The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [234]
“You don’t remember?”
“No, he was the one who didn’t remember. The story kept changing. My aunt and I picked up on it, she thought it was odd, she had a terrifying eye for any kind of nonsense.”
“This is Corinna, you mean?”
“Yes … Anyway, of course, the point was he never had a father, he was a bastard,” she said in her candid old-fashioned way. “His mother had been in a factory in the war, and got pregnant by someone there. There was some story about her being ill, as well, I can’t quite recall. That may have been true, of course, but one started to treat anything he said with a degree of suspicion.”
Rob glanced again at the porter, whose stare seemed simultaneously offended and indifferent. He himself didn’t see this as quite such a point against Bryant as Jennifer seemed to—in fact it made him if anything more intriguing and sympathetic. “So you said he used to be a bank-clerk?” (He had the examples of T. S. Eliot and P. G. Wodehouse at the ready.)
“Used, yes, in my uncle’s bank. No, the rather awful thing was, my uncle had to fire him: I believe he was jolly lucky it didn’t go to court.” They went out and down the steps into the waiting chill of Pall Mall, car headlights, briefly stalled, advancing on them with the bright impersonal rush of the London night. “Some sort of fiddle. He was quite clever—he is clever, Paul Bryant, in his odd way—and I think it was difficult to prove, but Uncle Leslie had no doubt about it, and Paul himself somehow wasn’t surprised, from what I gathered, to be thrown out of the bank. I was doing my doctorate then, and he sent me a card, right out of the blue, to say he was leaving the world of banking to pursue a career as a writer.”
Rob said, vaguely humorously, looking around, “To spend more time with his family.”
“Well, to spend more time with my family, as it turned out,” said Jennifer.
“And the rest is biography,” said Rob with a wise grin, as the cab he had waved at came to a halt and he opened the door for her.
2
WHAT ROB THOUGHT of as Raymond’s was properly Chadwick’s, Antiques and Second-Hand, though it had started out, a century ago, as the best dress-shop in Harrow. In the floor of the set-back doorway the words “MADAME CLAIRE” could still be read in the dulled mosaic, circling the barely legible “MODES.” Now the two broad display windows, where headless Edwardian mannequins had once been stationed (hats shown on separate stands, like cakes), were barricaded with old furniture, the rough deal backs of wardrobes, tables stacked on tables, among which an individual item, a plaster bust of Beethoven or a real glass cake-stand, was sometimes artlessly exhibited to the public. Rob had never set eyes on Hector Chadwick himself—it was always Raymond he saw, if he was in the area, or if Raymond let him know he had something for him. The old Harrow houses yielded treasures, now and then, among the van-loads of almost unsaleable books that found their way into the shop and then on, into junk shops and musty charity stores all over North London.
Rob shoved open the door, and a leisurely bell rang, and then rang again, in a part of the shop that was out of view. The showroom, as Raymond called it, was partitioned by ramparts of furniture into gloomy alleys, and it was hard to tell if there was anyone else in it. Not much natural light got through, and lamps that were notionally for sale glowed here and there on desks and sideboards. The feeling of secrecy and safety was shadowed by a childish sense of unease. At the back was a wall of books Rob had sometimes looked over, torn wrappers, dun-coloured cloth, obscure possibilities, the wary flicker of excitement snuffed out, as often as not, in the odour of dust and disuse. The smell of the books was like a drug, a promise of pleasure shot through with a kind of foreknown regret. In dreams he clambered or floated up bookshelves like these, where indefinably significant copies of editions that never