The Stranger’s Child

1

The rain wasn’t much, but the wind was wild, and he hurried round the square with his brolly held low in front of him and half-blocking his view. The plane trees roared in the dark overhead, and wide wet leaves shot past him or pressed blindly against his coat. In his left hand he had his briefcase, black leather, streaked by the rain. He’d been reading poetry in the library, in the dwindling evening crew. When the dark-haired man, called R. Simpson, who seemed to be working on Browning’s plays, started packing up, he had packed up too; but at the street-door, in the downpour, Simpson had hurried right, while he had gone left, in the usual muddle of gloom and relief, towards the Underground. He found the tussle with the weather oddly satisfying.

After dusk in Bedford Square you could see into the high first-floor windows of publishers’ offices, the walls of bookshelves and often a huddle of figures at a glaringly lit party. Such a party was going on now, at the front door below a few guests were leaving, and the bright rectangle widened and narrowed as they slipped out into the night, laughing and exclaiming about the weather. A couple emerged, heads lowered, and behind them he saw a small figure, an old woman surely, framed in the doorway as she buttoned her coat, secured her hat, hung her bag on her arm, and then, as she stepped out on to the pavement, pushed up a flimsy umbrella, which the wind snatched instantly and jerked upwards inside-out behind her head. Her words whipped back to him distinctly, ‘Oh bugger it!’ He saw her grappling with the thing as he drew nearer, his own umbrella swerving and struggling in the face of the wind. She staggered a little, more or less righted it, and moved quickly away, almost stumbling, though a spoke stuck up at a hopeless angle, the pink fabric flared loose, there was a lull and then a sudden slam of wind which wrenched the brolly out of her hands and off into the road, where it skidded and then leapt away in long hops between the parked cars. Of course he should help her, run after it, but she seemed, with a certain reckless good sense, to have given the thing up. She turned for a moment, glint of street-lamp on glasses, then ducked back into the wind, the rain now only a kind of roaring dampness, and as she hurried on Paul felt such a twisting stab of anxious excitement that he hid behind his umbrella for ten seconds, not knowing what to do. He slowed down, almost as though to let her get away; then pulled himself together. Trudging forward against the wind she seemed alarmingly vulnerable, to the weather, to the London night, and also to him. Why had no one come with her, or seen her to a cab? It was with a sort of ache he came up behind her, the painful comedy of having her for a further ten seconds, fifteen seconds, within arm’s reach, her red felt hat pulled down tight and her white hair beneath it tugging in clumps in the storm. There was a pink silk scarf around her neck, and her mac was shabby, the collar darkened. He picked up very faintly its musty, perennial smell, before he swept his umbrella up and then down between her and the gale. ‘There you are…’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said, ‘isn’t it awful,’ walking on, with a quick doubtful glance at him but perhaps a touch of reassurance too.

‘You shouldn’t be out in this, Mrs Jacobs,’ he said, very capably.

‘The rain’s pretty well stopped, I think.’

Paul grinned, perhaps rather stared at her. ‘Where are you going?’ He felt buoyant with his nerves and his own, perhaps unshared, sense of hilarity in the meeting. He slowed his step to hers.

‘Were you at the party?’ she said, with a slightly sentimental look, as if still savouring it.

Before he could think better of it, he said, ‘Yes, I was, but I didn’t get a chance to speak to you.’

‘Caroline has so many young friends…’ she made sense of it for herself. He could see she’d had quite a bit to drink – the grip of the drink at these parties and the nonsense you talked: then you came hurtling out, parched and light-headed and you hoped not alone. Night had fallen while you drank. He was straightforward, though still teasing her for some reason:

‘Do you remember me, Mrs Jacobs?’

She said, as if she’d been waiting a long time patiently for this question, and without looking at him, ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Why should you!’ he said. ‘We haven’t seen each other for a good ten years…’

‘Ah, well,’ she said, relieved but still non-committal.

‘No, it’s Paul – Paul Bryant. I used to be in the bank at Foxleigh. I came to your… your big birthday party, all those years ago.’ That perhaps wasn’t tactful.

‘Oh, did you,’ and then Mrs Jacobs gave a strange gasp, or grunt – Paul saw it too late, like a hazard in the black gleam of the pavement just ahead. Could they chat on casually around that double tragedy? It was also perhaps an opportunity, for sympathy, for showing that he knew her story and she could trust him. ‘Yes, indeed,’ she said.

‘I was so very sorry to hear about… Corinna, and…’

She almost stopped, put a hand on his sleeve, perhaps in silent thanks, though there was something corrective in it too. She looked up at him. ‘You couldn’t find me a taxi, I suppose, could you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Paul, chastened as if by several reminders at once, but relieved he could be of service. Above them towered the grey bulk of the new YMCA, and beyond it there was the glitter and hiss of traffic in the Tottenham Court Road. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘I have to get to Paddington.’

‘Oh, you’re not living in London any more?’

‘I think there’s a train at about ten to nine.’

Now the rain started pattering on the umbrella. They were by the bright doorway of the Y, young men coming out, with a glow of self-worth about them, putting up hoods, making a dash for it. ‘Would you like to wait here – I’ll find you a cab.’ Under the light he saw more plainly how shabby she was. She wore a lot of powder, over a face that now appeared both gaunt and pouchy. The rain had splashed her brownish stockings and her scuffed court shoes. The workings of time were sordid, slightly frightening to him, and he steadied himself with the thought of what she had been long ago. These glowing and darting boys coming out of the gym and the sauna had no idea of her interest. He spoke to her loudly and charmingly to show them she was worth it. She was a Victorian, she had seen two wars, and she was the sister-in-law, in a strange posthumous way, of the poet he was writing about. To Paul her natural habitat was an English garden, not a gusty defile off the Tottenham Court Road. Poems had been written for her, and set to music. She remembered intimacies that by now were nearly legendary. Whether she remembered Paul, however, he couldn’t tell.

It took five minutes to get a cab on the main road, and signal it round to where she was standing. Running back to her, seeing her expression, anxious but somehow inattentive, he knew he would go with her to Paddington, and on the way he would make an arrangement to see her again. He spoke to the driver, and then strode across with the brolly to bring her to the car. ‘The silly thing is,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure I’ve the fare for the cab.’

‘Ah!’ Paul said, almost sternly, ‘don’t worry,’ wondering if he could in fact afford this. ‘Anyway, I’m coming with you.’ And adopting a bland, unhearing expression he more or less pushed her into the taxi, and went round the other side to get in himself. He supposed they had fifteen minutes.

They settled, rather tensely, the cabby kept up talk through the partition about the diabolical weather, till Paul sat forward and shut the screen. He glanced at Mrs Jacobs for approval, though she seemed for a moment, in the underwater gloom of the cab, to be ignoring him. Her soft face was oddly haggard in the running shadows and gleams.

Paul said, ‘I can’t get over just bumping into you like that.’

‘I know…’ It was a struggle for her between being grateful, embarrassed and, he sensed, somewhat offended.

The cab had a food-like smell of earlier occupants, and the seat was still slippery from their wet clothes. He unbuttoned his coat, sat at an angle, with one leg drawn up, eager but casual. She had the transparent aura of old age, was notable and ignorable at the same time. She had her bag on her knee, both gloved hands on top of it. It wasn’t the same bag of twelve years earlier, but another, closely related, with the family trait of being shapelessly bulky – too bulky, really, to count as a handbag. It admitted as much in its helpless slump. He said, ‘So how have you been?’ – giving the question a solicitous, tentative note. He thought it was three years since Corinna’s death, and Leslie Keeping’s suicide.

‘Mm, very well, really. Considering, you know…!’ – a dry chuckle, quite like the old days, though her face retained its look of anxiety and preoccupation. She wiped the window beside her ineffectively and peered out, as if to check where they were going.

‘But you’re not living in London? I think the last time I saw you, you were in… Blackheath?’

‘Ah, yes. No, I’ve moved, I’ve moved back to the country.’

‘You don’t miss London?’ he said amiably. He wanted to find out where she lived, and sensed already a certain resistance to telling him. She merely sighed, peered at the blotted world outside, sat forward to push down the window a crack, though in a moment the throb of the engine shivered it shut. ‘I’ve been in London myself for three years now.’

She tucked in her chin. ‘Well you’re young, aren’t you. London’s fine when you’re young. I liked London fifty years ago.’

‘Well, I know,’ said Paul. In some absurd way her account in her book of living in Chelsea with Revel Ralph had coloured his own sense of what London life might offer: freedom, adventure, success. ‘I got out of the bank, you see. I think I always really wanted to be a writer.’

‘Ah, yes…’

‘It seems to be going quite well, I’m pleased to say.’

‘I’m so glad.’ She smiled anxiously. ‘We’re sure he is going to Paddington, aren’t we?’

Paul entered into it as a little joke, leaning forward. Through a wiped arc he saw for a moment a blurred corner pub, a hospital entrance, all unrecognizable. ‘We’re fine,’ he said. ‘No, I’ve been doing a bit of reviewing. You may have seen a piece of mine in the Telegraph a couple of months ago…’

‘I don’t see the Telegraph, as a rule,’ she said, with droll relief more than regret.

‘I know what you mean,’ Paul said, ‘but actually I think the books pages are as good as any.’ What he really wanted to know, but somehow couldn’t ask, was if she’d seen his review of The Short Gallery in the New Statesman, a paper he felt she was unlikely to take. He’d done it as a gesture of friendship, finding all that was best in the book, the tiny criticisms themselves clearly affectionate, the corrections of fact surely useful for any future edition. Whenever he reviewed a book he read all its other reviews as keenly as if he were the author of the book himself. Daphne’s memoir had been covered either by fellow survivors, some loyal, some sneering, or by youngsters with their own points to make; but a more or less open suggestion that she had made a good deal of it up hung over all of them. Paul blushed when he read about errors he had failed to spot, but drew a stubborn assurance of his own niceness from the fact of having been so gentle with her. His was much the best notice she had received. As he wrote it, he imagined her gratitude, phrased it for her in different ways and savoured it, and for weeks after the review appeared – rather cut, unfortunately, but its main drift still plain to see – he waited for her letter, thanking him, recalling their old friendship, and suggesting they meet up again, perhaps for lunch, which he pictured variously at a quiet hotel or in her own house in Blackheath, among the distracting memorabilia of her eighty-two years. In fact the only response had been a letter to the Editor from Sir Dudley Valance, pointing out a trifling error Paul had made in alluding to his novel The Long Gallery, on which Daphne’s title was a pawky in-joke. If even Sir Dudley, who lived abroad, saw the New Statesman, perhaps Daphne did too; or the publisher might have sent it on. Paul thought a certain well-bred reserve might have kept her from writing anything to a reviewer. She was pulling off her gloves. ‘You won’t mind if I have a cigarette?’

‘Not at all,’ said Paul; and when she’d found one in her bag he took the lighter from her and gently held her arm for a second as she leant to the flame. The smoke soured the fetid air almost pleasantly. And at once, with the little shake of her head as she exhaled, her face, even the uptilted gleam of her glasses, seemed restored to how they had been twelve years before. Encouraged, he said, ‘I’m very pleased to see you, because in fact I’m writing something about Cecil… Cecil Valance’ – with a gasp of a laugh, quickly deferential. He didn’t come out with the full scale of his plans. ‘Actually, I was about to write to you, and ask if I could come and see you.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said, but quite nicely. She blew out smoke as if at something very distant. ‘I wrote a book myself, I don’t know if you saw that. I sort of put it all in there.’

‘Well, yes, of course!’ – he laughed again. ‘I reviewed it, in fact.’

‘Were you horrid?’ she said, with another touch of the droll tone he remembered.

‘No, I loved it. It was a rave.’

‘Some of them were stinkers.’

He paused sympathetically. ‘I just felt it would be very valuable to be able to speak to you – of course I don’t want to be a nuisance. If you like, I’ll just come for an hour when it suits you.’

She frowned and thought. ‘You know, I never pretended to be a wonderful writer, but I have known some very interesting people.’ Her quiet laugh now was slightly grim.

Paul made a vague noise of indignant dismissal of all her critics. ‘Of course I saw your interview in the Tatler, but I thought there might be a bit more to say!’

‘Ah, yes.’ Again she seemed both flattered and wary.

‘I don’t know if you’d prefer the morning or the afternoon.’

‘Mm?’ She didn’t commit herself to a time, or to anything really. ‘Who was that very nice young man at the party – I expect you know him? I can’t remember anyone’s name. He was asking me about Cecil.’ She seemed to take some slightly mischievous pleasure in this.

‘I hope he’s not writing about him!’

‘Well, I’m not at all sure he isn’t.’

‘Oh dear…!’ – Paul felt rattled, but managed to say smoothly, ‘I’m sure since your book came out there’s been a lot more interest in him.’

She took in a deep draught of smoke and then let it out in a sleepy wave up her face. ‘It’s the War, too, of course. People can’t get enough of the War.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Paul, as if he too thought it rather overdone. In fact he was counting on it heavily.

She peered at him, in the streaking glare and shadow, almost haughtily. ‘I think I do remember you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you play the piano?’

‘Aha!’ said Paul. ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking of.’

‘You played duets with my daughter.’

He enjoyed this passive imposture, though it was uncomfortable too to be taken for Peter. ‘It was great fun, that evening,’ he said modestly.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Wasn’t it.’

‘They were happy times in Foxleigh, in many ways.’ He spread a warm glaze over the place and time, as if they were much more distant than was the case. ‘Well, they introduced me to your family!’ He thought she saw this as pure flattery. He wanted to ask about Julian, and Jenny, but any questions were darkened by the awful larger question of Corinna and Leslie Keeping. Was it proper to talk about them, or presumptuous and intrusive? The effort of keeping the talk going stalled him for a minute.

‘Ah! Here we are…!’ she said as the cab swung down the long ramp into the station. He saw that for her the moment of escape was also one of obligation. At the setting-down place he jumped out, and stood with his brolly hooked over his forearm and his wallet open in his hand. He only took a taxi about twice a year, but he tipped the driver with the jovial inattention of young men he had seen in the City. Mrs Jacobs had clambered out on the other side, and waited in a ladylike fashion for the business to be done. Paul rejoined her with a happy but submissive smile.

‘Why don’t you give me your address, anyway, and I can write to you.’

‘Yes, that would be fine,’ she said quietly, as though she’d been thinking it over.

‘And then we can take it from there…!’ He had a pad in his briefcase, and he lent it to her, looking away as she wrote her details down. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, still businesslike.

‘Well, thank you – for rescuing me.’

He stared at her stout, slightly stooped and shabby person, the cheerful glasses under the sad red hat, the clutched bag, and shook his head, as if at a chance meeting of devoted old friends. ‘I just can’t believe it!’ he said.

‘Well, there you are,’ she said, doing her best.

‘See you very soon, I hope’ – and they shook hands. She was getting, what was it?, a Worcester train, from the nearest platform – he hadn’t looked yet at her address. She turned away, went a few determined steps, then looked back with a hesitant and slightly conspiratorial air that he found immediately charming.

She said, ‘Just tell me your name again.’

‘Oh! Paul Bryant…’

She nodded and clenched her hand in the air, as if catching at a moth. ‘Au revoir,’ she said.

2

‘Dear Georgie,’ Paul read, ‘At luncheon today the General was moved to remark that your visit to Corley Court had been reasonably quiet, and pressed a little further said you had “hardly put a foot wrong”. That hardly may give you pause: but she would say no more. Overall, I take her to mean that further visits will not be frowned on. […] I will of course convey her good wishes to you in person, tomorrow afternoon, at 5.27 precisely. Praise the Lord for Bentley Park and Horner’s Van (Homer’s – can’t read? Not the Homer, dare I hope, the writer?). Then Middlesex will be all before us. Your CTV.’ Outside the train window, Middlesex itself was opening and then hiding again in the curves of the line. Paul kept his finger in the Letters of Cecil Valance as he stared into the bright afternoon – low sun over suburban houses, bare trees between playing-fields, now a tunnel. He looked down at Cecil’s face, the prominent dark eyes, wavy dark hair oiled almost flat, the sepia knot of his tie, with a pin behind it, the brass-buttoned epaulettes and wide serge lapels with a regimental badge on each, and the buckled leather strap that cut across his chest like a sash. ‘Edited by G. F. Sawle’ beneath the picture. Then the flickering townscape jumped in again and they were slowing to a station.

Paul had formed a general idea, from studying the London A-Z, of where ‘Two Acres’ was. But a small-scale map in black-and-white, with the street names squeezing like juggernauts through the streets and the odd vague rhombuses and triangles of blank space in the outer suburbs might have been showing him almost anything. The half-dozen letters of Cecil’s to George that survived were addressed, in the confident bygone style, to ‘Two Acres, Stanmore, Mddx’. There was no suggestion the house stood on a particular street, or that any functionary could fail to know it and its occupants. Horner’s van would have offered a lift from the station. But now it was impossible to arrive as Cecil had done: the station itself, ‘built to look like a church’, according to George Sawle’s meticulous footnotes, ‘with battlemented tower and steeple’, had been closed to passengers in 1956. Paul had a sense, as of some neglected worry, that a search in the British Library, or indeed in the Stanmore Library, might have turned up a detailed historical map. But for now the poem was his guide. There was a road called Stanmore Hill, and Cecil referred to the ‘beechy crown of Stanmore Hill’, so that was a useful start. The garden was described as running down a slope, pretty clearly (its ‘goatfoot paths and mimic tor’, its ‘steps dissolving in the dusk / Through scented belts of rose and green / Into the little twilit dene’), and the house itself Paul imagined, on even slighter evidence, perched at the top, for the view. Bentley Priory, a large empty pentagon marked ‘Royal Air Force’ in the A-Z, but with dotted footpaths through it, and the blank lozenge of a lake, seemed to climb the hillside too. George’s notes explained that the Priory, ‘once the home of the widowed Queen Adelaide, had later been a hotel; the branch-line from Harrow and Wealdstone to Stanmore had been opened to bring in the guests; trains ran hourly; subsequently the Priory became a girls’ school; during the Battle of Britain, it was the headquarters of Fighter Command’. Sawle pointed out the reference to Paradise Lost, but was something else meant by Cecil’s references to Middlesex? Throughout the book he looked back on the landscape of his own youth strictly as a historian; the initials GFS replaced the first person singular; he was patiently impartial. And yet there were omissions, like the one in this short letter, marked by the scrupulous square brackets. What could possibly have offended, sixty years on?

Outside the Tube station, Paul felt the little breathless shock of disorientation, swiftly denied. His thing in London was never to show that he didn’t know where he was going; he was less worried about being lost than about asking the way. And then the fact of doing research on the ground, the strange heart-race of crossing the physical terrain of his subject’s past, such as he’d felt when Peter first took him to Corley Court and showed him Cecil’s tomb, was like a secret guidance. He went along steadily, among the lunch-time shoppers, the office-workers going for a pint, with a completely private sense of purpose: no one knew who he was or what he was doing, or sensed the larger rhythm of his day that lay beyond their routines. It was freedom too, with its prickle of trepidation, since Paul had once been as routine-bound as them.

Stanmore Hill began like a village street, but soon opened out into a long straight climb out of town, already cheerless in the November afternoon. He passed a large pub, the Abercorn Arms, which was mentioned in one of the handful of letters from Cecil to George that survived: the boys had had a pint there themselves. Paul saw the appeal of it, as part of his research, but he felt self-conscious entering pubs alone and pressed on up the road. Boys is what they had been, of course, George only half Paul’s present age when he met Cecil, and yet they seemed to occupy their lives with a peculiar unselfconscious authority Paul had never felt in his own. Towards the top of the hill there was a small weather-vaned clock-tower on a stable block, half-covered by trees, and though he felt sure it couldn’t be ‘Two Acres’, it seemed in some incoherent way like a promise of it.

After that the road flattened out and on the far side was a long black pond, surrounded by scruffy trees, and the beginning of Stanmore Common. He saw a woman walking a dog, a white poodle that looked alarmingly too big, and since they were the only walkers about, Paul felt conspicuous. He turned down a side-road, thinking that he could have asked her, and for ten or fifteen minutes he wandered round a modest little network of lanes that none the less had something mysterious about them, the sun lowish already among the nearly bare trees, further murky ponds, woodlands sloping away on the far side, and here and there, half-hidden by hedges and fences and large gardens, a number of houses. He wished he was more expert at looking at houses, and knowing how old they were. George Sawle said ‘Two Acres’ was red-brick, and had been built in the 1880s; his father had bought it from its first owner in 1890; his mother had sold it in 1920. Paul checked each name as he passed: ‘The Kennels’… ‘Old Charlocks’… ‘Jubilee Cottage’. Could he have missed it? He thought of the tests he had just read about in an earlier letter of Cecil’s, from his first weeks at Marlborough, where he had had to prove to a senior boy that he knew where things were and the meaning of ridiculous names. ‘I got them all,’ Cecil told his mother, ‘except for Cotton’s kish, and for this it is Daubeny who must have forty lashes, for failing to instil this vital fact in my teeming brain. I fear you will think this unjust.’

He was almost back at the main road and here was the woman with the poodle coming towards him. She gave him a quick hard smile, a man roaming round with a briefcase in the afternoon. ‘You look lost,’ she said.

‘I’m okay now,’ said Paul, nodding at the road ahead. ‘Thanks so much!’ And then, ‘Well, actually,’ when she had passed him, ‘sorry… I’m looking for a house called “Two Acres”.’

She half-stopped and turned, the dog pulling her on. ‘Two Acres? No… I don’t know it. Are you sure it’s round here?’

‘Pretty sure,’ said Paul. ‘A famous poem was written about it.’

‘Mm, not a poetry reader, I’m afraid.’

‘I thought you might have heard of it.’

‘Stop it, Jingo! No…’ she frowned back to him, ‘I mean, two acres is quite big, you realize.’

‘Well… yes,’ Paul agreed.

‘We have a third of an acre, and believe me that takes a good deal of work.’

‘I suppose in the old days…’ said Paul.

‘Oh, well in the old days… Jingo – Jingo! – mad dog! I’m so sorry… Who lives in this house you’re looking for?’

‘That I don’t know,’ said Paul, the intimate and whimsical nature of his quest exposed, as he’d known it would be if he stooped to asking anyone. It seemed beyond the woman, too: she winced at his briefcase, which must hold the reason for his search, which she wasn’t going to ask – some rep or agent no doubt.

‘Well, good luck,’ she said, as if seeing she had wasted her time. And as she went on, ‘Try the other side of the hill!’

Which Paul did, going down a narrow road that was perhaps a private driveway – there seemed to be a new development of houses whose roofs he could see further down the slope. The lane turned a corner, running for thirty yards under a tall dark larch-lap fence that gave off, even on this chilly day, a dim scent of creosote. Just behind it, a house stood, only the long ridge of its roof and two tall chimneys visible. At the far end, gates, of the same height and material as the fence, chained and padlocked; but allowing, through the narrow gap between hinge and frame, a one-eyed view of a weedy bit of gravel and a downstairs window of the house, disconcertingly close. After this, a dense screen of leylandii, much taller than the fence, ran back from the road, cutting close to the corner of the house itself, and shielding it from the tarmacked drive beyond, at the head of which was a big display board, with an artist’s impression of another red-roofed house, and the words ‘Old Acres – Six Executive Homes, Two Remaining’.

The small dislocation in the name was dreamlike for him, though almost meaningless in the light of day. He supposed to have kept ‘Two Acres’ would only have brought home to the executives just how tiny their properties were; perhaps ‘Old Acres’ lent atmosphere to the still raw-looking properties packed in at artful angles to each other among trees which must be survivors from the Sawles’ garden. To those who knew, it preserved a word, at least, of the old order. But he saw already that the ‘airy-chambered garden’ had gone; and even the house itself, which Paul had no doubt was the house, seemed resistant to being looked at. He got out his camera from his bag and crossing the lane took a picture of the fence.

This wasn’t quite enough. Going back, he stared concernedly at the entranceway of the house before ‘Two Acres’, ‘Cosgroves’, a drive curving out of sight behind rhododendrons, the house itself too far off to keep a watch on its gate. As he strolled in he was smiling mildly, the smooth compulsion of the trespasser just hedged by a far-fetched pretence that he was lost. His movements felt almost involuntary, though everything about him was alert. On his right a wide lawn opened out, dead leaves drifted by the wind into ridges and spirals. An empty teak seat, a stone table. A blue sack wrapping a plant he took for a moment for a stooping person. The boundary with ‘Two Acres’ on this side was a dense run of shrubbery, and then a wall of old firs, bulging and decrepit, pressing down on an ancient wooden garage and a little tar-roofed potting-shed with cobwebbed windows. He caught the sound though not the words of a woman’s voice, somewhere outside but in monologue, as if on the telephone. The space between garage and shed gave him cover, he slid between them, and then going at a squat and for a yard or two on hands and knees, shielding his face with his briefcase, he pushed through the dense harsh fronds between the trunks of the firs, and emerged, scratched and dishevelled, in the back garden of ‘Two Acres’ itself.

He stood where he was for a minute, and looked round. He felt almost comically cheated but his excitement worked over and around his disappointment, with cunning persistence. There was little enough to see. The defensive wall of conifers turned a corner and cut across behind the house as well, robbing it of a last glimpse of the trees beyond and below, which must be the parkland of Bentley Priory. The enclosed space was dead and already sunless. The short slope of tangled grass, dead thistles and nettles had a track through it of the kind a fox might make – Paul saw it would live undisturbed here, the house condemned by its own urge for privacy. Taken by a sudden urge, territorial as much as physical, he turned his back on the house, put down his briefcase, and had a short fierce piss into the long grass.

Somehow he couldn’t take the house in; but he would take photographs, so as to see it all later. He wandered up to a small window in the side wall, a shadowy kitchen, a steel sink just in front of him, a door open beyond into a brighter space. The little translucent mill set in the pane span round fitfully when he breathed on it. The feeling he’d had, that the house might still somehow be lived in, left him completely. It was empty, and therefore in a way his; he felt a lurching certainty that he could and should get into it. Then as he stepped back he saw high up under the eaves the badge-shaped red-and-white box of a burglar alarm, Albion Security, which was a challenge he didn’t mean to take up. It looked new and alert and immune to the plea made by the books in his briefcase that he was only here to research the life of a poet. He went round the corner on to the front drive, just a narrow strip in front of the house; the horrible fence, with its creosote smell, concealed him completely from the road. A short brick path ran up to the front door. On the door-frame at chest height was a small oblong box with three circular holes in it, a wire trailing from one of them. So at some stage, before this latest degradation, ‘Two Acres’ had been divided up, three flats, probably – like almost every house in London. Well, there were sixty years unaccounted for, since the day the Sawle family had relinquished the place. Paul wondered dimly how it had been done – new bathrooms, fire-doors; his eyes ran over the black gleam of the little upstairs windows; who had got Daphne’s room, had the room where Cecil slept become a living-room, another kitchen?

