— Your parents moved away. How are they?
I tell her that they’re well; then I enquire whether Val’s at home. Hilda is looking behind me all this time for the supermarket van. I can see she’s irritated that I’ve arrived because it’s distracting her from this delivery which has been at the centre of her day. — Val does the orders on the Internet, she explains crossly. — They give you a two-hour time slot but they’re awfully unreliable, and this one’s late already. Though sometimes he thinks he’s put an order in, and then it turns out he’s forgotten to press the final button or something. He gets mixed up. Perhaps he just pretends he got mixed up, when actually he couldn’t be bothered.
Then she says that he’s usually in, he doesn’t go out much.
She shrugs when I ask if I can come in; I say that I’d love to see him, though it will be very strange after such a long time. — You may as well go up, she says. — He hasn’t been in touch with his old friends. I suppose that most of them have moved away.
The hall is more or less as I remember it — spacious and shabby with a cold cellar-breath. It’s dark because of the feeble light bulb and the overgrown shrubs against the window; a gigantic sideboard carved in black wood takes up too much space — one of the things they brought with them from Malaya. Hilda explains that Valentine doesn’t live in the attic any longer, he’s moved down into his father’s room because the attic’s full of junk. Then she seizes my hand in an awkward grip, heavy as iron, her knuckles swollen and freckled with age. — You know he hasn’t been well?
And I think in that moment that it is AIDS, which would fit in with Valentine’s timing perfectly. She asks if I have sons and I say I have two, both grown up now; I dread — because of her bowed head and the drooping, tragic face — that she is going to say something significant and terrible, about her love for her son and the pain of losing Valentine, because he’s going to die. Stupid tears force their way into my eyes in readiness; she must see them. But after all she only talks on in her deprecating way about her various grandchildren (none of them Valentine’s, of course) who seem all to be in expensive private schools, or at Oxford or Cambridge. I’m not quite sure what message this is supposed to have for me. Perhaps she is reminding me that I was never really quite good enough for their family. Or perhaps she’s just rambling round familiar territory because she’s an old lady and she’s distracted, she’s forgotten what she meant to say.
She doesn’t come upstairs with me, she wants to keep looking out for the van; and I hesitate on the landing because I’ve no idea which room was Valentine’s father’s. I call out, but there’s no response so I try one of the doors, which opens into a bedroom that must be Hilda’s, at the front of the house: there’s a ghost in the air in here of her cosmetics and scent, a high bed with a pink candlewick cover, and a cheval mirror (carved in the same black wood as the sideboard) that seems to stand in for Hilda’s presence, pulled stiffly upright. I try another door. In this second room it’s dark because thick curtains are pulled across the windows, and there’s an Anglepoise light switched on above a desk where an old man with a shock of white hair is sitting with his back to me, writing. I think for a startled moment that Madeleine made a mistake, Valentine’s father isn’t dead after all. Then the old man turns round and I see that it’s Valentine.
He isn’t really an old man. It’s the white hair which is so disconcerting: and yet it’s that pure white which is quite beautiful in itself, silky and light as floss, seeming charged with static because it floats like a translucence round his head. And Val’s got a lot of it, he’s not balding, it’s just receding in a distinguished way at the temples. He doesn’t really look so very old, more like someone who’s been seriously sick and is just coming back to life. He’s gaunt, his skin is papery-dry, his eyes seem huge and the folds of flesh under them are puffy. (It isn’t AIDS — Val insists on that at some point in our conversation, as if he knows what people guess. I don’t know what happened to him, exactly — some kind of breakdown, physical and mental, a consequence I suppose of all the drink and the drugs, and the lifestyle. It could so easily have been AIDS, going to America and to the gay scene and sleeping around just when he did; but if he’d got it then he’d probably have been dead by now. So he was lucky in his own way, charmed.)
The old faun-face is still there, behind the mask of age and illness. After the first moment’s shock of non-recognition I find it: the heart-shape and defiant jaunty chin, the curious deeply curved eye sockets, a sardonic twist to the long mouth. He is still handsome; and his looks are more densely male and less androgynous after thirty years — their style that was poised and provisional is etched now deep into the flesh. The bruise-black eyes are suffering and eloquent against that white hair. He’s wearing an old shirt which I guess was his father’s, half buttoned and without cufflinks, so that the sleeves dangle off his forearms. I feel ashamed of my smart outfit. There’s a stillness and steadiness in him which is new. He used to be too restless to sit at a desk for very long; but now as I look around I get the feeling that he doesn’t venture much out of this room. It smells stale in here; the bed is unmade, clothes are lying on the floor where he has dropped them. The walls are pinned all over with pictures, postcards, things cut out of the newspapers, scraps of paper scribbled with writing. There’s a Mac laptop open on the bed, though at the desk he was writing by hand. Books — not novels but heavy reference books, numbered on the spine as if they’re borrowed from a library — are piled up on the floor and the chairs. I’m sure when he stands up from his desk, turning enquiringly towards me, that he’s sorry he’s been interrupted.
I know right away that Val has no idea who I am.
It’s not only that he’s stalled for a moment, as I was with him, by how I’ve aged and changed. Even when I’ve told him my name and explained who I am and how we were friends before he went away, his expression doesn’t register anything except a vaguely polite hopefulness. — I’m so sorry, he says. — It’s part of my illness. Or rather, it’s part of the drugs they gave me to cure the illness. I’ve lost whole chunks of my past, you’ll have to forgive me.
His accent is faintly transatlantic; but his voice is the same, I’d know it anywhere: not deep, a tenor voice with something cracked and teasing in it, creaky and smoky. It’s because of the old known voice speaking out of him that I don’t just back off and make my excuses and leave right away. I feel at home with him, I know him, even if he doesn’t know me. — Tell me about yourself, he says. — Perhaps some of it will come back to me. Stella. Maybe I do remember a Stella. Come in. Shut the door behind you. I’d ask my mother to make you coffee only she’s driving me insane, I can’t bring myself to speak to her. Did she let you in? Did she pounce, the black widow?
He’s smiling but it’s not quite his old tautly mocking smile; I wonder if illness has wiped some of his irony. When he lights a cigarette (he’s kept Hilda’s lighter, after all this time) his hands shake. He goes around the room tidying up, pulling the sheets straight on the bed, lifting some books off a chair so that I can sit in it — and then he’s at a loss because he can’t find anywhere to put them down. Opening the curtains, he lets in a grey daylight which shows up the thick dust. Valentine was always indifferent to his surroundings but the mess seems more of a risk now that he’s older, and ill. When you are young and strong you can be sure of springing free of your material envelope through your own vitality; later, any dinginess or fustiness may seep back into you.
— Do you remember Fred? I say encouragingly. The chair that Valentine cleared for me to sit in is an ugly heavy thing, elaborately carved and high-backed like a throne; he’s sitting on the side of the bed, opposite me. — He was your teacher, he loved you.