The Stranger's Child (57 page)

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.

‘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 pressed 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: