The Stranger's Child

  ‘Oh dear . . . !’ – Paul felt rattled, but managed to say smoothly, ‘I’m sure since your book came out there’s been a lot more interest in him.’

  She took in a deep draught of smoke and then let it out in a sleepy wave up her face. ‘It’s the War, too, of course. People can’t get enough of the War.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Paul, as if he too thought it rather overdone. In fact he was counting on it heavily.

  She peered at him, in the streaking glare and shadow, almost haughtily. ‘I think I do remember you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you play the piano?’

  ‘Aha!’ said Paul. ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking of.’

  ‘You played duets with my daughter.’

  He enjoyed this passive imposture, though it was uncomfortable too to be taken for Peter. ‘It was great fun, that evening,’ he said modestly.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t it.’

  ‘They were happy times in Foxleigh, in many ways.’ He spread a warm glaze over the place and time, as if they were much more distant than was the case. ‘Well, they introduced me to your family!’ He thought she saw this as pure flattery. He wanted to ask about Julian, and Jenny, but any questions were darkened by the awful larger question of Corinna and Leslie Keeping. Was it proper to talk about them, or presumptuous and intrusive? The effort of keeping the talk going stalled him for a minute.

  ‘Ah! Here we are . . . !’ she said as the cab swung down the long ramp into the station. He saw that for her the moment of escape was also one of obligation. At the setting-down place he jumped out, and stood with his brolly hooked over his forearm and his wallet open in his hand. He only took a taxi about twice a year, but he tipped the driver with the jovial inattention of young men he had seen in the City. Mrs Jacobs had clambered out on the other side, and waited in a ladylike fashion for the business to be done. Paul rejoined her with a happy but submissive smile.

  ‘Why don’t you give me your address, anyway, and I can write to you.’

  ‘Yes, that would be fine,’ she said quietly, as though she’d been thinking it over.

  ‘And then we can take it from there . . . !’ He had a pad in his briefcase, and he lent it to her, looking away as she wrote her details down. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, still businesslike.

  ‘Well, thank you – for rescuing me.’

  He stared at her stout, slightly stooped and shabby person, the cheerful glasses under the sad red hat, the clutched bag, and shook his head, as if at a chance meeting of devoted old friends. ‘I just can’t believe it!’ he said.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ she said, doing her best.

  ‘See you very soon, I hope’ – and they shook hands. She was getting, what was it?, a Worcester train, from the nearest platform – he hadn’t looked yet at her address. She turned away, went a few determined steps, then looked back with a hesitant and slightly conspiratorial air that he found immediately charming.

  She said, ‘Just tell me your name again.’

  ‘Oh! Paul Bryant . . .’

  She nodded and clenched her hand in the air, as if catching at a moth. ‘Au revoir,’ she said.

  2

  ‘Dear Georgie,’ Paul read, ‘At luncheon today the General was moved to remark that your visit to Corley Court had been reasonably quiet, and pressed a little further said you had “hardly put a foot wrong”. That hardly may give you pause: but she would say no more. Overall, I take her to mean that further visits will not be frowned on. [. . .] I will of course convey her good wishes to you in person, tomorrow afternoon, at 5.27 precisely. Praise the Lord for Bentley Park and Horner’s Van (Homer’s – can’t read? Not the Homer, dare I hope, the writer?). Then Middlesex will be all before us. Your CTV.’ Outside the train window, Middlesex itself was opening and then hiding again in the curves of the line. Paul kept his finger in the Letters of Cecil Valance as he stared into the bright afternoon – low sun over suburban houses, bare trees between playing-fields, now a tunnel. He looked down at Cecil’s face, the prominent dark eyes, wavy dark hair oiled almost flat, the sepia knot of his tie, with a pin behind it, the brass-buttoned epaulettes and wide serge lapels with a regimental badge on each, and the buckled leather strap that cut across his chest like a sash. ‘Edited by G. F. Sawle’ beneath the picture. Then the flickering townscape jumped in again and they were slowing to a station.

