‘Oh, okay,’ said Paul, smiling to suggest he wasn’t worried and quickly taking the document off on the search for his glasses. At a glance it seemed both professional and a serious problem. She had set it out in a narrow column, like a play-script, though the play itself would have been some absurdist ordeal of pauses and cross-purposes. ‘We still have the tapes, don’t we?’ Paul said. ‘We’ll keep everything like that for the archive.’
‘I’m not sure that tape-recorder’s much good.’
‘It was quite expensive.’
‘Jonah’s all right, it’s you that’s sometimes very faint.’
‘Well, the mike was by him. It’s what he said that’s important.’
The point was, of course, that Karen often couldn’t make out the questions. He read a bit at random:
PB:
Did George Sawle (inaudible)?
JT:
Oh, no, he didn’t.
PB:
Really? how interesting!
JT:
Oh, lord, no! (Cackles)
PB:
So was Cecil himself at all (inaudible: fortunate?)
JT:
Well he could be, yes. Though I don’t suppose anybody knows that!
PB:
I’m sure they don’t! That’s not what you expect! (giggles)
Karen was very free with the exclamation marks, and Shavian stage-directions (sniggers, pauses regretfully, with sudden feeling etc.) attached to quite ordinary-looking statements. Well, she was trying to help, keen to help, and then, as so easily happens, getting in the way. Sometimes Jonah’s deafness itself came to the rescue, and he asked Paul to repeat a question louder. Elsewhere Paul was worried to find he already had no memory of the inaudible thing that had been said; at moments, too, he had let the machine do the listening, when Jonah was talking about the War, for instance, stuff he didn’t need for the book. Perhaps his anxiety at the time had made it hard to listen. His whole interest was in finding out what Jonah knew about Cecil’s dealings with Daphne and with George, and an awkward sense of strategy, of distractedly biding his time, interfered with his concentration. So he found himself next day, when Karen had gone to work, replaying the tapes as he read the transcript, to see if he could make out what she had missed or misinterpreted, and with a muddled angry sense of having got off to a bad start.
He saw that in too much of the interview he had let Jonah wander off the subject of Cecil to talk about life in ‘the old days’ in general, and about his life after the War, with Harry Hewitt, a rich businessman of whom he was clearly much fonder than he had been of the Sawles. The Sawles seemed the subject of some vague unplaceable disapproval, which perhaps outlasted the now forgotten things that caused it.
PB:
So you’re saying that Freda Sawle drank too much?
JT:
Well, I don’t know it was too much.
PB:
I mean, how did you know about it?
JT:
Well, you know what you know. What they said in the (unclear: kitchen?) She had a weakness.
PB:
A weakness? I see.
JT:
There was Mrs Masters (?check), her maid, she got the stuff for her.
PB:
You mean, she bought drink for her?
JT:
Well, Bombay gin, it was, I can see it now.
He had asked Jonah if he’d been back to the house lately, and Jonah had said, ‘Oh, I haven’t been over that way for years,’ as if it were really quite a journey. Paul thought it couldn’t be more than two miles away. Jonah’s lack of sentiment for the house and the family extended to Cecil himself.
PB:
You knew he was a famous poet, I suppose.
JT:
Well, we knew that.
PB:
Of course he wrote one of his most famous poems there, as you probably know.
JT:
Oh, yes?
PB:
It’s called ‘Two Acres’.
JT:
(doubtful) Ah, yes, I think I heard about that.
PB:
Do you remember him coming to the house?
JT:
(Hesitates) Oh, he was a (unclear: gentleman?), he was! [Paul played the tape again to confirm his recollection that the word, covered by his own cough and rustle of papers, was ‘devil’.]
PB:
Really? In what way? What was he like?
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.
PB:
You must have done some (inaudible) for him?
JT:
I hadn’t done nothing!
PB:
I’m not really sure what would happen if you valeted someone.
JT:
It wasn’t proper valeting, not at the Sawles’. They didn’t know about it. ‘Just make it look right,’ young George said, I remember that. ‘Do whatever he says.’
PB:
And what did he ask you to do?
JT:
I don’t rightly remember.
PB:
(laughs) Well, you must have really hit it off with him!
JT:
(inaudible) . . . anything like that.
PB:
But was it different the second time he came?
JT:
I don’t recall.
PB:
No particular –
JT:
(impatient) It was seventy years ago, damn nearly!
PB:
I know, sorry! I mean, did you do something extra the second time to get the double tip? Sorry, that’s sounds rude.
JT:
(pause) I daresay I was glad of the extra.
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.
PB:
I wondered if you remembered anything Cecil said?
JT:
(pauses; awkward laugh) Well, all I know is, he said he was a heathen. He wouldn’t go to church with the others on Sunday.
PB:
A pagan . . . ?
JT:
That was it. He said, ‘I recommend it, Jonah. It means you can do what you like without having to worry about it afterwards.’ I was a bit thrown by that! I said it wouldn’t go down so well if you were in service!
PB:
(laughs) Anything else?
JT:
I just remember that. I know he liked to talk. He liked the sound of his own voice. But I don’t remember.
PB:
What was his voice like?
JT:
Oh, very (inaudible). Like a proper gentleman.
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 of
f. 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.
PB:
And what was Cecil like with George Sawle?
JT:
What was he like?
PB:
(inaudible) George, you know?
JT:
I’m not sure what you mean. (nervous laugh)
PB:
They were great friends, weren’t they?
JT:
I think he met him at college. I don’t know much about that.
PB:
You didn’t mix much with the Sawle children yourself?
JT:
Good grief, no! (laughs wheezily) No, no, it wasn’t like that at all.
PB:
Did you know Daphne was (inaudible) with Cecil?
JT:
Well, I don’t recall. We didn’t know about that.
PB:
(pauses) What hours did you work, do you remember?
JT:
Well, I do, I worked six till six, I remember that very well.
PB:
But you didn’t sleep at the house?
JT:
I went back home. Then up every morning at five! We didn’t mind it, you know! [And here Jonah had gone on, with what seemed to Paul like relief, to a detailed description of a servant’s day – a day in which the principal figures in Paul’s story were oddly seen as mere ineffectual walk-ons.]
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.
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.
The Stranger's Child Page 40