The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
Beyond the coats was the sombre marble and mahogany washroom, and then the third room, with its towering cistern and high-up prison-like window. George locked the door with a remembered sense of refuge; and then with a gasp of confusion that the man he was hiding from was long dead.
On his way back along the passage he saw the charm of avoiding the party for a little longer, and decided to visit the chapel and look at Cecil’s effigy. On the occasion of Daphne and Dudley’s wedding, the tomb had been unfinished, a brick box that one had to go to left or right of. To tell the truth, he’d avoided looking at it. There had seemed to be some awful lurking joke that they were getting married over Cecil’s dead body. Now there was no one in the hall, no sound of voices, and he skirted the monstrous oak table and went out into the glassed-in arcade, half cloister, half conservatory, which ran along the side of the house to the chapel door. Here too everything seemed the same, everything old and old-fashioned, muddled and habitual, waiting no doubt for Mrs Riley’s ruthless hand. Hard to bear in mind it was only fifty years old, younger than his own mother. It looked sunk in habit and history. Gothic plinths held up stone tubs of flowers; three brass chandeliers, crudely wired for electricity, hung to just above head-height; the floor was of diapered tiles, crimson and biscuit. George felt how the dark oak door of the chapel loomed, seemed to summon and dishearten the visitor with the same black stare. He gripped the cold ring of the handle, the latch shot up inside with a clack, and again he saw Cecil, bustling him through on that first afternoon, with a glance back over his shoulder, in case they were being followed – ‘This gloomy hole is the family chapel’ – and holding him tightly round his upper arm. George had peeped about, in an excited muddle, trying to smother his awe in the required show of disdain for religion, while sensing none the less that Cecil would expect some sign of admiration at there being a chapel at all. Surely they were both rather thrilled by it. The chapel was tall for its modest size, the timber roof shadowy, the thwarted light through the stained-glass window giving the place, by afternoon, the atmosphere of the time just after sunset. Pale things glowed weakly, but others, tiles and tapestries, were dull until the eyes adjusted.
Now what he saw, among the grey shadows, was Cecil’s white figure, stretched out flat, and seeming to float above the floor. The sun had long since gone off the garish glass of the east window, and what daylight there was, oblique and qualified, seemed all to be gathered in Cecil. His feet pointed away, towards the altar. It was as if the chapel had been built for him.
George pushed the door to, without quite closing it, and stood by the first pew’s end, with a stern expression and a very slight feeling of fear. He was alone with his old pal again, almost as though he’d come into a hospital ward rather than a chapel, and was afraid of disturbing him, half-hoped to find him asleep and to slip away, having kept his word. That was a kind of visit he’d paid many times, in the War, and after, dreading to see what had happened to a fellow, afraid of the horror in his own face. Here there was a sickly smell of Easter lilies rather than disinfectant. ‘Hello, Cecil, old boy,’ he said, pleasantly and not very loudly, with a dim echo, and then he laughed to himself in the silence that followed. They wouldn’t have to have an awkward conversation. He listened to the silence, chapel silence, with its faint penumbra of excluded sounds – birdsong, periodic rattle of the distant mower, soft thumps that were less the wind on the roof than the pulse in his ear.
Cecil was laid out in dress uniform, with rich attention to detail. The sculptor had fastened his attention on the cuff-badges, the captain’s square stars, the thin square flower of the Military Cross. The buttons shone dully in their strange new light, brass transmuted into marble. Who was it . . . ? George stooped to read the name, which was dashingly signed along the edge of the cushion: ‘Professor Farinelli’ – dashing and a touch pedantic too. The effigy lay on a plain white chest, with less readable lettering, Gothic and plaited, running right round it in a long band: CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC CAPTAIN 6TH BATT ROYAL BERKSHIRE REGT BORN APRIL 13 1891 FELL AT MARICOURT JULY 1 1916 CRAS INGENS ITERABIMUS AEQUOR. It was a thoroughly dignified piece of work, in fact magnificently proper. It struck George, as the chapel itself had on that first day, as a quietly crushing assertion of wealth and status, of knowing what to do. It seemed to place Cecil in some floating cortège of knights and nobles reaching back through the centuries to the Crusades. George saw them for a moment like gleaming boats in a thousand chapels and churches the length of the land. He gripped Cecil’s marble boot-caps, and waggled them sulkily; his hand waggled, the boot-caps eternally not. Then he edged round to look at the dead man’s face.
