Guy Renton Page 10

  She stood in the centre of the room, pulled off her hat, tossed it on to the table, shook out her hair; she lifted the cover from the sandwiches, took one up, bit a mouthful: “This is very good,” then turned and looked at him.

  “Paris is horribly far away,” she said.

  “Three days can be a long, long time,” he answered.

  There were times when it took two hours, sometimes half an evening, before they could find their ways back to one another, before they felt close enough for him even to take her hand. There were others when they picked up the threads of their last meeting as though they had not been apart five minutes.

  He stepped beside her, placing his hands on her sides, above her waist: drawing her towards him. With the sandwich still between her fingers she coiled her arms about his neck, lifting herself upon her toes. Never had he felt more utterly at one with her.

  Twenty minutes later, wrapped in a Liberty silk dressing-gown, she sat curled up among his cushions munching her abandoned sandwich.

  “Well, what’s this problem that you had for me?”

  “It’s solved itself.”

  “Oh, was it to do with us?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing at all, but for this last ten minutes I’ve been feeling that anyone with the fabulous good fortune to have in his life anything as miraculous as yourself owes it to the world, to life in general, to be that much more generous.”

  “That’s about the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” she said. She paused. “All the same,” she added, “I think you’d better tell me what it was.”

  She listened, thoughtfully. The issue seemed very simple now: it was told in a few words. She nodded as he finished. “What do you plan to do?”

  “Set that twenty-five pounds deposit against his existing debt; settle the balance myself; then write an official letter to the clubs as from the firm, explaining that we must deal with them as a club, not as an individual. That’ll save Franklin’s face.”

  “That sounds very sensible. I’d rather like to see your brother one day.”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Couldn’t you have a small party here and ask me? It’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while. I’d like to see all your family, Lucy and Rex and Margery and Barbara. I’d know so much more about you if I could; I could share more with you, if you could talk about them openly to me. There’s so much we can’t share; we ought to try and share all we can. You must ask Roger too: that’s the good thing about all this, we haven’t got to be secretive.”

  “He’s never suspected anything?”

  “Why should he? The kind of woman that he thinks I am could never do anything to arouse suspicion. He’s never seen the woman that I am with you.”

  “Might he become jealous?”

  “By nature he’s extremely jealous, but I don’t think he’d be like that with me: not anyhow in that respect.” She paused, reverting to her plan. “The more I know about what you’re doing when I’m not with you... that’s the difference between us after all: you know what I’m doing every minute of the day, I don’t know what you are.”

  “You can’t surely imagine that anyone who’s got you would be bothering about other women?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got that much vanity. It’s simply that. . . well, if we were married I’d want to know about your business, about the men whom you did business with, about your games, about your family. I’d want to be a part of everything you did; so that there wouldn’t be a thing you did that you couldn’t talk over with me; so that when anything amusing happened you would think ‘It’ll be fun to tell Renée that,’ or if anything worried you, ‘I’ll like to know Renée’s opinion about that.’ Darling, that’s what marriage is. And we can’t be married. I want to get as near to it as I can. After all,” she paused, stood up, placed her hands upon his shoulders, looking down at him. “It’s been eighteen months. This isn’t a mere affair. It’s something that’s ‘for keeps’.”

  That afternoon he sent off three letters, one to Franklin in his own handwriting, the others identical and dictated to the club secretaries. The dictated letters read: ‘We were very glad to receive your order for wine and spirits, and the goods have been dispatched. We have opened an account in your name and we will present our account each month. Please note that our terms are cash. It is preferable for us to deal with an organization rather than an individual, and we hope this arrangement will be satisfactory to you.’

