The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [202]
At Worcester he was suddenly cheerful to be on the move; he queued for a taxi, the first one he had taken since their joint journey the previous November: Cathedral Cars. He mustered a breezy tone with the driver as they left the city and the meter started flickering in cheerful green increments. He thought he would enjoy the small country roads more on the way back—as yet he was looking straight through the barns and hedges to the imagined scene he had set up at Olga. They came into Staunton St. Giles, past the lodge-gates of a big house and then along a wide unattractive street of semi-detached council houses; a war memorial, with a church beyond, a village shop and Post Office, a pub, the Black Bear, where he almost felt like stopping first, but it was a minute or two from closing time. “Do you know where Olga is?” Paul asked the driver.
“Ooh, yes,” he said, as if Olga were a well-known local character. A handsome stone house, the Old Vicarage, came by, a run of old cottages looking much more pleased with themselves than the rest of the village, a nice place for Daphne to spend her final years. The taxi slowed and turned down a side lane, and pulled up unexpectedly by the gate of a decrepit-looking bungalow. “Twelve pounds exactly,” said the driver.
Paul waited till the taxi had turned the corner, then he walked a short way along the lane and took four or five photos of the bungalow, over the low garden wall, a documentary task that held off for a minute his heavy-hearted embarrassment at the state of the place. He came back, hiding the camera in his briefcase until later, when he’d worked out whether Daphne would mind being photographed herself. Sometimes, after the subjective indulgence of an interview, people found the crude fact of a photograph too jarring and intrusive.
The name OLGA was fashioned out of wrought iron, on the wrought-iron gate. Paul stepped in over the weedy gravel, and gazed round at the neglected garden, the grass tall and green in the roof-gutters, the dead climbing rose left swaying over the porch, an old Renault 12 with a rusty dent in the offside wing and green moss growing along the rubber sills of the windows. Two or three stripes of the lawn had been mown, perhaps a week ago, and the mower abandoned where it stood. The flower-beds were full of last year’s dead leaves. It all made him more flinchingly apprehensive about what he was going to find once he got indoors. He pressed the bell, a sleepy ding-dong that then repeated, all by itself, as if showing some impatience the caller might have hoped to conceal, and saw his face scarily distorted in the rippled glass of the front door; he seemed to run forward into their lives in waves. It was Wilfrid Valance who answered. He was just as Paul had remembered, and also, after thirteen more years of bumbling along as he was, alarmingly different, a wide-faced child with furrowed cheeks, and one defiant central tuft of grey hair fronting the bald plateau above. “How are you?” said Paul.
“Mm, you found us all right,” said Wilfrid, with a twitch of a smile but not meeting his eye. Paul thought he saw that his visit was quite an occasion.
“Well, just about …,” he said meaninglessly, and handed over his coat and scarf. The hall was tiny, with other glass-panelled doors opening off it—a look of sixties brightness that had already become obscurely depressing. “And how is your mother?” For a moment he felt a kind of awe, repressed till now, at being about to see her, the survivor, the friend of the long dead. And a twinge of something like envy at the thought of the friendship they might have had themselves if he hadn’t been a biographer.
“Oh, she’s …”—Wilfrid shook his head and grinned; Paul remembered his hesitations, like a suppressed stammer, in the middle of sentences, but this