Guy Renton Read online

  “How will Pamela like that?”

  “Love it, why not?”

  As always, Franklin assumed that his friends would enjoy anything that he did.

  Franklin asked for news of Pamela, but in very much the same way that he had asked for news of Barbara and Margery. He did not seem to be missing her particularly. Guy was reminded of a story of Somerset Maugham’s, The Fall of Edward Barnard, about a young man from Chicago who had gone down to the South Seas to make the fortune on which he could marry his American fiancée, but had found life in Tahiti so agreeable that he had preferred to live on there. As long as Franklin had someone crazy over him, then he was happy. He certainly had got that here. It was high time that he saw Pamela again.

  On his return Guy arranged to have his brother brought back for a ten-days conference before Christmas. Franklin professed delight. He returned in high spirits and in abundant health, bringing back for everyone the kind of present they could be expected to like most; presents that showed thought.

  On his first evening Pamela came out to No. 17. Franklin was as affectionate as ever. He had a photograph album which they examined together on the sofa: it provided them with an excuse for sitting very close beside each other. They made as pretty a couple as they had at the Flamingo. But Guy was surprised to learn that Franklin had rung up Mrs. Urquhart-Smythe on his very first afternoon. Franklin had repeated the conversation verbatim, with an amusing imitation of her voice.

  “Now this is marvellous. We must get together as soon as possible. The next two days I’m afraid we’re a little busy. How long are you over for? Only ten days: that’s too bad. I wish you had given us a little warning. What, you did write, you say? Aren’t the posts terrible these days. I don’t know what they do with letters: bury them or eat them. That’s why I always telephone. I don’t trust the mails. Now this is tragic. I wish we could ask you down for a week-end, but the next two week-ends our house is absolutely packed. Be sure and ring us up next time, at least a week before you’re over. We so enjoyed that marvellous lunch party of yours: we often talk about it and that delightful Portuguese; he’s been over here, you know: we’ve seen quite a lot of him. Your ears must have tingled. We said such nice things about you. Be sure now and let us know well in advance when you come next.”

  Franklin had seemed more irritated over this episode than he was excited about seeing his fiancée.

  Pamela and Franklin saw each other constantly during the ten days visit, but nothing was said about their marriage. Mrs. Renton became worried.

  “Do you think he’s fallen in love with someone over there? He’s so attractive. And it must be lonely for him. Couldn’t you have him moved to Spain, before he gets too involved? I knew it was a mistake his being sent abroad, but none of you would listen to me. I ought to know what’s best for my own son.”

  Barbara too was apprehensive.

  “Pamela was disappointed. She won’t stand much more of that. She didn’t at all like his going there alone. I shouldn’t have in her place.”

  “I thought he behaved rather well, not taking advantage of her inexperience.”

  Barbara shook her head. “Most girls want their inexperience taken advantage of. It proves they are really loved. They don’t want to have a man considerate on their behalf. They don’t want to have him adding up pros and cons. There’s only one kind of proposal that I’d say ‘yes’ to; do you know what that is?”

  “You tell me what it is.”

  “I want to have someone give a great start the first time he sees me. I want him to stop whatever he’s doing and come straight across. I want to hear him say, ‘When’s the first free meal that you can have with me?’ His diary may be black with dates: he’s got to break them; and at that first meal he’s got to say, ‘Everyone will tell you that this is nonsense, they’ll say that we don’t know each other, that we’re all wrong for one another; different tastes, different backgrounds, different ages, different incomes. Those things don’t matter. You’re the girl I’ve been waiting for. You’d better make up your mind now to marry me: because sooner or later you are going to.’ I don’t want to have a man asking me to marry him. I want to have him tell me that I’m going to marry him. That’s the way I want it.”

  “Perhaps that’s the way it will be.”

  “It’s got to be, or I’ll die a spinster.”

