Guy Renton Read online

  “There’s a Fancy Dress dance to-night,” he said.

  “I know there is. I’ve the cutest dress for it.”

  “Don’t you think it would be a good idea if we sat at the same table?”

  “I’d like that, thank you.”

  ‘The cutest dress’ was a Viennese peasant dress. A white lawn blouse, laced at the throat, loose sleeved and buttoned at the wrist; the bodice was patterned with elaborate needlework; blue and red and green and yellow. The long billowing skirt was green; a deep sage green. But it was the wig that she was wearing that made her seem at the same time a different person, yet more herself. It was a flaxen wig with the hair worn loose upon her neck and knotted in a bow. It seemed so natural, so right for her to be wearing it that he would never have known that it was a wig unless he had already seen her close shingled hair.

  She laughed when he told her that.

  “I know, and it’s my own hair, too. I had it made up when I had it cut. I ought never to have had it cut; it’s not my line at all, but Roger likes it. It’s all wrong for me trying to be fashionable. Short skirts don’t suit me either. I’m too tall. I only feel really right in things like this. I don’t feel that I’m in fancy dress at all. And I feel so gay.” She slipped her arm through his. “I know you’re dying to take me to the bar. I’m dying to be taken there.”

  Her arm was again through his as they came back half an hour later. On her table a gold-foiled bottle was cooling in a steaming bucket. “You think of everything,” she said.

  It was half-past eleven. The gala evening was at its height. The leader of the band, a paper cap set rakishly across his eye, his back turned to the orchestra, appeared to be conducting the tempo of the dancers rather than his musicians. His arms beat to the syncopated rhythm. His body was bent now to one side, now the other, at one moment flung back, his eyes raised to the ceiling, his arms lifted above his head like a Mussulman’s at prayer; at another bent forward, his hands stretched out with distended beseeching fingers, as though he were goading each dancer to a keener rhythm.

  “Wherever you go, whatever you do,

  I want you to know I love you.”

  As they danced Renée hummed the words.

  “I can’t begin to tell you what these three days have meant to me,” he said, “that first sight of you across the lounge ...”

  She shook her head. Her fingers tapped admonitorily against his shoulder; with her eyes half closed, with her lips framing the words, she seemed absorbed in a trance-like surrender to the music, utterly indifferent to her partner. But her hand tightened on his shoulder. She drew close to him; so close that they seemed one person, mentally and physically at one. Her head was against his cheek, the scent of tuberose was in her hair. His heart pounded with a taut expectancy. She couldn’t, surely she couldn’t dance with him like this and not mean anything.

  As the music stopped, she sighed. “I’m tired. It’s late. I think I’ll go.”

  With the blood singing along his veins he followed her.

  They stopped outside her door.

  “I can’t really believe,” he said, “that I’ll be gone tomorrow.”

  She smiled friendlily, teasingly too it seemed. Down the corridor came the sound of voices. She held out her hand.

  “This is good-bye then, I suppose.”

  She paused, or seemed to pause before that ‘I suppose’. In her grey-green eyes there was a look that made or seemed to make of that pause, a challenge.

  “Renée ...” he began, then checked.

  For a moment her fingers, her long slim fingers with the long pointed nails were folded over his. For a moment then her door had closed.

  Back in his room, he stared irresolute at his half-packed suitcase. That pause, that look, the way she had danced, what had they meant? Had they meant anything?

  He had only known her for three days. She was married. She had a child. Her husband was joining her to-morrow. She had talked of him with pride. Even if she was not in love with him, why should she with a whole world to pick from fall at sight for somebody like himself? She’d given up three days to him; yes, but only because she’d been alone, because she’d been bored, because she had needed someone to be squired by.

