Guy Renton Read online

  “Why did you bring him into it?”

  “Well, darling, he’d been a colonel: he was used to dealing with young officers; but no, it wasn’t a good idea, I see that now.”

  “How do you feel yourself?”

  “I’m worrying about how Franklin’s feeling.”

  “How do you think he is?”

  “It’s hard to tell. He’s always so cheerful about everything. But I think he’s felt himself neglected. The life here so centred around you; his father never took the same interest in him. There was so much talk about you; first during the war, and then your football; he wasn’t jealous, don’t think that: you were quite a hero to him. But he must have wondered where he came in. Then there was Rex, that regular-soldier point-of-view. I’m afraid after this trouble, you know what these psychoanalysts are saying, he might develop a feeling of inferiority.”

  Guy nodded. He could see her point.

  “It might be a good idea if I went down and saw him?”

  “Oh darling, if you only could.” Her eyes lit at the suggestion. “He could talk so much more openly to you than to his father. He’s thought of you as an uncle rather than a brother, your being so much older, and then the war, and your being an international.”

  From the passage outside came the sound of voices, or rather of Rex’s voice. “I should be firm, very firm. If he thinks he can get away with this, there’s no knowing what he may do next time.”

  It was high time, Guy decided, to change the subject.

  “I thought, Father, if you’ve no objection that I’d run down to Fernhurst one day in the middle of next week, and have a chat with Franklin. Till we know how he feels himself we’re in the dark. And now I insist on telling you about myself at Mürren.”

  The talk broke up into a series of isolated duologues that soon began to lose their animation; perhaps because of the argument that had preceded them. Soon after ten Lucy began to talk of what a long way back it was to Wentworth and to remind Rex that Guy had to play football the next day.

  It was a cold night, and the self-starter would not work. From the warmth of the drawing-room, the others listened in silence to the rattle of the cranking handle, and Rex’s voice raised in audible expostulation, probably about the inefficiency of the British workman. At last the engine began to purr. His father sighed. “My mother used to say that a woman’s better off unhappily married than not married at all. I wonder if that’s true to-day.” He rose. “I’m tired. I must go to bed. No, don’t get up.” As he walked to the door, he paused beside Guy’s chair and laid a hand upon his shoulder. “You’re a great, great comfort to me, my boy. He’s going to be a lucky young man who has you for a father. Good night, Margery.”

  By half-past ten Margery and Guy were left alone. For the last quarter of an hour he had been conscious of her eyeing him inquisitively.

  “You’re looking different. Something’s happened to you,” she said. “It has now, hasn’t it?”

  He hesitated. He had not been able to talk about Renée to Jimmy Grant with whom for the last five years he had shared such confidences, yet he felt he could talk to this kid-sister of his with whom until only recently he had never done anything but joke.

  “Come on, tell me all about her, please! How old is she?”

  Margery was insistent and he yielded.

  “In the early twenties.”

  “What’s she like? Is she pretty? But of course you’d think she was. Is she tall, is she blonde?” Eagerly the questions followed, one upon the next. “How does she feel? In the same way you do?”

  “I think she does, I hope she does.”

  “Oh, darling, but how lovely for you. Have you proposed?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Don’t tell me that she’s somebody—well, not ‘convenable’.”

  He smiled at her use of the French word.

  “You needn’t worry about that. She’s what even our mother would call a ‘lady’.”

  “Then why didn’t you clinch matters before you left? Wouldn’t it have been wiser?”

  “She’s already married.”

  “Oh!”

  “Don’t say you’re shocked.”

  “Of course not. It’s just that. . . Oh, I don’t know. But one hopes for the people that one loves that when they fall in love it’ll be with somebody that’s free to marry. Is she English?”

  “American married to an Englishman.”

  “What do you plan to do?”

  “I haven’t begun to think about that yet.”

  “Oh, but you must. If you let yourself drift, you may drift anywhere. You must plan things now.” It was said sharply; as though she were speaking out of her own experience.

