• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1090 0

English Language and Literature, taking a First in Honour Moderations in 1913. On the outbreak of War he enlisted with the Wiltshire Regiment (Duke of Edinburgh’s), quickly rising to the rank of Captain, but after being wounded at the Battle of Loos in September 1915 was unable to return to active service. His experiences during the War are memorably recorded in the present volume, largely written in the 1920s, though not published until twenty years later. His first book, The Long Gallery, came out to great acclaim in 1922. A satirical country-house novel, in the tradition of Peacock, it cast a merrily merciless eye over three generations of the ancient Mersham family, and added such figures as the jingoistic General Sir Gareth “Jo-boy” Mersham and his “artistic” pacifist grandson Lionel to the great roll-call of British comic characters. On the death of his father in 1925, Dudley Valance succeeded to the baronetcy, his elder brother having been killed in the War. When war broke out again, Corley Court was requisitioned as a military hospital, and in 1946 Sir Dudley deemed it best to sell the family home. England he felt was a changed land, and thenceforth he and his wife have chosen to spend much of each year at their fortified sixteenth-century house near Antequera in Andalusia. A further volume of his memoirs, The Woods Decay, appeared in 1954. Sir Dudley Valance is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and President of British Friends of Sherry.

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,