Guy Renton Read online

  It was in the last week in November that Daphne and Franklin came to London. They were leaving in time for Julia’s holidays. The next three weeks were crowded. Every night ‘the young couple’, as Mr. Renton persisted not very appropriately but at the same time not cynically in calling them, were engaged in some form of celebration, usually at their own invitation. There were frequent lunch parties as well.

  “We had no wedding reception,” Franklin said, “and Daphne has so many friends. She wants them to see the kind of bird she’s picked.”

  To quite a number of these parties Guy found himself invited, “to back me up,” so Franklin pleaded.

  They were gay and noisy parties: unmarred by the depression whose continuing presence every paper was headlining. Everybody was prosperously sleek with good living and good health. It surprised Guy to find how few of the guests he knew, even by name. A few of them were Americans; there were one or two Spaniards; but the majority were English; members of the international set who were constantly meeting one another at Biarritz, Le Touquet, Eden Roc, St. Moritz. There was only, so Guy supposed, such a preponderance of English because London was not at the moment a social centre: Christmas was a closed period for the set; its component members scattered to family hearths.

  To one of these parties the Burtons were invited. Roger was delighted with the match. “The very thing for Franklin. He needs guiding. That pretty child was altogether wrong for him.”

  Renée was less committal.

  “She knows how to dress. She doesn’t overload. She gives her best points a chance to speak for themselves. Only a person who was very rich could afford to wear such good and so little jewellery.”

  Guy rather wondered as to the provenance of all this wealth. The second son of somebody in Cumberland whose name could not be traced in Kelly’s could hardly be expected to leave a widow in a state bordering upon millionairedom. Renée laughed when he told her that. “Darling, you’re very innocent. Money attracts money and your sister-in-law has spent eleven years moving from one international playground to another. I hope you’re going to invite me to an intime lunch to meet her. I’d like to see what she’s really like.”

  It took a little time before a date suitable to all five could be agreed; but finally a lunch party was arranged. “We’ll have it in my flat,” he said. “That’s cosier, and I can promise you that the wine will be served at the right temperature. What would you soonest have? You can choose your menu and the wines to go with it.”

  Daphne shook her head. “I’m sorry, I never drink.”

  “Never?”

  “Not for the last two years. My doctor’s very firm.”

  To make the numbers even he invited Margery. Two days before Roger was forced to call off on account of a conference in Liverpool. Guy rang Margery. “Roger’s fallen through. Can you bring a beau?”

  “I expect I could.”

  “What about Michael Drummond?”

  There was a short laugh at the other end, indicative of shrugged shoulders. “That’s water over the mill now,” she said, “but don’t you worry. I’ll find somebody.”

  She brought with her a man of about forty, with a foreign office manner; black coat, striped trousers, starched linen, polka-dot black tie. He made himself most agreeable and he and Margery seemed to be on highly easy terms with one another. He seemed to be by a long way Margery’s best bet up to now. But towards the end of the meal he heard him discussing with Renée the advantages and disadvantages of sending a son to Eton if one had not been there oneself. ‘So,’ he thought, ‘a married man.’

  It was a successful lunch. It was the first time he had met Daphne in a small circle. She was a very civilized, very sophisticated product. He felt at ease with her. They were of the same war generation. He noticed that she ate very little; refused coffee, drank no water, but took one pill before lunch and two after. ‘What women will do,’ he thought, ‘to keep their figures.’

  Franklin and Daphne left on the seventeenth. On the Christmas Eve, to each member was delivered by hand from the best shop at which that particular commodity was to be acquired, a gift sufficiently expensive and thoughtfully selected to make the recipient give a start of pleasure, but not so sumptuous as to prove embarrassing. Franklin had fallen on his feet.

  15

  Mr. Renton’s Christmas present from Daphne and Franklin was a bill clip made out of two gold sovereigns. He turned it over between his hands. “This would have been very useful to me in the days when I carried foreign money,” he remarked.