  Three months later Franklin was posted to Jerez to learn the sherry trade. He seemed quite glad to go, but the precaution was unnecessary. Three weeks later Guy was writing to break the news that Pamela was shortly to announce her engagement to someone else. Franklin’s answer was typically detached. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised. I felt when I was over that she didn’t feel quite the same about me.’

  The way she felt about him; no reference to the way he felt for her: were his emotions entirely dependent on the strength of the emotions he evoked? When his mother heard the news, her expression hardened. “I knew it; it’s what I always prophesied. If anything serious were to happen to Franklin, I shall hold your father and you responsible. He and Pamela should never have been separated.”

  14

  That was in the spring of 1931, a rain-spoilt year, in which no French vineyard produced a wine that was worth a dated label, in which the financial status of the country deteriorated at such an alarming pace that a National government was formed to save the pound; a government that three weeks later abandoned the gold standard; a dubious summer that led to a winter of high national enthusiasm with everyone patriotically Buying British, declining to take foreign holidays, and the Duke of Connaught, as an example, spending the early winter months in Sidmouth instead of in his villa on Cap Ferrat. The very crisis in fact that Rex had long foretold.

  Rex did not, however, in the campaign preceding the general election, throw himself with the enthusiasm that Guy would have expected in support of the National government. He was working on the contrary for the New Party that under the leadership of Oswald Mosley and John Strachey, was hoping to hold the balance of power in the new Parliament. “I can’t say I’m too happy about young Strachey—a little too Left for my liking, but his father was a thoroughly sound man, and a Socialist who’s seen the error of his ways makes the best constitutionalist. No, I’m not going to contest a seat myself. The voters unfortunately distrust a military man; I shall stay in the background. My time will come.”

  It was not to come in this present instance. In spite of a highly publicized campaign the New Party did not return a single member to Westminster, and twenty-one of the two dozen candidates forfeited their deposits. Rex was disappointed, but not despondent. “At any rate we’ve introduced the public to our ideas.”

  “I don’t think the public was too clear as to what those ideas were,” Guy told him.

  “Don’t you? I thought it very clear: a new type of discipline. That’s what we were standing for.”

  The desertion of the gold standard threatened at first to make a considerable effect on Duke and Renton. The price of all wines was raised through the reduced purchasing power of the pound. There was a feeling that it was unpatriotic to drink French and German wines, and though the duty on spirits was raised, it became not unusual in night clubs like the Monseigneur to see bottles of gin and whisky instead of buckets of champagne upon the table.

  The impulse to ‘Buy British’ had a further repercussion upon the wine trade. It started an interest in Dominion, particularly in South African wines. “Seventy years ago Gladstone ruined the Cape wine trade by reducing the duty on claret. It looks as though Philip Snowden were going to restore their fortunes by abandoning the gold standard,” was Mr. Renton’s comment.

  An idea crossed Guy’s mind. Why not send Franklin to South Africa? It might be the killing of quite a few birds with a single stone. He began to make inquiries. But before they had proceeded far, the matter was taken out of his hands by a telegram from Jerez. ‘Hold everything just married reassure parents not misalliance long letter follows Franklin.’
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  The letter was not very long and it took some little while in following.

  ’As you will have heard I wrote our mother a conventional letter, telling her that I had met “the dream of my life”. In actual fact I consider myself extremely lucky. Daphne is a little older than myself, but I do not think age matters nowadays. Didn’t George Moore say that after an actress had been on the stage two minutes you forgot whether she was beautiful or not? As a matter of fact she is highly personable; smart, dark, svelte—you know. She has a twelve-year-old daughter. She is a war widow. Her first husband’s name was Winterby. He must have been quite rich; at any rate she has a supercharged Mercedes. Her maiden name was Ross: North country, I believe: she seems to have spent most of her time travelling, no settled home. We’re thinking of taking a villa in the south of France. I’m afraid it’ll be a blow to you, but I’m resigning my post with Duke and Renton. Break the news gently to poor young Pilcher.’