  She was an American, too, that made a difference. He’d been told how often, how easily an Englishman could misunderstand one. All these petting parties; a national pastime that meant nothing. “Don’t be a fool,” he told himself. “When you saw her on that first evening across the lounge, it was like something hitting you below the heart, when she looks at you in that teasing way of hers, when she speaks in that contralto voice like . . . like . . . like what?” He checked, searching for a simile, searching in vain; he could not find one. It had been like nothing he had known before, and because it had been like that for him, he had tried to persuade himself that it had been like that for her, had read meanings into a smile, a fancied pause.

  Impatient, irresolute, he paced his room. Did it matter what she had meant or what she hadn’t meant? It was what he felt, what she meant to him that mattered. Never in his life had there been anyone like her. He had to tell her that. He might never see her again. He had to tell her all that these three days had meant. He could not say good-bye like that, a casual parting in a corridor.

  He listened at his door. There was no sound of voices. From the hall came the wail of the saxophone, loudening in the final foxtrots. On slippered feet he hurried past the row of doors. His nervousness, his indecision were forgotten. His fingers did not tremble as they turned the handle. He was fired and sustained by the need to express in words, which the mood would find for him, all that these three days had meant.

  She was seated at her dressing-table. He could see her reflection in the mirror. She did not start. No look of surprise crossed her face. She turned in her chair and faced him.

  “So you have come,” she said, then smiled.

  He lifted himself upon his elbow. The curtains were quarter drawn. A waxing moon silvered the room with twilight, poetizing the bare bleak furniture. Outside, a frost-bound night rimed the balcony with ice. It was warm here in the heated room. Slowly he drew the palm of his hand along her shoulder. He had not known, he had not guessed that anything could be so smooth. From every nerve cell of his body, from every nerve cell of his brain, from every vein and artery of his heart, rose the words clamorous and insistent that would express his wonder, his gratitude, his adoration.

  “Beloved, if you only knew ...”

  She checked him; she lifted her hand against his mouth.

  “Don’t speak, words spoil things.”

  In a slow caress, she passed her palm along his cheek. Her nails were long; he could feel their points like sharpened spears as her arm coiled about his neck. Her fingers tightened in his hair, drawing his face back beside her. He relaxed vibrant to their pressure.

  Later, hours later, she stirred beside him.

  “Darling, it’s getting late,” she said.

  He shook himself out of his doze. The room was darkening. The moon had sunk. The jagged outline of the Eiger was black against the sky.

  “Darling, you must go, truly.”

  Her voice was drowsy, affectionate but distant. He stared at her, fearing that if he were to move, a spell would break. In a desperate need to be reassured he began to set her questions, abrupt jerky questions. When would he be seeing her again? When would she be back in London? How would he find her? Was she in the book? When would be the best time to ring her?

  She smiled lazily.

  “Three weeks. After ten, before eleven.”

  “And I shall see you—you promise that?”

  “Silly, what do you think?”

  3

  Guy lived in Highgate with his parents in the house which his grandfather had bought in the same year that Renée’s grandparents had left Vienna. Early Georgian, three-storied in dull red brick, No. 17 The Grove, opened on the short chestnut avenue that led into Hampstead Lane, but most of its
main windows faced the Heath. Waking there in the morning, with the air fresh, to the sound of birds, to the sight out of the window of green fields and trees, it was easy to believe yourself in the country.

  Guy was the second oldest, in a family of five. Lucy, his senior by two years, had married during the war Rex Irwin, a regular Army officer several years older than herself. She was now the mother of two small sons; Margery, his junior by nine years, worked in the secretariat of a city office; Franklin, three years younger, a public school boy was in his fourth year at Fernhurst; finally there was ‘the baby’, Barbara, a thirteen year old, who went as a weekly boarder to a school in Kensington.

  It was a family that before the war had been automatically split by the nine-year gap between Guy and Margery, into ‘the nursery huddle’ and ‘the other two’. Now with Lucy married and living in the country, Margery and Guy had begun to find themselves a team while Franklin accepted the admiration of his younger sister. Their father, tall, grey-haired, venerable; a composed and uncontentious man, was in his later sixties; their mother, smallish, grey-haired and silent, was not yet fifty. It was a happy family that had had few troubles, few misunderstandings.

