The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [53]
‘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