Dubious Legacy Read Free Page B

explaining.’
    ‘You are perspicacious.’ Henry helped himself to a scone, spread butter, dug his knife into the honey pot. ‘No spoon,’ he said. ‘Standards slipping.’
    The two friends laughed.
    ‘Historical hatreds last,’ said Jonathan. ‘I don’t mind betting that your average Frenchman, if neither a Jew nor a member of the Resistance, has been relatively comfortable under the Germans. My old ma, who liked the English, was hardly representative, and your mother, Henry, would have called the Liberation a misplaced act of kindness.’
    What are these snide references to my parents leading up to? thought Henry. ‘My mother is long dead,’ he said.
    ‘And your father,’ said John. ‘Our godfather, God bless him.’
    ‘I thought we all agreed years ago,’ said Henry, ‘that my mother, after understandable initial doubts, accepted that neither of you is my half-brother?’
    ‘We know that,’ said John, ‘but there was always the residue of doubt. We could have been his children; we could have been the results of wild oats. She never quite cured herself of sizing us up in that speculative way. She had a special way of looking at us.’
    ‘I don’t suppose,’ said Henry, helping himself to more honey, ‘that she ever really came to terms with Father’s philanthropy.’
    ‘Acting as our godfather? Paying for our education? Two little Jonathans.’
    ‘One would be understandable, two an exaggeration,’ said the larger man agreeably. ‘His kindness brimmed.’
    ‘I tried once,’ said Henry, ‘to get him to admit you were his younger brother’s children. But he said no, the dates were all wrong, some friend had slipped up—twice, two friends actually. Can I have another cup?’ He passed his cup to Jonathan. ‘It’s really absurd,’ he now said, ‘to have called you both Jonathan. It’s idiotic—’
    ‘Named for their godfather—’ said the larger man, complacent, irritating.
    Henry slammed his fist on the table, knocking a plate to the stone floor, where it broke. ‘I’d like to break another,’ he said angrily.
    ‘Feel free, help yourself,’ said the larger man, looking at the broken plate.
    Henry said, ‘I’ve come without a book to read in the train. Can one of you lend me something?’
    T. S. Eliot? Agatha Christie?’ suggested the thin man. ‘Why don’t you grind the plate into the floor? It’s past mending. They say bottling up rage is bad for you.’ He spoke with concern and a trace of shame.
    Henry thought, These two know something; it is making them feel awkward. There’s something funny here.
    ‘So you’ve come to tell us all about your marriage?’ said the larger man courageously.
    ‘Who is in a china shop now?’ his friend murmured.
    Henry, who had come to do precisely that, said, ‘No. No, I haven’t,’ and leaned down to pick up pieces of broken plate. ‘Tell me about your lives,’ he said. ‘Your pigs, geese, chickens. Are you still in the Observer Corps? Do you still do ARP?’
    When, later, he had to catch his train, they walked with him in the dark to the station; they had lent him The Screwtape Letters and a Dorothy L. Sayers.
    ‘We hear Aragon has written some wonderful poems,’ they said. ‘Will you send them to us?’
    Henry said that he would.
    Halfway to the station, he said, ‘You neither of you liked my mother—’
    ‘She used to say things like, “That man has Eton blue eyes—”’ said the older man.
    ‘Never pale blue,’ said his friend.
    ‘Snobbery is incurable when it’s unconscious,’ said Henry.
    ‘Of course,’ they said. ‘Absolutely.’ Then they said, ‘We loved your father,’ and one of them (Henry later could not remember which) said, ‘He had the highest possible motives,’ excusing the dead.
    Just before they reached the station, Henry said, ‘Will you go and meet my wife? Get to know her? See what you can do?’
    They said that of course they would, they couldn’t wait to meet her. Nothing they would