The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [172]
4
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.
It was another great trek across Middlesex, twenty-seven stops to Edgware, the very end of the Northern line, a reassuring eternity steadily shrinking, Paul rehearsing the questions and imagining the answers, and the questions they prompted in turn. He had the suspicion Jonah wouldn’t volunteer much; he would have to bring him out, and then help him to discover what he really had to say. The prospect made him extremely nervous, as though he were going for an intervew himself. In his briefcase he had a letter from Peter Rowe that he hadn’t looked at this morning when it arrived, and he opened it now, with slight misgivings, in the wintry sunlight of the empty train. The envelope contained a postcard, which in Peter’s case was always an old painting of a preferably naked man, this time a St. Sebastian by one of the millions of Italians Paul had never heard of; the message, in small brown italic, read:
Dearie! I distinctly felt an arrow go in, just under the heart, when I heard that you are writing the life of CTV. However, the agony is somewhat abated. That’s a book I always thought I would write myself, one day, though I’m not sure I could have done it as well as I know you will. Of course I feel I have a hand in it, from having led you one evening long ago to the Poet’s tomb. Wd love to talk about it with you—I have a few hunches about old C that might be worth exploring!
Sempre, P.
ps my book out in March
Paul wished he hadn’t read it, since Peter’s handwriting alone, with its quick cultured command of any space it alighted on, crossed his feelings with anxiety. And the Sebastian too, a huge foreshortened hunk shackled to a tree, and not at all like Peter to look at, was still an eerie reminder of his life when Peter was in it, and that critical summer of 1967. Now he had a book of his own coming out, on Victorian churches, he was planning a TV programme as well as giving interval talks, apparently, on Radio 3. Paul thought of him