Paul spent ten minutes at the house, magnetized but baffled, drawn to each window in turn. He looked out all the time for something detachable, and small enough to join the books in his bag. Not a flower-pot, or twig, but something that had been there unquestionably since before the First World War. A rusty horseshoe over the front door had swung sideways on its nail, the luck spilling out – he could reach it easily, but he didn’t like to; he pushed it up straight, but in a second it dropped back again. There were overgrown flower-beds in front of the windows, such as burglars leave footprints in, and he leant in across them. Beneath the visor of his hand he stared into the shadowy spaces, where electric sockets and dark lines and squares on the wallpaper were now the sole decoration. A big room on the garden side with french windows must have been the sitting-room. He could just about imagine Cecil flirting with Daphne in front of the brick fireplace. A square of worn and stained beige carpet covered part of the parquet floor. At the end of the room he could make out a shadowy alcove, under a huge oak beam, and he thought he saw what might have been romantic and even beautiful about it; but when he stepped away, and roamed off through the long grass to take some more photographs, he thought the house looked rather a hulk. He saw now that something had been knocked down – there was a broad black arrow on the brickwork where a roof must have abutted. A new bathroom window had been punched through the wall, out of line with everything else. You could strip all the romance from a place if you were determined enough, even the romance of decay. He’d had the idea that he would find things more or less as they had been in 1913 – more deeply settled in, of course, discreetly modernized, tastefully adapted, but the rockery still there, the ‘glinting spinney’ a beautiful wood, and the trees where the hammock had been slung still bearing the ridges of the ropes in their bark. He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired. It would live up to its fame. But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds.

3

Cecil Valance’s earliest known writing was a short composition produced for his mother when he was six years old. It was faithfully reproduced in the Memoir by Sebastian Stokes that prefaced the 1926 Collected Poems:

VII April MCCMLXXXXCVII

ALL ABOUT ME

My Name is CECIL TEUCER VALANCE. Teucer was a Famous Soldier he was a Grate Archer and Cecil was a Famous Lord by the way. My Father is called Sir Edwin Valance (2nd Bt) and my grashious Mother is known to all as Lady Valance. She has a beautifull red dress which made Lady Adleen extreemly jelous to see it. My home is called Corley Court in Berkshire, if you don’t know it It is one of the Grate Houses of that county. Oh if you meet a small boy calling himself Dudley Valance it is probably my small brother. He can be trying I shoud probally tell you here and now. On Monday on the Farm I saw IX new carves – they are the Sweetest Things on theyre wobbly legs. To-day we were all stuned by the news Lord PORTSCATHO has been killed in a explosin he was only XXXX XLIIV. My poor Father was very nearly in Tears at the sad news. I have had quit a bad caugh but am considerably recovered. Today I have red ‘How Rain is Made’ in the Home ‘Cyclopaidea’ and quit a fair number of Poems for my age as Nanny likes to say, among them ‘The Brook’ by LORD TENNOSYN, I am Determined to learn all IX of its verses, it is one of the best know of all poems of course. I emitted to say I am something of A Poet, this year I have written no fure than VII Poems ‘humbly deadicated’ to my Mother (Lady Valance).

What that same Lady Valance took to be Cecil’s last communications were described by Dudley Valance in his autobiography Black Flowers (1944):

My mother, who never wasted time (except, of course, other people’s), was nonetheless much involved in attempts to converse with the spirit-world. Her belief that Cecil might be reached and spoken to preoccupied her with the mingled gloom and determination of some hopeless love affair. Though notably reserved, as a rule, in her personal feelings, she allowed her tender yearnings for contact with the ‘other side’ to be seen by her family and by one or two friends with surprising candour. She was not perhaps likely to be embarrassed by emotions founded in her duty and suffering as the mother of a fallen hero. It was in the library at Corley that she undertook many lengthy and bewildering ‘book-tests’, upon a system taught to her by a clergyman in Croydon, and through the agency of Mrs Leland Aubrey, a notorious medium of the time, who mined the pitiful hopes of well-connected mourners for twenty years after the War. Mrs Leland Aubrey was herself under the ‘control’ of a spirit called Lara, a Hindoo lady some three hundred years old, so it will be seen that the chain of communication was by no means direct. This remoteness, however, with its clear resemblance to a game of Chinese Whispers, was the very thing claimed in its favour by my mother, who had absorbed it as a point of doctrine from her medium and from the clergyman, a very high authority with her. It was precisely because Mrs Aubrey had never been to Corley, had had no contact with its occupants, possessed no knowledge of the library there or of the disposition of any of the rooms, that she was seen as least susceptible to any kind of improper suggestion, and least capable of any kind of fraud. Her very remoteness argued for her probity. It was a bold advancement of the confidence-trickster’s art, bold but also subtle: since when this point of doctrine was absorbed it gave licence to the wildest and most arcane forms of self-delusion. Any message of such impeccable provenance must of necessity be meaningful, and the random scraps thrown up by the tests were raked over by my mother for esoteric messages as keenly as the entrails of a fowl by some ancient divinator. That act of interpretation was a responsibility that fell solely to her, or to her occasional companions in these sessions, its further beauty, to a woman as private as my mother, being that the message itself was apparently quite unknown to the medium, who merely indicated to her where it was to be found. It was as if she had opened a letter from her dead son which Mrs Aubrey had chanced to deliver.

What seems first to have happened was this: my mother received a letter (a real one, with a penny-halfpenny stamp on it) from the clergyman in Croydon, who had himself lost a son in the War, claiming that during a sitting with Mrs Leland Aubrey, at which he had received book-tests from his dead boy, Lara had also transmitted a message which was evidently from Cecil, and intended for his mother, Lady Valance. Might he have her permission to forward the test to her? A request can rarely have fallen on readier ears; and doubtless the impression of a longed-for miracle was just what the medium and the parson had calculated. My mother had already shown some interest in spiritualism, and in the year after Cecil’s death had even attended a number of séances at the house of Lady Adeline Strange-Paget, mother of my great friend Arthur, whose younger brother had been drowned at Gallipoli; these had left her with clear misgivings, but also perhaps with a sense of avenues still unexplored. The medium on that occasion was an associate of Mrs Aubrey’s and was later indicted on several charges of blackmail. But it turned out too that the parson’s son had been in the Royal Berkshire Regiment, and had been drafted into Cecil’s company in the weeks before the Somme offensive; he had outlived Cecil by a mere three days. In letters home the boy had written of his love and admiration for my brother. In many cases soldiers who had served with Cecil had written to my parents after his death, or the soldiers’ own parents had sent letters of condolence containing tributes from the letters of their sons, themselves now dead, to the officer they had admired. The parson from Croydon, however, stored up his tribute, until a time when he could use it to greater profit.

This first test my parents performed alone, but I can speak from direct experience of their later repetitions. The general form of a book-test was that Mrs Aubrey would go into a trance, in which Lara would communicate with Cecil, the result being taken down on the spot by the clergyman, since a trance very naturally impeded the medium’s capacity to write for herself. The message would then be sent to my mother, who would at once act upon its instructions. She kept all these messages, in the same place as she kept Cecil’s letters, regarding them as merely a further phase of their correspondence. This is a sample, and one at which my wife and I happened also to be present.

Lara speaking. ‘This is a message for Cecil’s mother. It is in the library. When you go in it is on a short shelf on the left, before the corner, the third shelf up from the floor, the seventh book. Cecil says it is a green book, it has green on it or in it. Page 32 or 34, a page with very little printed on it, but what there is makes a particular message for her. He wants to tell her that he loves her and is always with her.’

This final sentence, which appeared with minor variations at the end of most of the messages, was clearly added by the medium as a kind of insurance. The rest of the message, just as typically, created the impression of something exact while containing various ambiguities. There were, for instance, three doors into the library, the principal one from the hall, and two smaller ones, leading into the drawing-room on one side and the morning-room on the other. The instructions therefore might have led to three quite different locations. The morning-room was my mother’s own sanctum, and she had little doubt that Cecil envisaged her entering the library from that side. My father, who often in the evenings came into the library from the drawing-room, would naturally have taken the diametrically opposite view; but in this, as in so many things, he tended to give precedence to my mother. On the present occasion, I recall there was some uncertainty, none the less. The directions to the short shelf on the left and before the corner were very generous, since the first corner was at the far end of the room. On each slip my mother wrote the name of the book and its author, and the quotation itself. Here she has put: ‘Short shelf. The 7th book, Wingfield’s “Charity” – has no green. On trying on far side (enter from Dr-Room) “History of Lancashire” by Bunning, no green on it. On entering from Hall, 7th book, counting from the right, “The Silver Charger” by E. Manning GREENE, page 34 has only, “it could be said that the knight was returned, and all well about him, save that his heart went out in the night to his dear ones left behind.” A true message from Cecil.’ In this careful record her natural honesty is shown as clearly as her credulity; the phrase ‘counting from the right’ shows her awareness that books are normally counted from the left, but her conviction at the outcome is undimmed. Even her square, rather unformed, hand seems eloquent to me now of her stubbornness and innocence. Beneath this she has written, as always, ‘Present:’ and each witness has put his signature, as if subscribing to the larger truth of the proceedings. ‘Louisa Valance. Edwin Valance. Dudley Valance. Daphne Valance. 23rd March 1918.’ (On the matter of my father’s participation, it was notable that Lara’s messages never referred to him – until, once this fact had been commented on in a telephone conversation, the following week brought one expressly for him.)

I have spoken facetiously, but out of distaste, for there was an atmosphere, indescribable but unforgettable, in the library on these occasions; and one that came increasingly to linger, so that even at other times it seemed to darken the air in that already gloomy chamber. It was not at all, to my sense, that of a supernatural presence, but rather of hopes, and therefore fears, painfully laid bare. In a way it was the library I would most have liked to do away with, when I remodelled the house; the air of bogus method, of wilful tampering with broken hearts, seemed to haunt its dark alcoves and peer forth from the little carved faces on the book-shelves. You may think it strange, and weak-willed in me not to have broached the matter directly with my mother; to which I can only say that in all 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 course Daphne’s recent memoir.

He had written to Winton Parfitt and asked him straightforwardly if he knew of material on Stokes’s dealings with Cecil that had come to light since his book had been published twenty years earlier. The subtitle A Double Life referred disappointingly to Stokes’s dual careers as man of letters and discreet Tory fixer; Parfitt nowhere revealed that his subject had been queer, or drew what seemed to Paul to be the obvious inference, that he had been in love with Cecil. His waffling memoir of the ‘joyous’ and ‘splendid’ young poet, doubtless highly acceptable to old Lady Valance, was also a surreptitious love-letter of his own. In fact Parfitt was as much of a diplomatic clam as old ‘Sebby’ himself, and the royal-blue jacket of his huge biography, covered with praise from the leading reviewers, was now among those features that make all second-hand bookshops look inescapably the same. There was something ‘splendid’ about the book – an ‘event’, a ‘milestone’, a ‘labour of love’ – and something inescapably dodgy and second rate. It seemed a kind of warning to Paul. Still, he had grown familiar with half-a-dozen pages of it. There was a short paragraph mentioning Stokes’s visit to the Valances to gather materials for the memoir, but it was overshadowed by the frantic negotiations preceding the General Strike. That weekend at Corley was something he planned to ask Daphne herself about, when he managed to speak to her: it seemed a pregnant moment, an unrepeatable Cecil-focused gathering at which he longed to have been present himself. Parfitt had written back promptly, from his Dorset manor-house, in a fine italic hand, to say he knew of nothing significant, but offering warm encouragement before slipping in, with ingenuous briskness, the awful final sentence: ‘You will no doubt be in touch with Dr Nigel Dupont, of Sussex, who has also written to me in connection with his work on the ever-intriguing Cecil.’

Paul was very unhappy about Dr Nigel Dupont, but he didn’t know what to do about him. He couldn’t help thinking he must be the unknown person Daphne had met at the party in Bedford Square, the sinister ‘nice young man’ who’d been asking her all about Cecil. ‘Sussex’ presumably meant Sussex University, not merely that Dr Dupont lived somewhere in that county. He would be an ambitious young academic, an Englishman presumably, but with an incalculable element of Gallic arrogance and appetite for theory. Could he be writing a life of Cecil too? There were a number of obvious ways of finding out, but Paul was unable to take any of them. He saw himself at another party, being introduced to his rival, at which point the scenario halted and dithered in the mists of his ignorance and worry. He had a sense of the ‘ever-intriguing Cecil’ actively encouraging both biographers, as if through ‘Lara’ herself, in a spirit of mischief and self-importance.

At Tooting Graveney they lived on first-name terms with the dead. Karen, Paul’s landlady and would-be accomplice in what she called ‘the Cecil job’, worked at Peel’s Bookshop in Putney, and read a lot of things in drab-looking but exclusive bound proofs long before they were published. In his nine months as her lodger he’d grown used to daily gossip about Leonard and Virginia, Lytton and Morgan and the rest, whom she spoke of almost as personal friends; Duncan and Vanessa strayed into the conversation as easily as customers into the shop. It seemed a teenage meeting with Frances Partridge had set her off on a craze for Bloomsbury, and as books on the subject now came out about once a month she lived in an addictive state of constantly renewed expectation. Cecil hadn’t been strictly Bloomsbury, of course, but he’d known most of the Cambridge branch, and Karen clearly thought it a great stroke of luck to have his biographer as a lodger. She mothered him, and took a solemn interest in the ‘job’ (whose appeal to Paul was precisely that it wasn’t one); and Paul himself, who liked to preserve a certain mystery around his work, none the less shared almost everything with her. Karen’s kitchen became the nerve-centre for the project, and many plans and speculations were explored over the wandering vines of the William Morris tablecloth and the second bottle of Rioja. He enjoyed her admiring interest, looked forward to telling her things that otherwise only went in his diary, and worried intermittently that she was coming to see the job as a joint effort.

In the strange week after Christmas, Paul got home early from the library and saw that a letter with a Spanish stamp had come for him. Karen had propped it on the hall table, in a way that suggested great restraint in not opening it herself. There it was, with a typed address, his name misspelt. He took it to the kitchen to open it neatly. He saw now that it would say one of two things, and his knife seemed to dawdle even as it snicked it open.

El Almazán

Sabasona

Antequera

Dear Mr Bryan

My husband is unwell, and has asked me to reply to your letter of November 26. He is very sorry, but he will not be able to see you. As you may know, we live in Spain for much of the year, and my husband is rarely in London.

Yours sincerely,

Linette Valance

For a moment he felt oddly embarrassed, and was glad Karen wasn’t here to see it. It was unquestionably a blow: so much depended on Dudley, and his locked bureau of family papers. He put the letter back in the envelope, and a few minutes later got it out again, with an excited feeling that he couldn’t quite remember it; but it seemed to say more or less what he’d thought it had before. Unless, perhaps, something else was conveyed by its very perfunctoriness? Even a rejection was a communication, after all – the letter, sparse and snooty though it was, yielded a small charge of contact. In a way, it was an adjunct to the family archive itself. He left it lying on the kitchen table as he boiled the kettle and prepared the teapot. At each inspection it looked just a little less disheartening. It was a brush-off, which needed to be brief to be effective, but wasn’t it also a bit feeble? A strong response would have been to say, ‘Sir Dudley Valance refuses to see you, and furthermore is implacably opposed to your writing the life of his brother, Captain Cecil Valance MC.’ No such veto was even hinted at. He started to feel that Linette herself didn’t think it was over yet. There was almost something defeatist in it, a mere delaying gesture in the face of the inevitable. The objections given, that they were ‘rarely in London’ and in Spain ‘for much of the year’, were vague and obviously not insuperable – was there not very nearly a suggestion that they didn’t want to be a nuisance to Paul himself? And he started to wonder if he couldn’t somehow arrange to get out to Antequera and talk to them there, rather than troubling them on their rare and brief visits to London. His commitment in doing so would certainly impress them, even move them, and he began to see a warm and subtle friendship developing, of the kind that would be life-blood to his book.

Later on, upstairs in his room and writing up the arrival of the letter in his diary, Paul sat back and stared out of the window with a sudden pang of sympathy for the poor old Valances, a moment of insight that he felt at once was of the essence of being a biographer. What he’d taken as snootiness was surely a sign of their acute vulnerability, something the upper classes were often at pains to conceal from the lower ones. Dudley was under the weather, and at eighty-four finding the prospect of meeting strangers a strain – for all he knew Paul might be just another hack, it was quite understandable; and Linette herself, half-comprehendingly taking instruction from a sick man, had written in haste before returning to his bedside to nurse him. A conversation with Paul, when it actually happened, might be a huge and happy relief to both of them. He decided that over the coming days he would write another letter, more personal and accommodating, and building on the warm contact that was now established between them.

4

The first interview Paul conducted for the book had been with someone whose very survival seemed a little uncanny, one of the servants at ‘Two Acres’ at the time when Cecil had first visited the Sawles. On the phone, the old boy said he was jiggered if he knew how Paul had tracked him down, and Paul read him the passage in Cecil’s letter to Freda Sawle where he said he wanted to ‘kidnap young Jonah at the station and demand an impossible ransom’. ‘What’s that?’ said old Jonah indignantly, as if he thought Paul himself was making some improper suggestion; he was very deaf. Paul said, ‘You’ve got an unusual name!’ George had footnoted the reference punctiliously: ‘Jonah Trickett (b. 1898), the “boy” at “Two Acres”, who had been detailed to act as CV’s valet; employed by FS from 1912 to 1915, when enlisted with Middlesex Regiment. From 1919 gardener and chauffeur to H. R. Hewitt (see also below, p137, 139n).’ Paul wasn’t sure he’d understood, on the phone, what the proposed visit was about. He agreed to let him come, though still sounded vaguely offended that anyone could think it necessary. ‘You’re one of the few people left alive who remember Cecil Valance!’ Paul said. That of course was the uncanny thing: there were thousands of eighty-one-year-olds, but surely no one else left in the world who had handled the intimate effects of this poet who had died in 1916, helped him to dress and undress and done whatever it was for him that a valet did. ‘Oh, yes? Ah well,’ said the sharp old voice, ‘whatever you say…’ as if catching a first glimpse of his own potential importance in the story.

It was another great trek across Middlesex, twenty-seven stops to Edgware, the very end of the Northern line, a reassuring eternity steadily shrinking, Paul rehearsing the questions and imagining the answers, and the questions they prompted in turn. He had the suspicion Jonah wouldn’t volunteer much, he would have to bring him out, and then help him to discover what he really had to say. The prospect made him extremely nervous, as though he were going for an intervew himself. In his briefcase he had a letter from Peter Rowe that he hadn’t looked at this morning when it arrived, and he opened it now, with slight misgivings, in the wintry sunlight of the empty train. The envelope contained a postcard, which in Peter’s case was always an old painting of a preferably naked man, this time a St Sebastian by one of the millions of Italians Paul had never heard of; the message, in small brown italic, read:

Dearie! I distinctly felt an arrow go in, just under the heart, when I heard that you are writing the life of CTV. However, the agony is somewhat abated. That’s a book I always thought I would write myself, one day, though I’m not sure I could have done it as well as I know you will. Of course I feel I have a hand in it, from having led you one evening long ago to the Poet’s tomb. Wd love to talk about it with you – I have a few hunches about old C that might be worth exploring!

Sempre, P. ps my book out in March

Paul wished he hadn’t read it, since Peter’s handwriting alone, with its quick cultured command of any space it alighted on, crossed his feelings with anxiety. And the Sebastian too, a huge foreshortened hunk shackled to a tree, and not at all like Peter to look at, was still an eerie reminder of his life when Peter was in it, and that critical summer of 1967. Now he had a book of his own coming out, on Victorian churches, he was planning a TV programme as well as giving interval talks, apparently, on Radio 3. Paul thought of him with an uneasy mixture of envy, admiration and regret.

Arnold Close was a terrace of pebble-dashed cottages with playing-fields beyond. Paul approached the second house and unlatched the front gate with a new flinch of dread and determination. The little garden was all brown and tidied for winter, a few pink buds surviving the frost. He pretended not to look into the front room, where a lamp was on, framed photographs with their backs to him on the window-sill. The house seemed both watchful and defenceless. He hoped he would get something valuable out of it – and that in the process he would give it something back, an interest and distinction it didn’t know it had.

He lifted the knocker and dropped it with a mightier noise than he meant to. He was dully aware that the door, with its four thick bull’s-eye panes above the letter-box, was the same as his mother’s had been; and there was something vaguer, shouts and football whistles on the air, the meagre romance of suburbs petering out into country, that took him back to his Uncle Terry’s council house in Shrivenham. He knew little houses like this, almost knew the voice in the hall, and the shape looming and slipping in the curls of the glass. He felt the clutch of nerves, and set his face sternly when the door opened – a large middle-aged woman who kept her hand on the latch. ‘Oh, good afternoon… I’ve come to see Mr Trickett…’

‘And you are…?’

‘Paul Bryant!’

She nodded and stepped back. ‘Dad’s expecting you,’ she said, without exactly welcoming him herself. She was wearing a thick overcoat in a gloomy brown tartan pattern, and tight brown leather gloves. Paul sidled past her into the narrow hall, catching his look of polite apprehension in the mirror. The glamorous opening that he represented, putting her father in a book, seemed indifferent to her, or perhaps even undesirable. ‘Dad!’ she called out, as if knowing she wouldn’t be heard, ‘he’s here,’ and closing the door, she edged back past Paul and went into the front room. ‘Mr Bryant’s here,’ she said. ‘Now, will you be all right?’ Paul gulped a large breath and seemed to be sighing with gratification as he followed her into the room. The eagerness and charm, the smile confidently friendly but not hilarious, the note of respect with a hint of conspiracy – all this he hoped to sustain in his swoop towards the total stranger struggling up from his armchair with silvery head slightly cocked and the questioning look of a deaf person. ‘You’ll have to speak up,’ said the woman.

Paul shook his hand and said, ‘Hello, Mr Trickett!’ – he’d somehow forgotten about the deafness, and now he heard his own forced note.

‘Are you Paul?’ asked Mr Trickett, with a nervy laugh and again a bird-like way of looking for the answer.

‘That’s right,’ said Paul, finding of course that he was like a child to the old man, or like one of a number of confusing grandchildren. This too was annoying, but he would make the best of it. Jonah Trickett was small but broad-shouldered, with a wide friendly face very finely lined, and large blue eyes that seemed keener from listening as well as watching. He had a full head of hair and the perfect but impersonal dentures that give their own helpless eagerness to an old man’s face. Paul could see that as a boy he might have been appealing, he had something boy-like in him still. Now he lurched slightly as he moved.

‘I’ve got a new hip,’ he said, a half-embarrassed boast. ‘Take the young man’s coat, Gillian.’ His voice was a bit breathy, and like the road he lived in, London with a hint of country to it.

As he put down his briefcase and unbuttoned his coat Paul glanced round the room – some plates on the wall but no pictures, the photos in the window black-and-white weddings, and one more recent gathering in colour. The gas fire made the room disorientingly hot. On top of the TV was a photo of Jonah with a woman, who must surely be, or have been, his wife. Paul felt he should seem appreciative but not nosey, oddly the opposite of the case. ‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ said Gillian, taking his coat with her into the hall. When the front door slammed, he felt a horrible self-consciousness crawling over both of them, and he watched through the window with a paralysed smile as Gillian went up the path and closed the gate behind her. It was as if something intensely embarrassing had just been said. He supposed he need only stay twenty minutes if it didn’t work out. They sat down on either side of the gas fire, with a bowl of water on the hearth. The little bone pipes glowed and fluttered. He had a sense that the occasion had been prepared for: on the table beside Jonah there was a cardboard folder and his own letter under a coloured glass paperweight. He got out the tape-recorder, which had a mike on a stand, and took a minute or two to fit up; Jonah seemed to think this was a bit of a liberty as well as a novelty, but Paul said, ‘Every word you say is important to me,’ which he accepted with a wary smile. Paul pressed the Record button. ‘So how are you today?’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ said Jonah.

Karen, who had secretarial training, offered to transcribe the tape for Paul on her golfball typewriter, and after two tense evenings of sporadic clatter and the sound of men’s voices coming in five-second bursts from her room, incessantly stopped and replayed (his own voice not exactly his, and with its own unsuspected country burr), she came downstairs and handed over a thick sheaf of foolscap paper. ‘There were some bits I couldn’t be sure of,’ she said. ‘I’ve put guesses in brackets.’

‘Oh, okay,’ said Paul, smiling to suggest he wasn’t worried and quickly taking the document off on the search for his glasses. At a glance it seemed both professional and a serious problem. She had set it out in a narrow column, like a play-script, though the play itself would have been some absurdist ordeal of pauses and cross-purposes. ‘We still have the tapes, don’t we?’ Paul said. ‘We’ll keep everything like that for the archive.’

‘I’m not sure that tape-recorder’s much good.’

‘It was quite expensive.’

‘Jonah’s all right, it’s you that’s sometimes very faint.’

‘Well, the mike was by him. It’s what he said that’s important.’

The point was, of course, that Karen often couldn’t make out the questions. He read a bit at random:

PB: Did George Sawle (inaudible)?

JT: Oh, no, he didn’t.

PB: Really? how interesting!

JT: Oh, lord, no! (Cackles)

PB: So was Cecil himself at all (inaudible: fortunate?)

JT: Well he could be, yes. Though I don’t suppose anybody knows that!

PB: I’m sure they don’t! That’s not what you expect! (giggles)

Karen was very free with the exclamation marks, and Shavian stage-directions (sniggers, pauses regretfully, with sudden feeling etc.) attached to quite ordinary-looking statements. Well, she was trying to help, keen to help, and then, as so easily happens, getting in the way. Sometimes Jonah’s deafness itself came to the rescue, and he asked Paul to repeat a question louder. Elsewhere Paul was worried to find he already had no memory of the inaudible thing that had been said; at moments, too, he had let the machine do the listening, when Jonah was talking about the War, for instance, stuff he didn’t need for the book. Perhaps his anxiety at the time had made it hard to listen. His whole interest was in finding out what Jonah knew about Cecil’s dealings with Daphne and with George, and an awkward sense of strategy, of distractedly biding his time, interfered with his concentration. So he found himself next day, when Karen had gone to work, replaying the tapes as he read the transcript, to see if he could make out what she had missed or misinterpreted, and with a muddled angry sense of having got off to a bad start.

He saw that in too much of the interview he had let Jonah wander off the subject of Cecil to talk about life in ‘the old days’ in general, and about his life after the War, with Harry Hewitt, a rich businessman of whom he was clearly much fonder than he had been of the Sawles. The Sawles seemed the subject of some vague unplaceable disapproval, which perhaps outlasted the now forgotten things that caused it.

PB: So you’re saying that Freda Sawle drank too much?

JT: Well, I don’t know it was too much.

PB: I mean, how did you know about it?

JT: Well, you know what you know. What they said in the (unclear: kitchen?) She had a weakness.

PB: A weakness? I see.

JT: There was Mrs Masters (?check), her maid, she got the stuff for her.

PB: You mean, she bought drink for her?

JT: Well, Bombay gin, it was, I can see it now.

He had asked Jonah if he’d been back to the house lately, and Jonah had said, ‘Oh, I haven’t been over that way for years,’ as if it were really quite a journey. Paul thought it couldn’t be more than two miles away. Jonah’s lack of sentiment for the house and the family extended to Cecil himself.

PB: You knew he was a famous poet, I suppose.

JT: Well, we knew that.

PB: Of course he wrote one of his most famous poems there, as you probably know.

JT: Oh, yes?

PB: It’s called ‘Two Acres’.

JT: (doubtful) Ah, yes, I think I heard about that.

PB: Do you remember him coming to the house?

