‘Oh, god yes,’ said Robin, suddenly disgusted by his cigarette, stubbing it out and folding it under his thumb in the ashtray. ‘Basil wasn’t hopeless like that, he was much more conventional. I imagine Daphne felt she’d had enough of temperamental artists.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He was a businessman – he had a small factory that made something, I can’t remember what, a sort of . . . washer or something.’
‘Right.’
‘Anyway, he went bust. He had a daughter from an earlier marriage, and they went to live with her. I think it was all rather a nightmare.’
‘Oh, yes, Sue.’
‘Sue, exactly . . .’ said Robin, with a cautious smile. ‘You seem to know most of the family.’
‘Well . . .’ said Paul. ‘They’re not actually all that useful when it comes to Cecil. But it’s good to know they’re on my side.’ He found he had stood up, smiling, as if to go, and only then said, with a pitying shake of the head, ‘I mean, what do you think really went on between Daphne and Cecil?’
Robin laughed drily, as if to say there were limits. Paul knew already that information was a form of property – people who had it liked to protect it, and enhance its value by hints and withholdings. Then, perhaps, they could move on to enjoying the glow of self-esteem and surrender in telling what they knew. ‘Well,’ he said, and went slightly pink, under the pressure of his own discretion.
‘I mean, would you like to have a drink some time? I don’t want to bother you now.’ Paul thought a discreet encounter, something with almost the colour of a date, might appeal to Robin. He saw, because it was a habit he had himself, elsewhere, how his eyes paused a fraction of a second in each upward or sideways sweep at the convergence of his black-jeaned legs. But Robin hesitated, as if to grope round some other obstacle.
‘You see, I don’t drink during Lent,’ he said. ‘But after that . . .’ – with a suggestion he drank like a fish through the rest of the liturgical year. ‘Ah, Jake . . .’ and there was Jake again, standing behind them, with the twinkle of someone detecting a secret.
‘I hope I’m not breaking something up.’
‘Not a bit,’ said Robin suavely.
‘I’ll give you a ring if I may,’ said Paul, ‘– after Easter!’
Jake led Paul back to have his books entered in the system, an unfollowable procedure of typed slips and cards. ‘I’ve just had a word with the Editor,’ he said. ‘We wondered if you’d be interested in covering this for us?’ He passed him a sheet of paper – ‘Ignore that stuff at the top’: two other names with question-marks and phone-numbers, heavily inked over during phone-calls surely, which as surely had not borne fruit. ‘You’d have to stay overnight – it would just be seven hundred words for the Commentary pages.’ It was hard to take in, Balliol College, Oxford, a conference, dinner, the Warton Professor of English . . . a shiver of panic went through him, which he turned into a breathy laugh.
‘Well, if you think I’d be right for it.’
‘You’re not a Balliol man, are you?’
‘Ooh, no!’ said Paul with a little shudder. ‘Not I. Well, thank you – ah, I see, Dudley Valance is speaking.’
‘That’s partly what made me wonder – I didn’t know he was still alive.’
‘Not in good health, I’m afraid,’ said Paul.
‘You must know him . . .’
‘A bit, you know . . . He and Linette live in Spain for most of the year.’ He felt the prickle of the uncanny again, the secret sign, the reasserted intention that he should write his book. There were times in one’s life that one only knew as one passed through them, the decisive moments, when one saw that the decisions had been taken for one.
Jake walked him to the door of the office and they stood talking there a little longer, but had to move aside for a big fat boy in jeans and a T-shirt pushing a trolley stacked high with tightly bound bales of newsprint; he threw one down with a pleasant thump on to the floor. ‘Read all about it!’ he said, and watched with a curious cynical smile as they reacted.
‘Ah, yes . . . now . . .’ said Jake, showing off, but charmingly, to entertain his guest. One or two others got up and circled, looking for scissors, a sharp knife, and ignoring the delivery boy, who wheeled back into the corridor, still smiling thinly. In a moment the plastic tape was snipped, and the top copy plucked up and turned and presented to Paul with a casual flourish: ‘For you!’ – the new TLS – Friday’s TLS, ready two days early, ‘hot off the press’ someone said, enjoying his reactions, though in fact the paper was cool to the touch, even slightly damp. There was a cursory checking, in which Paul politely shared – that pictures had come out, that a last-minute correction had been made – while an enviable sense of professional satisfaction seemed to fill the air and then (since this momentous occurrence was a weekly routine) to fade almost at once as people went back to their desks and focused again on issues weeks and months ahead. Paul said goodbye to Jake, and went away with the clear idea of more such meetings already in his mind.
