The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [161]
She said, “Just tell me your name again.”
“Oh! Paul Bryant …”
She nodded and clenched her hand in the air, as if catching at a moth. “Au revoir,” she said.
2
“DEAR GEORGIE,” Paul read, “At luncheon today the General was moved to remark that your visit to Corley Court had been reasonably quiet, and pressed a little further said you had ‘hardly put a foot wrong.’ That hardly may give you pause: but she would say no more. Overall, I take her to mean that further visits will not be frowned on. [ … ] I will of course convey her good wishes to you in person, tomorrow afternoon, at 5:27 precisely. Praise the Lord for Bentley Park and Horner’s Van (Homer’s—can’t read? Not the Homer, dare I hope, the writer?). Then Middlesex will be all before us. Your CTV.” Outside the train window, Middlesex itself was opening and then hiding again in the curves of the line. Paul kept his finger in the Letters of Cecil Valance as he stared into the bright afternoon—low sun over suburban houses, bare trees between playing-fields, now a tunnel. He looked down at Cecil’s face, the prominent dark eyes, wavy dark hair oiled almost flat, the sepia knot of his tie, with a pin behind it, the brass-buttoned epaulettes and wide serge lapels with a regimental badge on each, and the buckled leather strap that cut across his chest like a sash. “Edited by G. F. Sawle” beneath the picture. Then the flickering townscape jumped in again and they were slowing to a station.
Paul had formed a general idea, from studying the London A–Z, of where “Two Acres” was. But a small-scale map in black-and-white, with the street names squeezing like juggernauts through the streets and the odd vague rhombuses and triangles of blank space in the outer suburbs, might have been showing him almost anything. The half-dozen letters of Cecil’s to George that survived were addressed, in the confident bygone style, to “Two Acres, Stanmore, Mddx.” There was no suggestion the house stood on a particular street, or that any functionary could fail to know it and its occupants. Horner’s van would have offered a lift from the station. But now it was impossible to arrive as Cecil had done: the station itself, “built to look like a church,” according to George Sawle’s meticulous footnotes, “with battlemented tower and steeple,” had been closed to passengers in 1956. Paul had a sense, as of some neglected worry, that a search in the British Library, or indeed in the Stanmore Library, might have turned up a detailed historical map. But for now the poem was his guide. There was a road called Stanmore Hill, and Cecil referred to the “beechy crown of Stanmore Hill,” so that was a useful start. The garden was described as running down a slope, pretty clearly (its “goatfoot paths and mimic tor,” its “steps dissolving in the dusk / Through scented belts of rose and green / Into the little twilit dene”), and the house itself Paul imagined, on even slighter evidence, perched at the top, for the view. Bentley Priory, a large empty pentagon marked “Royal Air Force” in the A–Z, but with dotted footpaths through it, and the blank lozenge of a lake, seemed to climb the hillside too. George’s notes explained that the Priory, “once the home of the widowed Queen Adelaide, had later been a hotel; the branch-line from Harrow and Wealdstone to Stanmore had been opened to bring in the guests; trains ran hourly; subsequently the Priory became a girls’ school; during the Battle of Britain, it was the headquarters of Fighter Command.” Sawle pointed out the reference to Paradise Lost, but was something else meant by Cecil’s references to Middlesex? Throughout the book he looked back on the landscape of his own youth strictly as a historian; the initials GFS replaced the first person singular; he was patiently impartial. And yet there were omissions, like the one in this short letter, marked by the scrupulous square brackets.