JT: (Hesitates) Oh, he was a (unclear: gentleman?), he was! [Paul played the tape again to confirm his recollection that the word, covered by his own cough and rustle of papers, was ‘devil’.]

PB: Really? In what way? What was he like?

Here Paul had arrived, quite effectively after all, at the great simple question; but it seemed that of Cecil’s visits to ‘Two Acres’ Jonah could remember next to nothing; it all looked very promising for a minute or two, but it thinned and dissolved under Paul’s questioning. What remained, offered with a kind of compensatory certainty, was first that Cecil had been ‘a horror!’, which appeared to mean no more than ‘extremely untidy’. Second, that he had silk underwear, very expensive (‘Hmm, was that unusual?’ ‘Well, I never saw it before. Like a woman’s, it was. I’ll never forget it.’) And third, that he was very generous – he tipped Jonah a guinea, and ‘when he came the second time, two guineas’, which since Jonah was only paid £12 a year, plus meals, by Freda Sawle, was surely a staggering amount.

PB: You must have done some (inaudible) for him?

JT: I hadn’t done nothing!

PB: I’m not really sure what would happen if you valeted someone.

JT: It wasn’t proper valeting, not at the Sawles’. They didn’t know about it. ‘Just make it look right,’ young George said, I remember that. ‘Do whatever he says.’

PB: And what did he ask you to do?

JT: I don’t rightly remember.

PB: (laughs) Well, you must have really hit it off with him!

JT: (inaudible)… anything like that.

PB: But was it different the second time he came?

JT: I don’t recall.

PB: No particular –

JT: (impatient) It was seventy years ago, damn nearly!

PB: I know, sorry! I mean, did you do something extra the second time to get the double tip? Sorry, that’s sounds rude.

JT: (pause) I daresay I was glad of the extra.

Paul had stopped to turn the cassette over, with a feeling, just in the little interval, while Jonah shifted on his new hip and twitched his cushion, that he’d rattled the old man; and with a novice’s indecision about whether he should back off or press him harder.

PB: I wondered if you remembered anything Cecil said?

JT: (pauses; awkward laugh) Well, all I know is, he said he was a heathen. He wouldn’t go to church with the others on Sunday.

PB: A pagan…?

JT: That was it. He said, ‘I recommend it, Jonah. It means you can do what you like without having to worry about it afterwards.’ I was a bit thrown by that! I said it wouldn’t go down so well if you were in service!

PB: (laughs) Anything else?

JT: I just remember that. I know he liked to talk. He liked the sound of his own voice. But I don’t remember.

PB: What was his voice like?

JT: Oh, very (inaudible). Like a proper gentleman.

Soon, because he was nervous and dry-mouthed, Paul had asked for a glass of water. He thought it a bit unfriendly that he hadn’t been offered anything, a cup of tea; but he’d come at 2.30, an odd between-times. They didn’t know what to do for an interview any more than he did. Jonah let him go into the kitchen. Gillian had left it all wiped down, the dish-cloth shrouding the two taps. Through the window Paul saw the back garden with a small greenhouse, and beyond a privet hedge the white frame of a soccer goal some way off. Again, it was a room he felt he knew. He stood, slowly gulping the cold water, in a brief unexpected trance, as if he could see decade after decade pass through this house, this square of garden, school terms and years, new generations of boys shouting, and Jonah’s long life, with all its own routines and duties, wife and daughter, all these unheeded but reassuring bits and bobs in the kitchen and the sitting-room, and thoughts of Cecil Valance as rare as holidays. On the tape, which continued to run in Paul’s absence, Jonah could be heard moving things around near the microphone, speaking indistinctly under his breath, and emitting a quietly musical fart.

PB: And what was Cecil like with George Sawle?

JT: What was he like?

PB: (inaudible) George, you know?

JT: I’m not sure what you mean. (nervous laugh)

PB: They were great friends, weren’t they?

JT: I think he met him at college. I don’t know much about that.

PB: You didn’t mix much with the Sawle children yourself?

JT: Good grief, no! (laughs wheezily) No, no, it wasn’t like that at all.

PB: Did you know Daphne was (inaudible) with Cecil?

JT: Well, I don’t recall. We didn’t know about that.

PB: (pauses) What hours did you work, do you remember?

JT: Well, I do, I worked six till six, I remember that very well.

PB: But you didn’t sleep at the house?

JT: I went back home. Then up every morning at five! We didn’t mind it, you know! [And here Jonah had gone on, with what seemed to Paul like relief, to a detailed description of a servant’s day – a day in which the principal figures in Paul’s story were oddly seen as mere ineffectual walk-ons.]

When Jonah got out his photo album the taped record became too cryptic altogether for Karen. Paul listened, fast-forwarded for ten seconds, cut in again – murmurs, grunts and rueful laughs like the sounds of some intimacy from which he was now bizarrely excluded. He had stooped over Jonah in his armchair, staying his hand sometimes as he turned the pages. It was a shared task, each of them somehow guiding the other, Jonah still puzzled and touchy about the undue interest Paul was taking in it all. ‘Well, there’s not much to it,’ he said, which was true in a way, though as always the ‘not much’ stared out like a provocation. Those old snapshots, two inches by three – the few Paul had seen of himself as a child were almost as small. Jonah hovered over them and partly concealed them with the oblong magnifying glass he used for reading the paper, the miniature faces swelling and darting as he muttered comments on one or two of them. There was a group photo of the staff at ‘Two Acres’, it must be just before the War, Jonah grinning in a work-coat buttoned at the neck, standing between two taller maids in caps and aprons, with a huge-bosomed woman behind them, who sure enough was the cook; Paul really didn’t recognize the door and window behind, but Jonah was unmistakeable, and so glowingly pretty that the older Jonah seemed to grow self-conscious on his behalf; at sixteen he had a look of being happy in his place as well as slyly curious about what lay outside it. Then there were several of the family. ‘So that was their mother? May I?’ Paul said – steadying the glass: a sturdy-looking woman with a wide appealing face and the guesswork smile that went with shortsightedness. He saw a lot of Daphne in her, not the teenager of the photos but Daphne as he knew her, older than her mother had been then. ‘Freda looks very nice.’ ‘Yes, well,’ said Jonah, ‘she was all right,’ though now her weakness, as he had called it, seemed to swim to the surface under the lens – Hubert Sawle, balding and responsible, standing next to her, surely knew about it too. They had the indefinable air of figures in an ongoing crisis, which their smiles didn’t quite expect to conceal. ‘What about George? – ah, yes, that must be him.’ George played up to the camera, pointing at Daphne, or posing just behind her with a silly face. Daphne herself had the vulnerable look of a girl hoping to get away for longer than five minutes with the pretence of being grown-up. She sat smiling graciously under a large hat with a silk flower on the side. Then George crept up, like a villain in a silent film, and made her jump. ‘Now is that…? I’ve got an idea,’ said Jonah, and let Paul take the glass again and square it over the cornermost snap – two young men almost level with the ground in deckchairs, George in a boater, the other’s face cast in primitive photographic shadow by the brim of his hat, save for a gleam of a nose and a smile. ‘That’s your young man, I think, isn’t it?’ said Jonah – really it could have been anybody, but Paul said, ‘Yes, of course it is…!’ and when he had done so he tingled at the certainty that it was.

He hadn’t expected Jonah to have such a hoard; it seemed the mysterious but omnipresent Harry Hewitt had given Hubert a camera, and Hubert had kept on dutifully taking snapshots and presenting them to all and sundry. Jonah showed him a photograph of the two men together; under the glass his square brown fingers half-hid what he was pointing out. ‘I see… yes…’ – Hubert was quite different here, peeping at the camera, a cigarette held uncertainly just by his trouser-pocket, while beside him, with an arm round his shoulder, as if escorting him towards some challenge he had been shyly avoiding, stood a darker, rather older man, very smartly dressed, with a long gaunt face, large ears, and a wide moustache drawn out into uncertain points. ‘So that was the man you worked for after the War…’ There was something so evidently gay about the photograph that the question sounded insinuating to himself, and perhaps to Jonah too. Later on he found the place in the transcript where he’d come back to questions about Hewitt.

JT: Mr Hewitt was a friend of the Sawles. He was a great friend of Mr Hubert. So I knew him already, in a way. He’d always been kind to me. He lived in Harrow Weald (unclear: Paddocks?)

PB: I’m sorry?

JT: That’s what his house was called.

PB: Oh!

JT: Well, it’s an old folks’ home now. The old dears are in there! (chuckles wheezily)

PB: Right. A big house, then.

JT: He was an art collector, wasn’t he, Harry Hewitt. I believe he left it all to a museum, would it be the Victoria and Albert Museum?

PB: He didn’t have children?

JT: Ooh no, no. He was a bachelor gentleman. He was always very generous to me.

Then, over the page, Jonah had changed his servant’s coat for lumpy serge and a too-large peaked cap, and in a line of recruits all taller than himself looked even younger than he had two years before, the smile of curiosity now a crooked look of childish worry. Paul straightened up, gazed down abstractedly for a minute at the neat old man with the album on his knee; then bent down again into his sharp clean odour of shaving-soap and hair-tonic.

In a minute, Jonah had to go to the loo, which was upstairs, and with his new hip was likely to take him a while. When he was safely halfway up, Paul stopped the tape, mooched across the room, glanced amiably through the window at the front garden and the lane, then lifted the paperweight from the folder on the table by Jonah’s chair, looked over his own letter again with interest, as it were from the recipient’s point of view, and with one finger raised the cardboard cover. Some brittle and sun-browned newspaper cuttings, words lost at the corners and folds, brown envelopes rubbed and softened with use. These must be Jonah’s demob papers. Then a prize certificate for carnations that he’d won in 1965. Then there was a folded review of a school play. A photograph from the local paper of what must be Gillian’s wedding. It struck him poor Jonah didn’t have enough treasures for separate folders – everything precious must be in here together. Paul leafed through the papers in loose groups. It was all just family stuff, of the most routine kind, very distant and pathetic, but put here ready perhaps, in the belief the interview was to be about Jonah’s own life. Then laying it all back again, and having a last look as he did so, Paul saw a large brown envelope addressed to Hubert Sawle Esq., ‘Two Acres’, the address struck through in ink: he lifted it out with a sudden heaviness of heart. Peering into it quickly but intently, half-pulling out the top two or three sheets, he saw letters, one signed H. O. Sawle, so perhaps these were just Jonah’s scraps and memorabilia from that time. ‘Wishing you good luck!’ – May 1915… in large backward-leaning writing. And then under it he found himself staring, in a sudden accusing rush of colour to his face, at a quite different hand, the hand he was only starting to know apart from all others, like the hand of a new lover. A tiny envelope, addressed to Pte J. Trickett, at the Middlesex Regiment barracks in Mill Hill. The large black postmark was smudged, but the year stood out, ‘1916’. Setting down the other papers, he was about to open it when he saw with astonishment that he had turned over something else in Cecil’s writing, several sheets of paper, torn in half, and covered in densely written and corrected verse. His fingers were trembling as he lifted the first one, which seemed to oscillate under his eyes like something out of focus. He knew it and he didn’t know it. He knew it so well that he couldn’t think what it was, and then when he understood he found it wasn’t what he knew. ‘Hearty, lusty, true and bold…’ The lavatory upstairs flushed, a sequence of muted sighs and whines spread through the plumbing system of the house; then he heard Jonah’s careful but not unduly slow tread coming down. It was a teetering five seconds of bewildered indecision. He squared up the papers, closed the folder, and set the paperweight back on top, calling up his mental photograph of how it had been before he touched it; he was completely confident it looked just as it had – even the paperweight was the right way round; but when Jonah came back in his eye seemed to go straight to it, and Paul wondered if the final impression wasn’t so meticulously accurate as to be in some way unconvincing.

Later on, listening to the tapes, so muffled and unprofessional, and leafing back and forth through the embarrassing half-clarification of the transcript, Paul had a growing gnawing sense that he’d already lost something of great value, though he wasn’t quite sure how he’d done so, or even what it was. Did Jonah know more than he said about Cecil’s friendship with George? It was natural enough that he wouldn’t say, perhaps wouldn’t know how to say; and though he didn’t seem to have much patience for George, or Daphne either, he was hardly going to go on record with the sort of claim Paul was hoping for about people who were still alive, whom he hadn’t seen for sixty-five years… Obscurely related there was the matter of Cecil’s massive tip, more than a month’s wages, and doubled on his second visit. Why had he done that? Because he knew he had been a ‘horror’, perhaps – though what did that word really mean? And why did Jonah remember that, and almost nothing else? Paul wondered if Cecil had bought his silence about something – perhaps so effectively that he had indeed entirely forgotten it. Or was that the matter he had written to him about, at the Mill Hill barracks? Paul felt sick that he hadn’t simply taken that letter. Why on earth would an aristocratic young officer be writing to a private in another regiment? It was striking enough that Cecil had even mentioned Jonah to Freda – Paul knew from other such letters he’d read that upper-class people never mentioned servants, unless it was some figure of great age and eccentric dignity, like a butler or old nanny. And then what seemed to be a manuscript of ‘Two Acres’ itself, glimpsed like something in a dream and, at a glimpse, full of dreamlike variants.

The mortifying thing, as Paul had packed up his tape-recorder, put on his coat and been followed to the front door, was the lingering presence in the air, and in his own tight smile, of Jonah’s rebuff – his wheezy, regretful head-shake of insistence that no, he had no letter, nothing written by Cecil Valance at all; so that Paul had been trapped, in the moment he was leaving, in a kind of impasse. He must have looked shifty, even coyly wounded – some new narrowing of suspicion and rejection had seemed to enter Jonah’s blue eyes. Paul didn’t tell Karen any of this, but it had made the long journey back to Tooting Graveney more uncomfortable than the journey out.

5

‘Shove?’

‘Mmm?’

‘Fredegond Shove.’

‘Oh, yes!… um…’

‘It’s the Collected Poems.’

‘Aha…’

‘Or… wait a minute, what about this…’ – he handed Paul a precious-looking volume, in a black slipcase: A Funny Kind of Friendship: Letters of Sir Henry Newbolt to Sebastian Stokes. ‘Interest you at all?’

‘Well, actually…’. It just might be interesting, for his own research; and anything he took away could be sold, sooner or later.

‘Private press, we don’t have to do it.’

Paul balanced the stack of books he’d already chosen on the edge of a table scattered with sugar and ground coffee. Here the reek of Gitanes smoke was laced with that of sour milk. In cracked old mugs with comic logos, bluish crusts of mould were forming. The books table itself, ten volumes deep, had a broken leg propped up on other books that presumably would never be reviewed. The squalor was remarkable, but no one who worked here – young men in olive-green corduroy, good-looking women chatting on the phone about Yeats or Poussin – appeared to notice it. They sat in their low cubicles, walled in by rubbish, books and boxes, half-eaten meals, old clothes, and great slews of scrawled-over galley-proofs.

‘So – gay things,’ said Jake, rubbing his hands.

‘That’s right!’ said Paul, and was furious to find himself blushing.

‘We get quite a lot of those these days…’ Jake wore a wedding-ring, but he seemed very glad for Paul to be gay. He was the same age, younger perhaps, clearly proud of working at the TLS, and cheerfully corporate – ‘we do this’, ‘we had that’. Paul imagined sharing his cubicle, high up above the traffic, deciding the fate of books together. ‘Bloomsbury, I suppose…?’

‘Bloomsbury… First World War.’ 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. ‘I think there’s a new volume of Virginia Woolf’s Letters coming up…’

‘Ah,’ said Jake, ‘yes, that’s gone, I’m afraid – Norman’s doing it.’

‘Ah, well…’ Paul flinched and nodded, as if at the evident justice of this commission, and wondered who the hell Norman could be; he felt Norman wasn’t his surname. So far Paul had had only two things in the paper, both very cut, and very far back, almost in the Classified section: a piece about Drink-water’s plays, and a regretful demolition of a novel by the retired diplomat Cedric Burrell. This caused a bit of a stir, as Burrell had immediately cancelled his subscription to the TLS, which he’d had since going up to Oxford in 1923. But no one seemed to mind, they were even rather pleased, and Jake had asked him to drop in and ‘look at the books’, if he was ever around. Paul let a day and a half pass before turning up.

‘Remind me what you’re working on?’

‘I’m writing a biography of Cecil Valance,’ said Paul firmly, and the claim sounded foolishly bold in this new setting. But one day, no doubt, his book would appear on the table in front of him. Someone would ask to do it. Maybe Norman would get a crack at it.

‘That’s right, “Two blessèd acres of English ground”.’

‘Among other things…’

‘Didn’t we have something on him recently?’

‘Oh, well the Letters, perhaps? That was a couple of years ago now…’

‘That must be it. So he was gay too, was he?’

‘Again… among other things.’

Again Jake was delighted. ‘They all were, weren’t they?’ he said.

Paul felt he should be a bit more cautious: ‘I mean, he did have affairs with women, but I have the feeling he really preferred boys. That’s one of the things I want to find out.’

An older man, in his fifties perhaps, with oiled black hair and a paisley bow-tie, had emerged from his cubicle to get coffee, and stayed looking at the new books and looking at Paul too, over his half-moon glasses, with a certain air of strategy. Jake said, ‘Robin, this is Paul Bryant, who’s been doing some things for us. Robin Gray.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Robin Gray, in a friendly patrician tone, tucking his chin in. He had the blue eyes of a schoolboy in the face of a don or a judge.

‘Paul’s writing about Cecil Valance, you know, the poet.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Robin glanced to left and right, as if at the enjoyable delicacy of the matter. ‘Indeed, I had heard…’

‘Oh, really?’ said Paul, smiling back, and feeling suddenly uneasy. ‘Goodness!’

Robin said, ‘I believe you bumped into Daphne Jacobs.’ And now he scratched his head, with an air almost of embarrassment.

‘Oh, yes…’ said Paul.

‘And who might Daphne Jacobs be?’ said Jake. ‘One of your golden oldies, Robin?’

Robin gave a curt laugh while still holding Paul’s eye. Paul felt he shouldn’t answer the question for him. He half-wondered himself what the answer would be. ‘Well,’ said Robin, ‘she is now the widowed Mrs Basil Jacobs, but once upon a time she was Lady Valance.’

‘Don’t tell me she was married to Cecil,’ said Jake.

‘Cecil!’ said Robin, as if Jake had a lot to learn. ‘No, no. She was the first wife of Cecil’s younger brother Dudley.’

‘I should explain, Robin knows everyone,’ said Jake, but just then he was called to the phone at the far end of the office, leaving the two of them in their unexpected new relation. They went into the semi-privacy of Robin’s cubicle, where he set down his coffee on the desk; unlike the others he kept a china cup and saucer, and there was a degree of order in the books, a parade of Loeb classics, archaeology, ancient history. On the radiator a brown towel and swimming-trunks were spread out to dry. There was a strong sense of a bachelor life, of rigorous routine. Robin shifted papers from a second chair. ‘I’m the ancient history editor,’ he said, ‘which everyone thinks is very apt.’ Paul smiled cautiously as he sat down; beside him was a shelf of Debrett’s and Who’s Who, and those eerily useful volumes of Who Was Who, giving the hobbies and phone-numbers of the long dead. Late one night he and Karen had rung Sebastian Stokes himself: a moment’s silence and then the busily negative drone of non-existence. Of course you had to convert the old exchanges to the new numbers – they might have got it wrong. ‘Don’t lean back in that chair, by the way, or you’ll land on the floor.’

‘I was a bit worried about… Daphne,’ Paul said, sitting forward, making his own thoughtful claim on knowing her. ‘No one seemed to be looking after her.’

‘I’m sure you were kind to her,’ said Robin, a touch cautiously.

‘Well, I didn’t do much… you know… Have you known her a long time?’

Robin stared and grunted as if at the effort it would take to explain properly, and at last said, very slowly, ‘Daphne’s second husband’s half-sister married my father’s elder brother.’

‘Right… right!… so…’ – Paul gazed at the world beyond the dirty window, the top floor of a pub across the Gray’s Inn Road.

‘So Daphne is my step-aunt by marriage.’

‘Exactly,’ said Paul. ‘Well I’m very glad to meet you. You see, I’m hoping to interview her, but she hasn’t replied to a letter I sent her in November, which is three months ago now…’

‘Well, you know she’s been ill,’ said Robin, tucking his chin in again.

Paul winced. ‘I was afraid that might be the reason.’

‘She has this macular problem.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘It means she can’t really see – her sight’s very bad. And as you may know she also has emphysema.’

‘Doesn’t that come from smoking?’

‘I fear they both do,’ said Robin, with a sigh at his own ashtray.

‘Is she getting better?’

‘Well, I’m not sure one ever really gets better.’

Paul had a sickening feeling she might smoke herself to death before he’d had a chance to speak to her. ‘I was surprised to see she still smoked, after Corinna… you know.’

‘Mmm.’ Robin looked at him keenly. ‘So you knew Corinna, did you?’

‘Oh, very much so,’ said Paul, noting as if from the corner of his eye how indulgently he thought of her now that she wasn’t there to expose him and put him down; she’d become a useful element in his own plans. ‘That was how I met Daphne, you see. I worked under Leslie Keeping for several years.’

‘Oh, you were in the bank,’ said Robin, ‘I see,’ and squared his lighter and cigarette-packet on the table, as if making some subtle calculation. ‘I wonder if you were there when Leslie died?’

‘No, I’d already left.’

‘Right, right.’

‘But I heard all about it, of course.’ It was the most grimly sensational piece of news that Paul had had anything to do with, and he felt, for all its horror, a keen attachment to it.

‘All that hit Daphne very hard, of course.’

‘Well, of course…’ Paul waited respectfully. ‘I first met them all in 1967,’ he said, ‘though I’m not sure Daphne remembered that when I saw her again.’

‘Her memory is certainly somewhat… um… tactical,’ said Robin.

Paul giggled, ‘Yes, I see… but I wondered, she’s not living by herself, is she?’

‘No, no – her son Wilfrid, from her first marriage – do you know? – is living with her.’

‘I do know Wilfrid,’ said Paul, and instantly pictured his strange determined amorous dance in the Corn Hall at Foxleigh, the first and last time he’d met him. He couldn’t see him being a very practical nurse or housekeeper. ‘And what about her son by her second marriage?’ Robin shook his head rapidly, a sort of shudder. ‘Okay…!’ Paul laughed. ‘And the Keeping boys, they don’t see her?’

‘Oh, John’s far too busy,’ said Robin, firmly but perhaps ironically. ‘And you know Julian has become a drop-out…’ – with an air of marvelling hearsay, like a magistrate. ‘Of course before long, Wilfrid will inherit the title.’

‘Yes, of course…’

‘He’ll be the fourth baronet.’ They looked ponderingly at each other, then laughed in minor embarrassment as if at some misunderstanding. Paul felt there was a certain sexual undertone to the chat, even to the way they’d quickly got off on this topic amid the business of the office.

‘To be absolutely frank – ’ said Robin, and here he did reach for his cigarettes, and kept Paul waiting uneasily while he lit one and inhaled and fixed him again with a blue gaze over the top of his spectacles, ‘I think Daphne was rather put out by your review of her book in the New Statesman.’ He sounded a bit stern about it himself. ‘She felt you’d rather gone for her.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Paul, with a guilty face, though a prickle of pride at his own sharpness very slightly offset the lurching feeling he’d been tactless and clumsy. ‘The piece was heavily cut, I did tell her that.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘They took out a lot of the nice things I said.’ He pictured her in the taxi to Paddington, and heard her saying how some reviewers had been horrid. To pretend she hadn’t seen his review seemed now to be dignified good manners of a crushingly high order. She had managed to reproach him and excuse him all at the same time. ‘It was supposed to be a bit of a fan letter.’

‘I’m not sure it read like that,’ said Robin. ‘Though you were by no means the worst.’

‘I certainly wasn’t.’ (‘Unhappy fantasies of a rejected wife’ had been Derek Messenger’s verdict in the Sunday Times.)

Robin sipped at his coffee and drew on his cigarette, as if measuring regrets and pondering possibilities. He was indefinably in his element, and Paul sensed it was a stroke of luck to have met him, and if he could get him on his side he might get Daphne too. ‘I must say, I enjoyed the book,’ Robin said, with a further head-shake of frankness.

‘No, I enjoyed it too. There were things I wanted to know more about, of course…’ Paul gave him an almost sly smile, but asked something harmless first: ‘I’m not clear really who Basil Jacobs was.’

‘Oh, Basil’ – Robin sounded impatient himself with this tame question. ‘Well, Basil was certainly the nicest of her husbands, though in a way as… as hopeless as the others.’

‘Oh, dear! Was Revel Ralph hopeless too?’

Robin pulled on his cigarette as if to steady himself. He said, ‘Revel was completely impossible.’

Paul grinned – ‘Really? You can’t have known him, surely.’

‘Well…’ Robin toyed with this flattery; ‘I was born in 1919, so you can work it out.’

‘Mm, I see!’ said Paul, which he didn’t altogether – was Robin claiming to have tangled with Revel himself? Revel was only forty-one when he was killed, so doubtless still pretty active, as it were, and Robin he could see just about as a naughty young soldier – it was too much to ask about.

‘Oh, god yes,’ said Robin, suddenly disgusted by his cigarette, stubbing it out and folding it under his thumb in the ashtray. ‘Basil wasn’t hopeless like that, he was much more conventional. I imagine Daphne felt she’d had enough of temperamental artists.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He was a businessman – he had a small factory that made something, I can’t remember what, a sort of… washer or something.’

‘Right.’

‘Anyway, he went bust. He had a daughter from an earlier marriage, and they went to live with her. I think it was all rather a nightmare.’

‘Oh, yes, Sue.’

‘Sue, exactly…’ said Robin, with a cautious smile. ‘You seem to know most of the family.’

‘Well…’ said Paul. ‘They’re not actually all that useful when it comes to Cecil. But it’s good to know they’re on my side.’ He found he had stood up, smiling, as if to go, and only then said, with a pitying shake of the head, ‘I mean, what do you think really went on between Daphne and Cecil?’

Robin laughed drily, as if to say there were limits. Paul knew already that information was a form of property – people who had it liked to protect it, and enhance its value by hints and withholdings. Then, perhaps, they could move on to enjoying the glow of self-esteem and surrender in telling what they knew. ‘Well,’ he said, and went slightly pink, under the pressure of his own discretion.

‘I mean, would you like to have a drink some time? I don’t want to bother you now.’ Paul thought a discreet encounter, something with almost the colour of a date, might appeal to Robin. He saw, because it was a habit he had himself, elsewhere, how his eyes paused a fraction of a second in each upward or sideways sweep at the convergence of his black-jeaned legs. But Robin hesitated, as if to grope round some other obstacle.

‘You see, I don’t drink during Lent,’ he said. ‘But after that…’ – with a suggestion he drank like a fish through the rest of the liturgical year. ‘Ah, Jake…’ and there was Jake again, standing behind them, with the twinkle of someone detecting a secret.

‘I hope I’m not breaking something up.’

‘Not a bit,’ said Robin suavely.

‘I’ll give you a ring if I may,’ said Paul, ‘- after Easter!’

