The Stranger's Child

  ‘I don’t know if my husband . . .’ But her husband seemed perfectly happy. And by a miracle the old chap took her off, out of the room, the slight flirty wobble of her high heels glimpsed beneath the raised wing of his gown, leaving Paul free at last to approach his prize.

  In fact it was Martin who brought him in – ‘Sir Dudley, I’m not sure if you’ve met – ’

  ‘Well, no, we haven’t yet,’ said Paul, bending to shake hands, which seemed to irritate Dudley, and went on cheerfully, before anyone could say his name, ‘I’m writing up the conference for the TLS.’ Martin of course knew about the Cecil job, but probably not about Dudley’s resistance to it.

  ‘Ah, yes, the TLS,’ said Dudley, as Paul further found himself being offered the low armchair at right-angles to him at the end of the sofa. He was in the presence, with a need no doubt to say his piece. ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with the TLS,’ Dudley went on, with a narrow smile that wasn’t exactly humorous.

  ‘Oh, dear!’ said Paul, his clutched brandy glass seeming to impose a new way of performing on him, a sort of simmering joviality. But Dudley’s smile remained fixed on his next remark:

  ‘They once gave me a very poor review.’

  ‘Oh, I’m surprised . . . what was that for?’

  ‘Eh? A book of mine called The Long Gallery.’

  The mock-modesty of the formulation made this less amusing, though a man on the other side laughed and said, ‘That would be what, sixty years ago?’

  ‘Mm, a bit before my time,’ Paul said, and put his head back rather steeply to get at the brandy in the bottom of his glass. He found Dudley disconcerting, in his sharpness and odd passive disregard for things around him, as if conserving his energy, perhaps just a question of age. He seemed to show he had fairly low expectations of the present company and the larger event they were part of, whilst no doubt thinking his own part in it quite important. Paul wanted to bring the talk round to Cecil before Linette got back, but without disclosing his plans. Then he heard an American graduate he’d met briefly earlier say, ‘I don’t know how you would rate your brother’s work, sir?’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Dudley slumped slightly; but he was courteous enough, perhaps liked to be asked for a bad opinion. ‘Well, you know . . . it looks very much of its time now, doesn’t it? Some pretty phrases – but it didn’t ever amount to anything very much. When I looked at “Two Acres” again a few years ago I thought it had really needed the War to make its point – it seems hopelessly sentimental now.’

  ‘Oh, I grew up on it,’ said another man, half-laughing, not exactly disagreeing.

  ‘Mm, so did I . . .’ said Paul quietly over his balloon.

  ‘It always rather amused me,’ said Dudley, ‘that my brother, who was heir to three thousand acres, should be best known for his ode to a mere two.’ This was exactly the joke that he had made in Black Flowers, and it didn’t go down very well in the Balliol SCR – there was a little sycophantic laughter, most prominently from Paul himself. ‘Ah . . . !’ General Colthorpe had come back in, and even in a civilian context there was an uneasy movement among a number of them to stand up.

  ‘Whom are you discussing?’ he said.

  ‘My brother Sizzle, General,’ Dudley seemed to say.

  ‘Ah, indeed,’ said the General, declining an offered space on the sofa but fetching a hard chair as he came round and making a square circle of the group, which took on a suddenly strategic air. ‘Yes, a tragic case. And a very promising writer.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ – Dudley was more cautious now.

  ‘Wavell had several of them by heart, you know. It’s “Soldiers Dreaming”, isn’t it, he puts in Other Men’s Flowers, but he had a great deal of time for “The Old Company”.’

  ‘Oh, well, yes,’ said Dudley.

  ‘I’ll be saying something about it tomorrow. He used to quote it’ – the General batted his eyelids – ‘ “It’s the old company, all right, / But without the old companions” – one of the truest things said about the experience of many young officers.’ He looked around – ‘They came back and they came back, do you see, if they came through at all, and the company was completely changed, they’d all been killed. There was always a company tradition, keenly maintained, but the only people who remembered the old soldiers were soon dead themselves – no one remembered the rememberers. No, a great poem in its way.’ He shook his head in candid submission. Paul sensed there were demurrers in the group, but the General’s claim for the poem’s truth made them hesitate.

  ‘It’s a subject, of course, I wrote about myself,’ said Dudley, in a strange airy tone.

  ‘Well – indeed,’ said the General, perhaps less on top of the younger brother’s work, or uneasy with its tone about army life in general. As a cultured person from the world of action and power, General Colthorpe, with his long intellectual face and keen inescapable eye, was so imposing that Dudley himself began to look rather pansy and decadent in comparison, with his beautiful cuff-links and his silver-headed stick, and the grey curls over his collar at the back. The General frowned apologetically. ‘I was wondering – there’s not been a Life, I think, has there?’