On the way along the dreary corridor he turned off into the Gents and had only just unzipped when he heard the yawn of the door behind him and a second later a half-pleased, half-embarrassed ‘Aha . . . !’ He glanced round. Slightly disconcertingly, Robin Gray didn’t follow the normal etiquette but came to the urinal right next to Paul’s, leaving three further stalls untenanted. There was a droll murmur and frowning fidget as he got himself going, a certain sturdiness of stance, as if on a rolling ship, and a quick candid gaze, friendly but businesslike, at Paul’s own progress on the other side of the porcelain partition. Then looking ahead, he said, ‘You were quite right, by the way, in what you said earlier.’
‘Oh . . . really?’ said Paul, glancing at him, a little confused. ‘What was that?’
‘About Cecil Valance and boys.’
Now it was Paul’s turn to say, ‘Aha! . . . Well, I thought it must be.’
Robin tucked in his chin, with his air of heavily flagged discretion. ‘Not for now, I think.’ He gave a cough of a laugh. ‘But I believe you’ll find it amusing. Well, I’ll tell you all about it when we meet.’ And with that plump promise he zipped himself up and went back to the office.
Paul sauntered down the broad stairs and into the lobby of the Times building with a smile on his face. He had A Funny Kind of Friendship in his briefcase and a feeling of something much funnier – the first sense of a welcome from the literary family, of curtains held back, doors opening into half-seen rooms full of oddities and treasures that seemed virtually normal to the people who lived in them. In the long lobby, belatedly gleaming with afternoon light, low tables between leather armchairs were spread with copies of today’s Times, and Sun, and the three Times supplements, thrilling evidence of what went on upstairs. He nodded goodbye as he passed the uniformed receptionist. The revolving door from the street brought in a courier in helmet and whistling leggings, red URGENT stickers on the packet in his hand; Paul stepped into the still-revolving quadrant and emerged on to the pavement with a graciously busy half-smile at the passers-by who would never have access to these mysteries. He kept his copy of the day-after-tomorrow’s TLS under his arm, which he wanted very much to be seen with. He didn’t think the people in the street here were getting the point of it – but back in the North Reading-Room of the British Library he felt it might stir a good deal of envy and conjecture.
6
Paul trotted down the long stone staircase and out into the quad with a preoccupied frown and a curious feeling of imposture. Though old enough to be a don, he was visited in waves by the nervous ignorance of a freshman. He skirted the lawn respectfully, beneath ranged Gothic windows, clutching his briefcase and picturing the evening to come, with its sequence of challenges, drinks in the Senior Common Room, dinner in Hall, social contacts and collisions all the more daunting for the tacit codes that college life was steeped in. But at some point, he was almost sure, tonight or perhaps tomorrow, he would get his chance. Of
course it was still possible the old boy wouldn’t turn up; at the age of eighty-four he had excuses readily to hand. With excited foreboding Paul pictured his dark autocratic face, as he knew it from photographs, and when he went up the three steps into the gatehouse there he was – under the arch, by the porter’s lodge, in a dark overcoat, leaning on a stick.