Jake led Paul back to have his books entered in the system, an unfollowable procedure of typed slips and cards. ‘I’ve just had a word with the Editor,’ he said. ‘We wondered if you’d be interested in covering this for us?’ He passed him a sheet of paper – ‘Ignore that stuff at the top’: two other names with question-marks and phone-numbers, heavily inked over during phone-calls surely, which as surely had not borne fruit. ‘You’d have to stay overnight – it would just be seven hundred words for the Commentary pages.’ It was hard to take in, Balliol College, Oxford, a conference, dinner, the Warton Professor of English… a shiver of panic went through him, which he turned into a breathy laugh.

‘Well, if you think I’d be right for it.’

‘You’re not a Balliol man, are you?’

‘Ooh, no!’ said Paul with a little shudder. ‘Not I. Well, thank you – ah, I see, Dudley Valance is speaking.’

‘That’s partly what made me wonder – I didn’t know he was still alive.’

‘Not in good health, I’m afraid,’ said Paul.

‘You must know him…’

‘A bit, you know… He and Linette live in Spain for most of the year.’ He felt the prickle of the uncanny again, the secret sign, the reasserted intention that he should write his book. There were times in one’s life that one only knew as one passed through them, the decisive moments, when one saw that the decisions had been taken for one.

Jake walked him to the door of the office and they stood talking there a little longer, but had to move aside for a big fat boy in jeans and a T-shirt pushing a trolley stacked high with tightly bound bales of newsprint; he threw one down with a pleasant thump on to the floor. ‘Read all about it!’ he said, and watched with a curious cynical smile as they reacted.

‘Ah, yes… now…’ said Jake, showing off, but charmingly, to entertain his guest. One or two others got up and circled, looking for scissors, a sharp knife, and ignoring the delivery boy, who wheeled back into the corridor, still smiling thinly. In a moment the plastic tape was snipped, and the top copy plucked up and turned and presented to Paul with a casual flourish: ‘For you!’ – the new TLS – Friday’s TLS, ready two days early, ‘hot off the press’ someone said, enjoying his reactions, though in fact the paper was cool to the touch, even slightly damp. There was a cursory checking, in which Paul politely shared – that pictures had come out, that a last-minute correction had been made – while an enviable sense of professional satisfaction seemed to fill the air and then (since this momentous occurrence was a weekly routine) to fade almost at once as people went back to their desks and focused again on issues weeks and months ahead. Paul said goodbye to Jake, and went away with the clear idea of more such meetings already in his mind.

On the way along the dreary corridor he turned off into the Gents and had only just unzipped when he heard the yawn of the door behind him and a second later a half-pleased, half-embarrassed ‘Aha…!’ He glanced round. Slightly disconcertingly, Robin Gray didn’t follow the normal etiquette but came to the urinal right next to Paul’s, leaving three further stalls untenanted. There was a droll murmur and frowning fidget as he got himself going, a certain sturdiness of stance, as if on a rolling ship, and a quick candid gaze, friendly but businesslike, at Paul’s own progress on the other side of the porcelain partition. Then looking ahead, he said, ‘You were quite right, by the way, in what you said earlier.’

‘Oh… really?’ said Paul, glancing at him, a little confused. ‘What was that?’

‘About Cecil Valance and boys.’

Now it was Paul’s turn to say, ‘Aha!… Well, I thought it must be.’

Robin tucked in his chin, with his air of heavily flagged discretion. ‘Not for now, I think.’ He gave a cough of a laugh. ‘But I believe you’ll find it amusing. Well, I’ll tell you all about it when we meet.’ And with that plump promise he zipped himself up and went back to the office.

Paul sauntered down the broad stairs and into the lobby of the Times building with a smile on his face. He had A Funny Kind of Friendship in his briefcase and a feeling of something much funnier – the first sense of a welcome from the literary family, of curtains held back, doors opening into half-seen rooms full of oddities and treasures that seemed virtually normal to the people who lived in them. In the long lobby, belatedly gleaming with afternoon light, low tables between leather armchairs were spread with copies of today’s Times, and Sun, and the three Times supplements, thrilling evidence of what went on upstairs. He nodded goodbye as he passed the uniformed receptionist. The revolving door from the street brought in a courier in helmet and whistling leggings, red URGENT stickers on the packet in his hand; Paul stepped into the still-revolving quadrant and emerged on to the pavement with a graciously busy half-smile at the passers-by who would never have access to these mysteries. He kept his copy of the day-after-tomorrow’s TLS under his arm, which he wanted very much to be seen with. He didn’t think the people in the street here were getting the point of it – but back in the North Reading-Room of the British Library he felt it might stir a good deal of envy and conjecture.

6

Paul trotted down the long stone staircase and out into the quad with a preoccupied frown and a curious feeling of imposture. Though old enough to be a don, he was visited in waves by the nervous ignorance of a freshman. He skirted the lawn respectfully, beneath ranged Gothic windows, clutching his briefcase and picturing the evening to come, with its sequence of challenges, drinks in the Senior Common Room, dinner in Hall, social contacts and collisions all the more daunting for the tacit codes that college life was steeped in. But at some point, he was almost sure, tonight or perhaps tomorrow, he would get his chance. Of course it was still possible the old boy wouldn’t turn up; at the age of eighty-four he had excuses readily to hand. With excited foreboding Paul pictured his dark autocratic face, as he knew it from photographs, and when he went up the three steps into the gatehouse there he was – under the arch, by the porter’s lodge, in a dark overcoat, leaning on a stick.

Paul nearly greeted him, gasped and suppressed a smile as he went past; his heart was racing at the sudden opportunity – he turned and then stood near him, at an angle, as though waiting for someone else. Awful of course if it wasn’t him; but no, the wide, hawkish face was unmistakable, stretched rather than furrowed by age, the full mouth a little thinner and down-turned, impressive dark eyes staring ahead, grey hair sleeked back into curls around the collar. Paul stepped aside to look at the glassed-in notice-boards, over which his own slightly smirking face floated in reflection. The old man remained immobile, only poking now and then at the flagstones with the rubber tip of his stick. He was evidently someone for whom arrangements had always been made. Paul cleared his throat and paced around, choosing his words. Through the inner window of the lodge, before the dark wall of pigeon-holes, he could see a woman talking to the porter. Surely, Linette – with thick stiff hair, an improbable auburn, mingling with the upturned collar of her fox-fur jacket. A hard, good-looking face, thoroughly made up, and a manner he knew at once, from its tight smiles and frowns, of getting people to do things. The porter made a brief phone-call, and then came out, opening the door for her, and bringing her suitcase. ‘Good evening, Sir Dudley! The Master’s coming down himself to meet you’ – a flourish in which Paul heard a doubling-up of respect, of everyday loyalty to the Master and deference to the visitor. Linette had now made an approach impossible, and Paul went to look for his imaginary friend by the gate on to Broad Street. He could hear the tone but not quite the words of the muttered conversation between the Valances. In front of him, students cycling past, university life rattling on although it was the vacation. In a minute there were calls and wheezy laughs behind him, and as Paul turned round he saw a tiny grey-haired man in a gown come whirling up the steps from the quad and greet his guests – not exactly as old friends but on the footing of some clear shared understanding, which seemed to smile out of his keen, rather spiritual face. Sir Dudley said, ‘You needn’t have come down yourself,’ in a voice of chuffing, almost supercilious grandeur, and his wife said, ‘Good evening, Master!’ which for all its submissiveness showed she had got what she wanted.

Off they went, the Master offering Sir Dudley an arm on the steps. ‘What year did you go down?’ he said, and Paul heard, ‘Nineteen fourteen, you see… I never took my degree… I got married…’ Lady Valance laughed for the Master, as though to show how little this lack of a degree had mattered, and perhaps to indulge the mention of this earlier marriage. Well, they must have been together for fifty years themselves, after the mere nine or ten with Daphne, whom Paul thought of now more fondly. What a contrast – he pictured her in her shabby mac and hat, in the place of this highly preserved woman, who still moved with the dawdling strut of a model. Paul watched them from the steps. Now two muscular boys in white rowing shorts burst out from a doorway, and slowed and ran on the spot to let the Master and his guests go by; then they were off, coming up past Paul in a rush and out through the gate into the street. For once it was the old man who held his interest, and seemed in fact almost miraculous, from the lordly jabs of his stick to the yap of his vowels. As they went off through an arch on the far side of the quad, Dudley still visibly a casualty of the Battle of Loos, other less palpable things seemed to hover about him, which were famous phrases of his brother, in Georgian Poetry, or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Paul felt, in some idiotic but undeniable way, that he had very nearly seen Cecil himself.

He went on, as planned, along Broad Street, to look at the bookshops. The rowing boys had already vanished into the thickening light of the late afternoon – the sun in the west struck right along the street, and dazzled the people who were coming towards him, leaving him, a mere looming silhouette, free to examine them closely. As he loitered around the biography table in Blackwell’s, picking up the expensive new books and looking at their indexes and acknowledgements, he had Dudley’s hunched but handsome figure on his mind, and was starting to hear answers to his questions in that extraordinary voice. Paul thought he would like his own acknowledgements page to begin with thanks to his subject’s brother, ideally perhaps by that stage ‘the late Sir Dudley Valance’, who ‘gave so generously of his time’ and ‘made his archives available without questions or conditions’. The author of this new life of Percy Slater had even been ‘welcomed warmly into the family home’ – something Paul now sensed was less likely to happen in his case.

He had always opened such books at the grey-black seams that marked the inserts of pictures. His daydreams for his own book often dwelt on this last, almost decorative addition to the work – the quickly passed-over photos of unappealing forebears, the birthplace or childhood residence, the subject sharpening into focus in his teens, the momentarily confusing captions – lower right, opposite, over -, one or two of the pictures thought worthy of a full page, the defining portraits. Would Dudley ever make such things available to him? Paul felt some kind of subterfuge might be necessary. Percy Slater had lived into his seventies so there was all the proliferation of wives and children, snapshots from Kenya and Japan, a late picture in doctoral robes of this very university, chatting to Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor. None of that for Cecil, of course, just a photograph of his tomb, perhaps.

And there, at the end of the table, in a sober brown jacket with the title in red and yellow, was The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, a book with an aura, it seemed to Paul, and fat with confidence of its own interest – he looked at something else first, just to savour and focus his anticipation, and then after a minute casually picked up the heavy volume and hopped backwards through the index in his now systematic way – Valance, then Sawle, then Ralph. Two mentions of Dudley, one of Cecil, which turned out to be in the footnote identifying Dudley as ‘younger brother of the First World War poet’. He coveted it, but the price, £15, a week’s rent – hardly possible. A familiar but still extraordinary calm came over him. He made his way into the History department, chose a huge book on medieval England, itself part of a massively scholarly series, pale blue wrappers, Clarendon Press, price £40, and a minute later took it off upstairs. In his bag he had a compliments slip from Jake at the TLS, with his name on and the scribbled message, ‘800 words by end of March’, and he tucked it into the front of the book as he went. Stopping at a mezzanine where Classics were displayed, he got out his notebook to write down a title, and squatting down to a low shelf behind a table he pencilled three or four page numbers and a question-mark on the fly-leaf of his volume of Plantagenet history. From here it was a further turn of the stairs up to the secondhand department, where he asked the bearded young man if they bought review copies in good condition. The Plantagenets were given a quick glance, the review-slip almost subliminally noted, the book checked for any devaluing marginalia. ‘We can only offer half-price,’ said the man. ‘Oh, really?’ said Paul, chewing his cheek – ‘well, okay, fine, I guess, if that’s your standard practice. Sorry… let me just take that review-slip…’ The item was written in a ledger, the book itself translated to a trolley of new acquisitions, and two clean £10 notes handed over. A few minutes later he strolled back into college with The Letters of Evelyn Waugh in his briefcase and a happy surplus of £5 in his back pocket.

The room he’d been given, at the top of a long stone staircase, had the name Greg Hudson on the door, and though the sheets and towel were fresh he felt like an unwanted guest among all the books, records and clothes that Greg had left behind over the vac. There were muddy plimsolls under the bed, a Blondie poster above the desk. In a sweet-smelling cupboard full of jam and coffee he found a bottle of malt whisky, half-full, and poured a finger of it into a tumbler. He stood sipping at it, with one foot on the hearthstone. There was a poem by Stephen Spender that began, very oddly, ‘Marston, dropping it in the grate, broke his pipe.’ It had come into his mind the moment he’d unlocked the door, amid the uneasy displeasure, and covert excitement, of finding the room was full of someone else’s things. The line about Marston was part of his illusion of Oxford, a glimpse of pipe-smoking students known by their surnames; and though he’d forgotten what happened in the rest of the poem, he saw Marston dropping his pipe on the stone hearth just here, as easily as he could let slip this glass of treasured Glenfiddich.

He read the postcards from Paris and Sydney propped on the mantelpiece, both signed Jacqui with a lot of crosses, and took down the mounted photo of the college’s Second XV, which had the names written underneath in a crazily ornate script. So that was Greg, the grinning giant standing off-centre, his mid-parts hidden by the shaggy round head of the man seated in front of him. How his great sweaty body must labour in this schoolboy-size bed – and when Jacqui came round, what a terrible squash it must be for them. He pulled open the top drawer of the desk, but it was so jammed with papers that he couldn’t face going through it just yet. Otherwise, there was nothing much to read except chemistry books. For some reason, he left his new purchase, if that’s what it was, untouched.

He decided that before going down to dinner in half an hour he would look again at Dudley’s Black Flowers, to have something to quote, or to ask, if he got a chance over drinks. ‘I was wondering, Sir Dudley, when you said…’ Since he knew Corley Court, it seemed a sound starting-point. He peered at the author photo with fresh interest, and a suspicion that Dudley looked almost younger now – the style of the 1950s man of letters seemed deliberately ageing. He sat selfconsciously under the bright ceiling-lamp, with his glass of whisky. A red tartan rug thrown over the armchair disguised the probing state of the springs, deranged presumably by the recurrent impact of Greg. About the changes at Corley, Dudley had written:

My father had been laid low and effectively silenced by a stroke a year after the War ended; he lived on until 1925, the patient prisoner of a bath chair, his essential geniality apparently undimmed. When he spoke it was in a cheerful language of his own, and with no awareness that the sounds issuing from his mouth were nonsense to his listeners. One saw from his expression that what he was saying was generally fond and amusing. And he appeared to follow our conversation with perfect clarity. It took a great deal of patience in us, and then a certain amount of kindly pretence, to keep up any sustained talk with him. His own demeanour, however, suggested that he drew great satisfaction from these agonizing encounters.

Of course all work on The Incidence of Red Calves Among Black Angus, meant as his major contribution to agricultural science, was suspended for ever. My mother very capably extended her control of domestic life at Corley to that of a large estate; my own efforts to assist her were, if not rebuffed, then treated as impractical and rather tiresome. It was suggested (fancifully, it seemed to me) that my brother Cecil had known all about farming, both ‘horn and corn’ as my mother liked to put it, but that I had never shown any aptitude for the matter. The fact that in due course I must surely take over the running of Corley weighed oddly little with her. I was myself, it is true, a mutilé de guerre, subject to various cautions and exemptions; but idleness did not sit easily with me. Perhaps the silencing of the other writers in our family, the poet and the agronomist, opened a door to the younger son. A psychologist of family life might find some such pattern of subconscious motivations and opportunities. At any rate I looked again at sketches I had published long before in the Cherwell and the Isis, and found myself pleased by their youthful sarcasm. The habit, so familiar to many of us after the War, of thinking of our earlier selves as foreign beings, Arcadian innocents, proved refreshingly a merely partial truth.

I wrote The Long Gallery at great speed, in a little under three months, in a mood of irritable tension and ferocious high spirits. I have already said something of its reception, and of the changes, some amusing and many tedious, that the success of that little book brought to our lives. But thereafter the more serious work I knew it in me to do refused to come. I felt as if there was much that I needed to clear away; and on this too no doubt our psychologist would have something to report. Some such need, I think, lay behind my strong desire, once my father had died, to clear out Corley itself. A deepening distaste for all Victoriana became a kind of mission for me, who had inherited by default a large Victorian house of exorbitant ugliness and inconvenience. Sometimes, it is true, I wondered if in later years its ugliness might recommend itself as a quaint kind of charm to generations yet unborn. In few places did I sanction the complete demolition of the heavy and garish decorative schemes of my grandfather – the ornate ceilings, the sombre panelling, the childish and clumsy outcrops of stone-carving and mosaic – but with the help of an interior designer of a thoroughly modern kind I saw to it that they were all ‘boxed in’. Waterhouse, whose dismal Gothic buildings had despoiled my own College, was sometimes credited with the design, which in its ability to inflict pain on the eye was certainly up to his best standard. It is quite possible my grandfather consulted him. But the drawings surviving at Corley were all from the hand of a Mr Money, a local practitioner known otherwise only for the draughty Town Hall at Newbury (a building whose discomforts my brother and I knew well from our annual visits as children to observe our father presenting trophies to local livestock breeders). At Corley, of course, certain things were sacrosanct – the chapel in the best Middle Pointed that money (or Money) could provide, and where my brother was laid to rest under a great quantity of Carrara marble. That could never be touched. And the library I left, at my mother’s stern request, in its original state of caliginous gloom. But in all the other principal rooms, a modern brightness and simplicity effectively overlaid the ingenious horrors of an earlier age.

Paul had finished his drink, and felt a small top-up would be undetectable, and if detected untraceable. He went back to the cupboard with righteous impatience. Was this building, this spartan attic room, part of Waterhouse’s work, he wondered? He peered at the stone-framed window, the notched and stained oak sill, the boarded-up fireplace, which perhaps had a general kinship with those at Corley Court. Peter’s room there had had a fireplace just the same, grey stone, with a wide flat pointed arch… He remembered the time he had made him examine a hole in the ceiling, in a state of high excitement. Really such things meant nothing to him – but Peter would certainly have known. He had been at Exeter College – but had he had friends across the road here in Balliol? Paul saw him entirely at home in the university, as if they had been destined for each other. He went out to the lavatory, in a queer little angled turret, and when he looked down from the window into the gloomy quad he saw a dark-haired figure moving swiftly through the shadows and into the lit doorway of a staircase who might almost have been Peter, before he knew him, fifteen years ago, calling on a friend, some earlier lover – that was what his unselfconscious evenings had been like.

By the time he set off for drinks, Paul already felt cautiously cheerful. In the large lamp-lit Common Room, a surprisingly sleek modern building, he rather got stuck with a secretary from the English faculty office, a nice young woman who’d been responsible for much of the conference arrangements. A mutual shyness tethered them in their corner, beside the table on which all the papers were laid out, including the TLS. ‘Well, there you are!’ said Ruth, his friend, blushing with satisfaction, so that Paul formed the wary idea she had taken a shine to him. The room itself, full of confident noise, brisk introductions, loud reunions, was a breathtaking plunge for him. He realized the man standing near him was Professor Stallworthy, whose life of Wilfred Owen had fought rather shy of Owen’s feelings for other men. Paul suddenly felt shy of them too. Beyond him was a white-haired man in military uniform of some splendour – General Colthorpe, Ruth said, who was going to speak about Wavell. She confirmed that the broad-faced, genially pugnacious-looking man talking to the Master was Paul Fussell, whose book on the Great War had moved and enlightened Paul more than anything he’d read on the subject – though sadly, like Evelyn Waugh’s Letters, it had only mentioned Cecil in a footnote (‘a less neurotic – and less talented – epigone of Brooke’). Paul looked around admiringly and restlessly, his tiny empty sherry glass cupped behind his hand, waiting for the Valances to come in. ‘Were you at Oxford?’ said Ruth.

‘No, I wasn’t,’ Paul said, with an almost bashful smile, as though to say he understood and forgave her error.

He was introduced to a young English don, and chatted to him in a keen but rather circular way about Cecil, the long sleeves of the don’s gown brushing over Paul’s hands as he moved and turned. Paul couldn’t always follow what he meant; he found himself in the role of lowly sapper while Martin (was he called?) talked in larger strategic terms, with a pervasive air of irony – ‘Well, quite!’ Paul found himself saying, two or three times. He felt he was boring him, and he himself was soon achingly tense and distracted by the presence of the Valances in the room, and merely nodded genially when Martin moved off. Dudley’s voice, both clipped and drawling, the historic vowels perhaps further pickled and preserved by thirty years’ exile in sherry country, could be heard now and then through the general yammer. He was easy to lose, among the taller younger figures milling round him, the swoop of gowns, the odd barbaric intensity of people connecting. Linette’s sparkly green evening jacket was a help in tracking their gradual movement through the crowd. Then for a minute they were alongside, Linette with her back to Paul, Dudley in stooped profile, and again with a look of short-winded good-humour as he tried to follow what a young Indian man was saying to him, in fashionably theoretical terms, about life in the trenches.

‘Yes, I don’t know,’ said Dudley, maintaining a precarious balance between mild modesty and his fairly clear belief that the Indian was talking rot. He smiled at him widely in a way that showed Paul the conversation was over, but which the Indian scholar took as a cue for a further convoluted question:

‘But would you agree, sir, that, in a very real sense, the experience of most writers about war is predicated on the idea that-’

‘Darling, you mustn’t tire yourself!’ said Linette sharply, so that the Indian, mortified, apologized and backed away from her flicker of a smile. Well, it was a little lesson for Paul in how not to proceed with them. In the moment of uncomfortable silence that followed he perhaps had his chance: he raised his chin to speak, but a weird paralysis left him murmuring and blinking, looking almost as apologetic as the retreating questioner. He could have asked Ruth to introduce him, but he didn’t want Linette in particular to learn his name at this early stage – whether Dudley himself had ever seen his letters he doubted. Stiff-necked, Dudley seemed rarely to turn his head, and a call from his other side made him swivel his whole body away, with a well-practised lurch of his weight on to his stick. Paul was left with a sense of astonished near-contact, of greatness, it almost seemed, within arm’s reach.

At dinner it turned out he’d been placed next to Ruth again, and when he said, ‘Oh that’s nice!’ he half-meant it, and half felt a kind of emasculation. The seating was on long benches, and they all remained standing, one or two bestriding the bench as they talked, until everyone was in. Dudley stumped past in a swaying line that was heading for the High Table, and proper chairs. Now the Master made a more official welcome to the conference, and said a long scurrying Latin grace, as if apologetically reminding them of something they knew far better than he did.

Paul was drunk enough to introduce himself to the very unattractive little man on his other side (there were far more men than women), but he soon found his shoulder turned against him, and for an awkward ten minutes he strained the patience of the two men opposite who were involved in complex discussion of faculty affairs into which there was no real point in trying to induct Paul, whose TLS credentials started to wear thin. He leant towards them with a smile of forced interest to which they were rudely immune. ‘I’m writing up the conference for the TLS’ – Paul felt he’d said this too often – ‘though also, as it happens, I’m working on a biography of Cecil Valance.’

‘Did he ever finish his work on the Cathars?’ said the man on the right.

‘Not as far as we know,’ said Paul, absorbing the horror of the question with some aplomb, he felt. Was the man thinking of someone else? Cecil’s work at Cambridge had been on the Indian Mutiny, for some reason. Was that anything to do with the Cathars? Who were the Cathars, in the first place?

‘Or have I got that wrong?’

‘Well…’ Paul paused. ‘His research – which he never finished, by the way – was on General Havelock.’

‘Oh, well, not the Cathars at all,’ said the man, though with a critical look at Paul, as though the mistake had somehow been his.

The other man, who was a little bit nicer, said, ‘I was just speaking to Dudley Valance, whom you must know, obviously, before dinner – he was up with Aldous Huxley and Macmillan, of course. Never took his degree.’

‘Well, nor did Macmillan, come to that,’ said the first man.

‘Didn’t stop him becoming Chancellor,’ said Paul.

‘That’s right,’ said the nicer man, and laughed cautiously.

‘That was all bloody Trevor-Roper’s doing,’ said the first man, with a bitter look, so that Paul saw he had ambled well-meaningly into some other academic minefield.

The meal unrolled in a further fuddle of wines, time was speeding past unnoticed and unmourned, he knew he was drinking too much, the fear of his own clumsiness mixing with a peculiar new sense of competence. He made it pretty clear to Ruth that he wasn’t interested in girls, but this only seemed to put them on to a more confusingly intimate footing. The Master clapped his hands and said a few words, and then everyone stood while the High Table filed out, the rest of them being invited to use a room whose name Paul didn’t catch for coffee and further refreshments. So perhaps tonight he wouldn’t get a shot at Dudley after all. But then outside in the quad, as cigarettes were lit and new groups formed and drifted off, Ruth kept him back, and then said, ‘Why don’t you slip into Common Room with me?’

‘Well, if you think that would be all right…’

‘I don’t want you to miss anything,’ she said.

So back they went, Paul now rather shy at getting what he wanted. At a first quick survey, over his coffee cup, he saw that Linette had been separated from her husband, and was standing talking to a group of men, one almost her own age, a couple of them younger than Paul. He attached himself to another small group round Jon Stallworthy, from which he could watch while nodding appreciatively at the conversation. Dudley was sitting on a long sofa at the other side of the room, with various Fellows and a good-looking younger woman who seemed to be flirting with him. His magnetism was physical, even in old age, and to certain minds no doubt class would come into it. Without him Linette seemed disoriented, an Englishwoman in her seventies, who lived much of the year abroad. She exacted some gallantry from the men, which went on in nervous swoops and laughs, small faltering sequences of jokes, perhaps to cover their own slight boredom and disorientation with her. And then, in a strange nerveless trance, Paul found himself accepting a glass of brandy, crossing the floor and joining the group around her – he didn’t know what he would say, it felt pointless and even perverse and yet, as a self-imposed dare, inescapable. She had a large jet brooch on her green jacket, a black flower in effect, which he examined as she talked. Her face, close-to, had a mesmerizing quality, fixed and photogenic, somehow consciously the face Dudley Valance had been pleased and proud to gaze on every day for half a century, as handsome as his own, in its way, and as disdainful of the impertinent modern world. She was having to say something about his work, but Paul had the feeling their lives and the people they saw were far from literary. He pictured them sitting in their fortified house, knocking back their fortified wine, their friends presumably the fellow expats of Antequera. And there was something else, about that stiff auburn mane, and those long black lashes – Paul knew in his bones that she hadn’t been born into Dudley’s world, even though she now wore its lacquered carapace. Anyway, it seemed his arrival had been more or less what the others were waiting for, and after a minute, with various courteous murmurs and nods they all moved off in different directions, leaving the two of them together. ‘I really must check on my husband,’ she said, looking past him, the gracious smile not yet entirely faded from her face. Paul had a feeling that all that was going to change when he said who he was. He said,

‘I’m so looking forward to your husband’s talk tomorrow, Lady Valance.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said, and he almost laughed, and then saw it was merely a general term of assent. She meant, what she then said, ‘It’s a great coup for you all to have got him here.’

‘I think everyone thinks the same,’ said Paul, then went on quickly, ‘I’m hoping he’ll be saying something about his brother.’

Linette’s head went back a little. It was as if she’d only vaguely heard that he had a brother. ‘Oh, good lord, no,’ she said, with a little shake. ‘No, no – he’ll be discussing his own work.’ And a new suspicion floated in her eyes, in the quick pinch of her lips and angling of the head. ‘I don’t think I caught your name.’

‘Oh – Paul Bryant.’ It semed absurd to be skulking around the truth, but he was glad to be able to say, ‘I’m covering the conference for the TLS.’

