The Valley of Bones (16 page)

‘Never knew
him well enough to penetrate that far.’

‘Terrific
gifts.’

‘Tell me more
about him.’

‘Bob can do
anything he turns his hand to. Wizard at business. Pick up any job in five
minutes. If he were on this course, he’d be the star-turn. Then, girls. They
simply lie down in front of him.’

‘I see.’

‘But he’s not
just interested in business and women.’

‘What else?’

‘You wouldn’t
believe what he knows about art and all that.’

‘He never gave
the impression of being that sort.’

‘You’ve got to know
him well before he lets on. Have to keep your eyes
open. Did you ever go to that house the Duports had in Hill
Street?’

‘Years ago, when
they’d let it to someone else. I was taken to
a party there.’

‘That place was
marvellously done up,’ said Brent. ‘Absolute perfection in
my humble opinion. Bob’s got taste. That’s what
I
mean. All the same, he isn’t one of those who go round gushing
about art. He keeps it to himself.’

I did not immediately grasp the point
of this great buildup of Duport. It certainly shed a new light on him. I did
not disbelieve the picture. On the contrary, in its illumination, many things
became plainer. Duport’s professional brutality of manner, thus interpreted in
Brent’s rough and ready style, might indeed conceal behind its façade sensibilities
he was unwilling to reveal to the world at large. There was nothing
unreasonable about that supposition. It might to some extent explain Duport’s
relationship with Jean, even if Brent’s own connexion with her were thereby
made less easy to understand. I thought of the views of my recent travelling
companion, Pennistone, so plainly expressed at Mrs Andriadis’s party:

‘… these appalling Italianate fittings
– and the pictures – my God, the pictures …’

However, such things were a matter of
opinion. The point at issue was Duport’s character: was he, in principle,
regardless of personal idiosyncrasy, what Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson used to call
a ‘man of taste’? It was an interesting question. Jean herself had always been
rather apologetic about that side of her married life, so that presumably Brent
was right: Duport, rather than Jean, had been responsible for the Hill Street
decorations and pictures. This was a new angle on Duport. I saw there were
important sides of him I had missed.

‘When you last met Bob,’ said Brent,
using the tone of one about to make a confidence, ‘did
he
mention my name to you?’

‘He said you and he had been in South
America together.’

‘Did he add anything about me and
Jean?’

‘He did, as a matter of fact. I gather
there was an involved situation.’

Brent laughed.

‘There was,’ he said. ‘I thought Bob
would go round shooting his mouth off. Just like him. It’s Bob’s one
weakness.
He can’t hold his tongue.’

He sighed, as if Duport’s heartless
chatter about his own matrimonial situation had aroused in Brent himself a
despair for human nature. He gave the impression that he thought it too bad of
Duport. I was reminded of Barnby, exasperated at some woman’s behaviour,
saying: ‘It’s enough to stop you ever committing adultery again.’ The deafening
vibrations of an insect-like Lysander just above us, which seemed unable to
decide whether or not to make a landing, put a stop to conversation for a
minute or two. When it sheered off, Brent spoke once more.

‘You said you knew Jean, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wonderful girl in her way.’

‘Very nice to look at.’

‘For a while we were lovers,’ said
Brent.

He spoke in that reminiscent, unctuous
voice men use when they tell you that sort of thing more to savour an enjoyable
past situation, than to impart information which might be of interest. It must
have been already clear to him that Duport had already revealed that fact.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Bob said that?’

‘He put it more bluntly.’

Brent laughed again, very
good-naturedly. The way he set about telling the
story emphasised his least tolerable side. I tried to feel objective about the
whole matter by recalling one of Moreland’s favourite themes, the attraction
exercised over women by men to whom they can safely feel complete superiority.

‘Are you hideous, stunted, mentally
arrested, sexually maladjusted, marked with warts, gross in manner, with a
cleft palate and an evil smell?’ Moreland used to say. ‘Then, oh boy, there’s a
treat ahead of you. You’re all set for a promising career as a lover. There’s
an absolutely ravishing girl round the corner who’ll find you irresistible. In
fact her knickers are bursting into flame at this very moment at the mere
thought of you.’

‘But your description does not fit in
with most of the lady-killers one knows. I should have thought they tended to
be decidedly good-looking, as often as not, together with a lot of other useful
qualities as well.’

‘What about Henri Quatre?’

‘What about him?’

‘He was impotent and he stank. It’s in
the histories. Yet he is remembered as one of the great lovers of all time.’

‘He was a king – and a good talker at
that. Besides, we don’t know him personally, so it’s hard to argue about him.’

‘Think of some of the ones we do know.’

‘But it would be an awful world if no
one but an Adonis, who was also an intellectual paragon and an international
athlete, had a chance. It always seems to me, on the contrary, that women’s
often expressed statement, that male good looks don’t interest them, is quite
untrue. All things being equal, the man who looks like a tailor’s dummy stands
a better chance than the man who doesn’t.’

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.’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t know. Suppose I hadn’t done
much about it. There’d been some trouble at one of our places up the river.
Production dropped from forty or fifty, to twenty-five barrels a day. I had to
go along there and take a look at things. That was one of the reasons why she
hadn’t heard from me for some time.’