The Stranger’s Child

‘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?’

‘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,