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By Root 1250 0

it was a form of loyalty, and there was some kind of auto-suggestion to it. The young woman didn’t have to go searching for another man when there was a similar one already to hand.” Were C and Dud particularly similar? “They lived in the same house, and D had a thing about Corley from the day she met C. C was D’s first love, but she was in awe of him. She was closer in age to Dud, and got on well with him from the start.” I said how C had written to both D and Ingham from France saying “will you be my widow?” but was he actually engaged to D? He said, “I don’t think so, though of course there was the child.” What child was that? Here GFS looked genuinely confused for a minute, then he said, “Well, the girl, wasn’t it …” He sipped at his coffee, still looking doubtful. “You see I’m not sure she knows about it.” I said did he mean Corinna? He said yes. I said, well you know she died three years ago. It was an awful moment, his old face looked really helpless with worry, and then anger coming through, as if I was lying to him. I said she’d had lung cancer, and this did make some sort of sense to him. “Poor old Leslie,” he said, but I didn’t feel I could say anything about Leslie’s suicide. He muttered about how awful it was, but I saw him coming to accept it, with a rather sulky look. He said, “Well, it doesn’t matter then.” I still didn’t know what he meant. I said, “What about Corinna?” Now I must get this right: he said that on C’s last leave, two weeks before he was killed, he had spent the night with D in London, and got her pregnant. (In her book D says they had supper in a restaurant and then she went home.) So did Dud think he was Corinna’s father? GFS didn’t know.

Of course I was incredibly excited by this, but at the same time I was worrying about the dates. Corinna was born in 1917, but when? I was furious that she was dead: the discovery of a living child would have been the making of the book! It gave me goose-bumps to think that that woman I’d seen several times a week until I left the bank might have been C’s daughter. Even her difficult and snobbish aspects, and her clear sense of having come down in the world, took on a more romantic and forgivable character. All that time, and I hadn’t known. And now she’s gone. Bad pangs of missed-chance syndrome, so that I’m telling myself, and even half-hoping, that it isn’t true. I said to GFS that Corinna and Wilf both look(ed) exactly like Dud. It seemed rude, and probably fairly pointless, to challenge him. I said, had D herself told him this? He said, “Well, you know …”

I decided I needed to go to the loo. MS was sitting in the hall by the telephone, as if ready to call for my taxi. Wondered if I could ask her what she knew, but some desire to protect GFS himself prevented me. Wondered about their marriage. I suppose she is anxious about him misbehaving in some way, she is grim but her worries come out; she said he is on heart drugs that react badly with his dementia, they can be very disinhibiting; alcohol is completely banned. I didn’t like to say that he seemed fairly disinhibited without alcohol. (What I don’t know, of course, is if he shares all these secrets—or speculations?—with her.)

When I got back I had to help him back again into what we were doing. I thought I’d ask him about Revel Ralph. (Not strictly relevant for the book, but I wanted to know.) “Oh, I loved RR, he was a charmer, very attractive, very sexy, though not in a conventional way. You know he married my sister. She ran away with him—it was a great scandal at the time, because Dud was always in the papers. He despised publicity, but he couldn’t do without it. Actually he didn’t seem to mind very much—he married a model, you know, a leggy blonde. She was a frightful bitch.” I asked if D and RR were happy together. He said RR was much nicer than Dud, and younger of course—they didn’t have much money, but they became quite a famous couple too—they lived in Chelsea. “I used to say they lived on the mere luxuries of life. [This is the phrase D uses in her own book.] You know, Picassos on the wall,