  Paul’s heart began to race, and he blushed at the naming of this still half-secret desire. ‘Well . . . !’ said Martin, and smiled across at him.

  ‘Of Sizzle, no,’ said Dudley. ‘There’s really not enough there. George Sawle did a very thorough job on the Letters a few years back – almost too thorough, dug out a lot of stuff about the girlfriends and so on: my brother had a great appetite for romantic young women. Anyway, I gave Sawle a free hand – he’s a sound fellow, I’ve known him for years.’ Dudley looked around with a hint of caution in this academic setting. ‘And of course there’s the old memoir, you know, that Sebby Stokes did – perfectly good, shows its age a bit, but it tells you all the facts.’

  This left Paul in a very absurd position. He sat forward, and had just started to say, ‘As a matter of fact, Sir Dudley, I was wondering—’ when Linette reappeared, alone, at the far end of the room.

  ‘Ah, there you are . . .’ Dudley called out, with an odd mixture of mockery and relief.

  Linette came towards them, in her still fascinating way, pleased to be looked at, smiling as if nursing something just a little too wicked to say. The General stood up, and then one or two others, half-ashamed not to have thought of it. Linette knew she had to speak, but hesitated appealingly. ‘Darling, the . . . Senior Dean’s just been showing me the most marvellous . . . what would one call it . . . ?’ – she smiled uncertainly.

  ‘I don’t know, my love.’

  She gave a pant of a laugh. ‘It was a sort of . . . very large . . . very lovely . . .’ – she raised a hand, which described it even more vaguely.

  ‘Animal, vegetable or mineral,’ said Dudley.

  ‘Now you’re being horrid,’ she said, with a playful pout, so that Paul felt admitted for a second to a semi-public performance, such as friends might see on the patio or whatever it was in Antequera: it was a little embarrassing, but carried off by their quite unselfconscious confidence of being a fascinating couple. ‘I was going to say, I hope they’re not tiring you, but now I rather hope they are!’

  ‘Lady Valance,’ said General Colthorpe, offering his chair.

  ‘Thank you so much, General, but I’m really rather tired myself.’ She looked across at Dudley with teasing reproach. ‘Don’t you think?’ she said.

  ‘You go, my love, I’m going to sit and jaw a bit longer with these good people’ – again the courtesy unsettled by the flash of a smile, like a sarcasm; though perhaps he really did want to make the most of this rare occasion to talk with young readers and scholars; or perhaps, Paul thought, as Martin jumped up to conduct her back to the Master’s lodgings, what Dudley really wanted was another large whisky.

  The next morning Paul woke to the sound of a tolling bell, with a hangover that felt much worse for the comfortless strangeness of Greg Hudson’s room. He lay with a knuckle press
ed hard against the pain in his forehead, as if in intensive thought. All he thought about was last night, in startling jumps and queasy circlings of recollection. He felt contempt for his juvenile weakness as a drinker, pitted against the octogenarian’s glassy-eyed appetite and capacity. He remembered with a squeezing of the gut the moment when he found himself talking about Corinna, and Dudley’s stare, at a spot just beyond Paul’s right shoulder, which he’d mistaken at first for tender gratitude, even a sort of bashful encouragement, but which turned out after twenty-five seconds to be the opposite, an icy refusal of any such intimacy. Thank god Martin the young English don had come back at that point. And yet at the end, perhaps because of the drink, there had been something forthright and friendly, hadn’t there, in the way they’d parted? On the doorstep of the Master’s lodgings, under the lamp, Dudley’s wincing gloom broken up in a grin, a seizing of the moment, an effusive goodnight: Paul could hear it now – no one had spoken to him since, and the sound of the words remained available, unerased. ‘Yes, see you in the morning!’ If he could get round Linette, there might be a chance of another conversation, with the tape running. Most of the other things Dudley had said last night he’d completely forgotten.

  When he got out of bed, Paul was lurchingly surprised to find Greg’s unwashed jock-strap and one or two other intimate items scattered across the floor, but the awful blurred recollections of his late-night antics were overwhelmed by the need to get to the lavatory; which he did just in time. After he’d been sick, in one great comprehensive paragraph, he felt an almost delicious weakness and near-simultaneous improvement; his headache didn’t vanish, but it lightened and receded, and when he shaved a few minutes later he watched his face reappearing in stripes with a kind of proud fascination.

