Was RR unfaithful to D? (The questions were very basic, but I felt the ‘disinhibition’ combined with the forgetfulness made it perfectly all right.) ‘I’m sure he was. RR was very highly sexed, he would fuck anyone.’ (I laughed at this, but he seemed not to know why. Sensed he felt everyone else had had a lot more sex than he had.) Me: ‘What about the son she had with RR, Jenny Ralph’s father, had he known him?’ ‘Well, there was a son, but of course RR wasn’t the father.’ Again, I thought I mustn’t startle him by showing my surprise. Again he gave me the confidential look: ‘Well, I don’t think it’s any secret that the child’s father was a painter called Mark Gibbons. They had an affair.’ I imagined Mark Gibbons would fuck anyone too, but didn’t like to ask. Remembered seeing him at D’s 70th, dancing with her, so perhaps something in it. (Note: is MG still alive? Could he have known C? Also does Jenny Ralph know who her grandfather is?) ‘I’m pretty sure that’s right,’ he said, ‘but you’d better keep it under your hat.’ I didn’t promise this.
I asked if he had any photos of C. ‘I’m sure I have!’ He went over to a low shelf on the far side of the room, where dozens of what looked like old albums and scrap-books were stacked up, and started hoiking them out on to a table there. Looking at him stooping, arse in the air, his tongue between his teeth as he grunted and squinted, I thought of the pictures in Jonah’s book of GFS at 19, that prim but secretive look that I’d thought was a bit like me. I said there were some good photos in the Letters. ‘Oh, were there?’ he said. But what I wanted was photos of GFS and C together. ‘That’s just what I’m looking for,’ he said. He pulled up a large album in floppy covers, and as he lifted it on to the table a number of small photos slid out and fell to the floor here and there. Obviously the old mounts had perished. I picked up one or two of them, and noted where others had fallen (inc the fantastic one of C reading aloud to Blanchard and Ragley, which was in the Letters).
‘Now, let me see…’ – there was a definite sense that neither of us knew what we were going to find. He supported himself lightly on my arm, stooping across in front of me to peer at particular pictures, so that his bald head and beard blocked my view, though he nattered on as if I could see what he was looking at. The albums go right back to late-Victorian sepia portraits of his parents’ families (Freda Sawle was half-Welsh, apparently, her uncle a well-known singer). GFS was easily distracted, squinting to read the inscriptions in white ink, puzzling things out and correcting himself, breathing in hot gasps over the page. I said I believed Hubert had had a camera. ‘Quite so. I remember Harry Hewitt gave it to him.’ Here was old HH again – I wondered what GFS’s line on him would be. ‘HH was a v rich man, who lived in Harrow Weald. He was in import/export, glass and china and so on, with Germany. Some people thought he was a spy.’ Me: ‘But he wasn’t?’ GFS squeezed my arm and giggled: ‘I don’t think so. He was queer, you know, he was in love with my brother Hubert, who was killed in the War.’ But Hubert didn’t reciprocate? ‘Hubert wasn’t at all that way himself. He was very shy. HH kept giving him expensive presents, which became emb for him.’ I said hadn’t C known HH? ‘They met when C was staying at 2A one time, and became friends of a sort.’ Was HH in love with C too? ‘Probably not, he was very loyal – he wanted someone to protect and help. C had too much money for HH to fancy him.’ Would C have flirted with him? ‘More than likely’ (laughed).
‘Now, here we are, Simon!’ A number of pictures of ‘poor old C’ – the best of them already in the Letters, the one of C in shorts with a rugger ball, looking furious: ‘You can see what marvellous legs he had!’ Me: ‘I’d like to reproduce that one.’ GFS: ‘Where would you do it?’ Me: ‘In the book I’m writing about C.’ GFS: ‘Oh, yes, I think you should. What a good idea. You know there’s never been a book about him. I’m glad you’re going to do that, it will be quite an eye-opener.’ There was a little group at 2A, on the lawn with the house behind, so that I could recognize it, C and D and GFS and a large old woman in black. ‘That was a German woman who lived near us – my mother took pity on her. She was at the Wagner festival in Germany when the War broke out, and she couldn’t get back to England. Her house was smashed up by the local people. When she came back after the war my mother sort of took her under her wing. We all rather dreaded her, though probably she was perfectly all right. Now, here’s C and me – that’s an interesting picture, though my wife doesn’t think it’s very good of me.’ I leant forward to look at it, GFS resting his hand on my shoulder. ‘That’s at Corley Court – you could get out on to the roof.’ After a moment I recognized the place exactly, from the two or three times Peter took me up there. I said, ‘You could climb up through the laundry-room.’ GFS: ‘Yes, that was it, you see.’ It showed C and GFS, leaning against a chimney, C with no shirt on, GFS with his shirt half undone, looking bashful but excited. A tiny photo, of course, but clear – C’s strong wiry body, bit of black hair on his chest, and running down his stomach, one arm raised against the chimney with biceps standing up sharp. He is smiling in a sneering sort of way, and looks much older than GFS, who always seems v self-conscious in the presence of a camera. He was quite handsome at 20 – odd glimpse of his white hairless chest: he looks like a schoolboy beside C. Me: ‘Who took it, I wonder?’ GFS: ‘I wonder too. Possibly my sister’ – which might help explain GFS’s look of confusion, if she’d just caught them at it. It gave me my first real idea of C’s body, and because the camera was like an intruder I suddenly felt what it must have been like to come into his presence – my subject! Very odd, and even a bit of a turn-on – as GFS seemed to feel, too: ‘I look positively debauched there, don’t I?’ he said. I said, ‘And were you?’ and felt his hand, rubbing my back encouragingly, move down not quite absent-mindedly to just above my waist. He said, ‘I’m afraid I probably was, you know.’
The atmosphere was now rather tense, and I glanced at him to see how conscious he was of it himself. ‘In what way, would you say?’ (shifting away a bit, but not wanting to startle him). He kept looking at the picture, breathing slowly but heavily, as if undecided: ‘Well, you know, in the normal ways,’ which I suppose was quite a good answer. I said something like, ‘Well, I don’t blame you!’ ‘Awful, isn’t it? I was quite a dish back then! And look at me now’ – turning his face to mine with a jut of his bearded chin while his hand moved down again in a determined little rubbing motion on to my bum.
So there we were, me and the famous (co-)author of An Everyday History of England, looking me in the eye with who knows what memories and conjectures, his hand appreciatively cupping my backside. I laughed awkwardly, but held his gaze for a moment, with a sort of curiosity and a sure sense now that C had touched him like this, nearly 70 years ago, and that probably I’d brought this on myself by freeing these memories in him. Also, that it didn’t matter in the least, this book-lined room was a place I was shortly going to leave, and leave him in, even the house itself would revert to the house I’d imagined for them before, a real Tudor house full of historical artefacts. I pictured the painstaking doodle I did round his name and Madeleine’s name on the title-page of their book when I was twelve or so; and now for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, and wondered how I would take it – I almost wanted him to, in a way – but he looked down, and as he did so I thought suddenly, well, this is a history I’m going to write. I went on politely, ‘And what about all C’s letters to you? You said they were lost?’ He said, ‘Yes, you see, I couldn’t say exactly what happened. My mother destroyed them, she burned almost all of them. By the way’ – his hand still clutching my left buttock, but now more as if he needed it for support than for any fun he was getting out of it – ‘better not mention this to my wife.’ It wasn’t at all clear what the ‘this’ referred to. ‘All right,’ I said, and he let go. GFS: ‘Oh, they were a great loss, a loss to literature. Though fairly hair-raising, some of them!’