He hadn’t expected Jonah to have such a hoard; it seemed the mysterious but omnipresent Harry Hewitt had given Hubert a camera, and Hubert had kept on dutifully taking snapshots and presenting them to all and sundry. Jonah showed him a photograph of the two men together; under the glass his square brown fingers half-hid what he was pointing out. ‘I see… yes…’ – Hubert was quite different here, peeping at the camera, a cigarette held uncertainly just by his trouser-pocket, while beside him, with an arm round his shoulder, as if escorting him towards some challenge he had been shyly avoiding, stood a darker, rather older man, very smartly dressed, with a long gaunt face, large ears, and a wide moustache drawn out into uncertain points. ‘So that was the man you worked for after the War…’ There was something so evidently gay about the photograph that the question sounded insinuating to himself, and perhaps to Jonah too. Later on he found the place in the transcript where he’d come back to questions about Hewitt.
JT: Mr Hewitt was a friend of the Sawles. He was a great friend of Mr Hubert. So I knew him already, in a way. He’d always been kind to me. He lived in Harrow Weald (unclear: Paddocks?)
PB: I’m sorry?
JT: That’s what his house was called.
PB: Oh!
JT: Well, it’s an old folks’ home now. The old dears are in there! (chuckles wheezily)
PB: Right. A big house, then.
JT: He was an art collector, wasn’t he, Harry Hewitt. I believe he left it all to a museum, would it be the Victoria and Albert Museum?
PB: He didn’t have children?
JT: Ooh no, no. He was a bachelor gentleman. He was always very generous to me.
Then, over the page, Jonah had changed his servant’s coat for lumpy serge and a too-large peaked cap, and in a line of recruits all taller than himself looked even younger than he had two years before, the smile of curiosity now a crooked look of childish worry. Paul straightened up, gazed down abstractedly for a minute at the neat old man with the album on his knee; then bent down again into his sharp clean odour of shaving-soap and hair-tonic.
In a minute, Jonah had to go to the loo, which was upstairs, and with his new hip was likely to take him a while. When he was safely halfway up, Paul stopped the tape, mooched across the room, glanced amiably through the window at the front garden and the lane, then lifted the paperweight from the folder on the table by Jonah’s chair, looked over his own letter again with interest, as it were from the recipient’s point of view, and with one finger raised the cardboard cover. Some brittle and sun-browned newspaper cuttings, words lost at the corners and folds, brown envelopes rubbed and softened with use. These must be Jonah’s demob papers. Then a prize certificate for carnations that he’d won in 1965. Then there was a folded review of a school play. A photograph from the local paper of what must be Gillian’s wedding. It struck him poor Jonah didn’t have enough treasures for separate folders – everything precious must be in here together. Paul leafed through the papers in loose groups. It was all just family stuff, of the most routine kind, very distant and pathetic, but put here ready perhaps, in the belief the interview was to be about Jonah’s own life. Then laying it all back again, and having a last look as he did so, Paul saw a large brown envelope addressed to Hubert Sawle Esq., ‘Two Acres’, the address struck through in ink: he lifted it out with a sudden heaviness of heart. Peering into it quickly but intently, half-pulling out the top two or three sheets, he saw letters, one signed H. O. Sawle, so perhaps these were just Jonah’s scraps and memorabilia from that time. ‘Wishing you good luck!’ – May 1915… in large backward-leaning writing. And then under it he found himself staring, in a sudden accusing rush of colour to his face, at a quite different hand, the hand he was only starting to know apart from all others, like the hand of a new lover. A tiny envelope, addressed to Pte J. Trickett, at the Middlesex Regiment barracks in Mill Hill. The large black postmark was smudged, but the year stood out, ‘1916’. Setting down the other papers, he was about to open it when he saw with astonishment that he had turned over something else in Cecil’s writing, several sheets of paper, torn in half, and covered in densely written and corrected verse. His fingers were trembling as he lifted the first one, which seemed to oscillate under his eyes like something out of focus. He knew it and he didn’t know it. He knew it so well that he couldn’t think what it was, and then when he understood he found it wasn’t what he knew. ‘Hearty, lusty, true and bold…’ The lavatory upstairs flushed, a sequence of muted sighs and whines spread through the plumbing system of the house; then he heard Jonah’s careful but not unduly slow tread coming down. It was a teetering five seconds of bewildered indecision. He squared up the papers, closed the folder, and set the paperweight back on top, calling up his mental photograph of how it had been before he touched it; he was completely confident it looked just as it had – even the paperweight was the right way round; but when Jonah came back in his eye seemed to go straight to it, and Paul wondered if the final impression wasn’t so meticulously accurate as to be in some way unconvincing.
Later on, listening to the tapes, so muffled and unprofessional, and leafing back and forth through the embarrassing half-clarification of the transcript, Paul had a growing gnawing sense that he’d already lost something of great value, though he wasn’t quite sure how he’d done so, or even what it was. Did Jonah know more than he said about Cecil’s friendship with George? It was natural enough that he wouldn’t say, perhaps wouldn’t know how to say; and though he didn’t seem to have much patience for George, or Daphne either, he was hardly going to go on record with the sort of claim Paul was hoping for about people who were still alive, whom he hadn’t seen for sixty-five years… Obscurely related there was the matter of Cecil’s massive tip, more than a month’s wages, and doubled on his second visit. Why had he done that? Because he knew he had been a ‘horror’, perhaps – though what did that word really mean? And why did Jonah remember that, and almost nothing else? Paul wondered if Cecil had bought his silence about something – perhaps so effectively that he had indeed entirely forgotten it. Or was that the matter he had written to him about, at the Mill Hill barracks? Paul felt sick that he hadn’t simply taken that letter. Why on earth would an aristocratic young officer be writing to a private in another regiment? It was striking enough that Cecil had even mentioned Jonah to Freda – Paul knew from other such letters he’d read that upper-class people never mentioned servants, unless it was some figure of great age and eccentric dignity, like a butler or old nanny. And then what seemed to be a manuscript of ‘Two Acres’ itself, glimpsed like something in a dream and, at a glimpse, full of dreamlike variants.