  Dudley didn’t come to breakfast in hall, of course, so at 9.20 Paul went down to the phone at the foot of the staircase and dialled the extension of the lodgings. He felt still the oddly enjoyable tingle of weakness and disorientation. The phone was answered by a helpful secretary, and almost at once Dudley was saying, in a nice gentlemanly way, and with perhaps a hint of tactical frailty to pre-empt any unwelcome request, ‘Dudley Valance . . . ?’

  ‘Oh, good morning, Sir Dudley – it’s Paul . . . !’ It was simply the sort of contact he had dreamed of.

  There was a moment’s thoughtful and potentially worrying silence, and then a completely charming ‘Paul, oh, thank god . . .’

  ‘Ah . . . !’ – Paul laughed with relief, and after a second Dudley did the same. ‘I hope this isn’t too early to call you.’

  ‘Not at all. Good of you to ring. I’m sorry, for a ghastly moment just then I thought it was Paul Bryant.’

  Paul didn’t know why he was sniggering too, as the colour rushed to his face and he looked round quickly to check that no one could see or hear him. ‘Oh . . . um . . .’ It was as bad as something overheard, a shocking glimpse of himself – and of Dudley too: he saw in a moment the intractable delicacy of the problem, the shouldering of the insult was the exposure of the gaffe . . . and yet already he was blurting out, ‘Actually it is Paul Bryant, um . . .’

  ‘Oh, it is,’ said Dudley, ‘I’m so sorry!’ with a momentary bleak laugh. ‘How very unfortunate!’

  Still too confused to feel the shock fully, Paul said incoherently, ‘I won’t trouble you now, Sir Dudley. I’ll see you at your lecture.’ And he hung up the phone again and stood staring at it incredulously.

  It was during General Colthorpe’s talk on Wavell that Paul suddenly understood, and blushed again, with the indignant but helpless blush of foolish recognition. Very discreetly, under the desk, he got out Daphne Jacobs’s book from his briefcase. It was somewhere in the passage on Dudley’s exploits as a practical joker, those efforts she retailed as classics of wit and cleverly left it to the reader to wonder at their cruelty or pointlessness. As before, he felt General Colthorpe was watching him particularly, and even accusingly, from behind his lectern, but with infinite dissimulation he found the place, her account of her first visit to Corley, and looking up devotedly at the General between sentences he read the now obvious description of Dudley taking a telephone call from his brother:

  The well-known voice came through, on a very poor line, from the telegraph office in Wantage: ‘Dud, old man, it’s Cecil here, can you hear me?’ Dudley paused, with the grin of feline villainy that was so amusing to anyone not the subject of his pranks, and then said, with a quick laugh of pretended relief, ‘Oh, thank god!’ Cecil could be heard faintly, but with genuine surprise and concern, ‘Everything all right?’ To which Dudley, his eye on himself in the mirror and on me in the hallway behind him, replied, ‘For a frightful moment I thought you were my brother Cecil.’ I was confused at first, and then astonished. I knew all about teasing from my own brothers, but this was the most audacious bit of teasing even I had ever heard. It was a joke I later heard him play on several other friends, or enemies, as they then unexpectedly found themselves to be. Cecil, of course, merely said ‘You silly ass!’ and carried on with the call; but the trick came back to my mind often, in later years, when a telephone call from Cecil was no longer remotely on the cards.

  7

  Paul wrote in his diary:

  April 13, 1980 (Cecil’s 89th birthday!) /10.30pm.

  I’m writing this up from skeleton notes while I can still remember it fairly well. On the coach back from Birmingham I started to play back the tape of the interview and found it goes completely dead after a couple of minutes: the battery in the mike must have given out. Amazing after twenty interviews that it should happen with this one – now I have no documentary proof for the most important material so far. Astounding revelations (if true!)

  My appt was for 2.30. The Sawles have lived in the same house (17 Chilcot Ave, Solihull) since the 1930s: a large semi, red brick, with a black-and-white gable at the front. It was new when they bought it. George Sawle walked me round the garden before I left, and pointed out the ‘Tudor half-timbering’: he said everyone at the university thought it was screamingly funny that 2 historians lived in a mock-Tudor house. A pond in the back garden, full of tadpoles, which interested him greatly, and a rockery. He held my arm as we went round. He said there had been a ‘very ambitious rockery’ at ‘Two Acres’, where he and Hubert and Daphne had played games as children – he has always liked rockeries. Hubert was killed in the First World War. Their father died of diphtheria in 1903 ‘or thereabouts’ and Freda Sawle in ‘about 1938’ (‘I’m afraid I’m rather bad with dates’). GFS told me with some pride that he was 84, but earlier he’d said 76. (He is 85.)