  To Franklin he wrote: ‘I’m enclosing a copy of the letters that I have written to the two clubs of which you are the vintner. I think you will see our point. We want to establish a connection with an organization, not with an individual, because when an individual “goes down”, the account closes, and a new vintner deals with his own wine merchant. But if the club has an account with us, a new vintner won’t disturb an existing arrangement. It would probably be simplest to start this new basis on a clean sheet. We’ve set your cheque of £25 against the balance in our favour, have cancelled the residue, and have opened two new accounts with this last order. You will yourself, probably, as vintner be giving us all subsequent orders, but the clubs will be held responsible for the orders; the cheques in settlement will be signed presumably by the secretary, on behalf of the club.’

  Guy was a little curious to know what acknowledgment he would receive for what amounted to a further loan of £50. He did not expect thanks, but he was curious to know what form the acknowledgment would take. It came as a telegram. ‘Approve and appreciate changed basis.’ It could not have been phrased more tactfully. Neither ungracious nor subservient. ‘The boy may go far,’ Guy thought.

  That Sunday Barbara invited to lunch the daughter of her father’s partner, Pamela Duke. Pamela was at the same school, and was Barbara’s exact opposite. She was tall and blonde and willowy, with what is called a typical English strawberry and cream complexion. She was a friendly, giggly kind of girl: “The perfect wife for a very clever man,” was Mr. Renton’s view of her. “She’d prevent him from getting serious and she wouldn’t irritate him with semi-highbrow conversation.”

  For the last month she and Barbara had been inseparable. They had private jokes which would send them off into fits of merriment. They spent the afternoon stretched out on the rug, lavishing endearments on the spaniel and turning over family photographs. Pamela had now met the whole family except Franklin. Her comments were mainly interjections. “Is that what Guy looked like in the war: oh, look at Lucy. You can’t imagine her the mother of three children. Oh and is that Franklin? How good-looking.”

  “He’s much better looking now. Look at that one in his last term at Fernhurst, and look at this last summer.”

  “What lovely clothes.”

  “If you could see his ties, their colour scheme. You must meet at Christmas. He’s clever too; Guy says that if he’d bothered over games, he’d have been better far than he was. You said so, didn’t you?”

  “I said so.”

  In just that way twelve years ago Lucy had sprawled on a rug showing off photographs of her schoolboy brother. Then she had suddenly grown up; older men had taken notice of her and her subaltern brother had seemed very juvenile. Would that happen with Barbara and Franklin? If it did, Franklin might take it badly. It hadn’t worried him; he had been at the war. Franklin was maybe more dependent upon Barbara. Barbara in her way was somehow special. She had lost her coltishness and was beginning to look pretty. She might become more than pretty. She had a giving nature. When the time came for her to fall in love, she’d fall with a shattering completeness. But probably by then Franklin himself would be engaged or married.

  8

  Rex lunched Guy at ‘The Rag’. He was in a reminiscent mood.

  “You don’t need telling how I’ve been spending the last half-hour. No, of course you don’t. Fighting old fights again. Just ran into ‘Smoky’ Townsend; my Brigade Major on the Somme. You weren’t there, were you, on July the first? No, I
thought not. Heavens that was a day: believe now that it all turned on sixty seconds. Our staff were convinced that no troops could survive our barrage; that we’d walk across No Man’s Land and find a morgue. They hadn’t taken into account all those deep dug-outs. The Germans went below but left their tripods mounted, then popped up with their machine guns the moment the barrage ceased; how they mowed us down! What were our casualties that first day?—60,000, something like that, I think.

  “Another sherry, yes, of course you will. This is an occasion. I’m not up here so often. Not often enough I tell myself: getting out of touch if I don’t take care. Not that I think I shall. I read the papers. I’ve an idea that the less one sees of London the more one sees of England. Never have seen much of London for that matter: place to spend one’s leaves, that’s how I’ve seen it. What a place too, for that, before the war. The Empire Promenade and the old Continental. These new night clubs aren’t the same. Kind of place where you can take your wife. Not my idea of a night club. What about some lunch? Excellent. I ordered claret. Hope that suits you. Ordered it ahead so as to give it time to breathe. Then we can order what we like to fit round it.

