The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [180]
An older man, in his fifties perhaps, with oiled black hair and a paisley bow-tie, had emerged from his cubicle to get coffee, and stayed looking at the new books and looking at Paul too, over his half-moon glasses, with a certain air of strategy. Jake said, “Robin, this is Paul Bryant, who’s been doing some things for us. Robin Gray.”
“Ah, yes,” said Robin Gray, in a friendly patrician tone, tucking his chin in. He had the blue eyes of a schoolboy in the face of a don or a judge.
“Paul’s writing about Cecil Valance, you know, the poet.”
“Yes, indeed.” Robin glanced to left and right, as if at the enjoyable delicacy of the matter. “Indeed, I had heard …”
“Oh, really?” said Paul, smiling back, and feeling suddenly uneasy. “Goodness!”
Robin said, “I believe you bumped into Daphne Jacobs.” And now he scratched his head, with an air almost of embarrassment.
“Oh, yes …,” said Paul.
“And who might Daphne Jacobs be?” said Jake. “One of your golden oldies, Robin?”
Robin gave a curt laugh while still holding Paul’s eye. Paul felt he shouldn’t answer the question for him. He half-wondered himself what the answer would be. “Well,” said Robin, “she is now the widowed Mrs. Basil Jacobs, but once upon a time she was Lady Valance.”
“Don’t tell me she was married to Cecil,” said Jake.
“Cecil!” said Robin, as if Jake had a lot to learn. “No, no. She was the first wife of Cecil’s younger brother Dudley.”
“I should explain, Robin knows everyone,” said Jake, but just then he was called to the phone at the far end of the office, leaving the two of them in their unexpected new relation. They went into the semi-privacy of Robin’s cubicle, where he set down his coffee on the desk; unlike the others he kept a china cup and saucer, and there was a degree of order in the books, a parade of Loeb classics, archaeology, ancient history. On the radiator a brown towel and swimming-trunks were spread out to dry. There was a strong sense of a bachelor life, of rigorous routine. Robin shifted papers from a second chair. “I’m the ancient history editor,” he said, “which everyone thinks is very apt.” Paul smiled cautiously as he sat down; beside him was a shelf of Debrett’s and Who’s Who, and those eerily useful volumes of Who Was Who, giving the hobbies and phone-numbers of the long dead. Late one night he and Karen had rung Sebastian Stokes himself: a moment’s silence and then the busily negative drone of non-existence. Of course you had to convert the old exchanges to the new numbers—they might have got it wrong. “Don’t lean back in that chair, by the way, or you’ll land on the floor.”
“I was a bit worried about … Daphne,” Paul said, sitting forward, making his own thoughtful claim on knowing her. “No one seemed to be looking after her.”
“I’m sure you were kind to her,” said Robin, a touch cautiously.
“Well, I didn’t do much … you know … Have you known her a long time?”
Robin stared and grunted as if at the effort it would take to explain properly, and at last said, very slowly, “Daphne’s second husband’s half-sister married my father’s elder brother.”
“Right … right! … so …”—Paul gazed at the world beyond the dirty window, the top floor of a pub across the Gray’s Inn Road.
“So Daphne is my step-aunt by marriage.”
“Exactly,” said Paul. “Well, I’m very glad to meet you. You see, I’m hoping to interview her, but she hasn’t replied to a letter I sent her in November, which is three months ago now …”
“Well, you know she’s been ill,” said Robin, tucking his chin in again.
Paul winced. “I was afraid that might be the reason.”
“She has this macular problem.”
“Oh, yes?”
“It means she can’t really see—her sight’s very bad. And as you may know she also has emphysema.”
“Doesn’t that come from smoking?”
“I fear they both do,” said Robin, with a sigh at his own ashtray.
“Is she getting better?”
“Well, I’m not sure one ever really gets better.”
Paul had a sickening feeling she might smoke herself to death before he’d had a chance to speak to her. “I was surprised to see she still smoked, after