The Stranger's Child

  My father had been laid low and effectively silenced by a stroke a year after the War ended; he lived on until 1925, the patient prisoner of a bath chair, his essential geniality apparently undimmed. When he spoke it was in a cheerful language of his own, and with no awareness that the sounds issuing from his mouth were nonsense to his listeners. One saw from his expression that what he was saying was generally fond and amusing. And he appeared to follow our conversation with perfect clarity. It took a great deal of patience in us, and then a certain amount of kindly pretence, to keep up any sustained talk with him. His own demeanour, however, suggested that he drew great satisfaction from these agonizing encounters.

  Of course all work on The Incidence of Red Calves Among Black Angus, meant as his major contribution to agricultural science, was suspended for ever. My mother very capably extended her control of domestic life at Corley to that of a large estate; my own efforts to assist her were, if not rebuffed, then treated as impractical and rather tiresome. It was suggested (fancifully, it seemed to me) that my brother Cecil had known all about farming, both ‘horn and corn’ as my mother liked to put it, but that I had never shown any aptitude for the matter. The fact that in due course I must surely take over the running of Corley weighed oddly little with her. I was myself, it is true, a mutilé de guerre, subject to various cautions and exemptions; but idleness did not sit easily with me. Perhaps the silencing of the other writers in our family, the poet and the agronomist, opened a door to the younger son. A psychologist of family life might find some such pattern of subconscious motivations and opportunities. At any rate I looked again at sketches I had published long before in the Cherwell and the Isis, and found myself pleased by their youthful sarcasm. The habit, so familiar to many of us after the War, of thinking of our earlier selves as foreign beings, Arcadian innocents, proved refreshingly a merely partial truth.

  I wrote The Long Gallery at great speed, in a little under three months, in a mood of irritable tension and ferocious high spirits. I have already said something of its reception, and of the changes, some amusing and many tedious, that the success of that little book brought to our lives. But thereafter the more serious work I knew it in me to do refused to come. I felt as if there was much that I needed to clear away; and on this too no doubt our psychologist would have something to report. Some such need, I think, lay behind my strong desire, once my father had died, to clear out Corley itself. A deepening distaste for all Victoriana became a kind of mission for me, who had inherited by default a large Victorian house of exorbitant ugliness and inconvenience. Sometimes, it is true, I wondered if in later years its ugliness might recommend itself as a quaint kind of charm to generations yet unborn. In few places did I sanction the complete demolition of the heavy and garish decorative schemes of my grandfather – the ornate ceilings, the sombre panelling, the childish and clumsy outcrops of stone-carving and mosaic – but with the help of an interior designer of a thoroughly modern kind I saw to it that they were all ‘boxed in’. Waterhouse, whose dismal Gothic buildings had despoiled my own College, was sometimes credited with the design, which in its ability to inflict pain on the eye was certainly up to his best standard. It is quite possible my grandfather consulted him. But the drawings surviving at Corley were all from the hand of a Mr Money, a local practitioner known otherwise only for the draughty Town Hall at Newbury (a building whose discomforts my brother and I knew well from our annual visits as children to observe our father presenting trophies to local livestock breeders). At Corley, of course, certain things were sacrosanct – the chapel in the best Middle Pointed that money (or Money) could provide, and where my brother was laid to rest under a great quantity of Carrara marble. That could never be touched. And the library I left, at my mother’s stern request, in its original state of caliginous gloom. But in all the other principal rooms, a modern brightness and simplicity effectively overlaid the ingenious horrors of an earlier age.

  Paul had finished his drink, and felt a small top-up would be undetectable, and if detected untraceable. He went back to the cupboard with righteous impatience. Was this building, this spartan attic room, part of Waterhouse’s work, he wondered? He peered at the stone-framed window, the notched and stained oak sill, the boarded-up fireplace, which perhaps had a general kinship with those at Corley Court. Peter’s room there had had a fireplace just the same, grey stone, with a wide flat pointed arch . . . He remembered the time he had made him examine a hole in the ceiling, in a state of high excitement. Really such things meant nothing to him – but Peter would certainly have known. He had been at Exeter College – but had he had friends across the road here in Balliol? Paul saw him entirely at home in the university, as if they had been destined for each other. He went out to the lavatory, in a queer little angled turret, and when he looked down from the window into the gloomy quad he saw a dark-haired figure moving swiftly through the shadows and into the lit doorway of a staircase who might almost have been Peter, before he knew him, fifteen years ago, calling on a friend, some earlier lover – that was what his unselfconscious evenings had been like.