  Madeleine opened the door when I arrived – she complained at some length about her arthritis, which she seemed to blame largely on me. Walks with an elbow-crutch (shades of Mum). Said, ‘I don’t know if you’ll get much sense out of him.’ She was candid, but not friendly; not sure if she remembered me from Daphne’s 70th. Her deafness much worse than thirteen years ago, but she looks just the same. Her sense of humour is really no more than an irritable suspicion that someone else might find something funny. She said, ‘I’m only giving you an hour – even that may be too much’ – which was a completely new condition, and put me in a bit of a flap.

  GFS was in his study – looked confused when I came in, but then brightened up when I said why I was there. ‘Ah, yes, poor old Cecil, dear old Cecil!’ A kind of slyness, as if to imply he really knew all along, but much more friendly than I remember at D’s 70th – in fact by the end rather too friendly (see below!) Now completely bald on top, the white beard long and straggly, looks a bit mad. Bright mixed-up clothes, red check shirt under green pullover, old pin-stripe suit-trousers hitched up so tight you don’t quite know where to look. I reminded him we’d met before, and he accepted the idea cheerfully, but later he said, ‘It’s a great shame we didn’t meet before.’ At first I was emb by his forgetfulness – why is it emb when people repeat themselves? Then I felt that as he didn’t know, and there was no one else there, it
didn’t matter; it was a completely private drama. He sat in the chair beside his desk and I sat in a low armchair – I felt it must be like a tutorial. Books on 3 walls, the room lived-in but dreary.

  I asked him straight away how he had met Cecil (which oddly he doesn’t say in the intro to the Letters). ‘At Cambridge. He got me elected to the Apostles. I’m not supposed to talk about that, of course’ (looking rather coy). What they called ‘suitable’ undergraduates were singled out and assessed, but the Society was so secret they didn’t know they were being vetted for it. ‘C was my “father”, as they called it. He took a shine to me, for some reason.’ I said he must have been suitable. ‘I must, mustn’t I?’ he said and gave me a funny look. Said, ‘I was extremely shy, and C was the opposite. You felt thrilled to be noticed by him.’ What was he like in those days? He was ‘a great figure in the college’, but he did too many things. Missed a First in the History tripos, because he was always off doing something else; he was easily bored, with activities and people. He sat for a fellowship twice but didn’t get it. He was always playing rugger or rowing or mountaineering. ‘Not in Cambs, presumably?’ GFS laughed. ‘He climbed in Scotland, and sometimes in the Dolomites. He was very strong, and had very large hands. The figure on his tomb is quite wrong, it shows him with almost a girl’s hands.’

  C also loved acting – he was in a French play they did every year for several years. ‘But he was a very bad actor. He made all the characters he played just like himself. In Dom Juan by Molière (check) he played the servant, which was quite beyond him.’ Did C not understand other people? GFS said it was his upbringing, he (C) believed his family and home were very important, and in a ‘rather innocent’ way thought everyone else would be interested in them too. Was he a snob? ‘It wasn’t snobbery exactly, more an unthinking social confidence.’ What about his writing? GFS said he was self-confident about that too, wrote all those poems about Corley Court. I said he wrote love poems as well. ‘Yes, people thought he was a sort of upper-class Rupert Brooke. Upper class but second rate.’ I said I couldn’t work out from the Letters how well C knew Brooke – there are 2 or 3 sarcastic mentions, and nothing in Keynes’s edition of RB’s letters. ‘Oh, he knew him – he was in the Society too, of course. RB was 3 or 4 years older. They didn’t get on.’ He said C was jealous of RB in many ways, C was naturally competitive and he was overshadowed by him, as a poet and ‘a beauty’. Wasn’t C v good-looking? GFS said ‘he was very striking, with wicked dark eyes that he used to seduce people with. Rupert was a flawless beauty, but Cecil was much stronger and more masculine. He had an enormous cock.’ I checked that the tape was still going round nicely and wrote this down before I looked at GFS again – he was matter-of-fact but did look vaguely surprised at what he’d just heard himself say. I said I supposed he’d gone swimming with C. ‘Well, on occasion,’ he said, as if not seeing the point of the question. ‘C was always taking his clothes off, he was famous for it.’ Hard to know what to say next. I said were there real people behind all the love-poems? This was really my central question. He said, ‘Oh, yes.’ I said Margaret Ingham and D of course. ‘Miss Ingham was a blue stocking and a red herring’ (laughed). I felt I should come out with it. Did C seduce men as well as women? He looked at me as if there’d been a slight misunderstanding. ‘C would fuck anyone,’ he said.