8
Didcot and then Swindon came by, with remote tugs of allegiance that distracted him, as the half-familiar outskirts slipped away, from the bigger tug of his mission to Worcester Shrub Hill. He treasured the length of the journey, and had a childish feeling, in the bright placeless run among farms and the gentle tilts of the earth one way or the other, that the important interview with Daphne Jacobs was all the time being magically deferred; though with each long deceleration and stop (Stroud, was it?, a little later Stonehouse) the end came inescapably closer. Of course he wanted to be there, in Olga, as Daphne’s house was surprisingly called, and he also wanted to be cradled all day in this pleasant underpopulated train. He couldn’t even bring himself to prepare; he had written out a series, or flight, of questions, up which he hoped to lead her towards a steady light at the top, but his briefcase, heavy with bookmarked evidence, stayed untouched on the seat beside him.
Some time after Stonehouse, the train made a long threading descent of the western edge of the Cotswolds into what seemed a vast plain beyond, half-hidden in murky sunlight. Paul had never been so far in this direction. The sensation of entering a whole new region of his own island was dreamlike but unsettling. A few minutes later they were sliding quite fast into Gloucester station, the knots of people on the platform, hikers, soldiers, closing in and moving along with their eyes fixed anxiously or threateningly on the rapidly braking train. Well, there was still Cheltenham to come before Worcester.
In a minute, however, he had to move his things for a woman and two children to sit down, she nagging at them distractedly, her own face taut with worry, and when the train began to move again he found the romance of the journey from London, which they knew nothing about, had been left behind for ever, and a period of compromise and cohabitation had begun. Paul kept his briefcase on the table, leaving little room for the boy to spread his colouring book. His dislike of children, with their protean ability to embarrass him, seemed to focus in his scowl over The Short Gallery, which he rather brandished in their faces. The fact that he was about to conduct an interview of enormous importance to his own book, and therefore to his future life, was squeezing and trapping him like the onset of some illness undetectable to anyone else. If what George had said was right, then Paul’s conversations with Daphne, today and again tomorrow, were bound to be a peculiar game, in which he would have to pretend not to know the thing he was most hoping to get her to own up to.
He looked through the first chapter again, which was her ‘portrait’ of Cecil:
On this fine June night, which was to be the last time I saw him, Cecil took me to Jenner’s for a Spartan supper of the kind which seems to a love-struck girl to be a perfect love-feast. Pea soup, I remember, and a leg of chicken, and a strawberry blancmange. Neither of us, I think, cared a hoot what we ate. It was the chance to be together, under the magic cloak of our own strong feelings, out of the noise of war, that counted above all. When we had done we walked the streets for an hour, down to the Embankment, watching the light pass on the broad stretches of the river. The next day, Cecil was to re-embark for France, and the mighty thrust that we knew was coming. He didn’t ask me then – it was to be in his last letter, a few days later – if I would marry him, but the evening air seemed charged with the largest questions. Our talk, meanwhile, was of simple and happy things. He saw me into a cab which would take me to my train at Marylebone, and my last sight of him was against the great black columns of St Martin-in-the-Fields, waving his cap, and then turning abruptly away into the future we both imagined with such excitement, and such dread.
Perhaps it was just a reflection of his own habits, but Paul didn’t believe anyone remembered all the courses of a meal they’d eaten four years ago, much less sixty-four; whereas (again perhaps reflecting his own fairly limited experience) they always remembered having sex. The worrying air of cliché and unreality about the whole of this scene was only heightened by the leg of chicken and the strawberry blancmange, which in some way Paul didn’t like to think about seemed to stand in for the blandly concealed truth of a night spent at the Valances’ Marylebone flat – even the naming of the station was a cover. And what, come to that, of Cecil preparing for a ‘mighty thrust’?
Chewing his lip, Paul examined Daphne’s photo on the back flap of the jacket. She appeared three-quarter length, in a plain dark suit and blouse and a single string of pearls, looking out with a half-smile and a certain generalized charm, caused perhaps by her not having her glasses on. Immediately behind her was an archway, through which a grand hall and staircase could dimly be made out. When you looked very closely at her face you saw it was a subtly worked blur, silvery smooth from touching up around the eyes and under the chin; the photographer had taken fifteen or twenty years off her. The whole thing gave the impression of a good-looking, even marriageable woman of means in a setting whose splendour needed only to be hinted at. It was hard to relate her to the bedraggled old figure he’d rescued in the street. None the less, the suggestion that the other persona existed was subtly unnerving.
At Worcester he was suddenly cheerful to be on the move; he queued for a taxi, the first one he had taken since their joint journey the previous November: Cathedral Cars. He mustered a breezy tone with the driver as they left the city and the meter started flickering in cheerful green increments. He thought he would enjoy the small country roads more on the way back – as yet he was looking straight through the barns and hedges to the imagined scene he had set up at Olga. They came into Staunton St Giles, past the lodge-gates of a big house and then along a wide unattractive street of semi-detached council houses; a war memorial, with a church beyond, a village shop and Post Office, a pub, the Black Bear, where he almost felt like stopping first, but it was a minute or two from closing time. ‘Do you know where Olga is?’ Paul asked the driver.