  By the time he set off for drinks, Paul already felt cautiously cheerful. In the large lamp-lit Common Room, a surprisingly sleek modern building, he rather got stuck with a secretary from the English faculty office, a nice young woman who’d been responsible for much of the conference arrangements. A mutual shyness tethered them in their corner, beside the table on which all the papers were laid out, including the TLS. ‘Well, there you are!’ said Ruth, his friend, blushing with satisfaction, so that Paul formed the wary idea she had taken a shine to him. The room itself, full of confident noise, brisk introductions, loud reunions, was a breathtaking plunge for him. He realized the man standing near him was Professor Stallworthy, whose life of Wilfred Owen had fought rather shy of Owen’s feelings for other men. Paul suddenly felt shy of them too. Beyond him was a white-haired man in military uniform of some splendour – General Colthorpe, Ruth said, who was going to speak about Wavell. She confirmed that the broad-faced, genially pugnacious-looking man talking to the Master was Paul Fussell, whose book on the Great War had moved and enlightened Paul more than anything he’d read on the subject – though sadly, like Evelyn Waugh’s Letters, it had only mentioned Cecil in a footnote (‘a less neurotic – and less talented – epigone of Brooke’). Paul looked around admiringly and restlessly, his tiny empty sherry glass cupped behind his hand, waiting for the Valances to come in. ‘Were you at Oxford?’ said Ruth.

  ‘No, I wasn’t,’ Paul said, with an almost bashful smile, as though to say he understood and forgave her error.

  He was introduced to a young English don, and chatted to him in a keen but rather circular way about Cecil, the long sleeves of the don’s gown brushing over Paul’s hands as he moved and turned. Paul couldn’t always follow what he meant; he found himself in the role of lowly sapper while Martin (was he called?) talked in larger strategic terms, with a pervasive air of irony – ‘Well, quite!’ Paul found himself saying, two or three times. He felt he was boring him, and he himself was soon achingly tense and distracted by the presence of the Valances in the room, and merely nodded genially when Martin moved off. Dudley’s voice, both clipped and drawling, the historic vowels perhaps further pickled and preserved by thirty years’ exile in sherry country, could be heard now and then through the general yammer. He was easy to lose, among the taller younger figures milling round him, the swoop of gowns, the odd barbaric intensity of people connecting. Linette’s sparkly green evening jacket was a help in tracking their gradual movement through the crowd. Then for a minute they were alongside, Linette with her back to Paul, Dudley in stooped profile, and again with a look of short-winded good-humour as he tried to follow what a young Indian man was saying to him, in fashionably theoretical terms, about life in the trenches.

  ‘Yes, I don’t know,’ said Dudley, maintaining a precarious balance between mild modesty and his fairly clear belief that the Indian was talking rot. He smiled at him wid
ely in a way that showed Paul the conversation was over, but which the Indian scholar took as a cue for a further convoluted question:

  ‘But would you agree, sir, that, in a very real sense, the experience of most writers about war is predicated on the idea that—’

  ‘Darling, you mustn’t tire yourself!’ said Linette sharply, so that the Indian, mortified, apologized and backed away from her flicker of a smile. Well, it was a little lesson for Paul in how not to proceed with them. In the moment of uncomfortable silence that followed he perhaps had his chance: he raised his chin to speak, but a weird paralysis left him murmuring and blinking, looking almost as apologetic as the retreating questioner. He could have asked Ruth to introduce him, but he didn’t want Linette in particular to learn his name at this early stage – whether Dudley himself had ever seen his letters he doubted. Stiff-necked, Dudley seemed rarely to turn his head, and a call from his other side made him swivel his whole body away, with a well-practised lurch of his weight on to his stick. Paul was left with a sense of astonished near-contact, of greatness, it almost seemed, within arm’s reach.

