and looked aghast and annoyed at the same time.
‘Paul! Stop that! Those books are Thomas’s. If you take them you’ll be stealing.’
Paul showed no sign of caring about such a minor accusation.
‘He won’t take them,’ I told her reassuringly.
Paul curled his lip at me, shouldered his way past and opened the front door.
‘What is he doing, dear?’ Dorothea asked, perplexed, watching her son’s back go purposefully down the path.
‘It seems,’ I said, ‘that he’s fetching one of his boxes to pack the books in.’ I closed the front door and shot its bolts, top and bottom. Then I hurried through into the kitchen and secured its outside door in the same way, and made a quick trip through all the rooms, and both bathrooms, to make sure the windows were shut and locked.
‘But Paul’s my son,’ Dorothea protested.
‘And he’s trying to steal Valentine’s books.’
‘Oh, dear.’
Paul began hammering on the front door. ‘Mother, let me in at once.’
‘Perhaps I should,’ Dorothea worried.
‘He’ll come to no harm out there. It’s nowhere near freezing and he can sit in his car. Or go home, of course.’
‘Sometimes Paul isn’t likeable,’ Dorothea said sadly.
I put the stacks of books back on Valentine’s shelves. The ones that Paul had chosen to steal first were those with the glossiest covers, the recently published racing biographies, which were, in commercial resale terms, almost worthless. I guessed that chiefly it was Paul’s vanity that was reacting against being thwarted by his mother and by me.
I had never underestimated the virulence of outraged vanity since directing a disturbing film about a real-life fanatical bodybuilder who’d killed his girl-friend because she’d left him for a wimp. I’d had to understand him, to crawl into his mind, and I’d hated it.
Paul’s heavy hand banged repeatedly on the door and he pressed unremittingly on the doorbell. This last resulted not in a shrill nerve-shredding single note, but in a less insupportable non-stop quiet ding-dong; quiet because Dorothea had turned down the volume to avoid disturbing Valentine as he’d grown weaker.
I looked at my watch: five minutes to six. Perhaps an hour before we could expect the doctor but only thirty minutes before I should start my own workday.
‘Oh, dear,’ Dorothea said for about the tenth time, ‘I do wish he’d stop.’
‘Tell him you’ll let him in if he promises to leave the books alone.’
‘Do you think he’ll agree?’ she asked dubiously.
‘A good chance,’ I said.
He wouldn’t want to lose too much face with the awakening neighbours, I reckoned: only a fool would allow himself to be seen to be shut out like a naughty boy by his aged mother.
With evident relief she relayed the terms, to which her son with bad grace agreed. She unbolted the door and let him in, an entrance I carefully didn’t watch, as the slightest smile on my face would be interpreted by him as a jeer which would set him off again. Motorists had been shot for cutting in.
I stayed for a while in Valentine’s sitting-room with the door shut while mother and son sorted themselves out in the kitchen. I sat in the armchair opposite the one no longer occupied by the old man, and thought how easy it was to get embroiled in a senseless fracas. Without expecting it, I’d made an enemy of Paul Pannier: and I surmised that what he really wanted was not so much the books themselves, but to get me and my influence out of his mother’s life, so that he could control and order her future as best suited his beneficent view of himself.
At least, I hoped that was the case. Anything worse was more than I felt like dealing with in the middle of making a film.
I stared vacantly at the wall of books, wondering if after all there were anything there of value. If so, I was sure Valentine had been unaware of it. When I’d mentioned the possibility of an autobiography and he’d vetoed the idea, he hadn’t referred to any diaries or other raw material that could be used as sources by anyone else but, sitting there, I wondered if by any chance Paul had made some sort of deal with a writer or publisher, to trade Valentine’s papers for a share of the profits. No biography of Valentine’s would make a fortune, but Paul, I guessed, would be content with modest pickings. Anything was better than nothing, one might hear him say.
Howard Tyler’s book was not on the shelves.
Valentine had asked me, the first