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By Root 1007 0

and Madeleine’s name on the title-page of their book when I was twelve or so; and now for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, and wondered how I would take it—I almost wanted him to, in a way—but he looked down, and as he did so I thought suddenly, well, this is a history I’m going to write. I went on politely, “And what about all C’s letters to you? You said they were lost?” He said, “Yes, you see, I couldn’t say exactly what happened. My mother destroyed them, she burned almost all of them. By the way”—his hand still clutching my left buttock, but now more as if he needed it for support than for any fun he was getting out of it—“better not mention this to my wife.” It wasn’t at all clear what the “this” referred to. “All right,” I said, and he let go. GFS: “Oh, they were a great loss, a loss to literature. Though fairly hair-raising, some of them!”

As soon as we’d sat down again MS came in and said she was going to ring for a minicab. We went out into the hall. MS insisted on ringing herself: reading glasses, the number looked up in an old address book, an impatient tone when she got through. She frowned into the mirror as she spoke, admiring her own no-nonsense handling of the person she kept mishearing. “Twenty minutes!” she said; so there was a strange gap to fill. She said, “I hope you’ll use your judgement about what my husband said to you?” I thought what a scary teacher she must have been; said I hoped so too. “Really I shouldn’t have let him see you, he’s very confused.” I said he probably knew more about C than anyone alive. MS: “And I’m afraid I have to ask you, did he give you anything to take away—any documents or anything?” I said I’d taken nothing apart from notes, but he had promised to lend me photos for the book. She looked at me very squarely, which of course I can deal with; then she considered my briefcase, but at this point the study door opened and GFS came wandering out. “Oh, hello!” he said—looked very interested to see me. “Paul’s just going, dear,” said MS (a first slip into first-name terms). “Yes, yes …”—he has quite a cunning smile for covering up about things which are obviously just at the edge of (very recent) memory, a tone of forbearance towards her, almost. MS: “Did you enjoy your chat, George?” GFS: “Oh, very much, dear, yes,” with a look at me that could have been a stealthy attempt to work out who I was or a much more mischievous mental replay of feeling me up. MS: “And what did you talk about? I don’t suppose you remember.” GFS: “Oh, you’d be surprised.” Then he proposed the potter round the garden, which MS allowed, though I was a bit more anxious, after the incident indoors. But clearly my polite pretence that nothing had happened was soon rendered meaningless by his forgetting that anything had. “Have a look at the tadpoles, George,” she said. Which we duly did, MS watching from the window the whole time. “Wriggly little buggers,” GFS called them.

8

DIDCOT AND THEN SWINDON came by, with remote tugs of allegiance that distracted him, as the half-familiar outskirts slipped away, from the bigger tug of his mission to Worcester Shrub Hill. He treasured the length of the journey, and had a childish feeling, in the bright placeless run among farms and the gentle tilts of the earth one way or the other, that the important interview with Daphne Jacobs was all the time being magically deferred; though with each long deceleration and stop (Stroud, was it?, a little later Stonehouse) the end came inescapably closer. Of course he wanted to be there, in Olga, as Daphne’s house was surprisingly called, and he also wanted to be cradled all day in this pleasant underpopulated train. He couldn’t even bring himself to prepare; he had written out a series, or flight, of questions, up which he hoped to lead her towards a steady light at the top, but his briefcase, heavy with bookmarked evidence, stayed untouched on the seat beside him.

Some time after Stonehouse, the train made a long threading descent of the western edge of the Cotswolds into what seemed a vast plain beyond, half-hidden