In the strange week after Christmas, Paul got home early from the library and saw that a letter with a Spanish stamp had come for him. Karen had propped it on the hall table, in a way that suggested great restraint in not opening it herself. There it was, with a typed address, his name misspelt. He took it to the kitchen to open it neatly. He saw now that it would say one of two things, and his knife seemed to dawdle even as it snicked it open.
El Almazán
Sabasona
Antequera
Dear Mr Bryan
My husband is unwell, and has asked me to reply to your letter of November 26. He is very sorry, but he will not be able to see you. As you may know, we live in Spain for much of the year, and my husband is rarely in London.
Yours sincerely,
Linette Valance
For a moment he felt oddly embarrassed, and was glad Karen wasn’t here to see it. It was unquestionably a blow: so much depended on Dudley, and his locked bureau of family papers. He put the letter back in the envelope, and a few minutes later got it out again, with an excited feeling that he couldn’t quite remember it; but it seemed to say more or less what he’d thought it had before. Unless, perhaps, something else was conveyed by its very perfunctoriness? Even a rejection was a communication, after all – the letter, sparse and snooty though it was, yielded a small charge of contact. In a way, it was an adjunct to the family archive itself. He left it lying on the kitchen table as he boiled the kettle and prepared the teapot. At each inspection it looked just a little less disheartening. It was a brush-off, which needed to be brief to be effective, but wasn’t it also a bit feeble? A strong response would have been to say, ‘Sir Dudley Valance refuses to see you, and furthermore is implacably opposed to your writing the life of his brother, Captain Cecil Valance MC.’ No such veto was even hinted at. He started to feel that Linette herself didn’t think it was over yet. There was almost something defeatist in it, a mere delaying gesture in the face of the inevitable. The objections given, that they were ‘rarely in London’ and in Spain ‘for much of the year’, were vague and obviously not insuperable – was there not very nearly a suggestion that they didn’t want to be a nuisance to Paul himself? And he started to wonder if he couldn’t somehow arrange to get out to Antequera and talk to them there, rather than troubling them on their rare and brief visits to London. His commitment in doing so would certainly impress them, even move them, and he began to see a warm and subtle friendship developing, of the kind that would be life-blood to his book.
Later on, upstairs in his room and writing up the arrival of the letter in his diary, Paul sat back and stared out of the window with a sudden pang of sympathy for the poor old Valances, a moment of insight that he felt at once was of the essence of being a biographer. What he’d taken as snootiness was surely a sign of their acute vulnerability, something the upper classes were often at pains to conceal from the lower ones. Dudley was under the weather, and at eighty-four finding the prospect of meeting strangers a strain – for all he knew Paul might be just another hack, it was quite understandable; and Linette herself, half-comprehendingly taking instruction from a sick man, had written in haste before returning to his bedside to nurse him. A conversation with Paul, when it actually happened, might be a huge and happy relief to both of them. He decided that over the coming days he would write another letter, more personal and accommodating, and building on the warm contact that was now established between them.
4
The first interview Paul conducted for the book had been with someone whose very survival seemed a little uncanny, one of the servants at ‘Two Acres’ at the time when Cecil had first visited the Sawles. On the phone, the old boy said he was jiggered if he knew how Paul had tracked him down, and Paul read him the passage in Cecil’s letter to Freda Sawle where he said he wanted to ‘kidnap young Jonah at the station and demand an impossible ransom’. ‘What’s that?’ said old Jonah indignantly, as if he thought Paul himself was making some improper suggestion; he was very deaf. Paul said, ‘You’ve got an unusual name!’ George had footnoted the reference punctiliously: ‘Jonah Trickett (b. 1898), the “boy” at “Two Acres”, who had been detailed to act as CV’s valet; employed by FS from 1912 to 1915, when enlisted with Middlesex Regiment. From 1919 gardener and chauffeur to H. R. Hewitt (see also below, p137, 139n).’ Paul wasn’t sure he’d understood, on the phone, what the proposed visit was about. He agreed to let him come, though still sounded vaguely offended that anyone could think it necessary. ‘You’re one of the few people left alive who remember Cecil Valance!’ Paul said. That of course was the uncanny thing: there were thousands of eighty-one-year-olds, but surely no one else left in the world who had handled the intimate effects of this poet who had died in 1916, helped him to dress and undress and done whatever it was for him that a valet did. ‘Oh, yes? Ah well,’ said the sharp old voice, ‘whatever you say…’ as if catching a first glimpse of his own potential importance in the story.
It was another great trek across Middlesex, twenty-seven stops to Edgware, the very end of the Northern line, a reassuring eternity steadily shrinking, Paul rehearsing the questions and imagining the answers, and the questions they prompted in turn. He had the suspicion Jonah wouldn’t volunteer much, he would have to bring him out, and then help him to discover what he really had to say. The prospect made him extremely nervous, as though he were going for an intervew himself. In his briefcase he had a letter from Peter Rowe that he hadn’t looked at this morning when it arrived, and he opened it now, with slight misgivings, in the wintry sunlight of the empty train. The envelope contained a postcard, which in Peter’s case was always an old painting of a preferably naked man, this time a St Sebastian by one of the millions of Italians Paul had never heard of; the message, in small brown italic, read:
Dearie! I distinctly felt an arrow go in, just under the heart, when I heard that you are writing the life of CTV. However, the agony is somewhat abated. That’s a book I always thought I would write myself, one day, though I’m not sure I could have done it as well as I know you will. Of course I feel I have a hand in it, from having led you one evening long ago to the Poet’s tomb. Wd love to talk about it with you – I have a few hunches about old C that might be worth exploring!
Sempre, P. ps my book out in March
Paul wished he hadn’t read it, since Peter’s handwriting alone, with its quick cultured command of any space it alighted on, crossed his feelings with anxiety. And the Sebastian too, a huge foreshortened hunk shackled to a tree, and not at all like Peter to look at, was still an eerie reminder of his life when Peter was in it, and that critical summer of 1967. Now he had a book of his own coming out, on Victorian churches, he was planning a TV programme as well as giving interval talks, apparently, on Radio 3. Paul thought of him with an uneasy mixture of envy, admiration and regret.
Arnold Close was a terrace of pebble-dashed cottages with playing-fields beyond. Paul approached the second house and unlatched the front gate with a new flinch of dread and determination. The little garden was all brown and tidied for winter, a few pink buds surviving the frost. He pretended not to look into the front room, where a lamp was on, framed photographs with their backs to him on the window-sill. The house seemed both watchful and defenceless. He hoped he would get something valuable out of it – and that in the process he would give it something back, an interest and distinction it didn’t know it had.