an excitable sales pitch, ‘Contains candid portraits of leading writers and artists A Huxley, Mary Gibbons, Lord Berners, Revd Ralph &c sensational account of teenage affair with WW1 Poet Dudley Valance.’
‘Wrong!’ said Raymond. ‘Right?’
‘Love Revd Ralph,’ said Rob. ‘Now that’s amusing. “Inscribed by the author ‘To Paul Bryant, April 18, 1980’.” ’ With it was the sixteen-page catalogue, which Garsaint sometimes had, for the Revel Ralph ‘Scenes and Portraits’ exhibition at the Michael Parkin Gallery in 1984, with a posthumous foreword by Daphne Jacobs – reassuringly unsigned: ?25.
The final copy, from Delirium Books in LA, floated aloft in a bookman’s empyrean of its own: ‘Sir Dudley Valance’s copy, with his bookplate designed by St John Hall, inscribed and signed by the author “To Dudley from Duffel”, with numerous comments and corrections in pencil and ink by Dudley Valance. Book condition: fair. Dust- jacket, losses to head of spine, 1cm repaired tear to rear panel. In protective red morocco slipcase. An exceptional association copy. $1,500.’
‘Take your pick,’ said Raymond.
‘Mm, I will,’ said Rob. Jennifer Ralph’s description of the book as ‘rather feeble’ tugged against his more indulgent curiosity. Of course she would have known some of the figures whose portraits appeared in it, which made a difference. ‘And how much do you want for Hewitt?’
‘Hundred?’
Rob raised an eyebrow. ‘Raymond?’
‘You saw the Valance letters?’
‘I’m sorry…?’ Rob raised an eyebrow too, coloured slightly.
‘Oh, yes.’ And taking the book back from him, Raymond showed him that a few blank pages further on from the mid-volume FINIS there was another small section of transcribed letters, very different in tone. ‘That’s really the interest, Robson, my friend.’
‘Dear Hewitt,’ the first one began, in September 1913; modulating to ‘Dear Harry’ in the third letter, sent from France. Five letters in total, the last dated June 27, 1916, signed, ‘Yours ever, Cecil’.
‘Have these been published, I wonder?’
‘You’d have to check.’
‘I bet they haven’t.’ Rob looked over them as quickly as the writing allowed. The idea that Valance might have had a thing with Hewitt too… No sign of it, which was itself somehow suggestive. ‘And why did the old fool transcribe them – I mean, what did he do with the originals?’
‘Ah, you see, he failed to think of the needs of a twenty-first-century bookseller – quite a common failing of the past.’
‘Thanks for that.’ Rob looked at the last letter more narrowly.
It was bad luck you couldn’t get to up to Stokes’s – you would like him, I think. It occurred to me to send you the new poems before we get stuck in to the next big show – I will send them tomorrow, all being well, when I have gone over them once more. They are for your eyes only – you will see they are not publishable in my life- time – or England’s! Stokes has seen some (not all). One of them draws, you will see, on our last meeting. Let me know you have them safe. My love (is that too fresh?) to Elspeth the strict scholar.
Yours ever, Cecil.
‘So the house has been completely cleared, has it?’
‘They’re getting out the last stuff this week.’
‘Mm, what sort of stuff?’ Rob thought he saw the colour creep up behind Raymond’s beard as he turned away and rummaged on the desk – a distraction, though at first Rob thought it was a search for some further evidence.
‘I haven’t been down there myself. I think Debbie’s there now.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so before?’ – to Rob the slow afternoon, the mild trance of autumn in North London, the musty otherworld of Chadwick’s shop, were revealed as a decoy, a disastrous waste of time, like the stifling obstacles and digressions of a certain kind of dream. ‘How far is it to the house?’
‘Well, how are you going?’
There was a taxi-rank down the road towards the school, as if ready to whisk the boys off to their homes, or the shops, or the airport… Rob ran down to the first car, but there was no driver: he was over the road, at the cafe, picking up a tea and a sandwich, and it was more than the driver of the second cab’s life was worth to take his fare… the cabbies’ tedious etiquette. Rob sensed there was something offputting in his own urgency, a hint of unwelcome trouble – he went grinning impatiently to the cafe, and after a minute the driver followed him out to the taxi. ‘It’s a house called Mattocks – was an old people’s home. Do you know it?’
