The Stranger's Child Part 26

'It's all coming back, you know,' Peter said, with a tight smile and shake of the head.

'How do you mean?'

'Victoriana. People are starting to understand it.' Last year at St Pancras Station he had joined a small rally headed by John Betjeman; he dreamed of getting Betjeman to come and talk to the boys about Corley Court he pictured his pleasure in the jelly-mould ceiling. 'That's my room, of course,' he said, without pointing, and saw Paul had no idea which one he meant. In one or two other windows strip lights showed against the evening sun, and in the end room on the first floor the curtains were closed, the Babies already in bed, in the barely muted light.

'Do you think Cecil Valance actually had an affair with Mrs Jacobs?' said Paul.

'Oh! Well, I suppose only one person alive knows for sure, and that's what she says. Of course you never know exactly what people mean by an affair.'

'No . . .' said Paul, and sure enough he blushed again.

'I think Cecil was probably queer, don't you?' said Peter, which was a mixture of a hunch and a certain amount of cheerfully wishful thinking, but Paul just gasped and looked away. There was a strange disturbance, almost subliminal at first. Over the rattling roar of the mower a few yards off a larger and darker noise began to drone and wallow, and then, not quite where they were looking, a military aircraft trawling low over the woods, steady, heavy-bellied, throbbing and majestic, and somehow aware, as if its pilot had waved, that its pa.s.sage overhead was a marvel to the craning and turning figures below. Its four propellers gave it a patient, old-fashioned look, unlike the sleek unanswerable jets they saw long before they heard them. As it pa.s.sed overhead and then over the house it appeared to rise a little before homing in through the lower haze towards the aerodrome five miles away. Mike sheltered his eyes with a raised right arm that seemed also to make a friendly claim or greeting. They went over, Peter introduced Paul, and Mike explained, amid the sweet and sharp smells of two-stroke exhaust and cut gra.s.s and his own sweat, that it was one of the big Belfast freighters they'd just brought in. 'Sluggish old bus,' he said, 'but it'll carry anything.' In upper windows of the school boys who'd been watching stood down and melted away. And then the evening re-established itself, but perceptibly at a later phase, as if the past two minutes had been a tranced half-hour.

Ahead of them the little creosoted cottage of the cricket pavilion waited under the lengthening shadow of the woods, a possible place for a snog, at least, but still too much in Mike's view. Peter put his arm round Paul's shoulders, and they strolled on stiffly for a few seconds, Paul again unsure what to do with his hands. 'No,' said Peter smoothly, 'I'd like to write something about old Cecil one day I don't think anyone has, since that Stokes memoir, you know.'

'Right . . .'

'Which is something of a period piece. Unreadable, really. That's why I was asking George Sawle the other night.'

'Do you write then?'

'Well, I'm always writing something or other. And of course I keep a sensational diary.'

'Oh, so do I,' said Paul, and Peter saw him tremble and focus, 'well, sensationally dull.' There it was, the tiny treasured bit of wit in him. Peter fell on it with a laugh.

Just beyond the whited boundary lay the slipcatch, mown all around, but little used, tall gra.s.s growing up through its silvery slats. Peter liked the shape of it, like some archaic boat, and sometimes on evening walks by himself he lay down in it and blew cigarette-smoke at the midges overhead. He imagined lying in it now, with Paul close beside him. It was another of those sites where half-glimpsed fantasies, always in the air, touched down questioningly for a minute, and then flitted on.

Paul had found a cricket ball in the long gra.s.s, and stepping back a few yards he threw it swerving through the dip of the slipcatch and up into the air, where no one of course was waiting to receive it it bounced once and ran off quickly towards the old parked roller, leaving Paul looking both smug and abashed. 'I can see you're rather good,' said Peter drily; and nervous that he might be asked to put the slipcatch to its proper use, and lob a ball to and fro through it with Paul for half an hour, pretending not to care that he could neither catch nor throw, he walked smilingly on. There was something expert and even vicious in the flick of Paul's arm and the hard momentary trundle of the ball along the curving rails.

It felt sweetly momentous to walk in under the edge of the wood. Here again the evening seemed suddenly advanced. Even the near distances were mysteriously barred and crowded with green, shadows blurred the ma.s.sive tree-boles while the roof of the wood formed a far-off, slowly stirring dazzle. The horse-chestnuts and limes that made a great undulating wall around the playing-fields were mixed further in with large oaks and sinister cl.u.s.ters of yews. The children climbed and hid in the unchecked brushwood round the base of the limes, and scratched out their tunnels in the rooty soil beneath. Here and there the undergrowth thickened artificially with barricades of dead branches, the camouflaged camps they made, with hidden entrances too small for any master to crawl through. You couldn't be sure if a rustling noise was a child at his spy-hole or a blackbird among the dead leaves.