‘For the…?’ – she turned an ear.

‘The Times…’

‘Oh, really?’ And with a slightly awkward hesitation, ‘Did you write to my husband?’

Paul looked puzzled. ‘Oh, about Cecil, you mean? Yes, I did, as it happens…’

She glanced approvingly at Dudley. ‘I’m afraid all requests such as yours fall on very stony ground.’

‘Well, I don’t want to be any trouble to him…’ Paul seemed to glimpse the barren hillsides of Andalusia. ‘So you’ve had others…’

‘Oh, every few years, you know, someone wants to poke about in Cecil’s papers, and one just knows from the start that it would be a disaster, so it’s best simply to say no.’ She was rather jolly about it. ‘I mean, his letters were published – I don’t know if you saw those?’

‘Well, of course!’ said Paul, unable to tell if anything here was in his favour. She seemed to be inviting him to agree he was a disaster in the making.

‘And you’ve read my husband’s books?’

‘I certainly have.’ It was time to be sternly flattering. ‘Black Flowers, obviously, is a classic – ’

‘Then I’m sorry to tell you you’ve really read everything he has to say about old… um… Cecil.’

Paul smiled as if at the great bonus of what Dudley had already given them; but did go on, ‘There are still one or two things…’

Linette was distracted. But she turned back to him after five seconds, again with her look of haughty humour, which made him unsure if she was mocking him or inviting him to share in her mockery of something else. ‘There’s been some extraordinary nonsense written.’

‘Has there…?’ Paul rather wanted to know what it was.

She made an oh-crikey face: ‘Extraordinary nonsense!’

‘Lady Valance? I don’t know if this would be a good moment?’ The elderly don had come back. ‘Forgive my breaking in…’

‘Oh, for the… um…?’

‘Indeed, if you’d like to see…’ The smiling old man left just enough sense of a chore in his voice to make it clear he was doing her a favour which she couldn’t decline.

‘I don’t know if my husband…’ But her husband seemed perfectly happy. And by a miracle the old chap took her off, out of the room, the slight flirty wobble of her high heels glimpsed beneath the raised wing of his gown, leaving Paul free at last to approach his prize.

In fact it was Martin who brought him in – ‘Sir Dudley, I’m not sure if you’ve met – ’

‘Well, no, we haven’t yet,’ said Paul, bending to shake hands, which seemed to irritate Dudley, and went on cheerfully, before anyone could say his name, ‘I’m writing up the conference for the TLS.’ Martin of course knew about the Cecil job, but probably not about Dudley’s resistance to it.

‘Ah, yes, the TLS,’ said Dudley, as Paul further found himself being offered the low armchair at right-angles to him at the end of the sofa. He was in the presence, with a need no doubt to say his piece. ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with the TLS,’ Dudley went on, with a narrow smile that wasn’t exactly humorous.

‘Oh, dear!’ said Paul, his clutched brandy glass seeming to impose a new way of performing on him, a sort of simmering joviality. But Dudley’s smile remained fixed on his next remark:

‘They once gave me a very poor review.’

‘Oh, I’m surprised… what was that for?’

‘Eh? A book of mine called The Long Gallery.’

The mock-modesty of the formulation made this less amusing, though a man on the other side laughed and said, ‘That would be what, sixty years ago?’

‘Mm, a bit before my time,’ Paul said, and put his head back rather steeply to get at the brandy in the bottom of his glass. He found Dudley disconcerting, in his sharpness and odd passive disregard for things around him, as if conserving his energy, perhaps just a question of age. He seemed to show he had fairly low expectations of the present company and the larger event they were part of, whilst no doubt thinking his own part in it quite important. Paul wanted to bring the talk round to Cecil before Linette got back, but without disclosing his plans. Then he heard an American graduate he’d met briefly earlier say, ‘I don’t know how you would rate your brother’s work, sir?’

‘Oh…’ Dudley slumped slightly; but he was courteous enough, perhaps liked to be asked for a bad opinion. ‘Well, you know… it looks very much of its time now, doesn’t it? Some pretty phrases – but it didn’t ever amount to anything very much. When I looked at “Two Acres” again a few years ago I thought it had really needed the War to make its point – it seems hopelessly sentimental now.’

‘Oh, I grew up on it,’ said another man, half-laughing, not exactly disagreeing.

‘Mm, so did I…’ said Paul quietly over his balloon.

‘It always rather amused me,’ said Dudley, ‘that my brother, who was heir to three thousand acres, should be best known for his ode to a mere two.’ This was exactly the joke that he had made in Black Flowers, and it didn’t go down very well in the Balliol SCR – there was a little sycophantic laughter, most prominently from Paul himself. ‘Ah…!’ General Colthorpe had come back in, and even in a civilian context there was an uneasy movement among a number of them to stand up.

‘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.

‘It’s a subject, of course, I wrote about myself,’ said Dudley, in a strange airy tone.

‘Well – indeed,’ said the General, perhaps less on top of the younger brother’s work, or uneasy with its tone about army life in general. As a cultured person from the world of action and power, General Colthorpe, with his long intellectual face and keen inescapable eye, was so imposing that Dudley himself began to look rather pansy and decadent in comparison, with his beautiful cuff-links and his silver-headed stick, and the grey curls over his collar at the back. The General frowned apologetically. ‘I was wondering – there’s not been a Life, I think, has there?’

Paul’s heart began to race, and he blushed at the naming of this still half-secret desire. ‘Well…!’ said Martin, and smiled across at him.

‘Of Sizzle, no,’ said Dudley. ‘There’s really not enough there. George Sawle did a very thorough job on the Letters a few years back – almost too thorough, dug out a lot of stuff about the girlfriends and so on: my brother had a great appetite for romantic young women. Anyway, I gave Sawle a free hand – he’s a sound fellow, I’ve known him for years.’ Dudley looked around with a hint of caution in this academic setting. ‘And of course there’s the old memoir, you know, that Sebby Stokes did – perfectly good, shows its age a bit, but it tells you all the facts.’

This left Paul in a very absurd position. He sat forward, and had just started to say, ‘As a matter of fact, Sir Dudley, I was wondering-’ when Linette reappeared, alone, at the far end of the room.

‘Ah, there you are…’ Dudley called out, with an odd mixture of mockery and relief.

Linette came towards them, in her still fascinating way, pleased to be looked at, smiling as if nursing something just a little too wicked to say. The General stood up, and then one or two others, half-ashamed not to have thought of it. Linette knew she had to speak, but hesitated appealingly. ‘Darling, the… Senior Dean’s just been showing me the most marvellous… what would one call it…?’ – she smiled uncertainly.

‘I don’t know, my love.’

She gave a pant of a laugh. ‘It was a sort of… very large… very lovely…’ – she raised a hand, which described it even more vaguely.

‘Animal, vegetable or mineral,’ said Dudley.

‘Now you’re being horrid,’ she said, with a playful pout, so that Paul felt admitted for a second to a semi-public performance, such as friends might see on the patio or whatever it was in Antequera: it was a little embarrassing, but carried off by their quite unselfconscious confidence of being a fascinating couple. ‘I was going to say, I hope they’re not tiring you, but now I rather hope they are!’

‘Lady Valance,’ said General Colthorpe, offering his chair.

‘Thank you so much, General, but I’m really rather tired myself.’ She looked across at Dudley with teasing reproach. ‘Don’t you think?’ she said.

‘You go, my love, I’m going to sit and jaw a bit longer with these good people’ – again the courtesy unsettled by the flash of a smile, like a sarcasm; though perhaps he really did want to make the most of this rare occasion to talk with young readers and scholars; or perhaps, Paul thought, as Martin jumped up to conduct her back to the Master’s lodgings, what Dudley really wanted was another large whisky.

The next morning Paul woke to the sound of a tolling bell, with a hangover that felt much worse for the comfortless strangeness of Greg Hudson’s room. He lay with a knuckle pressed hard against the pain in his forehead, as if in intensive thought. All he thought about was last night, in startling jumps and queasy circlings of recollection. He felt contempt for his juvenile weakness as a drinker, pitted against the octogenarian’s glassy-eyed appetite and capacity. He remembered with a squeezing of the gut the moment when he found himself talking about Corinna, and Dudley’s stare, at a spot just beyond Paul’s right shoulder, which he’d mistaken at first for tender gratitude, even a sort of bashful encouragement, but which turned out after twenty-five seconds to be the opposite, an icy refusal of any such intimacy. Thank god Martin the young English don had come back at that point. And yet at the end, perhaps because of the drink, there had been something forthright and friendly, hadn’t there, in the way they’d parted? On the doorstep of the Master’s lodgings, under the lamp, Dudley’s wincing gloom broken up in a grin, a seizing of the moment, an effusive goodnight: Paul could hear it now – no one had spoken to him since, and the sound of the words remained available, unerased. ‘Yes, see you in the morning!’ If he could get round Linette, there might be a chance of another conversation, with the tape running. Most of the other things Dudley had said last night he’d completely forgotten.

When he got out of bed, Paul was lurchingly surprised to find Greg’s unwashed jock-strap and one or two other intimate items scattered across the floor, but the awful blurred recollections of his late-night antics were overwhelmed by the need to get to the lavatory; which he did just in time. After he’d been sick, in one great comprehensive paragraph, he felt an almost delicious weakness and near-simultaneous improvement; his headache didn’t vanish, but it lightened and receded, and when he shaved a few minutes later he watched his face reappearing in stripes with a kind of proud fascination.

Dudley didn’t come to breakfast in hall, of course, so at 9.20 Paul went down to the phone at the foot of the staircase and dialled the extension of the lodgings. He felt still the oddly enjoyable tingle of weakness and disorientation. The phone was answered by a helpful secretary, and almost at once Dudley was saying, in a nice gentlemanly way, and with perhaps a hint of tactical frailty to pre-empt any unwelcome request, ‘Dudley Valance…?’

‘Oh, good morning, Sir Dudley – it’s Paul…!’ It was simply the sort of contact he had dreamed of.

There was a moment’s thoughtful and potentially worrying silence, and then a completely charming ‘Paul, oh, thank god…’

‘Ah…!’ – Paul laughed with relief, and after a second Dudley did the same. ‘I hope this isn’t too early to call you.’

‘Not at all. Good of you to ring. I’m sorry, for a ghastly moment just then I thought it was Paul Bryant.’

Paul didn’t know why he was sniggering too, as the colour rushed to his face and he looked round quickly to check that no one could see or hear him. ‘Oh… um…’ It was as bad as something overheard, a shocking glimpse of himself – and of Dudley too: he saw in a moment the intractable delicacy of the problem, the shouldering of the insult was the exposure of the gaffe… and yet already he was blurting out, ‘Actually it is Paul Bryant, um…’

‘Oh, it is,’ said Dudley, ‘I’m so sorry!’ with a momentary bleak laugh. ‘How very unfortunate!’

Still too confused to feel the shock fully, Paul said incoherently, ‘I won’t trouble you now, Sir Dudley. I’ll see you at your lecture.’ And he hung up the phone again and stood staring at it incredulously.

It was during General Colthorpe’s talk on Wavell that Paul suddenly understood, and blushed again, with the indignant but helpless blush of foolish recognition. Very discreetly, under the desk, he got out Daphne Jacobs’s book from his briefcase. It was somewhere in the passage on Dudley’s exploits as a practical joker, those efforts she retailed as classics of wit and cleverly left it to the reader to wonder at their cruelty or pointlessness. As before, he felt General Colthorpe was watching him particularly, and even accusingly, from behind his lectern, but with infinite dissimulation he found the place, her account of her first visit to Corley, and looking up devotedly at the General between sentences he read the now obvious description of Dudley taking a telephone call from his brother:

The well-known voice came through, on a very poor line, from the telegraph office in Wantage: ‘Dud, old man, it’s Cecil here, can you hear me?’ Dudley paused, with the grin of feline villainy that was so amusing to anyone not the subject of his pranks, and then said, with a quick laugh of pretended relief, ‘Oh, thank god!’ Cecil could be heard faintly, but with genuine surprise and concern, ‘Everything all right?’ To which Dudley, his eye on himself in the mirror and on me in the hallway behind him, replied, ‘For a frightful moment I thought you were my brother Cecil.’ I was confused at first, and then astonished. I knew all about teasing from my own brothers, but this was the most audacious bit of teasing even I had ever heard. It was a joke I later heard him play on several other friends, or enemies, as they then unexpectedly found themselves to be. Cecil, of course, merely said ‘You silly ass!’ and carried on with the call; but the trick came back to my mind often, in later years, when a telephone call from Cecil was no longer remotely on the cards.

7

Paul wrote in his diary:

April 13, 1980 (Cecil’s 89th birthday!) /10.30pm.

I’m writing this up from skeleton notes while I can still remember it fairly well. On the coach back from Birmingham I started to play back the tape of the interview and found it goes completely dead after a couple of minutes: the battery in the mike must have given out. Amazing after twenty interviews that it should happen with this one – now I have no documentary proof for the most important material so far. Astounding revelations (if true!)

My appt was for 2.30. The Sawles have lived in the same house (17 Chilcot Ave, Solihull) since the 1930s: a large semi, red brick, with a black-and-white gable at the front. It was new when they bought it. George Sawle walked me round the garden before I left, and pointed out the ‘Tudor half-timbering’: he said everyone at the university thought it was screamingly funny that 2 historians lived in a mock-Tudor house. A pond in the back garden, full of tadpoles, which interested him greatly, and a rockery. He held my arm as we went round. He said there had been a ‘very ambitious rockery’ at ‘Two Acres’, where he and Hubert and Daphne had played games as children – he has always liked rockeries. Hubert was killed in the First World War. Their father died of diphtheria in 1903 ‘or thereabouts’ and Freda Sawle in ‘about 1938’ (‘I’m afraid I’m rather bad with dates’). GFS told me with some pride that he was 84, but earlier he’d said 76. (He is 85.)

Madeleine opened the door when I arrived – she complained at some length about her arthritis, which she seemed to blame largely on me. Walks with an elbow-crutch (shades of Mum). Said, ‘I don’t know if you’ll get much sense out of him.’ She was candid, but not friendly; not sure if she remembered me from Daphne’s 70th. Her deafness much worse than thirteen years ago, but she looks just the same. Her sense of humour is really no more than an irritable suspicion that someone else might find something funny. She said, ‘I’m only giving you an hour – even that may be too much’ – which was a completely new condition, and put me in a bit of a flap.

GFS was in his study – looked confused when I came in, but then brightened up when I said why I was there. ‘Ah, yes, poor old Cecil, dear old Cecil!’ A kind of slyness, as if to imply he really knew all along, but much more friendly than I remember at D’s 70th – in fact by the end rather too friendly (see below!) Now completely bald on top, the white beard long and straggly, looks a bit mad. Bright mixed-up clothes, red check shirt under green pullover, old pin-stripe suit-trousers hitched up so tight you don’t quite know where to look. I reminded him we’d met before, and he accepted the idea cheerfully, but later he said, ‘It’s a great shame we didn’t meet before.’ At first I was emb by his forgetfulness – why is it emb when people repeat themselves? Then I felt that as he didn’t know, and there was no one else there, it didn’t matter; it was a completely private drama. He sat in the chair beside his desk and I sat in a low armchair – I felt it must be like a tutorial. Books on 3 walls, the room lived-in but dreary.

I asked him straight away how he had met Cecil (which oddly he doesn’t say in the intro to the Letters). ‘At Cambridge. He got me elected to the Apostles. I’m not supposed to talk about that, of course’ (looking rather coy). What they called ‘suitable’ undergraduates were singled out and assessed, but the Society was so secret they didn’t know they were being vetted for it. ‘C was my “father”, as they called it. He took a shine to me, for some reason.’ I said he must have been suitable. ‘I must, mustn’t I?’ he said and gave me a funny look. Said, ‘I was extremely shy, and C was the opposite. You felt thrilled to be noticed by him.’ What was he like in those days? He was ‘a great figure in the college’, but he did too many things. Missed a First in the History tripos, because he was always off doing something else; he was easily bored, with activities and people. He sat for a fellowship twice but didn’t get it. He was always playing rugger or rowing or mountaineering. ‘Not in Cambs, presumably?’ GFS laughed. ‘He climbed in Scotland, and sometimes in the Dolomites. He was very strong, and had very large hands. The figure on his tomb is quite wrong, it shows him with almost a girl’s hands.’

C also loved acting – he was in a French play they did every year for several years. ‘But he was a very bad actor. He made all the characters he played just like himself. In Dom Juan by Molière (check) he played the servant, which was quite beyond him.’ Did C not understand other people? GFS said it was his upbringing, he (C) believed his family and home were very important, and in a ‘rather innocent’ way thought everyone else would be interested in them too. Was he a snob? ‘It wasn’t snobbery exactly, more an unthinking social confidence.’ What about his writing? GFS said he was self-confident about that too, wrote all those poems about Corley Court. I said he wrote love poems as well. ‘Yes, people thought he was a sort of upper-class Rupert Brooke. Upper class but second rate.’ I said I couldn’t work out from the Letters how well C knew Brooke – there are 2 or 3 sarcastic mentions, and nothing in Keynes’s edition of RB’s letters. ‘Oh, he knew him – he was in the Society too, of course. RB was 3 or 4 years older. They didn’t get on.’ He said C was jealous of RB in many ways, C was naturally competitive and he was overshadowed by him, as a poet and ‘a beauty’. Wasn’t C v good-looking? GFS said ‘he was very striking, with wicked dark eyes that he used to seduce people with. Rupert was a flawless beauty, but Cecil was much stronger and more masculine. He had an enormous cock.’ I checked that the tape was still going round nicely and wrote this down before I looked at GFS again – he was matter-of-fact but did look vaguely surprised at what he’d just heard himself say. I said I supposed he’d gone swimming with C. ‘Well, on occasion,’ he said, as if not seeing the point of the question. ‘C was always taking his clothes off, he was famous for it.’ Hard to know what to say next. I said were there real people behind all the love-poems? This was really my central question. He said, ‘Oh, yes.’ I said Margaret Ingham and D of course. ‘Miss Ingham was a blue stocking and a red herring’ (laughed). I felt I should come out with it. Did C seduce men as well as women? He looked at me as if there’d been a slight misunderstanding. ‘C would fuck anyone,’ he said.

At this point MS’s crutch whacked against the door and she came in with a couple of coffees on a tray. GFS has prostate trouble, but says coffee is good for his memory. ‘I’m starting to get a bit forgetful,’ he said. ‘A bit!’ said MS. GFS (quietly): ‘Well, you don’t always hear what I say, you know, dear.’ She said coffee excited him and made him confused about things; he continually got things wrong. She talked about him in the third person. GFS said, ‘Peter’s asking me about Cecil at Cambridge.’ She didn’t correct him, and nor did I (later I became Simon, and by the time I left I was Ian). ‘I remember C very well, though, dear.’ MS rather squashed me, perching on the arm of my chair; she said she’d never met C, but she took a dim view of the other Valances. Old Sir Edwin seemed nice enough, though he only talked nonsense by the time she knew him, and before that apparently he had only talked about cows; he’d always been a great bore. C’s mother was a tyrant and a bully. Dudley was unstable – he’d had a bad war and afterwards he used it as an excuse to attack friend and foe alike. I said, could he not be charming too? His first novel was very funny, and D’s book describes him as ‘magnetic’. ‘Perhaps to a certain type of woman. Daphne was always easily charmed. I was relieved when they split up, and we never had to go there again. Corley Court was a ghastly place.’ Having soured the atmosphere thoroughly, she went out again. GFS however seems not to take much notice of her – he makes the requisite signals and potters along in serene vagueness about the recent past, though events of 60 or more years ago are clear to him (‘clearer than ever’, he said, as if to say I was in luck). Still, he jumps around and is hard to follow. (He now spoke incoherently about WW1, when he was in military intelligence – nothing to do with C.)

I wanted to bring him back to what he’d been saying before we were interrupted. It took me a while to realize he’d lost what little sense he’d had of who I was – I reminded him tactfully. I said I’d recently met Dudley for the first time. ‘Oh, Dudley Valance, you mean?’ GFS then launched into a thing about Dud, how he’d been ‘stunningly attractive, but in a very dangerous way, very sexy’. Much more than C – he had marvellous legs and teeth. Dud was always naughty, satirical. C was his parents’ favourite, and Dud resented this, he was always making trouble. Later he became a frightful shit. I said in one of C’s letters he called Dud a womanizer. GFS said this was just a word they all used then for a heterosexual man, it didn’t mean anything. ‘Lytton and people always said it – they were all terrified of women.’ But C wasn’t, I said. ‘He was and he wasn’t, he didn’t understand women any more than he did servants.’ I said he (GFS) hadn’t made it clear about ‘womanizer’ in the Letters. Didn’t it create a misleading impression? He said Dud had read the book and didn’t object. He probably quite liked people to think he had been a Lothario. The thing about Dud in fact was that he wasn’t very keen on ‘all that’: he liked to play with women. After Wilf was born it more or less stopped – it was very hard for D. It was all part of his mental trouble after the War.

I asked had he been surprised when D suddenly married Dud? GFS: ‘It happened all the time. Women often married the brother of someone they were engaged to who was killed in the War. It was a form of remembrance in a way, it was a form of loyalty, and there was some kind of auto-suggestion to it. The young woman didn’t have to go searching for another man when there was a similar one already to hand.’ Were C and Dud particularly similar? ‘They lived in the same house, and D had a thing about Corley from the day she met C. C was D’s first love, but she was in awe of him. She was closer in age to Dud, and got on well with him from the start.’ I said how C had written to both D and Ingham from France saying ‘will you be my widow?’ but was he actually engaged to D? He said, ‘I don’t think so, though of course there was the child.’ What child was that? Here GFS looked genuinely confused for a minute, then he said, ‘Well, the girl, wasn’t it…’ He sipped at his coffee, still looking doubtful. ‘You see I’m not sure she knows about it.’ I said did he mean Corinna? He said yes. I said, well you know she died three years ago. It was an awful moment, his old face looked really helpless with worry, and then anger coming through, as if I was lying to him. I said she’d had lung cancer, and this did make some sort of sense to him. ‘Poor old Leslie,’ he said, but I didn’t feel I could say anything about Leslie’s suicide. He muttered about how awful it was, but I saw him coming to accept it, with a rather sulky look. He said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter then.’ I still didn’t know what he meant. I said, ‘What about Corinna?’ Now I must get this right: he said that on C’s last leave, two weeks before he was killed, he had spent the night with D in London, and got her pregnant. (In her book D says they had supper in a restaurant and then she went home.) So did Dud think he was Corinna’s father? GFS didn’t know.

Of course I was incredibly excited by this, but at the same time I was worrying about the dates. Corinna was born in 1917, but when? I was furious that she was dead: the discovery of a living child would have been the making of the book! It gave me goose-bumps to think that that woman I’d seen several times a week until I left the bank might have been C’s daughter. Even her difficult and snobbish aspects, and her clear sense of having come down in the world, took on a more romantic and forgivable character. All that time, and I hadn’t known. And now she’s gone. Bad pangs of missed-chance syndrome, so that I’m telling myself, and even half-hoping, that it isn’t true. I said to GFS that Corinna and Wilf both look(ed) exactly like Dud. It seemed rude, and probably fairly pointless, to challenge him. I said, had D herself told him this? He said, ‘Well, you know…’

I decided I needed to go to the loo. MS was sitting in the hall by the telephone, as if ready to call for my taxi. Wondered if I could ask her what she knew, but some desire to protect GFS himself prevented me. Wondered about their marriage. I suppose she is anxious about him misbehaving in some way, she is grim but her worries come out; she said he is on heart drugs that react badly with his dementia, they can be very disinhibiting; alcohol is completely banned. I didn’t like to say that he seemed fairly disinhibited without alcohol. (What I don’t know, of course, is if he shares all these secrets – or speculations? – with her.)

When I got back I had to help him back again into what we were doing. I thought I’d ask him about Revel Ralph. (Not strictly relevant for the book, but I wanted to know.) ‘Oh, I loved RR, he was a charmer, very attractive, very sexy, though not in a conventional way. You know he married my sister. She ran away with him – it was a great scandal at the time, because Dud was always in the papers. He despised publicity, but he couldn’t do without it. Actually he didn’t seem to mind very much – he married a model, you know, a leggy blonde. She was a frightful bitch.’ I asked if D and RR were happy together. He said RR was much nicer than Dud, and younger of course – they didn’t have much money, but they became quite a famous couple too – they lived in Chelsea. ‘I used to say they lived on the mere luxuries of life. [This is the phrase D uses in her own book.] You know, Picassos on the wall, and the children with holes in their clothes. Wilf adored Revel, but Corinna disapproved of him. RR was a well-known stage designer. He was queer, and rather a weak character. D always fell for difficult men who couldn’t love her properly – they couldn’t give her what she wanted. RR became a drug addict, and they both drank like fishes.’ I asked if D had taken drugs. ‘I expect so. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she had tried it.’ Had he seen much of her in the 1930s? ‘We were never at all close. Well, she’s still alive, you know.’ Me: ‘But you don’t see her?’ I think he was genuinely unsure about this: ‘I don’t think we see much of each other now.’

Was RR unfaithful to D? (The questions were very basic, but I felt the ‘disinhibition’ combined with the forgetfulness made it perfectly all right.) ‘I’m sure he was. RR was very highly sexed, he would fuck anyone.’ (I laughed at this, but he seemed not to know why. Sensed he felt everyone else had had a lot more sex than he had.) Me: ‘What about the son she had with RR, Jenny Ralph’s father, had he known him?’ ‘Well, there was a son, but of course RR wasn’t the father.’ Again, I thought I mustn’t startle him by showing my surprise. Again he gave me the confidential look: ‘Well, I don’t think it’s any secret that the child’s father was a painter called Mark Gibbons. They had an affair.’ I imagined Mark Gibbons would fuck anyone too, but didn’t like to ask. Remembered seeing him at D’s 70th, dancing with her, so perhaps something in it. (Note: is MG still alive? Could he have known C? Also does Jenny Ralph know who her grandfather is?) ‘I’m pretty sure that’s right,’ he said, ‘but you’d better keep it under your hat.’ I didn’t promise this.

I asked if he had any photos of C. ‘I’m sure I have!’ He went over to a low shelf on the far side of the room, where dozens of what looked like old albums and scrap-books were stacked up, and started hoiking them out on to a table there. Looking at him stooping, arse in the air, his tongue between his teeth as he grunted and squinted, I thought of the pictures in Jonah’s book of GFS at 19, that prim but secretive look that I’d thought was a bit like me. I said there were some good photos in the Letters. ‘Oh, were there?’ he said. But what I wanted was photos of GFS and C together. ‘That’s just what I’m looking for,’ he said. He pulled up a large album in floppy covers, and as he lifted it on to the table a number of small photos slid out and fell to the floor here and there. Obviously the old mounts had perished. I picked up one or two of them, and noted where others had fallen (inc the fantastic one of C reading aloud to Blanchard and Ragley, which was in the Letters).

