The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [170]
He had written to Winton Parfitt and asked him straightforwardly if he knew of material on Stokes’s dealings with Cecil that had come to light since his book had been published twenty years earlier. The subtitle A Double Life referred disappointingly to Stokes’s dual careers as man of letters and discreet Tory fixer; Parfitt nowhere revealed that his subject had been queer, or drew what seemed to Paul to be the obvious inference, that he had been in love with Cecil. His waffling memoir of the “joyous” and “splendid” young poet, doubtless highly acceptable to old Lady Valance, was also a surreptitious love-letter of his own. In fact Parfitt was as much of a diplomatic clam as old “Sebby” himself, and the royal-blue jacket of his huge biography, covered with praise from the leading reviewers, was now among those features that make all second-hand bookshops look inescapably the same. There was something “splendid” about the book—an “event,” a “milestone,” a “labour of love”—and something inescapably dodgy and second rate. It seemed a kind of warning to Paul. Still, he had grown familiar with half-a-dozen pages of it. There was a short paragraph mentioning Stokes’s visit to the Valances to gather materials for the memoir, but it was overshadowed by the frantic negotiations preceding the General Strike. That weekend at Corley was something he planned to ask Daphne herself about, when he managed to speak to her: it seemed a pregnant moment, an unrepeatable Cecil-focused gathering at which he longed to have been present himself. Parfitt had written back promptly, from his Dorset manor-house, in a fine italic hand, to say he knew of nothing significant, but offering warm encouragement before slipping in, with ingenuous briskness, the awful final sentence: “You will no doubt be in touch with Dr. Nigel Dupont, of Sussex, who has also written to me in connection with his work on the ever-intriguing Cecil.”
Paul was very unhappy about Dr. Nigel Dupont, but he didn’t know what to do about him. He couldn’t help thinking he must be the unknown person Daphne had met at the party in Bedford Square, the sinister “nice young man” who’d been asking her all about Cecil. “Sussex” presumably meant Sussex University, not merely that Dr. Dupont lived somewhere in that county. He would be an ambitious young academic, an Englishman presumably, but with an incalculable element of Gallic arrogance and appetite for theory. Could he be writing a life of Cecil too? There were a number of obvious ways of finding out, but Paul was unable to take any of them. He saw himself at another party, being introduced to his rival, at which point the scenario halted and dithered in the mists of his ignorance and worry. He had a sense of the “ever-intriguing Cecil” actively encouraging both biographers, as if through “Lara” herself, in a spirit of mischief and self-importance.
At Tooting Graveney they lived on first-name terms with the dead. Karen, Paul’s landlady and would-be accomplice in what she called “the Cecil job,” worked at Peel’s Bookshop in Putney, and read a lot of things in drab-looking but exclusive bound proofs long before they were published. In his nine months as her lodger he’d grown used to daily gossip about Leonard and Virginia, Lytton and Morgan and the rest, whom she spoke of almost as personal friends; Duncan and Vanessa strayed into the conversation as easily as customers into the shop. It seemed a teenage meeting with Frances Partridge had set her off on a craze for Bloomsbury, and as books on the subject