The Stranger's Child

by Alan Hollinghurst

Paul saw a promising mauve cover deep down, gay books keeping generally to that end of the spectrum, but when he dug it out it was a survey of historic thimbles, which wasn’t quite gay enough.

‘Whom are you discussing?’ he said. ‘My brother Sizzle, General,’ Dudley seemed to say. ‘Ah, indeed,’ said the General, declining an offered space on the sofa but fetching a hard chair as he came round and making a square circle of the group, which took on a suddenly strategic air. ‘Yes, a tragic case. And a very promising writer.’ ‘Yes . . .’ – Dudley was more cautious now. ‘Wavell had several of them by heart, you know. It’s “Soldiers Dreaming”, isn’t it, he puts in Other Men’s Flowers, but he had a great deal of time for “The Old Company”.’ ‘Oh, well, yes,’ said Dudley. ‘I’ll be saying something about it tomorrow. He used to quote it’ – the General batted his eyelids – ‘ “It’s the old company, all right, / But without the old companions” – one of the truest things said about the experience of many young officers.’ He looked around – ‘They came back and they came back, do you see, if they came through at all, and the company was completely changed, they’d all been killed. There was always a company tradition, keenly maintained, but the only people who remembered the old soldiers were soon dead themselves – no one remembered the rememberers. No, a great poem in its way.’ He shook his head in candid submission. Paul sensed there were demurrers in the group, but the General’s claim for the poem’s truth made them hesitate.

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books about music and art – she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were a thing people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle: looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene: a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the streets outside – a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.