  Paul had formed a general idea, from studying the London A–Z, of where ‘Two Acres’ was. But a small-scale map in black-and-white, with the street names squeezing like juggernauts through the streets and the odd vague rhombuses and triangles of blank space in the outer suburbs might have been showing him almost anything. The half-dozen letters of Cecil’s to George that survived were addressed, in the confident bygone style, to ‘Two Acres, Stanmore, Mddx’. There was no suggestion the house stood on a particular street, or that any functionary could fail to know it and its occupants. Horner’s van would have offered a lift from the station. But now it was impossible to arrive as Cecil had done: the station itself, ‘built to look like a church’, according to George Sawle’s meticulous footnotes, ‘with battlemented tower and steeple’, had been closed to passengers in 1956. Paul had a sense, as of some neglected worry, that a search in the British Library, or indeed in the Stanmore Library, might have turned up a detailed historical map. But for now the poem was his guide. There was a road called Stanmore Hill, and Cecil referred to the ‘beechy crown of Stanmore Hill’, so that was a useful start. The garden was described as running down a slope, pretty clearly (its ‘goatfoot paths and mimic tor’, its ‘steps dissolving in the dusk / Through scented belts of rose and green / Into the little twilit dene’), and the house itself Paul imagined, on even slighter evidence, perched at the top, for the view. Bentley Priory, a large empty pentagon marked ‘Royal Air Force’ in the A–Z, but with dotted footpaths through it, and the blank lozenge of a lake, seemed to climb the hillside too. George’s notes explained that the Priory, ‘once the home of the widowed Queen Adelaide, had later been a hotel; the branch-line from Harrow and Wealdstone to Stanmore had been opened to bring in the guests; trains ran hourly; subsequently the Priory became a girls’ school; during the Battle of Britain, it was the headquarters of Fighter Command’. Sawle pointed out the reference to Paradise Lost, but was something else meant by Cecil’s references to Middlesex? Throughout the book he looked back on the landscape of his own youth strictly as a historian; the initials GFS replaced the first person singular; he was patiently impartial. And yet there were omissions, like the one in this short letter, marked by the scrupulous square brackets. What could possibly have offended, sixty years on?

  Outside the Tube station, Paul felt the little breathless shock of disorientation, swiftly denied. His thing in London was never to show that he didn’t know where he was going; he was less worried about being lost than about asking the way. And then the fact of doing research on the ground, the strange heart-race of crossing the physical terrain of his subject’s past, such as he’d felt when Peter first took him to Corley Court and showed him Cecil’s tomb, was like a secret guidance. He went along steadily, among the lunch-time shoppers, the office-workers going for a pint, with a completely private sense of purpose: no one knew who he was or what he was doing, or sensed the larger rhythm of his day that lay beyond their routines. It was freedom too, with its prickle of trepidation, since Paul had once been as routine-bound as them.

  Stanmore Hill began like a village street, but soon opened out into a long straight climb out of town, already cheerless in the November afternoon. He passed a large pub, the Abercorn Arms, which was mentioned in one of the handful of letters from Cecil to George that survived: the boys had had a pint there themselves. Paul saw the appeal of it, as part of his research, but he felt self-conscious entering pubs alone and pressed on up the road. Boys is what they had been, of course, George only half Paul’s present age when he met Cecil, and yet they seemed to occupy their lives with a peculiar unselfconscious authority Paul h
ad never felt in his own. Towards the top of the hill there was a small weather-vaned clock-tower on a stable block, half-covered by trees, and though he felt sure it couldn’t be ‘Two Acres’, it seemed in some incoherent way like a promise of it.

  After that the road flattened out and on the far side was a long black pond, surrounded by scruffy trees, and the beginning of Stanmore Common. He saw a woman walking a dog, a white poodle that looked alarmingly too big, and since they were the only walkers about, Paul felt conspicuous. He turned down a side-road, thinking that he could have asked her, and for ten or fifteen minutes he wandered round a modest little network of lanes that none the less had something mysterious about them, the sun lowish already among the nearly bare trees, further murky ponds, woodlands sloping away on the far side, and here and there, half-hidden by hedges and fences and large gardens, a number of houses. He wished he was more expert at looking at houses, and knowing how old they were. George Sawle said ‘Two Acres’ was red-brick, and had been built in the 1880s; his father had bought it from its first owner in 1890; his mother had sold it in 1920. Paul checked each name as he passed: ‘The Kennels’ . . . ‘Old Charlocks’ . . . ‘Jubilee Cottage’. Could he have missed it? He thought of the tests he had just read about in an earlier letter of Cecil’s, from his first weeks at Marlborough, where he had had to prove to a senior boy that he knew where things were and the meaning of ridiculous names. ‘I got them all,’ Cecil told his mother, ‘except for Cotton’s kish, and for this it is Daubeny who must have forty lashes, for failing to instil this vital fact in my teeming brain. I fear you will think this unjust.’

