The Stranger’s Child

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 passed 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.’

‘It certainly changes the poem,’ said Stokes more leniently.

‘For us it was a bit like finding a gun-emplacement at the bottom of the garden… But perhaps you think rather better of it. I’m a historian, not a critic.’

‘I’m not sure I allow a clear distinction.’

‘I mean I’m not a reader of new poetry. I don’t keep up, as you do.’

‘Well, I try,’ said Stokes. ‘I admit there are poets writing at this moment whom I don’t fully understand – some of the Americans, perhaps…’

‘But you keep up,’ George assured him.

Stokes seemed to ponder. ‘I think more in terms of those individuals I can help,’ he said, something at once noble and needy in his tone.

‘And now…’

‘And now… well, now I must get all Valance’s things up together,’ said Stokes, standing up, with the air of someone late for work.

‘How much is there, would you say?’

Stokes paused as if considering a further confidence. ‘Oh, it will be quite a book.’

‘A lot of new things…?’

A tiny flinch. ‘Well, a good many old ones.’

‘Mm, you mean the infant effusions.’

Sebby Stokes looked around, with his almost comical air of simultaneous candour and caution. ‘The infant effusions, as you so justly put it.’

‘Not omittable?’

‘All addressed to Mamma!’

‘Of course…’

‘Most unfortunate.’

‘Touching, in a way, perhaps?’

‘Oh, touching, certainly. Certainly that.’

George giggled ruefully. ‘And then Marlborough, I suppose?’

‘There the view grows a good deal brighter. Some of the schoolboy work we know from Night Wake, of course, but I shall comb the Marlburian with much keenness.’

‘But again… later unknown things?’

Stokes looked at him keenly, even pleadingly, for a second. ‘If you know of any…’

‘As I say, we’d rather lost touch.’

‘No… The fact is I am a little troubled by something.’ Stokes glanced at the tomb. ‘When I last saw Cecil that night in London, he showed me a handful of new poems, some of them unfinished. We went back to my flat after dinner, and he read to me, it must have been for half an hour or so. Very striking: both in itself and, somehow, in the way he read: very quiet and… thoughtful. It was a new voice – you might say a personal voice, as much as a poetical one, if you see what I mean. I was most taken, and stirred.’ Stokes was brusque for a moment with reawoken feeling.

George pictured this scene with a forgiving sense of the Cecil that Stokes had never known, the nudist, the satyr, the fornicator; and with a twist of envy too – the bachelor flat, Cecil in uniform, the bewildering brevity of a soldier’s leave, the luxury of talk about poems over a coal fire. ‘And what subjects was he dealing with?’

‘Oh, they were war poems, poems about his men, trench life. They were very… candid,’ said Stokes frankly but airily, briefly searching George’s face.

‘Mm, I’d like to see them.’ (No, the coal fire was nonsense, some memory of his own – it must have been June, windows open on to the London night.)

Stokes nodded impatiently. ‘So indeed should I.’

‘Ah. He didn’t leave them with you.’

‘He said he’d send them,’ said Stokes, with a touch of petulance; and then, with an accepting snuffle, ‘but of course he went back to France without finding occasion to do so.’

‘He had other things on his mind,’ said George.

‘I’m sure he did…’ said Stokes, clearly not in need of a lesson.

‘And these poems weren’t among his effects?’ George had a sense of Stokes’s pretty formidable efficiency rattled by this lapse.

Stokes shook his head, and looked up quickly, almost furtively, at the groan of the door behind them. ‘Anyway… here is your wife!’

George turned and saw Madeleine step cautiously into the gloom. He raised a hand reassuringly and called, ‘Hello, Mad’ – the echoes reawoken.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said Madeleine. She came forward, adjusting her eyes to the shadows and perhaps to something else in the atmosphere. ‘Are you praying, or plotting?’

‘Neither,’ said George.

‘Both,’ said Stokes.

‘We’ve been communing with Cecil,’ said George.

‘Well, it’s Cecil I’ve come to see,’ said Madeleine, in her own tone, with its possible tremor of humour; George had seen people peer at her, trying to make it out. The two men stood silent and observant as she approached the effigy and looked it over, with her scholarly firmness of interest and her cool immunity to all aesthetic sensations. ‘Is it a good likeness?’ she said.

‘As it happens,’ said Stokes, ‘we weren’t quite able in the end to decide; were we, George? Is it Cecil, or is it, as it were, someone else?’ He had a slight air of taking sides and teasing Madeleine, which George entirely understood and keenly resented. He said,

‘I’m afraid I don’t think it’s him.’

Madeleine stood by the head of the tomb, with the straight-backed look of a senior nurse. Impossible to guess how much she knew; or even to know how much she guessed. ‘Was he not bigger?’ she said.

‘Oh… possibly…’ said George, coming over to face her across the body, with a clear, disingenuous desire to be open, casual, critical if need be. ‘But it’s not that.’

‘Not more muscular?’ said Madeleine, giving a glimpse perhaps of what she’d been encouraged to believe about the dead hero.

George stood, with his eyebrows raised, gently shaking his head… ‘What can I say? – just more alive, simply.’

‘Ha, yes,’ said Madeleine, and gave him a quick puzzled look. ‘Have you been having a useful discussion?’

‘Your husband has been moderately forthcoming,’ said Stokes. ‘Though I feel I haven’t finished with him yet.’

‘Sebastian has a great deal to do,’ said George, and laughed.

Stokes bowed his head with courteous humour. ‘Indeed, and I must get on – I’ve promised to interrogate your dear mother…’ And he went out, with that slight hardening of the face again at the prospect of further work and new calculations.

George looked up at his wife, and then down again at Cecil, who seemed somehow to have turned into a piece of evidence, ambiguous but irreducible, lying between them. He had an almost physical sense of changing