The Stranger's Child Part 31

'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 cla.s.sic '

'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 ch.o.r.e 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. He found Dudley disconcerting, in his sharpness and odd pa.s.sive 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 s.p.a.ce 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 appet.i.te 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 embarra.s.sing, 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 gla.s.sy-eyed appet.i.te 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 grat.i.tude, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d . . .'

'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 sn.i.g.g.e.ring 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 pa.s.sage on Dudley's exploits as a practical joker, those efforts she retailed as cla.s.sics 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 G.o.d!' 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 a.s.s!' 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 doc.u.mentary 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. .h.i.tched 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 a.s.sessed, 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 Moliere (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 sn.o.b? 'It wasn't sn.o.bbery 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-cla.s.s Rupert Brooke. Upper cla.s.s 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 compet.i.tive 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 c.o.c.k.' 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 f.u.c.k 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 s.e.xy'. 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 s.h.i.t. 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 heteros.e.xual 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-b.u.mps 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 sn.o.bbish 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 s.e.xy, 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 b.i.t.c.h.' 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, Pica.s.sos 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 s.e.xed, he would f.u.c.k anyone.' (I laughed at this, but he seemed not to know why. Sensed he felt everyone else had had a lot more s.e.x 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 f.u.c.k 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 alb.u.ms and sc.r.a.p-books were stacked up, and started hoiking them out on to a table there. Looking at him stooping, a.r.s.e 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 alb.u.m 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 alb.u.ms 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, gla.s.s 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 b.u.m.

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 t.i.tle-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 b.u.t.tock, 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 gla.s.ses, 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 doc.u.ments 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, h.e.l.lo!' 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 b.u.g.g.e.rs,' 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 embarra.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 s.e.x. The worrying air of cliche 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 gla.s.ses 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 doc.u.mentary task that held off for a minute his heavy-hearted embarra.s.sment 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 gra.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 b.u.mbling 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.