The Stranger’s Child

probability you never knew her.

There were other friends, no doubt, who acquiesced and even looked hopefully on the outcome of this psychical quackery – Lady Adeline, old Brigadier Aston at Uffington, who had lost all three of his boys. But my wife and I quickly came to deplore the hold Mrs Aubrey had over my mother. Interspersed with evidently random book- tests came others so pointedly specific as to arouse suspicion in us (though in my mother, of course, only heightened conviction). One week the test led us to a Westminster Review with a poem of Cecil’s own in it, and the lines, ‘When you were there, and I away / But scenting in the Alpine air the roses of an English May’ – a poem written in fact to a Newnham girl he was keen on, but to my mother’s eye a perfectly adequate parable of the afterlife. Another gave her a line from Swinburne (a poet she hadn’t previously approved of), ‘I will go back to the great sweet mother’; she didn’t seem to mind that the great sweet mother in question was the English Channel. She was accustomed to receiving answers to her questions and satisfaction of her demands; had it not been so pathetic I might have been more moved to laughter at the spectacle of her determination, brought face to face with the meaningless results of these latterday sortes Virgilianae. My wife was once so bold as to ask her mother-in-law why, if Cecil had wanted to tell her ‘Love is love alway’, he had not simply said as much to Lara, rather than putting her through the paper-chase in the library? It was one of a number of remarks taken by the older lady to typify the younger one’s unsuitability as the future mistress of Corley.

My wife and I, who lived at Naughton’s Cottage until my father’s death, were naturally unable to measure, even less control, these activities. But our suspicions grew, and for a while threatened to corrupt the whole character of domestic life at Corley, already under great strain from the War. Mrs Aubrey was clever enough to fire a number of blanks (one test led unequivocally to a page of quadratic equations, which even my mother’s best efforts could not bring out right). But the incidence of gratifying bromide grew so high that we began to wonder whether there were not some accomplice within the house, a maid or footman confirming the location of certain volumes. On occasion the book in question was out of its normal run – a fact interpreted no doubt as proof of Cecil’s absolute up-to-dateness and all-seeing eye. I enlisted Wilkes, who had risen to be butler during the War, and who I knew was above reproach, but his discreet enquiries among the staff led nowhere. I don’t know if I am more embarrassed or proud of a trick I played myself. I had learned to use my limp in various ways, so as to get what I wanted or simply to get in the way. On this occasion, seizing the letter from my mother, I lurched off as fast as I could down the room, rather as an eager shop assistant might run for a packet of tea, and concealing the shelves from her view I called out ‘The fourth book, Mamma, on the second shelf’ whilst taking at random a volume from the shelf above. I have forgotten the volume, but will always remember the sentence: ‘Its want of volitary powers led inevitably to its extirpation’, the subject being, I believe, the Giant Moa: ‘What does he mean?’ worried my mother, faced with this bleakly Darwinian pronouncement from my brother. Ah, had Cecil been able to fly, how different things might have been!

One had wondered from the start, of course, what Mrs Aubrey was getting out of it. It slowly became clear that she was in receipt of cheques for sums unmatched by even the most charitable of the causes my mother espoused. She had a rich old lady where she wanted her, a victim passionate to be duped. But then, by slight, almost deniable, degrees, my mother seemed to let the thing go; she mentioned it rarely, she grew somewhat furtive – not about the tests but about stopping the tests, with the implication that doubt had won out over painful desire. I suspect that by the time my father had his stroke they had completely stopped. The strange timorous delicacy imposed on others by a very forceful personality ensured that we did not ask. She herself recovered much of the humourless cheerfulness that had been so typical of her before the War. Her good works redoubled in mass and effort. With my father indisposed, the present-day concerns of a large estate consumed the energies lately devoted to the past. She was still careful to spend some minutes of each morning in the chapel, alone with her first-born; but grief itself perhaps had run its course.

