The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [198]
Was RR unfaithful to D? (The questions were very basic, but I felt the “disinhibition” combined with the forgetfulness made it perfectly all right.) “I’m sure he was. RR was very highly sexed, he would fuck anyone.” (I laughed at this, but he seemed not to know why. Sensed he felt everyone else had had a lot more sex than he had.) Me: “What about the son she had with RR, Jenny Ralph’s father, had he known him?” “Well, there was a son, but of course RR wasn’t the father.” Again, I thought I mustn’t startle him by showing my surprise. Again he gave me the confidential look: “Well, I don’t think it’s any secret that the child’s father was a painter called Mark Gibbons. They had an affair.” I imagined Mark Gibbons would fuck anyone too, but didn’t like to ask. Remembered seeing him at D’s 70th, dancing with her, so perhaps something in it. (Note: is MG still alive? Could he have known C? Also does Jenny Ralph know who her grandfather is?) “I’m pretty sure that’s right,” he said, “but you’d better keep it under your hat.” I didn’t promise this.
I asked if he had any photos of C. “I’m sure I have!” He went over to a low shelf on the far side of the room, where dozens of what looked like old albums and scrapbooks were stacked up, and started hoicking them out on to a table there. Looking at him stooping, arse in the air, his tongue between his teeth as he grunted and squinted, I thought of the pictures in Jonah’s book of GFS at 19, that prim but secretive look that I’d thought was a bit like me. I said there were some good photos in the Letters. “Oh, were there?” he said. But what I wanted was photos of GFS and C together. “That’s just what I’m looking for,” he said. He pulled up a large album in floppy covers, and as he lifted it on to the table a number of small photos slid out and fell to the floor here and there. Obviously the old mounts had perished. I picked up one or two of them, and noted where others had fallen (inc the fantastic one of C reading aloud to Blanchard and Ragley, which was in the Letters).
“Now, let me see …”—there was a definite sense that neither of us knew what we were going to find. He supported himself lightly on my arm, stooping across in front of me to peer at particular pictures, so that his bald head and beard blocked my view, though he nattered on as if I could see what he was looking at. The albums go right back to late-Victorian sepia portraits of his parents’ families (Freda Sawle was half-Welsh, apparently, her uncle a well-known singer). GFS was easily distracted, squinting to read the inscriptions in white ink, puzzling things out and correcting himself, breathing in hot gasps over the page. I said I believed Hubert had had a camera. “Quite so. I remember Harry Hewitt gave it to him.” Here was old HH again—I wondered what GFS’s line on him would be. “HH was a v rich man, who lived in Harrow Weald. He was in import/export, glass and china and so on, with Germany. Some people thought he was a spy.” Me: “But he wasn’t?” GFS squeezed my arm and giggled: “I don’t think so. He was queer, you know, he was in love with my brother Hubert, who was killed in the War.” But Hubert didn’t reciprocate? “Hubert wasn’t at all that way himself. He was very shy. HH kept giving him expensive presents, which became emb for him.” I said hadn’t C known HH? “They met when C was staying at 2A one time, and became friends of a sort.” Was HH in love with C too? “Probably