The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [74]
‘Farmers, I suppose,’ he said. ‘My grandfather was a farmer. He didn’t spend his time in a stuffy office.’
‘Where did he farm?’
‘Up by the Shropshire border.’
‘And your father took to office life?’
‘That was it. My dad’s in insurance. His firm sent him to another part of the country.’
‘Do you know that Shropshire border yourself?’
‘We’ve been up there for a holiday. I expect you’ve heard of the great Lord Aberavon?’
‘I have, as a matter of fact.’
‘The farm was on his estate.’
I had never thought of Lord Aberavon (first and last of his peerage) as a figure likely to go down to posterity as ‘great’, though the designation might no doubt reasonably be applied by those living in the neighbourhood. His name was merely memorable to myself as deceased owner of Mr Deacon’s Boyhood of Cyrus, the picture in the Walpole-Wilsons’ hall, which always made me think of Barbara Goring when I had been in love with her in pre-historic times. Lord Aberavon had been Barbara Goring’s grandfather; Eleanor Walpole-Wilson’s grandfather too. I wondered what had happened to Barbara, whether her husband,
Johnny Pardoe (who also owned a house in the country of which Gwatkin spoke) had been recalled to the army. Eleanor, lifelong friend of my sister-in-law, Norah Tolland, was now, like Norah herself, driving cars for some women’s service. Gwatkin by his words had certainly conjured up the past. He looked at me rather uncomfortably, as if he could read my mind, and knew I felt suddenly carried back into an earlier time sequence. He also had the air of wanting to elaborate what he had said, yet feared he might displease, or, at least, not amuse me. He cleared his throat and took a gulp of stout.
‘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