At this point MS’s crutch whacked against the door and she came in with a couple of coffees on a tray. GFS has prostate trouble, but says coffee is good for his memory. ‘I’m starting to get a bit forgetful,’ he said. ‘A bit!’ said MS. GFS (quietly): ‘Well, you don’t always hear what I say, you know, dear.’ She said coffee excited him and made him confused about things; he continually got things wrong. She talked about him in the third person. GFS said, ‘Peter’s asking me about Cecil at Cambridge.’ She didn’t correct him, and nor did I (later I became Simon, and by the time I left I was Ian). ‘I remember C very well, though, dear.’ MS rather squashed me, perching on the arm of my chair; she said she’d never met C, but she took a dim view of the other Valances. Old Sir Edwin seemed nice enough, though he only talked nonsense by the time she knew him, and before that apparently he had only talked about cows; he’d always been a great bore. C’s mother was a tyrant and a bully. Dudley was unstable – he’d had a bad war and afterwards he used it as an excuse to attack friend and foe alike. I said, could he not be charming too? His first novel was very funny, and D’s book describes him as ‘magnetic’. ‘Perhaps to a certain type of woman. Daphne was always easily charmed. I was relieved when they split up, and we never had to go there again. Corley Court was a ghastly place.’ Having soured the atmosphere thoroughly, she went out again. GFS however seems not to take much notice of her – he makes the requisite signals and potters along in serene vagueness about the recent past, though events of 60 or more years ago are clear to him (‘clearer than ever’, he said, as if to say I was in luck). Still, he jumps around and is hard to follow. (He now spoke incoherently about WW1, when he was in military intelligence – nothing to do with C.)
I wanted to bring him back to what he’d been saying before we were interrupted. It took me a while to realize he’d lost what little sense he’d had of who I was – I reminded him tactfully. I said I’d recently met Dudley for the first time. ‘Oh, Dudley Valance, you mean?’ GFS then launched into a thing about Dud, how he’d been ‘stunningly attractive, but in a very dangerous way, very sexy’. Much more than C – he had marvellous legs and teeth. Dud was always naughty, satirical. C was his parents’ favourite, and Dud resented this, he was always making trouble. Later he became a frightful shit. I said in one of C’s letters he called Dud a womanizer. GFS said this was just a word they all used then for a heterosexual man, it didn’t mean anything. ‘Lytton and people always said it – they were all terrified of women.’ But C wasn’t, I said. ‘He was and he wasn’t, he didn’t understand women any more than he did servants.’ I said he (GFS) hadn’t made it clear about ‘womanizer’ in the Letters. Didn’t it create a misleading impression? He said Dud had read the book and didn’t object. He probably quite liked people to think he had been a Lothario. The thing about Dud in fact was that he wasn’t very keen on ‘all that’: he liked to play with women. After Wilf was born it more or less stopped – it was very hard for D. It was all part of his mental trouble after the War.
I asked had he been surprised when D suddenly married Dud? GFS: ‘It happened all the time. Women often married the brother of someone they were engaged to who was killed in the War. It was a form of remembrance in a way, it was a form of loyalty, and there was some kind of auto-suggestion to it. The young woman didn’t have to go searching for another man when there was a similar one already to hand.’ Were C and Dud particularly similar? ‘They lived in the same house, and D had a thing about Corley from the day she met C. C was D’s first love, but she was in awe of him. She was closer in age to Dud, and got on well with him from the start.’ I said how C had written to both D and Ingham from France saying ‘will you be my widow?’ but was he actually engaged to D? He said, ‘I don’t think so, though of course there was the child.’ What child was that? Here GFS looked genuinely confused for a minute, then he said, ‘Well, the girl, wasn’t it…’ He sipped at his coffee, still looking doubtful. ‘You see I’m not sure she knows about it.’ I said did he mean Corinna? He said yes. I said, well you know she died three years ago. It was an awful moment, his old face looked really helpless with worry, and then anger coming through, as if I was lying to him. I said she’d had lung cancer, and this did make some sort of sense to him. ‘Poor old Leslie,’ he said, but I didn’t feel I could say anything about Leslie’s suicide. He muttered about how awful it was, but I saw him coming to accept it, with a rather sulky look. He said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter then.’ I still didn’t know what he meant. I said, ‘What about Corinna?’ Now I must get this right: he said that on C’s last leave, two weeks before he was killed, he had spent the night with D in London, and got her pregnant. (In her book D says they had supper in a restaurant and then she went home.) So did Dud think he was Corinna’s father? GFS didn’t know.
Of course I was incredibly excited by this, but at the same time I was worrying about the dates. Corinna was born in 1917, but when? I was furious that she was dead: the discovery of a living child would have been the making of the book! It gave me goose-bumps to think that that woman I’d seen several times a week until I left the bank might have been C’s daughter. Even her difficult and snobbish aspects, and her clear sense of having come down in the world, took on a more romantic and forgivable character. All that time, and I hadn’t known. And now she’s gone. Bad pangs of missed-chance syndrome, so that I’m telling myself, and even half-hoping, that it isn’t true. I said to GFS that Corinna and Wilf both look(ed) exactly like Dud. It seemed rude, and probably fairly pointless, to challenge him. I said, had D herself told him this? He said, ‘Well, you know…’
I decided I needed to go to the loo. MS was sitting in the hall by the telephone, as if ready to call for my taxi. Wondered if I could ask her what she knew, but some desire to protect GFS himself prevented me. Wondered about their marriage. I suppose she is anxious about him misbehaving in some way, she is grim but her worries come out; she said he is on heart drugs that react badly with his dementia, they can be very disinhibiting; alcohol is completely banned. I didn’t like to say that he seemed fairly disinhibited without alcohol. (What I don’t know, of course, is if he shares all these secrets – or speculations? – with her.)
When I got back I had to help him back again into what we were doing. I thought I’d ask him about Revel Ralph. (Not strictly relevant for the book, but I wanted to know.) ‘Oh, I loved RR, he was a charmer, very attractive, very sexy, though not in a conventional way. You know he married my sister. She ran away with him – it was a great scandal at the time, because Dud was always in the papers. He despised publicity, but he couldn’t do without it. Actually he didn’t seem to mind very much – he married a model, you know, a leggy blonde. She was a frightful bitch.’ I asked if D and RR were happy together. He said RR was much nicer than Dud, and younger of course – they didn’t have much money, but they became quite a famous couple too – they lived in Chelsea. ‘I used to say they lived on the mere luxuries of life. [This is the phrase D uses in her own book.] You know, Picassos on the wall, and the children with holes in their clothes. Wilf adored Revel, but Corinna disapproved of him. RR was a well-known stage designer. He was queer, and rather a weak character. D always fell for difficult men who couldn’t love her properly – they couldn’t give her what she wanted. RR became a drug addict, and they both drank like fishes.’ I asked if D had taken drugs. ‘I expect so. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she had tried it.’ Had he seen much of her in the 1930s? ‘We were never at all close. Well, she’s still alive, you know.’ Me: ‘But you don’t see her?’ I think he was genuinely unsure about this: ‘I don’t think we see much of each other now.’