The Stranger's Child (52 page)

Here Paul had arrived, quite effectively after all, at the great simple question; but it seemed that of Cecil’s visits to ‘Two Acres’ Jonah could remember next to nothing; it all looked very promising for a minute or two, but it thinned and dissolved under Paul’s questioning. What remained, offered with a kind of compensatory certainty, was first that Cecil had been ‘a horror!’, which appeared to mean no more than ‘extremely untidy’. Second, that he had silk underwear, very expensive (‘Hmm, was that unusual?’ ‘Well, I never saw it before. Like a woman’s, it was. I’ll never forget it.’) And third, that he was very generous – he tipped Jonah a guinea, and ‘when he came the second time, two guineas’, which since Jonah was only paid £12 a year, plus meals, by Freda Sawle, was surely a staggering amount.

Paul had stopped to turn the cassette over, with a feeling, just in the little interval, while Jonah shifted on his new hip and twitched his cushion, that he’d rattled the old man; and with a novice’s indecision about whether he should back off or press him harder.

Soon, because he was nervous and dry-mouthed, Paul had asked for a glass of water. He thought it a bit unfriendly that he hadn’t been offered anything, a cup of tea; but he’d come at 2.30, an odd between-times. They didn’t know what to do for an interview any more than he did. Jonah let him go into the kitchen. Gillian had left it all wiped down, the dish-cloth shrouding the two taps. Through the window Paul saw the back garden with a small greenhouse, and beyond a privet hedge the white frame of a soccer goal some way off. Again, it was a room he felt he knew. He stood, slowly gulping the cold water, in a brief unexpected trance, as if he could see decade after decade pass through this house, this square of garden, school terms and years, new generations of boys shouting, and Jonah’s long life, with all its own routines and duties, wife and daughter, all these unheeded but reassuring bits and bobs in the kitchen and the sitting-room, and thoughts of Cecil Valance as rare as holidays. On the tape, which continued to run in Paul’s absence, Jonah could be heard moving things around near the microphone, speaking indistinctly under his breath, and emitting a quietly musical fart.

When Jonah got out his photo album the taped record became too cryptic altogether for Karen. Paul listened, fast-forwarded for ten seconds, cut in again – murmurs, grunts and rueful laughs like the sounds of some intimacy from which he was now bizarrely excluded. He had stooped over Jonah in his armchair, staying his hand sometimes as he turned the pages. It was a shared task, each of them somehow guiding the other, Jonah still puzzled and touchy about the undue interest Paul was taking in it all. ‘Well, there’s not much to it,’ he said, which was true in a way, though as always the ‘not much’ stared out like a provocation. Those old snapshots, two inches by three – the few Paul had seen of himself as a child were almost as small. Jonah hovered over them and partly concealed them with the oblong magnifying glass he used for reading the paper, the miniature faces swelling and darting as he muttered comments on one or two of them. There was a group photo of the staff at ‘Two Acres’, it must be just before the War, Jonah grinning in a work-coat buttoned at the neck, standing between two taller maids in caps and aprons, with a huge-bosomed woman behind them, who sure enough was the cook; Paul really didn’t recognize the door and window behind, but Jonah was unmistakeable, and so glowingly pretty that the older Jonah seemed to grow self-conscious on his behalf; at sixteen he had a look of being happy in his place as well as slyly curious about what lay outside it. Then there were several of the family. ‘So that was their mother? May I?’ Paul said – steadying the glass: a sturdy-looking woman with a wide appealing face and the guesswork smile that went with shortsightedness. He saw a lot of Daphne in her, not the teenager of the photos but Daphne as he knew her, older than her mother had been then. ‘Freda looks very nice.’ ‘Yes, well,’ said Jonah, ‘she was all right,’ though now her weakness, as he had called it, seemed to swim to the surface under the lens – Hubert Sawle, balding and responsible, standing next to her, surely knew about it too. They had the indefinable air of figures in an ongoing crisis, which their smiles didn’t quite expect to conceal. ‘What about George? – ah, yes, that must be him.’ George played up to the camera, pointing at Daphne, or posing just behind her with a silly face. Daphne herself had the vulnerable look of a girl hoping to get away for longer than five minutes with the pretence of being grown-up. She sat smiling graciously under a large hat with a silk flower on the side. Then George crept up, like a villain in a silent film, and made her jump. ‘Now is that . . . ? I’ve got an idea,’ said Jonah, and let Paul take the glass again and square it over the cornermost snap – two young men almost level with the ground in deckchairs, George in a boater, the other’s face cast in primitive photographic shadow by the brim of his hat, save for a gleam of a nose and a smile. ‘That’s your young man, I think, isn’t it?’ said Jonah – really it could have been anybody, but Paul said, ‘Yes, of course it is . . . !’ and when he had done so he tingled at the certainty that it was.

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.