Anthony Powell - The Valley of Bones

All things never are equal,’ said Moreland, always impossible to shake in his theories, ‘though I agree that to be no intellectual strain is an advantage where the opposite sex is concerned. But you look into the matter. Remember Bottom and Titania. The Bard knew.’

Brent, so far as he had been a success with Jean, seemed to strengthen Moreland’s argument. I wondered whether I wanted to hear more. The Jean business was long over, but even when you have ceased to love someone, that does not necessarily bring an indifference to a past shared together. Besides, though love may die, vanity lives on timelessly. I knew that I must be prepared to hear things I should not like. Yet, although where unfaithfulness reigns, ignorance may be preferable to knowledge, at the same time, once knowledge is brutally born, exactitude is preferable to uncertainty. To learn at what precise moment Jean had decided to take on Brent, in preference to myself, would be more acceptable than to allow the imagination continually to range unhindered through boundless fields of disagreeable supposition. Even so, I half hoped Macfaddean would return, full of new ideas about terrain and lines of communication. However, the choice did not lie with me. The narrative rested in Brent’s own hands. Whether I wanted to listen or not, he was determined to tell his story.

‘You’d never guess,’ he said apologetically, ‘but Jean fell for me first.’

‘Talk about girls lying down for Bob Duport.’

‘Shall I tell you how it happened?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Peter Templer asked me to dine with him to meet a couple called Taylor or Porter. He could never remember which. Peter subsequently went off with Mrs Taylor, whoever she was, but that was later. He also invited his sister, Jean, to the party, and a woman called Lady McReith. I didn’t much take to the latter. We dined at the Carlton Grill.’

Brent paused. I remembered perfectly the occasion of which he spoke. One evening when we were out together, Jean had remarked she was dining with her brother the following night. The fact that the dinner party was to be at the Carlton Grill pinpointed the incident in my mind. I had noted at the time, without soreness, that Peter Templer, as a result of his exertions in the City, could afford to entertain at restaurants of that sort, while I frequented Foppa’s and the Strasbourg. It was one of several differences that had taken shape between us. I remembered thinking that. Then the whole matter had passed from my mind until Jean and I next met, when she had made rather a point of emphasising what a boring evening she had had to endure with her brother and his friends. In fact the party at the Carlton Grill appeared to have been so tedious she could not keep off the subject.

‘Who was there?’

‘Two businessmen you’d never have heard of, one of them married to a very pretty, silly girl, whom Peter obviously has his eye on. Then there was a rather older woman I’ve met before, who might be a lesbian.’

‘What was she called?’

‘You wouldn’t know her either.’

‘What made you think she was a lesbian?’

‘Something about her.’

Jean knew perfectly well I had met Lady McReith when, as a boy, I had stayed at the Templers’ house. Even had she forgotten that fact, Lady McReith was an old friend of the Templer family, especially of Jean’s sister, Babs. It was absurd to speak of her in that distant way. By that time, too, Jean must have made up her mind whether or not Gwen McReith was a lesbian. All this mystification was impossible to ascribe to any rational form of behaviour. Possibly the emphasis on an unknown lesbian was to distract attention from the unmarried businessman — Brent. Jean wanted to talk about the party simply because Brent had interested her, yet instinct told her this fact must be concealed. It was rather surprising that she had never before met Brent with her brother. Certainly, if she had named him, I should have had no suspicion of what was to follow. If that were the reason — a desire to talk about the party, but at the same time not to mention Brent by name — she could have stated quite simply that Lady McReith was present, gossiped in a straightforward way about Lady McReith’s past, present and future. In short, this utterly unnecessary, irrational lie was a kind of veiled attack on our own relationship, a deliberate deceiving of me for no logical reason, except that, by telling a lie of that kind, truth was suddenly undermined between us; thus even though I was unaware of it, moving us inexorably apart. It was a preliminary thrust that must have satisfied some strange inner urge.

‘Poor Peter,’ Jean had said, ‘he really sees the most dreary people. One of the men at dinner had never heard of Chaliapin.’

That musical ignoramus was no doubt Brent too. I made up my mind to confirm later his inexperience of opera, even if it meant singing the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’ to him to prove that point. At the moment, however, I did no more than ask for his own version of the dinner party at the Carlton Grill.

‘Well, I thought Mrs Duport an attractive piece,’ Brent said, ‘but I’d never have dreamt of carrying things further, if she hadn’t rung me up the next day. You see, it was obvious Peter had just given the dinner because he wanted to talk to the other lady — the one he ran away with. The rest of us had been got there for that sole purpose. Peter’s an old friend of mine, so I just did the polite as required, chatted about this and that. Talked business mostly, which Mrs Duport seemed to find interesting.*

‘What did she say when she rang up?’

‘Asked my opinion about Amparos.’

‘Who is Amparos?’

‘An oil share.’

‘Just that?’

‘We talked for a while on the phone. Then she suggested I should give her lunch and discuss oil investments. She knows something about the market. I could tell at once. In her blood, I suppose.’

‘And you gave her lunch?’

‘I couldn’t that week,’ said Brent, ‘too full of business. But I did the following week. That was how it all started. Extraordinary how things always happen at the same time. That was just the moment when the question opened up of my transfer to the South American office.’

I saw the whole affair now. From the day of that luncheon with Brent, Jean had begun to speak with ever-increasing seriousness of joining up again with her husband; chiefly, she said, for the sake of their child. That seemed reasonable enough. Duport might have behaved badly; that did not mean I never suffered any sensations of guilt.

‘How did it end?’

Brent pulled up a large tuft of grass and threw it from him.

‘Rather hard to answer that one,’ he said.

He spoke as if the conclusion of this relationship with Jean required much further reflection than he had at present been able to allow the subject.

‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘I liked Jean all right, and naturally I was pretty flattered that she preferred me to a chap like Bob. All the same, I always felt what you might call uneasy with her, know what I mean. You must have come across that with girls. Feel they’re a bit too good for you. Jean was too superior a wench for a chap of my simple tastes. That was what it came to. Talked all sorts of stuff I couldn’t follow. Did you ever go to that coloured night-club called the Old Plantation?’

‘Never, but I know it by name.’

‘A little coloured girl sold cigarettes there. She was more in my line, though it cost me a small fortune to get her.’

‘So the thing with Jean Duport just petered out?’

‘With a good deal of grumbling on her side, believe me, before it did. I think she’d have run away with me if I’d asked her. Didn’t quite see my way to oblige in that respect. Then one day she told me she didn’t want to see me again. As a matter of fact we hadn’t met for quite a time when she said that.’