The Stranger's Child (21 page)

‘Oh, I had many letters from him,’ said George, with a sigh, and choosing Stokes’s word, ‘really
splendid
letters . . . But I’m afraid they were lost when we moved from “Two Acres”. At least they’ve never turned up.’

‘That is a shame,’ said Stokes, so sincerely as to suggest a vague suspicion. ‘My own letters from Cecil, only a handful, you know, but they were marvellous things . . .
joyous
things. Even up to the end he had such spirit. I will certainly give some beautiful instances.’

‘I hope you will.’

‘And of course if yours were to be found . . .’

‘Ah,’ said George, with a laugh to cover his momentary vertigo.
Was ever such a letter written by a man to a man? How the world would howl and condemn if it read over my shoulder, yet everything in it is as natural and true as the spring itself.
He slid past Stokes to look at the tomb again and thought he could ask practically, ‘I suppose you’re his literary executor?’

‘Yes,’ said Stokes; and perhaps hearing something more in the question,‘He didn’t appoint me, to be completely frank, but I made a promise I’d look after all that for him.’ George saw he couldn’t ask if the promise had been made to Cecil in person or was purely a duty Stokes had imposed on himself.

‘Well, he’s very lucky, in that at least.’

‘There has to be someone . . .’

‘Mm, but someone with judgement. Posthumous publication doesn’t always enhance a writer’s reputation.’ He took a frank, almost academic note. ‘I don’t know how you would rate Cecil Valance, as a poet?’

‘Oh . . .’ Stokes looked at him, and then looked at Cecil, who now seemed to cause him a slight inhibition, his marble nose alert for any disloyalty. ‘Oh, I think no one would question,’ he said, ‘do you? that a number, really a goodly few, of Cecil’s poems, especially perhaps the lyrics . . . one or two of the trench poems, certainly . . . “Two Acres”, indeed, lighter but of course so charming . . . will be read for as long as there are readers with an ear for English music, and an eye for English things . . .’

This large claim seemed rather to evaporate in its later clauses. George glanced at Cecil’s knightly figure and said kindly, ‘I just wonder if people aren’t growing sick of the War.’

‘Oh, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the War,’ said Stokes.

‘Well, no,’ said George. ‘And of course much of Cecil’s work was done before the War.’

‘Quite so, quite so . . . but the War made his name, you’d have to agree; when Churchill quoted those lines from “Two Acres” in
The Times
, Cecil had become a war poet . . .’ Stokes sat down, at the end of the first pew, as though to mitigate the strict air of debate, as well as to show he had time for it.

‘And yet,’ said George, as he often had before, with a teacher’s persistence, ‘ “Two Acres” itself was written a full year before war broke out.’

‘Yes . . .’ said Stokes, with something of a committee face. ‘Yes. But isn’t there often, in our poets and our artists, a prophetic strain?’ He smiled in concession: ‘Or if not that precisely, a fore-knowledge, a sense, perhaps, of the great inevitable that most of us are deaf and blind to?’

‘It may be so,’ said George, wary of this sweeping talk, which in his view bedevilled too much of what passed as literary criticism. ‘But to that I’d say two things. You’d agree, I’m sure, that we were all talking about war long before it happened. You didn’t need prophetic gifts to know what was going on, though Cecil certainly, who went to Hamburg and Berlin, and had been sailing up on the Frisian coast, was very much in the picture. My second point is that as I’m sure you know Cecil appended that further little section to “Two Acres” when it came out in
New Numbers
.’

‘ “The greyhound in its courses, / The hawk above the hill”, you mean.’

‘ “Move not more surely to their end / Than England to the kill”,’ said George, pleased to cap the quotation, though far from pleased by the words themselves. ‘Which of course has nothing to do with “Two Acres” the house, though it turns the poem “Two Acres” into a war poem of – in my view – a somewhat depressing kind.’

‘It certainly changes the poem,’ said Stokes more leniently.

‘For us it was a bit like finding a gun-emplacement at the bottom of the garden . . . But perhaps you think rather better of it. I’m a historian, not a critic.’

‘I’m not sure I allow a clear distinction.’

‘I mean I’m not a reader of new poetry. I don’t keep up, as you do.’

‘Well, I try,’ said Stokes. ‘I admit there are poets writing at this moment whom I don’t fully understand – some of the Americans, perhaps . . .’