  He looked at her, thoughtfully. One imagined that nothing ever happened to one’s own sister. One forgot in the case of one’s own sister that this was 1925, the heyday of the Bright Young People. Margery was on the brink of twenty, dark eyed, dark haired, of medium height, with a neat trim figure: a girl whom men found attractive. Two or three nights a week she was dining out. She went away quite often for week-ends. He knew the houses that she was visiting, but not the other guests. He could no longer think of her as his kid sister. More and more during this last year had he become conscious of her as an equal, as an ally. To-night he felt closer to her than he had ever done. Yet oddly enough he did not feel that she had grown up to him, but that he had grown up to her, that it was through what had happened to him during this last week that he was meeting her on equal terms.

  “Life’s a mess,” she said reflectively, as though again she were reflecting on her experience rather than on his. “You heard what Father said just now about his mother having said that it was better for a woman to be unhappily married than not married at all, but that he wasn’t sure if that was true to-day. He realizes that things are different. People say things are easier. I don’t think they are. It’s always easier to play a game when the rules are strict, when you know what you may do and what you mayn’t. Our mothers, or anyhow our grandmothers did. We don’t. In our grandmother’s day, if you weren’t married you couldn’t fall in love with anyone who was. It would be social suicide. To-day it isn’t. There’s the loophole of divorce. There aren’t the same consequences. There are those little books. You remind yourself of all the people who’ve got away with it. You think of the second marriages that seem to be working out all right with no one thinking the worse of anyone. You hesitate, and drift and then ...” She paused: then laughed. “Oh, well, it doesn’t do to get dramatic. Life may be a mess, but it’s a lot of fun. Darling, I do wish you all the luck that’s going.” To his surprise, with a sudden impulsive gesture, she threw her arms around his neck.

  Her kiss upon his cheek was warm and very fond. He felt that it was a wishing of good luck to herself as much as him.

  Next day the Harlequins beat the Park by their usual cricket score, thirty-five to three. After the game Guy went back to Jimmy’s flat. It was the first time that he had been there. Ordinarily after a game, the team stayed together, but Jimmy was leaving on the Monday, “On one of my business trips, old boy.” He wanted to have a quiet talk with Guy about the various committee decisions that had been taken in his absence.

  It was a minute two-room service flat on the third floor of a house in Buckingham Street, Adelphi. It was agreeably furnished, with a comfortable Chesterfield and a deep armchair and an elegant cocktail cabinet with glass doors. But Guy could not help being surprised to find it quite so small. He had always pictured Jimmy as being a rather affluent young man. Jimmy, guessing what he was thinking, chuckled.

  “I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering why I don’t go out to Kensington or St. John’s Wood where for the same rent I could have got a flat with big rooms and a view. I’ll tell you. There’s only one thing that’s important about a flat to my kind of person; it must be accessible. You’re lunching a girl at the Savoy. There’s something in her eye that tells you you’re not wasting time. ‘Look
here,’ you say, ‘the coffee’s not too good. Why don’t we go back to my place and have it there? I’ve got a bottle of real Chartreuse.’ As likely as not she’ll come. If she does, well then it’s up to you. Or else you’re dining in Soho. It’s ten o’clock and you’re feeling good. ‘They’ll be wanting to close down soon,’ you say. ‘But it’s too early for a night club yet, why don’t we go back to my flat for an hour or so. It’s just round the corner, and we could play the gramophone.’ As likely as not you’ll never make that night club.

  “The great thing,” he insisted, “is to give a girl a reasonable excuse for going back to your flat with you. You’ve got to be able to say to her afterwards, ‘Well, I never expected that to happen when we came up these stairs.’ That saves her self-respect. It’s got to seem unpremeditated. If you start trying to take a girl out to Kensington or St. John’s Wood, she’s bound to shy. You could only have one possible reason for trying that one on.”

  Guy listened with a smile. To Jimmy gallantry was a game, visualised in terms of’scalps’; the chase was everything: it bore no relation to this new-born thing between himself and Renée. At the same time there was one point which he could learn from his friend’s lecture on technique: a very essential point that he had overlooked. If he was going to conduct a private relationship in London, it was essential that he should have a flat.

