The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [239]
“You saw the Valance letters?”
“I’m sorry …?” Rob raised an eyebrow too, coloured slightly.
“Oh, yes.” And taking the book back from him, Raymond showed him that a few blank pages further on from the mid-volume FINIS there was another small section of transcribed letters, very different in tone. “That’s really the interest, Robson, my friend.”
“Dear Hewitt,” the first one began, in September 1913; modulating to “Dear Harry” in the third letter, sent from France. Five letters in total, the last dated June 27, 1916, signed, “Yours ever, Cecil.”
“Have these been published, I wonder?”
“You’d have to check.”
“I bet they haven’t.” Rob looked over them as quickly as the writing allowed. The idea that Valance might have had a thing with Hewitt too … No sign of it, which was itself somehow suggestive. “And why did the old fool transcribe them—I mean, what did he do with the originals?”
“Ah, you see, he failed to think of the needs of a twenty-first-century bookseller—quite a common failing of the past.”
“Thanks for that.” Rob looked at the last letter more narrowly.
It was bad luck you couldn’t get to up to Stokes’s—you would like him, I think. It occurred to me to send you the new poems before we get stuck in to the next big show—I will send them tomorrow, all being well, when I have gone over them once more. They are for your eyes only—you will see they are not publishable in my life-time—or England’s! Stokes has seen some (not all). One of them draws, you will see, on our last meeting. Let me know you have them safe. My love (is that too fresh?) to Elspeth the strict scholar.
Yours ever, Cecil.
“So the house has been completely cleared, has it?”
“They’re getting out the last stuff this week.”
“Mm, what sort of stuff?” Rob thought he saw the colour creep up behind Raymond’s beard as he turned away and rummaged on the desk—a distraction, though at first Rob thought it was a search for some further evidence.
“I haven’t been down there myself. I think Debbie’s there now.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so before?”—to Rob the slow afternoon, the mild trance of autumn in North London, the musty otherworld of Chadwick’s shop, were revealed as a decoy, a disastrous waste of time, like the stifling obstacles and digressions of a certain kind of dream. “How far is it to the house?”
“Well, how are you going?”
There was a taxi-rank down the road towards the school, as if ready to whisk the boys off to their homes, or the shops, or the airport … Rob ran down to the first car, but there was no driver: he was over the road, at the café, picking up a tea and a sandwich, and it was more than the driver of the second cab’s life was worth to take his fare … the cabbies’ tedious etiquette. Rob sensed there was something offputting in his own urgency, a hint of unwelcome trouble—he went grinning impatiently to the café, and after a minute the driver followed him out to the taxi. “It’s a house called Mattocks—was an old people’s home. Do you know it?”
“Well, I did know it,” said the cabbie, slow in the pleasure of his own irony. “There’s not much going on down there now.”
“No, I know.”
“They’ll have the wreckers’ balls down there, any day now.” And he looked at Rob in the mirror as he slid into his seat, doubtless toying with some dismal joke.
“Let’s see if we can get there first,” said Rob. He leant coaxingly forward and saw his own eyes and nose in the mirror, in surreal isolation.
They turned and headed out north again, up through the most densely congested junctions of Harrow-on-the-Hill, the driver’s courtesy extending to any number of undecided road-crossers, reversing delivery-vans and anxious would-be joiners from side-roads; he was a great letter-in. Then in the leafy residential streets and avenues of the Weald his vaguely smiling dawdle on the brink of third gear suggested almost that he didn’t know where he was going. He started joking about something Rob seemed to have missed, Rob said “Sorry?” and then saw he was talking on his phone, deploring something with a friend, laughing, the loud unguarded