‘Now, let me see…’ – there was a definite sense that neither of us knew what we were going to find. He supported himself lightly on my arm, stooping across in front of me to peer at particular pictures, so that his bald head and beard blocked my view, though he nattered on as if I could see what he was looking at. The albums go right back to late-Victorian sepia portraits of his parents’ families (Freda Sawle was half-Welsh, apparently, her uncle a well-known singer). GFS was easily distracted, squinting to read the inscriptions in white ink, puzzling things out and correcting himself, breathing in hot gasps over the page. I said I believed Hubert had had a camera. ‘Quite so. I remember Harry Hewitt gave it to him.’ Here was old HH again – I wondered what GFS’s line on him would be. ‘HH was a v rich man, who lived in Harrow Weald. He was in import/export, glass and china and so on, with Germany. Some people thought he was a spy.’ Me: ‘But he wasn’t?’ GFS squeezed my arm and giggled: ‘I don’t think so. He was queer, you know, he was in love with my brother Hubert, who was killed in the War.’ But Hubert didn’t reciprocate? ‘Hubert wasn’t at all that way himself. He was very shy. HH kept giving him expensive presents, which became emb for him.’ I said hadn’t C known HH? ‘They met when C was staying at 2A one time, and became friends of a sort.’ Was HH in love with C too? ‘Probably not, he was very loyal – he wanted someone to protect and help. C had too much money for HH to fancy him.’ Would C have flirted with him? ‘More than likely’ (laughed).

‘Now, here we are, Simon!’ A number of pictures of ‘poor old C’ – the best of them already in the Letters, the one of C in shorts with a rugger ball, looking furious: ‘You can see what marvellous legs he had!’ Me: ‘I’d like to reproduce that one.’ GFS: ‘Where would you do it?’ Me: ‘In the book I’m writing about C.’ GFS: ‘Oh, yes, I think you should. What a good idea. You know there’s never been a book about him. I’m glad you’re going to do that, it will be quite an eye-opener.’ There was a little group at 2A, on the lawn with the house behind, so that I could recognize it, C and D and GFS and a large old woman in black. ‘That was a German woman who lived near us – my mother took pity on her. She was at the Wagner festival in Germany when the War broke out, and she couldn’t get back to England. Her house was smashed up by the local people. When she came back after the war my mother sort of took her under her wing. We all rather dreaded her, though probably she was perfectly all right. Now, here’s C and me – that’s an interesting picture, though my wife doesn’t think it’s very good of me.’ I leant forward to look at it, GFS resting his hand on my shoulder. ‘That’s at Corley Court – you could get out on to the roof.’ After a moment I recognized the place exactly, from the two or three times Peter took me up there. I said, ‘You could climb up through the laundry-room.’ GFS: ‘Yes, that was it, you see.’ It showed C and GFS, leaning against a chimney, C with no shirt on, GFS with his shirt half undone, looking bashful but excited. A tiny photo, of course, but clear – C’s strong wiry body, bit of black hair on his chest, and running down his stomach, one arm raised against the chimney with biceps standing up sharp. He is smiling in a sneering sort of way, and looks much older than GFS, who always seems v self-conscious in the presence of a camera. He was quite handsome at 20 – odd glimpse of his white hairless chest: he looks like a schoolboy beside C. Me: ‘Who took it, I wonder?’ GFS: ‘I wonder too. Possibly my sister’ – which might help explain GFS’s look of confusion, if she’d just caught them at it. It gave me my first real idea of C’s body, and because the camera was like an intruder I suddenly felt what it must have been like to come into his presence – my subject! Very odd, and even a bit of a turn-on – as GFS seemed to feel, too: ‘I look positively debauched there, don’t I?’ he said. I said, ‘And were you?’ and felt his hand, rubbing my back encouragingly, move down not quite absent-mindedly to just above my waist. He said, ‘I’m afraid I probably was, you know.’

The atmosphere was now rather tense, and I glanced at him to see how conscious he was of it himself. ‘In what way, would you say?’ (shifting away a bit, but not wanting to startle him). He kept looking at the picture, breathing slowly but heavily, as if undecided: ‘Well, you know, in the normal ways,’ which I suppose was quite a good answer. I said something like, ‘Well, I don’t blame you!’ ‘Awful, isn’t it? I was quite a dish back then! And look at me now’ – turning his face to mine with a jut of his bearded chin while his hand moved down again in a determined little rubbing motion on to my bum.

So there we were, me and the famous (co-)author of An Everyday History of England, looking me in the eye with who knows what memories and conjectures, his hand appreciatively cupping my backside. I laughed awkwardly, but held his gaze for a moment, with a sort of curiosity and a sure sense now that C had touched him like this, nearly 70 years ago, and that probably I’d brought this on myself by freeing these memories in him. Also, that it didn’t matter in the least, this book-lined room was a place I was shortly going to leave, and leave him in, even the house itself would revert to the house I’d imagined for them before, a real Tudor house full of historical artefacts. I pictured the painstaking doodle I did round his name and Madeleine’s name on the title-page of their book when I was twelve or so; and now for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, and wondered how I would take it – I almost wanted him to, in a way – but he looked down, and as he did so I thought suddenly, well, this is a history I’m going to write. I went on politely, ‘And what about all C’s letters to you? You said they were lost?’ He said, ‘Yes, you see, I couldn’t say exactly what happened. My mother destroyed them, she burned almost all of them. By the way’ – his hand still clutching my left buttock, but now more as if he needed it for support than for any fun he was getting out of it – ‘better not mention this to my wife.’ It wasn’t at all clear what the ‘this’ referred to. ‘All right,’ I said, and he let go. GFS: ‘Oh, they were a great loss, a loss to literature. Though fairly hair-raising, some of them!’

As soon as we’d sat down again MS came in and said she was going to ring for a minicab. We went out into the hall. MS insisted on ringing herself: reading glasses, the number looked up in an old address book, an impatient tone when she got through. She frowned into the mirror as she spoke, admiring her own no-nonsense handling of the person she kept mishearing. ‘Twenty minutes!’ she said; so there was a strange gap to fill. She said, ‘I hope you’ll use your judgement about what my husband said to you?’ I thought what a scary teacher she must have been; said I hoped so too. ‘Really I shouldn’t have let him see you, he’s very confused.’ I said he probably knew more about C than anyone alive. MS: ‘And I’m afraid I have to ask you, did he give you anything to take away – any documents or anything?’ I said I’d taken nothing apart from notes, but he had promised to lend me photos for the book. She looked at me very squarely, which of course I can deal with; then she considered my briefcase, but at this point the study door opened and GFS came wandering out. ‘Oh, hello!’ he said – looked very interested to see me. ‘Paul’s just going, dear,’ said MS (a first slip into first-name terms). ‘Yes, yes…’ – he has quite a cunning smile for covering up about things which are obviously just at the edge of (very recent) memory, a tone of forbearance towards her, almost. MS: ‘Did you enjoy your chat, George?’ GFS: ‘Oh, very much, dear, yes,’ with a look at me that could have been a stealthy attempt to work out who I was or a much more mischievous mental replay of feeling me up. MS: ‘And what did you talk about? I don’t suppose you remember.’ GFS: ‘Oh, you’d be surprised.’ Then he proposed the potter round the garden, which MS allowed, though I was a bit more anxious, after the incident indoors. But clearly my polite pretence that nothing had happened was soon rendered meaningless by his forgetting that anything had. ‘Have a look at the tadpoles, George,’ she said. Which we duly did, MS watching from the window the whole time. ‘Wriggly little buggers,’ GFS called them.

8

Didcot and then Swindon came by, with remote tugs of allegiance that distracted him, as the half-familiar outskirts slipped away, from the bigger tug of his mission to Worcester Shrub Hill. He treasured the length of the journey, and had a childish feeling, in the bright placeless run among farms and the gentle tilts of the earth one way or the other, that the important interview with Daphne Jacobs was all the time being magically deferred; though with each long deceleration and stop (Stroud, was it?, a little later Stonehouse) the end came inescapably closer. Of course he wanted to be there, in Olga, as Daphne’s house was surprisingly called, and he also wanted to be cradled all day in this pleasant underpopulated train. He couldn’t even bring himself to prepare; he had written out a series, or flight, of questions, up which he hoped to lead her towards a steady light at the top, but his briefcase, heavy with bookmarked evidence, stayed untouched on the seat beside him.

Some time after Stonehouse, the train made a long threading descent of the western edge of the Cotswolds into what seemed a vast plain beyond, half-hidden in murky sunlight. Paul had never been so far in this direction. The sensation of entering a whole new region of his own island was dreamlike but unsettling. A few minutes later they were sliding quite fast into Gloucester station, the knots of people on the platform, hikers, soldiers, closing in and moving along with their eyes fixed anxiously or threateningly on the rapidly braking train. Well, there was still Cheltenham to come before Worcester.

In a minute, however, he had to move his things for a woman and two children to sit down, she nagging at them distractedly, her own face taut with worry, and when the train began to move again he found the romance of the journey from London, which they knew nothing about, had been left behind for ever, and a period of compromise and cohabitation had begun. Paul kept his briefcase on the table, leaving little room for the boy to spread his colouring book. His dislike of children, with their protean ability to embarrass him, seemed to focus in his scowl over The Short Gallery, which he rather brandished in their faces. The fact that he was about to conduct an interview of enormous importance to his own book, and therefore to his future life, was squeezing and trapping him like the onset of some illness undetectable to anyone else. If what George had said was right, then Paul’s conversations with Daphne, today and again tomorrow, were bound to be a peculiar game, in which he would have to pretend not to know the thing he was most hoping to get her to own up to.

He looked through the first chapter again, which was her ‘portrait’ of Cecil:

On this fine June night, which was to be the last time I saw him, Cecil took me to Jenner’s for a Spartan supper of the kind which seems to a love-struck girl to be a perfect love-feast. Pea soup, I remember, and a leg of chicken, and a strawberry blancmange. Neither of us, I think, cared a hoot what we ate. It was the chance to be together, under the magic cloak of our own strong feelings, out of the noise of war, that counted above all. When we had done we walked the streets for an hour, down to the Embankment, watching the light pass on the broad stretches of the river. The next day, Cecil was to re-embark for France, and the mighty thrust that we knew was coming. He didn’t ask me then – it was to be in his last letter, a few days later – if I would marry him, but the evening air seemed charged with the largest questions. Our talk, meanwhile, was of simple and happy things. He saw me into a cab which would take me to my train at Marylebone, and my last sight of him was against the great black columns of St Martin-in-the-Fields, waving his cap, and then turning abruptly away into the future we both imagined with such excitement, and such dread.

Perhaps it was just a reflection of his own habits, but Paul didn’t believe anyone remembered all the courses of a meal they’d eaten four years ago, much less sixty-four; whereas (again perhaps reflecting his own fairly limited experience) they always remembered having sex. The worrying air of cliché and unreality about the whole of this scene was only heightened by the leg of chicken and the strawberry blancmange, which in some way Paul didn’t like to think about seemed to stand in for the blandly concealed truth of a night spent at the Valances’ Marylebone flat – even the naming of the station was a cover. And what, come to that, of Cecil preparing for a ‘mighty thrust’?

Chewing his lip, Paul examined Daphne’s photo on the back flap of the jacket. She appeared three-quarter length, in a plain dark suit and blouse and a single string of pearls, looking out with a half-smile and a certain generalized charm, caused perhaps by her not having her glasses on. Immediately behind her was an archway, through which a grand hall and staircase could dimly be made out. When you looked very closely at her face you saw it was a subtly worked blur, silvery smooth from touching up around the eyes and under the chin; the photographer had taken fifteen or twenty years off her. The whole thing gave the impression of a good-looking, even marriageable woman of means in a setting whose splendour needed only to be hinted at. It was hard to relate her to the bedraggled old figure he’d rescued in the street. None the less, the suggestion that the other persona existed was subtly unnerving.

At Worcester he was suddenly cheerful to be on the move; he queued for a taxi, the first one he had taken since their joint journey the previous November: Cathedral Cars. He mustered a breezy tone with the driver as they left the city and the meter started flickering in cheerful green increments. He thought he would enjoy the small country roads more on the way back – as yet he was looking straight through the barns and hedges to the imagined scene he had set up at Olga. They came into Staunton St Giles, past the lodge-gates of a big house and then along a wide unattractive street of semi-detached council houses; a war memorial, with a church beyond, a village shop and Post Office, a pub, the Black Bear, where he almost felt like stopping first, but it was a minute or two from closing time. ‘Do you know where Olga is?’ Paul asked the driver.

‘Ooh, yes,’ he said, as if Olga were a well-known local character. A handsome stone house, the Old Vicarage, came by, a run of old cottages looking much more pleased with themselves than the rest of the village, a nice place for Daphne to spend her final years. The taxi slowed and turned down a side lane, and pulled up unexpectedly by the gate of a decrepit-looking bungalow. ‘Twelve pounds exactly,’ said the driver.

Paul waited till the taxi had turned the corner, then he walked a short way along the lane and took four or five photos of the bungalow, over the low garden wall, a documentary task that held off for a minute his heavy-hearted embarrassment at the state of the place. He came back, hiding the camera in his briefcase until later, when he’d worked out whether Daphne would mind being photographed herself. Sometimes, after the subjective indulgence of an interview, people found the crude fact of a photograph too jarring and intrusive.

The name OLGA was fashioned out of wrought iron, on the wrought-iron gate. Paul stepped in over the weedy gravel, and gazed round at the neglected garden, the grass tall and green in the roof-gutters, the dead climbing rose left swaying over the porch, an old Renault 12 with a rusty dent in the offside wing and green moss growing along the rubber sills of the windows. Two or three stripes of the lawn had been mown, perhaps a week ago, and the mower abandoned where it stood. The flower-beds were full of last year’s dead leaves. It all made him more flinchingly apprehensive about what he was going to find once he got indoors. He pressed the bell, a sleepy ding-dong that then repeated, all by itself, as if showing some impatience the caller might have hoped to conceal, and saw his face scarily distorted in the rippled glass of the front door; he seemed to run forward into their lives in waves. It was Wilfrid Valance who answered. He was just as Paul had remembered, and also, after thirteen more years of bumbling along as he was, alarmingly different, a wide-faced child with furrowed cheeks, and one defiant central tuft of grey hair fronting the bald plateau above. ‘How are you?’ said Paul.

‘Mm, you found us all right,’ said Wilfrid, with a twitch of a smile but not meeting his eye. Paul thought he saw that his visit was quite an occasion.

‘Well, just about…’ he said meaninglessly and handed over his coat and scarf. The hall was tiny, with other glass-panelled doors opening off it – a look of sixties brightness that had already become obscurely depressing. ‘And how is your mother?’ For a moment he felt a kind of awe, repressed till now, at being about to see her, the survivor, the friend of the long dead. And a twinge of something like envy at the thought of the friendship they might have had themselves if he hadn’t been a biographer.

‘Oh, she’s…’ – Wilfrid shook his head and grinned; Paul remembered his hesitations, like a suppressed stammer, in the middle of sentences, but this time the rest of the statement wasn’t forthcoming.

The sitting-room was stifling from a two-bar electric fire – a great thing like a fire-basket, with glowing fake coals showing dimly in the sunlight. There was a strong smell of burnt dust. Paul came in with a cheerful ‘Hello, Mrs Jacobs,’ determined not to show his shock at the state of the room. She was sitting almost with her back to him, in a wing-chair covered in shabby pink chintz. All around her was an astounding chaos of junk, so extreme that he knew he must simply ignore it. There was a worrying sense of the temporary grown permanent, piled-up objects adapting into furniture, covered by tablecloths and tipsily topped with lamps and vases and figurines.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, half-turning her head, but not looking at him, ‘Wilfrid’s put me right about you.’

‘Oh, yes…?’ – he laughed cautiously: so she was tackling the question of his review straight off.

‘You’re not the pianist.’

‘No, I’m not – you’re quite right,’ said Paul.

‘I have an excellent memory, Mummy, as you know,’ said Wilfrid, as if still contradicting her. ‘The pianist was a big… handsome fellow.’

‘Oh, what was he called? that charming young man… so talented…’

Paul groped round this for a moment, almost as if struggling to remember himself. ‘Peter Rowe, do you mean?’

‘Peter – you see, I rather liked him.’

‘Oh, yes, well…’ murmured Paul, coming round in front of her; she didn’t seem interested in shaking hands. She was wearing a thick grey skirt and a blouse under a shabby sleeveless cardigan. She gave him a calculating look, perhaps only the result of her not seeing him properly. After the first awkward moments, he absorbed this as a likely hazard of the hours ahead.

‘What became of him, I wonder?’

‘Peter? Oh, he’s doing all right, I think,’ said Paul blandly. He was standing in the small area between the fire and a low coffee-table heaped with books and newspapers, it was almost like a childish dare as the back of his calves got hotter and hotter.

‘Of course he taught at Corley Court – he was extremely interested in that house, you know.’

‘Oh he was,’ said Wilfrid, with a shake of the head.

‘Extremely interested. He wanted to put back all the jelly-mould ceilings and what-have-you that Dudley did away with.’

‘During your time, of course,’ said Paul encouragingly, as if the interview had already started. He moved round towards the armchair facing hers, and got out the tape-recorder from his briefcase in a slightly furtive way.

‘You see, he’s the one I might have expected to be writing about Cecil,’ she said. ‘He was extremely interested in him, as well.’

‘What wasn’t he interested in!’ said Paul.

Daphne said, ‘I’m having a certain amount of trouble with my eyes,’ reaching on the little table beside her with its lamp and books. Could she still read, Paul wondered? He half-expected to see his own letters there.

‘Yes, so I gathered from Robin,’ he said, with a fond tone towards this mutual friend.

‘You didn’t block the drive, did you?’ said Daphne.

‘Oh… no – I got a taxi at Worcester station.’

‘Oh, you got a Cathedral. Aren’t they expensive?’ said Daphne, with a hint of satisfaction. ‘Can you find somewhere to sit? One day quite soon Wilfrid’s going to sort this room out, but until that day I fear we live in chaos and disorder. It’s funny to think I once lived in a house with thirty-five servants.’

‘Goodness…!’ said Paul, lifting a leather Radio Times folder and a heap of thick woollen socks, perhaps waiting to be darned, from the armchair. In her book he was sure she’d said twenty-five servants. He rigged up the microphone on top of the books on the coffee-table between them. ‘Why is this house called Olga, I wonder?’ he said, just to test the levels.

‘Ah! You see, Lady Caroline had it built for her old housekeeper,’ said Wilfrid in a pious tone, ‘whose name was Olga. She retired here… out of sight but not quite… out of reach.’

‘And now Lady Caroline lets it to you,’ said Paul, watching the bobbing red finger which dropped, as if by gravity, when no one spoke.

‘Well, we hardly pay a thing…’

Daphne chuckled narrowly. ‘What have you got there?’ she said.

‘I hope you don’t mind if I tape our conversation…’ Paul clicked the button and rewound.

‘Perhaps as well to get it right,’ said Daphne uncertainly. It was the tape-recorder’s odd insinuations of flattery and mistrust. Some people glanced at it as an awkward third person in the room, others were calmed by the just-detectable turning of the spool, some, like old Joan Valance, a second cousin of Cecil’s whom he’d tracked down in Sidmouth, were moved to gabbling relief at having so impartial and receptive an audience. Daphne fidgeted with her cushions. ‘I’ll have to be careful what I say.’

‘Oh, I hope not,’ with his ear to the idiotic tone of the playback.

‘Very careful.’

‘If you want to tell me anything off the record, you can: just say, and I’ll stop the tape.’

‘No, I don’t think I’ll be doing that,’ said Daphne, with a quick smile. ‘Aren’t we having any refreshments, Wilfrid?’

‘Well, if you care to ask for them…’

They both said coffee. ‘Bring us a couple of coffees, Wilfrid, and then find something useful to do. You could make a start on clearing up those things in the garage.’

‘Oh, that’s a very big job, Mummy,’ said Wilfrid, as if not so easily fooled.

When he had gone out of the room, she said, ‘It’s only a very big job because he will keep putting it off. Oh, he’s so… disorganized,’ and she shifted her cushion again, flinched and half-turned, the powder-and-smoke-smudged discs of her glasses blank for a second in the light. This irritable nervousness might be hard to deal with. Paul wanted to remind her of their old connections, but he was wary of mentioning Corinna. He said, just while they waited,

‘I was wondering, do you see much of John, and Julian, and Jenny?’ They sounded like characters in a children’s book.

‘We’re a bit cut off here, to be perfectly frank,’ she said. He saw she wouldn’t want to admit to feeling neglected.

‘What are they doing now?’ – with a glance at the red needle.

‘Well…’ She was slow to warm to the question. ‘Well, they’re all extremely busy, and successful, as you might expect. Jennifer’s a doctor – I mean, not an actual doctor, obviously. She’s teaching at Edinburgh, I think it’s Edinburgh. Wilfrid will put me right if it’s not.’

‘Teaching French literature?’

‘Yes… and John of course has his very successful wine business.’

‘He takes after his grandfather,’ said Paul, almost fondly.

‘His grandfather doesn’t have a wine business.’

‘No, I meant – I believe Sir Dudley is involved in the sherry world, isn’t he.’

‘Oh, I see… And Julian – well Julian’s the artistic one. He’s very creative.’

Paul could tell from her tone, which was also fond, but final, that he shouldn’t ask what form this creativity took. He felt his own secret interest in Julian as a sixth-former might somehow burn through. Daphne said, ‘Why, have you met Dudley?’

‘Yes, I have,’ said Paul simply, with no idea as yet what line to take about him. He told her a bit about the Oxford conference, in what felt to him a very fair-minded way, and finding he had already somehow both censored and excused Dudley’s crushing put-down over the phone; as an anecdote it had a value that went some way to compensate for the further talk they had never had. ‘He was quite controversial. He said that war poems, being written at the time, were usually not much good, “inept and amateurish” I think were his words; whereas the great war writing was all in prose, and appeared ten years later – or more in his case, of course.’

‘That sounds like Dudley.’

‘He wouldn’t say anything much about Cecil.’

She pondered for a minute, and he thought she might say something about him herself. ‘Of course they’ve made him an honorary fellow, haven’t they,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Yes, they have. We’re talking about your father,’ Daphne said, as Wilfrid came back in.

‘Oh…!’ said Wilfrid, with a surprising cold grimace.

‘Not Wilfie’s favourite person,’ said Daphne.

When Wilfrid had gone out again, there was swiftly a new atmosphere, of involuntary intimacy, as if Paul were a doctor and about to ask her to undo her blouse. He checked the tape again. Daphne had a look of conditional resignation. He cleared his throat and looked at his notes, his plan, designed to make the whole thing more like a conversation, and for both of them more convincing. Still, it sounded more stilted than he’d meant: ‘I was wondering about the way you wrote your memoirs, er, The Short Gallery, as a set of portraits of other people, rather than one of yourself.’ He was afraid she couldn’t see his respectful smile.

‘Oh, yes.’ Her head went back an inch. No doubt the shadowy question of his review of that book lurked somewhere beyond the actual question – beyond all of them. ‘Well…’

‘I mean’ – Paul laughed – ‘why did you do it like that? Of course, I remember when I first met you you said you were writing your memoirs then, so I know it occupied you for a long time. That was thirteen years ago!’

‘No, it did,’ said Daphne. ‘Much longer than that, even.’

‘And may I just say that I admired the book a great deal.’

‘Oh – that’s kind of you,’ she said, pretty drily. ‘Well, I suppose the main reason was that I was lucky enough to know a lot of people more talented and interesting than myself.’

‘Of course, in a way I wish you’d written more about yourself.’

‘Well, there’s a certain amount that gets in, I hope.’ She squinted at the tape-recorder, aware it was capturing this flannel, and her reaction to it. ‘I was very much brought up in the understanding that the men all around me were the ones who were doing the important things. A lot of them wrote their own memoirs, or, you know, their lives are being written about now – there’s this new life of Mark Gibbons that’s going to come out.’

‘Oh, yes, I’ve heard about it,’ Paul said; Karen had got the proofs – unindexed, but a quick read through had produced only passing references to Daphne; Daphne, it seemed, had them too.

‘The publisher sent it. Wilfrid’s been reading it to me, because I can’t read any more. But of course she’s got all sorts of things wrong.’

‘Were you consulted for that book?’

‘Oh yes, the woman wrote to me. But really, I put it all in my own book – everything I thought worth saying about Mark, who was a dear friend, of course.’

‘Well, I know,’ said Paul, and looked at her rather cannily; but it was instantly clear from her hard half-smile that no confessions about bearing his child were remotely on the cards. ‘I remember meeting him at your seventieth.’

‘Ah, do you…’ – she accepted this. ‘Yes, he must have been there. Isn’t it awful, I’ve forgotten,’ she said, and smiled more sweetly, as if she’d just seen a good way out of his future questions.

‘Well, of course I’m hoping not to get it wrong,’ said Paul, ‘with your help!’ He sipped a little of the weak coffee. It struck him that if Daphne had helped her a bit more, the biographer of Mark Gibbons might not have made the mistakes that she was now deploring. It was a recurrent little knot of self-defeating resistance that perhaps all biographers of recent subjects had to confront and undo. People wouldn’t tell you things, and then they blamed you for not knowing them – unless they were George Sawle, of course, where the flow of secrets had been so disinhibited as to be almost unusable. Still, Daphne was an old lady, of whom he was reasonably fond, and he said gently, ‘I suppose you wanted to put the record straight a bit, though.’

‘Well, a bit – about “Two Acres” and things, you see. In the poem I’m merely referred to as “you”. And of course in Sebby Stokes’s thing I’m “Miss S.”!’

Paul laughed sympathetically, half-embarrassed by his own new suspicion that the ‘you’ of the poem was really George. ‘There’s more about you in… Sir Dudley’s book.’

‘Yes… but then he’s always so down on everybody.’

‘I was surprised by how little he says about Cecil.’

‘I know…’ – she sounded amiable but bored at once by talk of Black Flowers.

‘I suppose Cecil must have been the first real writer you’d met.’

‘Oh, yes, well as I said in the book, he was the most famous person I had met before I was married, though he wasn’t actually terribly famous at the time. I mean, he’d had poems here and there, but he hadn’t yet published a book or anything.’

‘Night Wake wasn’t till 1916, was it, only a few months before he was killed?’

‘That’s probably right,’ said Daphne. ‘And then after that of course he emerged as quite an important figure.’

‘But you’d read some of his poems before you met him?’

‘I think one or two.’

‘So to you he would have been a glamorous figure before you’d even set eyes on him.’

‘We were all quite curious to meet him.’

‘What do you remember about his first visit to “Two Acres”? Why don’t you just tell me about that.’

She tucked in her chin. ‘Well, he arrived,’ she said, as if resolved to tackle the question squarely.

‘He arrived at 5.27,’ said Paul.

‘Did he…? Yes.’

‘I think… your brother… must have met him.’

‘Well, of course he had.’

‘No…! I mean, he was at the station.’

‘Oh, quite possibly.’

‘Do you remember when you first saw Cecil yourself?’

‘Well, it would have been then.’

‘And did you feel an immediate attraction to him?’

‘Well, he was very striking, you know. I was only sixteen… very innocent… well, we all were in those days – I’d certainly never had a boyfriend, or anything like that – I was a great reader, I read romantic novels, but I had no knowledge of romance myself – and a lot of poetry, of course, Keats, and Tennyson we all loved…’ – Paul saw her easing into a routine, something sweet and artificial in her voice. He let her run on, his own face abstracted and impatient as he saw the shape of his next question, a rather tougher one. When she seemed to have finished, and turned to pick up her coffee, he said,

‘Can I ask you, what did you think about your brother’s friendship with Cecil?’

