The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [162]
Outside the Tube station, Paul felt the little breathless shock of disorientation, swiftly denied. His thing in London was never to show that he didn’t know where he was going; he was less worried about being lost than about asking the way. And then the fact of doing research on the ground, the strange heart-race of crossing the physical terrain of his subject’s past, such as he’d felt when Peter first took him to Corley Court and showed him Cecil’s tomb, was like a secret guidance. He went along steadily, among the lunch-time shoppers, the office-workers going for a pint, with a completely private sense of purpose: no one knew who he was or what he was doing, or sensed the larger rhythm of his day that lay beyond their routines. It was freedom too, with its prickle of trepidation, since Paul had once been as routine-bound as them.
Stanmore Hill began like a village street, but soon opened out into a long straight climb out of town, already cheerless in the November afternoon. He passed a large pub, the Abercorn Arms, which was mentioned in one of the handful of letters from Cecil to George that survived: the boys had had a pint there themselves. Paul saw the appeal of it, as part of his research, but he felt self-conscious entering pubs alone and pressed on up the road. Boys are what they had been, of course, George only half Paul’s present age when he met Cecil, and yet they seemed to occupy their lives with a peculiar unselfconscious authority Paul had never felt in his own. Towards the top of the hill there was a small weather-vaned clock-tower on a stable block, half-covered by trees, and though he felt sure it couldn’t be “Two Acres,” it seemed in some incoherent way like a promise of it.
After that the road flattened out and on the far side was a long black pond, surrounded by scruffy trees, and the beginning of Stanmore Common. He saw a woman walking a dog, a white poodle that looked alarmingly too big, and since they were the only walkers about, Paul felt conspicuous. He turned down a side-road, thinking that he could have asked her, and for ten or fifteen minutes he wandered round a modest little network of lanes that none the less had something mysterious about them, the sun lowish already among the nearly bare trees, further murky ponds, woodlands sloping away on the far side, and here and there, half-hidden by hedges and fences and large gardens, a number of houses. He wished he were more expert at looking at houses, and knowing how old they were. George Sawle said “Two Acres” was red-brick, and had been built in the 1880s; his father had bought it from its first owner in 1890; his mother had sold it in 1920. Paul checked each name as he passed: “The Kennels” … “Old Charlocks” … “Jubilee Cottage.” Could he have missed it? He thought of the tests he had just read about in an earlier letter of Cecil’s, from his first weeks at Marlborough, where he had had to prove to a senior boy that he knew where things were and the meaning of ridiculous names. “I got them all,” Cecil told his mother, “except for Cotton’s kish, and for this it is Daubeny who must have forty lashes, for failing to instil this vital fact in my teeming brain. I fear you will think this unjust.”
He was almost back at the main road and here was the woman with the poodle coming towards him. She gave him a quick hard smile, a man roaming round with a briefcase in the afternoon. “You look lost,” she said.
“I’m okay now,” said Paul, nodding at the road ahead. “Thanks so much!” And then, “Well, actually,” when she had passed him, “sorry … I’m looking for a house called ‘Two Acres.’ ”
She half-stopped and turned, the dog pulling her on. “Two Acres? No … I don’t know it. Are you sure it’s round here?”
“Pretty sure,” said Paul. “A famous poem was written about it.”
“Mm, not a poetry reader, I’m afraid.”
“I thought you might have heard of it.”
“Stop it, Jingo! No …,” she frowned back to him, “I mean, two acres is quite big, you realize.”
“Well … yes,” Paul agreed.
“We have a third of an acre,