  Guy arrived back from Mürren shortly after half-past seven. As he closed the front door behind him, Margery hurried from the drawing-room, a finger pressed against her lips.

  “Sh, not in there, not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Trouble. The clan has gathered. You need briefing.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Franklin, he’s got the sack.”

  “He’s here?”

  “No, no, he’s still at school. But they won’t have him back next term.”

  “Not really the sack then. The embroidered bag.”

  “That’s it.”

  “What for?”

  “Nothing specific. He should be a prefect but the chief says he won’t make him one.”

  “How’s Father taking it?”

  “Philosophically, trying to be detached.”

  “Is he upset?”

  “Not really; not inside himself. It’s a nuisance. It makes a problem for him. He says it’s letting down the family. But he’s only saying that because he thinks he should.”

  “What about Mother?”

  “You know Mother. Franklin’s her ewe lamb.”

  “Who else is here?”

  “Lucy and Rex.”

  “With Rex doing all the talking?”

  “You bet he is.”

  “Being very British about it all?”

  “Very. ‘This country needs a Mussolini.’”

  “Why was he dragged in?”

  “Mother’s idea. That row of medals, she’s still impressed by them.”

  “All that seems quite a while ago.”

  “You wouldn’t think it was to hear him talk.”

  “Poor Lucy. Are they dining here?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d better hurry then. Dinner’s a parade to Rex.”

  He bounded up the stairs. Franklin with the embroidered bag. For the usual reason, he supposed. Suspected but not proved. The kind of thing that happened in other families: about which you said, ‘Nobody bothers about that nowadays. Everyone knows that it goes on. It’s bad luck if you’re caught.’ The kind of thing you never expected to have happen to yourself.

  Probably it was not too surprising. Franklin was strikingly good looking, tall, light-haired, loose-limbed, fresh complexioned, with an easy, effortless power of making friends, quick-witted and rebellious, with a lack of ambition that had made Guy wonder how he had managed to be so good at games. A natural ball-game player, with an eye and with a sense of timing, almost self-taught, Franklin only bothered to exert himself when circumstances were against him, a bad light, good bowling or a tricky wicket: he enjoyed a losing game but lost interest when a game was saved or a corner turned: the kind that very easily ran into trouble: into this kind of trouble.

  With two minutes to spare Guy joined them in the drawing-room. They all looked very solemn: so solemn that he decided to be frivolous.

  “I consider it’s all very cavalier,” he said. “You send a boy to a headmaster to be trained, then after he’s taken your money for four years, he admits that he can’t make a job of it. He ought to return your money. If a watchmaker can’t make your watch go, he doesn’t expect to be paid for the time he’s put in on it.”

  His brother-in-law had a literal mind.

  “I don’t agree with you at all,” Rex said. “A headmaster has a responsibility to the other boys, to the parents who have put those boys under his charge. If he feels that that charge is to be imperilled by the presence among them of one boy—even though there is no specific accusation against the boy ...”

  Mrs. Renton interrupted. “I can’t have you say a thing like that. I insist. ...” At that point dinner was announced.

  Dinner brought a break in the discussion, since a parlourmaid was in attendance throughout the meal, but it did not make the occasion easier. Rex as usual had a dampening effect. He had met and courted Lucy as a dashing young colonel with two gold wound stripes and a row of medals. He had been Guy’s colonel: that was how he and Lucy had come to meet. It had been a romantic marriage, but that was nine years ago. The years had taken toll of him. Like many another regular, he had resigned after the war rather than revert to junior rank; his father died and he believed he would have plenty to keep him occupied, running an estate in Devonshire. He had not realized how difficult it would be to run even parsimoniously an estate that had yielded a comfortable income through the nineteenth century. He had raged and cursed and protested, but could see no way of making his estate support the kind of life to which he considered himself entitled. In his indignation he had persuaded the Conservative Association to select him as their candidate at the next election. He had voiced the grievances of the landed gentry with great force and eloquence, but had been soundly beaten at the polls by a Liberal from the manufacturing section of the constituency. For the next election the Conservative Association had chosen a different candidate. They had suggested as tactfully as possible that Rex’s appeal to the electorate had been somewhat limited.