  “Shall we look at the cold table? That beef doesn’t look too bad. Wouldn’t harm the wine. I’ve an idea myself, daresay you as an expert will endorse it, that practically all food except cheese spoils one’s palate. Yet one can’t enjoy good wine unless one’s enjoying a good dinner. One of those contradictions that make life entertaining. You’d rather have something hot: well, I see your point, it’s a chilly day. I’d say that chicken pilaff would be good if it’s not over-seasoned: you know what those Indian Army colonels are, always pining for their curries.”

  He chattered away in a breezy, friendly manner, just as he had in France when they had gone round the guns.

  Guy remembered an afternoon at Ypres, in ’17; a few days before the rains came down. They had advanced two days before, taken a ridge and lost half a company. Now they were in reserve with another four days to wait in their converted shell holes, to enfilade a counter-attack if one broke through. His company was scattered in a series of nests over a mile-long front, fifteen hundred yards or so behind No Man’s Land. He’d been sitting beside his second in command in the September sunlight, tired but at ease in a lull of shelling when suddenly right up the main road, without a runner, under open observation, came the colonel.

  “Wanted to see how you fellows were,” he said. “Thought it better to come up in daylight, then I can see your faces. I know what they’ll say at Division, giving away your positions by coming here. As if the Boche didn’t know there was a nest of some kind every hundred yards. Let’s be going round the guns.”

  The trip round the emplacement took two hours, intermittent shelling was punctuated by the sharp zip of bullets. And right through it all Rex maintained a rattle of comment and reminiscence, as though he was on an exercise in Salisbury Plain. It was a piece of bravado, Guy knew that; done to show the men that he was not afraid: reckless bravado; a needless risking of his life: and others’ too. But later, when the eventual counter-attack did come, Guy wondered whether those scattered posts would have stood so firm if Rex had not made it. It was difficult to realize that was only nine years ago; and that in those nine years Rex, without going to seed in any way, had become a joke. The time spirit had moved and he had not kept pace with it.

  “Was Passchendaele the worst battle you were in?” Guy asked.

  Rex nodded. “By and large. I won’t say it was worse than the Somme; as regards actual, well you know what I mean when I talk about the filth of war, but there was a different spirit on the Somme. It was the first time that the bulk of Kitchener’s armies had gone into action. There was confidence and hope. But at Passchendaele fifteen months later, after Russia had been defeated, there wasn’t the same faith in victory; too many pacifists about. I didn’t feel my troops behind me in the way they had been. I’d become a slave driver, not a leader.”

  Guy nodded. He’d been conscious of the same feeling too; though he’d not had the same length of service overseas. Six months in ’15; then a wound at Loos had sent him back to England, keeping him there till the autumn of 1916. He’d had a year and a half after that: till a stray bullet got him, at the tail end of the spring retreat: two years in the line when Rex had been there from the start; hit four times but each time managing to get back quickly, to a staff appointment when he wasn’t completely fit. Rex must have been pretty tired by Passchendaele. Even he, after half that time, had been.

  He recalled the third day of the Cambrai Battle. His company was on the extreme left, in front of Bullecourt. They attacked on a limited front, with limited objectives. They were only going to push on if the central attack succeeded. Early rumours told them that it had. On the evening he had received his operation orders to attack on the third day. His heart had bounded: this was the moment he had trained for, the moment he had waited for; the great ‘break through’.

  Next day it rained incessantly. He slipped into a shell hole and was soaked. His clothes took a long time drying on him. It had been a relief as he went round the guns that night to creep into the snug warmth of each section dugout, to crouch there in the froust over a cup of tea; he had delayed as long as possible his return into the cold. As he had slithered over the duckboard tracks, he had pictured himself on the following night trailing out into the open in the dark into an unmapped wilderness of shell-holes. How on earth could they hope to break through on a large scale in late November? Why should anyone expect this to be the big break-through? It was only another of these political offensives that sooner or later would get bogged down in a morass of slaughter. There’d been so many political offensives, English, German, French. Neuve Chapelle, Loos, the Somme, Arras, Le Chemin des Dames, Verdun, Passchendaele; they had all ended the same way; why should it be any different now?

