The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [105]
“Terrible thing,” said Mr. Keeping, raising his hat to an approaching lady with a murmur and his unsettling smile, as if to say he remembered exactly the size of her overdraft.
They went up into the quieter reaches of Church Walk, with its fanlights and front railings and lace curtains. A week ago Paul had known almost no one in the town, and now he had been put into an odd grim privileged relation with hundreds of them, over the counter, through the little mahogany doorway of his “position.” He was their servant and also an adjudicator, a strange young man granted intimate knowledge of at least one aspect of their lives, which was how much money they had, or didn’t have, and how much they wanted. He spoke to them courteously, amid tacit understandings, muted embarrassments: the loan, the “arrangement.” Now he glanced at Church Walk, grey veils of the curtains, glints of polished tables, porcelain, clocks, with a sense of arrangements reaching rooms-deep, years-deep into the shadows. Mr. Keeping said nothing else, and seemed satisfied by silence.
Opposite the church they turned into an unmade road, Glebe Lane, with larger houses on one side and a view over a hedge into fields on the other. Long brambly strands of dog-roses swayed in the breeze along the top of the hedge. The lane had its own atmosphere, exclusive and a little neglected. It was odd to find yourself here two minutes from the centre of town. Grass and daisies grew patchily along the ridge of the road. Paul glanced through gateways at squareish villas set back behind gravel sweeps in broad gardens; between one or two of them humbler modern houses had been awkwardly inserted—“The Orchard,” “The Cottage.” “This is a private road, you see, Paul,” said Mr. Keeping, reverting to his ironical tone: “hence the countless potholes and unchecked vegetation. I advise you never to bring a motor-car along here.” Paul felt he could pretty safely promise that. “Here we are …,” and they turned into the driveway of the penultimate house: the lane was sloping down already and narrowing, as if to lose itself in the approaching fields.
The house was another wide grey villa, with bay-windowed rooms either side of the front door, and its Victorian name, “Carraveen,” in stucco above it. The front door was wide open, as though the house had surrendered itself to the sunny day. A pale blue Morris Oxford stood in the drive with its windows down, and in its shadow a fat little Jack Russell lay on the gravel alternately panting and thinking. Paul squatted down to talk to the dog, which let him scratch it behind the ears but never really got interested. Mr. Keeping had gone into the house, and it seemed so unlikely that he had simply forgotten him that Paul stood and waited with a consciously unassuming expression. He saw the drive had an In and an Out, not marked as such, but the fact sank down in him to some buried childhood idea of grandeur.
There was a thick flower-border, colourful but weedy and overgrown, around the edge of the drive, and over the top of it he looked into the garden beside the house, which stretched away through mysterious shadows of two or three large trees to a bright mown lawn that must run across the back. The whole place, at this indefinable time of day—late afternoon, late June, work over but hours of sunlight still ahead—made a peculiar impression on him. The time, like the light, seemed somehow viscous. He studied the name “Carraveen,” a bit like caravan, a bit like carrageen, the stuff his mother used to set a blancmange, but clearly romantic too, Scottish perhaps, some now completely forgotten home or holiday place that someone had loved long ago. He felt seduced, and delicately stifled, by something he couldn’t yet explain. Through the left-hand bay-window he could see a grand piano in what appeared to be a dining-room, though the table in the centre was covered with books. The church clock struck the quarter-hour,