The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [194]
“Oh, it is,” said Dudley, “I’m so sorry!” with a momentary bleak laugh. “How very unfortunate!”
Still too confused to feel the shock fully, Paul said incoherently, “I won’t trouble you now, Sir Dudley. I’ll see you at your lecture.” And he hung up the phone again and stood staring at it incredulously.
It was during General Colthorpe’s talk on Wavell that Paul suddenly understood, and blushed again, with the indignant but helpless blush of foolish recognition. Very discreetly, under the desk, he got out Daphne Jacobs’s book from his briefcase. It was somewhere in the passage on Dudley’s exploits as a practical joker, those efforts she retailed as classics of wit and cleverly left it to the reader to wonder at their cruelty or pointlessness. As before, he felt General Colthorpe was watching him particularly, and even accusingly, from behind his lectern, but with infinite dissimulation he found the place, her account of her first visit to Corley, and looking up devotedly at the General between sentences he read the now obvious description of Dudley taking a telephone call from his brother:
The well-known voice came through, on a very poor line, from the telegraph office in Wantage: “Dud, old man, it’s Cecil here, can you hear me?” Dudley paused, with the grin of feline villainy that was so amusing to anyone not the subject of his pranks, and then said, with a quick laugh of pretended relief, “Oh, thank god!” Cecil could be heard faintly, but with genuine surprise and concern, “Everything all right?” To which Dudley, his eye on himself in the mirror and on me in the hallway behind him, replied, “For a frightful moment I thought you were my brother Cecil.” I was confused at first, and then astonished. I knew all about teasing from my own brothers, but this was the most audacious bit of teasing even I had ever heard. It was a joke I later heard him play on several other friends, or enemies, as they then unexpectedly found themselves to be. Cecil, of course, merely said “You silly ass!” and carried on with the call; but the trick came back to my mind often, in later years, when a telephone call from Cecil was no longer remotely on the cards.
7
PAUL WROTE in his diary:
April 13, 1980 (Cecil’s 89th birthday!) /10:30pm.
I’m writing this up from skeleton notes while I can still remember it fairly well. On the coach back from Birmingham I started to play back the tape of the interview and found it goes completely dead after a couple of minutes: the battery in the mike must have given out. Amazing after twenty interviews that it should happen with this one—now I have no documentary proof for the most important material so far. Astounding revelations (if true!)
My appt was for 2:30. The Sawles have lived in the same house (17 Chilcot Ave, Solihull) since the 1930s: a large semi, red brick, with a black-and-white gable at the front. It was new when they bought it. George Sawle walked me round the garden before I left, and pointed out the “Tudor half-timbering”: he said everyone at the university thought it was screamingly funny that 2 historians lived in a mock-Tudor house. A pond in the back garden, full of tadpoles, which interested him greatly, and a rockery. He held my arm as we went round. He said there had been a “very ambitious rockery” at “Two Acres,” where he and Hubert and Daphne had played games as children—he has always liked rockeries. Hubert was killed in the First World War. Their father died of diphtheria in 1903 “or thereabouts” and Freda Sawle in “about 1938” (“I’m afraid I’m rather bad with dates”). GFS told me with some pride that he was 84, but earlier he’d said 76. (He is 85.)
Madeleine opened the door when I arrived—she complained at some length about her arthritis, which she seemed to blame largely on me. Walks with an elbow-crutch (shades of Mum). Said, “I don’t know if you’ll get much sense out of him.” She was candid, but not friendly; not sure if she remembered