As soon as we’d sat down again MS came in and said she was going to ring for a minicab. We went out into the hall. MS insisted on ringing herself: reading glasses, the number looked up in an old address book, an impatient tone when she got through. She frowned into the mirror as she spoke, admiring her own no-nonsense handling of the person she kept mishearing. ‘Twenty minutes!’ she said; so there was a strange gap to fill. She said, ‘I hope you’ll use your judgement about what my husband said to you?’ I thought what a scary teacher she must have been; said I hoped so too. ‘Really I shouldn’t have let him see you, he’s very confused.’ I said he probably knew more about C than anyone alive. MS: ‘And I’m afraid I have to ask you, did he give you anything to take away – any documents or anything?’ I said I’d taken nothing apart from notes, but he had promised to lend me photos for the book. She looked at me very squarely, which of course I can deal with; then she considered my briefcase, but at this point the study door opened and GFS came wandering out. ‘Oh, hello!’ he said – looked very interested to see me. ‘Paul’s just going, dear,’ said MS (a first slip into first-name terms). ‘Yes, yes…’ – he has quite a cunning smile for covering up about things which are obviously just at the edge of (very recent) memory, a tone of forbearance towards her, almost. MS: ‘Did you enjoy your chat, George?’ GFS: ‘Oh, very much, dear, yes,’ with a look at me that could have been a stealthy attempt to work out who I was or a much more mischievous mental replay of feeling me up. MS: ‘And what did you talk about? I don’t suppose you remember.’ GFS: ‘Oh, you’d be surprised.’ Then he proposed the potter round the garden, which MS allowed, though I was a bit more anxious, after the incident indoors. But clearly my polite pretence that nothing had happened was soon rendered meaningless by his forgetting that anything had. ‘Have a look at the tadpoles, George,’ she said. Which we duly did, MS watching from the window the whole time. ‘Wriggly little buggers,’ GFS called them.
8
Didcot and then Swindon came by, with remote tugs of allegiance that distracted him, as the half-familiar outskirts slipped away, from the bigger tug of his mission to Worcester Shrub Hill. He treasured the length of the journey, and had a childish feeling, in the bright placeless run among farms and the gentle tilts of the earth one way or the other, that the important interview with Daphne Jacobs was all the time being magically deferred; though with each long deceleration and stop (Stroud, was it?, a little later Stonehouse) the end came inescapably closer. Of course he wanted to be there, in Olga, as Daphne’s house was surprisingly called, and he also wanted to be cradled all day in this pleasant underpopulated train. He couldn’t even bring himself to prepare; he had written out a series, or flight, of questions, up which he hoped to lead her towards a steady light at the top, but his briefcase, heavy with bookmarked evidence, stayed untouched on the seat beside him.
Some time after Stonehouse, the train made a long threading descent of the western edge of the Cotswolds into what seemed a vast plain beyond, half-hidden in murky sunlight. Paul had never been so far in this direction. The sensation of entering a whole new region of his own island was dreamlike but unsettling. A few minutes later they were sliding quite fast into Gloucester station, the knots of people on the platform, hikers, soldiers, closing in and moving along with their eyes fixed anxiously or threateningly on the rapidly braking train. Well, there was still Cheltenham to come before Worcester.
In a minute, however, he had to move his things for a woman and two children to sit down, she nagging at them distractedly, her own face taut with worry, and when the train began to move again he found the romance of the journey from London, which they knew nothing about, had been left behind for ever, and a period of compromise and cohabitation had begun. Paul kept his briefcase on the table, leaving little room for the boy to spread his colouring book. His dislike of children, with their protean ability to embarrass him, seemed to focus in his scowl over The Short Gallery, which he rather brandished in their faces. The fact that he was about to conduct an interview of enormous importance to his own book, and therefore to his future life, was squeezing and trapping him like the onset of some illness undetectable to anyone else. If what George had said was right, then Paul’s conversations with Daphne, today and again tomorrow, were bound to be a peculiar game, in which he would have to pretend not to know the thing he was most hoping to get her to own up to.
He looked through the first chapter again, which was her ‘portrait’ of Ceciclass="underline"
On this fine June night, which was to be the last time I saw him, Cecil took me to Jenner’s for a Spartan supper of the kind which seems to a love-struck girl to be a perfect love-feast. Pea soup, I remember, and a leg of chicken, and a strawberry blancmange. Neither of us, I think, cared a hoot what we ate. It was the chance to be together, under the magic cloak of our own strong feelings, out of the noise of war, that counted above all. When we had done we walked the streets for an hour, down to the Embankment, watching the light pass on the broad stretches of the river. The next day, Cecil was to re-embark for France, and the mighty thrust that we knew was coming. He didn’t ask me then – it was to be in his last letter, a few days later – if I would marry him, but the evening air seemed charged with the largest questions. Our talk, meanwhile, was of simple and happy things. He saw me into a cab which would take me to my train at Marylebone, and my last sight of him was against the great black columns of St Martin-in-the-Fields, waving his cap, and then turning abruptly away into the future we both imagined with such excitement, and such dread.
Perhaps it was just a reflection of his own habits, but Paul didn’t believe anyone remembered all the courses of a meal they’d eaten four years ago, much less sixty-four; whereas (again perhaps reflecting his own fairly limited experience) they always remembered having sex. The worrying air of cliché and unreality about the whole of this scene was only heightened by the leg of chicken and the strawberry blancmange, which in some way Paul didn’t like to think about seemed to stand in for the blandly concealed truth of a night spent at the Valances’ Marylebone flat – even the naming of the station was a cover. And what, come to that, of Cecil preparing for a ‘mighty thrust’?