The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [193]
“Lady Valance,” said General Colthorpe, offering his chair.
“Thank you so much, General, but I’m really rather tired myself.” She looked across at Dudley with teasing reproach. “Don’t you think?” she said.
“You go, my love, I’m going to sit and jaw a bit longer with these good people”—again the courtesy unsettled by the flash of a smile, like a sarcasm; though perhaps he really did want to make the most of this rare occasion to talk with young readers and scholars; or perhaps, Paul thought, as Martin jumped up to conduct her back to the Master’s lodgings, what Dudley really wanted was another large whisky.
THE NEXT MORNING Paul woke to the sound of a tolling bell, with a hangover that felt much worse for the comfortless strangeness of Greg Hudson’s room. He lay with a knuckle pressed hard against the pain in his forehead, as if in intensive thought. All he thought about was last night, in startling jumps and queasy circlings of recollection. He felt contempt for his juvenile weakness as a drinker, pitted against the octogenarian’s glassy-eyed appetite and capacity. He remembered with a squeezing of the gut the moment when he found himself talking about Corinna, and Dudley’s stare, at a spot just beyond Paul’s right shoulder, which he’d mistaken at first for tender gratitude, even a sort of bashful encouragement, but which turned out after twenty-five seconds to be the opposite, an icy refusal of any such intimacy. Thank god Martin the young English don had come back at that point. And yet at the end, perhaps because of the drink, there had been something forthright and friendly, hadn’t there, in the way they’d parted? On the doorstep of the Master’s lodgings, under the lamp, Dudley’s wincing gloom broken up in a grin, a seizing of the moment, an effusive goodnight: Paul could hear it now—no one had spoken to him since, and the sound of the words remained available, unerased. “Yes, see you in the morning!” If he could get round Linette, there might be a chance of another conversation, with the tape running. Most of the other things Dudley had said last night he’d completely forgotten.
When he got out of bed, Paul was lurchingly surprised to find Greg’s unwashed jock-strap and one or two other intimate items scattered across the floor, but the awful blurred recollections of his late-night antics were overwhelmed by the need to get to the lavatory; which he did just in time. After he’d been sick, in one great comprehensive paragraph, he felt an almost delicious weakness and near-simultaneous improvement; his headache didn’t vanish, but it lightened and receded, and when he shaved a few minutes later he watched his face reappearing in stripes with a kind of proud fascination.
Dudley didn’t come to breakfast in hall, of course, so at 9:20 Paul went down to the phone at the foot of the staircase and dialled the extension of the lodgings. He felt still the oddly enjoyable tingle of weakness and disorientation. The phone was answered by a helpful secretary, and almost at once Dudley was saying, in a nice gentlemanly way, and with perhaps a hint of tactical frailty to pre-empt any unwelcome request, “Dudley Valance …?”
“Oh, good morning, Sir Dudley—it’s Paul …!” It was simply the sort of contact he had dreamed of.
There was a moment’s thoughtful and potentially worrying silence, and then a completely charming “Paul, oh, thank god …”
“Ah …!”—Paul laughed with relief, and after a second Dudley did the same. “I hope this isn’t too early to call you.”
“Not at all. Good of you to ring. I’m sorry, for a ghastly moment just then I thought it was Paul Bryant.”
Paul didn’t know why he was sniggering too, as the colour rushed to his face and he looked round quickly to check that no one could see or hear him. “Oh … um …” It was as bad as something overheard, a shocking glimpse of himself—and of Dudley too: he saw in a moment the intractable delicacy of the problem,