The Stranger’s Child

Karen was very free with the exclamation marks, and Shavian stage-directions (sniggers, pauses regretfully, with sudden feeling etc.) attached to quite ordinary-looking statements. Well, she was trying to help, keen to help, and then, as so easily happens, getting in the way. Sometimes Jonah’s deafness itself came to the rescue, and he asked Paul to repeat a question louder. Elsewhere Paul was worried to find he already had no memory of the inaudible thing that had been said; at moments, too, he had let the machine do the listening, when Jonah was talking about the War, for instance, stuff he didn’t need for the book. Perhaps his anxiety at the time had made it hard to listen. His whole interest was in finding out what Jonah knew about Cecil’s dealings with Daphne and with George, and an awkward sense of strategy, of distractedly biding his time, interfered with his concentration. So he found himself next day, when Karen had gone to work, replaying the tapes as he read the transcript, to see if he could make out what she had missed or misinterpreted, and with a muddled angry sense of having got off to a bad start.

He saw that in too much of the interview he had let Jonah wander off the subject of Cecil to talk about life in ‘the old days’ in general, and about his life after the War, with Harry Hewitt, a rich businessman of whom he was clearly much fonder than he had been of the Sawles. The Sawles seemed the subject of some vague unplaceable disapproval, which perhaps outlasted the now forgotten things that caused it.

PB: So you’re saying that Freda Sawle drank too much?

JT: Well, I don’t know it was too much.

PB: I mean, how did you know about it?

JT: Well, you know what you know. What they said in the (unclear: kitchen?) She had a weakness.

PB: A weakness? I see.

JT: There was Mrs Masters (?check), her maid, she got the stuff for her.

PB: You mean, she bought drink for her?

JT: Well, Bombay gin, it was, I can see it now.

He had asked Jonah if he’d been back to the house lately, and Jonah had said, ‘Oh, I haven’t been over that way for years,’ as if it were really quite a journey. Paul thought it couldn’t be more than two miles away. Jonah’s lack of sentiment for the house and the family extended to Cecil himself.

PB: You knew he was a famous poet, I suppose.

JT: Well, we knew that.

PB: Of course he wrote one of his most famous poems there, as you probably know.

JT: Oh, yes?

PB: It’s called ‘Two Acres’.

JT: (doubtful) Ah, yes, I think I heard about that.

PB: Do you remember him coming to the house?

JT: (Hesitates) Oh, he was a (unclear: gentleman?), he was! [Paul played the tape again to confirm his recollection that the word, covered by his own cough and rustle of papers, was ‘devil’.]

PB: Really? In what way? What was he like?

Here Paul had arrived, quite effectively after all, at the great simple question; but it seemed that of Cecil’s visits to ‘Two Acres’ Jonah could remember next to nothing; it all looked very promising for a minute or two, but it thinned and dissolved under Paul’s questioning. What remained, offered with a kind of compensatory certainty, was first that Cecil had been ‘a horror!’, which appeared to mean no more than ‘extremely untidy’. Second, that he had silk underwear, very expensive (‘Hmm, was that unusual?’ ‘Well, I never saw it before. Like a woman’s, it was. I’ll never forget it.’) And third, that he was very generous – he tipped Jonah a guinea, and ‘when he came the second time, two guineas’, which since Jonah was only paid ?12 a year, plus meals, by Freda Sawle, was surely a staggering amount.

PB: You must have done some (inaudible) for him?

JT: I hadn’t done nothing!

PB: I’m not really sure what would happen if you valeted someone.

JT: It wasn’t proper valeting, not at the Sawles’. They didn’t know about it. ‘Just make it look right,’ young George said, I remember that. ‘Do whatever he says.’

PB: And what did he ask you to do?

JT: I don’t rightly remember.

PB: (laughs) Well, you must have really hit it off with him!

JT: (inaudible)… anything like that.

PB: But was it different the second time he came?

JT: I don’t recall.

PB: No particular –

JT: (impatient) It was seventy years ago, damn nearly!

PB: I know, sorry! I mean, did you do something extra the second time to get the double tip? Sorry, that’s sounds rude.

JT: (pause) I daresay I was glad of the extra.

Paul had stopped to turn the cassette over, with a feeling, just in the little interval, while Jonah shifted on his new hip and twitched his cushion, that he’d rattled the old man; and with a novice’s indecision about whether he should back off or press him harder.

PB: I wondered if you remembered anything Cecil said?

JT: (pauses; awkward laugh) Well, all I know is, he said he was a heathen. He wouldn’t go to church with the others on Sunday.

PB: A pagan…?

JT: That was it. He said, ‘I recommend it, Jonah. It means you can do what you like without having to worry about it afterwards.’ I was a bit thrown by that! I said it wouldn’t go down so well if you were in service!

PB: (laughs) Anything else?

JT: I just remember that. I know he liked to talk. He liked the sound of his own voice. But I don’t remember.

PB: What was his voice like?

JT: Oh, very (inaudible). Like a proper gentleman.

Soon, because he was nervous and dry-mouthed, Paul had asked for a glass of water. He thought it a bit unfriendly that he hadn’t been offered anything, a cup of tea; but he’d come at 2.30, an odd between-times. They didn’t know what to do for an interview any more than he did. Jonah let him go into the kitchen. Gillian had left it all wiped down, the dish-cloth shrouding the two taps. Through the window Paul saw the back garden with a small greenhouse, and beyond a privet hedge the white frame of a soccer goal some way off. Again, it was a room he felt he knew. He stood, slowly gulping the cold water, in a brief unexpected trance, as if he could see decade after decade pass through this house, this square of garden, school terms and years, new generations of boys shouting, and Jonah’s long life, with all its own routines and duties, wife and daughter, all these unheeded but reassuring bits and bobs in the kitchen and the sitting-room, and thoughts of Cecil Valance as rare as holidays. On the tape, which continued to run in Paul’s absence, Jonah could be heard moving things around near the microphone, speaking indistinctly under his breath, and emitting a quietly musical fart.

PB: And what was Cecil like with George Sawle?