‘Oh…’ she huffed over her mug. ‘Well, it was very unusual.’

‘In what way?’ said Paul, with a small shake of the head.

‘Mm? He’d never had a friend before, poor George. I think we were all rather tickled when he suddenly produced one.’

Paul grinned at this with the reluctant sense of kinship that sometimes ghosted his interviews. ‘And could you see why they were such friends? Did they seem very close?’

Again Daphne sighed out, as if to say she might as well be candid. ‘I think it was just a clear case of old-fashioned’ – she paused and sipped – ‘well, hero-worship, really, wasn’t it? George was very young for his age, emotionally. I suppose Cambridge brought him out a bit.’ She winced. ‘To be honest, George has always been a bit of a cold fish.’

Paul played for a pondering moment or two with even more candid phrases, but looking at her he was doubtful, and frightened of disgusting her. He said, ‘I just wondered if you felt he was jealous of your affair with Cecil?’

‘George? No, no;’ and as if not satisfied with her earlier put-down, or feeling that by now it didn’t matter anyway, ‘George never exactly had normal human emotions, you see. I don’t know why. And I dare say it hasn’t done him any harm – life’s probably much simpler without them, though a bit dull, wouldn’t you think!’ Paul pictured George with the half-naked Cecil on the roof at Corley, and smiled distantly, at a loss as to how much of this she believed or expected him to believe; and to how much she might quite willingly have forgotten. ‘If you’d come a few years ago, I’d have suggested you go and talk to him, but I’m afraid he’s rather lost it now – up top, you know. I think poor Madeleine has quite a struggle with him.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Paul.

‘No, he’d have been a useful person for you to talk to. I don’t mean to suggest he was ever a bore, by the way. He was an intellectual, he was always the brains of the family.’

Paul let a moment pass, while he looked at his papers, his little mime of being an interviewer, which seemed more for his own benefit than for hers. ‘Do you mind if I ask you – you say in the book that it was, well, a love-affair – you and Cecil, I mean…!’

‘Well, indeed.’

‘You wrote to each other, but did you see each other?’

‘Didn’t I say…? No, we saw each other fairly often, I think.’

‘The War, I suppose, intervened.’

‘Well, the War, quite. We didn’t see each other so often then.’

‘I’ve been trying to work out from the Letters when he was in England – he signed up almost at once, September 1914.’

‘Yes, well he loved the War.’

‘So he was out in France by December, and then only home quite rarely on leave, until he – until he was killed, eighteen months later.’

‘That must be right, yes,’ said Daphne, with a small cough of impatience.

Paul said, in a tactical tone, but with a quick apologetic smile, ‘Can I jump forward to the last time you saw him?’

‘Oh, yes…’ she gasped, as if momentarily dizzy.

‘What happened then?’

‘Well, again…’ She shook her head, as if to say that she’d have liked to help. ‘I think it was all very much as I said in my little book.’

So Paul read out, rather skimmingly, the passage he’d read on the train earlier, which she listened to with an air of curiosity as well as mild defiance. Again he wasn’t sure how to do it: how did you ask an eighty-three-year-old woman if someone had – he hardly liked to say it even to himself. And if Cecil had got her pregnant – well, of course she could get the whole thing off her chest at last, in a tearful rush of relief, but something told Paul it wasn’t going to happen in the present atmosphere. Still, when he looked up, it seemed she was moved by her own words. ‘Well, there you are!’ she said, and shook her head again. It was one of those disorienting moments, all too common in Paul’s life, when he saw he’d missed something, and thinking back he still couldn’t see what had triggered the very quick change of emotion in the other person. He wondered if she was about to cry. Socially awkward, but wonderful for the book if the trick had worked and he’d stirred some brand new memory; he glanced at the patient revolution of the tape. Then he saw he’d got it wrong again – or else she was brusquely shutting him out from her unexpected turn of feeling. She said, ‘To tell the truth I sometimes feel I’m shackled to old Cecil. It’s partly his fault, for getting killed – if he’d lived we would just have been figures in each other’s pasts, and I don’t suppose anyone would have cared two hoots.’

‘Oh, I think they might have done…!’ – was he teasing her or reassuring her? ‘I understand you were planning to get married?’

‘Well… Even if we had I don’t imagine it would have been a great success.’

‘There’s the letter where he says, “will you be my widow?” ’ Paul thought it wasn’t tactful, even now, to mention the fact, exposed by the Letters, that Cecil had also asked Margaret Ingham to be his widow on the very same day. ‘But I suppose he was rather… fickle, perhaps?’

‘Well, of course he was. But the thing you have to understand is that Cecil made you feel you were at the absolute centre of his universe.’ And at this Paul felt both pity and a hint of envy.

Quite soon it was time for the customary, necessary, and often useful visit to the loo – a welcome escape into privacy, a gape in the mirror, and a chance to pry unobserved into the subject’s habits and attitude to hygiene and sense of humour. At Olga perhaps a touch of mad humour showed in the junk that had been piled and propped in the gloomy and mouldy-smelling little room. Behind the door there was a stack of pictures with cracked glass and a folding card-table, and under the basin the long box of a croquet set with JACOBS stencilled on the lid. Opposite the basin his shoulder brushed a large murky painting in a fancy gilt frame with various bits chipped off: it showed a pale young man with a black hat and a snooty expression, and was streaked across as though someone had tried to clean it with a muddy sponge. The lavatory, which could never have been a bright room, was made all the gloomier by Virginia creeper which covered the lower part of the frosted-glass window and had forced its way in through the opening top light, a long strand feeling its way across the wall, above a stack of large objects covered in a tablecloth. Paul hardly liked to use the loo itself, dark as peat below the water-line, and with what Peter Rowe used to call a lesbian seat, that had to be held up. Under the tablecloth it turned out there were wine boxes, sealed with brittle yellow Sellotape, which might be worth exploring on a later visit. Along the wall beside the loo books and magazines were stacked several feet high. On top was the issue of the Tatler with Daphne’s interview in it, and a six-year-old Country Life with a feature on Staunton Hall, ‘the home of Lady Caroline Messent’ – he supposed they must be kept there for some small ritual of reassurance. The books were like a jumble sale in which you might find something – it was clearly either Daphne or Wilfrid’s habit to mark their place each time with a torn-off sheet of toilet-paper. The cohabitation of mother and son oppressed Paul here more than he could explain. He sat down for a minute, and looked sideways at the titles. And there, just above floor level, and tricky to prise out, was Black Flowers, in its dust-jacket, torn and stained, but the first edition, 1944, on cheap wartime paper, signed: ‘For Wilfrid, Dudley Valance’. It was too stark and sad and valuable to leave here, and Paul placed it where he would be able to get it later. He washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror to assess his progress and give himself a quick pep-talk, slightly thrown by the murky sneer of the young man in the frame behind him.

Wilfrid, sensing his brief absence, had come back in and was edging round the end of the sitting-room, apparently looking for something. ‘And I really must ask you,’ Paul said in a rush, ‘if you still have the book with the manuscript of “Two Acres” in it. I’d love to see it.’

‘Well, you’re out of luck, I’m afraid,’ said Daphne.

‘You don’t have it?’

She frowned almost crossly. ‘Where is it, Wilfrid?’

‘I believe it’s in London, Mother,’ said Wilfrid, peering into a large wicker basket on top of a pile of old curtains, ‘it’s gone to be photographed.’

‘It’s being photographed,’ she confirmed. ‘It’s extraordinarily delicate, well, it’s seventy years old, isn’t it? – nearly seventy.’

‘No, that’s a very good idea,’ Paul said. ‘Who’s doing it for you?’

‘I can’t remember his name – he’s doing the new edition of Cecil’s poems.’

‘Oh, well you’re in good hands,’ Paul said.

‘What is his name?’

‘I think he’s called Dr Nigel Dupont.’

‘Exactly. He told me he feels a very personal connection with Cecil because he was at school at Corley.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘He got interested in him from seeing his tomb all the time in the chapel.’

‘How interesting,’ said Paul, as the heavy likelihood that Dupont had been a pupil of Peter’s closed sickeningly about him. ‘Did Nigel… um… come to see you?’

‘No, it was all very easy, we did it by mail.’

‘Recorded delivery,’ said Wilfrid.

‘He doesn’t give two pins about, you know, the biographical side,’ said Daphne, ‘he’s very much a textual editor, would you call it.’

‘Well, indeed.’

‘All the different editions and what have you.’

‘Fascinating…’ Paul edged back towards his chair. Outside, the afternoon was beginning to lower, late sunlight making the dirty windows opaque.

‘Well, it is rather fascinating. He says they’re full of mistakes. It was Sebby Stokes, you know, he messed around with them quite a bit, apparently, I suppose he thought he was improving them.’

‘Perhaps he was!’

Daphne turned and said, ‘Why don’t you and Mr Bryant get out round the village.’

‘We don’t know that he wants to,’ Wilfrid said.

‘Walk down to the farm, you like that.’

It was a bold distraction on Daphne’s part, cutting short the interview, but Paul had been hoping for a chance to talk to Wilfrid in private at some point. So out they went, Paul borrowing a large loose pair of old black wellingtons, which Wilfrid told him, once they’d got into the road, had ‘formerly belonged to Basil’.

‘Oh, really?’ said Paul, disliking the thought of wearing a dead man’s shoes; they dragged and clunked on the tarmac. ‘For some reason I hadn’t imagined he was so big…’ Later he thought it odd that Daphne had hung on to them, moved house with them. Wilfrid had put on a pair of mud-caked workman’s boots, and a kind of car-coat over his fleece. His big monkish head, with its tufts of grey hair, was bare.

‘This isn’t one of the attractive, picturesque villages,’ Wilfrid said. They strode back down the lane, past the shop with its steamed-up window, past the council houses, and then into another lane that ran up the side of some fenced-off parkland, ploughed fields on the other side. Away from the bungalow Wilfrid became both franker and more anxious; he said twice, ‘She can look after herself for half an hour.’

‘She’s lucky to have you,’ Paul said, sounding feebly polite.

‘Oh, she drives me potty!’ said Wilfrid, with a grin of guilty excitement. Now they mounted the verge to let a tractor and trailer go past, great clots of silage dropping off behind it into the lane. Wilfrid stared at the driver but didn’t greet him. Paul wasn’t sure what to say – he felt both mother and son were cheered up and somehow kept going by driving each other potty.

‘Well, she’s made a very good recovery,’ said Paul.

‘Thanks to Nurse Valance,’ said Wilfrid, in an odd pert tone.

Paul couldn’t think what Wilfrid would have been doing if he hadn’t had his mother to look after. ‘But you have some help?’

‘Nothing worth mentioning. And of course the whole thing makes it… very hard for me to have a girlfriend.’

Paul managed to raise his eyebrows in sympathy. ‘No, I can imagine…’

‘But there you are!’ said Wilfrid. ‘I’m with her till the end now. Now that’s Staunton Hall over there, she’d want me to… point that out. That’s where Lady Caroline lives.’

‘Olga’s former employer.’

‘Olga is what she calls her… Petit Trianon.’ Paul made out the bulk of a large square house among the trees a couple of fields away. The sun was now very low over the hedges behind them, and the small attic windows of the mansion glowed as if all the lights were on. ‘Do you want to see the farm?’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Paul.

‘I wouldn’t have minded being a farmer,’ said Wilfrid.

They walked on for a while and Paul said, ‘Well, of course! – your grandfather…’

‘I always liked animals. There were two farms at Corley. One very much… grew up amongst all that’ – with a return of his precise, clerical tone, perhaps to cover the strange disjunction between then and now. As Robin had reminded him, Wilfrid would soon be the fourth baronet.

‘Do you remember your grandfather at all?’

‘Oh, hardly. He died when I was… four or five. You know, I called him… Grandpa Olly-olly – because that was all he could say.’

‘He had a stroke, didn’t he.’

‘He could only make that sort of olly-olly noise.’

‘Were you frightened of him?’

‘I expect a bit,’ said Wilfrid. ‘I was a rather nervous child’ – as if looking back on some quite alien state.

‘Your father was fond of him.’

‘I don’t think my father had much time for him.’

‘Ah… he writes about him very nicely.’

‘Yes, he does,’ said Wilfrid.

A steady increase in the mud in the lane, and round a right-angled bend was the entrance to the farmyard, a concrete platform for the milk-churns at the gate, and beyond it a glistening oily-brown quagmire of cow-shit stretching away to the open doors of a corrugated-iron barn. ‘Well, this must be it!’ said Paul. He didn’t see the point of fouling up the late Basil Jacobs’s wellies, and Wilfrid’s boots were hardly up to it. Wilfrid seemed to feel some irritable embarrassment, having brought him here, but then said,

‘We’d probably better be getting back anyway.’

‘Do you ever see your father?’ said Paul, as they turned round.

‘Not often,’ said Wilfrid firmly, and looked out across the fields.

‘He must have been very upset about… your sister.’

‘You’d think… wouldn’t you?’

Paul sensed he’d pressed him enough, and changed the subject to his hotel, which he was worried about getting back to.

‘The bad thing was,’ Wilfrid cut in, ‘that he didn’t come to the funeral. He said he was going to come over, but that week of course Leslie… blew his brains out, and my sister’s funeral was put back, as a result, and he didn’t come after all. He just had a horrible wreath… delivered.’

‘That’s awful,’ said Paul. He wanted to say hadn’t Dudley had various mental problems, but he rather gathered that Wilfrid had had them too, so he merely looked at him respectfully for a moment.

‘But then he never much cared for my sister,’ Wilfrid said, ‘so though bad, it wasn’t perhaps… surprising.’

‘No, I see…’

‘Though sometimes there’s something… almost surprising in a person being so completely true to type.’

‘You mean on this one occasion you really thought he’d do the right thing.’

‘Stupidly, we did,’ said Wilfrid, and there seemed little more to say after that; though a good deal for Paul to think about.

Now the sun had sunk among the black cloud-bars to the west, and the back of the village huddled clear but bleak in the neutral light of the early evening. Chicken-runs, garden sheds, heaps of garden refuse thrown over the hedge all year long; a car on bricks, a greenhouse painted white, the jostle of tall TV aerials against the cold sky. Paul pictured his street in Tooting and the lit red buses with a shiver of longing. It was what Peter used to call his nostalgie du pavé, the panicky longing for London. ‘Oh, my dear,’ he would say, in Wantage or Foxleigh, ‘I’m not dying here.’

When they got back to the bungalow, Paul said ‘Thanks so much, I should probably push off now,’ but to his surprise Daphne said, ‘Have a drink first.’ She made her way, holding on to table and chair, to the corner of the room where on a crowded surface there was a cluster of bottles with an ice-bucket, phials of Tabasco and bitters, all the paraphernalia of the cocktail hour. Wilfrid was sent out to the garage to get ice from the freezer. ‘He knows we need it, and then he makes such a face!’ said Daphne. ‘G-and-t?’ Paul said yes, and smiled at the thought of the time he’d first met her, over the same drink, when he’d sat in the garden trying not to look up her skirt. Daphne opened a tonic bottle with a practised snap, the tonic fizzing out round the top and dripping down her wrist. ‘Have you got it?’ she said, as Wilfrid returned with the silver plastic bucket. ‘Oh, look, it’s all an enormous lump, you’ll have to break it up, I can’t possibly use this. Really, Wilfrid!’ – making a half-hearted comedy out of her annoyance for the sake of their guest.

When they were settled, Daphne came back with a genial but purposeful look to the new book on Mark Gibbons that she’d been reading, which she said again wasn’t good at all, and anyway half the point of Mark was lost if the pictures were in black-and-white. (Paul guessed she meant Wilfrid had been reading it to her, but as usual his agency was somehow elided.) She said it was funny how some people emerged from the great backward and abyss while others were wholly forgotten. Mark had had a sort of handy-man, called Dick Mint, who was a bit of a character, fixed the car, looked after the garden, and was often to be found sitting in Mark’s kitchen at Wantage jawing endlessly with his employer. A pretty fair bore, actually, but he had his remarks: he thought the Post-Impressionists were something to do with the GPO. Perhaps, what? twenty people in the whole world knew him, hardly a household name. Lived in a caravan. And now, thanks to this book, thousands of people, probably, were going to know about him – he’d become a character on a world stage. People in America would know about him. Whereas the woman who came in, whose name Daphne thought was Jean, who did all the washing and cleaning, wasn’t mentioned at all – in fact nobody now thought of her from one year to the next.

‘I must read the Mark Gibbons book,’ Paul said, wishing he’d had the tape-recorder on through this spiel.

‘Really I shouldn’t bother,’ said Daphne.

Paul laughed. ‘This must happen to you quite a lot.’

‘Mm?’

‘You must know a lot of people whose lives have been written.’

‘Yes, or they turn up in someone else’s, you know.’

‘Like you, yourself, indeed, Mummy!’ said Wilfrid.

‘The thing is, they all get it wrong.’ She’d now got back into that irritable mood that she clearly enjoyed.

‘The best ones don’t, perhaps,’ said Paul.

‘They take against people,’ said Daphne, ‘or someone they talk to bears a grudge, and tells them things that aren’t right. And they put it all in as if it was gospel!’ This was obviously meant as a warning, but was said as if it had completely slipped her mind that he was writing a biography himself. She glowed, chin tucked in, eyes turned on him but, as he had to remind himself, barely seeing him; though a tremor of contact seemed to pass between them through the quivering heat of the electric fire.

‘Well…!’ Paul paused respectfully. The first rush of the gin seemed to present him with a view of all the things it was in his grasp to ask her, the numerous doubts and rumours and aspersions he had heard, about her and her family. Did she have any idea what had gone on between George and Cecil, for instance? Did Wilfrid himself know the theory that his sister was Cecil’s child? He had to tread carefully, but he saw more clearly than ever that the writer of a life didn’t only write about the past, and that the secrets he dealt in might have all kinds of consequences in other lives, in years to come. With Wilfrid present, knocking back an orange squash, he could hardly say or ask anything intimate; though Daphne too was more open and cheerful after a drink – it might have been worth trying.

Still, something warned Paul not to accept a second gin, and at seven o’clock he asked if he could call a taxi. Daphne smiled firmly at this, and Wilfrid said he’d be happy to drive him into Worcester in the Renault.

‘I really don’t want to make you turn out at night,’ Paul said, his courteous demurral covering a natural nervousness about the car as well as the driver.

‘Oh, I like to take her out for a spin,’ said Wilfrid, so that for a moment Paul thought Daphne was coming too. ‘It’s not good for her just to… stand in the drive from one week to the next.’

Daphne stood up, and hanging on to the large oak chest got across the room with a new air of warmth and enthusiasm. ‘Where do you live?’ she said, almost as if thinking of a return visit.

‘I live in Tooting Graveney.’

‘Oh, yes… Is that near Oxford?’

‘Not really, no… It’s near Streatham.’

‘Streatham, oh!’ – even this seemed rather a lark.

They now shook hands. ‘Well, thank you so much.’ It was perhaps a moment to call her Daphne, but he held off till their second session. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, same time.’

Paul wondered afterwards if it was a true misunderstanding or a bit of Dudleyesque fooling. She halted by the door into the hall, head cocked in confusion. ‘Oh, are you coming back?’ she said.

‘Oh… well’ – Paul gasped. ‘I think that was… what we agreed!’ He’d got nothing out of her today, but was resignedly treating it as a warm-up for the real explorations the following afternoon.

‘What are we doing tomorrow, Wilfrid?’

‘I should be surprised if we were doing anything very much,’ said Wilfrid, in a way that made Paul wonder whether all his patient simplicities weren’t perhaps a very cool kind of sarcasm.

In the Renault it was rather as if a child drove an adult, both of them pretending that it wasn’t worrying or surprising. It emerged that the dip-switch was broken, so that they had either to crawl along on side-lights, the hedges looming dimly above them, or to be flashed at by on-coming motorists blinded by the headlights on full beam. Wilfrid coped with both things with his usual whimsical patience. Paul didn’t want to distract him, but when they got on to the main road he said, ‘I hope I’m not tiring your mother.’

‘I think she’s enjoying it,’ Wilfrid said; and with a glance in the mirror, as if to check she wasn’t there, ‘She likes telling a story.’

Paul very much wished she would tell him a story. He said, ‘I’m afraid it was all so long ago.’

‘There are things she won’t talk about… I hope we can trust you on that,’ said Wilfrid, with an unexpected note of solidarity after his earlier grumbling about her.

‘Well…’ – Paul was torn between the discretion just requested of him and the wish to ask Wilfrid what he was talking about. ‘I obviously don’t want to say anything that would upset her – or any of the family.’ Might Wilfrid himself tell him things? Paul had no idea what he was capable of, mentally. He clearly loved his mother and more or less hated his father, but he might not be the ally Paul needed for his further prying into the dealings of the Sawles and Valances. If Corinna was really Cecil’s daughter, then Dudley’s shocking coolness towards her might have some deeper cause.

‘I don’t think you’re married, are you?’ Wilfrid asked, peering forward over the wheel into the muddled glare on the edge of Worcester.

‘No, I’m not…’

‘No, Mother thought not.’

‘Ah, yes… well, hmm.’

‘Poor old Worcester,’ said Wilfrid a minute later, as the car swerved through a sort of urban motorway right next to the Cathedral; up above, too close to see properly, reared floodlit masonry, the great Gothic tower. ‘How could they have butchered the old place like this?’ Paul heard this as a catch-phrase, saw mother and son on their trips into town coming out with it each time. ‘Right next to the Cathedral,’ said Wilfrid, craning out to encourage Paul to do the same, while the car wandered over into the fast lane – there was a massive blast on a horn, a lit truck as tall as the tower screeching behind them, then thundering past.

Turning left, and then passing staunchly through a No Entry sign, they travelled the length of a one-way street in the wrong direction, Wilfrid mildly offended by the rudeness of on-coming drivers, turned another corner, and there they were outside the front door of the Feathers. ‘Amazing,’ said Paul.

‘I know this old town backwards,’ said Wilfrid.

‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,’ said Paul, opening the door.

‘Shall I pick you up?’ said Wilfrid, with just a hint of breathlessness, Paul thought, a glimpse of excitement at having this visitor in their lives. But Paul insisted he was perfectly happy to get a Cathedral. He stood and watched as Wilfrid drove off into the night.

9

Daphne followed her regime as usual that evening – there was the hot milk, and then the tiny glass of cherry brandy, to take the sickening sleepy taste away. Her sleeping pill itself was swallowed with the last cooled inch of the milk, and after that a pleasant certainty that the day was wound up suffused her, well before the physical surrender to temazepam. Tonight the cherry brandy seemed to celebrate the fact. She said, ‘What time is he coming back?’ just to have it confirmed that it wasn’t till after lunch. Wilfrid started on the film that followed the News, but her macular thing made the telly both boring and upsetting. So she left him to it, going out of the room with a passing pat at his arm or shoulder, and made her way to the other end (in so far as Olga had another end) of the house.

Book at Bedtime this week was the autobiography of a woman – she couldn’t remember her name, or what exactly she’d been up to in Kenya last night when sleep had come with just enough warning for her to switch off the radio and the bedside light. On the dressing-table, an awful cheap white and gilt thing, stood the photographs she never really looked at, but she peered at them now, in her sidelong way, as she smeared on her face cream. Their interest seemed enhanced after the visit from the young man, and she was glad he hadn’t seen them. The one of her with Corinna and Wilfrid by the fishpond at Corley was her favourite – so small but clear: she turned it to the light with a creamy thumb. Who had taken it, she wondered?… The photo, known by heart, was the proof of an occasion she couldn’t remember at all. The Beaton photo of Revel in uniform was, pleasingly, almost famous: other portraits from the same session had appeared in books, one of them in her own book, but this exact photograph, with its momentary drop of the pose, the mischievous tongue-tip on the upper lip, was hers alone. A pictorial virtue, of the kind that Revel himself had taught her to understand, had been made of the hideous great-coat. His lean head and fresh-cropped poll were framed by the upturned collar – he looked like some immensely wicked schoolboy, though she knew if you looked closely you could see the fine lines round the eyes and the mouth that Beaton had touched out in the published images.

She woke in the dark out of dreams of her own mother, very nearly a nightmare; it was wartime and she was searching for her, going in and out of shops and cafés asking if anyone had seen her. Daphne never remembered her dreams, but even so she felt sure she had never dreamt about her mother before – she was a novelty, an intruder! It was bracing, disconcerting, amusing even, once she had felt for the switch at the neck of the lamp, and squinted at the time, and had a small drink of water. Freda had died in 1940, so the Blitz setting made almost too much sense. And no doubt talking to the young man, trying to cope with all his silly and rather unpleasant questions, had brought her back. In talking, she had only touched on her mother, whose actual presence in 1913 she could no longer see at all, but that must have been enough to set the old girl going, as if greedy for more attention. Daphne kept the light on for a while longer, with a barely conscious sense that in childhood she would have done the same, longing for her mother but too proud to call for her.

In the dark again she found she was at the tipping-point, relief at the closing-down of yesterday was ebbing irrecoverably, and already the dread of tomorrow (which of course was already today) was thickening like regret around her heart. Why on earth had she said he could come back? Why had she let him come at all, after that idiotic condescending piece about her book in the Listener, or perhaps the New Statesman? He was only pretending to be a friend – something no interviewer, probably, had ever been. Paul Bryant… he was like some little wire-haired ratter, with his long nose and his tweed jacket and his bloody-minded way of going at things. Daphne turned over in a spasm of confused annoyance, at him and at herself. She didn’t know what was worse, the genial vague questions or the stern particular ones. He called him Cecil all the time, not as if he’d known him, exactly, but as if he could help him. ‘What was Cecil like?’ – what a stupid question… ‘When you say in your book he made love to you, what happened exactly?’ She’d said ‘Pass!’ to that one, rather good, as if she were on Mastermind. She thought tomorrow she would just say ‘Pass!’ to everything.

And Robin, too – there was a good deal of Robin this and that. She couldn’t think what he meant by sending him, recommending him; though then a shadowy understanding, grim, frivolous, almost wordless – the old thing that she didn’t even picture – turned over and after a minute lay down again at the side of her mind. As well as which, there was something else, which maybe was actually a blessing in its way, that for quite long stretches of the conversation young Paul Bryant had clearly not been listening to a word she said. He thought she couldn’t see him at all, reading something while she talked; then he hurried her along, or he came in suddenly with some completely irrelevant other thing. Maybe he thought he knew all the answers already, but in that case why ask questions? Of course he had it all on his blasted tape-recorder, but that didn’t exempt him from the normal courtesies. She thought in the morning she would ring up Robin at the office and give him a very hard time about it.

She turned over once more and settled with a spasm of self-righteousness; and was on the very edge of sleep again when the obvious idea that she could put Paul Bryant off altogether made her suddenly and beautifully alert. Wilfrid had taken him back to the Feathers, that fearful dump – she was glad he was staying there. He seemed to think it was quite the thing! Only two stars, he’d said, but very comfortable… She’d get her son to ring up for her first thing in the morning. She lay there, half-plotting, half-drowsing, imagining it, the afternoon without him, freedom tinged, but not irreparably spoilt, by guilt. She was pretty sure she had said he could come twice, and besides he had come from London specially. But why should she be put upon, at the age of eighty-three? She wasn’t at all well, she was having a lot of trouble with her eyes… She really mustn’t worry about it. He’d been through all Cecil’s letters to her, which he claimed were manipulative and self-pitying – perfectly true, perhaps, but then what more did he want from her? He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh. And she felt that if she did, Paul Bryant was hardly the person she would want to share it with.

