The Stranger's Child (20 page)

His first polite thought was that he must have forgotten what Cecil looked like, in the ten years and more since he’d been in a room with him alive. But no, of course, the long curved nose . . . the wide cheekbones . . . the decisive mouth: they were surely what he remembered. Naturally the rather bulbous eyes were closed, the hair short and soldierly, as it must have been latterly, pushed back flat about a central parting. The nose had grown somehow mathematical. The whole head had an air of the ideal that bordered on the standardized; it simplified, no doubt, in some acceptable accord between the longings of the parents and the limits of the artist’s skill. The Professor had never set eyes on Cecil – he must have worked from photographs, chosen by Louisa, which only told their own truth. Cecil had been much photographed, and doubtless much described; he was someone who commanded description, which was a rareish thing, most people going on for years on end with not a word written down as to what they looked like. And yet all these depictions were in a sense failures, just as this resplendent effigy was . . . So George reasoned for half a minute, looking over the polished features, the small seamed cushions of the closed eyes that once had seen right into him; thinking already what phrases he would use when he spoke to Louisa about it; whilst he tried to hold off some other unexpected sadness – not that he had lost Cecil, but that some longing of his own, awakened by the day and the place, some occult opportunity of meeting him again, had been so promptly denied.

None the less, he thought he would sit for a minute or two, in the flanking pew – he couldn’t quite have said why; but when he was there he dropped his forehead to his raised hand, leant forward slightly and prayed, in a vague, largely wordless way, a prayer of images and reproaches. He looked up, on a level now with Cecil’s sleeping form, the obdurate nose pointing roofwards, the soldierly commonplace of the body, posed perhaps by some artist’s model, not completely unlike Cecil, not a runt or a giant, but not Cecil in any particular way. And pictures of the particular Cecil rose towards him, naked and dripping on the banks of the Cam, or trotting through the Backs in his rugger bags and clattering studs, white and unassailable before a match, filthy and bloody after it. They were beautiful images, but vague as well with touching and retouching. He had others, more magical and private, images less seen than felt, memories kept by his hands, the heat of Cecil, the hair-raising beauty of his skin, of his warm waist under his shirt, and the trail of rough curls leading down from his waist. George’s praying fingers spread in a tentative caress of recollection. And then of course the celebrated . . . the celebrated
membrum virile
, unguessed for ever beneath the marble tunic, but once so insistently alive and alert . . . How Cecil went on about it, pompously and responsibly – it might have been the Magna Carta from the way he talked of it. Absurd but undeniable, even now, so that the colour came to George’s face and he thought of Madeleine, as a kind of remedy, though it didn’t seem to work like that, in fact didn’t seem to work at all.

George dropped his head again, rather wondering about this probing of old feelings. It was awful that Cecil was dead, he’d been wonderful in many ways, and who knew what he might not have gone on to do for English poetry. Yet the plain truth was that months went past without his thinking of him. Had Cecil lived, he would have married, inherited, sired children incessantly. It would have been strange, in some middle-aged drawing-room, to have stood on the hearthrug with Sir Cecil, in blank disavowal of their mad sodomitical past. Was it even a past? – it was a few months, it was a moment. And then might there have been another moment, in the study one night, which Cecil now occupied as surely as his father had done, some instinctual surrender to the old passion, George bald and professorial, Cecil haggard and scarred? Could passion survive such changes? The scene was undeniably fantastic. Did he take off his glasses? Perhaps Cecil by then had glasses too, a monocle that dropped between them just as their lips approached. Only young men kissed, and even then not frequently. He saw the charming troublesome face of Revel Ralph, and pictured himself in the same tense proximity with him, with a sudden canter of the heart of a kind he had almost forgotten.

There was the sharp moan of the door on its hinges, and Sebby Stokes stepped in, with his quiet official air, gleam of high white collar and silvery head. He pushed the door almost closed, as George had done, and came forward – clearly he thought he was alone, for these first few moments, and for George, half-hidden by the tomb, his unguarded expression had an odd, almost comic interest. Stokes surely felt the slight but unusual thrill of his imminent encounter with Cecil. George saw more clearly something feminine and nervous in his walk and glance; but there was something else too in the set of his mouth, his frown of appraisal – something hard and impatient, not glimpsed at all in the infinite diplomacy of his social manner. George stood up abruptly and enjoyed his jump of alarm, and humorous recovery, in which a trace of irritation lingered for a minute. ‘Ah! Mr Sawle . . . You startled me.’

