The kindly ones (20 page)

‘Corner the Turkish market. The more there is talk of war, the more Donners-Brebner will need chromite. Donners gives out that it is for some special process he is interested in. That was why Peter Templer was asked to Stourwater – so that he would gossip afterwards about that. Not a word of truth. Donners had quite other reasons. He is not going to give away his plans to a fool like Widmerpool, even when it suits his book to use Widmerpool. Widmerpool talks a lot of balls about “reducing the firm’s commitments”. He’s missed the whole bloody point.’

I was not sure that I saw the point myself. It presumably turned on whether or not there was a war – Sir Magnus thinking there would be, Widmerpool undecided how to act if there were. All that was clear was that Duport had been put into an unenviable position.

‘So you see,’ he said, ‘Widmerpool isn’t a great favourite with me at the moment.’

‘You were going to tell me why you left South America.’

‘I was,’ said Duport, speaking as if it were a relief to abandon the subject of Widmerpool and chromite. ‘Since you know Peter Templer, did you ever meet another ex-brother-in-law of mine, Jimmy Stripling, who was married to Peter’s other sister, Babs? He used to have quite a name as a racing driver.’

‘Stripling was at the Templers’ when I stayed there years ago. I met him once since.’

‘Jimmy and Babs got a divorce. Jimmy – who has always been pretty cracked in some ways – took up with a strange lady called Mrs Erdleigh, who tells fortunes. Incidentally, she sometimes came to the Bellevue to see your uncle. I remembered her. Looks as if she kept a high-class knocking-shop. There is another queer fish living at the Bellevue – old boy with a beard. He and Mrs Erdleigh and your late lamented uncle used sometimes to have tea together.’

‘I know about Mrs Erdleigh – and Dr Trelawney too.’

‘You do? Trelawney tried to bring off a touch last time we talked. I explained I was as broke as himself. No ill feeling. That’s beside the point. Also the fact that Myra Erdleigh milked Jimmy Stripling to quite a tune. All I want to know is: what did you think of Jimmy when you met him?’

‘Pretty awful – but I never knew him well. He may be all right.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ said Duport. ‘He is awful. Couldn’t be worse. Kept out of the war himself and ran away with Babs when her husband was at the front. Double-dealing, stingy, conceited, bad tempered, half cracked. I went to him to try and get a bit of help during my last pre-South American
débâcle.
Not on your life. Nothing doing with Jimmy. I might have starved in the gutter for all Jimmy cared. Now, you say you knew Jean, my ex-wife?’

‘She was at Peter’s Maidenhead house once when I went there.’

‘Nice girl, didn’t you think?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Reasonably attractive?’

‘I’d certainly have said so.’

‘Wouldn’t have any difficulty in getting hold of the right sort of chap?’

‘It wouldn’t be polite to express doubt on that point, since she married you.’

I did not manage to impart all the jocularity fittingly required to give lively savour to this comment. Duport, in any case, brushed it aside as irrelevant.

‘Leave me out of it by all means,’ he said. ‘Just speaking in general, would you think Jean would have any difficulty in getting hold of a decent sort of chap? Yes or no.’

‘No.’

‘Neither should I,’ said Duport. ‘But the fact remains that she slept with Jimmy Stripling.’

I made some suitable acknowledgment, tempered, I hoped, by polite surprise. I well remembered the frightful moment when Jean herself had first informed me, quite gratuitously, of having undergone the experience to which Duport referred. I could recall even now how painful that information had been at the time, as one might remember a physical accident long passed. The matter no longer worried me, primarily because I no longer loved Jean, also because the whole Stripling question had, so to speak, been resolved between Jean and myself at the time. All the same, the incident had been a disagreeable one. That had to be admitted. One does not want to dwell on some racking visit to the dentist, however many years have rolled on since that day. Perhaps I would have preferred to have remained even then unreminded of Jean and Stripling. However, present recital could in no way affect the past. That was history.

‘Can you beat it?’

I acknowledged inability to offer a parallel instance.

‘Well, I can,’ said Duport. ‘I don’t set up as behaving particularly well myself, but, when it comes to behaving badly, women can give you a point or two every time. I just tell you about Jimmy Stripling by the way. He is not the cream of the jest. As I mentioned before, I thought things would be easier if Jean and I joined up again. I found I was wrong.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Not surprisingly, Jean had been having a bit of a run around while we were living apart,’ said Duport. ‘I suppose that was to be expected.’

