The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [77]
‘You remember Lord Aberavon’s family name?’ he asked.
‘Why, now I come to think of it, wasn’t it “Gwatkin”?’
‘It was – same as mine. He was called Rowland too.’
He said that very seriously.
‘I’d quite forgotten. Was he a relation?’
Gwatkin laughed apologetically.
‘No, of course he wasn’t,’ he said.
‘Well, he might have been.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘You never know with names.’
‘If so, it was miles distant,’ said Gwatkin.
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘I mean so distant, he wasn’t a relation at all,’ Gwatkin said. ‘As a matter of fact my grandfather, the old farmer I was talking about, used to swear we were the same lot, if you went back far enough – right back, I mean.’
‘Why not, indeed?’
I remembered reading one of Lord Aberavon’s obituaries, which had spoken of the incalculable antiquity of his line, notwithstanding his own modest start in a Liverpool shipping firm. The details had appealed to me.
‘Wasn’t it a very old family?’
‘So they say.’
‘Going back to Vortigern – by one of his own daughters? I’m sure I read that.’
Gwatkin looked uncertain again, as if he felt the discussion had suddenly got out of hand, that there was something inadmissible about my turning out to know so much about Gwatkin origins. Perhaps he was justified in thinking that.
‘Who was Vortigern?’ he asked uneasily.
‘A fifth-century British prince. You remember – he invited Hengist and Horsa. All that. They came to help him. Then he couldn’t get rid of them.’
It was no good. Gwatkin looked utterly blank. Hengist and Horsa meant nothing to him; less, if anything, than Vortigern. He was unimpressed by the sinister splendour of the derivations indicated as potentially his own; indeed, totally uninterested in them. Thought of Lord Aberavon’s business acumen kindled him more than any steep ascent in the genealogies of ancient Celtic Britain. His romanticism, though innate, was essentially limited – as often happens – by sheer lack of imagination. Vortigern, I saw, was better forgotten. I had deflected Gwatkin’s flow of thought by ill-timed pedantry.
‘I expect my grandfather made up most of the stuff,’ he said. ‘Just wanted to be thought related to a man of the same name who left three-quarters of a million.’
He now appeared to regret ever having let fall this confidence regarding his own family background, refusing to be drawn into further discussion about his relations, their history or the part of the country they came from. I thought how odd, how typical of our island – unlike the Continent or America in that respect – that Gwatkin should put forward this claim, possibly in its essentials reasonable enough, be at once attracted and repelled by its implications, yet show no wish to carry the discussion further. Was it surprising that, in such respects, foreigners should find us hard to understand? Odd, too, I felt obstinately, that the incestuous Vortigern should link Gwatkin with Barbara Goring and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. Perhaps it all stemmed from that ill-judged negotiation with Hengist and Horsa. Anyway, it linked me, too, with Gwatkin in a strange way. We had some more stout. Maureen was now too deeply involved in local gossip with the young farmers, if farmers they were, to pay further attention to us. Their party had been increased by the addition of an older man of similar type, with reddish hair and the demeanour of a professional humorist. There was a good deal of laughter. We had to fetch our drinks from the counter ourselves. This seemed to depress Gwatkin still further. We talked rather drearily of the affairs of the Company. More customers came in, all apparently on the closest terms with Maureen. Gwatkin and I drank a fair amount of stout. Finally, it was time