Guy Renton Page 7

  She asked him questions; practical questions about meals and heat and service.

  “It sounds exactly what you want. I know it’ll look charming.”

  “Could I persuade you to have tea with me?”

  “I’m sure you could.” Then after a second’s pause, “Have you ever read Notre Cœur, Maupassant’s Notre Cœur?”

  He shook his head. He’d read a good deal of Maupassant, but no, not that.

  “Then I’ll bring it you round as a house-warming present. I couldn’t bear to have you think of me as someone who only reads magazines!”

  She smiled as she added that. He flushed. She had known then that he had been piqued when she had buried herself in Cosmopolitan. It was exciting if alarming to be with someone who could read one’s thoughts.

  She changed the subject, not returning to it until the meal was over, and she was gathering together her gloves and bag, and the small stumpy umbrella that had recently become the mode.

  How soon, she asked him, would his flat be ready?

  “They’re at work there now. They said by the middle of next week, but knowing what decorators are, I’m giving them another fortnight.”

  “Another fortnight—that’s early April. Have you got your diary?”

  He took it out. “What about the seventh?”

  “Fine. And in the meantime you must dine with us. You’ve not met Roger yet.”

  “But ...”

  “You’ll like him. I’ve talked about you a lot. I told him that we were lunching. ‘Be certain to tie him down to a fixed date,’ he said.”

  “Surely though ...”

  She smiled. In actual age she was his junior. In experience she made him feel a child.

  “A husband must know one’s friends. So many amusing things are impossible if a friendship isn’t accepted and approved. When will you come? On Tuesday? That’ll be delightful. Eight o’clock. Black tie. I’ve loved my lunch.”

  He left the office early on that Tuesday. It might be a difficult occasion. He did not know the kind of people he would be meeting. He did not intend to be dismissed as a ‘rugger tough in the Wine Trade’. He wanted to make a good impression in front of Renée. He spent an hour in his club library reading Oscar Browning’s Memoirs, and checking up in Who’s Who on Roger’s contemporaries at Cambridge—Maynard Keynes, Osbert Burdett, Shane Leslie, Lytton Strachey, Gilbert Cannan, E. M. Forster.

  As the door was opened a wave of scented heat surged outwards. Joss sticks, he told himself.

  His eyes as he followed the butler up the stairs made a quick inventory of the setting. The narrow hall was decorated with Beardsley prints. The window at the turn of the stairs was curtained with crimson velvet. The pile carpet was green, close cut to the wainscoting. The walls were silver-papered. The ceiling was a cerulean blue. It was not like Renée, this, at all.

  Against a background of Chinese lacquer, a short figure in a tight-fitting double-breasted dinner jacket welcomed him.

  “This is such a pleasure. I have more than once watched you from the touchline. I was thrilled when Renée told me of your meeting.”

  Guy could not have been more surprised. He had seen a number of press photographs of Roger Burton; a head and shoulders in the corner of an interview, a dark neat head with a short black moustache. He had imagined, without quite knowing why, that Burton would be small, dapper and ambassadorial, with possibly a somewhat bandbox air. He was utterly unprepared for swaying shoulders, the pointing of a toe, a precise high-pitched voice, stressed syllables.

  From his manner of speech Guy expected his host’s handshake to be flabby. It wasn’t, it was firm. It was not though its firmness that Guy noticed so much as the texture of the skin, its soft pneumatic quality. A sudden uncomfortable suspicion struck him.

  At dinner from his seat on Renée’s left—it was a party of ten covers at a narrow table—he studied with curiosity the frescoes on the wall, a trailing tropical landscape, a succession of bays and beaches, of bending palms and dusky figures before attar huts. “It’s rather like Tetriakov,” he said.

  “It is Tetriakov.”

  “But he died six or seven years ago.”

  “And I didn’t marry until ‘twenty-one. I know. This was Roger’s house. I didn’t alter anything, except my own room and study. I’ll take you to see them afterwards.”

  Which was her way of saying, ‘This is Roger’s house, and Roger’s life, and Roger’s friends and I’m a loyal wife to him. But all the same I have my own personal and private life. No one can take that from me.’

  She was an attentive and an easy hostess. It was a five-course dinner, but the courses were served in quick succession, as though they were going to a theatre afterwards. By nine o’clock the women had left the room; as Roger came down to the other end of the table to take Renée’s place, Guy was conscious round the table of a general atmosphere of expansion; as though each was saying to himself, ‘At last.’

  Guy braced himself. Now, he thought. He turned to Roger.

  “I was reading Oscar Browning’s Memoirs the other day,” he said. “I wondered how much it was due to him that there should have been quite such a very brilliant collection of young men at King’s at the beginning of the century.”

  Roger looked surprised, but gratified.

  “How very flattering that you should ask me that; that you should be interested in my crusted period. Fancy your reading the O.B.’s memoirs. Yes, we all owed a lot to him.”

  He chuckled reminiscently. He told stories about O.B., all of them to the old man’s credit. He quoted the quatrain that had been written when his love of the table was adding to his girth:

  “Oh be obedient great O.B.,

  To nature’s stern decrees;

  Though there can be but one O.B.

  You may be too obese.”

  “One could make fun of him, of course,” he said, “his snobbery and his vanity. Do you remember that story about his receiving no visitors after King Edward’s death and having the butler announce that he was not at home because of a family bereavement? He was ridiculous in many ways. But though he aped the grand manner, he had it too. He was a very exciting person to an undergraduate. He had met everyone. He knew the world.”

  “He couldn’t have been nicer,” Guy told Renée afterwards.

  She smiled.

