‘Oh, I think they might have done…!’ – was he teasing her or reassuring her? ‘I understand you were planning to get married?’
‘Well… Even if we had I don’t imagine it would have been a great success.’
‘There’s the letter where he says, “will you be my widow?” ’ Paul thought it wasn’t tactful, even now, to mention the fact, exposed by the Letters, that Cecil had also asked Margaret Ingham to be his widow on the very same day. ‘But I suppose he was rather… fickle, perhaps?’
‘Well, of course he was. But the thing you have to understand is that Cecil made you feel you were at the absolute centre of his universe.’ And at this Paul felt both pity and a hint of envy.
Quite soon it was time for the customary, necessary, and often useful visit to the loo – a welcome escape into privacy, a gape in the mirror, and a chance to pry unobserved into the subject’s habits and attitude to hygiene and sense of humour. At Olga perhaps a touch of mad humour showed in the junk that had been piled and propped in the gloomy and mouldy-smelling little room. Behind the door there was a stack of pictures with cracked glass and a folding card-table, and under the basin the long box of a croquet set with JACOBS stencilled on the lid. Opposite the basin his shoulder brushed a large murky painting in a fancy gilt frame with various bits chipped off: it showed a pale young man with a black hat and a snooty expression, and was streaked across as though someone had tried to clean it with a muddy sponge. The lavatory, which could never have been a bright room, was made all the gloomier by Virginia creeper which covered the lower part of the frosted-glass window and had forced its way in through the opening top light, a long strand feeling its way across the wall, above a stack of large objects covered in a tablecloth. Paul hardly liked to use the loo itself, dark as peat below the water-line, and with what Peter Rowe used to call a lesbian seat, that had to be held up. Under the tablecloth it turned out there were wine boxes, sealed with brittle yellow Sellotape, which might be worth exploring on a later visit. Along the wall beside the loo books and magazines were stacked several feet high. On top was the issue of the Tatler with Daphne’s interview in it, and a six-year-old Country Life with a feature on Staunton Hall, ‘the home of Lady Caroline Messent’ – he supposed they must be kept there for some small ritual of reassurance. The books were like a jumble sale in which you might find something – it was clearly either Daphne or Wilfrid’s habit to mark their place each time with a torn-off sheet of toilet-paper. The cohabitation of mother and son oppressed Paul here more than he could explain. He sat down for a minute, and looked sideways at the titles. And there, just above floor level, and tricky to prise out, was Black Flowers, in its dust-jacket, torn and stained, but the first edition, 1944, on cheap wartime paper, signed: ‘For Wilfrid, Dudley Valance’. It was too stark and sad and valuable to leave here, and Paul placed it where he would be able to get it later. He washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror to assess his progress and give himself a quick pep-talk, slightly thrown by the murky sneer of the young man in the frame behind him.
Wilfrid, sensing his brief absence, had come back in and was edging round the end of the sitting-room, apparently looking for something. ‘And I really must ask you,’ Paul said in a rush, ‘if you still have the book with the manuscript of “Two Acres” in it. I’d love to see it.’
‘Well, you’re out of luck, I’m afraid,’ said Daphne.
‘You don’t have it?’
She frowned almost crossly. ‘Where is it, Wilfrid?’
‘I believe it’s in London, Mother,’ said Wilfrid, peering into a large wicker basket on top of a pile of old curtains, ‘it’s gone to be photographed.’
‘It’s being photographed,’ she confirmed. ‘It’s extraordinarily delicate, well, it’s seventy years old, isn’t it? – nearly seventy.’
‘No, that’s a very good idea,’ Paul said. ‘Who’s doing it for you?’
‘I can’t remember his name – he’s doing the new edition of Cecil’s poems.’
‘Oh, well you’re in good hands,’ Paul said.
‘What is his name?’
‘I think he’s called Dr Nigel Dupont.’
‘Exactly. He told me he feels a very personal connection with Cecil because he was at school at Corley.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘He got interested in him from seeing his tomb all the time in the chapel.’
‘How interesting,’ said Paul, as the heavy likelihood that Dupont had been a pupil of Peter’s closed sickeningly about him. ‘Did Nigel… um… come to see you?’
‘No, it was all very easy, we did it by mail.’
‘Recorded delivery,’ said Wilfrid.
‘He doesn’t give two pins about, you know, the biographical side,’ said Daphne, ‘he’s very much a textual editor, would you call it.’
‘Well, indeed.’
‘All the different editions and what have you.’
‘Fascinating…’ Paul edged back towards his chair. Outside, the afternoon was beginning to lower, late sunlight making the dirty windows opaque.
‘Well, it is rather fascinating. He says they’re full of mistakes. It was Sebby Stokes, you know, he messed around with them quite a bit, apparently, I suppose he thought he was improving them.’
‘Perhaps he was!’
Daphne turned and said, ‘Why don’t you and Mr Bryant get out round the village.’
‘We don’t know that he wants to,’ Wilfrid said.
‘Walk down to the farm, you like that.’
It was a bold distraction on Daphne’s part, cutting short the interview, but Paul had been hoping for a chance to talk to Wilfrid in private at some point. So out they went, Paul borrowing a large loose pair of old black wellingtons, which Wilfrid told him, once they’d got into the road, had ‘formerly belonged to Basil’.
‘Oh, really?’ said Paul, disliking the thought of wearing a dead man’s shoes; they dragged and clunked on the tarmac. ‘For some reason I hadn’t imagined he was so big…’ Later he thought it odd that Daphne had hung on to them, moved house with them. Wilfrid had put on a pair of mud-caked workman’s boots, and a kind of car-coat over his fleece. His big monkish head, with its tufts of grey hair, was bare.
‘This isn’t one of the attractive, picturesque villages,’ Wilfrid said. They strode back down the lane, past the shop with its steamed-up window, past the council houses, and then into another lane that ran up the side of some fenced-off parkland, ploughed fields on the other side. Away from the bungalow Wilfrid became both franker and more anxious; he said twice, ‘She can look after herself for half an hour.’
‘She’s lucky to have you,’ Paul said, sounding feebly polite.
‘Oh, she drives me potty!’ said Wilfrid, with a grin of guilty excitement. Now they mounted the verge to let a tractor and trailer go past, great clots of silage dropping off behind it into the lane. Wilfrid stared at the driver but didn’t greet him. Paul wasn’t sure what to say – he felt both mother and son were cheered up and somehow kept going by driving each other potty.
‘Well, she’s made a very good recovery,’ said Paul.
‘Thanks to Nurse Valance,’ said Wilfrid, in an odd pert tone.
Paul couldn’t think what Wilfrid would have been doing if he hadn’t had his mother to look after. ‘But you have some help?’
‘Nothing worth mentioning. And of course the whole thing makes it… very hard for me to have a girlfriend.’
Paul managed to raise his eyebrows in sympathy. ‘No, I can imagine…’