The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [186]
The room he’d been given, at the top of a long stone staircase, had the name Greg Hudson on the door, and though the sheets and towel were fresh he felt like an unwanted guest among all the books, records and clothes that Greg had left behind over the vac. There were muddy plimsolls under the bed, a Blondie poster above the desk. In a sweet-smelling cupboard full of jam and coffee he found a bottle of malt whisky, half-full, and poured a finger of it into a tumbler. He stood sipping at it, with one foot on the hearthstone. There was a poem by Stephen Spender that began, very oddly, “Marston, dropping it in the grate, broke his pipe.” It had come into his mind the moment he’d unlocked the door, amid the uneasy displeasure, and covert excitement, of finding the room was full of someone else’s things. The line about Marston was part of his illusion of Oxford, a glimpse of pipe-smoking students known by their surnames; and though he’d forgotten what happened in the rest of the poem, he saw Marston dropping his pipe on the stone hearth just here, as easily as he could let slip this glass of treasured Glenfiddich.
He read the postcards from Paris and Sydney propped on the mantelpiece, both signed Jacqui with a lot of crosses, and took down the mounted photo of the college’s Second XV, which had the names written underneath in a crazily ornate script. So that was Greg, the grinning giant standing off-centre, his mid-parts hidden by the shaggy round head of the man seated in front of him. How his great sweaty body must labour in this schoolboy-size bed—and when Jacqui came round, what a terrible squash it must be for them. He pulled open the top drawer of the desk, but it was so jammed with papers that he couldn’t face going through it just yet. Otherwise, there was nothing much to read except chemistry books. For some reason, he left his new purchase, if that’s what it was, untouched.
He decided that before going down to dinner in half an hour he would look again at Dudley’s Black Flowers, to have something to quote, or to ask, if he got a chance over drinks. “I was wondering, Sir Dudley, when you said …” Since he knew Corley Court, it seemed a sound starting-point. He peered at the author photo with fresh interest, and a suspicion that Dudley looked almost younger now—the style of the 1950s man of letters seemed deliberately ageing. He sat self-consciously under the bright ceiling-lamp, with his glass of whisky. A red tartan rug thrown over the armchair disguised the probing state of the springs, deranged presumably by the recurrent impact of Greg. About the changes at Corley, Dudley had written:
My father had been laid low and effectively silenced by a stroke a year after the War ended; he lived on until 1925, the patient prisoner of a bath chair, his essential geniality apparently undimmed. When he spoke it was in a cheerful language of his own, and with no awareness that the sounds issuing from his mouth were nonsense to his listeners. One saw from his expression that what he was saying was generally fond and amusing. And he appeared to follow our conversation with perfect clarity. It took a great deal of patience in us, and then a certain amount of kindly pretence, to keep up any sustained talk with him. His own demeanour, however, suggested that he drew great satisfaction from these agonizing encounters.
Of course all work on The Incidence of Red Calves Among Black Angus, meant as his major contribution to agricultural science, was suspended for ever. My mother very capably extended her control of domestic