His first polite thought was that he must have forgotten what Cecil looked like, in the ten years and more since he’d been in a room with him alive. But no, of course, the long curved nose . . . the wide cheekbones . . . the decisive mouth: they were surely what he remembered. Naturally the rather bulbous eyes were closed, the hair short and soldierly, as it must have been latterly, pushed back flat about a central parting. The nose had grown somehow mathematical. The whole head had an air of the ideal that bordered on the standardized; it simplified, no doubt, in some acceptable accord between the longings of the parents and the limits of the artist’s skill. The Professor had never set eyes on Cecil – he must have worked from photographs, chosen by Louisa, which only told their own truth. Cecil had been much photographed, and doubtless much described; he was someone who commanded description, which was a rareish thing, most people going on for years on end with not a word written down as to what they looked like. And yet all these depictions were in a sense failures, just as this resplendent effigy was . . . So George reasoned for half a minute, looking over the polished features, the small seamed cushions of the closed eyes that once had seen right into him; thinking already what phrases he would use when he spoke to Louisa about it; whilst he tried to hold off some other unexpected sadness – not that he had lost Cecil, but that some longing of his own, awakened by the day and the place, some occult opportunity of meeting him again, had been so promptly denied.
None the less, he thought he would sit for a minute or two, in the flanking pew – he couldn’t quite have said why; but when he was there he dropped his forehead to his raised hand, leant forward slightly and prayed, in a vague, largely wordless way, a prayer of images and reproaches. He looked up, on a level now with Cecil’s sleeping form, the obdurate nose pointing roofwards, the soldierly commonplace of the body, posed perhaps by some artist’s model, not completely unlike Cecil, not a runt or a giant, but not Cecil in any particular way. And pictures of the particular Cecil rose towards him, naked and dripping on the banks of the Cam, or trotting through the Backs in his rugger bags and clattering studs, white and unassailable before a match, filthy and bloody after it. They were beautiful images, but vague as well with touching and retouching. He had others, more magical and private, images less seen than felt, memories kept by his hands, the heat of Cecil, the hair-raising beauty of his skin, of his warm waist under his shirt, and the trail of rough curls leading down from his waist. George’s praying fingers spread in a tentative caress of recollection. And then of course the celebrated . . . the celebrated membrum virile, unguessed for ever beneath the marble tunic, but once so insistently alive and alert . . . How Cecil went on about it, pompously and responsibly – it might have been the Magna Carta from the way he talked of it. Absurd but undeniable, even now, so that the colour came to George’s face and he thought of Madeleine, as a kind of remedy, though it didn’t seem to work like that, in fact didn’t seem to work at all.
George dropped his head again, rather wondering about this probing of old feelings. It was awful that Cecil was dead, he’d been wonderful in many ways, and who knew what he might not have gone on to do for English poetry. Yet the plain truth was that months went past without his thinking of him. Had Cecil lived, he would have married, inherited, sired children incessantly. It would have been strange, in some middle-aged drawing-room,
There was the sharp moan of the door on its hinges, and Sebby Stokes stepped in, with his quiet official air, gleam of high white collar and silvery head. He pushed the door almost closed, as George had done, and came forward – clearly he thought he was alone, for these first few moments, and for George, half-hidden by the tomb, his unguarded expression had an odd, almost comic interest. Stokes surely felt the slight but unusual thrill of his imminent encounter with Cecil. George saw more clearly something feminine and nervous in his walk and glance; but there was something else too in the set of his mouth, his frown of appraisal – something hard and impatient, not glimpsed at all in the infinite diplomacy of his social manner. George stood up abruptly and enjoyed his jump of alarm, and humorous recovery, in which a trace of irritation lingered for a minute. ‘Ah! Mr Sawle . . . You startled me.’
‘Well, you startled me,’ said George equably.
‘Oh! Hmm, my apologies . . .’ Stokes walked around the tomb with a firmer expression, frank but respectful, so that now you couldn’t tell what he thought. ‘Quite a fine piece of work, don’t you think? May I call you George? – it seems to be the style here now, and one hates to appear stuffy!’
‘Of course,’ said George, ‘I wish you would,’ and then wondered if he was meant to call Stokes Sebby, which seemed an unwarranted jump into familiarity with a man so much older and so oddly, almost surprisingly, distinguished.
‘It’s not a bad likeness, by any means,’ Stokes said. ‘Often I’m afraid they don’t quite get them if they haven’t known them. I’ve seen some very hand-me-down efforts.’
‘Yes . . .’ said George, out of courtesy, but feeling, now the subject was being aired, more critical and proprietary. ‘Of course I didn’t see him later on,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t quite feel I’ve found him here.’ He drew his fingers thoughtfully down Cecil’s arm, and glanced for an abstracted moment at the marble hands, which lay idly on his tunicked stomach, almost touching, the hands of a sleeper. They were small and neat, somewhat stylized and square, in what was clearly the Professor’s way. They were the hands of a gentleman, or even of a large child, untested by labour or use. But they were not the hands of Cecil Valance, mountaineer, oarsman and seducer. If the Captain’s neat head was a well-meant approximation, his hands were an imposture. George said, ‘And of course the hands are quite wrong.’