Paul's behaviour was more anxious now, he hung back again, craned round at the trees, found inexplicable interest among the leaves underfoot; his thin stiff smile of admiration was almost comical to see. 'Come here,' said Peter, and when Paul came to him, as if good-naturedly leaving something more involving, which still half-held his attention, he locked an arm tight under his elbow, making a quick necessary joke of that too, and marched him briskly along. 'You're coming with me!' he said, and found himself shivering and swallowing with excitement and a kind of latent violence. He really wasn't waiting for more than a minute longer it was only the dim consciousness that outside this hot-faced rush of beautiful necessity there might still be boys about, among the trees, in the dugout of a camp, that kept him from seizing him roughly there and then. He saw of course that Paul needed this treatment, needed someone to override him. Still, he had to give in, after a few ducking and face-shielding yards of scrambling through the saplings and thick undergrowth, to Paul's 'Um, actually . . . !', his tug and grimace less scared than indignant.

'Sorry, my dear, am I hurting you?' Peter's grasp became a reasonable stroke, a clumsy holding hands, two fingers plaited for a moment, his endearment gleaming with his humorous annoyance at being checked. He looked around as if thinking of something else; it seemed all right, and then, with a moment's courteous questioning pause in the air, he kissed him fully but gently on the lips. He made the promise of withdrawing a part of the advance, a tantalizing tremor. And again, as if overcome, Paul yielded; and again, when Peter pulled back and smiled, he started talking. 'Oh G.o.d . . .' he said, in a sort of tragical quiet voice Peter hadn't heard before. 'Oh my G.o.d.'

'Come on then,' said Peter quietly, and they walked on with a new sense of purpose, surely, towards the ma.s.sive old wreck of a tree which Peter thought of as a kind of Herne's Oak. Beyond here was the line, invisible but potent as any prep-school law or prohibition, dividing the In-Bounds from the Out-of-Bounds Woods.

Peter dropped Paul in Marlborough Gardens, watched from behind the wheel as he let himself in, with a quick turn of the head in the lighted doorway but no wave. At a bedroom window a light already showed through unlined pink curtains; in a minute the bathroom light went on. He had a sense of the private but simple life of the household marked out in lights, and Paul reabsorbed into its routines, which both were and weren't his own; relieved to be back, in a way, but glowing and inattentive surely with new knowledge. Peter wrestled the car into gear and made off with his usual air of helpless indiscretion round the loop of the Gardens.

He wondered if Paul might be too strange for him after all. It might be hard work having such a silent boyfriend, his reserve seemed like a judgement on you. Still, certainly worth holding on to him in the present dearth of opportunity. Someone else might not see the point of him at all someone who hadn't touched his hot sleek skin, felt his hesitations and his burning little stabs at letting go. He had a charming, slightly tapering c.o.c.k, hard as a hat-peg, which he had clearly been astonished, and almost appalled, to see in the hands of someone other than himself, and then in the mouth. He had panted and giggled at the shock. And then quickly, afterwards, he started to fret he let Peter hold him, and hold his hand, but he had a troubled look, as if he felt he had let himself down. They almost rushed, then, to get him back home; they parted with only a 'See you soon' and the darting, deniable kiss on the cheek in the insecure shadow of the car. Yet all these little awkwardnesses raised the game for Peter, and excited him more. It wasn't at all like other affairs he had had, but he felt the same disorienting rush of insight, the roll and lift of some larger conveyance than a rattling Hillman Imp. On the main road back to Corley, with the windows down, a new smell blew in, the moist sweet night smell off the fields and trees, all the more mysterious when the nights were so short. The sun would be up a little after four: and find them both waking to their separate sense of how things had changed. Peter saw his thoughts drifting during lessons, and Paul with the paying-in books, preoccupied by his sensations, perched on his swivel stool in a distracting new awareness of being thought about and wanted.

He slowed and indicated to the empty road, and turned in through the gates to the heavier occluded darkness of the Park. The lights of home . . . the mile of scented darkness . . . The woods had grown up a lot, clearly, since Cecil's day: now the lights of the school were hidden. That mile, too, was a purely poetical distance or a social one, perhaps, designed to impress. It was one of Cecil's many invitations to admire him, though not, presumably, to turn up at Corley Court in person. He appeared to the reader on fast-moving horse-back, this latter-day world of cheap cars and jet-planes superbly unimagined.

Between the White Horse downs and Radcot Bridge Nothing but corn and copse and shadowed grazing, Grey village spires and sleeping thatch, and stems Of moon-faced mayweed under poplars gazing Upon their moon-cast shadows in the Thames.

It was one of his better pre-war poems, though with that tendency to sonorous padding that spoiled almost everything he wrote if judged by the sternest standard.