  A flat must be accessible. Since his office was in Soho Square and Renée lived in Albion Street, Chelsea was out of range.

  On Monday morning he visited an estate agent’s. He wanted a small bachelor flat, he told them: a service flat, quiet, unfurnished, in a residential district: not further north than Baker Street, nor further south or west than Knightsbridge. He left their office laden with ‘orders to view’. One was a little further than he had wanted: in Rutland Street, within two minutes’ walk of the Brompton Road Tube Station, but it was strongly recommended. Four houses were being put under a single management with the housekeeper living in the basement. It would have the efficiency of a new régime.

  Because it was the furthest away, he went there first, walking from Knightsbridge Station, through Montpelier Square with all its Galsworthian memories of Irene Forsyte. There was something that was very London about this quiet backwater between the turmoil of Harrod’s Depository and the Knightsbridge Barracks. There was a village atmosphere about Cheval Place with its small two-storied cottages and Howell’s grocery where you could buy everything. He liked the feudal survival of Box Cottage with its black-faced, gilt-handed clock. He liked the feel of this small world, whose existence you would not suspect as you drove along Brompton Road or Piccadilly. A good home for a man who had been born in London, through whose veins ran deep and warm a love of London: an appropriate place too as the setting for a private life.

  It was the first time that he had walked through Rutland Street. It was a short alley of small three-storied early Victorian houses, stucco-fronted, with balconies in front of their first-story windows and short flights of steps running up to their front doors. It was part of a mews, designed for the services of the comfortably-incomed upper middle class families who had lived in the four adjacent squares—Brompton, Rutland, Trevor, Mont-pelier. It was easy to reconstruct the life of the adjacent cottages, the bustling world of grooms and ostlers. Very definitely this was the kind of thing he wanted. The conversion was obviously recent. The stucco was new, the front doors and windows freshly painted. He rang at the second house and the bell was answered by a neat, trim maid.

  “I’ve an order to view,” he said.

  “I’ll get Mrs. Stevenson.”

  He looked round the hall as he stood waiting. It was comfortably warm after the damp chill street. The staircase had a new red-brown carpet. The stair rods shone. On the walls were gilt-framed coloured reproductions of French eighteenth-century engravings. There was a general air of competence and comfort.

  A large fat woman in the later forties came bustling from the basement. She was out of breath; her forehead damp, and her sparse hair dishevelled.

  “I’m sorry, sir, to be caught this way, but I’ve only just done me dinner. Stevenson and I don’t get down to it till after three. We don’t like to start till all the tenants’ meals is cleared. I wouldn’t ‘ave come up at all if I could ‘ave trusted Alice to show you round. She’s new: not got the run of things. Who was it you came from? Did they tell you what the arrangements was? Fifteen shillings a week for service. Then you give the maid what you like. Half-a crown’s plenty—then if she does anything extra, you gives her what you likes. There’s a fixed charge for meals: one-and-six breakfast, three shillings lunch, four shillings dinner, but when you ‘ave company, that’s different. All grist to the mill, I say, and I likes young people to enjoy themselves. Mrs. ‘obson now, she’s in Number Fifty, gave a dinner party for eight last week. Eight, I ask you. I ‘ad a maid waiting on her all the time. Six shillings a ‘ead and she said she couldn’t ‘ave been done no better in the Ritz; and she a lady too what knows what’s what.”

  She maintained the flow of talk breathlessly but uninterruptedly as she led him up the stairs. The first floor flat to which he had an order was composed out of an L-shaped drawing-room; it was high with moulded ceilings, divided with connecting doors. There were tall French windows at each end. You can best judge a room’s proportions whenit is bare; and the house had been built at the close of a great architectural period; the room had a harmony of line.

  He stood on the narrow balcony. It had no view. The mews buildings to the back of Rutland Square were facing it. To the left Rutland Street ran into Cheval Place, to the right into Mont-pelier Square. There was no view either at the other end, only the roofs and backyards of the Brompton Road. He would not need a view; he would not be here much in daytime; houses with views were far too often on a ‘bus route.

