The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [224]
“Well it is interesting,” said Jennifer drily, tucking in her chin, “but according to Paul Bryant everything I’ve just told you is untrue. Let me see … My aunt wasn’t really Dudley’s daughter, but Cecil’s, Dudley was gay, though he managed to father a son with my grandmother, and my father’s father wasn’t Revel Ralph, who really was gay, but a painter called Mark Gibbons. I may be simplifying a bit.”
Rob grinned and nodded, not taking all of this in. “And this wasn’t the case?” he said.
“Oh, who knows?” said Jennifer. “Paul was something of a fantasist, we all knew that. But it caused a fair old stink at the time. Dudley’s wife even tried to take out an injunction against it.”
“Yes, of course”—it was that sense he’d had of the old guard trying and failing to close ranks.
“Do you remember? And of course it cast my poor grandmother in rather an unenviable light.”
“Yes, I see that.”
“She’d been married three times as it was, and now he was claiming that two of her three children hadn’t been sired by her husbands, and also, did I mention that Cecil had had an affair with her brother? Yup, that too.”
“Oh dear!” said Rob, who couldn’t quite see where Jennifer stood on the subject. She seemed to deplore Paul Bryant, but wasn’t exactly disputing what he’d said. Her droll academic tone had something county in it too, a little snobbish reserve she hadn’t wholly wanted to disown. “I presume she wasn’t still alive?”
“Mm, well she was, I’m afraid, though extremely old, and virtually blind, so there was no chance of her actually reading it. Everyone tried to keep it from her.” Jennifer flinched with her evident sense of the humour as well as the horror of the situation. “Though as I’m sure you know there will always be one very dear friend who feels they have to put you in the picture. I think it sort of finished her off. As it happened she’d written a rather feeble book of her own about her affair with Uncle Cecil, so it was a bit of a shock to be told he’d also had an affair with her brother.”
“Well, outing gay writers was all the rage then, of course.”
“Well, fine,” she said, with a candid shake of the head. “If that’s all it had been …”
Rob looked at her as he found the title. “England Trembles,” he said. Long out of print, though an American paperback had surfaced later—he could see the photo of Valance on the front—“Sensational!”—Times of London—something like that.
“England Trembles,” said Jennifer, “exactly …,” turning down the corners of her mouth in a rather French expression of indifference. “The thing was—”
A loud purring sound, a preparatory burble of self-pleasure, rose above the talk, and then “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much, my name’s Nigel Dupont …”
“Ah—” Rob winced.
“There’s quite a story about Master Bryant as well,” said Jennifer, with a rapid nod and grimace of a promise to carry on with it later. “All was not as it seemed …” Rob sat back, smiling appreciatively, but amused too to be reserving judgement on the matter.
It seemed Dupont had been asked by the family to be a sort of MC for the occasion—he assumed the role with evident willingness and natural authority and just a hint of allowable muddle, as if to remind them he was good-naturedly helping out. “So, we’re all here,” he said, peering down with a smile of exaggerated patience at the confused figure of Peter’s sister, red-faced from a horrible rush across London, still settling her bags and papers in the front row. Then, the smile running across the rows, “I’m aware many people in this very splendid room knew … er, Peter far better than I did, and we’ll be hearing from some of them in a moment. Peter was a hugely popular guy, with a huge variety of friends. I can see many different types of people here”—surveying the room humorously, with his expat’s eye, and producing confusion and even laughter in persons suddenly considering what type they might belong to—“and perhaps this gathering of his friends can best be thought of as the last of Peter’s famous parties,