‘But you keep up,’ George assured him.

Stokes seemed to ponder. ‘I think more in terms of those individuals I can help,’ he said, something at once noble and needy in his tone.

‘And now . . .’

‘And now . . . well, now I must get all Valance’s things up together,’ said Stokes, standing up, with the air of someone late for work.

‘How much is there, would you say?’

Stokes paused as if considering a further confidence. ‘Oh, it will be quite a book.’

‘A lot of new things . . . ?’

A tiny flinch. ‘Well, a good many old ones.’

‘Mm, you mean the infant effusions.’

Sebby Stokes looked around, with his almost comical air of simultaneous candour and caution. ‘The infant effusions, as you so justly put it.’

‘Not omittable?’

‘All addressed to Mamma!’

‘Of course . . .’

‘Most unfortunate.’

‘Touching, in a way, perhaps?’

‘Oh, touching, certainly. Certainly that.’

George giggled ruefully. ‘And then Marlborough, I suppose?’

‘There the view grows a good deal brighter. Some of the schoolboy work we know from
Night Wake
, of course, but I shall comb the
Marlburian
with much keenness.’

‘But again . . . later unknown things?’

Stokes looked at him keenly, even pleadingly, for a second. ‘If you know of any . . .’

‘As I say, we’d rather lost touch.’

‘No . . . The fact is I am a little troubled by something.’ Stokes glanced at the tomb. ‘When I last saw Cecil that night in London, he showed me a handful of new poems, some of them unfinished. We went back to my flat after dinner, and he read to me, it must have been for half an hour or so. Very striking: both in itself and, somehow, in the way he read: very quiet and . . . thoughtful. It was a new voice – you might say a personal voice, as much as a poetical one, if you see what I mean. I was most taken, and stirred.’ Stokes was brusque for a moment with reawoken feeling.

George pictured this scene with a forgiving sense of the Cecil that Stokes had never known, the nudist, the satyr, the fornicator; and with a twist of envy too – the bachelor flat, Cecil in uniform, the bewildering brevity of a soldier’s leave, the luxury of talk about poems over a coal fire. ‘And what subjects was he dealing with?’

‘Oh, they were war poems, poems about his men, trench life. They were very . . .
candid
,’ said Stokes frankly but airily, briefly searching George’s face.

‘Mm, I’d like to see them.’ (No, the coal fire was nonsense, some memory of his own – it must have been June, windows open on to the London night.)

Stokes nodded impatiently. ‘So indeed should I.’

‘Ah. He didn’t leave them with you.’

‘He said he’d send them,’ said Stokes, with a touch of petulance; and then, with an accepting snuffle, ‘but of course he went back to France without finding occasion to do so.’

‘He had other things on his mind,’ said George.

‘I’m sure he did . . .’ said Stokes, clearly not in need of a lesson.

‘And these poems weren’t among his effects?’ George had a sense of Stokes’s pretty formidable efficiency rattled by this lapse.

Stokes shook his head, and looked up quickly, almost furtively, at the groan of the door behind them. ‘Anyway . . . here is your wife!’

George turned and saw Madeleine step cautiously into the gloom. He raised a hand reassuringly and called, ‘Hello, Mad’ – the echoes reawoken.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said Madeleine. She came forward, adjusting her eyes to the shadows and perhaps to something else in the atmosphere. ‘Are you praying, or plotting?’

‘Neither,’ said George.

‘Both,’ said Stokes.

‘We’ve been communing with Cecil,’ said George.

‘Well, it’s Cecil I’ve come to see,’ said Madeleine, in her own tone, with its possible tremor of humour; George had seen people peer at her, trying to make it out. The two men stood silent and observant as she approached the effigy and looked it over, with her scholarly firmness of interest and her cool immunity to all aesthetic sensations. ‘Is it a good likeness?’ she said.

‘As it happens,’ said Stokes, ‘we weren’t quite able in the end to decide; were we, George? Is it Cecil, or is it, as it were, someone else?’ He had a slight air of taking sides and teasing Madeleine, which George entirely understood and keenly resented. He said,

‘I’m afraid I don’t think it’s him.’

Madeleine stood by the head of the tomb, with the straight-backed look of a senior nurse. Impossible to guess how much she knew; or even to know how much she guessed. ‘Was he not bigger?’ she said.

