The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [185]
He went on, as planned, along Broad Street, to look at the bookshops. The rowing boys had already vanished into the thickening light of the late afternoon—the sun in the west struck right along the street, and dazzled the people who were coming towards him, leaving him, a mere looming silhouette, free to examine them closely. As he loitered around the biography table in Blackwell’s, picking up the expensive new books and looking at their indexes and acknowledgements, he had Dudley’s hunched but handsome figure on his mind, and was starting to hear answers to his questions in that extraordinary voice. Paul thought he would like his own acknowledgements page to begin with thanks to his subject’s brother, ideally perhaps by that stage “the late Sir Dudley Valance,” who “gave so generously of his time” and “made his archives available without questions or conditions.” The author of this new life of Percy Slater had even been “welcomed warmly into the family home”—something Paul now sensed was less likely to happen in his case.
He had always opened such books at the grey-black seams that marked the inserts of pictures. His daydreams for his own book often dwelt on this last, almost decorative addition to the work—the quickly passed-over photos of unappealing forebears, the birthplace or childhood residence, the subject sharpening into focus in his teens, the momentarily confusing captions—lower right, opposite, over—one or two of the pictures thought worthy of a full page, the defining portraits. Would Dudley ever make such things available to him? Paul felt some kind of subterfuge might be necessary. Percy Slater had lived into his seventies so there was all the proliferation of wives and children, snapshots from Kenya and Japan, a late picture in doctoral robes of this very university, chatting to Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor. None of that for Cecil, of course, just a photograph of his tomb, perhaps.
And there, at the end of the table, in a sober brown jacket with the title in red and yellow, was The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, a book with an aura, it seemed to Paul, and fat with confidence of its own interest—he looked at something else first, just to savour and focus his anticipation, and then after a minute casually picked up the heavy volume and hopped backwards through the index in his now systematic way—Valance, then Sawle, then Ralph. Two mentions of Dudley, one of Cecil, which turned out to be in the footnote identifying Dudley as “younger brother of the First World War poet.” He coveted it, but the price, £15, a week’s rent—hardly possible. A familiar but still extraordinary calm came over him. He made his way into the History department, chose a huge book on medieval England, itself part of a massively scholarly series, pale blue wrappers, Clarendon Press, price £40, and a minute later took it off upstairs. In his bag he had a compliments slip from Jake at the TLS, with his name on and the scribbled message, “800 words by end of March,” and he tucked it into the front of the book as he went. Stopping at a mezzanine where Classics were displayed, he got out his notebook to write down a title, and squatting down to a low shelf behind a table he pencilled three or four page numbers and a question-mark on the flyleaf of his volume of Plantagenet history. From here it was a further turn of the stairs up to the second-hand department, where he asked the bearded young man if they bought review copies in good condition. The Plantagenets were given a quick glance, the review-slip almost subliminally noted,