Daphne was supposed to have a good memory, and this reputation sustained her uneasily in face of the thousands of things she couldn’t remember. People had been amazed by what she’d dredged up for her book, but much of it, as she’d nearly admitted to Paul Bryant, was – not fiction, which one really mustn’t do about actual people, but a sort of poetical reconstruction. The fact was that all the interesting and decisive things in her adult life had happened when she was more or less tight: she had little recall of anything that occurred after about 6.45, and the blur of the evenings, for the past sixty years and more, had leaked into the days as well. Her first problem, in doing her book, had been to recall what anyone said; in fact she had made up all the conversations, based (if one was strictly truthful) on odd words the person almost certainly had said, and within about five, or at the outside ten, years of the incident recorded. Was this just her failing? Now and then people gave her the most astonishing reports of what she had said, drolleries they would never forget, and rather gratifying to her – though perhaps these should be treated with comparable suspicion? Sometimes she knew for sure that they were mixing her up with someone else. She had probably taken too long with her memoirs. Basil had encouraged her, told her quite freely to write all about Revel, and Dudley before him, ‘significant figures!’ he’d said, self-mockingly. But it had taken thirty years to bring it off, over which time she’d naturally forgotten a great deal that she’d known very well when she started out. If she’d kept a diary it would have been different, but she never had, and her experience as a memoirist, if typical, couldn’t help but throw the most worrying light over half the memoirs that were written. Certain of her incidents were tied indubitably to Berkshire or Chelsea, but a host of others took place against a general-purpose scenery, as in some repertory theatre, of drinks-tray and mirrors and chintz-covered sofas, blending all social life into one staggeringly extended run.

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.

She woke to find grey light spreading above the curtains, and made a wary assessment of the time. These early wakings were anxious countings of loss and gain – was it late enough not to mind being woken? Might it still be early enough to lay a presentable claim on more sleep? With the coming on of spring one was more defenceless. Five-fifty: not too bad. And as soon as she wondered about whether she had to go to the loo she found she did. Out of bed, into slippers, dressing-gown on over pyjamas – she was glad she couldn’t see herself in the mirror as more than a blurred bundle. Light on, out past Wilfrid’s door, the click of the loose parquet, but it wouldn’t wake him. He had the large capacity for sleep of a child. She had a picture, not much changed in fifty years, of his head on the pillow, and nothing ever happening to him, at least that she knew of. And now there was this Birgit, with her shadowy plans. Poor Wilfrid was so naïve that he couldn’t see the woman for the fortune-hunter she was – and what a fortune!… Daphne tutted as she groped her way through the shadowy cupboard in which the wash-basin and lavatory were like surreal intrusions in a mountain of rubbish.

In the morning, bright and early, Lady Caroline Messent rang to invite her to tea. The phone at Olga was fixed to the kitchen wall, Caroline perhaps having pictured Olga herself as habitually in that room, and standing more or less to attention when she spoke to her. ‘I can’t, my dear,’ said Daphne, ‘I’ve got this young man coming back.’

‘Oh, do put him off,’ said Caroline in her droll scurry of a voice. ‘Who is he?’

‘He’s called – he’s interrogating me, I’m like a prisoner in my own home.’

‘Darling…’ said Caroline, allowing that for the present at least it was Daphne’s home. ‘I wouldn’t stand for it. Is he from the gas board?’

‘Oh, much worse.’ Daphne steadied herself against the worktop which she could dimly see was a dangerous muddle of dirty dishes, half-empty bottles and pill-packets. ‘He turned up yesterday – he’s like the Kleeneze man.’

‘You mean hawking?’

‘He says I met him at Corinna and Leslie’s, but I have absolutely no recollection of it.’

‘Oh, I see…’ said Caroline, as if now siding slightly with the intruder. ‘But what does he want?’

Daphne sighed heavily. ‘Smut, essentially.’

‘Smut?’

‘He’s trying to write a book about Cecil.’

‘Cecil? Oh, Valance, you mean? Yes, I see.’

‘You know, I’ve already written all about it.’

Caroline paused. ‘I suppose it was only a matter of time,’ she said.

‘Hmm? I don’t know what he’s got into his head. He’s insinuating, if you know what I mean. He’s more or less saying that I didn’t come clean in some way in my book.’

‘No, that must be awfully annoying.’

‘Well, less awfully, more bloody, actually, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson said to my father.’

‘So funny, that,’ said Caroline.

‘Really Cecil means nothing to me – I was potty about him for five minutes sixty years ago. The significant thing about Cecil, as far as I’m concerned,’ said Daphne, half-hearing herself go on, ‘is that he led to Dud, and the children, and all the grown-up part of my life, which naturally he had no part in himself!’

‘Well, tell that to your Kleeneze man, darling,’ said Caroline, evidently thinking Daphne protested too much.

‘I suppose I should.’ And she saw there was a little shameful reluctance to do so, and thus reduce even further her interest for the young man. It struck her suddenly that Caroline must already know him. ‘I’m fairly sure he was at your launch party,’ she said. ‘Paul Bryant.’

‘You don’t mean the young man from… was it Canterbury… one of the red-bricks.’

‘He might be, I suppose. He used to work in the bank with Leslie.’

‘Ah, no. But there certainly was a clever young man, you’re quite right, doing something on Cecil’s poetry.’

‘No, I know who you mean, I can’t remember his name. I’ve dealt with him already. This is another young man.’

‘Mm, my dear, it’s obviously Cecil’s moment,’ said Caroline.

10

Next morning Paul sat in his hotel room, going over his notes, with a coffee tray beside him: the pitted metal pot with the untouchable handle, the lipsticked cup, the bowl of white sugar in soft paper tubes which he emptied serially into the three strong cupfuls he took, getting quickly excited and overheated. On a plate with a doily were five biscuits, and though he’d only just had breakfast he ate them all, the types so familiar – the Bourbon, the sugared Nice, the rebarbative ginger-nut, popped in whole – that he was touched for a moment by a sense of the inseparable poverty and consistency of English life, as crystallized in the Peek Frean assortment box. He sat back in his chair as he munched and levelled a look at his own industrious jaw movements in the mirror; and a less comfortable sensation came over him. The fact was he had never watched himself eating, and was astonished at his forceful, rodent-like look, the odd sag of his neck on one side as he chewed, the working flicker of his temples. This must be what his company was like to others, what Karen faced each night over dinner, and the realization made him run down pensively, stop chewing mid-biscuit and then start up again as if to catch himself unawares. He wasn’t at all sure he would want to confide his own secrets to such a man.

He was writing up further aspects of yesterday’s meeting in his diary – a book in which the sparse record of his own life was now largely replaced by the ramifying details of others’. Now and then he played back the tape, more for the feel of it than because he believed he would get much out of it. There was a fair amount he had forgotten, but he knew too that there were spells in any interview when he didn’t listen to the other person: it was partly the perennial self-consciousness, his sense of playing a role – laughing, sighing, sadly nodding – eclipsing any likelihood of taking in whatever was being said; and it was partly some colder sense that the interviewee was evasive or repetitive, deliberately boring him and wasting his time. It was appalling what they couldn’t remember, and with his primary witnesses, all in their eighties, he had a view of them stuck in a rut, or a wheel, doggedly chasing the same few time-smoothed memories along with their nose and their paws. When he’d gone through ‘The Hammock’ with Daphne, hoping to goad her memory, she had carried on using the same words and phrases as she had in her book, and probably had for fifty years before that. In her book she’d made such a thing of this youthful romance, and he could see that the thing that she’d made had replaced the now remote original experience, and couldn’t usefully be interrogated for any further unrevealed details. She didn’t actually seem at all interested in Cecil, much less in the chance Paul was giving her, at the end of her life, to put things straight. He laughed warily when he thought of her little snub, as he was leaving (‘Are you coming back?’); but in a way it simply made him more determined.

George’s theory about Corinna, if true, threw a very strange light on to Dudley. Perhaps today he should try to get her on to the subject of her first marriage, and trick her, almost, into some revelation. George had said such marriages happened a great deal at that time. Obviously Paul would have to track down Corinna’s birth certificate. How complicit was Dudley in the whole thing? It was a most peculiar love triangle. In Black Flowers Dudley coped with his brother’s affairs in his customary ramblingly cutting style.

My wife had met Cecil before the War, when he had been something of a mentor to her brother George Sawle, and it was after a visit to the Sawles’ cottage in Harrow that he had written ‘Two Acres’, a poem that attained some celebrity in the war years, and after. I suspect she was a good deal dazzled by his energy and his profile, and as an ardent consumer of romantic verse she was surely impressed to meet a real live poet, dark-eyed and raven-haired. There are certainly signs that he was fond of her, though these should not be exaggerated; my brother was accustomed to admiration, and as a rule was gracious to those who provided it. He wrote his famous poem at her request for some memento in her visitors’ book, but he had only known her at the time for two days. It amused me somewhat that Cecil, heir to three thousand acres, should have been best-known for his ode to a mere two. Very thoughtfully, he invited her to Corley once when her brother also was staying with us.

There followed various sarcasms about George’s visits to the Valances.

He showed a keen interest in both house and estate. If he had the unintended air at times of an agent or bailiff, his preoccupations were no doubt largely intellectual. He and Cecil were sometimes absent for hours, returning with tales of what they had found in the labyrinthine cellars or secluded attics of the house, or with reports, which pleased my father, of the quality of the grazing or the woodsman-ship shown on the Corley farms.

Paul thought again about George and Cecil on the roof, the whole rich difficult range of unspoken testimony, in images and implications. Surely Dudley was hinting here at something he couldn’t possibly have said outright?

Daphne, two or three years younger, was more open and at ease, and spoke her mind in a manner that sometimes startled my mother but habitually delighted me. She had grown up with two elder brothers of her own, and was used to their spoiling. I was thrown together with her by the somewhat exclusive nature of George and Cecil’s pursuits, and our own relations were at first fraternal; it was clear that she idolized Cecil, but to me she was an amusingly artless companion, unaffected by the family view of me as, if not a black, then certainly a greyish sheep. She loved to talk, and her face lit up with amusement at the simplest pleasantries. To her Corley Court was less a matter for the social historian than a vision out of some old romance. Its inhuman aspects were part of its charm. The stained glass windows that kept out the light, the high ceilings that baffled all attempts at heating, the barely penetrable thickets of overladen tables, chairs and potted palms that filled the rooms, were invested with a kind of magic. ‘I should like very much to live in a house like this,’ she said, on the occasion of that first visit. Four years later she was married in the chapel at Corley, and in due course, if for a limited span, was herself the mistress of the house.

Paul decided hotels were hardly the best place to work. All around there was noise – a late riser above had pulled the bath-plug and the waste fell with an unembarrassed frothing and gargling sound through a pipe apparently inches from his desk; the maid had come in twice, even though check-out wasn’t till eleven; baffled but unbeaten, she toiled in the hallway with the hoover or went up and down opening and slamming the doors; in a room immediately to his left, and previously unsuspected, some sort of business meeting had got under way, with periodic laughter and the rambling voice of a man addressing them, a completely meaningless phrase now and then discernible through the thin wall. Paul sat back with a yelp of frustration; yet he saw the scene had already a kind of anecdotal quality, and he wrote it up too in his diary, as a reminder of the biographer’s difficult existence.

When he got back to Olga, just before two o’clock, he found the front door open and heard Wilfrid’s voice coming from the kitchen, speaking more regularly and emphatically than usual. Even so, he couldn’t make out at first what he was saying. He felt he’d chanced on something awkwardly private. There was a sense of possible crisis. Rather than ring the bell, Paul stepped into the hall and gripping his briefcase stood leaning forward with an apologetic expression. It dawned on him that Wilfrid was reading to his mother. ‘ “Ah hammer… dryers ever seen”,’ he seemed to say. For a dislocated second Paul couldn’t place it; then of course he knew. Are Hamadryads ever seen / Between the dancing veils of green…? He was reading ‘Two Acres’ for her, and she was making a grumbling noise or coming in on the words herself as if to say the reading was hardly necessary; it was a sort of briefing perhaps for her second day’s interview, and Paul found something reassuring in that – and something oddly touching in the reversal of roles, son reading to mother. ‘ “Or pause, then take the hidden turn, The path amid-” ’ ‘ “The path amid the hip-high fern”,’ Daphne came in. ‘You don’t read it at all well.’

‘Perhaps you would rather I didn’t?’ said Wilfrid in his usual tone of dry forbearance.

‘Poetry, I mean, you have no idea how to read poetry. It’s not the football results…’

‘Well I’m sorry…’

‘The curfew tolls the knell of passing day: one; The ploughman homeward plods his weary way: nil,’ said Daphne, getting a bit carried away. ‘When I’m gone, you should get a job on the telly.’

‘Don’t… talk like that,’ said Wilfrid, and Paul, not seeing their faces, took a moment to realize it was not her mockery but the mention of her going that he was objecting to. And what indeed would he do then? Puzzled for a moment by his own muddled feelings of affection and irritation towards Daphne, Paul tiptoed back out again and rang the bell.

Exactly as yesterday, but with determined new warmth, Paul said to Wilfrid in the hall, ‘And how is your mother?’

‘I fear she didn’t sleep at all well,’ said Wilfrid, not meeting his eye; ‘you might keep it… pretty short today.’ Paul went into the sitting-room and set up the mike and looked over his notes with a clear sense they were blaming him for her bad night. But in fact when Daphne came through she seemed if anything rather more spry than yesterday. She made her way among the helpful obstacles of the room with the inward smile of an elderly person who knows they’re not done yet. He felt something had happened in the interim; of course she would have been thinking, reassessing her position as she lay awake, and he would have to find out as he went along if the spryness was a sign of compliance or resistance.

‘Rather a lovely day,’ she said as she sat down; and then cocking her head to check Wilfrid was still in the kitchen making coffee, ‘Has he been telling you about his popsy?’

‘Oh – well, I gathered…’ Paul smiled distractedly as he checked the tape-recorder.

‘I mean, he’s sixty! He can’t look after a lively young woman – he can hardly look after me!’

‘Perhaps she would look after him.’

But she gave a rather earthy chuckle at this. ‘He’s not a bad person, he wouldn’t hurt a fly, or even a flea probably, but he’s totally impractical. I mean look at this house! It’s a miracle I haven’t tripped over something and broken my leg; or my wrist; or my neck!’

‘Does she live locally?’

‘Thank god, no – she lives in Norway.’

‘Oh, I see…’

‘Birgit. She’s a pen-pal, didn’t he tell you that?’

‘Well, Norway’s a long way away.’

‘That’s not what Birgit thinks. Well, she’s got designs on him.’

‘Do you think?’

Daphne was quietly candid. ‘She wants to be the next Lady Valance. Ah, tea, Wilfie, how splendid!’

‘Coffee, you said, Mummy.’ She took it cautiously from the tray. ‘Shall I go over to Smiths’ for those things, then?’

‘No, no,’ she said, ‘stay and talk with us – it will be more fun for Mr Bryant, and you can help me out – I forget so much!’

‘Do call me Paul,’ said Paul, with a glare of a smile at Wilfrid – if he stayed it was certain Daphne would say nothing remotely interesting; he needed to be sent off on some sort of errand, but it was hard for Paul to know what.

‘Well, of course I’m very interested in… Paul’s great project.’

‘Well, I know you are.’ She sipped. ‘Mm, delicious.’

Paul wondered how to cope with this. As always he had plans, which as often proved impossible to follow, and he had never been good at improvising: he clung to the discarded plan still when he could. He reminded her about Corley Court, and the times he’d visited the house, and how he was hoping to go again, he’d written to the Headmaster; but she couldn’t be got to show any interest in the topic at all. ‘Do you have much from those days, I wonder?’ Paul said. Perhaps under the tablecloths and blankets in this room there were Valance heirlooms, little dusty things that Cecil might have owned and handled. The sense of the whole unexamined terrain of Cecil’s life lying so close and yet so stubbornly out of view came over him at times in waves of dreamlike opportunity and bafflement.

‘I didn’t get much. I got the Raphael.’

‘Oh, well…?’ – Paul narrowed his eyes at her tone.

‘You probably saw it in the loo.’

‘Oh… oh, the picture of the man, do you mean… Goodness… Well, that must be worth quite a lot!’ Paul hated his own snigger – he really had no idea.

‘Well, so one had hoped. Unfortunately it’s a copy, done when was it, Wilfie?’

‘About 1840, I believe,’ said Wilfrid, sportingly, but with a certain pride too.

‘But you didn’t know that at the time?’

‘Well, I think… you know. And what else?’ – she gazed around as if against a bright glare.

‘The ashtray,’ said Wilfrid.

‘Oh, yes – I got the ashtray.’ On the little table, beside her coffee cup, was a small silver bowl, with a scalloped edge. ‘Have a look.’ She lifted it and Paul got up to take it from her. It was just the sort of thing people used to keep in old suitcases in the strong-room at the bank, but tarnished and scratched by the protracted attentions of a heavy smoker.

‘Look on the bottom,’ said Wilfrid.

‘Oh, I see…’

‘I suppose Dudley had a sort of complex or something about property. He had that done to all sorts of valuable things, no doubt greatly reducing their value in the process.’ In flowing letters, like some more conventional inscription stamped in the silver, were the words Stolen from Corley Court. He handed it back, with a blush at the naming of this particular vice.

‘I was wondering about the picture behind you,’ he said, to distract her. Somehow the nightmare of the room was yielding small treasures, consolation prizes for the talk that Daphne was trying to prevent from happening.

‘Oh, well, that’s Revel, of course,’ said Daphne, as though now referring to an undisputed master.

‘And it’s obviously… you!’ said Paul.

‘I’m very attached to that drawing, aren’t I, Wilfie.’

‘Yes… you are,’ Wilfrid agreed.

‘So when was it done?’ Paul got up, and edged around between the back of Daphne’s chair and the standard-lamp to have a closer look. It struck him that the Victorian ‘thicket’ of furniture and stuff at Corley had been recreated here by Daphne willy-nilly. Perhaps clutter always won in the end.

‘It’s a very fine picture,’ said Daphne. It showed a round-faced young woman with dark hair in bunches on either side of her head. A light scarf was tied loosely in the open neck of her blouse. She leant forward, lips parted, as if waiting for the punchline of a joke. It was done in what Paul thought was red chalk, and signed For Daphne – RR April 1926. ‘We both had the most appalling hangovers at the time, but I don’t believe you can tell with either of us.’

Paul giggled, but didn’t hazard a view. When he thought about the date, it began to seem significant. ‘I’d like to see more of his pictures,’ he said, sad to hear himself surrender to a further diversion from the subject of Cecil, but with a feeling she could still be brought back to it.

‘Would you, really?’ Daphne sounded surprised, but was ready to oblige. ‘What have we got? Well, have a look at Revel’s albums, I suppose. You know where they are, Wilfie.’

‘Yes… now then…’ said Wilfrid, nodding his head from side to side as he fetched them out from a chest of drawers behind his chair. Paul began to suspect Wilfrid’s years-long failure to tidy the house was really a cover for a highly personal but efficient system of his own. ‘Well, there’s this one anyway.’ And Paul was shown, more hastily than he would have liked, a large black-covered sketchbook of Revel Ralph’s; it was laid open across Daphne’s knee, and Paul and Wilfrid flanked her, craning down politely while she peered from odd ingenious angles and quickly turned the pages, as if regretting showing them after all. There were pages of Georgian-looking houses, whether real or invented Paul had no idea, pretty but rather boring, which Wilfrid then said were designs for The School for Scandal; some sketches of another woman in a dark hat, which Daphne said were studies for a portrait of Lady somebody, ‘a very trying woman’; and then a rapid and much more inspired-looking series of drawings, over ten or twelve pages, of a naked young man, lying, sitting, standing, in a range of ideal but natural-looking positions, everything about him wonderfully brought out, except his cock and balls which were consigned to the imagination by a swoop of the pencil, ostentatiously discreet, pretending it wasn’t the point. Daphne seemed to sense Paul’s interest – ‘What’s that?’ pushing the book away so she could see it – ‘Oh, you remember him, Wilfie, the Scotch boy at Corley. Revel was awfully taken with him – he did a lot of drawings of him – I remember they became great friends.’

‘I was too young to remember him,’ said Wilfrid, and looking at Paul over Daphne’s head, ‘I was only seven when we… er, moved to London.’

Even so, Paul wondered whether Wilfrid wasn’t abashed by looking at these sketches, all the bolder for being private things, the little studies of the Scotch boy’s thighs, buttocks and nipples, in the presence of his mother; and what on earth Daphne herself thought, having married a man who produced such work. ‘I remember he came to several of our parties at the studio,’ she said, as if in fact recommending her husband’s roving eye. Paul thought for a moment she might be teasing him.

‘These ought to be in a museum,’ he said awkwardly.

‘And soon I dare say they will be. But I like having them around, so for now I’m hanging on to them, thanks very much’ – and she shut the book halfway through as if to say she’d indulged him quite enough.

‘Actually I wanted to ask if you have any pictures of “Two Acres”?’ – something told him it was cleverer to ask for pictures of the house than pictures of people: it sounded more disinterested, and no doubt both kinds of photo would be mounted in the same album. Once more Wilfrid obliged. ‘This was Granny Sawle’s album,’ he said.

‘It was a dear house,’ said Daphne, again holding the album down by her left knee and raising her eyebrows suspiciously. ‘That’s the view from the lane, isn’t it, yes, that was the dining-room window, and there were the four cherry-trees in front of it, of course.’

‘A cloud of snow at Eastertide!’ said Paul (it wasn’t Cecil’s most original line).

‘Aha!’ said Wilfrid from the far side of the room.

‘There you are…’ said Daphne. ‘And the rockery, look. Goodness, how it all comes back.’

‘Well, I’m glad,’ said Paul, with a frank laugh.

‘Now who’s that? Wilfie, is it Granny?’

‘Oh…’ said Paul. It was the stout old German woman again, that George had told him about, but of course he didn’t know her name. Already Paul felt annoyed by her, a figure of no interest who kept demanding attention. He remembered George had said she was a great bore. She sat in light-absorbing black in a deckchair from which it was hard to see how she would ever get up.

‘What?’ said Wilfrid, coming over. ‘I don’t know who everyone is, I wasn’t even born yet, remember? Oh, good grief – no, no, that’s not Granny. No, no.’ He laughed breathily. ‘Granny was a really a rather – lovely woman, with lovely auburn hair.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say it was auburn,’ said Daphne. ‘She was a dark blonde. She was very proud of her hair.’ It probably wasn’t something Daphne would say of herself. Paul looked to Wilfrid, and said,

‘She was the German woman, wasn’t she?’

‘That’s right…’ said Wilfrid, already abstracted, leaning forward quickly to turn the page. ‘I haven’t seen these for a long time,’ he said.

‘I wonder what’s become of the house,’ said Daphne.

‘It probably doesn’t even exist any more, Mother,’ said Wilfrid. It was one of those little moments when Paul found it in his power to inform and perhaps upset the person he had himself come to for information.

‘Oh, it does, actually,’ he said.

‘You’ve seen it, I suppose, have you,’ Daphne said, in an irritable tone.

Paul pursed his lips regretfully, ‘Well, I’m not sure you’d recognize the old place.’

‘Oh, really?’ she said, lightly but grimly.

‘Well, no – you would,’ said Paul, ‘of course you would’ – and he thought, ‘but you never will go there, you’ll never see the place again.’ He had a feeling she was blaming him already for the changes, the years of flats, the sold-off garden, blaming him for knowing what he knew and what she had hoped never to know.

‘Actually don’t tell me,’ she said.

‘Anyway, we’ve got the poem, haven’t we,’ said Wilfrid.

‘Well, of course,’ said Daphne, ‘there’s always the poem.’

There were no photos of Cecil in the album, which since he’d only spent six nights of his life at ‘Two Acres’ was hardly surprising, but of course disappointing. Paul looked closely at George whenever he appeared, from sailor-suited six-year-old to boatered Cambridge man, and with less and less doubt that whatever warmth this cold fish had felt had been directed at other young men. He asked Daphne if she would let him reproduce two photos of the house and garden, and she said she didn’t see why not, but she fidgeted until she was sure that Wilfrid had returned the album to its hiding-place. When they were all sitting down again, Paul cleared his throat and looked at her more narrowly than before, and with a greater cumulative sense that it didn’t matter how he looked at her, she wasn’t going to see him. He said airily, ‘There’s one thing-’ just as Daphne, with a little chuckle, almost grinning, as if at some great mutual satisfaction, said, ‘Well! I’m sorry to say that I’ve promised to be at my friend Caroline’s by four o’clock, so alas we’ll have to bring the meeting to a conclusion, with a vote of thanks to Wilfrid Valance for the refreshments!’

Paul’s face reddened and stiffened, but he wasn’t going to be outdone. He made a thing of nodding regretfully at his watch. ‘Well, if I’m to catch the 5.10,’ he said.

‘Oh, well, there you are, perfect,’ said Daphne smoothly.

It wasn’t clear if Wilfrid would want to drive him again; Paul was ready to phone for a Cathedral. He stood up, and started putting the tape-recorder and his papers into his briefcase with as little discomfiture as possible, in fact with a few delaying and normalizing remarks. ‘I’m so grateful to you,’ he said.

‘Well, I don’t suppose I’ve been much help to you,’ she said.

‘You’ve been very kind!’ said Paul, in a full embrace of untruth. He took out his copy of The Short Gallery: ‘I wonder – would you sign this for me?’ – it was the copy he had had for review. He hoped she was no longer up to reading the pencilled marginalia, even if she thought to look.

‘What’s that…?’

‘Oh, Paul wants you to sign your book for him, Mummy,’ said Wilfrid, clearly pleased by the request.

‘Oh, well, if you like’ – and after a scrabble for a biro and with an awkward squint at the title page, Daphne wrote something, in her large loping hand – Paul didn’t look but it took him back in a complex moment to the night she had written down her address for him at Paddington, and then much further to the morning at Foxleigh long before when he’d seen her make out a cheque with a comic precautionary air of not knowing what she was doing. There was something about her writing, with its big squareish loops and above-normal scale, that seemed to show her to him as a girl, something unguarded and almost unaltered by time, the same swelling Ds and crook-like ps she would have signed in letters to Cecil Valance before the First World War, and that now she was signing for him. She closed the book and handed it back; then stood up too, with the uncertain look of having come through something without too much harm. He clipped his briefcase shut.

‘Well! I’ll be in touch,’ he said. He wasn’t at all sure he would ever see her again. ‘And as I say, I’ll let you know about the book-launch, whenever it happens. You have to be there!’ She was completely impassive at this, and Paul moved forward with a quick amiable gasp and touched her upper arm – she hadn’t seen it coming: it was only after he’d planted the first kiss and was already committed to the second that her resistance showed, a little bewildered grunt and recoil, as if from the sheer scale of his misunderstanding.