The Stranger's Child (50 page)

Paul re-read this passage with a rather silly feeling of excitement, thinking how useful it might be to get some messages from Cecil for himself. An appendix in G. F. Sawle’s edition of Cecil’s Letters seemed to suggest the book-test slips still existed, in the Valance archive, which Paul imagined bundled haphazardly in a large locked bureau like the one in
The Aspern Papers
; George gave them short shrift, but noted their significance as evidence of the spiritualist craze during and after the First World War. Paul’s copy of
Black Flowers
was the old red Penguin edition, 1957, and he peered again at the tiny author photo on the back: a shadowy sneer in a one-inch square. Beneath it there was a ramblingly circumstantial biographical note:

Paul imagined the meetings of these two groups had fairly similar trajectories. Of course he had nearly met Dudley, he remembered preparing to do so, at Daphne’s seventieth, out in the twilit lane, and his relief (apparently shared by everyone) when he failed to turn up. Now he was the person that he most wanted, or anyway needed, to talk to – he was considerably more frightened of him now he’d read his books, with their extended exasperated portrait of his mother and their puzzled coolness about Cecil himself, whom Dudley clearly thought very overrated. They were masculine books, in a way that seemed, from the viewpoint of the late 1970s, when so much was coming into the open, to be interestingly ‘gay’, in a suppressed English fashion – ‘deniable’, as Dudley would say. It was hard not to feel that his relations with the soldier whose death gave the book its title had been much more of a romance than his marriage to Daphne Sawle. The funny thing about the Penguin note was the mixture of cranky candour and evasion – of the two figures who really interested Paul, Cecil was only obliquely referred to, and the first Lady Valance might never have existed. It followed of course that their two children could not exist either. Even in the book itself they featured hardly at all. There was a sentence towards the end which began, almost comically, ‘By now the father of two children, I began to take a different view of the Corley entail’ – the first mention of Corinna and Wilfrid’s existence.

Dudley, naturally, was the first person Paul had written to, care of his agent, but the letter, like the one he had written soon after to Daphne, remained unanswered, creating a very uncertain mood. George Sawle needed to be approached, but Paul put off writing to him, out of muddled emotions of rivalry and inadequacy. At this stage of the project he had a sense of dotted items, an archipelago of documents, images, odd facts that fed his private belief that he was meant to write Cecil Valance’s Life. Sawle’s long-delayed edition of the Letters had done a lot of his work for him, in its drily scholarly way. Beside it on his bookshelf in Tooting Graveney stood his small collection of related items, some with a very thin but magical thread of connection; the books that only mentioned Cecil in a footnote gave him the strongest sense of uncovering a mystery. In front of him now he saw the torn and sellotaped wrapper of Winton Parfitt’s
Sebastian Stokes: A Double Life
; the black quarto notebooks in which he’d transcribed in pencil the letters between Cecil and Elkin Mathews, the publisher of
Night Wake
, in the British Library; the strange stiff binding of a privately printed register of Kingsmen killed in the Great War, with its peculiar heady smell of gum. On a barrow in the Farringdon Road he had found a copy of Sir Edwin Valance’s
Cattle Feeds and Cattle Care
(1910), 25p, which he felt in its very intractability conveyed something almost mystical about his subject’s family. He also had ‘the Galleries’: Dudley’s novel of 1922, which certainly drew on the Valances for its deranged Mersham family, and of course Daphne’s recent memoir.

He had written to Winton Parfitt and asked him straightforwardly if he knew of material on Stokes’s dealings with Cecil that had come to light since his book had been published twenty years earlier. The subtitle
A Double Life
referred disappointingly to Stokes’s dual careers as man of letters and discreet Tory fixer; Parfitt nowhere revealed that his subject had been queer, or drew what seemed to Paul to be the obvious inference, that he had been in love with Cecil. His waffling memoir of the ‘joyous’ and ‘splendid’ young poet, doubtless highly acceptable to old Lady Valance, was also a surreptitious love-letter of his own. In fact Parfitt was as much of a diplomatic clam as old ‘Sebby’ himself, and the royal-blue jacket of his huge biography, covered with praise from the leading reviewers, was now among those features that make all second-hand bookshops look inescapably the same. There was something ‘splendid’ about the book – an ‘event’, a ‘milestone’, a ‘labour of love’ – and something inescapably dodgy and second rate. It seemed a kind of warning to Paul. Still, he had grown familiar with half-a-dozen pages of it. There was a short paragraph mentioning Stokes’s visit to the Valances to gather materials for the memoir, but it was overshadowed by the frantic negotiations preceding the General Strike. That weekend at Corley was something he planned to ask Daphne herself about, when he managed to speak to her: it seemed a pregnant moment, an unrepeatable Cecil-focused gathering at which he longed to have been present himself. Parfitt had written back promptly, from his Dorset manor-house, in a fine italic hand, to say he knew of nothing significant, but offering warm encouragement before slipping in, with ingenuous briskness, the awful final sentence: ‘You will no doubt be in touch with Dr Nigel Dupont, of Sussex, who has also written to me in connection with his work on the ever-intriguing Cecil.’

Paul was very unhappy about Dr Nigel Dupont, but he didn’t know what to do about him. He couldn’t help thinking he must be the unknown person Daphne had met at the party in Bedford Square, the sinister ‘nice young man’ who’d been asking her all about Cecil. ‘Sussex’ presumably meant Sussex University, not merely that Dr Dupont lived somewhere in that county. He would be an ambitious young academic, an Englishman presumably, but with an incalculable element of Gallic arrogance and appetite for theory. Could he be writing a life of Cecil too? There were a number of obvious ways of finding out, but Paul was unable to take any of them. He saw himself at another party, being introduced to his rival, at which point the scenario halted and dithered in the mists of his ignorance and worry. He had a sense of the ‘ever-intriguing Cecil’ actively encouraging both biographers, as if through ‘Lara’ herself, in a spirit of mischief and self-importance.

At Tooting Graveney they lived on first-name terms with the dead. Karen, Paul’s landlady and would-be accomplice in what she called ‘the Cecil job’, worked at Peel’s Bookshop in Putney, and read a lot of things in drab-looking but exclusive bound proofs long before they were published. In his nine months as her lodger he’d grown used to daily gossip about Leonard and Virginia, Lytton and Morgan and the rest, whom she spoke of almost as personal friends; Duncan and Vanessa strayed into the conversation as easily as customers into the shop. It seemed a teenage meeting with Frances Partridge had set her off on a craze for Bloomsbury, and as books on the subject now came out about once a month she lived in an addictive state of constantly renewed expectation. Cecil hadn’t been strictly Bloomsbury, of course, but he’d known most of the Cambridge branch, and Karen clearly thought it a great stroke of luck to have his biographer as a lodger. She mothered him, and took a solemn interest in the ‘job’ (whose appeal to Paul was precisely that it wasn’t one); and Paul himself, who liked to preserve a certain mystery around his work, none the less shared almost everything with her. Karen’s kitchen became the nerve-centre for the project, and many plans and speculations were explored over the wandering vines of the William Morris tablecloth and the second bottle of Rioja. He enjoyed her admiring interest, looked forward to telling her things that otherwise only went in his diary, and worried intermittently that she was coming to see the job as a joint effort.

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.

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.

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.