  At dinner it turned out he’d been placed next to Ruth again, and when he said, ‘Oh that’s nice!’ he half-meant it, and half felt a kind of emasculation. The seating was on long benches, and they all remained standing, one or two bestriding the bench as they talked, until everyone was in. Dudley stumped past in a swaying line that was heading for the High Table, and proper chairs. Now the Master made a more official welcome to the conference, and said a long scurrying Latin grace, as if apologetically reminding them of something they knew far better than he did.

  Paul was drunk enough to introduce himself to the very unattractive little man on his other side (there were far more men than women), but he soon found his shoulder turned against him, and for an awkward ten minutes he strained the patience of the two men opposite who were involved in complex discussion of faculty affairs into which there was no real point in trying to induct Paul, whose TLS credentials started to wear thin. He leant towards them with a smile of forced interest to which they were rudely immune. ‘I’m writing up the conference for the TLS’ – Paul felt he’d said this too often – ‘though also, as it happens, I’m working on a biography of Cecil Valance.’

  ‘Did he ever finish his work on the Cathars?’ said the man on the right.

  ‘Not as far as we know,’ said Paul, absorbing the horror of the question with some aplomb, he felt. Was the man thinking of someone else? Cecil’s work at Cambridge had been on the Indian Mutiny, for some reason. Was that anything to do with the Cathars? Who were the Cathars, in the first place?

  ‘Or have I got that wrong?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Paul paused. ‘His research – which he never finished, by the way – was on General Havelock.’

  ‘Oh, well, not the Cathars at all,’ said the man, though with a critical look at Paul, as though the mistake had somehow been his.

  The other man, who was a little bit nicer, said, ‘I was just speaking to Dudley Valance, whom you must know, obviously, before dinner – he was up with Aldous Huxley and Macmillan, of course. Never took his degree.’

  ‘Well, nor did Macmillan, come to that,’ said the first man.

  ‘Didn’t stop him becoming Chancellor,’ said Paul.

  ‘That’s right,’ said the nicer man, and laughed cautiously.

  ‘That was all bloody Trevor-Roper’s doing,’ said the first man, with a bitter look, so that Paul saw he had ambled well-meaningly into some other academic minefield.

  The meal unrolled in a further fuddle of wines, time was speeding past unnoticed and unmourned, he knew he was drinking too much, the fear of his own clumsiness mixing with a peculiar new sense of competence. He made it pretty clear to Ruth that he wasn’t interested in girls, but this only seemed to put them on to a more confusingly intimate footing. The Master clapped his hands and said a few words, and then everyone stood while the High Table filed out, the rest of them being invited to use a room whose name Paul didn’t catch for coffee and further refreshments. So perhaps tonight he wouldn’t get a shot at Dudley after all. But then outside in the quad, as cigarettes were lit and new groups formed and drifted off, Ruth kept him back, and then said, ‘Why don’t you slip into Common Room with me?’

  ‘Well, if you think that would be all right . . .’

  ‘I don’t want you to miss anything,’ she said.

