The Stranger’s Child

underestimate its interest. You should take more pride in it.’ She reached down beside her chair and brought up her bag, the large tapestry bag with wooden jaws that Paul had seen earlier. She started going through it.

Mrs Keeping sighed and was more conciliatory. ‘Well, I am proud of one or two of them, Mother, you know that very well. Cecil’s not exactly my cup of tea, but my father, for all his… oddities, has moments of genius.’

‘Well, he’s certainly very clever,’ said Mrs Jacobs, brows lightly furrowed over her bag. Paul had the impression of a small-scale chaos of papers, powder compacts, glasses cases, pills. She stopped for a moment and looked up at him, her hand in the bag marking her place. ‘Jenny’s grandfather was a marvellous painter, too. You may have heard of him, Revel Ralph? No… he was, well, he was very different from Mark Gibbons. I suppose you’d say more decorative.’

‘I think Mark’s a bit over the hill, Granny,’ said Jenny.

‘Well, possibly, my dear, since he’s almost as old as me.’ Paul knew how old this was, of course, but didn’t know if it was a secret. ‘You probably think Revel’s hopelessly old hat too.’

Jenny made a moue and raised her eyebrows as if to say she could reach her own negative judgements. ‘No, I like Grandpa’s things. I find them rather piquant, actually. Particularly the late ones.’ Again Paul was amused and impressed by the confidence of her views. She spoke with a small frown as if she was at Oxford already. He said, ‘Is he… not still alive?’

‘He was killed in the War,’ said Mrs Keeping, with a quick shake of the head, stubbing out her cigarette.

‘Well, he was extraordinarily brave,’ said Mrs Jacobs. ‘He had two tanks blown up under him, and he was running to reach a third one when a shell got him.’ Her cigarette was in one hand, her lighter in the other, but she went on, before anyone else could, ‘He was a hero, actually. He got a posthumous gong, you know…’

‘What became of that, Granny?’ said Jenny in a more docile tone.

‘Oh, I have it,’ said Mrs Jacobs, quickly puffing, ‘of course I have it.’ Paul wasn’t clear whom her indignation was aimed at. She gave him a look as if they were united against the others. ‘You know, people think he was flighty and gay and what-have-you, but in fact he could be quite fearless.’

‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘I’m sure…’ slightly mesmerized by her and already an admirer of this man he had never heard of a minute ago.

At the gate Paul turned and waved his bandaged hand but Jenny, who’d been told to see him out, had already vanished from the front step. Still, the small muscular contractions of pleasure and politeness remained almost unconsciously on his face as he swung and scuffed along the lane. He smiled at the view over the hedge, at the other front gardens, at the approaching Rover and then its driver, squinting in a rictus of his own against the evening sun, and making Paul feel again like an intruder, or now perhaps an absconder. The sun was still hot on his back. Among the trees the church clock chimed the quarter-hour once more – he checked his watch: 7.15 of course; the hour just gone had taken about twenty minutes, and some compensating sense made him wonder if it shouldn’t in fact be 8.15. Here he was in Church Walk. Here was the marketplace. He had never really touched spirits before, and the second gin-and-tonic, as wildly drinkable as the first, had brought him to a state of grinning elation just touched by notes of worry and confusion. He’d been talking and telling himself not to talk, things he normally avoided saying, about his father’s plane being shot down, and his mother’s illness, and even his exploits at school, things that must have made him sound childish and simple. But no one had seemed to mind. Now he wondered if Mr Keeping, who said very little, hadn’t thought him a fool – it was actually rather creepy of him to get Paul drunk and just sit there watching, with his unnerving smile. He imagined some sarcasm about it, in the office tomorrow. On the other hand, he felt he’d been quite a success with old Daphne Jacobs, who seemed grateful for a new listener, and he’d laughed and winced sympathetically at her stories without necessarily following them. He often found, when he concentrated really hard on what someone was saying, that nothing much went in. The intoxication was partly that of being in the home of people who knew writers, in this case quite famous ones. He was barely aware of Dudley Valance, but he quoted whole verses of Cecil Valance’s to the old lady, who smiled indulgently and then began to look slightly impatient. She had a soft uncanny light about her, somehow, from having been his lover – it turned out ‘Two Acres’ had been written specifically for her. She told Paul about it quite frankly, over the second Gin and It (whatever It was), and Jenny had said, ‘I think Uncle Cecil’s poems are awfully imperialist, Granny,’ which she pretended not to hear. In Vale Street he looked through the windows of the International Stores, closed and shadowy. Something shockingly sad caught at him – he was free, buoyant and squiffy, twenty-three years old, and he was entirely alone, with hours still before sunset and no one to share them with.