‘Ooh, yes,’ he said, as if Olga were a well-known local character. A handsome stone house, the Old Vicarage, came by, a run of old cottages looking much more pleased with themselves than the rest of the village, a nice place for Daphne to spend her final years. The taxi slowed and turned down a side lane, and pulled up unexpectedly by the gate of a decrepit-looking bungalow. ‘Twelve pounds exactly,’ said the driver.
Paul waited till the taxi had turned the corner, then he walked a short way along the lane and took four or five photos of the bungalow, over the low garden wall, a documentary task that held off for a minute his heavy-hearted embarrassment at the state of the place. He came back, hiding the camera in his briefcase until later, when he’d worked out whether Daphne would mind being photographed herself. Sometimes, after the subjective indulgence of an interview, people found the crude fact of a photograph too jarring and intrusive.
The name OLGA was fashioned out of wrought iron, on the wrought-iron gate. Paul stepped in over the weedy gravel, and gazed round at the neglected garden, the grass tall and green in the roof-gutters, the dead climbing rose left swaying over the porch, an old Renault 12 with a rusty dent in the offside wing and green moss growing along the rubber sills of the windows. Two or three stripes of the lawn had been mown, perhaps a week ago, and the mower abandoned where it stood. The flower-beds were full of last year’s dead leaves. It all made him more flinchingly apprehensive about what he was going to find once he got indoors. He pressed the bell, a sleepy ding-dong that then repeated, all by itself, as if showing some impatience the caller might have hoped to conceal, and saw his face scarily distorted in the rippled glass of the front door; he seemed to run forward into their lives in waves. It was Wilfrid Valance who answered. He was just as Paul had remembered, and also, after thirteen more years of bumbling along as he was, alarmingly different, a wide-faced child with furrowed cheeks, and one defiant central tuft of grey hair fronting the bald plateau above. ‘How are you?’ said Paul.
‘Mm, you found us all right,’ said Wilfrid, with a twitch of a smile but not meeting his eye. Paul thought he saw that his visit was quite an occasion.
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bsp; ‘Well, just about . . .’ he said meaninglessly and handed over his coat and scarf. The hall was tiny, with other glass-panelled doors opening off it – a look of sixties brightness that had already become obscurely depressing. ‘And how is your mother?’ For a moment he felt a kind of awe, repressed till now, at being about to see her, the survivor, the friend of the long dead. And a twinge of something like envy at the thought of the friendship they might have had themselves if he hadn’t been a biographer.
‘Oh, she’s . . .’ – Wilfrid shook his head and grinned; Paul remembered his hesitations, like a suppressed stammer, in the middle of sentences, but this time the rest of the statement wasn’t forthcoming.
The sitting-room was stifling from a two-bar electric fire – a great thing like a fire-basket, with glowing fake coals showing dimly in the sunlight. There was a strong smell of burnt dust. Paul came in with a cheerful ‘Hello, Mrs Jacobs,’ determined not to show his shock at the state of the room. She was sitting almost with her back to him, in a wing-chair covered in shabby pink chintz. All around her was an astounding chaos of junk, so extreme that he knew he must simply ignore it. There was a worrying sense of the temporary grown permanent, piled-up objects adapting into furniture, covered by tablecloths and tipsily topped with lamps and vases and figurines.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, half-turning her head, but not looking at him, ‘Wilfrid’s put me right about you.’
‘Oh, yes . . . ?’ – he laughed cautiously: so she was tackling the question of his review straight off.
‘You’re not the pianist.’
‘No, I’m not – you’re quite right,’ said Paul.
‘I have an excellent memory, Mummy, as you know,’ said Wilfrid, as if still contradicting her. ‘The pianist was a big . . . handsome fellow.’
‘Oh, what was he called? that charming young man . . . so talented . . .’
Paul groped round this for a moment, almost as if struggling to remember himself. ‘Peter Rowe, do you mean?’
‘Peter – you see, I rather liked him.’
‘Oh, yes, well . . .’ murmured Paul, coming round in front of her; she didn’t seem interested in shaking hands. She was wearing a thick grey skirt and a blouse under a shabby sleeveless cardigan. She gave him a calculating look, perhaps only the result of her not seeing him properly. After the first awkward moments, he absorbed this as a likely hazard of the hours ahead.
‘What became of him, I wonder?’
‘Peter? Oh, he’s doing all right, I think,’ said Paul blandly. He was standing in the small area between the fire and a low coffee-table heaped with books and newspapers, it was almost like a childish dare as the back of his calves got hotter and hotter.
‘Of course he taught at Corley Court – he was extremely interested in that house, you know.’
‘Oh he was,’ said Wilfrid, with a shake of the head.
‘Extremely interested. He wanted to put back all the jelly-mould ceilings and what-have-you that Dudley did away with.’
‘During your time, of course,’ said Paul encouragingly, as if the interview had already started. He moved round towards the armchair facing hers, and got out the tape-recorder from his briefcase in a slightly furtive way.
