The Stranger's Child (69 page)

Half an hour later, after three drinks, and a trip downstairs to the marble and mahogany loo, where Peter’s father emerged from a cubicle and engaged him in earnest talk by the basins while a dozen tipsy guests darted or staggered in and out, he accompanied the old man up the grand stairs and thought about saying his goodbyes and going. The huge brass chandeliers had been switched on, and the room was thinning. It seemed the blond man had already left, and at this Rob felt almost relieved. And really this wasn’t the moment . . . and with the eager young Gareth to see in an hour, at the Style Bar . . . He looked round for Desmond, whom he had, not quite purposely, been avoiding.

He saw him talking to an elderly couple, with a resolute air of courtesy which Rob found lightly chastening as he slid towards him. He gave him the warm little smile of a prior claim, over their two grey heads. Desmond caught his eye but carried on talking, ‘Well, we’ll speak to Anne about it – that should work out well,’ still standing stiffly, so that Rob, in momentary confusion, merely gave him a hug, sideways on; and was then introduced to Mr and Mrs Sorley.

‘Did you know Peter well?’ asked Mrs Sorley, small and sweet-faced, a bit thrown perhaps by a glass of wine in the afternoon, and the crowded occasion. They were Yorkshire, it seemed lived there still.

‘Not well,’ said Rob, ‘I sold him a lot of expensive books.’

‘Oh . . . oh, I see! No, we’re old friends of Terry and Rose – well, Bill was in the army with Terry, and of course I knew Rose in the Wrens – all those years ago!’ – a guileless promptness of exposure. Rob said,

‘So you knew Peter all his life,’ and smiled back.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, with a conscientious little shake of the head. ‘I was just saying to Desmond, how Petie used to put on plays when he was quite small – him and his sister played all the parts. Proper grown-up plays, you know –
Julius Caesar
.’

‘I can just imagine!’ Rob thought they could hardly have expected then to have been up in London half a century later, at Peter’s own memorial, talking to his male partner. He wanted to commiserate with them and also in a way to congratulate them.

‘Well, I must have a word with Sir Edward,’ said Desmond, with a dutiful smile.

‘Well, well done today,’ said Rob, mournful, head on one side.

‘Yeah, thanks, Rob. We’ll be in touch – we’ve got your e-mail, I think’ – so was there a new man on the scene already? Or was the ‘we’ a mere habit, the way he thought of his and Peter’s home? With a kiss for Mrs Sorley, though not for Rob, he went off across the room, amid sympathetic smiles and blank but lingering glances.

Rob spoke a bit longer to the Sorleys, feeling stung by Desmond’s coldness, and of course completely unable to protest or explain. It was true he hadn’t been to the funeral, hadn’t been in touch with Desmond at all since 1995. He meant nothing to Desmond. And it occurred to him, as he gazed a little distractedly over Bill Sorley’s shoulder, that perhaps Desmond thought Rob had only come today out of some idea he had of making an offer for Peter’s library – which was, in truth, at the back of his mind. Though there was more to it than that, much more.

He could see the Sorleys rather sticking to him, now they’d got him, among all these strangers and alarming if sometimes unnameable celebrities. Paul Bryant and Bobby were leaving, Bobby turning and giving Rob a finger wave. They went out through the double doors, arm in arm for a moment, so that he felt abashed by their evident contentment and self-sufficiency. ‘That’s very funny,’ he said to Bill Sorley, ‘yes . . .’: they seemed happy to do most of the talking. He spotted Jennifer, by the white marble fireplace, talking to a man he’d seen arrive about half an hour ago, as if unavoidably detained or really as if appointments of any kind were beyond him. He had a soft, intelligent but very nervous face, and thick shoulder-length grey hair, unwashed and unmanageable, which he ran his hands through incessantly as he spoke. His suit was old and shiny and scuffed at the heels, and Rob imagined he might have had some difficulty getting past the porter downstairs. He couldn’t tell from Jennifer’s expression, which seemed to hover between grief and hilarity, if she needed rescuing. He smiled and slumped regretfully – ‘Well, I think I really have to go . . .’

As he approached her, she looked up and nodded at him, as if they were partners themselves, or at least had some useful and chivalrous agreement for the occasion. The man half turned – ‘Well, it was marvellous to see you, darling,’ a cultured voice, terrible teeth, a flinching smile, the look of being fed up with being a nuisance to people.

‘And you!’ said Jennifer, warm in the moment of escape; but perhaps here there was more to it too. ‘Shall we?’ she said to Rob. And then, ‘This is Julian Keeping.’

‘Hello.’ Rob smiled keenly at him, leant in and shook his hand, which had a bony grip.

