The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [173]
Arnold Close was a terrace of pebble-dashed cottages with playing-fields beyond. Paul approached the second house and unlatched the front gate with a new flinch of dread and determination. The little garden was all brown and tidied for winter, a few pink buds surviving the frost. He pretended not to look into the front room, where a lamp was on, framed photographs with their backs to him on the window-sill. The house seemed both watchful and defenceless. He hoped he would get something valuable out of it—and that in the process he would give it something back, an interest and distinction it didn’t know it had.
He lifted the knocker and dropped it with a mightier noise than he meant to. He was dully aware that the door, with its four thick bull’s-eye panes above the letter-box, was the same as his mother’s had been; and there was something vaguer, shouts and football whistles on the air, the meagre romance of suburbs petering out into country, that took him back to his Uncle Terry’s council house in Shrivenham. He knew little houses like this, almost knew the voice in the hall, and the shape looming and slipping in the curls of the glass. He felt the clutch of nerves, and set his face sternly when the door opened—a large middle-aged woman who kept her hand on the latch. “Oh, good afternoon … I’ve come to see Mr. Trickett …”
“And you are …?”
“Paul Bryant!”
She nodded and stepped back. “Dad’s expecting you,” she said, without exactly welcoming him herself. She was wearing a thick overcoat in a gloomy brown tartan pattern, and tight brown leather gloves. Paul sidled past her into the narrow hall, catching his look of polite apprehension in the mirror. The glamorous opening that he represented, putting her father in a book, seemed indifferent to her, or perhaps even undesirable. “Dad!” she called out, as if knowing she wouldn’t be heard, “he’s here,” and closing the door, she edged back past Paul and went into the front room. “Mr. Bryant’s here,” she said. “Now, will you be all right?” Paul gulped a large breath and seemed to be sighing with gratification as he followed her into the room. The eagerness and charm, the smile confidently friendly but not hilarious, the note of respect with a hint of conspiracy—all this he hoped to sustain in his swoop towards the total stranger struggling up from his armchair with silvery head slightly cocked and the questioning look of a deaf person. “You’ll have to speak up,” said the woman.
Paul shook his hand and said, “Hello, Mr. Trickett!”—he’d somehow forgotten about the deafness, and now he heard his own forced note.
“Are you Paul?” asked Mr. Trickett, with a nervy laugh and again a bird-like way of looking for the answer.
“That’s right,” said Paul, finding of course that he was like a child to the old man, or like one of a number of confusing grandchildren. This too was annoying, but he would make the best of it. Jonah Trickett was small but broad-shouldered, with a wide friendly face very finely lined, and large blue eyes that seemed keener from listening as well as watching. He had a full head of hair and the perfect but impersonal dentures that give their own helpless eagerness to an old man’s face. Paul could see that as a boy he might have been appealing; he had something boy-like in him still. Now he lurched slightly as he moved.
“I’ve got a new hip,” he said, a half-embarrassed boast. “Take the young man’s coat, Gillian.” His voice was a bit breathy, and like the road he lived in, London with a hint of country to it.
As he put down his briefcase and unbuttoned his coat Paul glanced round the room—some plates on the wall but no pictures, the photos in the window black-and-white weddings, and one more recent gathering in colour. The gas fire made the room disorientingly hot. On top of the TV was a photo of Jonah with a woman, who must surely be, or have been, his wife. Paul felt he should seem appreciative but not nosey, oddly the opposite of the case. “Well, I’ll be off then,” said Gillian, taking his coat with her into