  Next day the cold was sharper, the rain stung like a whip. His forehead was hot, but he was shivering. A touch of trench fever, he supposed. He stayed all morning in his own Headquarters, awaiting orders from Brigade. Finally the advance was countermanded; thank God, he thought. He was ashamed of himself for having thought it: but relief had been his first sensation. Yes, there had been a defeatist atmosphere in the line that winter, after forty months of war.

  “You remember the Cambrai show?” he asked.

  Rex laughed. “Those tracer bullets.”

  It had been one of those un-to-be-predicted slips on which the fates of battles sometimes turn. The secret of the offensive had been kept with care. With the greatest caution during the previous days they had dug in a sunken lane the emplacements from which they would put down their barrage. For several months nothing except routine shelling had taken place along that particular stretch of front. Then suddenly at six o’clock the dark and silence of a November morning were shattered by the thunder of artillery, the rattle of machine guns. The sky was alight with fire: star shells, Verey lights, rockets, SOS flares. It was the most stupendous firework display that Guy had seen. He had stared entranced, with Rex beside him. A full half-minute passed before either realized that from one of the guns was emerging a flashing stream of tracer bullets, that would pinpoint their carefully concealed position for every observation post in the German line. Heaven only knew how that belt of bullets had found its way into the ammunition box. It was the kind of mistake that by revealing a concealed position could well have lost a battle. Rex saw it first.

  “Shall I ever forget,” Guy said, “the way you shrieked out ‘Stop that gun’? No one knew which gun you meant.”

  “Nor the way that fat corporal fell upon his face.”

  They laughed together. Guy had brought up Cambrai as an example of what Rex had said about the changed spirit in the line. But already it had switched them over to the jokes, the absurd comical situations that had humanized and made tolerable the squalor, the horror, the drab monotony of war.

  “Do you remember that subaltern of yours whose guns cou
ldn’t be made to fire for three days; finally we discovered that he was lathering them with the whale oil that we’d sent up as a prevention against frostbite, and anointing the men’s feet with the glycerine that was intended for the guns.”

  How easily it all came back, the hardships and discomfitures that became jokes in retrospect. Guy rarely talked about the war these days; he did not even think about it much; it was shut away and finished. Yet how largely bulked those fifty months; how real they were; how real were the men that he had met: the senior officers, the subalterns, the sergeants, the corporals, the privates. How well he had known his men: how distinct and separate each one was. He had never known any other men one-tenth as well: not even those that he had played football with, Saturday after Saturday, season after season. He had only known them in terms of football; the meeting at the station barrier, the train journey out of town; the tea in the pavilion, the evening celebration at Dehem’s: he had no idea what their homes or offices were like. He never saw them in the round.

  “I wonder what’s happened to that Corporal Ferguson of yours?” Rex said.

  “I saw him once. He’s doing well: married, two children, runs a tobacco shop in Taunton.”

  Ferguson had been barely twenty, he’d come from a West Country Grammar School: he was better educated than the rest, speaking without an accent. But he had refused to be put in for a commission, didn’t want to leave his friends, he said; wouldn’t be happy in England with a white band round his hat, thinking of his section in the mud. He was engaged to a girl in Somerset; he wrote to her every day. Of all the letters that Guy had censored, they were the only ones that he remembered. They had wit and character; day by day commentaries on the routine of trench life; friendly, good humoured, pertinent, with a steady undercurrent of emotion that was ready at any moment to flood its banks. Every day there had been a letter back, addressed in a thin-penned, schoolgirlish script. Guy would have given a lot to know what kind of answer they contained, what kind of a girl it was who had inspired so deep a feeling in so worth-while a man. When he had learnt that Ferguson had been taken prisoner, un-wounded, in the March offensive, he had been relieved. There was no one he would sooner have had come back safe.