The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [205]
“Oh, yes.” Her head went back an inch. No doubt the shadowy question of his review of that book lurked somewhere beyond the actual question—beyond all of them. “Well …”
“I mean”—Paul laughed—“why did you do it like that? Of course, I remember when I first met you, you said you were writing your memoirs then, so I know it occupied you for a long time. That was thirteen years ago!”
“No, it did,” said Daphne. “Much longer than that, even.”
“And may I just say that I admired the book a great deal.”
“Oh—that’s kind of you,” she said, pretty drily. “Well, I suppose the main reason was that I was lucky enough to know a lot of people more talented and interesting than myself.”
“Of course, in a way I wish you’d written more about yourself.”
“Well, there’s a certain amount that gets in, I hope.” She squinted at the tape-recorder, aware it was capturing this flannel, and her reaction to it. “I was very much brought up in the understanding that the men all around me were the ones who were doing the important things. A lot of them wrote their own memoirs, or, you know, their lives are being written about now—there’s this new life of Mark Gibbons that’s going to come out.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about it,” Paul said; Karen had got the proofs—unindexed, but a quick read-through had produced only passing references to Daphne; Daphne, it seemed, had them too.
“The publisher sent it. Wilfrid’s been reading it to me, because I can’t read any more. But of course she’s got all sorts of things wrong.”
“Were you consulted for that book?”
“Oh yes, the woman wrote to me. But really, I put it all in my own book—everything I thought worth saying about Mark, who was a dear friend, of course.”
“Well, I know,” said Paul, and looked at her rather cannily; but it was instantly clear from her hard half-smile that no confessions about bearing his child were remotely on the cards. “I remember meeting him at your seventieth.”
“Ah, do you …”—she accepted this. “Yes, he must have been there. Isn’t it awful, I’ve forgotten,” she said, and smiled more sweetly, as if she’d just seen a good way out of his future questions.
“Well, of course I’m hoping not to get it wrong,” said Paul, “with your help!” He sipped a little of the weak coffee. It struck him that if Daphne had helped her a bit more, the biographer of Mark Gibbons might not have made the mistakes that she was now deploring. It was a recurrent little knot of self-defeating resistance that perhaps all biographers of recent subjects had to confront and undo. People wouldn’t tell you things, and then they blamed you for not knowing them—unless they were George Sawle, of course, where the flow of secrets had been so disinhibited as to be almost unusable. Still, Daphne was an old lady, of whom he was reasonably fond, and he said gently, “I suppose you wanted to put the record straight a bit, though.”
“Well, a bit—about ‘Two Acres’ and things, you see. In the poem I’m merely referred to as ‘you.’ And of course in Sebby Stokes’s thing I’m ‘Miss S.’!”
Paul laughed sympathetically, half-embarrassed by his own new suspicion that the “you” of the poem was really George. “There’s more about you in … Sir Dudley’s book.”
“Yes … but then he’s always so down on everybody.”
“I was surprised by how little he says about Cecil.”
“I know …”—she sounded amiable but bored at once by talk of Black Flowers.
“I suppose Cecil must have been the first real writer you’d met.”
“Oh, yes, well as I said in the book, he was the most famous person I had met before I was married, though he