The way to his digs took him out of the town, past the closed and overgrown yards of the old goods station, past the new secondary modern school, hard and transparent in the evening sun. Then he crossed into Marlborough Gardens, which was a loop, or noose, with one exit on to the main road. From the pavement he saw people eating in kitchens, or finished already and out in the garden, mowing and watering. The houses were a strange economy that there wasn’t a word for, built in threes, two semis with the central house in common, like segments of a terrace. Mrs Marsh at least had an end house, with a view behind on to a field of barley. Her husband was a coach-driver, with odd hours, taking a party up to London, or sometimes away overnight on a run to Bournemouth or the Isle of Wight. Now she was in the front room with the curtains pulled against the sun and the box blaring – it was the start of Z-Cars. She had a pleasant way of not bothering her lodger – she turned her head and nodded; in the kitchen there was a ham salad for him under a cloth, and a redirected letter with a note saying ‘This came for you, Mrs Marsh’. Paul went upstairs two at a time, used the bathroom, which was where he felt most a stranger, among the couple’s shaving-soap and flannels, Mrs Marsh’s other things in the cabinet. The bathroom had a frosted glass panel in the door, which showed if it was occupied at night, and made going to the lavatory especially seem audible and almost visible and even vaguely culpable. Paul’s designated bath nights were Tuesday and Thursday: so tonight! Saturdays the bank worked through till one, then he would be off on the bus to Wantage, and his first week of work here would be over.

After his supper he went back upstairs and got down his diary from the top of the wardrobe. He had hardly made his mark on the room – his slippers and dressing-gown, a few books he’d stuffed into his bag. He had the new Angus Wilson out of the library, and was getting through it in his own way, with a restless eye running ahead for the appearances of Marcus, the queer son, whose antics he pondered as if for portents or advice. He didn’t want to read this at home and risk his mother asking questions. Also the latest Penguin Modern Poets, The Mersey Sound, which he didn’t really think was poetry at all; and Poems of To-day, in fact published over fifty years ago, and full of things that he loved and knew by heart, such as Drinkwater’s ‘Moonlit Apples’ and Valance’s ‘Soldiers Dreaming’. The room had a hard square armchair in prickly moquette and up against the window a ladies’ dressing-table with three mirrors and a stool, which was where Paul sat each night to do his writing. Whenever he looked up he saw himself, the Bryant nose in triumphant triplicate, his two profiles playing hide and seek with each other. He’d been keeping his diary since he left school, a top-secret record, and the volumes themselves, black quarto notebooks, were growing harder to hide as they amassed. At home he had a box under the bed in which old school projects and browning newsprint concealed a lower layer of private things, frail mementoes of boys at school, three issues of Manifique!, with muscle-men in posing pouches, sometimes clearly drawn on afterwards, and then the diaries themselves, in which Paul let himself go in a way that these publications weren’t allowed to.

Now he leant forward, like a schoolboy shielding his work, and wrote: ‘June 29th 1967: hot and sunny all day.’As he wrote he pressed very hard with his biro into the page, so that the paper itself seemed to spread and rise in a curl at the margins. When closed, the book showed exactly how much of it had been used up. The written pages, their edges crinkly and darkened, were a pleasing proof of industry, the rest of the book, clean, trim and dense, a pleasing challenge. This week had been rich in material, and he had summed up the girls at work and given Geoff Viner a franker appraisal than was possible in the bank itself. Now he had his chat with Geoff in the toilets to write up, and the whole unexpected adventure at ‘Carraveen’. ‘It turns out Mrs J was married to Dudley Valance, C’s brother. But she also had big affair with Cecil V before WW1, said he was her first love, he was madly attractive but bad with women. I said what did she mean. She said, “He didn’t really understand women, you know, but he was completely irresistible to them. Of course he was only 25 when he was killed.” ’ At the foot of the page, where the edge of his writing hand had rested, the greasy paper resisted the ink, and he had to go over some of the words twice: ‘completely irresistible’, he wrote again, ‘only 25’ – the effect bold and clumsy, like the writing of someone who was still drunk or slightly mad.