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By Root 1038 0

Peek Frean assortment box. He sat back in his chair as he munched and levelled a look at his own industrious jaw movements in the mirror; and a less comfortable sensation came over him. The fact was he had never watched himself eating, and was astonished at his forceful, rodent-like look, the odd sag of his neck on one side as he chewed, the working flicker of his temples. This must be what his company was like to others, what Karen faced each night over dinner, and the realization made him run down pensively, stop chewing mid-biscuit and then start up again as if to catch himself unawares. He wasn’t at all sure he would want to confide his own secrets to such a man.

He was writing up further aspects of yesterday’s meeting in his diary—a book in which the sparse record of his own life was now largely replaced by the ramifying details of others’. Now and then he played back the tape, more for the feel of it than because he believed he would get much out of it. There was a fair amount he had forgotten, but he knew too that there were spells in any interview when he didn’t listen to the other person: it was partly the perennial self-consciousness, his sense of playing a role—laughing, sighing, sadly nodding—eclipsing any likelihood of taking in whatever was being said; and it was partly some colder sense that the interviewee was evasive or repetitive, deliberately boring him and wasting his time. It was appalling what they couldn’t remember, and with his primary witnesses, all in their eighties, he had a view of them stuck in a rut, or a wheel, doggedly chasing the same few time-smoothed memories along with their nose and their paws. When he’d gone through “The Hammock” with Daphne, hoping to goad her memory, she had carried on using the same words and phrases as she had in her book, and probably had for fifty years before that. In her book she’d made such a thing of this youthful romance, and he could see that the thing that she’d made had replaced the now remote original experience, and couldn’t usefully be interrogated for any further unrevealed details. She didn’t actually seem at all interested in Cecil, much less in the chance Paul was giving her, at the end of her life, to put things straight. He laughed warily when he thought of her little snub, as he was leaving (“Are you coming back?”); but in a way it simply made him more determined.

George’s theory about Corinna, if true, threw a very strange light on to Dudley. Perhaps today he should try to get her on to the subject of her first marriage, and trick her, almost, into some revelation. George had said such marriages happened a great deal at that time. Obviously Paul would have to track down Corinna’s birth certificate. How complicit was Dudley in the whole thing? It was a most peculiar love triangle. In Black Flowers Dudley coped with his brother’s affairs in his customary ramblingly cutting style.

My wife had met Cecil before the War, when he had been something of a mentor to her brother George Sawle, and it was after a visit to the Sawles’ cottage in Harrow that he had written “Two Acres,” a poem that attained some celebrity in the war years, and after. I suspect she was a good deal dazzled by his energy and his profile, and as an ardent consumer of romantic verse she was surely impressed to meet a real live poet, dark-eyed and raven-haired. There are certainly signs that he was fond of her, though these should not be exaggerated; my brother was accustomed to admiration, and as a rule was gracious to those who provided it. He wrote his famous poem at her request for some memento in her visitors’ book, but he had only known her at the time for two days. It amused me somewhat that Cecil, heir to three thousand acres, should have been best-known for his ode to a mere two. Very thoughtfully, he invited her to Corley once when her brother also was staying with us.

There followed various sarcasms about George’s visits to the Valances.

He showed a keen interest in both house and estate. If he had the unintended air at times of an agent or bailiff, his preoccupations