The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [137]
“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