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By Root 1113 0

’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.

In a minute, Jonah had to go to the loo, which was upstairs, and with his new hip was likely to take him a while. When he was safely halfway up, Paul stopped the tape, mooched across the room, glanced amiably through the window at the front garden and the lane, then lifted the paperweight from the folder on the table by Jonah’s chair, looked over his own letter again with interest, as it were from the recipient’s point of view, and with one finger raised the cardboard cover. Some brittle and sun-browned newspaper cuttings, words lost at the corners and folds, brown envelopes rubbed and softened with use. These must be Jonah’s demob papers. Then a prize certificate for carnations that he’d won in 1965. Then there was a folded review of a school play. A photograph from the local paper of what must be Gillian’s wedding. It struck him poor Jonah didn’t have enough treasures for separate folders—everything precious must be in here together. Paul leafed through the papers in loose groups. It was all just