The Stranger's Child (48 page)

‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said, but quite nicely. She blew out smoke as if at something very distant. ‘I wrote a book myself, I don’t know if you saw that. I sort of put it all in there.’

‘Well, yes, of course!’ – he laughed again. ‘I reviewed it, in fact.’

‘Were you horrid?’ she said, with another touch of the droll tone he remembered.

‘No, I loved it. It was a rave.’

‘Some of them were stinkers.’

He paused sympathetically. ‘I just felt it would be very valuable to be able to speak to you – of course I don’t want to be a nuisance. If you like, I’ll just come for an hour when it suits you.’

She frowned and thought. ‘You know, I never pretended to be a wonderful writer, but I have known some very interesting people.’ Her quiet laugh now was slightly grim.

Paul made a vague noise of indignant dismissal of all her critics. ‘Of course I saw your interview in the
Tatler
, but I thought there might be a bit more to say!’

‘Ah, yes.’ Again she seemed both flattered and wary.

‘I don’t know if you’d prefer the morning or the afternoon.’

‘Mm?’ She didn’t commit herself to a time, or to anything really. ‘Who was that very nice young man at the party – I expect you know him? I can’t remember anyone’s name.
He
was asking me about Cecil.’ She seemed to take some slightly mischievous pleasure in this.

‘I hope he’s not writing about him!’

‘Well, I’m not at all sure he isn’t.’

‘Oh dear . . . !’ – Paul felt rattled, but managed to say smoothly, ‘I’m sure since your book came out there’s been a lot more interest in him.’

She took in a deep draught of smoke and then let it out in a sleepy wave up her face. ‘It’s the War, too, of course. People can’t get enough of the War.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Paul, as if he too thought it rather overdone. In fact he was counting on it heavily.

She peered at him, in the streaking glare and shadow, almost haughtily. ‘I think I do remember you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you play the piano?’

‘Aha!’ said Paul. ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking of.’

‘You played duets with my daughter.’

He enjoyed this passive imposture, though it was uncomfortable too to be taken for Peter. ‘It was great fun, that evening,’ he said modestly.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t it.’

‘They were happy times in Foxleigh, in many ways.’ He spread a warm glaze over the place and time, as if they were much more distant than was the case. ‘Well, they introduced me to your family!’ He thought she saw this as pure flattery. He wanted to ask about Julian, and Jenny, but any questions were darkened by the awful larger question of Corinna and Leslie Keeping. Was it proper to talk about them, or presumptuous and intrusive? The effort of keeping the talk going stalled him for a minute.

‘Ah! Here we are . . . !’ she said as the cab swung down the long ramp into the station. He saw that for her the moment of escape was also one of obligation. At the setting-down place he jumped out, and stood with his brolly hooked over his forearm and his wallet open in his hand. He only took a taxi about twice a year, but he tipped the driver with the jovial inattention of young men he had seen in the City. Mrs Jacobs had clambered out on the other side, and waited in a ladylike fashion for the business to be done. Paul rejoined her with a happy but submissive smile.

‘Why don’t you give me your address, anyway, and I can write to you.’

‘Yes, that would be fine,’ she said quietly, as though she’d been thinking it over.

‘And then we can take it from there . . . !’ He had a pad in his briefcase, and he lent it to her, looking away as she wrote her details down. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, still businesslike.

‘Well, thank you – for rescuing me.’

He stared at her stout, slightly stooped and shabby person, the cheerful glasses under the sad red hat, the clutched bag, and shook his head, as if at a chance meeting of devoted old friends. ‘I just can’t believe it!’ he said.

‘Well, there you are,’ she said, doing her best.

‘See you very soon, I hope’ – and they shook hands. She was getting, what was it?, a Worcester train, from the nearest platform – he hadn’t looked yet at her address. She turned away, went a few determined steps, then looked back with a hesitant and slightly conspiratorial air that he found immediately charming.

She said, ‘Just tell me your name again.’

‘Oh!
Paul Bryant
. . .’

She nodded and clenched her hand in the air, as if catching at a moth. ‘Au revoir,’ she said.

