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By Root 1041 0

but did look vaguely surprised at what he’d just heard himself say. I said I supposed he’d gone swimming with C. “Well, on occasion,” he said, as if not seeing the point of the question. “C was always taking his clothes off, he was famous for it.” Hard to know what to say next. I said were there real people behind all the love-poems? This was really my central question. He said, “Oh, yes.” I said Margaret Ingham and D of course. “Miss Ingham was a blue stocking and a red herring” (laughed). I felt I should come out with it. Did C seduce men as well as women? He looked at me as if there’d been a slight misunderstanding. “C would fuck anyone,” he said.

At this point MS’s crutch whacked against the door and she came in with a couple of coffees on a tray. GFS has prostate trouble, but says coffee is good for his memory. “I’m starting to get a bit forgetful,” he said. “A bit!” said MS. GFS (quietly): “Well, you don’t always hear what I say, you know, dear.” She said coffee excited him and made him confused about things; he continually got things wrong. She talked about him in the third person. GFS said, “Peter’s asking me about Cecil at Cambridge.” She didn’t correct him, and nor did I (later I became Simon, and by the time I left I was Ian). “I remember C very well, though, dear.” MS rather squashed me, perching on the arm of my chair; she said she’d never met C, but she took a dim view of the other Valances. Old Sir Edwin seemed nice enough, though he only talked nonsense by the time she knew him, and before that apparently he had only talked about cows; he’d always been a great bore. C’s mother was a tyrant and a bully. Dudley was unstable—he’d had a bad war and afterwards he used it as an excuse to attack friend and foe alike. I said, could he not be charming too? His first novel was very funny, and D’s book describes him as “magnetic.” “Perhaps to a certain type of woman. Daphne was always easily charmed. I was relieved when they split up, and we never had to go there again. Corley Court was a ghastly place.” Having soured the atmosphere thoroughly, she went out again. GFS however seems not to take much notice of her—he makes the requisite signals and potters along in serene vagueness about the recent past, though events of 60 or more years ago are clear to him (“clearer than ever,” he said, as if to say I was in luck). Still, he jumps around and is hard to follow. (He now spoke incoherently about WW1, when he was in military intelligence—nothing to do with C.)

I wanted to bring him back to what he’d been saying before we were interrupted. It took me a while to realize he’d lost what little sense he’d had of who I was—I reminded him tactfully. I said I’d recently met Dudley for the first time. “Oh, Dudley Valance, you mean?” GFS then launched into a thing about Dud, how he’d been “stunningly attractive, but in a very dangerous way, very sexy.” Much more than C—he had marvellous legs and teeth. Dud was always naughty, satirical. C was his parents’ favourite, and Dud resented this, he was always making trouble. Later he became a frightful shit. I said in one of C’s letters he called Dud a womanizer. GFS said this was just a word they all used then for a heterosexual man, it didn’t mean anything. “Lytton and people always said it—they were all terrified of women.” But C wasn’t, I said. “He was and he wasn’t, he didn’t understand women any more than he did servants.” I said he (GFS) hadn’t made it clear about “womanizer” in the Letters. Didn’t it create a misleading impression? He said Dud had read the book and didn’t object. He probably quite liked people to think he had been a Lothario. The thing about Dud in fact was that he wasn’t very keen on “all that”: he liked to play with women. After Wilf was born it more or less stopped—it was very hard for D. It was all part of his mental trouble after the War.

I asked had he been surprised when D suddenly married Dud? GFS: “It happened all the time. Women often married the brother of someone they were engaged to who was killed in the War. It was a form of remembrance in a way,