I began to feel decidedly uncomfortable. So far as I knew, neither Duport, nor anyone else, had the smallest reason to guess anything of what had passed between Jean and myself. All the same, his words suggested he was aware of more than I might suppose.

‘The point turned out to be this,’ said Duport. ‘Jean only wanted to link up with me again to make things easier for herself in carrying on one of her little affairs.’

‘But how could joining up with you possibly help? Surely things were much easier when she was on her own?’

Duport did not answer that question.

‘Guess who the chap was?’ he said.

‘How could I possibly?’

‘Somebody known to you.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Seen you and him at the same time.’

Duport grinned horribly. At least I guiltily thought his grin horrible, because I supposed him to be teasing me. It was unlikely, most unlikely, that Jean had told him about ourselves, although, since she had told both of us about Stripling, such a confession could not be regarded as out of the question. Perhaps someone else, unknown to us, had passed the story on to Duport. In either case, the situation was odious. I greatly regretted having agreed to come out drinking with him, even more of having encouraged him to speak of his own troubles. My curiosity had put me in this position. I had no one but myself to blame. It was just in Duport’s character, I felt, to discompose me in this manner. If he chose to make himself unpleasant about what had happened, I was in no position to object. Things would have to be brazened out. All the same, I could not understand what he meant by saying that Jean had come back to him in order to ‘make things more convenient’. Her return to her husband, their journey together to South America, had been the moment when we had been forced finally to say good-bye to each other. Since then, I had neither seen nor heard of her.

‘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 someone I did not like, someone who could not, in the circumstances, reasonably be expected to be in the least sympathetic. I tried to sort out what had happened. Only a short while earlier, I had thought of myself as standing in an uneasy position
vis-à-vis
Duport, although at the same time a somewhat more advantageous one. Now, I saw that I, even more than he, had been made a fool of. At least Duport seemed to have begun the discord in his own married life – although, again, who can state with certainty the cause of such beginnings? – while I had supposed myself finally parting with Jean only in order that her own matrimonial situation might be patched up. That charming love affair, which had formerly seemed to drift to a close through my own ineffectiveness, had, in reality, been terminated by the deliberate manoeuvre of Jean herself for her own purposes, certainly to the detriment of my self-esteem. I thought of that grave, gothic beauty that once I had loved so much, which found fulfilment in such men. The remembered moaning in pleasure of someone once loved always haunts the memory, even when love itself is over. Perhaps, I thought, her men are gothic too, beings carved on the niches and corbels of a mediaeval cathedral to arouse at once laughter and horror. In any case, I had been one of them. If her lovers were horrifying, I too had been of their order. That had to be admitted.

‘It is no good pontificating,’ Mr Deacon used to say, ‘about other people’s sexual tastes.’

For the moment, angry, yet at the same time half inclined to laugh, I could not make up my mind what I thought. This was yet another example of the tricks that Time can play within its own folds, tricks that emphasise the insecurity of those who trust themselves over much to that treacherous concept. I suddenly found what I had regarded as immutable – the not entirely unsublime past – roughly reshaped by the rude hands of Duport. That was justice, I thought, if you like.

‘What happened after?’

‘After what?’

‘Did she marry Brent?’

Duport’s story had made me forget entirely that Templer had already told me his sister had made a second marriage.

‘Not she,’ said Duport. ‘Ditched Brent too. Can’t blame her for that. Nobody could stick Jimmy for long – either of them. She married a local Don Juan some years younger than herself – in the army. Nephew of the President. I’ve just met him. He looks like Rudolph Valentino on an off day. Change from Brent, anyway. It takes all sorts to make a lover. Probably keep her in order, I should think. More than I ever managed.’

He stretched.

‘I could do with a woman now,’ he said.

‘Why not have one of Fred’s?’

‘Fred hasn’t got what I want. Besides, it’s too late in the evening. Fred likes about an hour’s notice. You know, I’ll tell you something else, as I seem to be telling you all about my marital affairs. My wife wasn’t really much of a grind. That was why I went elsewhere. All the same, she had something. I wasn’t sorry when we started up again.’

I loathed him. I still carried with me
The Perfumed Garden.
Now seemed a suitable moment to seek a home for the Sheik Nefzaoui’s study. Room could no doubt be found for it in the Duport library. To present him with the book would be small, secret amends for having had a love affair with his wife, a token of gratitude for having brought home to me in so uncompromising a fashion the transitory nature of love. It would be better not to draw his attention to the chapter on the Deceits and Treacheries of Women. He could find that for himself.