The Stranger's Child Part 27

'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 pa.s.sive 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 gla.s.ses 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 Middles.e.x will be all before us. Your CTV.' Outside the train window, Middles.e.x 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 bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned 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 AZ, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sengers 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 AZ, 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 Middles.e.x? 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 p.r.i.c.kle 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed: '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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+elding 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 trespa.s.ser 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 s.p.a.ce 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, s.h.i.+elding 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 s.p.a.ce was dead and already sunless. The short slope of tangled gra.s.s, 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 p.i.s.s into the long gra.s.s.

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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.ces, 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 gra.s.s 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 ab.u.t.ted. 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 MCCMLx.x.xXCVII 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 gras.h.i.+ous 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 Berks.h.i.+re, 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 x.x.xX 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 embarra.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 seances 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 a.s.sociate 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 Berks.h.i.+re 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 repet.i.tions. 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 princ.i.p.al 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 Lancas.h.i.+re" 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 partic.i.p.ation, 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 embarra.s.sed 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 a.s.sistant 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 p.r.o.nouncement 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 pa.s.sionate 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 circ.u.mstantial biographical note: Sir Dudley Valance was born in 1895 at Corley Court in Berks.h.i.+re, 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 Wilts.h.i.+re 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 Peac.o.c.k, 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 fas.h.i.+on 'deniable', as Dudley would say. It was hard not to feel that his relations with the soldier whose death gave the book its t.i.tle 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 doc.u.ments, 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 subt.i.tle 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 surrept.i.tious 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 Suss.e.x, 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. 'Suss.e.x' presumably meant Suss.e.x 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 appet.i.te 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 Almazan 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 embarra.s.sed, 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, spa.r.s.e 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sage 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 Middles.e.x 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 Middles.e.x, twenty-seven stops to Edgware, the very end of the Northern line, a rea.s.suring 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gla.s.s. 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 c.o.c.ked and the questioning look of a deaf person. 'You'll have to speak up,' said the woman.

Paul shook his hand and said, 'h.e.l.lo, 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-embarra.s.sed 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 unb.u.t.toned 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 embarra.s.sing 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 gla.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton. '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 doc.u.ment off on the search for his gla.s.ses. 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:.