‘Dear Georgie,’ Paul read, ‘At luncheon today the General was moved to remark that your visit to Corley Court had been
reasonably quiet
, and pressed a little further said you had “hardly put a foot wrong”. That
hardly
may give you pause: but she would say no more. Overall, I take her to mean that further visits will not be frowned on. [. . .] I will of course convey her good wishes to you in person, tomorrow afternoon, at 5.27 precisely. Praise the Lord for Bentley Park and Horner’s Van (Homer’s – can’t read? Not
the
Homer, dare I hope, the writer?). Then Middlesex will be all before us. Your CTV.’ Outside the train window, Middlesex itself was opening and then hiding again in the curves of the line. Paul kept his finger in the
Letters of Cecil Valance
as he stared into the bright afternoon – low sun over suburban houses, bare trees between playing-fields, now a tunnel. He looked down at Cecil’s face, the prominent dark eyes, wavy dark hair oiled almost flat, the sepia knot of his tie, with a pin behind it, the brass-buttoned epaulettes and wide serge lapels with a regimental badge on each, and the buckled leather strap that cut across his chest like a sash. ‘Edited by G. F. Sawle’ beneath the picture. Then the flickering townscape jumped in again and they were slowing to a station.

Paul had formed a general idea, from studying the
London A–Z
, of where ‘Two Acres’ was. But a small-scale map in black-and-white, with the street names squeezing like juggernauts through the streets and the odd vague rhombuses and triangles of blank space in the outer suburbs might have been showing him almost anything. The half-dozen letters of Cecil’s to George that survived were addressed, in the confident bygone style, to ‘Two Acres, Stanmore, Mddx’. There was no suggestion the house stood on a particular street, or that any functionary could fail to know it and its occupants. Horner’s van would have offered a lift from the station. But now it was impossible to arrive as Cecil had done: the station itself, ‘built to look like a church’, according to George Sawle’s meticulous footnotes, ‘with battlemented tower and steeple’, had been closed to passengers in 1956. Paul had a sense, as of some neglected worry, that a search in the British Library, or indeed in the Stanmore Library, might have turned up a detailed historical map. But for now the poem was his guide. There was a road called Stanmore Hill, and Cecil referred to the ‘beechy crown of Stanmore Hill’, so that was a useful start. The garden was described as running down a slope, pretty clearly (its ‘goatfoot paths and mimic tor’, its ‘steps dissolving in the dusk / Through scented belts of rose and green / Into the little twilit dene’), and the house itself Paul imagined, on even slighter evidence, perched at the top, for the view. Bentley Priory, a large empty pentagon marked ‘Royal Air Force’ in the
A–Z
, but with dotted footpaths through it, and the blank lozenge of a lake, seemed to climb the hillside too. George’s notes explained that the Priory, ‘once the home of the widowed Queen Adelaide, had later been a hotel; the branch-line from Harrow and Wealdstone to Stanmore had been opened to bring in the guests; trains ran hourly; subsequently the Priory became a girls’ school; during the Battle of Britain, it was the headquarters of Fighter Command’. Sawle pointed out the reference to
Paradise Lost
, but was something else meant by Cecil’s references to Middlesex? Throughout the book he looked back on the landscape of his own youth strictly as a historian; the initials GFS replaced the first person singular; he was patiently impartial. And yet there were omissions, like the one in this short letter, marked by the scrupulous square brackets. What could possibly have offended, sixty years on?

Outside the Tube station, Paul felt the little breathless shock of disorientation, swiftly denied. His thing in London was never to show that he didn’t know where he was going; he was less worried about being lost than about asking the way. And then the fact of doing research on the ground, the strange heart-race of crossing the physical terrain of his subject’s past, such as he’d felt when Peter first took him to Corley Court and showed him Cecil’s tomb, was like a secret guidance. He went along steadily, among the lunch-time shoppers, the office-workers going for a pint, with a completely private sense of purpose: no one knew who he was or what he was doing, or sensed the larger rhythm of his day that lay beyond their routines. It was freedom too, with its prickle of trepidation, since Paul had once been as routine-bound as them.

