The Stranger's Child Part 12

'I'm so glad.'

'I trust you're well, too, sir; and Mrs Sawle . . .'

'Oh, yes, both frightfully busy and burdened with work, you know, but, thank you, pretty well.'

George and Wilkes were both holding the door, while Wilkes gazed at him with his usual flattering lack of impatience, of any suggestion that a moment before he had been rushing elsewhere. 'It's good to see you back at Corley, sir.' Though it struck George that Wilkes's mastery of implicit moral commentary was conveyed in the same smooth phrase.

He frowned and said, 'We don't get down as often as we should like.'

'It's possibly not very convenient for you,' allowed Wilkes, letting his hand drop.

'Well, not terribly,' George said.

'I know Lady Valance is especially pleased you've come, sir.'

'Oh . . .'

'I mean the old Lady, sir, particularly . . . though your sister, too, I'm sure!'

'Oh, well it's the least I could do for her,' said George, with adequate conviction, he felt.

'Since you and Captain Valance were such great friends.'

'Well, yes,' said George quickly, and rather sternly, over his own incipient blush. 'Though goodness, it all feels a world ago, Wilkes.' He looked around the hall, with a kind of weary marvelment that it was still there, the armorial windows, the brightly polished 'hall chairs' no one would dream of sitting on, the vast brown canvas of a Highland glen, with long-horned cattle standing in the water. He remembered looking at this painting on his first visit, and Cecil's father telling him it was 'a very fine picture', and what sort of cows they were. Cecil was behind him, not quite touching, a latent heat; he had said something, 'That's MacArthur's herd, isn't it, Pa?' his interest as smooth and confident as his deceit; the old boy had agreed, and they'd gone into lunch, Cecil's hand just for a moment in the small of his guest's back. 'Of course I remember it all,' said George, and even working it up a bit in his embarra.s.sment: 'I always remember that Scottish picture.' The picture itself could hardly have been duller, but it was eloquent of something the drinking cattle seemed almost to embody Sir Edwin's artless unawareness of what his son got up to.

'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 fl.u.s.tered 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 pa.s.sage.

It was a strange sensation, this pa.s.sage. 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 a meeting or a concert were going on next door, and Cecil pushed him against them, lifting a tall stiff mackintosh off its peg it toppled slowly over them and put a comical kind of stop to things, for the time being.

Beyond the coats was the sombre marble and mahogany washroom, and then the third room, with its towering cistern and high-up prison-like window. George locked the door with a remembered sense of refuge; and then with a gasp of confusion that the man he was hiding from was long dead.

On his way back along the pa.s.sage he saw the charm of avoiding the party for a little longer, and decided to visit the chapel and look at Cecil's effigy. On the occasion of Daphne and Dudley's wedding, the tomb had been unfinished, a brick box that one had to go to left or right of. To tell the truth, he'd avoided looking at it. There had seemed to be some awful lurking joke that they were getting married over Cecil's dead body. Now there was no one in the hall, no sound of voices, and he skirted the monstrous oak table and went out into the gla.s.sed-in arcade, half cloister, half conservatory, which ran along the side of the house to the chapel door. Here too everything seemed the same, everything old and old-fashioned, muddled and habitual, waiting no doubt for Mrs Riley's ruthless hand. Hard to bear in mind it was only fifty years old, younger than his own mother. It looked sunk in habit and history. Gothic plinths held up stone tubs of flowers; three bra.s.s chandeliers, crudely wired for electricity, hung to just above head-height; the floor was of diapered tiles, crimson and biscuit. George felt how the dark oak door of the chapel loomed, seemed to summon and dishearten the visitor with the same black stare. He gripped the cold ring of the handle, the latch shot up inside with a clack, and again he saw Cecil, bustling him through on that first afternoon, with a glance back over his shoulder, in case they were being followed 'This gloomy hole is the family chapel' and holding him tightly round his upper arm. George had peeped about, in an excited muddle, trying to smother his awe in the required show of disdain for religion, while sensing none the less that Cecil would expect some sign of admiration at there being a chapel at all. Surely they were both rather thrilled by it. The chapel was tall for its modest size, the timber roof shadowy, the thwarted light through the stained-gla.s.s window giving the place, by afternoon, the atmosphere of the time just after sunset. Pale things glowed weakly, but others, tiles and tapestries, were dull until the eyes adjusted.

Now what he saw, among the grey shadows, was Cecil's white figure, stretched out flat, and seeming to float above the floor. The sun had long since gone off the garish gla.s.s of the east window, and what daylight there was, oblique and qualified, seemed all to be gathered in Cecil. His feet pointed away, towards the altar. It was as if the chapel had been built for him.

George pushed the door to, without quite closing it, and stood by the first pew's end, with a stern expression and a very slight feeling of fear. He was alone with his old pal again, almost as though he'd come into a hospital ward rather than a chapel, and was afraid of disturbing him, half-hoped to find him asleep and to slip away, having kept his word. That was a kind of visit he'd paid many times, in the War, and after, dreading to see what had happened to a fellow, afraid of the horror in his own face. Here there was a sickly smell of Easter lilies rather than disinfectant. 'h.e.l.lo, Cecil, old boy,' he said, pleasantly and not very loudly, with a dim echo, and then he laughed to himself in the silence that followed. They wouldn't have to have an awkward conversation. He listened to the silence, chapel silence, with its faint penumbra of excluded sounds birdsong, periodic rattle of the distant mower, soft thumps that were less the wind on the roof than the pulse in his ear.

