The Stranger's Child

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

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

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

  5

  ‘Shove?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Fredegond Shove.’

  ‘Oh, yes! . . . um . . .’

  ‘It’s the Collected Poems.’

  ‘Aha . . .’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Bloomsbury . . . First World War.’ Paul saw a promising mauve cover deep down, gay books keeping generally to that end of the spectrum, but when he dug it out it was a survey of historic thimbles, which wasn’t quite gay enough. ‘I think there’s a new volume of Virginia Woolf’s Letters coming up . . .’

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

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

  ‘Remind me what you’re working on?’

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

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

  ‘Among other things . . .’

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

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

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

  ‘Again . . . among other things.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Oh, yes . . .’ said Paul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘She has this macular problem.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

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

  ‘Doesn’t that come from smoking?’

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

  ‘Is she getting better?’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘No, I’d already left.’

  ‘Right, right.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Yes, of course . . .’

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

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

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

  ‘I’m sure.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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