  It was said lightly, but in the saying of it his voice, perhaps unconsciously, took on an inflection that made Guy start, as though the remark had an undertone of dramatic irony. Guy looked at his father with a more close attention. Seeing him week in, week out, he had not noticed any change in him, but now with that odd inflection echoing in his ears, he wondered whether his father was not looking thin: his cheeks seemed flabby and his clothes to be hanging loosely. He remarked on it to his mother. She nodded. “I’m not quite happy about him. I wish he’d see Dr. Martin. But you know what he is.”

  After that Guy took closer note. His father seemed less alert at the weekly board meetings. He rang up Dr. Martin. “I wish you’d pay a social call some time and tell me if you think there’s any cause to worry.”

  The doctor called round on the following Sunday, after church. He made it clear that he was paying a social visit. But as Guy walked with him to his car, his face was serious. “I wish your father would consult me.”

  “You know what my father is. He won’t go to a doctor unless there’s something immediately wrong.”

  “I know, but in this case I’m afraid there is.”

  “Couldn’t you drop him a note?”

  “I think I’ll have to.”

  On the following Friday Mr. Renton left the board-room early. “That fusspot Martin wants me to have some X-rays taken. Nuisance the man is. Comes round and drinks my sherry, then wants to run me up a bill of costs.”

  On the Tuesday Guy rang up Dr. Martin. “Have those photographs been developed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything wrong?”

  “I’m afraid there is.”

  “Seriously wrong?”

  “Very seriously.”

  “Will you have to operate?”

  “I’m afraid that an operation won’t do any good.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a silence. “We’d better have a talk about this, hadn’t we?” Guy asked.

  “I think we’d better.”

  Guy drove out that evening. His father might have four months to live; he might have a year. It was not likely to be as much. “Will he be in much pain?”

  The doctor shook his head. “He’ll just get weaker.”

  “You’ll give him morphia if he is in pain?”

  “Of course, but I don’t think he will be.”

  “Have you told him yet?”

  “No. I wanted to ask you how you felt.”

  “I think he’d rather know.”

  “I think so too.”

  “I’ve an idea as a matter of fact that he knows already.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  On the Thursday afternoon Guy received a telegram. ‘Hope you will find convenient lunch with me to-morrow before board meeting Travellers one o’clock.’

  They lunched at a window table by the fire. It was a bleak day. Mr. Renton watched the scurrying figures, their heads bent into the wind under their umbrellas. “How cold they look,” he said. “On a day like this one can feel resigned to not being here much longer.”

  He could not have been more matter of fact about his illness.

  “I shan’t tell anyone,” he said. “Why embarrass people? I shan’t resign my chairmanship. Doctors make mistakes. Wouldn’t I look silly if I went on living for ten more years? Most of my contemporaries have gone already. During the next few weeks I shall ask to lunch such intimates as I still have. I’d lik
e to leave them with a happy last memory of me. And I must confess that I shall derive a good deal of interior amusement from the dramatic irony of the situation; they’ll have no idea that it’s the last time that they’ll be seeing me. I shan’t tell Barbara and I shan’t tell Margery. I’d just as soon your mother didn’t know until she has to. I don’t want to be fussed over.”

  He talked about it as calmly as though he were making his plans to start on a long journey. When they left the club the rain was driving across Pall Mall in long gusty sheets. He shivered. “I hope it’s a good summer. I’d like to watch a little cricket up at Lord’s. What a fuss the Australians are making about this body-line: the way I see it. . .”

  On the way to the board meeting he discussed the Test Matches with unimpaired enthusiasm.

  Never had Guy had more respect for his father than he had during the following weeks. His father’s steadfast refusal to dramatize the situation made it difficult for him to realize that this spring was in any way different from any other. His father never made any reference to his illness, or to the progress of his illness. If his mother felt anxiety, she did not betray it. Barbara certainly had no suspicions. She was gay, radiant; bubbling over with plans and projects. Guy was soon to learn the reason for her radiance: the usual reason. “Now you’re not to be prim and starchy and say that I’m too young. Half the heroines in half the novels that I read are under twenty.”