‘Oh . . . possibly . . .’ said George, coming over to face her across the body, with a clear, disingenuous desire to be open, casual, critical if need be. ‘But it’s not that.’

‘Not more muscular?’ said Madeleine, giving a glimpse perhaps of what she’d been encouraged to believe about the dead hero.

George stood, with his eyebrows raised, gently shaking his head . . . ‘What can I say? – just more alive, simply.’

‘Ha, yes,’ said Madeleine, and gave him a quick puzzled look. ‘Have you been having a useful discussion?’

‘Your husband has been moderately forthcoming,’ said Stokes. ‘Though I feel I haven’t finished with him yet.’

‘Sebastian has a great deal to do,’ said George, and laughed.

Stokes bowed his head with courteous humour. ‘Indeed, and I must get on – I’ve promised to interrogate your dear mother . . .’ And he went out, with that slight hardening of the face again at the prospect of further work and new calculations.

George looked up at his wife, and then down again at Cecil, who seemed somehow to have turned into a piece of evidence, ambiguous but irreducible, lying between them. He had an almost physical sense of changing the subject as he turned away and said, ‘You know, old Valance has been quite bearable, so far.’

Madeleine smiled tightly. ‘So far. But then we have only been here for three hours.’

‘I imagine it’s pretty galling for him to have this fuss kicked up about Cecil, all over again.’

‘I don’t see why,’ said Madeleine, naturally contrary.

‘One sees the anniversaries stretching ahead for ever.’

‘Dudley Valance is a very strange man. I think it very sad, if he’s jealous after all this time.’

‘A bad war, of course.’

‘Though you might think not so bad as Cecil’s. Louisa was just telling me about the death. How they went out to France themselves to see him.’

‘Yes, he hung on, didn’t he, for several days . . . ?’ George had an idea that ‘Fell at Maricourt’ was a sonorous formula, rather than the strict and messy truth.

‘They got permission to bring his body back. I say they, but I had the impression it was Louisa’s doing.’

‘She’s not called the General for nothing.’

‘One can sympathize with them wanting to see their son,’ said Madeleine fairly.

‘Well, of course, darling.’

‘Though immediately one thinks of the thousands of parents who simply couldn’t do that.’

‘Very true. My own dear mother, for instance.’

‘Well, there you are,’ said Madeleine, but as if arguing rather than agreeing – it was their way, their own odd intimacy, though charged now with something more anxious. ‘They brought him back here, and he was laid out in his own room, facing the rising sun.’

‘Oh, god. What, in the coffin?’ George pursed his lips against a horrified giggle.

‘I wasn’t quite clear,’ said Madeleine.

‘No . . . Where was he hit exactly?’

‘Well, I could hardly ask, could I. I suppose he might have been very disfigured.’

George saw how he’d been able to avoid such questions before; and had a certain sense, too, of Madeleine choosing her moment to raise them.

‘I don’t think you’ve ever told me,’ she said, ‘about when you heard the news.’

‘Oh, didn’t I, Mad . . . ?’ George blinked, and frowned at the floor. His thoughts ran along the diagonals, the larger red lozenge of the tiles. Well, she’d asked him, and he must answer. ‘I do remember one or two things about it very well. I was up at Marston, of course, I remember it was very hot, and everyone was tired and tense about what was happening in France. Then after dinner I was called to the telephone. As soon as I heard it was Daphne, I felt quite sick with dread that something had happened to Hubert, and when it turned out to be Cecil, awful to say but I remember the news had to fight with a sort of upsurge of relief.’ He glanced at his wife. ‘I remember blurting out, “But Huey’s all right!” and old Daph saying, rather crossly, you know, “What . . . ? Oh, Huey’s fine,” and then, her exact words, “It’s beautiful Cecil who’s dead” – and then she sort of wailed into the telephone, an extraordinary sound I’ve never heard her make before or since.’ George himself, looking at Madeleine, gave a weird gasp of a laugh. She looked back, showing in her blankly pondering face that she had other questions. ‘Beautiful Cecil is dead,’ said George quietly again, in a tone of amused reminiscence. Well, he would never forget the words, or the sudden wild licence of grief so startling in someone as close as a sister. Even then he had resisted them, their sudden appeal to something shared but never said till now. In truth, more than most deaths that summer, Cecil’s death had seemed both quite impossible and numbly unsurprising. Within a week or so he had seen it as inevitable.