• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1015 0

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 off. 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 unmistakable, 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 short-sightedness. 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