  By the same post Franklin had sent his mother a snapshot of the bride. It was passed round at the family conference that followed. It was the kind of chic, anonymous photograph that adorns the Tatler. Daphne was dark, slim, and smart. That at least was obvious. Mrs. Renton made no comment on her daughter-in-law’s appearance. “If she’s got a daughter of twelve, she must be at least thirty: that’s six years older than Franklin.”

  “I’d say she was older than that, quite a little older,” Barbara said. “Probably a femme fatale. I hope it’s not a marriage on the rebound. Daphne must be nearly old enough to be Pamela’s mother. Don’t they say when a love affair goes wrong you look for the exact opposite?”

  Barbara was the most excited. But Margery was the most reassuring. “I think Franklin will appreciate the status of being a married man. He was tired of being treated as a child.”

  Rex made no comment in the presence of his mother-in-law. “Can’t say it’s the kind of position that I’d like myself,” he said to Guy, “living on a woman’s money.”

  “Most people in our world live on money they haven’t earned. I’m living on the business that my great-great-grandfather built up.”

  “That’s different, you are working.”

  “I expect Franklin will have his work cut out keeping Daphne happy. He’ll find it a whole-time job. The man who marries money, earns it.”

  “It’s not the way I’d care to earn it.”

  Guy let that pass. He recalled Franklin’s crack about the country squires who considered they were performing duties of national importance by indulging their personal taste for blood sports. A townsman himself he did not see how Rex’s management of an estate could involve more than an hour’s work a day. He changed the angle. “We’ll know best how it’s going to work out when we’ve seen the two together.”

  They had to wait several months for that. A stream of postcards from various Mediterranean ports underlined the motif ‘Having wonderful time’, but indicated no intention of abandoning the sunlight. What was happening Guy wondered to the twelve-year-old daughter: was she at school or was she perched among the suitcases in the rumble seat? The inquiries that he made about Daphne were unavailing. There was no entry in Burke’s nor in Who’s Who. Roger had never heard of her, nor had Renée. Jimmy Grant had a vague idea that he had met her on the Lido. “But you know how it is, old boy, Christian names and all that. One knows the villas and who owns them, but as for who the house guests are——I was making a list the other day of the people I’ve been to bed with in the last five years. Do you know there were as many as seven whose surnames I never had known.”

  It was not till the end of November that they returned, driven northwards by the approach of winter. A series of telegrams invited the various members of the family to dinner on the night of their arrival. They had a suite in Claridge’s, and the table by the balcony was banked high with gladioli. Daphne was simply dressed: black taffeta with a gold chain belt, and with very small ruby ear-rings that matched the red of her nail polish and lipstick.

  Guy had expected her to be exotic and highly perfumed. She was not: her scent, a faint gardenia, was so lightly applied that you were only intermittently aware of it. At a first glance she looked like a hundred other modishly impersonal women on the brink of forty. She was very slim and you could not tell from her dress whether or not she had a pretty figure. Her chin was pointed and a little long, her cheeks were thin; there was a tight drawn look about her mouth. Her teeth were very white and even: her eyes were large and grey, long-lashed and luminous: her nose was small and pointed. It was not till you had talked to her that you realized that her face divided into two sections, that the whole upper part from forehead to nose was exquisite, but the lower part of her face was plain.

  Her manner was like her appearance, controlled, composed, unostentatious. For eleven years she had had no fixed address: she had travelled about the world, following the flow of fashion. She did not need the background of a house, a drawing-room, a recognized position in a social pattern. Her car, her jewellery, her traveller’s cheques were the requisite visas on the passport of the international society in which she moved. If she felt any embarrassment at meeting her husband’s family, she did not show it. Probably, Guy reflected, she did not feel it. She had acquired a technique for meeting strangers; she was constantly meeting for the first time people with whom she would be thrown in frequent juxtaposition for a day, a week, a month, and then very possibly never see again.

