Post 1

Dear Tom,
It is a year since we first re-met and discussed this project. Many lunches and suppers between then and now have not taken us any nearer to the answer to the question: What do you actually want out of it? Publication, a private print-out? Do you simply want to slake our curiosity? I have been too busy simply enjoying myself, after all this time, in your company.
Now that I have something to show, a little for a lot of labour, I have decided to write you the First Report to put into my Yokeham File. It may not thrive to grow big, I realise, but time has come to put something on paper.
As you know, I accepted your assignment in the first place because I needed the money. It was also because I was flattered, and because our re-meeting after all these years exhilarated me. As you also know, you did not make clear the prodigious size of the proposed task. "Massive hoard" you said. How could I have expected nine foolscap boxes crammed with manuscripts constituting, at a fair guess, six separate books? And none of it in any order of chronology.
The `first' of these, it seemed the earliest work, so far as I can disentangle it, seems to be seven hundred pages of close-typed, or close-handwritten content, mixed. That's point number one. Number two is that I now accept your assignment because I cannot leave it alone.
What I did not realise, as you could not have, is the extent to which these papers have to do with very private family matters, yours, the Yokehams - the world's private and professional business. To my confounding amazement, much concerns my own young inhibited self, `the dreadful Susan Sage'. Your youthful political views are preserved intact, your father's ancient love affairs are investigated, your step-mother's love affairs (well, I never liked her), Philip's death is here, and her sisters Sarah and Frances are turned inside out, and there is a fair amount of speculation about who had, and who nearly had, whose babies. If we are going to share this manuscript on a professional basis, it is going to be, sooner or later, very difficult to look each other in the eye - and here I make only a sort of joke. If, after reading the enclosed first sample of what I take to be the first book (it seems like some sort of beginning) you still want this `sorting out' to be done and still want me to do it, then we must sit down business like and unwaylaid by our revived mutual admiration, and work out dates and relationships - why Molly Absecond is `Aunt Molly', how it is that Philip and James Harisonn are your cousins, and so on. If I ever knew I can't remember, and I can't get on without knowing.
There is one slight difficulty, may be serious. It depends upon whether you would seriously think of publishing or just want a private print-out. Let me say, first: the idea that Constance Yokeham as a young girl was a bit odd, or fey, or absent-minded has to be entirely forgotten. Also that she was often mysteriously physically absent. She was writing and to that end watching, listening, judging, inventing, eavesdropping, hiding, stealing letters, diaries, papers, anything that was grist to the mill. She was writing it all down, sometimes in what seems like the bowels of the earth in the cellarage of the Golden Square House. Down there she was grinding us all exceedingly small. The trouble is that all the stolen papers, letters, all sorts of documents are enclosed with this vast undertaking: and they all belong to somebody, heirs or extants. We should have to find them all. We might even have a reunion, a general mixture of elements rather than the return of the original pairs together.
Constance was merciless with titles: there are literally ten upon ten: The Grodust Construction. Daughters of the Flood. The Yokeham Files. Writing for Pleasure. Good Morrow to Our Waking Souls. Rooms of My Native Country. Contes du Temps Passe. The Meat of the Fowl. The Management of Public Dinners. Plaque Near The Dwelling. The Way She Went.
I can only do my best to make sense of this `massive hoard', but for the sake of my own renewed old life I cannot put it down. I have double vision. On the other hand, if you as publisher want this seriously pursued, you cannot pay me as one of your readers. This is a full-time job as I choose to make it so on your behalf, so I should need a proper salary.
I look at my own children nervously. When say we meet? Answer me. I am setting up my Yokeham File.
The first question: read, and then say: Do you want me to go on?

As ever,

Susan