‘Well, I did know it,’ said the cabbie, slow in the pleasure of his own irony. ‘There’s not much going on down there now.’
‘No, I know.’
‘They’ll have the wreckers’ balls down there, any day now.’ And he looked at Rob in the mirror as he slid into his seat, doubtless toying with some dismal joke.
‘Let’s see if we can get there first,’ said Rob. He leant coaxingly forward and saw his own eyes and nose in the mirror, in surreal isolation.
They turned and headed out north again, up through the most densely congested junctions of Harrow-on- the-Hill, the driver’s courtesy extending to any number of undecided road-crossers, reversing delivery-vans and anxious would-be joiners from side-roads; he was a great letter-in. Then in the leafy residential streets and avenues of the Weald his vaguely smiling dawdle on the brink of third gear suggested almost that he didn’t know where he was going. He started joking about something Rob seemed to have missed, Rob said ‘Sorry?’ and then saw he was talking on his phone, deploring something with a friend, laughing, the loud unguarded half of a conversation in which Rob’s needs seemed to shrink even further, the mere transient ticking of the fare. Above the pavements the tall horse-chestnuts were dropping their leaves, the oaks just beginning to rust and wither. So many of the big old houses had come down, their long gardens built over. There was a low wall with a sloped coping, the railings gone, a broken and leaning board fence behind. ‘Just a minute, Andy,’ said the driver, and set Rob down with a pleasant nod as he gave the change, a faint retroactive suggestion they’d had a nice time together.
Rob picked his way past the black puddles in the ruts of the drive. The house was set fifty yards back from the road, though its privacy had long been surrendered – on either side new developments looked in over the boundary walls. It was one of those big red-brick villas, of the 1880s perhaps, with gables and a turret, a lot of timber and tile-hanging, and very high ground-floor rooms that would take a fortune to furnish and heat, and so easily (Rob had seen them all over London) turned bleak and barely habitable in their latter-day lives. Now there were holes in the steep slate roof, small bushes seeded in the gutters, stripes of moss and slime down the walls. A JCB was backed up under the trees, and beside it a blue Focus presumably belonging to Debbie.
The front door was boarded up, and Rob made his way round to the side. There was a smell of smoke, cutting and toxic, not the good autumn-leaf smell. The ground sloped down, so that the broken veranda along the side of the house rose up to shoulder height. Then there was the round turret, and then a high brick wall with a door on to a tiny yard, the service entrance, the door here wide open – Rob slipped into the house through a dark scullery with huge tin sinks, a dim kitchen with a gas range, broken chairs, nothing worth salvaging. The floor was gritty underfoot, and there was a penetrating smell of raw damp – then he pushed open a fire-door into what must have been the dining-room and there was the smell of smoke again. He saw the awful wiring and boxing-in – the old house had been too disfigured thirty years before for any real sense of marvelment or discovery. He wrote it off. Into the hall – fire-doors again concealing the stairs, but light through double doors on to a room on the garden side of the house. He heard a child’s voice, the carefree note with its little edge of determination.
‘Are you Debbie?’ Out on the lawn, a shrubby tangle trampled back, a red-faced woman in jeans and a T-shirt was picking up items around the smouldering bonfire and throwing them on top – some old magazines caught, doubtfully, a moment of flame curling outwards as they slithered back down.
‘Don’t get too close, now’ – a boy of six or seven, red-faced too in his small anorak, bringing random things forward, a cardboard box, a handful of grass and twigs that fell back over his feet as he tossed it.
Debbie didn’t know who Rob was: he saw the curbing of curiosity, her provisional stance of responsibility for what was going on. ‘Raymond sent me down, I’m Rob.’
‘Oh, yes, right,’ said Debbie. ‘I was just about to call him, we’re nearly done.’