‘Yes?’ said Stokes, with a momentary anxiety, and then, a little reluctantly, ‘No, I think you’re right,’ a sense of their unequal intimacies in the air.
‘But when did you last see him yourself, I wonder?’
‘Oh . . . well . . .’ Stokes looked at him: ‘It must have been . . . ten days before he was killed?’
‘Oh, well, there you are . . .’
‘He was on leave unexpectedly, you know, and I invited him to dine at my club.’ Stokes said this in a natural, practical tone, but it was clear the invitation had meant a great deal to him.
‘How was he?’
‘Oh, he was splendid. Cecil was always splendid.’ Stokes smiled for a moment at the marble figure, which certainly seemed to encourage this view. George felt, as he had with Wilkes, that the older man’s words lightly censured some suspected impropriety in his own. ‘Of course I first met him in a punt,’ said Stokes, while George’s pulse quickened at the chance for disclosure, a diverting little episode.
‘You came to Cambridge . . .’ he said, neutrally, with a quiet sense of the chance flowing away. There had been four or five of them in the punt, Ragley and Willard certainly, both now dead, and someone else George couldn’t see. His own focus, like Sebby’s evidently, had been on the figure with the pole at the rear.
‘Lady Blanchard’s son, Peter, had asked me down to meet Cecil, and meet some of the new poets.’
‘Of course . . .’ said George, ‘yes, Peter Blanchard . . .’
‘Peter Blanchard was full of Cecil.’
‘Yes, wasn’t he just . . .’ said George, looking away, distantly bewildered to think how jealous of Blanchard he’d been. The absolute torments of those days, the flicker of gowns in stairwells, the faces glimpsed as curtains were closed, seemed now like distant superstitions. What could any such emotions mean years later, and when their objects were dead? Stokes gave him a quick uncertain glance, but pushed on humorously,
‘I can’t remember them all now. There was a young man who never said a word, and who had the job of keeping the champagne cold.’
‘Did he have the bottles on strings in the water . . . ?’ said George, now feeling terribly foolish, in retrospect as well as in the present moment. The bottles used to knock against the hull with each forward thrust of the boat; when you loosened the wire the corks went off like shots into the overhanging willows.
‘Exactly so,’ said Stokes, ‘exactly so. It was a splendid day. I’ll never forget Cecil reading – or not reading, reciting – his poems. He seemed to have them by heart, didn’t he, so that they came out like talk; but in quite a different voice, the poet’s voice. It was distinctly impressive. He recited “Oh do not smile on me” – though one could hardly help it, of course!’
‘No, I’m sure,’ said George, blushing abruptly and turning away. He peered at the altar, beyond its polished brass rail, as though he had found something interesting. Was he doomed to glow like a beacon throughout the whole weekend?
‘But you were never one of the poets?’
‘What . . . ? Oh, never written a line,’ said George, over his shoulder.
‘Ah . . .’ – Stokes murmured behind him. ‘But you have the satisfaction of having inspired, or occasioned, or anyway in some wise brought about perhaps his most famous poem.’
George turned – they were rather penned in in this space between the tomb and the altar. The question was laboriously genial but he ran over it again carefully. ‘Oh, if you mean “Two Acres”,’ he said. ‘Well that of course was written for my sister.’
Stokes smiled vaguely at him and then at the floor. It was as if a mist of delicacy had obscured the subject. ‘Of course I must ask Lady Valance – Daphne – about that when we talk this afternoon. Do you not see yourself in the lines, what is it? “I wonder if there’s any man more / Learned than the man of Stanmore”?’
George laughed warily. ‘Guilty as charged,’ he said – though he knew ‘learned’ had not been Cecil’s original choice of epithet. ‘You know he wrote it first in Daphne’s autograph book.’
‘I have it,’ said Stokes, with the brevity that lay just beyond his delicacy; and then, ‘She must have felt she’d got rather more than she bargained for,’ with a surprising laugh.
‘Yes, doesn’t it go on,’ said George. He himself felt sick of the poem, though still wearily pleased by his connection with it; bored and embarrassed by its popularity, therefore amused by its having a secret, and sadly reassured by the fact that it could never be told. There were parts of it unpublished, unpublishable, that Cecil had read to him – now lost for ever, probably. The English idyll had its secret paragraphs, priapic figures in the trees and bushes . . . ‘Well, Daphne can tell you the story,’ he said, with his usual disavowal of it.
Stokes said, in a most tactful tone, ‘But you and Cecil were clearly . . . very dear friends,’ the tact being a con
‘Oh, for a while we were terrific pals.’
‘Do you recall how you met?’
‘Do you know, I’m not sure.’
‘I suppose in College . . .’
‘Cecil was very much a figure in College. It was flattering if he took an interest. I think I’d won . . . oh, one of our essay prizes. Cecil took a keen interest in the younger historians . . .’