The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [77]
‘Just have a shot at who it was,’ said Duport, ‘bearing in mind Jimmy Stripling as the standard of what a lover should be.’
‘Did he look like Stripling?’
I felt safe, at least, in the respect that, apart from any difference in age, no two people could look less alike than Stripling and myself.
‘Even more of a lout,’ said Duport, ‘if you can believe that.’
‘In what way?’
There was a ghastly fascination in seeing how far he would go.
‘Wetter, for one thing.’
‘I give it up.’
‘Come on.’
‘No good.’
I knew I must be red in the face. By this time we had had some more drinks, to which heightened colouring might reasonably be attributed.
‘I’ll tell you.’
I nerved myself.
‘It was another Jimmy,’ said Duport. ‘Perhaps Jimmy is just a name she likes. Call a man Jimmy and she gets hot pants at once, I shouldn’t wonder. Anyway, it was Jimmy Brent.’
‘Brent?’
At first the name conveyed nothing to me.
‘The fat slob who was in the Vauxhall when Peter drove us all into the hedge. You must remember him.’
‘I do remember him now.’
Even in retrospect, this was a frightful piece of information.
‘Jimmy Brent – always being ditched by tarts in nightclubs.’
I felt as if someone had suddenly kicked my legs from under me, so that I had landed on the other side of the room, not exactly hurt, but thoroughly ruffled, with all the breath knocked out of me.
‘Nice discovery, wasn’t it?’ said Duport.
‘Had this business with Brent been going on long?’
‘Quite a month or two. Took the place of something else, I gather. In fact there was a period when she was running both at the same time. That’s what I have good reason to believe. The point was that Brent was going to South America too. It suited Jean’s book for me to buy her ticket. We all three crossed on the same boat. Then she continued to carry on with him over there.’
‘But are you sure this is true? She can’t really have been in love with Brent.’
This naïve comment might have caught the attention of someone more interested than Duport in the emotions of other people. It was, in short, a complete give-away. No one was likely to use that phrase about a woman he scarcely knew, as I had allowed Duport to suppose about Jean and myself. As it was, he merely showed justifiable contempt for my lack of grasp, no awareness that the impact of his story had struck a shower of sparks.
‘Who’s to say when a woman’s in love?’ he said.
I thought how often I had made that kind of remark myself, when other people were concerned.
‘I’ve no reason to suppose she wasn’t speaking the truth when she told me she’d slept with him,’ Duport said. ‘She informed me in bed, appropriately enough. You’re not going to tell me any woman would boast of having slept with Jimmy Brent, if she hadn’t. The same applies to Jimmy Stripling. It’s one of the characteristics the two Jimmies have in common. Both actions strike me as even odder to admit to than to do, if that was possible.’
‘I see.’
‘Nothing like facing facts when you’ve been had for a mug in a big way,’ said Duport. ‘I was thinking that this morning when I was working out some freight charges. The best one can say is that Jimmy and the third party – if there was a third party – were probably had for mugs too.’
I agreed. There was nothing like facing facts. They blew into the face hard, like a stiff, exhilarating, decidedly gritty breeze, which brought sanity with it, even though sanity might be unwelcome.
‘What made you think there was another chap too?’ I asked, from sheer lack of self-control.
‘Something Jean herself let fall.’
It is always a temptation to tell one’s own story. However, I saw that would be only to show oneself, without the least necessity, in a doubly unflattering light to