The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [136]
“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