  The following spring he let his house. An industrialist who had made a fortune during the war wanted a country house where he could entertain his friends over the week-end. He did not mind its running at a loss. He could charge his entertainment against sur-tax. Rex rented a bungalow on the Wentworth Estate and took up golf seriously. “There’s nothing else that people like myself can be serious about,” he said. “That’s what’s wrong with the country. It doesn’t find proper employment for those who have, or should have—shall we say—a real stake in its prosperity.”

  The effect of all this on Lucy was depressing. She had been lively company in her teens, slim and pretty and vivacious; but she had lost and never recovered her figure after the birth of her first child. Her face wore a perpetual worried frown. One did not think of her as being under thirty. One associated her with cooks and cushions, nursery complaints and a husband’s rheumatism.

  Rex discussed politics through dinner. It was not a cosy meal and there was an uncomfortable pause when the table had been cleared, the port and dessert set upon the table and the parlourmaid left them to their privacy. It was now up to himself, Guy felt, to put up a defence for Franklin; the best defence surely was a practical discussion of the immediate future.

  “The only problem for us, so it seems to me, is to decide what’s to happen to him during the next year or so. He’s only seventeen and a half. Isn’t that young to go up to Oxford?”

  He had his solution ready, but Rex interrupted.

  “I know what my father’d have done in a case like this. Given me fifty pounds and packed me off to the Colonies. That’s what I’d do with Franklin. Do him all the good in the world. Live in a hard school. Discipline. That’s what these youngsters need. Conscription. Salvation of the country. What I always say


  Before Rex could pursue his argument along the course that was obviously set out, an interruption came. A telephone call, for Mr. Guy.

  It was from Jimmy Grant. He wanted to make sure that Guy was back. He’d got a reserve waiting in case of a delay. He was also in a mood to gossip. “Any adventures?”

  “Not what you’d call adventures.”

  “Oh, come now, surely.”

  “No, honestly.”

  “Not one little Belgian Countess?”

  “Not one very little one.”

  “Old boy, I’m ashamed of you.”

  “You know what I am.”

  “I’m afraid I do. Now I, on the other hand . . .” It was a long and scabrous anecdote. As he listened Guy remembered how at the end of that first evening he had self-gloriously dramatized this very conversation. Only four days ago. Ninety-six hours. How much had happened in it. He had not dared to dream that so much could happen. Yet now that it had happened, nothing could be more impossible than the recital of it to Jimmy Grant. When he had pictured such an experience in his imagination, he had seen it in terms of a general heightening of a Rugger night at Brett’s. It hadn’t been like that at all: an altogether different level of experience. It was something you couldn’t talk about to Jimmy Grant.

  The conversation lasted for some while. As he hung the receiver back a light under the drawing-room door told him that Rex and his father had been left over their port. He could hear Rex’s voice booming in steady, uninterrupted expostulation. He turned towards the drawing-room. Silence; that meant the wireless; Lucy and Margery with earphones clamped over their heads, his mother with her knitting. He was tired, physically and mentally. Better the drawing-room. He did not feel up to Rex. He took up a footstool, set it at his mother’s feet and took her hand.

  “Darling, you’ve scarcely said a word about it all.”

  “Rex had so much to say.”

  “That’s a kind way of putting it.”

  “Is it? I don’t think it is. He means so well, he had such a fine war record, he makes Lucy happy. I’m sure he’ll be a good father to his two sons; provided of course they grow up the way he wants, but I’m afraid he doesn’t understand a boy like Franklin.”