The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [236]
“Well, strictly speaking,” said Raymond, “though of course you can fake the voices, if you want to,” peeping at Rob with that strange look, in a middle-aged man, of a teenager trying his luck.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” said Rob.
“No, a bit naff, perhaps.” Raymond shielded his feelings with a genial-sounding change of subject. “So what can I do for you, Rob?”
Rob narrowed his eyes. “You said you might have something for me …”
“Oh, yes … Yes, indeed.” Raymond swivelled his chair and peered bemusedly around the office—a moment’s teasing to cover his excitement. He raked his beard as his eyes ran over the shelves. “I thought, this is quite up Rob’s street … if I can only find it. Oh, I know, I put it in my naughty drawer”—and leaning forward over himself, Raymond tugged open the bottom drawer of a filing-cabinet. The naughty drawer was where he kept things he didn’t want the Harrow schoolboys to find, in their occasional lingering searches in the more hidden parts of the shop. Sometimes a house clearance turned up a stash of girlie mags or even muscle mags, which by now were antique collectibles in themselves. Raymond was the mere dealer—to Rob’s eye he seemed to survey an old Penthouse and an issue of Physique Pictorial with the same gruff detachment. Now he brought out a red leather-bound book, a thickish quarto, at a glance a journal or manuscript book, with a rounded spine to enable it to open flat. He swivelled back, weighing the book in both hands, as if he shouldn’t let it go without certain warnings and preconditions. “What do you know about someone called Harry Hewitt?”
“Nothing whatever.” Rob saw that the book had a clasp, a lockable diary, perhaps; on the front, under Raymond’s thumb, an embossed gold H.
“No …” Raymond nodded. “Quite an interesting character. Died in the sixties. Businessman, art collector—left some stuff to the V and A?” Rob shook his head obligingly. “Lived up the road—Harrow Weald. Big house called Mattocks, sort of Arts and Crafts. Never married,” said Raymond reasonably.
“I get the picture.”
“Lived with his sister, who died in the mid-seventies. After which Mattocks became an old people’s home. Closed down a few years ago—place boarded up, kids got in, a bit of vandalism, not too bad. Now about to be demolished.”
“I assume Hector’s been over it …?”
“There wasn’t much left.”
“No, well, those old folks …”
Raymond grunted. “Thieves got the best stained-glass windows. Hector salvaged a fireplace or two. But there was a strong-room no one had got into, which didn’t hold Hector back for long. Nothing valuable in it, apparently, just papers and stuff from Hewitt’s days.”
“Including what you have in your hand.”
Raymond passed it over—and as he did so the hinged brass bar of the lock dropped open. “We had to cut it, I’m afraid.”
“Oh …” It seemed to Rob a bit rum that a man who could unlock a strong-room had to take a hacksaw to a book. A handsome book, too, the inner border of the binding tooled in gold, thick gold on the page-edges, the endpapers with gold-seamed crimson marbling, bound by Webster’s, “By Appointment to Queen Alexandra.” Rob winced at the violation, quite apart from the damage to the price. Inside perhaps a hundred pages densely written over in greyish blue-black ink, a sheet of mauve blotting-paper half-way through marking where the writing stopped.
“Have a look at it,” said Raymond. “Cup of tea?”
And so he settled Rob down, after jarring shunting of a large wardrobe, in a tiny improvised sitting-room, made out of a chaise-longue, a bedside cupboard and a standard-lamp. The tea was served in a bone-china cup and saucer. Beyond the wardrobe, he could hear Raymond back at his computer, moments of music and talk.
At first, Rob wasn’t sure what he was reading. “December 27, 1911—My dear Harry—I can never thank you enough for the Gramophone, or ‘Sheraton Upright Grand’ to give it its official title! It is the most splendid gift anyone ever had, Harry old boy. You should have seen my sister’s face when the lid was first opened—it was