  He was almost back at the main road and here was the woman with the poodle coming towards him. She gave him a quick hard smile, a man roaming round with a briefcase in the afternoon. ‘You look lost,’ she said.

  ‘I’m okay now,’ said Paul, nodding at the road ahead. ‘Thanks so much!’ And then, ‘Well, actually,’ when she had passed him, ‘sorry . . . I’m looking for a house called “Two Acres”.’

  She half-stopped and turned, the dog pulling her on. ‘Two Acres? No . . . I don’t know it. Are you sure it’s round here?’

  ‘Pretty sure,’ said Paul. ‘A famous poem was written about it.’

  ‘Mm, not a poetry reader, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I thought you might have heard of it.’

  ‘Stop it, Jingo! No . . .’ she frowned back to him, ‘I mean, two acres is quite big, you realize.’

  ‘Well . . . yes,’ Paul agreed.

  ‘We have a third of an acre, and believe me that takes a good deal of work.’

  ‘I suppose in the old days . . .’ said Paul.

  ‘Oh, well in the old days . . . Jingo – Jingo! – mad dog! I’m so sorry . . . Who lives in this house you’re looking for?’

  ‘That I don’t know,’ said Paul, the intimate and whimsical nature of his quest exposed, as he’d known it would be if he stooped to asking anyone. It seemed beyond the woman, too: she winced at his briefcase, which must hold the reason for his search, which she wasn’t going to ask – some rep or agent no doubt.

  ‘Well, good luck,’ she said, as if seeing she had wasted her time. And as she went on, ‘Try the other side of the hill!’

  Which Paul did, going down a narrow road that was perhaps a private driveway – there seemed to be a new development of houses whose roofs he could see further down the slope. The lane turned a corner, running for thirty yards under a tall dark larch-lap fence that gave off, even on this chilly day, a dim scent of creosote. Just behind it, a house stood, only the long ridge of its roof and two tall chimneys visible. At the far end, gates, of the same height and material as the fence, chained and padlocked; but allowing, through the narrow gap between hinge and frame, a one-eyed view of a weedy bit of gravel and a downstairs window of the house, disconcertingly close. After this, a dense screen of leylandii, much taller than the fence, ran back from the road, cutting close to the corner of the house itself, and shielding it from the tarmacked drive beyond, at the head of which was a big display board, with an artist’s impression of another red-roofed house, and the words ‘Old Acres – Six Executive Homes, Two Remaining’.

  The small dislocation in the name was dreamlike for him, though almost meaningless in the light of day. He supposed to have kept ‘Two Acres’ would only have brought home to the executives just how tiny their properties were; perhaps ‘Old Acres’ lent atmosphere to the still raw-looking properties packed in at artful angles to each other among trees which must be survivors from the Sawles’ garden. To those who knew, it preserved a word, at least, of the old order. But he saw already that the ‘airy-chambered garden’ had gone; and even the house itself, which Paul had no doubt was the house, seemed resistant to being looked at. He got out his camera from his bag and crossing the lane took a picture of the fence.

  This wasn’t quite enough. Going back, he stared concernedly at the entranceway of the house before ‘Two Acres’, ‘Cosgroves’, a drive curving out of sight behind rhododendrons, the house itself too far off to keep a watch on its gate. As he strolled in he was smiling mildly, the smooth compulsion of the trespasser just hedged by a far-fetched pretence that he was lost. His movements felt almost involuntary, though everything about him was alert. On his right a wide lawn opened out, dead leaves drifted by the wind into ridges and spirals. An empty teak seat, a stone table. A blue sack wrapping a plant he took for a moment for a stooping person. The boundary with ‘Two Acres’ on this side was a dense run of shrubbery, and then a wall of old firs, bulging and decrepit, pressing down on an ancient wooden garage and a little tar-roofed potting-shed with cobwebbed windows. He caught the sound though not the words of a woman’s voice, somewhere outside but in monologue, as if on the telephone. The space between garage and shed gave him cover, he slid between them, and then going at a squat and for a yard or two on hands and knees, shielding his face with his briefcase, he pushed through the dense harsh fronds between the trunks of the firs, and emerged, scratched and dishevelled, in the back garden of ‘Two Acres’ itself.

