The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [65]
“But when did you last see him yourself, I wonder?”
“Oh … well …” Stokes looked at him: “It must have been … ten days before he was killed?”
“Oh, well, there you are …”
“He was on leave unexpectedly, you know, and I invited him to dine at my club.” Stokes said this in a natural, practical tone, but it was clear the invitation had meant a great deal to him.
“How was he?”
“Oh, he was splendid. Cecil was always splendid.” Stokes smiled for a moment at the marble figure, which certainly seemed to encourage this view. George felt, as he had with Wilkes, that the older man’s words lightly censured some suspected impropriety in his own. “Of course I first met him in a punt,” said Stokes, while George’s pulse quickened at the chance for disclosure, a diverting little episode.
“You came to Cambridge …,” he said, neutrally, with a quiet sense of the chance flowing away. There had been four or five of them in the punt, Ragley and Willard certainly, both now dead, and someone else George couldn’t see. His own focus, like Sebby’s evidently, had been on the figure with the pole at the rear.
“Lady Blanchard’s son, Peter, had asked me down to meet Cecil, and meet some of the new poets.”
“Of course …,” said George, “yes, Peter Blanchard …”
“Peter Blanchard was full of Cecil.”
“Yes, wasn’t he just …,” said George, looking away, distantly bewildered to think how jealous of Blanchard he’d been. The absolute torments of those days, the flicker of gowns in stairwells, the faces glimpsed as curtains were closed, seemed now like distant superstitions. What could any such emotions mean years later, and when their objects were dead? Stokes gave him a quick uncertain glance, but pushed on humorously,
“I can’t remember them all now. There was a young man who never said a word, and who had the job of keeping the champagne cold.”
“Did he have the bottles on strings in the water …?” said George, now feeling terribly foolish, in retrospect as well as in the present moment. The bottles used to knock against the hull with each forward thrust of the boat; when you loosened the wire the corks went off like shots into the overhanging willows.
“Exactly so,” said Stokes, “exactly so. It was a splendid day. I’ll never forget Cecil reading—or not reading, reciting—his poems. He seemed to have them by heart, didn’t he, so that they came out like talk; but in quite a different voice, the poet’s voice. It was distinctly impressive. He recited ‘Oh do not smile on me’—though one could hardly help it, of course!”
“No, I’m sure,” said George, blushing abruptly and turning away. He peered at the altar, beyond its polished brass rail, as though he had found something interesting. Was he doomed to glow like a beacon throughout the whole weekend?
“But you were never one of the poets?”
“What …? Oh, never written a line,” said George, over his shoulder.
“Ah …”—Stokes murmured behind him. “But you have the satisfaction of having inspired, or occasioned, or anyway in some wise brought about perhaps his most famous poem.”
George turned—they were rather penned in in this space between the tomb and the altar. The question was laboriously genial but he ran over it again carefully. “Oh, if you mean ‘Two Acres,’ ” he said. “Well that of course was written for my sister.”
Stokes smiled vaguely at him and then at the floor. It was as if a mist of delicacy had obscured the subject. “Of course I must ask Lady Valance—Daphne—about that when we talk this afternoon. Do you not see yourself in the lines, what is it? ‘I wonder if there’s any man more / Learned than the man of Stanmore’?”
George laughed warily. “Guilty as charged,” he said—though he knew “learned” had not been Cecil’s original choice of epithet. “You know he wrote it first in Daphne’s autograph book.”
“I have it,” said Stokes, with the brevity that lay just beyond his delicacy; and then, “She must have felt she’d got rather more than she bargained for,” with a surprising laugh.
“Yes, doesn’t it go on,” said