The Valley of Bones (17 page)

‘Fact was you were tired of it.’

‘Jean seemed to think so, the way she
carried on. She was bloody rude when we parted. Anyway, she had the consolation
of feeling she broke it off herself. Women like that.’

So it appeared, after all, the love
affair had been brought to an end by Brent’s apathy, rather than Jean’s
fickleness. Even Duport had not known that. He had supposed Brent to have been,
in his own words, ‘ditched’. It had certainly never occurred to Duport, as a
husband, that Brent, his own despised hanger-on, had actually been pursued by
Jean, had himself done the ‘ditching’. I, too, had little cause for self-congratulation,
if it came to that.

‘How did Duport find out about
yourself and his wife?’

‘Through their dear little daughter.’

‘Good God – Polly? I suppose she must
be twelve or thirteen by now.’

‘Quite that,’ said Brent. ‘Fancy you’re
remembering. I expect Bob spoke of
her when you saw him. He’s mad about that kid. Not surprising. She’s a very
pretty little girl. Will need keeping an eye on soon – perhaps even now.’

‘Did Bob find out while it was still
going on?’

‘Just before the end. Polly let out
something about a meeting between Jean and me. Bob remarked that if it had been
anyone else he’d have been suspicious. Then Jean flew off the handle and told
him everything. Bob couldn’t believe it at first. Didn’t think I was up to it.
He always regarded me as an absolute flop where women were concerned. It was
quite a blow to him in a way. To his pride, I mean.’

In this scene between the Duports, I
saw a parallel to the occasion when I had myself made a slighting remark about
Jimmy Stripling, and Jean, immediately furious, had told me of her former
affair with him. The pattern was, as ever, endlessly repeated. There was
something to be admired in Brent’s lack of vanity in so absolutely accepting
Duport’s low estimate of his own attractions, even after causing Duport’s wife
to fall in love with him. Whatever other reason Brent might have had for
embarking on the matter, a cheap desire to score off Jean’s husband had played
no part whatever. That was certain. Duport, cuckolded or no, remained Brent’s
ideal of manhood.

‘I think it’s just as well Bob finally
got rid of her,’ Brent said. ‘Now he’ll probably find a wife who suits him
better. Work Jean out of his system. Anyway he’ll have a freer hand to live the
sort of life he likes.’

The tramp of men and sound of singing
interrupted us. A detachment of Sappers were marching by, chanting their song,
voices harsh and tuneless after those of my own Regiment:

‘You make fast, I make fast, make fast
the dinghy,
Make fast the dinghy, make fast the dinghy,
You
make fast, I make fast, make fast the dinghy,
Make fast the dinghy pontoon.
For we’re marching on to Laffan’s Plain,
To Laffan’s Plain, to Laffan’s Plain,
Yes we’re marching on to Laffan’s Plain,
Where they don’t know mud from shit…’

The powerful rhythms, primitive,
incantatory, hypnotic, seemed not only the battle hymn of warring tribes, but
also a refrain with obscure bearing on what Brent had just told me, a general
lament for the emotional conflict of men and women. The Sappers disappeared
over the horizon, their song dying away with them. From the other direction,
Macfaddean approached at the double. He was breathless when he arrived beside
us.

‘Sorry to keep you laddies waiting,’
he said, still panting, ‘but I’ve found a wizard alternative concentration
area. Here, look at the map. We won’t revise our earlier plan, just show up
this as a second choice. It means doing the odd spot of collating. Give me the
coloured pencils. Now, take down these map references. Look sharp, old man.’

Meanwhile, the problem of how best to
reach Frederica’s house when leave was granted remained an unsolved one. I
asked Stevens whether he were going to spend the weekend in Birmingham.

‘Much too far,’ he said, ‘I’m getting
an aunt and uncle to put me up. It won’t be very exciting, but it’s somewhere
to go.

He named a
country town not many miles from Frederica s village.

‘That’s the part of the world
I’m
trying to reach myself. It’s not going
to be too easy to get there and back in a weekend. Trains are
rotten.’

‘Trains are hopeless,’ said Stevens. ‘You’ll
spend the whole bloody time going backwards and forwards. Look here, I’ve got a
broken-down old car I bought with the proceeds of my writing
activities. It cost a tenner, but it should get us there
and back. I can put my hand on some black market petrol too. Where exactly do
you want to go?’

I named the place.

‘I’ve heard of it,’ said Stevens. ‘My
uncle is an estate agent in those parts. I’ve probably heard him talk of some
house he’s done a deal with in the neighbourhood – your sister-in-law’s
perhaps. I can drop you there easily, if you like. Then pick you up on Sunday
night, when we’re due back here.’

So it was arranged. The day came.
Stevens’s car, a Morris two-seater, started all right. We set off. It was
invigorating to leave Aldershot. We drove along, while Stevens talked about his
family, his girls, his ambitions. I heard how his mother was the daughter of a
detective-inspector who had had to leave the force on account of drink; why he
thought his sister’s husband, a master in a secondary school, was rather too
keen on the boys; what a relief it had been when he had heard, just before
taking leave of his unit for the Aldershot course, that he had not got a local
girl in the family way. Such confidences are rare in the army. Narcissistic,
Stevens was at the same time – if the distinction can be made – not narrowly
egotistical. He was interested in everything round him, even though everything
must eventually lead back to himself. He asked about Isobel. It is hard to describe
your wife. Instead I tried to give some account of Frederica’s household. He
seemed to absorb it all pretty well.

‘Good name, “Frederica”,’ he said, ‘I
was christened ‘Herbert”, but a hieroglyphic like “Odo” was put on an envelope
addressed to me when I was abroad, and I saw at once that was the thing to be
called. I was getting fed up with being “Bert” as it was.’

Apart from the unexpected circumstance
that Stevens and I should be
driving across country together, the war seemed far away. Frederica had lived
in her house, a former vicarage, for a year or two. A widow, she had moved to
the country for her children’s sake. Not large, the structure was splayed out
and rambling, so that the building looked as if its owners had at some period
taken the place to pieces, section by section, then put it together again, not
always in correct proportions. A white gate led up a short drive with rose
bushes on either side. The place had that same air of intense respectability
Frederica’s own personality conveyed. In spite of war conditions, there was no
sign of untidiness about the garden, only an immediate sense of having entered
a precinct where one must be on one’s best behaviour. Stevens stopped in front
of the porch. Before I could ring or knock, Frederica herself opened the door.

‘I saw you coming up the drive,’ she
said.

She wore trousers. Her head was tied
up in a handkerchief. I kissed her, and introduced Stevens.

‘Do come in for a moment and have a
drink,’ she said. ‘Or have you got to push on? I’m sure not at once.’

Frederica was not usually so cordial
in manner to persons she did not already know; often, not particularly cordial
to those she knew well. I had not seen her since the outbreak of war. The war
must have shaken her up. That was the most obvious explanation of this new
demeanour. The trousers and handkerchief were uncharacteristic. However, it was
not so much style of dress that altered her, as something within herself. Robin
Budd her husband had been killed in a fall from his horse nine or ten years
before. By now not far from forty, she had never – so far as her own family
knew – considered remarriage, still less indulged in any casual love affair;
although those rather deliberately formidable, armour-plated good
looks of hers were of the sort to attract quite a lot of men. Her sister,
Priscilla, had some story about Jack Udney, an elderly courtier whose wife had
died not long before, getting rather tight at Ascot after a notable win, and
proposing to Frederica while the Gold Cup was actually being run, but the
allegation had never been substantiated. It was true Frederica had snapped out
total disagreement once, when Isobel met Jack Udney somewhere and said she
thought him a bore. In short, Frederica’s most notable characteristic was what
Molly Jeavons called her ‘dreadful correctness’. Now, total war seemed slightly
to have dislodged this approach to life. Frederica’s reception of Stevens
showed that. Stevens himself did not need further pressing to come in for a
drink.

‘Nothing I’d like better,’ he said. ‘It’ll
help me to face Aunt Doris’s woes about shortages and ration cards. Half a sec,
I’ll back the car to a place where I’m not blocking your front door.’

He started up the car again.

‘How’s Isobel?’

‘Pretty well,’ said Frederica. ‘She’s
resting. She’ll be down in a moment. We’re rather full here. Absolutely packed
to the ceiling, as a matter of fact.’

‘Who have you got?’

‘Priscilla is here – with Caroline.’

‘Who is Caroline?’

‘Priscilla’s daughter, our niece. You
ought to know that.’

‘Ah, yes, I’d forgotten her name.’

‘Then
Robert turned up unexpectedly on leave.’

‘I’ll be glad to see Robert.’

Frederica
laughed.

‘Robert
has brought a lady with him.’

‘No?’

‘But
yes.
One of my
own contemporaries, as a matter of fact, though I never knew her well.’

‘What’s she called?’

‘She married an American, now
deceased, and has the unusual name of Mrs Wisebite. She was
nee
Stringham. I used to see her at dances.’

‘Charles Stringham’s sister, in fact.’

‘Yes, you knew him, didn’t you. I
remember now. Well, Robert has brought her along. What do you think of that?
Then the boys are home for the holidays – and there’s someone else you know.’

‘Who is that?’

‘Wait and see.’

Frederica laughed shrilly again,
almost hysterically. That was most unlike her. I could not make out what was
happening. Usually calm to the point of iciness, rigidly controlled except when
she quarrelled with her sister, Norah, Frederica seemed now half excited, half
anxious about something. It could hardly be Robert’s morals she was worrying
about, although she took family matters very seriously, and the fact that
Robert had a woman in tow was certainly a matter for curiosity. That Robert
should be associated with Stringham’s sister was of special interest to myself.
I had never met this sister, who was called Flavia, though I had seen her years
before at Stringham’s wedding. Chips Lovell, our brother-in-law, Priscilla’s
husband, had always alleged that Robert had a taste for ‘night-club hostesses
old enough to be his mother’. Mrs Wisebite, though not a night-club hostess,
was certainly appreciably older than Robert. By this time, after several
changes of position, Stevens had parked the car to his own satisfaction. As he
joined us, another possible explanation of Frederica’s jumpiness suddenly
occurred to me.

‘Isobel hasn’t had
the baby yet without anyone telling me?’

‘Oh, no, no, no.

However, something
about the way I asked the question must have indicated to Frederica herself
that her manner struck me as
unaccustomed. While we followed her through the
hall,
she spoke more quietly.

‘It’s only that I’m looking forward to
your meeting an old friend, Nick,’ she said.

Evidently Robert was not the point at
issue. We entered a sitting-room full of people, including a lot of children.
These younger persons became reduced, in due course, to four only; Frederica’s
two sons, Edward and Christopher, aged about ten and twelve respectively,
together with a couple of quite little ones, who played with bricks on the
floor. One of these latter was presumably Priscilla’s daughter, Caroline.
Priscilla herself, blonde and leggy, quite a beauty in her way, was also lying
on the floor, helping to build a tower with the bricks. Her brother, Robert
Tolland, wearing battle-dress, sat on the sofa beside a tall, good-looking woman
of about forty. Robert had removed his gaiters, but still wore army boots. The
woman was Flavia Wisebite. Not noticeably like her brother in feature, she had
some of Stringham’s air of liveliness weighed down with melancholy. In her,
too, the melancholy predominated. There was something greyhound-like about her
nose and mouth. These two, Robert and Mrs Wisebite, seemed to have arrived in
the house only a very short time before Stevens and myself. Tall, angular,
Robert wore Intelligence Corps shoulder titles, corporal’s stripes on his arm.
The army had increased his hungry, even rather wolfish appearance. He jumped up
at once with his usual manner of conveying that the last person to enter the
room was the one he most wanted to see, an engaging social gesture that often
caused people to exaggerate Robert’s personal interest in his fellow human
beings, regarding whom, in fact, he was inclined to feel little concern.

‘Nick,’ he said, ‘it’s marvellous we
should have struck just the
moment when you’ve been able to get away for a weekend. I don’t think you’ve
ever met Flavia, but she knows all about you from her brother.’

I introduced Odo Stevens to them.

‘How do you do, sir,’ said Robert.

‘Oh, blow the sir, chum,’ said
Stevens. ‘You can keep that for when we’re on duty. I’m rather thick with the
lance-corporal in your racket who functions with my Battalion. I’ve borrowed
his motor bike before now. Where are you stationed?’

‘Mytchett,’ said Robert, ‘but I hope
to move soon.’