The Stranger's Child (41 page)

‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Paul, finding it very hard to concentrate on talking or eating; he felt sure the Sawles must be able to see what was going on; and anyway, he might know ‘Soldiers Dreaming’ by heart, but they came at things from another angle here, out of a world of family gossip and connections. He held his leg firm against Peter’s, which seemed to matter more. He reached out again and drank solemnly from his glass to cover his confusion, thinking at the same time he shouldn’t drink so fast, but feeling too there was something fated and irresistible about it. Across the party, half-hidden by the trailing fronds of the tree above, candles had started to flicker, at each little table, against the half-light. In a minute, young Julian appeared, as if raising a curtain, with a lit white candle in a jar held in front of him. ‘Here you are, Great-Uncle George!’ he said, reaching over Madeleine’s shoulder to put the jar on the table, his own sleek face, brown eyes, glossy fringe, lit up by the quickly settling flame. Paul felt a new pressure of attention in Peter’s knee, as they all gazed up fondly at him. ‘Are you all right out here – you should be in with Gran,’ he said. His voice, at seventeen, still had a boy’s rawness. He stood smiling at them with that cheerful little consciousness of behaving well, to his worthy old relations, and light-heartedly clinging to his decorum after quite a few drinks.

‘Oh, we don’t expect special treatment, you know,’ said George Sawle in a gently ironic voice.

‘I don’t know if it’s just me,’ said Peter smoothly, watching Julian go, ‘but I thought that Stokes thing was almost unreadable.’

Sawle gave a cluck of a laugh. ‘Deplorable publication altogether.’

‘Oh, I’m glad I’m not wrong.’

‘What . . . !’ – old Sawle looked at Peter with some enviable shared understanding. It was a whole way of talking that had Oxford and Cambridge in it, to Paul’s ears.

‘There hasn’t been a proper Life, has there?’ Peter said.

‘I don’t suppose there’s enough for a full biography,’ Sawle said. ‘To be perfectly honest, I have old Cecil somewhat on my conscience.’

‘Well, you’ve no need to, George,’ said his wife.

Sawle cleared his throat. ‘I’m supposed to have turned in an edition of his letters quite some time ago.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Peter.

‘Well, Louisa asked me originally, oh goodness, some time after the War – his mother.’

‘She must have lived to a great age, then?’ Peter said.

‘Well, she was in her eighties, I suppose,’ said Sawle, with the faint touchiness of someone getting on himself. ‘She was a very difficult woman. She made a sort of cult of Cecil. There was a very awkward occasion when I was asked down, it was rather like when the poems were being done, to talk about it all. She wasn’t living at Corley Court any more by then, she’d moved to a house in Stanford-in-the-Vale. I went for the weekend. “Let’s lay them all out, and decide what ought to go in,” she said. Of course no editor could work under such conditions. I knew I’d have to wait till she was dead.’

‘Wait as long as you like, dear,’ said Mrs Sawle. ‘You expect too much of yourself. And I can’t believe anyone’s crying out for these letters.’

‘Oh, some of them are marvellous – the War letters, love. But Louisa had no idea of course of the sort of thing Cecil wrote in letters to his men friends.’

‘Is there some quite racy stuff?’

Sawle gave a fond apologetic look to his wife, but didn’t exactly answer. ‘I think all sorts of stuff’s going to come out, don’t you. I was talking just now to someone about Strachey.’

‘You must have known him too, I suppose?’ Peter said.

‘Oh, a bit, you know.’

‘Didn’t really care for Strachey, did you, George?’ said Madeleine Sawle, again looking quizzically over her husband’s food.

‘There’s this young chap . . . Hopkirk.’ Sawle looked at her.

‘Holroyd,’ she said.

‘Who’s about to tell all about old Lytton.’

‘Oh, I can’t wait,’ said Peter.

‘Mark Holroyd,’ said Madeleine firmly.

‘He came to see me. Very young, charming, clever, and extremely tenacious’ – Sawle laughed as though to admit he’d been got the better of. ‘I don’t suppose I helped him much, but it seems he’s got some people to agree to the most amazing revelations.’

‘Quite a tale, by all accounts!’ said Madeleine, with a grim pretence of enthusiasm.

‘I think if people ever do get to learn the real details of what went on among the Bloomsbury Group,’ Sawle said, ‘they’ll be pretty astonished.’

