The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [179]
5
“SHOVE?”
“Mm?”
“Fredegond Shove.”
“Oh, yes! … um …”
“It’s the Collected Poems.”
“Aha …”
“Or … wait a minute, what about this …”—he handed Paul a precious-looking volume, in a black slipcase: A Funny Kind of Friendship: Letters of Sir Henry Newbolt to Sebastian Stokes. “Interest you at all?”
“Well, actually …” It just might be interesting, for his own research; and anything he took away could be sold, sooner or later.
“Private press, we don’t have to do it.”
Paul balanced the stack of books he’d already chosen on the edge of a table scattered with sugar and ground coffee. Here the reek of Gitanes smoke was laced with that of sour milk. In cracked old mugs with comic logos, bluish crusts of mould were forming. The books table itself, ten volumes deep, had a broken leg propped up on other books that presumably would never be reviewed. The squalor was remarkable, but no one who worked here—young men in olive-green corduroy, good-looking women chatting on the phone about Yeats or Poussin—appeared to notice it. They sat in their low cubicles, walled in by rubbish, books and boxes, half-eaten meals, old clothes, and great slews of scrawled-over galley-proofs.
“So—gay things,” said Jake, rubbing his hands.
“That’s right!” said Paul, and was furious to find himself blushing.
“We get quite a lot of those these days …” Jake wore a weddingring, but he seemed very glad for Paul to be gay. He was the same age, younger perhaps, clearly proud of working at the TLS, and cheerfully corporate—“we do this,” “we had that.” Paul imagined sharing his cubicle, high up above the traffic, deciding the fate of books together. “Bloomsbury, I suppose …?”
“Bloomsbury … First World War.” Paul saw a promising mauve cover deep down, gay books keeping generally to that end of the spectrum, but when he dug it out it was a survey of historic thimbles, which wasn’t quite gay enough. “I think there’s a new volume of Virginia Woolf’s Letters coming up …”
“Ah,” said Jake, “yes, that’s gone, I’m afraid—Norman’s doing it.”
“Ah, well …” Paul flinched and nodded, as if at the evident justice of this commission, and wondered who the hell Norman could be; he felt Norman wasn’t his surname. So far Paul had had only two things in the paper, both very cut, and very far back, almost in the Classified section: a piece about Drinkwater’s plays, and a regretful demolition of a novel by the retired diplomat Cedric Burrell. This caused a bit of a stir, as Burrell had immediately cancelled his subscription to the TLS, which he’d had since going up to Oxford in 1923. But no one seemed to mind, they were even rather pleased, and Jake had asked him to drop in and “look at the books,” if he was ever around. Paul let a day and a half pass before turning up.
“Remind me what you’re working on?”
“I’m writing a biography of Cecil Valance,” said Paul firmly, and the claim sounded foolishly bold in this new setting. But one day, no doubt, his book would appear on the table in front of him. Someone would ask to do it. Maybe Norman would get a crack at it.
“That’s right, ‘Two blessèd acres of English ground.’ ”
“Among other things …”
“Didn’t we have something on him recently?”
“Oh, well the Letters, perhaps? That was a couple of years ago now …”
“That must be it. So he was gay too, was he?”
“Again … among other things.”
Again Jake was delighted. “They all were, weren’t they?” he said.
Paul felt he should be a bit more cautious: “I mean, he did have affairs with women, but I have the feeling he really preferred boys.