Keeping flapped his other hand, as if to say he wouldn’t bother them further. ‘An old friend of Peter’s, from way back,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Too long ago!’ He had a sad smell to him – Rob didn’t think it was drink, that sweet and sour choke to the nose; but smoke certainly, his finger ends and nails were tanned; and beyond that perhaps just long and compounded neglect. Rob nodded to him again, and then followed Jennifer to the door.

‘Are you getting a taxi?’ she said, at the top of the stairs, and Rob saw, which he hadn’t a minute before, that she was pretty drunk. She went down with high-stepping wariness, smiling faintly, preoccupied perhaps by thoughts of this unfortunate man. Rob was bright and speedy with drink himself, laughing half-guiltily at the echo of his own voice off the marble stairwell. ‘Believe it or not,’ she said, ‘that was my first sweetheart.’

‘Really,’ said Rob. ‘Well . . .’ He glanced at her, still unsure of her feelings, or what she would let him see of them.

‘He couldn’t be said to have worn well.’

‘Um, no . . .’

‘Corinna’s son, in fact,’ she said.

‘Oh, really?’ Rob looked narrowly at her. ‘So, your cousin, and, let me get this right, Cecil Valance’s grandson!’

‘Well, if you believe all that,’ she said; she shook her head and laughed, ‘Oh god!’

They went to their separate cloakrooms, and then he waited for her under the columns of the hall – the lights on now and a glimpse through the glass doors of evening already in possession of the street outside. She came back out with a humorous smile of accepted courtesy, a little flushed, but clearly, even determinedly, refocused on the present. Her coat was long, dark, made of some softly crinkling and glowing material, shyly extravagant, and again with an air of being a fashion all of her own. ‘So funny seeing Paul Bryant,’ she said, as they went through into the lobby, her tone again very dry.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Rob, glad she hadn’t forgotten her promise.

‘I probably shouldn’t say this . . .’

‘Oh, surely?’ – catching her mischievous look under the flowered hat, and giddily aware of the contrasting sobriety of the porter, in his striped trousers. Jennifer glanced over her shoulder. ‘He was always somewhat of a fantasist, you see. He told the most pitiful stories about his father, being a fighter pilot, shot down at the end of the war – somewhere or other.’

‘You don’t remember?’

‘No,
he
was the one who didn’t remember. The story kept changing. My aunt and I picked up on it, she thought it was odd, she had a terrifying eye for any kind of nonsense.’

‘This is Corinna, you mean?’

‘Yes . . . Anyway, of course, the point was he never had a father, he was a bastard,’ she said in her candid old-fashioned way. ‘His mother had been in a factory in the war, and got pregnant by someone there. There was some story about her being ill, as well, I can’t quite recall. That may have been true, of course, but one started to treat anything he said with a degree of suspicion.’

Rob glanced again at the porter, whose stare seemed simultaneously offended and indifferent. He himself didn’t see this as quite such a point against Bryant as Jennifer seemed to – in fact it made him if anything more intriguing and sympathetic. ‘So you said he used to be a bank-clerk?’ (He had the examples of T. S. Eliot and P. G. Wodehouse at the ready.)

‘Used, yes, in my uncle’s bank. No, the rather awful thing was, my uncle had to fire him: I believe he was jolly lucky it didn’t go to court.’ They went out and down the steps into the waiting chill of Pall Mall, car headlights, briefly stalled, advancing on them with the bright impersonal rush of the London night. ‘Some sort of fiddle. He was quite clever – he is clever, Paul Bryant, in his odd way – and I think it was difficult to prove, but Uncle Leslie had no doubt about it, and Paul himself somehow wasn’t surprised, from what I gathered, to be thrown out of the bank. I was doing my doctorate then, and he sent me a card, right out of the blue, to say he was leaving the world of banking to pursue a career as a writer.’

Rob said, vaguely humorously, looking around, ‘To spend more time with his family.’

‘Well, to spend more time with
my
family, as it turned out,’ said Jennifer.

‘And the rest is biography,’ said Rob with a wise grin, as the cab he had waved at came to a halt and he opened the door for her.

What Rob thought of as Raymond’s was properly Chadwick’s, Antiques and Second-Hand, though it had started out, a century ago, as the best dress-shop in Harrow. In the floor of the set-back doorway the words ‘MADAME CLAIRE’ could still be read in the dulled mosaic, circling the barely legible ‘MODES’. Now the two broad display windows, where headless Edwardian mannequins had once been stationed (hats shown on separate stands, like cakes), were barricaded with old furniture, the rough deal backs of wardrobes, tables stacked on tables, among which an individual item, a plaster bust of Beethoven or a real glass cake-stand, was sometimes artlessly exhibited to the public. Rob had never set eyes on Hector Chadwick himself – it was always Raymond he saw, if he was in the area, or if Raymond let him know he had something for him. The old Harrow houses yielded treasures, now and then, among the van-loads of almost unsaleable books that found their way into the shop and then on, into junk shops and musty charity stores all over North London.

