“Later, I saw a photograph of Gawsworth that more or less — as far as can be told — coincides with the physical description of him given by Durrelclass="underline" ‘… of medium height and somewhat pale and lean; he had a broken nose that gave his face a touch of Villonesque foxiness. His eyes were brown and bright, his sense of humour unimpaired by his literary privations.’ In the one photo I’ve seen, he wears the RAF uniform and has a cigarette, still unlit, between his lips. His collar is a little loose and the knot of his tie seems too tight, though it was an era of tightly knotted ties. He sports a medal. There are neat, horizontal furrows on his forehead and small folds, rather than circles, beneath his eyes, which gaze with a mixture of roguishness and amusement, dreaminess and nostalgia. It’s a generous face. The gaze is clear. The ear is striking; he may be listening. He must be in Cairo, undoubtedly in the Middle East, or perhaps not there but in North Africa, in French Barbary, and the year is 1941 or 1942 or 1943, perhaps not long before he was transferred from the Spitfire Squadron to the Eighth Army’s Desert Air Force. That cigarette can’t have lasted much longer. He must be about thirty, though he looks older, a bit older. Because I know he is dead, I see the face of a dead man in this picture. He reminds me a little of Cromer-Blake, though Cromer-Blake’s hair was prematurely white and the moustache he would allow to grow in for several weeks only to shave it off and not wear it for the next several weeks was also greying or at least had threads of silver, while Gawsworth’s hair and moustache are dark. Their gazes are similarly ironic, but Gawsworth’s is more affable, not a trace of sarcasm or anger in it, no forewarning or even possibility of such a thing. The uniform needs pressing.” Now that I’m the one talking and not the narrator, I can say that he reminds me a little of Juan Benet, and a little of Eduardo Mendoza, too, to name only writers, though the first could be irascible and sarcastic as well as very affable, while the second seems to be all affability, with a touch of irony. Two people he doesn’t at all remind me of are Eric Southworth and Philip Lloyd-Bostock, the supposed real models, living and dead, for Cromer-Blake.
“I’ve also seen a photo of his death mask. He had just taken leave of age and the passage of time itself when the mask was made, but immediately before that he had been a man of fifty-eight. It was made by Hugh Olaff de Wet on September 23, 1970, the day of or the day after Gawsworth’s death in London, in the Borough of Kensington where he was born. His old friend from Cairo, Sir John Waller, donated it to the Poetry Society, but these kind attentions came posthumously and too late. The man who was John Gawsworth and Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong and Orpheus Scrannel and Juan I, King of Redonda, and also, at times, just Fytton Armstrong or J.G. or even simply G. now has his eyes closed and no kind of gaze at all. The folds are definite bags now, the wrinkles in the forehead aren’t as distinct (the skull has bulged) and the eyelashes look thicker, which could be a side-effect of the sealed eyelids. The hair would appear to be white — but maybe because the mask is made of plaster — and the hairline has receded since the 1940s, the outer limit of his youth, the war against the Afrika Korps. The moustache seems thicker but also limper, it both bristles and droops, the moustache of an old soldier who’s grown weary of combing it. The nose is longer and broader, the cheeks are very flaccid, the whole face is swollen as if with false fleshiness and despair. He’s grown jowly. There can be no doubt that he is dead.” I now suspect that they shaved him while he was in the hospital or when he was already a corpse, because I’ve seen a photograph of him in his final days that shows him with an ugly, long, scraggly beard as befitted the beggar he then was. I also know that the correct name of the mask maker, about whom I knew nothing else when I wrote those pages, was Hugh Oloff de Wet; I also know that De Wet was in Madrid the year I was born in Madrid, and that twice long before then he almost faced a firing squad, once in Valencia and the second time in Berlin. And that in Spain he had lost an eye (or said he had) and had killed, there and in other places, before and after Spain. The novel’s gentleman narrator went on: