The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [61]
“Ah, yes, sir,” said Wilkes, to show it meant something, surely rather different, to him too. “Sir Edwin cared greatly for ‘The Loch of Galber.’ He often said he preferred it to the Raphael.”
“Yes …,” said George, not sure if Wilkes’s eyebrows, raised in amiable remembrance, acknowledged the general opinion about the Raphael. “I was thinking, Wilkes, Mr. Stokes should have a word with you about Cecil while he’s here.”
“Oh, it hasn’t been suggested, sir.”
“Really? You probably knew him better than anybody.”
“It’s true, sir, in some ways I did,” said Wilkes modestly, and with something else in his hesitancy, a hazy vision of all the people who nursed the illusion of “knowing” Cecil best of all.
“Lady Valance made it clear at luncheon that she wants a full picture of his childhood years,” said George, with a hint of pomp. “She has a poem he wrote when he was only three, I believe …”
Wilkes’s pink, attentive face absorbed the idea of this new kind of service, which would evidently be a very delicate one. “Of course I have numerous memories,” he said, rather doubtfully.
“Cecil always spoke of you with the greatest … admiration, you know,” said George, and then put in the word he’d just dodged, “and affection, Wilkes.”
Wilkes murmured half-gratefully, and George looked down for a moment before saying, “My own feeling is that we should tell Mr. Stokes all we can; it’s for him to judge what details to include.”
“I’m sure there’s nothing I wouldn’t be happy to tell Mr. Stokes, sir,” said Wilkes, with a geniality close to reproach.
“No, no,” said George, “no, I’m sure …”—and again he felt a little flustered by this courteous saunter round an unmentionable truth. “But I mustn’t keep you!” And with a snuffle and a little bow, which seemed unintentionally to mimic the butler himself, and made George colour suddenly again, he turned through the door, which he closed softly behind him, and started down the long passage.
It was a strange sensation, this passage. He went along it with the natural rights of a guest, a slightly tipsy adult free to do as he pleased, but breathless at once with the reawoken feelings of his first visit, thirteen years before. Nothing had changed: the dim natural light, the school-like smell of polish, the long row of portraits of almost rectangular bulls and cows. He was dismayed to find himself blushing so soon and so much. He wondered anxiously if Wilkes, a valet in those days, who had been so helpful and tactful with him, and always somehow to hand, hadn’t also been present, unremembered, in other scenes. Had he come and gone, silently, unnoticed? Was it indeed part of a very good valet’s duties to spy, to read letters, to go through waste-paper baskets, the more fully to know his master’s thoughts and anticipate his needs? Would that increase or diminish his respect for his master? Was it not said, by one of the French aphorists, that great men rarely seemed great to their valets? And it was here, where you turned the corner, that Cecil had grabbed him and kissed him, in his very first minutes at Corley, while showing him where to wash his hands. Kissed him in his imperious way, with a twist of aggression. George’s heart jumped and raced, for a moment, remembering. The kiss, together with the tension of arrival at a country house and his own keen desire to impress and deceive Cecil’s parents, had made George suddenly mad with worry. He had struggled with Cecil, who was proud of his strength. The cloakroom was thick with coats, as if