Rob shoved open the door, and a leisurely bell rang, and then rang again, in a part of the shop that was out of view. The showroom, as Raymond called it, was partitioned by ramparts of furniture into gloomy alleys, and it was hard to tell if there was anyone else in it. Not much natural light got through, and lamps that were notionally for sale glowed here and there on desks and sideboards. The feeling of secrecy and safety was shadowed by a childish sense of unease. At the back was a wall of books Rob had sometimes looked over, torn wrappers, dun-coloured cloth, obscure possibilities, the wary flicker of excitement snuffed out, as often as not, in the odour of dust and disuse. The smell of the books was like a drug, a promise of pleasure shot through with a kind of foreknown regret. In dreams he clambered or floated up bookshelves like these, where indefinably significant copies of editions that never existed hid among themselves in shy dull colours, old greens and ochres and faded yellows. Undeveloped prototypes for books, the novel by Woolf of which only one copy was printed, the unknown Compton-Burnett with its ever-mutating title,
Helpers and Hinderers
,
A House and Its Horse
,
Friend and Fraud
. He worked his way round – ‘Raymond?’

‘Hey, Rob?’ There was the clatter of his keyboard. ‘With you in a sec.’ Raymond and his computer lived together in intense co-dependency, as if they shared a brain, his arcane undiscriminating memory backed up on the machine and perpetually enlarged by it. Raymond himself was vast, in a cheerfully challenging way. What his life was like beyond the confines of the shop Rob had no idea. ‘Just uploaded a new thing for you.’

‘Oh yeah . . . ?’

‘You’re going to like this one.’

‘Mm, I wonder.’

At the side of the shop, a chaotic cubicle made a kind of office. Rob grinned in over the heaped papers and coiling dusty cables at Raymond’s round face gleaming in the light from the screen; he bounced slightly on his office chair as he nodded. His reddish beard, grown long and wild like a martyr’s, spread out over his T-shirt, half-covering the slogan for his website, ‘Poets Alive! Houndvoice.com’, above an implausibly cheerful picture of W. B. Yeats. He looked up and nodded. ‘I’ve just done Tennyson – want to see?’

On Houndvoice Raymond posted eerie little videos of long-dead poets reading, authentic sound recordings emerging from the mouths of digitally animated photographs. It was clear from the Comments that some viewers thought they were really seeing Alfred Noyes read ‘The Highwayman’, while even those who weren’t taken in were apparently impressed by the fish-like gaping of the poet’s lips and the rhythmical flicker of his eyebrows.

‘Yeah, I guess . . .’ said Rob, coming round as Raymond pushed back his chair. ‘They’re a bit spooky, aren’t they.’

‘Yeah?’ said Raymond, clearly pleased. ‘Yeah, I suppose people might be a bit spooked by them.’

Rob didn’t think the films were remotely convincing, but in a way this made them more disturbing. The dummylike dropping of the jaw, the cheesy melting and setting of the features, were like the evidence of other impostures – the doctored photos of early séances, more creepy and depressing to Rob than the thought of real communication with the dead. Rob met up with his dead friends in witty and poignant dreams, where they didn’t look at all like these bundles of mouthing matter. ‘Here we go,’ said Raymond, maximizing the player and whacking up the volume. Lord Tennyson’s notable head and shoulders filled the screen – hollow-cheeked, high-domed, hair tangled and greasy, the straggly dark beard with a lot of grey in it. The beard, at least, was a blessing, as it completely covered the poet’s mouth, preventing any ghoulish working of the lips. Raymond clicked the Play button and against a rainstorm of hissing and the galloping thump of the cylinder the determined quavering voice of the great poet began its familiar rush through ‘Come Into the Garden, Maud’. Rob had always thought the recording uncanny in itself – the effect whenever he’d heard it before was comic and touching and awe-inspiring by turns. He saw Raymond was watching him watch the video, and he smiled thinly, as if only just reserving judgement. The bard’s beard quivered like a beast in a hedge, as the famous face made repetitive mincing and chewing movements. Rob felt the peculiar look in the older Tennyson’s eyes, the air of almost belligerent anxiety, appealing to him critically and directly through the shame that was being inflicted on his lower features. Then it came to its abrupt end, and Raymond’s copyright line – not in the recording or the image, but in the puppet-show he’d made with them – appeared across Tennyson’s frozen face.