The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [182]
Robin pulled on his cigarette as if to steady himself. He said, “Revel was completely impossible.”
Paul grinned—“Really? You can’t have known him, surely.”
“Well …” Robin toyed with this flattery; “I was born in 1919, so you can work it out.”
“Mm, I see!” said Paul, which he didn’t altogether—was Robin claiming to have tangled with Revel himself? Revel was only forty-one when he was killed, so doubtless still pretty active, as it were, and Robin he could just about see as a naughty young soldier—it was too much to ask about.
“Oh, god yes,” said Robin, suddenly disgusted by his cigarette, stubbing it out and folding it under his thumb in the ashtray. “Basil wasn’t hopeless like that, he was much more conventional. I imagine Daphne felt she’d had enough of temperamental artists.”
“What did he do?”
“He was a businessman—he had a small factory that made something, I can’t remember what, a sort of … washer or something.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, he went bust. He had a daughter from an earlier marriage, and they went to live with her. I think it was all rather a nightmare.”
“Oh, yes, Sue.”
“Sue, exactly …,” said Robin, with a cautious smile. “You seem to know most of the family.”
“Well …,” said Paul. “They’re not actually all that useful when it comes to Cecil. But it’s good to know they’re on my side.” He found he had stood up, smiling, as if to go, and only then said, with a pitying shake of the head, “I mean, what do you think really went on between Daphne and Cecil?”
Robin laughed drily, as if to say there were limits. Paul knew already that information was a form of property—people who had it liked to protect it, and enhance its value by hints and withholdings. Then, perhaps, they could move on to enjoying the glow of self-esteem and surrender in telling what they knew. “Well,” he said, and went slightly pink, under the pressure of his own discretion.
“I mean, would you like to have a drink some time? I don’t want to bother you now.” Paul thought a discreet encounter, something with almost the colour of a date, might appeal to Robin. He saw, because it was a habit he had himself, elsewhere, how his eyes paused a fraction of a second in each upward or sideways sweep at the convergence of his black-jeaned legs. But Robin hesitated, as if to grope round some other obstacle.
“You see, I don’t drink during Lent,” he said. “But after that …”—with a suggestion he drank like a fish through the rest of the liturgical year. “Ah, Jake …,” and there was Jake again, standing behind them, with the twinkle of someone detecting a secret.
“I hope I’m not breaking something up.”
“Not a bit,” said Robin suavely.
“I’ll give you a ring if I may,” said Paul, “—after Easter!”
Jake led Paul back to have his books entered in the system, an unfollowable procedure of typed slips and cards. “I’ve just had a word with the Editor,” he said. “We wondered if you’d be interested in covering this for us?” He passed him a sheet of paper—“Ignore that stuff at the top”: two other names with question-marks and phone-numbers, heavily inked over during phone-calls surely, which as surely had not borne fruit. “You’d have to stay overnight—it would just be seven hundred words for the Commentary pages.” It was hard to take in, Balliol College, Oxford, a conference, dinner, the Warton Professor of English … a shiver of panic went through him, which he turned into a breathy laugh.
“Well, if you think I’d be right for it.”
“You’re not a Balliol man, are you?”
“Ooh, no!” said Paul with a little shudder. “Not I. Well, thank you—ah, I see, Dudley Valance is speaking.”
“That’s partly what made me wonder—I didn’t know he was still alive.”
“Not in good health, I’m afraid,” said Paul.
“You must know him …”
“A bit, you know … He and Linette live in Spain for most of the year.” He felt the prickle of the uncanny again, the secret sign, the reasserted intention that he should write his book. There were times in one’s life that one only knew as one passed through them, the decisive moments, when one saw that the decisions had been taken for one.