‘We barely knew that world,’ said Madeleine.

‘Well, we were in Birmingham, dear,’ said Sawle.

‘We still are!’ she said.

‘Mm, I was just thinking,’ said Peter, ‘that if this Bill goes through next week it could open the way for a lot more frankness.’

Paul, who hadn’t been able to discuss the Bill with anybody, felt the grip of the crisis again, but less upsettingly than in the drive with Jenny. ‘Yes . . . indeed,’ he said quite calmly, and looking up in the candlelight he felt (though of course you could never really measure it) he was blushing much less than on that occasion.

‘Oh, Leo Abse’s Bill, you mean,’ said Sawle, in an abstracted tone, and perhaps to avoid the charged phrase ‘Sexual Offences’. He seemed fixed on some distant and subtle calculation. ‘It could certainly change the atmosphere, couldn’t it’ – with a tiny suggestion that prominent and public though it was it had better not be mentioned in front of his wife. He picked up with a little apologetic gasp from where he had been a minute before – ‘No, to go back to Cecil, I came to feel all his rather wilful behaviour was really an attempt to do one of two things – either to appease his mother or to get as far away from her as possible. Going to war was the perfect combination.’

‘Ah, yes . . .’ Paul glanced at George Sawle almost superstitiously. It wasn’t just that he’d known Lytton Strachey and Cecil Valance, but that he spoke so illusionlessly about them. Cecil loomed in the background for him, less as a poet than as some awkward piece of lumber in the family attic.

‘Dudley was a very different character,’ Sawle went on, ‘but equally under her spell. She appalled them and she fascinated them. He writes very well about her in his autobiography. I don’t know if you’ve read that?’

Paul gazed, hardly bothering to shake his head, and Peter of course said, ‘I certainly have.’

‘Awfully good, isn’t it?’

Paul said, ‘I wondered if he’d be coming tonight, actually,’ with a certain confidence, but Sawle said almost brusquely,

‘I’d be astonished if he did.’

And having said one thing, Paul thought he’d better immediately say the other thing he’d been nursing and rehearsing, ‘I wondered what you thought of Valance’s poetry, actually?’ looking from husband to wife, oracular sources. He felt he must be prepared for a tough answer; but in fact they seemed barely interested.

Madeleine said, ‘I’m honestly not a poetry person.’

The Professor seemed to muse a little longer, and said with regret, ‘It’s hard to say, when you remember them being written. They’re probably not much cop, are they?’

Peter glanced rather sweetly at Paul, and at his tender question, but seemed unwilling to disagree with the Sawles; so Paul kept silent about how much they had always meant to him.

‘I don’t mean to say, incidentally,’ said Sawle, in his way of not letting others drive him off-course, ‘that Louisa wasn’t heart-broken by Cecil’s death – I’m sure she was. But she made the most of it . . . you know. They did, those women. The memorial volumes, the stained-glass windows. Cecil indeed got a marble tomb by some Italian sculptor.’

‘Well, I know . . .’ said Peter.

‘Of course you know all about it.’

‘What’s that?’ said Paul.

‘Oh, at school,’ said Peter: ‘Cecil Valance is buried in the chapel.’

‘Really?’ said Paul, and gasped, the whole subject like a dream taking substance in the candle-lit bell of the beech-tree.

‘You must come and see him,’ said Peter, ‘if you like the poems; he’s rather splendid.’

‘Thank you,’ said Paul, ‘I’d like to very much,’ his pop-eyed look of earnest gratitude covering his surprise as Peter’s hand, stroking the napkin in his lap, wandered as if unawares on to Paul’s thigh, and lay there lightly for several seconds.