Peter parked on the front gravel and made a poor attempt to shut the car door quietly. The moon was up, among streaky clouds, and before going in he walked round in front of the house, across the lawn by the fishpond, and back up the rise towards the gate into the High Ground. He seemed to stride through the complex calm of s.e.xual gratification, borne along by running and looping images of what had happened he saw himself enhancing it, warming it by little touches, then felt the countervailing cool of something like unease, the cool of loneliness. If Paul were with him still, they would make it better, do it over again. No doubt it was painful for anyone who was courting, but for two men . . . He stopped in front of the Ionic temple and peered into the deep shadow, oddly wary of the warm life caged invisibly there. Perhaps disturbed by him, a rabbit or hamster rustled and scratched, a budgie hopped and fluttered and tinkled its bell. He went on and stood by the gate, looking back, the moonlight and its shadows making the house insubstantial, for all its pinnacled bulk, as if half in ruin. The dorms were all dark but the light of the Headmaster's television flickered inside the oriel window. The moon gleamed sharply on the pointed vane of the chapel roof, and on the dial of the stopped clock in the central gable, under the pale stone banner of the Valance motto, 'Seize the Day'.

It was funny how Paul had been turned on by Cecil's tomb, and by the fact of Corley having been his home. Cecil's brother, of course, had stayed on here for thirty years more, till the military took over. It was surely good luck in the end that all the Victorian work was boxed in there was nothing for the army to ruin. Dudley Valance's hatred for the house was what had preserved it. It would be worth trying to talk to him about the early days, about Cecil as a boy. In Black Flowers he dealt very coolly with his brother there was quite a sarcastic tone to some of it. Still, what a subject, two writers growing up in this astonishing place, the whole age that had built it riding for a fall. Perhaps he should seize the day himself, and start gathering materials, talking to people like old Daphne Jacobs who still remembered Cecil, and had loved him, and apparently been loved back.

Were people interested in Cecil? How did he rank? Undeniably a very minor poet, who just happened to have written lines here and there that had stuck . . . But his life was dramatic as well as short, and now everyone was mad about the First World War the Sixth Form all learned 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' by heart, and they liked the Valance war poems he had shown them. There was something a little bit queer about several of these poems; something he suspected in Dudley, too. Dudley seemed if anything the queerer one, with his intense devotion to the man he called Billy Prideaux, who'd been shot beside him on a night recce, and seemed to have triggered a nervous breakdown, powerfully but obscurely described in his book.

Peter came back to the stone bench by the fishpond and lit a cigarette. Cecil's letters would be the thing to get a look at Peter hoped his charm had worked last week on George Sawle, who must have all sorts of useful memories. Interesting what he'd said about Lytton Strachey too, and this book that was about to come out. Was the era of hearsay about to give way to an age of doc.u.mentation? He looked at the house, as if it enshrined the mystery and in its Victorian way imposed the task. Was he up to writing a biography? It would take a much more orderly existence than any he'd managed so far . . . It was odd, it often struck him, being here in the country with these eighty children and a group of adults he would never have chosen as friends. But it would be at least a symbolic advantage, if he were to write the book. The stars thickened in the outer sky and the sinking moon threw the steep black profile of the roof into Gothic relief. It was windless and warm, the near-stasis of an ideal English summer. It all looked very good for the Open Day. He got up and strolled back towards the house in the nice tired mood of prospective exertion.

What was that? A hand stroked the back of his neck as the shadow of a tall brick chimney high above the Headmaster's window wobbled and shifted. A kite-like form detached itself, and moved with dreamy-looking wariness across the sloping upper leads; five seconds later another, hesitant but committed, and making it seem that the inky shadow might harbour many more of them. They were strangely antique, these two figures, of uncertain size and height, and seemed to flow like oily shadows themselves, in dressing-gowns left open like cloaks. They crept from chimney-stack to chimney-stack, towards the higher slope of the chapel roof, with its crowning spirelet still far above their heads. Once or twice Peter could hear very faintly the patter or slither of their slippered feet.

FOUR.

Something of a Poet

Mrs Failing found in his remains a sentence that puzzled her. 'I see the respectable mansion. I see the smug fortress of culture. The doors are shut. The windows are shut. But on the roof the children go dancing for ever.'

E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey, chapter 12

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 b.u.t.toned 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed instantly and jerked upwards inside-out behind her head. Her words whipped back to him distinctly, 'Oh b.u.g.g.e.r 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 gla.s.ses, 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 rea.s.surance 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 part.i.tion 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 b.u.mping into you like that.'

'I know . . .' It was a struggle for her between being grateful, embarra.s.sed 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 unb.u.t.toned 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 a.s.surance 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 grat.i.tude, 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 t.i.tle 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 gla.s.ses, 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.'