‘You see, he’s the one I might have expected to be writing about Cecil,’ she said. ‘He was extremely interested in him, as well.’
‘What wasn’t he interested in!’ said Paul.
Daphne said, ‘I’m having a certain amount of trouble with my eyes,’ reaching on the little table beside her with its lamp and books. Could she still read, Paul wondered? He half-expected to see his own letters there.
‘Yes, so I gathered from Robin,’ he said, with a fond tone towards this mutual friend.
‘You didn’t block the drive, did you?’ said Daphne.
‘Oh . . . no – I got a taxi at Worcester station.’
‘Oh, you got a Cathedral. Aren’t they expensive?’ said Daphne, with a hint of satisfaction. ‘Can you find somewhere to sit? One day quite soon Wilfrid’s going to sort this room out, but until that day I fear we live in chaos and disorder. It’s funny to think I once lived in a house with thirty-five servants.’
‘Goodness . . . !’ said Paul, lifting a leather Radio Times folder and a heap of thick woollen socks, perhaps waiting to be darned, from the armchair. In her book he was sure she’d said twenty-five servants. He rigged up the microphone on top of the books on the coffee-table between them. ‘Why is this house called Olga, I wonder?’ he said, just to test the levels.
‘Ah! You see, Lady Caroline had it built for her old housekeeper,’ said Wilfrid in a pious tone, ‘whose name was Olga. She retired here . . . out of sight but not quite . . . out of reach.’
‘And now Lady Caroline lets it to you,’ said Paul, watching the bobbing red finger which dropped, as if by gravity, when no one spoke.
‘Well, we hardly pay a thing . . .’
Daphne chuckled narrowly. ‘What have you got there?’ she said.
‘I hope you don’t mind if I tape our conversation . . .’ Paul clicked the button and rewound.
‘Perhaps as well to get it right,’ said Daphne uncertainly. It was the tape-recorder’s odd insinuations of flattery and mistrust. Some people glanced at it as an awkward third person in the room, others were calmed by the just-detectable turning of the spool, some, like old Joan Valance, a second cousin of Cecil’s whom he’d tracked down in Sidmouth, were moved to gabbling relief at having so impartial and receptive an audience. Daphne fidgeted with her cushions. ‘I’ll have to be careful what I say.’
‘Oh, I hope not,’ with his ear to the idiotic tone of the playback.
‘Very careful.’
‘If you want to tell me anything off the record, you can: just say, and I’ll stop the tape.’
‘No, I don’t think I’ll be doing that,’ said Daphne, with a quick smile. ‘Aren’t we having any refreshments, Wilfrid?’
‘Well, if you care to ask for them . . .’
They both said coffee. ‘Bring us a couple of coffees, Wilfrid, and then find something useful to do. You could make a start on clearing up those things in the garage.’
‘Oh, that’s a very big job, Mummy,’ said Wilfrid, as if not so easily fooled.
When he had gone out of the room, she said, ‘It’s only a very big job because he will keep putting it off. Oh, he’s so . . . disorganized,’ and she shifted her cushion again, flinched and half-turned, the powder-and-smoke-smudged discs of her glasses blank for a second in the light. This irritable nervousness might be hard to deal with. Paul wanted to remind her of their old connections, but he was wary of mentioning Corinna. He said, just while they waited,
‘I was wondering, do you see much of John, and Julian, and Jenny?’ They sounded like characters in a children’s book.
‘We’re a bit cut off here, to be perfectly frank,’ she said. He saw she wouldn’t want to admit to feeling neglected.
‘What are they doing now?’ – with a glance at the red needle.
‘Well . . .’ She was slow to warm to the question. ‘Well, they’re all extremely busy, and successful, as you might expect. Jennifer’s a doctor – I mean, not an actual doctor, obviously. She’s teaching at Edinburgh, I think it’s Edinburgh. Wilfrid will put me right if it’s not.’
‘Teaching French literature?’
‘Yes . . . and John of course has his very successful wine business.’
‘He takes after his grandfather,’ said Paul, almost fondly.
‘His grandfather doesn’t have a wine business.’
‘No, I meant – I believe Sir Dudley is involved in the sherry world, isn’t he.’
‘Oh, I see . . . And Julian – well Julian’s the artistic one. He’s very creative.’
Paul could tell from her tone, which was also fond, but final, that he shouldn’t ask what form this creativity took. He felt his own secret interest in Julian as a sixth-former might somehow burn through. Daphne said, ‘Why, have you
met Dudley?’
‘Yes, I have,’ said Paul simply, with no idea as yet what line to take about him. He told her a bit about the Oxford conference, in what felt to him a very fair-minded way, and finding he had already somehow both censored and excused Dudley’s crushing put-down over the phone; as an anecdote it had a value that went some way to compensate for the further talk they had never had. ‘He was quite controversial. He said that war poems, being written at the time, were usually not much good, “inept and amateurish” I think were his words; whereas the great war writing was all in prose, and appeared ten years later – or more in his case, of course.’
‘That sounds like Dudley.’
‘He wouldn’t say anything much about Cecil.’