Paul re-read this passage with a rather silly feeling of excitement, thinking how useful it might be to get some messages from Cecil for himself. An appendix in G. F. Sawle’s edition of Cecil’s Letters seemed to suggest the book-test slips still existed, in the Valance archive, which Paul imagined bundled haphazardly in a large locked bureau like the one in The Aspern Papers; George gave them short shrift, but noted their significance as evidence of the spiritualist craze during and after the First World War. Paul’s copy of Black Flowers was the old red Penguin edition, 1957, and he peered again at the tiny author photo on the back: a shadowy sneer in a one-inch square. Beneath it there was a ramblingly circumstantial biographical note:

Sir Dudley Valance was born in 1895 at Corley Court in Berkshire, the younger son of Sir Edwin Valance, Bt., and educated at Wellington and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English Language and Literature, taking a First in Honour Moderations in 1913. On the outbreak of War he enlisted with the Wiltshire Regiment (Duke of Edinburgh’s), quickly rising to the rank of Captain, but after being wounded at the Battle of Loos in September 1915 was unable to return to active service. His experiences during the War are memorably recorded in the present volume, largely written in the 1920s, though not published until twenty years later. His first book, The Long Gallery, came out to great acclaim in 1922. A satirical country-house novel, in the tradition of Peacock, it cast a merrily merciless eye over three generations of the ancient Mersham family, and added such figures as the jingoistic General Sir Gareth ‘Jo-boy’ Mersham and his ‘artistic’ pacifist grandson Lionel to the great roll-call of British comic characters. On the death of his father in 1925, Dudley Valance succeeded to the baronetcy, his elder brother having been killed in the War. When war broke out again, Corley Court was requisitioned as a military hospital, and in 1946 Sir Dudley deemed it best to sell the family home. England he felt was a changed land, and thenceforth he and his wife have chosen to spend much of each year at their fortified sixteenth-century house near Antequera in Andalusia. A further volume of his memoirs, The Woods Decay, appeared in 1954. Sir Dudley Valance is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and President of British Friends of Sherry.

Paul imagined the meetings of these two groups had fairly similar trajectories. Of course he had nearly met Dudley, he remembered preparing to do so, at Daphne’s seventieth, out in the twilit lane, and his relief (apparently shared by everyone) when he failed to turn up. Now he was the person that he most wanted, or anyway needed, to talk to – he was considerably more frightened of him now he’d read his books, with their extended exasperated portrait of his mother and their puzzled coolness about Cecil himself, whom Dudley clearly thought very overrated. They were masculine books, in a way that seemed, from the viewpoint of the late 1970s, when so much was coming into the open, to be interestingly ‘gay’, in a suppressed English fashion – ‘deniable’, as Dudley would say. It was hard not to feel that his relations with the soldier whose death gave the book its title had been much more of a romance than his marriage to Daphne Sawle. The funny thing about the Penguin note was the mixture of cranky candour and evasion – of the two figures who really interested Paul, Cecil was only obliquely referred to, and the first Lady Valance might never have existed. It followed of course that their two children could not exist either. Even in the book itself they featured hardly at all. There was a sentence towards the end which began, almost comically, ‘By now the father of two children, I began to take a different view of the Corley entail’ – the first mention of Corinna and Wilfrid’s existence.

Dudley, naturally, was the first person Paul had written to, care of his agent, but the letter, like the one he had written soon after to Daphne, remained unanswered, creating a very uncertain mood. George Sawle needed to be approached, but Paul put off writing to him, out of muddled emotions of rivalry and inadequacy. At this stage of the project he had a sense of dotted items, an archipelago of documents, images, odd facts that fed his private belief that he was meant to write Cecil Valance’s Life. Sawle’s long-delayed edition of the Letters had done a lot of his work for him, in its drily scholarly way. Beside it on his bookshelf in Tooting Graveney stood his small collection of related items, some with a very thin but magical thread of connection; the books that only mentioned Cecil in a footnote gave him the strongest sense of uncovering a mystery. In front of him now he saw the torn and sellotaped wrapper of Winton Parfitt’s Sebastian Stokes: A Double Life; the black quarto notebooks in which he’d transcribed in pencil the letters between Cecil and Elkin Mathews, the publisher of Night Wake, in the British Library; the strange stiff binding of a privately printed register of Kingsmen killed in the Great War, with its peculiar heady smell of gum. On a barrow in the Farringdon Road he had found a copy of Sir Edwin Valance’s Cattle Feeds and Cattle Care (1910), 25p, which he felt in its very intractability conveyed something almost mystical about his subject’s family. He also had ‘the Galleries’: Dudley’s novel of 1922, which certainly drew on the Valances for its deranged Mersham family, and of