  “And how old’s he?”

  “He’s twenty-three.”

  “And is he able to support you in the style . . .?”

  “Now don’t be tiresome, it’s I who’ll be supporting him, for the first years at any rate. No one expects a painter to make any money till he’s at least——”

  “So he’s a painter then?”

  “Yes and he wears a beard.”

  It was a short red beard and it suited him. He was tall, loose-limbed, the kind of young man you could not imagine wearing a morning-suit, who looked supremely right in corduroys. At the same time you were not surprised when you were told that as the son of an Admiral he had been conventionally educated up to the age of eighteen, at Winchester. His name was Norman Glyn. He was studying at Heatherley’s. They planned to be married in the autumn, and make straight for French North Africa.

  “We’re going to live like gipsies in the sun,” she said. “That’s what his painting needs: sunlight and bright colours.”

  She took Guy round to his studio to see his pictures. They were only moderately modern: they were representational to the extent that you could recognize the objects that they were intended to represent. They were decorative. Guy felt that he would be glad to have one on his walls, but he had no idea how good they were. He’d like to have Roger’s opinion on them.

  “Now you’ve seen how good he is, you’ll be able to tell Father how lucky he is to have such a talented son-in-law,” Barbara told him.

  The only reference that his father made to the progress of his illness came when Guy acted as his sister’s emissary.

  “I wish they could be married now,” he said. “I should have liked to walk down the aisle beside her. But it would be very selfish of me to try to hurry things, and perhaps that fool Martin’s made a mistake with his diagnosis.”

  The engagement was announced in June: but by then it was abundantly apparent that Dr. Martin’s diagnosis was not incorrect. Mr. Renton was losing weight so rapidly that he no longer cared to leave the house. “I don’t like being stared at,” he said.

  It was a warm summer; but he refused to go to Lord’s. “I shouldn’t enjoy it. People would see me, hesitate, wonder whether it was me or not, whether to come up or not. How I’d hate that.”

  He preferred to sit in the garden, in the sun, with a rug wrapped round his knees. He started to re-read Dickens. “I’d forgotten how good he was,” he said. “I’d certainly never realized how well he wrote; the gusto and the humour yes, but I’d never appreciated before the quality of the actual writing. Of course I was only a schoolboy when I read him first.”

  It was largely, Guy suspected, because he had read David Copperfield as a schoolboy that he was returning to it now. His thoughts were turning more and more towards his childhood. He took an active day-to-day interest in current events, reading the daily and the evening papers as though he were following a serial story, but he had lost interest in the middle years. He turned the pages of old albums, looked at the Fernhurst register and at bound copies of the school magazine. He talked more to his wife than he had been wont to do, reminding her of things that had happened before the children had been born. It was not that his grasp of what was happening was less acute; it was simply that he was remembering different things. He seemed much closer to his wife, seemed to rely more on her than Guy remembered. In a surprising way his mother seemed happier, more at peace in herself than she had been for a long time. She never referred to her husband’s illness. But she proved that she was conscious of it, by making no reference to the future.

  By July it was apparent even to Barbara that her father had not very long to live. “What am I to do?” she asked her brother.

  “Behave exactly as though nothing were happening. That’s the kindest thing. Go on with your plans to marry in October.”

  “But suppose ...” She checked. She could not bring herself to use the actual word ‘die’.

  “You would be very selfish if you let him feel he was being a nuisance. You know how he hates fussing.”

  “But to go on a honeymoon when any day one might get the news ...”

  “Wouldn’t it be much worse for him to have you waiting for him to die: he wants to have life going on around him just the same.”

  “It seems so heartless to be happy at a time when he . . .”

  “You can make him happiest by being happy, by letting him know that you are happy.”

