More secrects and lies, in Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst's "The Stranger's Child" might well have been called Secrets and Lies, as we move along with the weekend gathering of many at the Valance estate, Corley, where family friend "Sebby" is embarking on his authorized (and euthanized) bio of the Valance son and dead war poet, Cecil. The great "secret," though well known to we the readers, is that Cecil was homosexual and in fact that he carried on a serious relationship with old Cambridge pal George, one of the weekend guests present with his stuffy, "bluestocking" wife, Madeleine. What we learn in this section is that George's mother, Freda, who is very unforthcoming when Sebby interviews her about Cecil, in fact had read and saved a very large package of love letters that Cecil had sent to George in the years before and during the war (WWI). This is surprising and not quite credible on a # of counts: doubtful she would have been such a snoop as to read the letters, not really explicable that she (rather than George) would have kept them, and why on earth would she bring them with her to Corley unless she intends to share them with the biographer? Putting that aside, we know at least that she's aware that her son was in homosexual relationship and that it may explain his apparently loveless marriage. Then we learn that George knows his mother read the letters - though I don't think we know she had them with her. At the end of the day, all of the tensions would vanish if everyone could just come clean about George's relationship with Cecil and about Cecil's sexual relationships with George and presumably others, maybe Sebby himself, and old dry diplomatic bachelor of a very British sort. But this part of the novel is set in the 1920s and the British are famously reserved - so everyone acts out through drinking, foolish banter, and gruff treatment of the precocious and needy children - a very ugly scene in which Dudley, lord of the manor, berates the children and sends them to bed, and later falls off the piano stool, dead drunk. I love that it's not really a piano - just a pianola, or player-piano; he has to pump the pedals to roll the music, but he considers it "playing" the piano: these twits will take credit for anything. A good gossippy novel but it feels like very well-trodden ground and it's half-way through and hard to find a character to care about in the least.