The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [195]
GFS was in his study—looked confused when I came in, but then brightened up when I said why I was there. “Ah, yes, poor old Cecil, dear old Cecil!” A kind of slyness, as if to imply he really knew all along, but much more friendly than I remember at D’s 70th—in fact by the end rather too friendly (see below!) Now completely bald on top, the white beard long and straggly, looks a bit mad. Bright mixed-up clothes, red check shirt under green pullover, old pin-stripe suit-trousers hitched up so tight you don’t quite know where to look. I reminded him we’d met before, and he accepted the idea cheerfully, but later he said, “It’s a great shame we didn’t meet before.” At first I was emb by his forgetfulness—why is it emb when people repeat themselves? Then I felt that as he didn’t know, and there was no one else there, it didn’t matter; it was a completely private drama. He sat in the chair beside his desk and I sat in a low armchair—I felt it must be like a tutorial. Books on 3 walls, the room lived-in but dreary.
I asked him straight away how he had met Cecil (which oddly he doesn’t say in the intro to the Letters). “At Cambridge. He got me elected to the Apostles. I’m not supposed to talk about that, of course” (looking rather coy). What they called “suitable” undergraduates were singled out and assessed, but the Society was so secret they didn’t know they were being vetted for it. “C was my ‘father,’ as they called it. He took a shine to me, for some reason.” I said he must have been suitable. “I must, mustn’t I?” he said and gave me a funny look. Said, “I was extremely shy, and C was the opposite. You felt thrilled to be noticed by him.” What was he like in those days? He was “a great figure in the college,” but he did too many things. Missed a First in the History tripos, because he was always off doing something else; he was easily bored, with activities and people. He sat for a fellowship twice but didn’t get it. He was always playing rugger or rowing or mountaineering. “Not in Cambs, presumably?” GFS laughed. “He climbed in Scotland, and sometimes in the Dolomites. He was very strong, and had very large hands. The figure on his tomb is quite wrong, it shows him with almost a girl’s hands.”
C also loved acting—he was in a French play they did every year for several years. “But he was a very bad actor. He made all the characters he played just like himself. In Dom Juan by Molière (check) he played the servant, which was quite beyond him.” Did C not understand other people? GFS said it was his upbringing, he (C) believed his family and home were very important, and in a “rather innocent” way thought everyone else would be interested in them too. Was he a snob? “It wasn’t snobbery exactly, more an unthinking social confidence.” What about his writing? GFS said he was self-confident about that too, wrote all those poems about Corley Court. I said he wrote love poems as well. “Yes, people thought he was a sort of upper-class Rupert Brooke. Upper class but second rate.” I said I couldn’t work out from the Letters how well C knew Brooke—there are 2 or 3 sarcastic mentions, and nothing in Keynes’s edition of RB’s letters. “Oh, he knew him—he was in the Society too, of course. RB was 3 or 4 years older. They didn’t get on.” He said C was jealous of RB in many ways, C was naturally competitive and he was overshadowed by him, as a poet and “a beauty.” Wasn’t C v good-looking? GFS said “he was very striking, with wicked dark eyes that he used to seduce people with. Rupert was a flawless beauty, but Cecil was much stronger and more masculine. He had an enormous cock.” I checked that the tape was still going round nicely and wrote this down before I looked at GFS again—he was matter-of-fact