A dubious legacy summery

A DUBIOUS LEGACY

A Dubious Legacy is a story about a man called Henry Tillotson, who had been
away at war when his father died. One day, he received two letters when
he was in Cairo. One letter was from Jonathans (John and Jonathan had been his
friends since childhood), who told him that the girl he loved, called Calypso,
married Hector early in the war for his money. The other letter was
from his father, who told him he was dying and asked for his help. There was an
English woman in Cairo, called Margaret, who had been married to a German,
but at the moment she was divorced. There was a possibility that the British
sending her to prison and he very much wanted to help her, so he asked him to
save her by marrying her. So, they married during the war and Henry brought
Margaret to Cotteshaw, a farmhouse in the country.
When Margaret got to Cotteshaw she made it clear that there would never be
any questions of love, sex or friendship and she chose to spend most of her time
alone in bed and her only hobby was to redecorate her room.
James Martineau and Matthew Stepheson were Henry’s friends who, one day,
meeting in a London street, discovered that they had both been invited to
Cotteshaw for the coming weekend: then, they decided to go with Antonia and
Barbara. They spent a nice weekend, in spite of being really difficult to get on
well with Margaret, even James got engaged to Barbara and Matthew to
Antonia. Later on they got married and had children and grandchildren. They
went to Cotteshaw at weekends, as paying guests. The Jonathans rented part of
Henry’s garden. The weekends visitors also paid a rent for the rooms they used.
In the end, Sussie, Antonia’s daughter, tried to help Margaret and decided to
teach her to swim but Margaret, panicking, drowned.
By no means Henry was the sad and disappointed man people might have
expected him to be.
Some years later, when Henry was dying because he was old and ill, Antonia
and Barbara decided to visit him and Antonia confessed to Barbara that she
had slept with Henry from time to time and asked her if she had done the
same, she answered she didn’t, but… that wasn’t true. Then… who was the
actual father of the children…?