Paul nearly greeted him, gasped and suppressed a smile as he went past; his heart was racing at the sudden opportunity – he turned and then stood near him, at an angle, as though waiting for someone else. Awful of course if it wasn’t him; but no, the wide, hawkish face was unmistakable, stretched rather than furrowed by age, the full mouth a little thinner and down-turned, impressive dark eyes staring ahead, grey hair sleeked back into curls around the collar. Paul stepped aside to look at the glassed-in notice-boards, over which his own slightly smirking face floated in reflection. The old man remained immobile, only poking now and then at the flagstones with the rubber tip of his stick. He was evidently someone for whom arrangements had always been made. Paul cleared his throat and paced around, choosing his words. Through the inner window of the lodge, before the dark wall of pigeon-holes, he could see a woman talking to the porter. Surely, Linette – with thick stiff hair, an improbable auburn, mingling with the upturned collar of her fox-fur jacket. A hard, good-looking face, thoroughly made up, and a manner he knew at once, from its tight smiles and frowns, of getting people to do things. The porter made a brief phone-call, and then came out, opening the door for her, and bringing her suitcase. ‘Good evening, Sir Dudley! The Master’s coming down himself to meet you’ – a flourish in which Paul heard a doubling-up of respect, of everyday loyalty to the Master and deference to the visitor. Linette had now made an approach impossible, and Paul went to look for his imaginary friend by the gate on to Broad Street. He could hear the tone but not quite the words of the muttered conversation between the Valances. In front of him, students cycling past, university life rattling on although it was the vacation. In a minute there were calls and wheezy laughs behind him, and as Paul turned round he saw a tiny grey-haired man in a gown come whirling up the steps from the quad and greet his guests – not exactly as old friends but on the footing of some clear shared understanding, which seemed to smile out of his keen, rather spiritual face. Sir Dudley said, ‘You needn’t have come down yourself,’ in a voice of chuffing, almost supercilious grandeur, and his wife said, ‘Good evening, Master!’ which for all its submissiveness showed she had got what she wanted.
Off they went, the Master offering Sir Dudley an arm on the steps. ‘What year did you go down?’ he said, and Paul heard, ‘Nineteen fourteen, you see . . . I never took my degree . . . I got married . . .’ Lady Valance laughed for the Master, as though to show how little this lack of a degree had mattered, and perhaps to indulge the mention of this earlier marriage. Well, they must have been together for fifty years themselves, after the mere nine or ten with Daphne, whom Paul thought of now more fondly. What a contrast – he pictured her in her shabby mac and hat, in the place of this highly preserved woman, who still moved with the dawdling strut of a model. Paul watched them from the steps. Now two muscular boys in white rowing shorts burst out from a doorway, and slowed and ran on the spot to let the Master and his guests go by; then they were off, coming up past Paul in a rush and out through the gate into the street. For once it was the old man who held his interest, and seemed in fact almost miraculous, from the lordly jabs of his stick to the yap of his vowels. As they went off through an arch on the far side of the quad, Dudley still visibly a casualty of the Battle of Loos, other less palpable things seemed to hover about him, which were famous phrases of his brother, in Georgian Poetry, or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Paul felt, in some idiotic but undeniable way, that he had very nearly seen Cecil himself.
He went on, as planned, along Broad Street, to look at the bookshops. The rowing boys had already vanished into the thickening light of the late afternoon – the sun in the west struck right along the street, and dazzled the people who were coming towards him, leaving him, a mere looming silhouette, free to examine them closely. As he loitered around the biography table in Blackwell’s, picking up the expensive new books and looking at their indexes and acknowledgements, he had Dudley’s hunched but handsome figure on his mind, and was starting to hear answers to his questions in that extraordinary voice. Paul thought he would like his own acknowledgements page to begin with thanks to his subject’s brother, ideally perhaps by that stage ‘the late Sir Dudley Valance’, who ‘gave so generously of his time’ and ‘made his archives available without questions or conditions’. The author of this new life of Percy Slater had even been ‘welcomed warmly into the family home’ – something Paul now sensed was less likely to happen in his case.
He had always opened such books at the grey-black seams that marked the inserts of pictures. His daydreams for his own book often dwelt on this last, almost decorative addition to the work – the quickly passed-over photos of unappealing forebears, the birthplace or childhood residence, the subject sharpening into focus in his teens, the momentarily confusing captions – lower right, opposite, over – , one or two of the pictures thought worthy of a full page, the defining portraits. Would Dudley ever make such things available to him? Paul felt some kind of subterfuge might be necessary. Percy Slater had lived into his seventies so there was all the proliferation of wives and children, snapshots from Kenya and Japan, a late picture in doctoral robes of this very university, chatting to Harold Macmillan, the Chancellor. None of that for Cecil, of course, just a photograph of his tomb, perhaps.
