The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [192]
“Whom are you discussing?” he said.
“My brother Sizzle, General,” Dudley seemed to say.
“Ah, indeed,” said the General, declining an offered space on the sofa but fetching a hard chair as he came round and making a square circle of the group, which took on a suddenly strategic air. “Yes, a tragic case. And a very promising writer.”
“Yes …”—Dudley was more cautious now.
“Wavell had several of them by heart, you know. It’s ‘Soldiers Dreaming,’ isn’t it, he puts in Other Men’s Flowers, but he had a great deal of time for ‘The Old Company.’ ”
“Oh, well, yes,” said Dudley.
“I’ll be saying something about it tomorrow. He used to quote it”—the General batted his eyelids—“ ‘It’s the old company, all right, / But without the old companions’—one of the truest things said about the experience of many young officers.” He looked around—“They came back and they came back, do you see, if they came through at all, and the company was completely changed, they’d all been killed. There was always a company tradition, keenly maintained, but the only people who remembered the old soldiers were soon dead themselves—no one remembered the rememberers. No, a great poem in its way.” He shook his head in candid submission. Paul sensed there were demurrers in the group, but the General’s claim for the poem’s truth made them hesitate.
“It’s a subject, of course, I wrote about myself,” said Dudley, in a strange airy tone.
“Well—indeed,” said the General, perhaps less on top of the younger brother’s work, or uneasy with its tone about army life in general. As a cultured person from the world of action and power, General Colthorpe, with his long intellectual face and keen inescapable eye, was so imposing that Dudley himself began to look rather pansy and decadent in comparison, with his beautiful cuff-links and his silver-headed stick, and the grey curls over his collar at the back. The General frowned apologetically. “I was wondering—there’s not been a Life, I think, has there?”
Paul’s heart began to race, and he blushed at the naming of this still half-secret desire. “Well …!” said Martin, and smiled across at him.
“Of Sizzle, no,” said Dudley. “There’s really not enough there. George Sawle did a very thorough job on the Letters a few years back—almost too thorough, dug out a lot of stuff about the girlfriends and so on: my brother had a great appetite for romantic young women. Anyway, I gave Sawle a free hand—he’s a sound fellow, I’ve known him for years.” Dudley looked around with a hint of caution in this academic setting. “And of course there’s the old memoir, you know, that Sebby Stokes did—perfectly good, shows its age a bit, but it tells you all the facts.”
This left Paul in a very absurd position. He sat forward, and had just started to say, “As a matter of fact, Sir Dudley, I was wondering—” when Linette reappeared, alone, at the far end of the room.
“Ah, there you are …,” Dudley called out, with an odd mixture of mockery and relief.
Linette came towards them, in her still fascinating way, pleased to be looked at, smiling as if nursing something just a little too wicked to say. The General stood up, and then one or two others, half-ashamed not to have thought of it. Linette knew she had to speak, but hesitated appealingly. “Darling, the … Senior Dean’s just been showing me the most marvellous … what would one call it …?”—she smiled uncertainly.
“I don’t know, my love.”
She gave a pant of a laugh. “It was a sort of … very large … very lovely …”—she raised a hand, which described it even more vaguely.
“Animal, vegetable or mineral,” said Dudley.
“Now you’re being horrid,” she said, with a playful pout, so that Paul felt admitted for a second to a semi-public performance, such as friends might see on the patio or whatever it was in Antequera: it was a little embarrassing,