  She had learnt that it put strangers at their ease to have one talk about oneself; then they in their turn could be confidential.

  “No,” she said, “I’ve never had a home. I hadn’t come out when the war began. I married during it. I was in the W. A. A.C.s; moving from one camp to another; joining my husband on his leaves. He was a second son, so the place in Cumberland went to his brother; what a time the poor fellow has had with it. What with death duties, supertax and all the rest, he hasn’t a spare penny to call his own, though he really is quite rich. Possessions are a nuisance nowadays. Live in a suitcase; one black frock and never wear the same piece of jewellery twice in the same company. That’s what I’m teaching Franklin: two neutral-coloured suits and a tie for every day of the year, then you can live in two suitcases and always look a little different.”

  Having adopted a certain way of living, she had organized it to a point of supreme efficiency. It was a way of life like any other. Work did not enter it. She was aware that a number of the men she met had professions and responsibilities that reclaimed them to Berlin, London, Paris, New York, even though it meant the missing of an amusing party. But she never saw them when they were working. Work was something that you had to do if you were unfortunate enough to have no money. She would have been astonished if Franklin had insisted on continuing his work in Jerez. Had he been the kind of person who would have had such feelings, she would not have considered him as matrimonial timber. For the running, Guy fancied, must have been made by her.

  During the eleven years since the war, she had never stayed in any single place for longer than three months, but she was now looking for a villa in Antibes. It was time her daughter had a home. They could always let it, besides there were legal advantages about having a fixed residence.

  “France is the best place to have one,” she maintained. “No one really bothers to pay Income Tax; it’s a question of finding the right person for the douceur.” She was modest and unaffected about her possessions, accepting them as she accepted herself and her way of life. It would never occur to her that her way of living required any explanation or apology; nor would she consider it anything to boast about. It was Franklin who did the boasting.

  “I must show you, Mother darling, the cigarette-case Daphne’s given me.”

  It was long, thin, in white and yellow gold, with his initials in the corner. Inside was inscribed the date of their first meeting.

  “That was my engagement present: look at my wedding one.” It was a gold wrist-watch with an intricate self-locking band. He wa
s also wearing a pair of cuff links that Guy had not seen before: “And do you know what she’s promised me for my birthday. No, I won’t tell you, you must wait and see it.”

  Daphne listened to him with an indulgent smile. She enjoyed spoiling him and Franklin enjoyed being spoilt. Guy remembered his remark with reference to Pamela, “I could be in love with anyone who was crazy about me.”

  Was Daphne crazy about him? He doubted it. He suspected that she had acquired him in the same way that she had acquired her car and jewellery, and was about to acquire a villa in Antibes. It was time she had a husband. Up to a certain age, an unattached woman—particularly a widow—fitted easily into other people’s plans: but later she became more manageable if she had a husband. Franklin had happened to be around at the moment she was coming to this decision. A piece of luck for him.

  Guy kept his eye on Franklin through the evening. Daphne had coached him in his new role of host. He was proving an apt pupil. He had always known how to put people at their ease; as a host he was expansive but unostentatious. Daphne and he ought to make a team. Each had to give precisely what the other wanted. There was no reason at all why it should not be a great success.

  “What about your daughter?” Guy inquired.

  At school in Zürich, Daphne told him. “We’re going out there for her Christmas holidays. We’ll probably take her to St. Moritz. She’s always spent her holidays with me. One day I suppose I shall have to bring her here, have her presented, give a dance for her. But I’ll cross that river when I get to it.”

  It was a cordial evening. As far as Guy could judge his mother got on well with Daphne. She made no comment then or afterwards, but Mr. Renton was held to have summed up the general family attitude when he remarked at lunch on the following Sunday: “For the first time for several years I have been able to join wholeheartedly in the general thanksgiving. It’s a great weight off my mind, a great, great weight.”