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By Root 1172 0

the hall. When the front door slammed, he felt a horrible self-consciousness crawling over both of them, and he watched through the window with a paralysed smile as Gillian went up the path and closed the gate behind her. It was as if something intensely embarrassing had just been said. He supposed he need only stay twenty minutes if it didn’t work out. They sat down on either side of the gas fire, with a bowl of water on the hearth. The little bone pipes glowed and fluttered. He had a sense that the occasion had been prepared for: on the table beside Jonah there was a cardboard folder and his own letter under a coloured glass paperweight. He got out the tape-recorder, which had a mike on a stand, and took a minute or two to fit up; Jonah seemed to think this was a bit of a liberty as well as a novelty, but Paul said, “Every word you say is important to me,” which he accepted with a wary smile. Paul pressed the Record button. “So how are you today?” he said.

“What’s that?” said Jonah.

KAREN, WHO HAD SECRETARIAL TRAINING, offered to transcribe the tape for Paul on her golfball typewriter, and after two tense evenings of sporadic clatter and the sound of men’s voices coming in five-second bursts from her room, incessantly stopped and replayed (his own voice not exactly his, and with its own unsuspected country burr), she came downstairs and handed over a thick sheaf of foolscap paper. “There were some bits I couldn’t be sure of,” she said. “I’ve put guesses in brackets.”

“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