  He took stock of the flat. It looked small, as houses do before they have been furnished. But when he stepped it out, he realized that it would suit his purpose. Standing there looking round him, trying to visualize it furnished, he was conscious of impending destiny. How much might happen, how much of the drama of his life be staged here.

  “Thank you very much,” he told Mrs. Stevenson. “I’ll let you know.” But his mind was made up already. He knew very well that he was not going to use any of those other orders.

  He turned east into the Brompton Road. The rain had ceased, but it was cold and windy; women as they came out of Harrod’s huddled into their high-collared coats, their stumpy umbrellas tucked under their arms, hesitated for a moment in the shelter of its doorway before butting into the wind with their pudding-bowl close-fitting hats. It was March at its very worst, the pavements greasy, the buses splashing mud out of the gutters. But his heart was jubilant with a sense of spring, of life opening and budding. A sudden impulse seized him to array himself to match his mood; new clothes for a new life.

  In his office he wore the usual city man’s uniform of striped trousers and short black coat. His lounge suits were for the most part brown.

  “I’ve the very thing for you,” his tailor said, draping over his arm a dark red-brown cloth that on an ordinary occasion he might well have chosen. Guy shook his head. He wanted something unlike himself. He ran his eye along the bales: blues and reys and browns and checks, till his attention was caught and held by a smooth dark cloth with an unusual gloss. “That looks like green,” he said.

  “It is, sir, a bottle green. I’ll show you it in the light.” He took it to the doorway. In the dark electric-lit shop it would have passed for black, but in the daylight, the green tinge was definite. “It needs the sun though to bring out its true colour,” the tailor said. It was not only unlike any suit he had ever had himself, but it was unlike any suit that he had seen. Yet in no sense could it have been described as ‘loud’.

  “I’m not sure that it’s quite your style,” the tailor said.

  “That’s precisely what I’m looking for. Something that isn’t my usual style.
”

  “Well, of course, sir, you could get away with it.”

  Guy smiled. He knew what the man was thinking. That a man who had played for England could wear anything and not be misunderstood.

  “I’ll have it,” he said, “and single-breasted. And could you give me a cutting so that I can get some hosiery to match. Oh, and one other thing. It’s most important that it should be ready in a fortnight.”

  Was he counting his chickens before they were hatched? Ordering new clothes, contracting for a flat. What a fool he’d feel if Renée treated him as a casual acquaintance, and he was left with an unusual suit and a flat he did not need. He shrugged. You should always plan things on the assumption you would win, as though things were going to turn out the way you wanted.

  4

  On the Thursday Guy went down to Fernhurst. When his father had gone there in the 1870s, the school, though it had been founded by Edward VI had only recently emerged from the status of a small West Country day school. Now, half a century later, it had taken its place beside Marlborough, Uppingham, and Tonbridge in the hierarchy of the system, with four hundred names upon its roll.

  It was a three-hour train journey and Guy arrived late in the afternoon. It was not a half holiday, and the whole school was in form. It was a grey chill day, but the rain had ceased and the wind had dropped. He strolled through the main gate, past the sixth-form green towards the point below Big School where you could see the square Abbey tower in silhouette above the School House studies. The Abbey had been built in the twelfth century; the studies a century later, to serve as the Abbot’s quarters. It must have looked much the same when Edward VI endowed the school in 1550.

  Guy let his eye travel round the courts to the succession of lighted windows in the classrooms. The Abbey clock struck three times. Quarter of an hour more to tea. He thought of all the boys behind all those windows whose hearts had quickened at the sound, just as his father’s had, just as his had done, just as his son’s would do. He walked on through the cloisters, up the chapel steps. A new wing had been built as a war memorial. The roll of honour was engraved upon its walls. Four hundred names: name after familiar name. Of those who had come here on the same day as he, in September 1909, over half were dead, over half had not reached their thirties.