Cecil was laid out in dress uniform, with rich attention to detail. The sculptor had fastened his attention on the cuff-badges, the captain's square stars, the thin square flower of the Military Cross. The b.u.t.tons shone dully in their strange new light, bra.s.s trans.m.u.ted into marble. Who was it . . . ? George stooped to read the name, which was dashingly signed along the edge of the cushion: 'Professor Farinelli' dashing and a touch pedantic too. The effigy lay on a plain white chest, with less readable lettering, Gothic and plaited, running right round it in a long band: CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC CAPTAIN 6TH BATT ROYAL BERKSHIRE REGT BORN APRIL 13 1891 FELL AT MARICOURT JULY 1 1916 CRAS INGENS ITERABIMUS AEQUOR. It was a thoroughly dignified piece of work, in fact magnificently proper. It struck George, as the chapel itself had on that first day, as a quietly crushing a.s.sertion of wealth and status, of knowing what to do. It seemed to place Cecil in some floating cortege of knights and n.o.bles reaching back through the centuries to the Crusades. George saw them for a moment like gleaming boats in a thousand chapels and churches the length of the land. He gripped Cecil's marble boot-caps, and waggled them sulkily; his hand waggled, the boot-caps eternally not. Then he edged round to look at the dead man's face.

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 una.s.sailable before a match, filthy and b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sion, George bald and professorial, Cecil haggard and scarred? Could pa.s.sion survive such changes? The scene was undeniably fantastic. Did he take off his gla.s.ses? Perhaps Cecil by then had gla.s.ses 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 superst.i.tions. 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 bra.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 embarra.s.sed by its popularity, therefore amused by its having a secret, and sadly rea.s.sured 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 pa.s.sing 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?'

'Oh, I had many letters from him,' said George, with a sigh, and choosing Stokes's word, 'really splendid letters . . . But I'm afraid they were lost when we moved from "Two Acres". At least they've never turned up.'

'That is a shame,' said Stokes, so sincerely as to suggest a vague suspicion. 'My own letters from Cecil, only a handful, you know, but they were marvellous things . . . joyous things. Even up to the end he had such spirit. I will certainly give some beautiful instances.'

'I hope you will.'

'And of course if yours were to be found . . .'

'Ah,' said George, with a laugh to cover his momentary vertigo. Was ever such a letter written by a man to a man? How the world would howl and condemn if it read over my shoulder, yet everything in it is as natural and true as the spring itself. He slid past Stokes to look at the tomb again and thought he could ask practically, 'I suppose you're his literary executor?'

'Yes,' said Stokes; and perhaps hearing something more in the question,'He didn't appoint me, to be completely frank, but I made a promise I'd look after all that for him.' George saw he couldn't ask if the promise had been made to Cecil in person or was purely a duty Stokes had imposed on himself.

'Well, he's very lucky, in that at least.'

'There has to be someone . . .'

'Mm, but someone with judgement. Posthumous publication doesn't always enhance a writer's reputation.' He took a frank, almost academic note. 'I don't know how you would rate Cecil Valance, as a poet?'

'Oh . . .' Stokes looked at him, and then looked at Cecil, who now seemed to cause him a slight inhibition, his marble nose alert for any disloyalty. 'Oh, I think no one would question,' he said, 'do you? that a number, really a goodly few, of Cecil's poems, especially perhaps the lyrics . . . one or two of the trench poems, certainly . . . "Two Acres", indeed, lighter but of course so charming . . . will be read for as long as there are readers with an ear for English music, and an eye for English things . . .'

This large claim seemed rather to evaporate in its later clauses. George glanced at Cecil's knightly figure and said kindly, 'I just wonder if people aren't growing sick of the War.'

'Oh, I don't think we've heard the last of the War,' said Stokes.

'Well, no,' said George. 'And of course much of Cecil's work was done before the War.'

'Quite so, quite so . . . but the War made his name, you'd have to agree; when Churchill quoted those lines from "Two Acres" in The Times, Cecil had become a war poet . . .' Stokes sat down, at the end of the first pew, as though to mitigate the strict air of debate, as well as to show he had time for it.

'And yet,' said George, as he often had before, with a teacher's persistence, ' "Two Acres" itself was written a full year before war broke out.'

'Yes . . .' said Stokes, with something of a committee face. 'Yes. But isn't there often, in our poets and our artists, a prophetic strain?' He smiled in concession: 'Or if not that precisely, a fore-knowledge, a sense, perhaps, of the great inevitable that most of us are deaf and blind to?'

'It may be so,' said George, wary of this sweeping talk, which in his view bedevilled too much of what pa.s.sed as literary criticism. 'But to that I'd say two things. You'd agree, I'm sure, that we were all talking about war long before it happened. You didn't need prophetic gifts to know what was going on, though Cecil certainly, who went to Hamburg and Berlin, and had been sailing up on the Frisian coast, was very much in the picture. My second point is that as I'm sure you know Cecil appended that further little section to "Two Acres" when it came out in New Numbers.'

' "The greyhound in its courses, / The hawk above the hill", you mean.'

' "Move not more surely to their end / Than England to the kill",' said George, pleased to cap the quotation, though far from pleased by the words themselves. 'Which of course has nothing to do with "Two Acres" the house, though it turns the poem "Two Acres" into a war poem of in my view a somewhat depressing kind.'