And there, at the end of the table, in a sober brown jacket with the title in red and yellow, was The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, a book with an aura, it seemed to Paul, and fat with confidence of its own interest – he looked at something else first, just to savour and focus his anticipation, and then after a minute casually picked up the heavy volume and hopped backwards through the index in his now systematic way – Valance, then Sawle, then Ralph. Two mentions of Dudley, one of Cecil, which turned out to be in the footnote identifying Dudley as ‘younger brother of the First World War poet’. He coveted it, but the price, £15, a week’s rent – hardly possible. A familiar but still extraordinary calm came over him. He made his way into the History department, chose a huge book on medieval England, itself part of a massively scholarly series, pale blue wrappers, Clarendon Press, price £40, and a minute later took it off upstairs. In his bag he had a compliments slip from Jake at the TLS, with his name on and the scribbled message, ‘800 words by end of March’, and he tucked it into the front of the book as he went. Stopping at a mezzanine where Classics were displayed, he got out his notebook to write down a title, and squatting down to a low shelf behind a table he pencilled three or four page numbers and a question-mark on the fly-leaf of his volume of Plantagenet history. From here it was a further turn of the stairs up to the secondhand department, where he asked the bearded young man if they bought review copies in good condition. The Plantagenets were given a quick glance, the review-slip almost subliminally noted, the book checked for any devaluing marginalia. ‘We can only offer half-price,’ said the man. ‘Oh, really?’ said Paul, chewing his cheek – ‘well, okay, fine, I guess, if that’s your standard practice. Sorry . . . let me just take that review-slip . . .’ The item was written in a ledger, the book itself translated to a trolley of new acquisitions, and two clean £10 notes handed over. A few minutes later he strolled back into college with The Letters of Evelyn Waugh in his briefcase and a happy surplus of £5 in his back pocket.
The room he’d been given, at the top of a long stone staircase, had the name Greg Hudson on the door, and though the sheets and towel were fresh he felt like an unwanted guest among all the books, records and clothes that Greg had left behind over the vac. There were muddy plimsolls under the bed, a Blondie poster above the desk. In a sweet-smelling cupboard full of jam and coffee he found a bottle of malt whisky, half-full, and poured a finger of
it into a tumbler. He stood sipping at it, with one foot on the hearthstone. There was a poem by Stephen Spender that began, very oddly, ‘Marston, dropping it in the grate, broke his pipe.’ It had come into his mind the moment he’d unlocked the door, amid the uneasy displeasure, and covert excitement, of finding the room was full of someone else’s things. The line about Marston was part of his illusion of Oxford, a glimpse of pipe-smoking students known by their surnames; and though he’d forgotten what happened in the rest of the poem, he saw Marston dropping his pipe on the stone hearth just here, as easily as he could let slip this glass of treasured Glenfiddich.
He read the postcards from Paris and Sydney propped on the mantelpiece, both signed Jacqui with a lot of crosses, and took down the mounted photo of the college’s Second XV, which had the names written underneath in a crazily ornate script. So that was Greg, the grinning giant standing off-centre, his mid-parts hidden by the shaggy round head of the man seated in front of him. How his great sweaty body must labour in this schoolboy-size bed – and when Jacqui came round, what a terrible squash it must be for them. He pulled open the top drawer of the desk, but it was so jammed with papers that he couldn’t face going through it just yet. Otherwise, there was nothing much to read except chemistry books. For some reason, he left his new purchase, if that’s what it was, untouched.
He decided that before going down to dinner in half an hour he would look again at Dudley’s Black Flowers, to have something to quote, or to ask, if he got a chance over drinks. ‘I was wondering, Sir Dudley, when you said . . .’ Since he knew Corley Court, it seemed a sound starting-point. He peered at the author photo with fresh interest, and a suspicion that Dudley looked almost younger now – the style of the 1950s man of letters seemed deliberately ageing. He sat selfconsciously under the bright ceiling-lamp, with his glass of whisky. A red tartan rug thrown over the armchair disguised the probing state of the springs, deranged presumably by the recurrent impact of Greg. About the changes at Corley, Dudley had written: