Which Paul did, going down a narrow road that was perhaps a private driveway – there seemed to be a new development of houses whose roofs he could see further down the slope. The lane turned a corner, running for thirty yards under a tall dark larch-lap fence that gave off, even on this chilly day, a dim scent of creosote. Just behind it, a house stood, only the long ridge of its roof and two tall chimneys visible. At the far end, gates, of the same height and material as the fence, chained and padlocked; but allowing, through the narrow gap between hinge and frame, a one-eyed view of a weedy bit of gravel and a downstairs window of the house, disconcertingly close. After this, a dense screen of leylandii, much taller than the fence, ran back from the road, cutting close to the corner of the house itself, and shielding it from the tarmacked drive beyond, at the head of which was a big display board, with an artist’s impression of another red-roofed house, and the words ‘Old Acres – Six Executive Homes, Two Remaining’.
The small dislocation in the name was dreamlike for him, though almost meaningless in the light of day. He supposed to have kept ‘Two Acres’ would only have brought home to the executives just how tiny their properties were; perhaps ‘Old Acres’ lent atmosphere to the still raw-looking properties packed in at artful angles to each other among trees which must be survivors from the Sawles’ garden. To those who knew, it preserved a word, at least, of the old order. But he saw already that the ‘airy-chambered garden’ had gone; and even the house itself, which Paul had no doubt was the house, seemed resistant to being looked at. He got out his camera from his bag and crossing the lane took a picture of the fence.
This wasn’t quite enough. Going back, he stared concernedly at the entranceway of the house before ‘Two Acres’, ‘Cosgroves’, a drive curving out of sight behind rhododendrons, the house itself too far off to keep a watch on its gate. As he strolled in he was smiling mildly, the smooth compulsion of the trespasser just hedged by a far-fetched pretence that he was lost. His movements felt almost involuntary, though everything about him was alert. On his right a wide lawn opened out, dead leaves drifted by the wind into ridges and spirals. An empty teak seat, a stone table. A blue sack wrapping a plant he took for a moment for a stooping person. The boundary with ‘Two Acres’ on this side was a dense run of shrubbery, and then a wall of old firs, bulging and decrepit, pressing down on an ancient wooden garage and a little tar-roofed potting-shed with cobwebbed windows. He caught the sound though not the words of a woman’s voice, somewhere outside but in monologue, as if on the telephone. The space between garage and shed gave him cover, he slid between them, and then going at a squat and for a yard or two on hands and knees, shielding his face with his briefcase, he pushed through the dense harsh fronds between the trunks of the firs, and emerged, scratched and dishevelled, in the back garden of ‘Two Acres’ itself.
He stood where he was for a minute, and looked round. He felt almost comically cheated but his excitement worked over and around his disappointment, with cunning persistence. There was little enough to see. The defensive wall of conifers turned a corner and cut across behind the house as well, robbing it of a last glimpse of the trees beyond and below, which must be the parkland of Bentley Priory. The enclosed space was dead and already sunless. The short slope of tangled grass, dead thistles and nettles had a track through it of the kind a fox might make – Paul saw it would live undisturbed here, the house condemned by its own urge for privacy. Taken by a sudden urge, territorial as much as physical, he turned his back on the house, put down his briefcase, and had a short fierce piss into the long grass.
Somehow he couldn’t take the house in; but he would take photographs, so as to see it all later. He wandered up to a small window in the side wall, a shadowy kitchen, a steel sink just in front of him, a door open beyond into a brighter space. The little translucent mill set in the pane span round fitfully when he breathed on it. The feeling he’d had, that the house might still somehow be lived in, left him completely. It was empty, and therefore in a way his; he felt a lurching certainty that he could and should get into it. Then as he stepped back he saw high up under the eaves the badge-shaped red-and-white box of a burglar alarm, Albion Security, which was a challenge he didn’t mean to take up. It looked new and alert and immune to the plea made by the books in his briefcase that he was only here to research the life of a poet. He went round the corner on to the front drive, just a narrow strip in front of the house; the horrible fence, with its creosote smell, concealed him completely from the road. A short brick path ran up to the front door. On the door-frame at chest height was a small oblong box with three circular holes in it, a wire trailing from one of them. So at some stage, before this latest degradation, ‘Two Acres’ had been divided up, three flats, probably – like almost every house in London. Well, there were sixty years unaccounted for, since the day the Sawle family had relinquished the place. Paul wondered dimly how it had been done – new bathrooms, fire-doors; his eyes ran over the black gleam of the little upstairs windows; who had got Daphne’s room, had the room where Cecil slept become a living-room, another kitchen?
Paul spent ten minutes at the house, magnetized but baffled, drawn to each window in turn. He looked out all the time for something detachable, and small enough to join the books in his bag. Not a flower-pot, or twig, but something that had been there unquestionably since before the First World War. A rusty horseshoe over the front door had swung sideways on its nail, the luck spilling out – he could reach it easily, but he didn’t like to; he pushed it up straight, but in a second it dropped back again. There were overgrown flower-beds in front of the windows, such as burglars leave footprints in, and he leant in across them. Beneath the visor of his hand he stared into the shadowy spaces, where electric sockets and dark lines and squares on the wallpaper were now the sole decoration. A big room on the garden side with french windows must have been the sitting-room. He could just about imagine Cecil flirting with Daphne in front of the brick fireplace. A square of worn and stained beige carpet covered part of the parquet floor. At the end of the room he could make out a shadowy alcove, under a huge oak beam, and he thought he saw what might have been romantic and even beautiful about it; but when he stepped away, and roamed off through the long grass to take some more photographs, he thought the house looked rather a hulk. He saw now that something had been knocked down – there was a broad black arrow on the brickwork where a roof must have abutted. A new bathroom window had been punched through the wall, out of line with everything else. You could strip all the romance from a place if you were determined enough, even the romance of decay. He’d had the idea that he would find things more or less as they had been in 1913 – more deeply settled in, of course, discreetly modernized, tastefully adapted, but the rockery still there, the ‘glinting spinney’ a beautiful wood, and the trees where the hammock had been slung still bearing the ridges of the ropes in their bark. He thought other resourceful people would have come, over the years, to look at it, and that the house would wear its own mild frown of self-regard, a certain half-friendly awareness of being admired. It would live up to its fame. But really there was nothing to see. The upstairs windows seemed to ponder blankly on the reflections of clouds.
3
Cecil Valance’s earliest known writing was a short composition produced for his mother when he was six years old. It was faithfully reproduced in the Memoir by Sebastian Stokes that prefaced the 1926 Collected Poems: