The Valley of Bones

by Anthony Powell

  ‘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.’

  ‘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 d
inghy,

  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 s
hould 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.