The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [156]
Were people interested in Cecil? How did he rank? Undeniably a very minor poet, who just happened to have written lines here and there that had stuck … But his life was dramatic as well as short, and now everyone was mad about the First World War—the Sixth Form all learned “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by heart, and they liked the Valance war poems he had shown them. There was something a little bit queer about several of these poems; something he suspected in Dudley, too. Dudley seemed if anything the queerer one, with his intense devotion to the man he called Billy Prideaux, who’d been shot beside him on a night recce, and seemed to have triggered a nervous breakdown, powerfully but obscurely described in his book.
Peter came back to the stone bench by the fishpond and lit a cigarette. Cecil’s letters would be the thing to get a look at—Peter hoped his charm had worked last week on George Sawle, who must have all sorts of useful memories. Interesting what he’d said about Lytton Strachey too, and this book that was about to come out. Was the era of hearsay about to give way to an age of documentation? He looked at the house, as if it enshrined the mystery and in its Victorian way imposed the task. Was he up to writing a biography? It would take a much more orderly existence than any he’d managed so far … It was odd, it often struck him, being here in the country with these eighty children and a group of adults he would never have chosen as friends. But it would be at least a symbolic advantage, if he were to write the book. The stars thickened in the outer sky and the sinking moon threw the steep black profile of the roof into Gothic relief. It was windless and warm, the near-stasis of an ideal English summer. It all looked very good for the Open Day. He got up and strolled back towards the house in the nice tired mood of prospective exertion.
What was that? A hand stroked the back of his neck as the shadow of a tall brick chimney high above the Headmaster’s window wobbled and shifted. A kite-like form detached itself, and moved with dreamy-looking wariness across the sloping upper leads; five seconds later an-other, hesitant but committed, and making it seem that the inky shadow might harbour many more of them. They were strangely antique, these two figures, of uncertain size and height, and seemed to flow like oily shadows themselves, in dressing-gowns left open like cloaks. They crept from chimney-stack to chimney-stack, towards the higher slope of the chapel roof, with its crowning spirelet still far above their heads. Once or twice Peter could hear very faintly the patter or slither of their slippered feet.
FOUR
Something of a Poet
Mrs. Failing found in his remains a sentence that puzzled her. “I see the respectable mansion. I see the smug fortress of culture. The doors are shut. The windows are shut. But on the roof the children go dancing for ever.”
—E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey, chapter 12
1
THE RAIN WASN’T MUCH, but the wind was wild, and he hurried round the square with his brolly held low in front of him and half-blocking his view. The plane trees roared in the dark overhead, and wide wet leaves shot past him or pressed blindly against his coat. In his left hand he had his briefcase, black leather, streaked by the rain. He’d been reading poetry in the library, in the dwindling evening crew. When the dark-haired man, called R. Simpson, who seemed to be working on Browning’s plays, started packing up, he had packed up too; but at the street-door, in the downpour, Simpson had hurried right, while he had gone left, in the usual muddle of gloom and relief, towards the Underground. He found the tussle with the weather oddly satisfying.
After dusk in Bedford Square