The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [130]
“He has a war-wound, you know,” said John, with some satisfaction. “Well, here you are,” he said, nodding at an approaching Austin Princess, and set off back over the gravel to find a drink of his own.
“He can walk perfectly well,” said Jenny. “It’s just that everyone’s frightened of him.”
“Why’s that?” said Paul.
“Oh …”—Jenny puffed, and shook her head, as if it was all too tedious to explain to him. “Oh, god, it’s Uncle George,” she said. “Here, let me take your drink.” She put it down on a flat stone by the gate-post and shouted, “Hello, Uncle George!” and with a kind of weary cheerfulness, “Aunt Madeleine …”
Paul leaned a hand on the sun-baked edge of the roof and smiled in through the open window. Uncle George, in the passenger seat, was a man in his seventies, perhaps, with a sun-burnt pate and neat white beard. Craning past him was a strong-jawed woman with crimped grey hair and oddly gaudy make-up and ear-rings. Uncle George himself wore a deep red shirt with a floral green bow-tie. He squinted up at Paul as if determined to solve a puzzle without help. “Now which one are you?” he said.
“Um …,” said Paul.
“He isn’t any of them,” said Aunt Madeleine sharply, “are you?”
“You’re not one of Corinna’s boys?”
“No, sir, I’m … I’m just a colleague, a friend—”
“You remember Corinna’s boys, surely,” said Madeleine.
“Forgive me, I thought you might be Julian.”
“No,” said Paul, with a gasp, and a muddled sense of protest at being taken for a schoolboy, however pretty and charming.
“So who’s he?” said Paul, once he’d sent them on towards the field.
“Uncle George? He’s Granny’s brother; well, there were two brothers, in fact, but one was killed in the War—in the First World War, I mean: he was called Uncle Hubert. You should ask her about it, if you’re interested in the First World War. Uncle George and Aunt Madeleine used to be history professors. They wrote quite a well-known book together called An Everyday History of England,” said Jenny, almost yawning with casual pride.
“Oh—not G. F. Sawle?”
“That’s right, yes …”
“What, G. F. Sawle and Madeleine Sawle!—we had it at school.”
“There you are then.”
Paul pictured the title-page on which he had boxed the names G. F. SAWLE and MADELEINE SAWLE in a complex Elizabethan doodle. “Is everyone in your family a famous writer?”
Jenny giggled. “And you know Granny’s writing her memoirs …”
“Yes, I know, she told me.”
“She’s been writing them for yonks, actually. We all rather wonder if they’ll ever see the light of day.”
Paul took another swig of fruit-cup, already feeling weirdly giddy in the evening sunshine. He said, “I hope you won’t mind me saying but I find your family a bit complicated to work out.”
“Mm, I did warn you.”
“I don’t know, for instance, is there a Mr. Jacobs?”
“Dead, I’m afraid. Granny’s always had bad luck, in a way,” said Jenny, as if she’d been there at the time. “First she married Dudley, who was probably very exciting but a bit unhinged by the War and he was beastly to her; so she ran away with … my grandfather”—she took a swig of whatever she was drinking—
“Whatsisname … Ralph …”
“Revel Ralph, the artist, who everyone thought was queer, you know, but anyway they somehow managed to have … my father … and in due course …”
“Really?” said Paul, as if amused and delighted, moving away, his face burning at this sudden eruption of queer, the word and the fact, and going a few yards down the lane … such a casual eruption, too, as if no one much cared. Everyone thought he was queer. Thank god, here was a car, at least, which he prayed was coming to Carraveen. He looked at it fondly, full of hospitable feelings, ignoring his blush in the fervent hope it would go away. A pea-green Hillman Imp, sounding rough in a low gear, windscreen white with dust, perhaps a farmer’s car, the visor flipped down against the glare full in the driver’s face. Paul watched almost impatiently as it approached, looked with odd camaraderie at the large hands on the wheel, the wrinkled nose, the involuntary grin of the man perhaps barely able to see him waiting, in