On the way in after supper Paul stuck with the Sawles for a moment, but they latched on to others with sudden warmth and relief, and so he slipped off. They’d been polite, even kind to him, but he knew it was really Peter they were interested in. In the deepening shadows between pools of candlelight, the guests, gathering up bags and glasses, conversations stretching and breaking, in an amiable jostle as they bunched in through the french windows, seemed to Paul like a flickering frieze, unknowable faces all bending willingly to something perhaps none of them individually would have chosen to do. He was drunk, and he bunched in too, the drink making him less conspicuous. Everyone was friendlier and noisier. The drawing-room appeared blocked with rows of chairs. The connecting doors into the dining-room had been flung open, and the piano turned round. Mr Keeping stood to one side with his mocking smile, asking people to go to the front, to fill up the rows. Paul buttoned his jacket and smiled politely at him as he squeezed past. The effects of the drink, free and easy outside, felt a bit more critical in the glare of the crowded room. Could people tell how drunk he was? Before anything happened he would need the lavatory; where there was a queue, of course; some of the old ladies took two minutes, nearly three minutes. He smiled at the woman in front of him and she smiled back tightly and looked away, as though they were both after the same bargain. Then he was alone in the hall with the colourful chaos of presents and cards, most of them unopened, piled on the table and under it. Books obviously, and loosely swathed plants, and soft things it was difficult to wrap neatly. His jiggling desperation grew painful with the knowledge he hadn’t bought Mrs Jacobs a present or even a card himself. When the woman at last emerged and hurried into the drawing-room Paul heard a loud rapping, a hush, a scatter of applause, and then Mrs Keeping starting to talk. Well he couldn’t not go. Better to miss the concert altogether. All he really wanted was to see Peter play, to watch him, with the beautiful and alarming new certainty that he was about to . . . he looked in the mirror, hardly knowing, now it came to it, what it was they might be going to do.

He finished as fast as he could, and listened – awful to pull the great clanking flush during Mrs Keeping’s opening bars. But no, they were still laughing. They must all be as drunk as he was by now. He hung about in the shadow of the door from the hall, there were two empty seats, but in the middle of rows, there was a burst of laughter which he thought for a mad second was aimed at him, and he slipped in pink-faced at the side of the room and stood against the wall, behind a row of dining chairs. Here he could see everything – but so too could everyone see him. There were two or three others standing, and at the back of the room the french windows were still open, with further guests gathered outside in what already looked like darkness. Mrs Keeping was erect in front of the piano, hands clasped, in the posture of a child reciting. He didn’t take in what she was saying. Peter was at the end of the front row, smiling at his hands, or at the floor; Mrs Jacobs in the middle of the row, the place of honour, sipping at her drink and blinking up at her daughter with delighted reproach as the surprise got under way. Paul smiled anxiously himself, and when everyone laughed he laughed too. ‘Now mother is awfully fond of music,’ Mrs Keeping said, ‘so we thought we’d better humour her by playing some.’ Laughter again – he looked at Mrs Jacobs, enjoying the collective sense of treasuring and teasing her; a woman just behind her exclaimed, ‘Dear Daphne,’ and people laughed at that too. Mrs Keeping pulled her black wrap around her upper arms and pushed back her shoulders – ‘So, to start with, her favourite composer.’

‘Aha . . . !’ said Mrs Jacobs, with an accepting smile, though perhaps a tiny uncertainty as to who that would turn out to be.

‘Chopin?’ said one old boy to the woman beside him.

‘You’ll see soon enough!’ said Mrs Keeping. She sat down on the piano stool, and then looked round. ‘We can’t run to the original, I fear, so this is a paraphrase by Liszt.’ There was a murmur of humorous apprehension. ‘It’s
very hard
!’ She fixed the music on the stand with a furious glare, and then she was off.

She could really play, couldn’t she? – that was Paul’s first feeling. He looked around hastily at the others, with a bashful grin on his face. Was it Chopin? He saw them all deciding, staring at each other, frowning or nodding, some leaning to whisper. There was a noiseless sigh, a wave of collective recognition and relief that almost made the music itself unimportant: they’d got it. He didn’t want to show that he hadn’t. He had never seen anyone play the piano seriously and at close range, and it locked him into a state of mesmerized embarrassment, made worse by the desire to conceal it. There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had, and there was the sight of Mrs Keeping in action, the plunges and stabs of her bare arms up and down the keyboard. She wasn’t a large woman – it was only her presence that was crushing. Her little hands looked brave and comical as they stretched and rumbled and tinkled. She rocked and jumped from one buttock to the other, in her stiff red dress, her black wrap slipping – it twitched and drooped behind her as she moved, with a worrying life of its own. The riveting, but almost unwatchable, thing was her profile, powdered and severe, shaken by twitches and nods, like tics only just kept under control. He stared, smiling tightly, and covering his mouth and chin pensively with his hand.