Stanmore Hill began like a village street, but soon opened out into a long straight climb out of town, already cheerless in the November afternoon. He passed a large pub, the Abercorn Arms, which was mentioned in one of the handful of letters from Cecil to George that survived: the boys had had a pint there themselves. Paul saw the appeal of it, as part of his research, but he felt self-conscious entering pubs alone and pressed on up the road. Boys is what they had been, of course, George only half Paul’s present age when he met Cecil, and yet they seemed to occupy their lives with a peculiar unselfconscious authority Paul had never felt in his own. Towards the top of the hill there was a small weather-vaned clock-tower on a stable block, half-covered by trees, and though he felt sure it couldn’t be ‘Two Acres’, it seemed in some incoherent way like a promise of it.

After that the road flattened out and on the far side was a long black pond, surrounded by scruffy trees, and the beginning of Stanmore Common. He saw a woman walking a dog, a white poodle that looked alarmingly too big, and since they were the only walkers about, Paul felt conspicuous. He turned down a side-road, thinking that he could have asked her, and for ten or fifteen minutes he wandered round a modest little network of lanes that none the less had something mysterious about them, the sun lowish already among the nearly bare trees, further murky ponds, woodlands sloping away on the far side, and here and there, half-hidden by hedges and fences and large gardens, a number of houses. He wished he was more expert at looking at houses, and knowing how old they were. George Sawle said ‘Two Acres’ was red-brick, and had been built in the 1880s; his father had bought it from its first owner in 1890; his mother had sold it in 1920. Paul checked each name as he passed: ‘The Kennels’ . . . ‘Old Charlocks’ . . . ‘Jubilee Cottage’. Could he have missed it? He thought of the tests he had just read about in an earlier letter of Cecil’s, from his first weeks at Marlborough, where he had had to prove to a senior boy that he knew where things were and the meaning of ridiculous names. ‘I got them all,’ Cecil told his mother, ‘except for Cotton’s kish, and for this it is Daubeny who must have forty lashes, for failing to instil this vital fact in my teeming brain. I fear you will think this unjust.’

He was almost back at the main road and here was the woman with the poodle coming towards him. She gave him a quick hard smile, a man roaming round with a briefcase in the afternoon. ‘You look lost,’ she said.

‘I’m okay now,’ said Paul, nodding at the road ahead. ‘Thanks so much!’ And then, ‘Well, actually,’ when she had passed him, ‘sorry . . . I’m looking for a house called “Two Acres”.’

She half-stopped and turned, the dog pulling her on. ‘
Two
Acres? No . . . I don’t know it. Are you sure it’s round here?’

‘Pretty sure,’ said Paul. ‘A famous poem was written about it.’

‘Mm, not a poetry reader, I’m afraid.’

‘I thought you might have heard of it.’

‘Stop it, Jingo! No . . .’ she frowned back to him, ‘I mean, two acres is quite big, you realize.’

‘Well . . . yes,’ Paul agreed.

‘We have a third of an acre, and believe me that takes a good deal of work.’

‘I suppose in the old days . . .’ said Paul.

‘Oh, well in the old days . . . Jingo –
Jingo!
– mad dog! I’m so sorry . . . Who lives in this house you’re looking for?’

‘That I don’t know,’ said Paul, the intimate and whimsical nature of his quest exposed, as he’d known it would be if he stooped to asking anyone. It seemed beyond the woman, too: she winced at his briefcase, which must hold the reason for his search, which she wasn’t going to ask – some rep or agent no doubt.

‘Well, good luck,’ she said, as if seeing she had wasted her time. And as she went on, ‘Try the other side of the hill!’

Which Paul did, going down a narrow road that was perhaps a private driveway – there seemed to be a new development of houses whose roofs he could see further down the slope. The lane turned a corner, running for thirty yards under a tall dark larch-lap fence that gave off, even on this chilly day, a dim scent of creosote. Just behind it, a house stood, only the long ridge of its roof and two tall chimneys visible. At the far end, gates, of the same height and material as the fence, chained and padlocked; but allowing, through the narrow gap between hinge and frame, a one-eyed view of a weedy bit of gravel and a downstairs window of the house, disconcertingly close. After this, a dense screen of leylandii, much taller than the fence, ran back from the road, cutting close to the corner of the house itself, and shielding it from the tarmacked drive beyond, at the head of which was a big display board, with an artist’s impression of another red-roofed house, and the words ‘Old Acres – Six Executive Homes, Two Remaining’.