  That however was a decision she was not to be called upon to make. As August became September Mr. Renton’s weakness rapidly increased. In the second week he passed into a coma. A nurse came into residence. On a warm sunny Saturday while the nurse took her afternoon walk over the Heath, Guy sat watching by his bedside; his thoughts were in the past, in childhood, remembering how he and his father had put down a deck chair on the study floor, pretended that it was a boat, and gone out ‘shooting sausages’ for tea, with the fire-irons as their muskets; remembering their first visit to Lord’s and how he had burst into tears when ‘Plum’ Warner had been bowled; remembering being taken to Peter Pan and the huge tea afterwards at the Criterion where for the inclusive charge of a shilling you could eat as many sandwiches and éclairs as you could manage: he thought of all their walks at Fernhurst, over the slopes, comparing the Fernhurst of his father’s day with his; remembering himself as a fourth former, in an Eton collar hurrying out of school on the Saturdays when his father had come down for the week-end, to see pacing outside the Abbey the tall, erect figure in the grey homburg hat; he recalled that first Saturday in August 1914 when they had gone down to Blackheath to watch Kent play Surrey at the Rectory field.

  He thought of all the jokes and confidences that they had shared: of all the incidents and characters of whom he would now never talk again. A closed book, never to be reopened.

  At his mother’s request he went through his father’s papers. They were kept separate in a series of small tin boxes: they were locked, but his father had only a few keys and these were ticketed. Each tin box bore a label: Family. Fernhurst. Oxford: there were three tin boxes each marked London with the dates 1878-1885, 1885-1890, 1890-93. His father had come down from Oxford in 1878, as a young man of twenty-three. He had been on the brink of forty, on the brink of middle age as the Victorians saw it, when he married. Fifteen years of London: all his youth. A lot must have happened during that long period.

  He opened the box marked Family. A nursery collection of Christmas cards, programmes, letters home, the scores of nursery cricket games. There was a letter he had written to his mother his first Sunday
at his Dame’s school. It was dated 1865. Apathetic little note written in a large handwriting between ruled lines, ‘Darling muz, I cold cream my lips every day the way you told me . ..’ it ended, ‘I will do my best to be a good and dutiful son to you.’ ‘Dutiful,’ what an odd word for a ten-year-old boy to use. How it typified that era of decorum. He ought to keep this box. It might have a period value for Lucy’s children, and for Barbara’s.

  He opened the box marked Fernhurst. There was a stack of school reports on the familiar dark blue paper. The usual comments ‘Fair’, ‘Marked improvement’, ‘could do much better’. He read the house reports. The earlier ones were very good: nearly everybody got good reports during his first terms, when he was on his best behaviour, in a strange, hostile world: later came the falling off, when a boy began to find his feet, grew noisy and obstreperous.

  His father’s reports followed the universal pattern, a rapid deterioration starting after the fifth term: then a sense of responsibility intervening; caps and colours and seniority. ‘I have every confidence that he will make a good house prefect.’

  Guy shuffled through the final sheets, to be arrested by a sudden phrase. ‘I am glad to say there has been no recurrence of the trouble about which last term I had to invite your co-operation.’

  What had that trouble been? He had no idea. He would never know. There was no one in the world now who could tell him. If he himself had been in a similar predicament, his father would no doubt have said, “As a matter of fact I was in rather a similar position once myself.” But he never had been.

  He laid the sheaf of reports down on the desk, turned over the other papers. There was a house list dated 1873. His father was in the first section, in the Upper Fifth. He ran his eyes down the names: some of them, several of them, must be still alive: one or two of the names were in a vague way familiar. Why had this one list survived out of the many his father must have had? Was another in existence anywhere? Had some other Old Fern-hurstian got one among his papers, to be read over occasionally on winter evenings by someone who reading last week of his father’s death had thought, ‘Ah yes, I remember him; caned me once for reading a novel during hall,’ someone who remembered his father as a tall slim prefect in a high white collar, in a way that his son could not even from photographs imagine him.