The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [168]
My wife and I, who lived at Naughton’s Cottage until my father’s death, were naturally unable to measure, even less control, these activities. But our suspicions grew, and for a while threatened to corrupt the whole character of domestic life at Corley, already under great strain from the War. Mrs. Aubrey was clever enough to fire a number of blanks (one test led unequivocally to a page of quadratic equations, which even my mother’s best efforts could not bring out right). But the incidence of gratifying bromide grew so high that we began to wonder whether there were not some accomplice within the house, a maid or footman confirming the location of certain volumes. On occasion the book in question was out of its normal run—a fact interpreted no doubt as proof of Cecil’s absolute up-to-dateness and all-seeing eye. I enlisted Wilkes, who had risen to be butler during the War, and who I knew was above reproach, but his discreet enquiries among the staff led nowhere. I don’t know if I am more embarrassed or proud of a trick I played myself. I had learned to use my limp in various ways, so as to get what I wanted or simply to get in the way. On this occasion, seizing the letter from my mother, I lurched off as fast as I could down the room, rather as an eager shop assistant might run for a packet of tea, and concealing the shelves from her view I called out “The fourth book, Mamma, on the second shelf” whilst taking at random a volume from the shelf above. I have forgotten the volume, but will always remember the sentence: “Its want of volitary powers led inevitably to its extirpation,” the subject being, I believe, the Giant Moa: “What does he mean?” worried my mother, faced with this bleakly Darwinian pronouncement from my brother. Ah, had Cecil been able to fly, how different things might have been!
One had wondered from the start, of course, what Mrs. Aubrey was getting out of it. It slowly became clear that she was in receipt of cheques for sums unmatched by even the most charitable of the causes my mother espoused. She had a rich old lady where she wanted her, a victim passionate to be duped. But then, by slight, almost deniable, degrees, my mother seemed to let the thing go; she mentioned it rarely, she grew somewhat furtive—not about the tests but about stopping the tests, with the implication that doubt had won out over painful desire. I suspect that by the time my father had his stroke they had completely stopped. The strange timorous delicacy imposed on others by a very forceful personality ensured that we did not ask. She herself recovered much of the humourless cheerfulness that had been so typical of her before the War. Her good works redoubled in mass and effort. With my father indisposed, the present-day concerns of a large estate consumed the energies lately devoted to the past. She was still careful to spend some minutes of each morning in the chapel, alone with her first-born; but grief itself perhaps had run its course.
Paul re-read this passage with a rather silly feeling of excitement, thinking how useful it might be to get some messages from Cecil for himself. An appendix in G. F. Sawle’s edition of Cecil’s Letters seemed to suggest the book-test slips still existed, in the Valance archive, which Paul imagined bundled haphazardly in a large locked bureau like the one in The Aspern Papers; George gave them short shrift, but noted their significance as evidence of the spiritualist craze during and after the First World War. Paul’s copy of Black Flowers was the old red Penguin edition, 1957, and he peered again at the tiny author photo on the back: a shadowy sneer in a one-inch square. Beneath it there was a ramblingly circumstantial biographical note:
Sir Dudley Valance was born in 1895 at Corley Court in Berkshire, the younger son of Sir Edwin Valance, Bt., and educated at Wellington and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read