  He stood where he was for a minute, and looked round. He felt almost comically cheated but his excitement worked over and around his disappointment, with cunning persistence. There was little enough to see. The defensive wall of conifers turned a corner and cut across behind the house as well, robbing it of a last glimpse of the trees beyond and below, which must be the parkland of Bentley Priory. The enclosed space was dead and already sunless. The short slope of tangled grass, dead thistles and nettles had a track through it of the kind a fox might make – Paul saw it would live undisturbed here, the house condemned by its own urge for privacy. Taken by a sudden urge, territorial as much as physical, he turned his back on the house, put down his briefcase, and had a short fierce piss into the long grass.

  Somehow he couldn’t take the house in; but he would take photographs, so as to see it all later. He wandered up to a small window in the side wall, a shadowy kitchen, a steel sink just in front of him, a door open beyond into a brighter space. The little translucent mill set in the pane span round fitfully when he breathed on it. The feeling he’d had, that the house might still somehow be lived in, left him completely. It was empty, and therefore in a way his; he felt a lurching certainty that he could and should get into it. Then as he stepped back he saw high up under the eaves the badge-shaped red-and-white box of a burglar alarm, Albion Security, which was a challenge he didn’t mean to take up. It looked new and alert and immune to the plea made by the books in his briefcase that he was only here to research the life of a poet. He went round the corner on to the front drive, just a narrow strip in front of the house; the horrible fence, with its creosote smell, concealed him completely from the road. A short brick path ran up to the front door. On the door-frame at chest height was a small oblong box with three circular holes in it, a wire trailing from one of them. So at some stage, before this latest degradation, ‘Two Acres’ had been divided up, three flats, probably – like almost every h
ouse in London. Well, there were sixty years unaccounted for, since the day the Sawle family had relinquished the place. Paul wondered dimly how it had been done – new bathrooms, fire-doors; his eyes ran over the black gleam of the little upstairs windows; who had got Daphne’s room, had the room where Cecil slept become a living-room, another kitchen?

  Paul spent ten minutes at the house, magnetized but baffled, drawn to each window in turn. He looked out all the time for something detachable, and small enough to join the books in his bag. Not a flower-pot, or twig, but something that had been there unquestionably since before the First World War. A rusty horseshoe over the front door had swung sideways on its nail, the luck spilling out – he could reach it easily, but he didn’t like to; he pushed it up straight, but in a second it dropped back again. There were overgrown flower-beds in front of the windows, such as burglars leave footprints in, and he leant in across them. Beneath the visor of his hand he stared into the shadowy spaces, where electric sockets and dark lines and squares on the wallpaper were now the sole decoration. A big room on the garden side with french windows must have been the sitting-room. He could just about imagine Cecil flirting with Daphne in front of the brick fireplace. A square of worn and stained beige carpet covered part of the parquet floor. At the end of the room he could make out a shadowy alcove, under a huge oak beam, and he thought he saw what might have been romantic and even beautiful about it; but when he stepped away, and roamed off through the long grass to take some more photographs, he thought the house looked rather a hulk. He saw now that something had been knocked down – there was a broad black arrow on the brickwork where a roof must have abutted. A new bathroom window had been punched through the wall, out of line with everything else. You could strip all the romance from a place if you were determined enough, even the romance of decay. He’d had the idea that he would find things more or less as they had been in 1913 – more deeply settled in, of course, discreetly modernized, tastefully adapted, but the rockery still there, the ‘glinting spinney’ a beautiful wood, and the trees where the hammock had been slung still bearing the ridges of the ropes in their bark. He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired. It would live up to its fame. But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds.