Another piece in the mosaic - Old Filth

Read just a little father in Jane Gardam's Old Filth, enough for the intro of another character, I. who writers to Filth/Feathers when she learns of the death of his wife, Betty - and he thinks back to when he met her, the cousin of his close school days friend who shows up at their country house - he's completely fascinated by her, older, attractive, fiercely independent - she comes into his bedroom at night and asks him what he thinks of her - and he rebuffs this advance. He sees this, retrospectively, as a great turning point in his life - we;re not sure yet why this is so. In her letter to him, which he reads reluctantly, she says he must have guessed or known that she is a lesbian - again, we don't know yet whether he had surmised this, and if so (or if not) what difference that makes to his life. But her introduction is another piece in the collage or mosaic that makes up this unusual portrait of the life of a British expat, seemingly serene and content on the surface but underneath roiling with jealousies, hatreds, possibly prejudices, and eccentricities. Very British.