  So back they went, Paul now rather shy at getting what he wanted. At a first quick survey, over his coffee cup, he saw that Linette had been separated from her husband, and was standing talking to a group of men, one almost her own age, a couple of them younger than Paul. He attached himself to another small group round Jon Stallworthy, from which he could watch while nodding appreciatively at the conversation. Dudley was sitting on a long sofa at the other side of the room, with various Fellows and a good-looking younger woman who seemed to be flirting with him. His magnetism was physical, even in old age, and to certain minds no doubt class would come into it. Without him Linette seemed disoriented, an Englishwoman in her seventies, who lived much of the year abroad. She exacted some gallantry from the men, which went on in nervous swoops and laughs, small faltering sequences of jokes, perhaps to cover their own slight boredom and disorientation with her. And then, in a strange nerveless trance, Paul found himself accepting a glass of brandy, crossing the floor and joining the group around her – he didn’t know what he would say, it felt pointless and even perverse and yet, as a self-imposed dare, inescapable. She had a large jet brooch on her green jacket, a black flower in effect, which he examined as she talked. Her face, close-to, had a mesmerizing quality, fixed and photogenic, somehow consciously the face Dudley Valance had been pleased and proud to gaze on every day for half a century, as handsome as his own, in its way, and as disdainful of the impertinent modern world. She was having to say something about his work, but Paul had the feeling their lives and the people they saw were far from literary. He pictured them sitting in their fortified house, knocking back their fortified wine, their friends presumably the fellow expats of Antequera. And there was something else, about that stiff auburn mane, and those long black lashes – Paul knew in his bones that she hadn’t been born into Dudley’s world, even though she now wore its lacquered carapace. Anyway, it seemed his arrival had been more or less what the others were waiting for, and after a minute, with various courteous murmurs and nods they all moved off in different directions, leaving the two of them together. ‘I really must check on my husband,’ she said, looking past him, the gracious smile not yet entirely faded from her face. Paul had a feeling that all that was going to change when he said who he was. He said,

  ‘I’m so looking forward to your husband’s talk tomorrow, Lady Valance.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, and he almost laughed, and then saw it was merely a general term of assent. She meant, what she then said, ‘It’s a great coup for you all to have got him here.’

  ‘I think everyone thinks the same,’ said Paul, then went on quickly, ‘I’m hoping he’ll be saying something about his brother.’

  Linette’s head went back a little. It was as if she’d only vaguely heard that he had a brother. ‘Oh, good lord, no,’ she said, with a little shake. ‘No, no – he’ll be discussing his own work.’ And a new suspicion floated in her eyes, in the quick pinch of her lips and angling of the head. ‘I don’t think I caught your name.’

  ‘Oh – Paul Bryant.’ It semed absurd to be skulking around the truth, but he was glad to be able to say, ‘I’m covering the conference for the TLS.’

  ‘For the . . . ?’ – she turned an ear.

  ‘The Times . . .’

  ‘Oh, really?’ And with a slightly awkward hesitation, ‘Did you write to my husband?’

  Paul looked puzzled. ‘Oh, about Cecil, you mean? Yes, I did, as it happens . . .’

  She glanced approvingly at Dudley. ‘I’m afraid all requests such as yours fall on very stony ground.’

&nbs
p; ‘Well, I don’t want to be any trouble to him . . .’ Paul seemed to glimpse the barren hillsides of Andalusia. ‘So you’ve had others . . .’

  ‘Oh, every few years, you know, someone wants to poke about in Cecil’s papers, and one just knows from the start that it would be a disaster, so it’s best simply to say no.’ She was rather jolly about it. ‘I mean, his letters were published – I don’t know if you saw those?’

  ‘Well, of course!’ said Paul, unable to tell if anything here was in his favour. She seemed to be inviting him to agree he was a disaster in the making.

  ‘And you’ve read my husband’s books?’

  ‘I certainly have.’ It was time to be sternly flattering. ‘Black Flowers, obviously, is a classic – ’

  ‘Then I’m sorry to tell you you’ve really read everything he has to say about old . . . um . . . Cecil.’

  Paul smiled as if at the great bonus of what Dudley had already given them; but did go on, ‘There are still one or two things . . .’

  Linette was distracted. But she turned back to him after five seconds, again with her look of haughty humour, which made him unsure if she was mocking him or inviting him to share in her mockery of something else. ‘There’s been some extraordinary nonsense written.’

  ‘Has there . . . ?’ Paul rather wanted to know what it was.

  She made an oh-crikey face: ‘Extraordinary nonsense!’

  ‘Lady Valance? I don’t know if this would be a good moment?’ The elderly don had come back. ‘Forgive my breaking in . . .’

  ‘Oh, for the . . . um . . . ?’

  ‘Indeed, if you’d like to see . . .’ The smiling old man left just enough sense of a chore in his voice to make it clear he was doing her a favour which she couldn’t decline.