HUBERT OWEN SAWLE
1st Lieut ‘The Blues’
Born Stanmore, Mddx, January 15, 1891
Killed at Ivry April 8, 1917
Aged Twenty-Six
At the counter Raymond raked his beard, ‘Ah, Rob – any interest?’
‘This Hubert Sawle – any relation of G. F. Sawle and Madeleine Sawle?’
‘Very good, Rob… yes… Hubert was G. F.’s brother.’
‘Totally unheard-of.’
‘Till now…’ – Raymond nodded at the book.
‘And Daphne Sawle was the sister. You see, I met this woman last week who was Daphne Sawle’s grand-daughter.’
‘Right…’
‘I got a bit lost in her story, about the biography of Cecil Valance, you know. She said her grandmother had written her memoirs. I meant to chase it up.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Raymond; and as this was something he didn’t like saying, he got to work.
‘Of course the house in “Two Acres” was round here, wasn’t it?’
‘Stanmore, yep.’
‘Anything there?’
Raymond peered, scrolled down and up, tongue on lip. ‘Demolished five or six years ago – well, it was a ruin already. No, Rob, there’s no one called Sawle except G. F. and Madeleine, who I happen to know was his wife.’
‘Are you on Abe?’
‘G. F. edited Valance’s letters, of course.’
‘That’s right,’ said Rob, again with the private glow of perceived connections, the protective feeling for his quarry that came up in any extended search. ‘I’ve an idea Daphne wrote under the name Jacobs.’
‘Oh yes…’ Raymond’s large hands made their darting wobble above the keyboard.
‘She’s totally forgotten now, but she published this book of memoirs about thirty years ago – she was married to Dudley Valance, then to an artist called Revel Ralph.’
‘Right… here we are… Daphne Jacobs: Assyrian Woodwind Instruments – that the one?’
‘Um…’
‘Bronze Ornaments of Ancient Mesopotamia.’
‘I don’t think she goes back quite that far.’
‘Corpus Mesopotamianum…’ – that slowed him up for a second. ‘There’s loads of this stuff.’
‘I think her book’s called The Short Gallery.’
‘O-kay – here we go – The Short Gallery: Portraits from Life. Aha, seven copies… Plymbridge Press, 1979, 212 pp… First Edition, £1. There you are!’
Rob came round and looked over Raymond’s shoulder. ‘Scroll down a bit.’ There were the usual anomalies – fine copy in fine dj, £2.50; ex-library, with no dj, damp-staining to rear boards, some light underlining, £18, with an excitable sales pitch, ‘Contains candid portraits of leading writers and artists A Huxley, Mary Gibbons, Lord Berners, Revd Ralph &c sensational account of teenage affair with WW1 Poet Dudley Valance.’
‘Wrong!’ said Raymond. ‘Right?’
‘Love Revd Ralph,’ said Rob. ‘Now that’s amusing. “Inscribed by the author ‘To Paul Bryant, April 18, 1980’.” ’ With it was the sixteen-page catalogue, which Garsaint sometimes had, for the Revel Ralph ‘Scenes and Portraits’ exhibition at the Michael Parkin Gallery in 1984, with a posthumous foreword by Daphne Jacobs – reassuringly unsigned: £25.
The final copy, from Delirium Books in LA, floated aloft in a bookman’s empyrean of its own: ‘Sir Dudley Valance’s copy, with his bookplate designed by St John Hall, inscribed and signed by the author “To Dudley from Duffel”, with numerous comments and corrections in pencil and ink by Dudley Valance. Book condition: fair. Dust-jacket, losses to head of spine, 1cm repaired tear to rear panel. In protective red morocco slipcase. An exceptional association copy. $1,500.’
‘Take your pick,’ said Raymond.
‘Mm, I will,’ said Rob. Jennifer Ralph’s description of the book as ‘rather feeble’ tugged against his more indulgent curiosity. Of course she would have known some of the figures whose portraits appeared in it, which made a difference. ‘And how much do you want for Hewitt?’
‘Hundred?’
Rob raised an eyebrow. ‘Raymond?’
‘You saw the Valance letters?’
‘I’m sorry…?’ Rob raised an eyebrow too, coloured slightly.
‘Oh, yes.’ And taking the book back from him, Raymond showed him that a few blank pages further on from the mid-volume FINIS there was another small section of transcribed letters, very different in tone. ‘That’s really the interest, Robson, my friend.’
‘Dear Hewitt,’ the first one began, in September 1913; modulating to ‘Dear Harry’ in the third letter, sent from France. Five letters in total, the last dated June 27, 1916, signed, ‘Yours ever, Cecil’.
‘Have these been published, I wonder?’
‘You’d have to check.’
‘I bet they haven’t.’ Rob looked over them as quickly as the writing allowed. The idea that Valance might have had a thing with Hewitt too… No sign of it, which was itself somehow suggestive. ‘And why did the old fool transcribe them – I mean, what did he do with the originals?’
‘Ah, you see, he failed to think of the needs of a twenty-first-century bookseller – quite a common failing of the past.’
‘Thanks for that.’ Rob looked at the last letter more narrowly.
It was bad luck you couldn’t get to up to Stokes’s – you would like him, I think. It occurred to me to send you the new poems before we get stuck in to the next big show – I will send them tomorrow, all being well, when I have gone over them once more. They are for your eyes only – you will see they are not publishable in my life-time – or England’s! Stokes has seen some (not all). One of them draws, you will see, on our last meeting. Let me know you have them safe. My love (is that too fresh?) to Elspeth the strict scholar.
Yours ever, Cecil.
‘So the house has been completely cleared, has it?’
‘They’re getting out the last stuff this week.’
‘Mm, what sort of stuff?’ Rob thought he saw the colour creep up behind Raymond’s beard as he turned away and rummaged on the desk – a distraction, though at first Rob thought it was a search for some further evidence.
‘I haven’t been down there myself. I think Debbie’s there now.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so before?’ – to Rob the slow afternoon, the mild trance of autumn in North London, the musty otherworld of Chadwick’s shop, were revealed as a decoy, a disastrous waste of time, like the stifling obstacles and digressions of a certain kind of dream. ‘How far is it to the house?’
‘Well, how are you going?’
There was a taxi-rank down the road towards the school, as if ready to whisk the boys off to their homes, or the shops, or the airport… Rob ran down to the first car, but there was no driver: he was over the road, at the café, picking up a tea and a sandwich, and it was more than the driver of the second cab’s life was worth to take his fare… the cabbies’ tedious etiquette. Rob sensed there was something offputting in his own urgency, a hint of unwelcome trouble – he went grinning impatiently to the café, and after a minute the driver followed him out to the taxi. ‘It’s a house called Mattocks – was an old people’s home. Do you know it?’