seconds.

  On the way in after supper Paul stuck with the Sawles for a moment, but they latched on to others with sudden warmth and relief, and so he slipped off. They’d been polite, even kind to him, but he knew it was really Peter they were interested in. In the deepening shadows between pools of candlelight, the guests, gathering up bags and glasses, conversations stretching and breaking, in an amiable jostle as they bunched in through the french windows, seemed to Paul like a flickering frieze, unknowable faces all bending willingly to something perhaps none of them individually would have chosen to do. He was drunk, and he bunched in too, the drink making him less conspicuous. Everyone was friendlier and noisier. The drawing-room appeared blocked with rows of chairs. The connecting doors into the dining-room had been flung open, and the piano turned round. Mr Keeping stood to one side with his mocking smile, asking people to go to the front, to fill up the rows. Paul buttoned his jacket and smiled politely at him as he squeezed past. The effects of the drink, free and easy outside, felt a bit more critical in the glare of the crowded room. Could people tell how drunk he was? Before anything happened he would need the lavatory; where there was a queue, of course; some of the old ladies took two minutes, nearly three minutes. He smiled at the woman in front of him and she smiled back tightly and looked away, as though they were both after the same bargain. Then he was alone in the hall with the colourful chaos of presents and cards, most of them unopened, piled on the table and under it. Books obviously, and loosely swathed plants, and soft things it was difficult to wrap neatly. His jiggling desperation grew painful with the knowledge he hadn’t bought Mrs Jacobs a present or even a card himself. When the woman at last emerged and hurried into the drawing-room Paul heard a loud rapping, a hush, a scatter of applause, and then Mrs Keeping starting to talk. Well he couldn’t not go. Better to miss the concert altogether. All he really wanted was to see Peter play, to watch him, with the beautiful and alarming new certainty that he was about to . . . he looked in the mirror, hardly knowing, now it came to it, what it was they might be going to do.