‘Well, you startled me,’ said George equably.

‘Oh! Hmm, my apologies . . .’ Stokes walked around the tomb with a firmer expression, frank but respectful, so that now you couldn’t tell what he thought. ‘Quite a fine piece of work, don’t you think? May I call you George? – it seems to be the style here now, and one hates to appear stuffy!’

‘Of course,’ said George, ‘I wish you would,’ and then wondered if he was meant to call Stokes Sebby, which seemed an unwarranted jump into familiarity with a man so much older and so oddly, almost surprisingly, distinguished.

‘It’s not a bad likeness, by any means,’ Stokes said. ‘Often I’m afraid they don’t quite get them if they haven’t known them. I’ve seen some very hand-me-down efforts.’

‘Yes . . .’ said George, out of courtesy, but feeling, now the subject was being aired, more critical and proprietary. ‘Of course I didn’t see him later on,’ he admitted. ‘But I don’t quite feel I’ve found him here.’ He drew his fingers thoughtfully down Cecil’s arm, and glanced for an abstracted moment at the marble hands, which lay idly on his tunicked stomach, almost touching, the hands of a sleeper. They were small and neat, somewhat stylized and square, in what was clearly the Professor’s way. They were the hands of a gentleman, or even of a large child, untested by labour or use. But they were not the hands of Cecil Valance, mountaineer, oarsman and seducer. If the Captain’s neat head was a well-meant approximation, his hands were an imposture. George said, ‘And of course the hands are quite wrong.’

‘Yes?’ said Stokes, with a momentary anxiety, and then, a little reluctantly, ‘No, I think you’re right,’ a sense of their unequal intimacies in the air.

‘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 George. He himself felt sick of the poem, though still wearily pleased by his connection with it; bored and embarrassed by its popularity, therefore amused by its having a secret, and sadly reassured by the fact that it could never be told. There were parts of it unpublished, unpublishable, that Cecil had read to him – now lost for ever, probably. The English idyll had its secret paragraphs, priapic figures in the trees and bushes . . . ‘Well, Daphne can tell you the story,’ he said, with his usual disavowal of it.

Stokes said, in a most tactful tone, ‘But you and Cecil were clearly . . . very dear friends,’ the tact being a continued sympathy for his loss, of course, but suggesting to George some further, not quite welcome, sympathy, of a subtler kind.

‘Oh, for a while we were terrific pals.’

‘Do you recall how you met?’

‘Do you know, I’m not sure.’

‘I suppose in College . . .’

‘Cecil was very much a figure in College. It was flattering if he took an interest. I think I’d won . . . oh, one of our essay prizes. Cecil took a keen interest in the younger historians . . .’

‘Quite so, I imagine,’ said Stokes, with perhaps a passing twinkle at George’s tone.

‘I’m not really able to talk about it,’ said George, and saw Stokes’s ghost of a smile stiffen with repressed curiosity. ‘But still . . . you must know about the Society, I imagine.’

‘Ah, I see, the Society . . .’

‘Cecil was my Father.’ It was striking, and useful, how one set of secrets nested inside another.

‘I see . . .’ said Stokes again, with the usual faint drollery of an Oxford man about Cambridge customs. Still, the exchange of esoteric fact was very much his line, and his face softened once more into a ready reflector of hints and allusions. ‘So he . . .’

‘He picked me – he put me up,’ said George curtly, as if he shouldn’t be giving even this much away.

Stokes smiled almost slyly over this. ‘And do you still go back?’

‘So you do know about us, perhaps everyone knows.’

‘Oh, I don’t think by any means.’

George shrugged. ‘I haven’t been back for years. I’m immensely busy with the department in Birmingham. I can’t tell you how it nails me down.’ He heard his own forced note, and thought he saw Stokes hear it too, absorb it and conceal it. He went on, with a quick laugh, ‘I’ve rather left Cambridge behind, to be frank.’

‘Well, perhaps one day they will call you back.’

Stokes seemed to speak from the world of discreet power, of committees and advisers, and George smiled and murmured at his courtesy. ‘Perhaps. Who knows.’

‘And what about letters, by the way?’