In the morning, bright and early, Lady Caroline Messent rang to invite her to tea. The phone at Olga was fixed to the kitchen wall, Caroline perhaps having pictured Olga herself as habitually in that room, and standing more or less to attention when she spoke to her. ‘I can’t, my dear,’ said Daphne, ‘I’ve got this young man coming back.’
‘Oh, do put him off,’ said Caroline in her droll scurry of a voice. ‘Who is he?’
‘He’s called – he’s interrogating me, I’m like a prisoner in my own home.’
‘Darling…’ said Caroline, allowing that for the present at least it was Daphne’s home. ‘I wouldn’t stand for it. Is he from the gas board?’
‘Oh, much worse.’ Daphne steadied herself against the worktop which she could dimly see was a dangerous muddle of dirty dishes, half-empty bottles and pill-packets. ‘He turned up yesterday – he’s like the Kleeneze man.’
‘You mean hawking?’
‘He says I met him at Corinna and Leslie’s, but I have absolutely no recollection of it.’
‘Oh, I see…’ said Caroline, as if now siding slightly with the intruder. ‘But what does he want?’
Daphne sighed heavily. ‘Smut, essentially.’
‘Smut?’
‘He’s trying to write a book about Cecil.’
‘Cecil? Oh, Valance, you mean? Yes, I see.’
‘You know, I’ve already written all about it.’
Caroline paused. ‘I suppose it was only a matter of time,’ she said.
‘Hmm? I don’t know what he’s got into his head. He’s insinuating, if you know what I mean. He’s more or less saying that I didn’t come clean in some way in my book.’
‘No, that must be awfully annoying.’
‘Well, less awfully, more bloody, actually, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson said to my father.’
‘So funny, that,’ said Caroline.
‘Really Cecil means nothing to me – I was potty about him for five minutes sixty years ago. The significant thing about Cecil, as far as I’m concerned,’ said Daphne, half-hearing herself go on, ‘is that he led to Dud, and the children, and all the grown-up part of my life, which naturally he had no part in himself!’
‘Well, tell that to your Kleeneze man, darling,’ said Caroline, evidently thinking Daphne protested too much.
‘I suppose I should.’ And she saw there was a little shameful reluctance to do so, and thus reduce even further her interest for the young man. It struck her suddenly that Caroline must already know him. ‘I’m fairly sure he was at your launch party,’ she said. ‘Paul Bryant.’
‘You don’t mean the young man from… was it Canterbury… one of the red-bricks.’
‘He might be, I suppose. He used to work in the bank with Leslie.’
‘Ah, no. But there certainly was a clever young man, you’re quite right, doing something on Cecil’s poetry.’
‘No, I know who you mean, I can’t remember his name. I’ve dealt with him already. This is another young man.’
‘Mm, my dear, it’s obviously Cecil’s moment,’ said Caroline.
10
Next morning Paul sat in his hotel room, going over his notes, with a coffee tray beside him: the pitted metal pot with the untouchable handle, the lipsticked cup, the bowl of white sugar in soft paper tubes which he emptied serially into the three strong cupfuls he took, getting quickly excited and overheated. On a plate with a doily were five biscuits, and though he’d only just had breakfast he ate them all, the types so familiar – the Bourbon, the sugared Nice, the rebarbative ginger-nut, popped in whole – that he was touched for a moment by a sense of the inseparable poverty and consistency of English life, as crystallized in the Peek Frean assortment box. He sat back in his chair as he munched and levelled a look at his own industrious jaw movements in the mirror; and a less comfortable sensation came over him. The fact was he had never watched himself eating, and was astonished at his forceful, rodent-like look, the odd sag of his neck on one side as he chewed, the working flicker of his temples. This must be what his company was like to others, what Karen faced each night over dinner, and the realization made him run down pensively, stop chewing mid-biscuit and then start up again as if to catch himself unawares. He wasn’t at all sure he would want to confide his own secrets to such a man.
He was writing up further aspects of yesterday’s meeting in his diary – a book in which the sparse record of his own life was now largely replaced by the ramifying details of others’. Now and then he played back the tape, more for the feel of it than because he believed he would get much out of it. There was a fair amount he had forgotten, but he knew too that there were spells in any interview when he didn’t listen to the other person: it was partly the perennial self-consciousness, his sense of playing a role – laughing, sighing, sadly nodding – eclipsing any likelihood of taking in whatever was being said; and it was partly some colder sense that the interviewee was evasive or repetitive, deliberately boring him and wasting his time. It was appalling what they couldn’t remember, and with his primary witnesses, all in their eighties, he had a view of them stuck in a rut, or a wheel, doggedly chasing the same few time-smoothed memories along with their nose and their paws. When he’d gone through ‘The Hammock’ with Daphne, hoping to goad her memory, she had carried on using the same words and phrases as she had in her book, and probably had for fifty years before that. In her book she’d made such a thing of this youthful romance, and he could see that the thing that she’d made had replaced the now remote original experience, and couldn’t usefully be interrogated for any further unrevealed details. She didn’t actually seem at all interested in Cecil, much less in the chance Paul was giving her, at the end of her life, to put things straight. He laughed warily when he thought of her little snub, as he was leaving (‘Are you coming back?’); but in a way it simply made him more determined.
George’s theory about Corinna, if true, threw a very strange light on to Dudley. Perhaps today he should try to get her on to the subject of her first marriage, and trick her, almost, into some revelation. George had said such marriages happened a great deal at that time. Obviously Paul would have to track down Corinna’s birth certificate. How complicit was Dudley in the whole thing? It was a most peculiar love triangle. In Black Flowers Dudley coped with his brother’s affairs in his customary ramblingly cutting style.
My wife had met Cecil before the War, when he had been something of a mentor to her brother George Sawle, and it was after a visit to the Sawles’ cottage in Harrow that he had written ‘Two Acres’, a poem that attained some celebrity in the war years, and after. I suspect she was a good deal dazzled by his energy and his profile, and as an ardent consumer of romantic verse she was surely impressed to meet a real live poet, dark-eyed and raven-haired. There are certainly signs that he was fond of her, though these should not be exaggerated; my brother was accustomed to admiration, and as a rule was gracious to those who provided it. He wrote his famous poem at her request for some memento in her visitors’ book, but he had only known her at the time for two days. It amused me somewhat that Cecil, heir to three thousand acres, should have been best-known for his ode to a mere two. Very thoughtfully, he invited her to Corley once when her brother also was staying with us.
There followed various sarcasms about George’s visits to the Valances.
He showed a keen interest in both house and estate. If he had the unintended air at times of an agent or bailiff, his preoccupations were no doubt largely intellectual. He and Cecil were sometimes absent for hours, returning with tales of what they had found in the labyrinthine cellars or secluded attics of the house, or with reports, which pleased my father, of the quality of the grazing or the woodsman-ship shown on the Corley farms.