  “I said you’d like him: he’s very intelligent; very considerate. He’ll always do a kindness if he can. He’ll be a good father. You must come here and see Eric one afternoon. You must come here often; yes, you must come here very often. And before you go I insist on showing you the nursery. Roger,” she called out, “Guy wants to see the nursery. You won’t, will you, let anyone go before I come down?”

  The nursery was at the top of the house. She paused on the second landing, pointing to two doors.

  “Roger’s suite.” It was as though she had said, “We lead separate lives.”

  “I shall weep,” she said, “if you don’t like the nursery.”

  He could not have helped liking it. It was large and light and airy. It had a pale blue ceiling, spattered with silver stars. Chintz curtains over the windows matched it. The wallpaper was a serial fairy tale; Mother Goose, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in Boots. On the linoleum-covered floor before the fire was a thick worsted rug with an animal design. She flung open a large cupboard, “His toys,” she said. It was a vast higgledy-piggledy menagerie—cats and gollywogs and bears, with boxes of bricks and soldiers and clockwork dolls.

  She pointed to a door.

  “He’s in there. I wish I could show you him asleep. But Nannie’s there. Here’s a photo of him.”

  It was in profile: a full length picture of a sixteen months’ old boy, in knickerbockers and a jersey, standing beside a table holding out a ball. It looked like a photograph of any other child. He didn’t quite know what to say.

  “He’s more like Roger, isn’t he?” he said at length.

  She nodded.
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  “That’s what Roger thinks. It makes him very happy. He’s so proud of Eric. Eric’s his whole life now. I was so glad he was a boy. It was the one thing that Roger wanted.”

  The words were ordinary enough; words that any mother might have used. Yet it seemed to him that they had a second meaning, as though she were saying, “Listen well, this is the clue to my real self.”

  “I’d like you to see my room,” she said.

  It was on the ground floor, behind the dining-room, facing on a stone-flagged courtyard; a small room, serene and cool; pale cream papered walls, a secretaire; a small Queen Anne bookcase, some calf-bound books, a plain grey fitted carpet, with a small dark blue Persian praying rug before the fireplace; a couple of stiff-backed gilt armchairs, a low footstool, woven in petit-point; there were only three pictures, gilt-framed coloured prints of New England villages.

  “It’s not quite what I’d think of as your room,” he said.

  “Would you think of the rest of the house as mine?”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  “That’s why this room’s the way it is.”

  She looked at him with steady eyes.

  “There are so many things I’d like to know, that I’d like to ask you about yourself,” he said.

  “Some things are better guessed at.”

  She stepped over to the wall. She took one of the pictures down and handed it to him. It showed a broad avenue, lined with elms and maples. White-painted Colonial houses, with green-painted window frames and shutters, stood back from the roadway. At the end of the avenue was a house larger than the rest, and to the right of it a church with a pointed spire.

  “I was born near there,” she said. “That’s the church I went to as a girl. You haven’t been to America. You wouldn’t know what New England stands for. But maybe that picture will give you an idea; dignity and graciousness and grace. You’ll hear talk of Puritan traditions and rigid rectitude, but they’re fine straight people there. They pay their debts, they keep their bargains, even their bad bargains. I keep those pictures to remind me.”

  She hung the picture back. She took from the desk a silver-framed photograph of a middle-aged woman in late-Victorian evening dress; bare shoulders, the bosom lifted and tightly corseted, the hair piled high.

  “My grandmother. My father’s mother. She was half French. That’s why I’m called Renée. I spent a great deal of my childhood in her house. She was very mondaine. She believed in family pride, in the family as the unit of the State. That’s out of fashion now. ‘Keep the family united and you’ll have a country that can face its enemies,’ she’d say. She believed in reticence; that’s unfashionable as well. ‘Cover up your weaknesses,’ she would say. ‘Lock them in your heart and throw away the key.’”

  She looked at him very straight. It was as near, he felt, to a confession as she would ever come. Had he read the clues correctly; the Beardsley prints, the Tetriakov frescoes, the Chinese lacquer, the sidling gait, the sense of liberation with which the men settled to their talk; the irresistible longing for a son that came so often in middle age to that type of man. How easy it must have been for a man like Roger, worldly, charming, assured, successful, with his host’s capacity to put inexperience at its ease, to entangle the affections of a girl in her late teens, an American girl with no pre-knowledge of the type. If he had read the clues correctly, how bitter the revelation must have been.

  “And on the seventh, that’s Tuesday,” she was saying, “I’ll come to tea with you.”

  Her voice was firm and her eyes were resolute with the integrity and pride of her New England ancestors; women who had made their bargains and had stood by them; firm and resolute too with the mondaine wisdom of a grandmother who had known and had accepted the necessity for compromise. He was conscious for the first time fully of the nature and magnitude of the gift that she was bringing him. This was not just an episode. And in that consciousness, he became conscious too of the responsibilities and obligations that that gift entailed. Loyalty must be matched with loyalty. Faith must keep faith. He felt proud and humble simultaneously.

  “I can’t think what you see in me,” he said.

  She smiled. She raised her hand. She patted his cheek, fondly.

  “If you can go on wondering that,” she said, “you’ll make me very happy.”

  Franklin came back on the first of April. “All Fool’s Day, so suitable,” he said.

  Barbara’s school had broken up the day before. In her fifteenth year brown-haired, brown-eyed, with a large mouth and white very even teeth, she had with her long slim legs a clumsy coltish look. She was a lively girl and laughed a lot.

  She was thrilled with the news that Franklin would be at home that summer. It would make all the difference to her week-ends. Franklin was not only her favourite but her hero; she gave him not only a favourite’s but a hero’s welcome on his return. She flung herself into his arms, then stood back, looking him up and down.

  “You must be terribly clever, being allowed to leave school so young,” she said.

  They all did their best to make Franklin’s homecoming happy. His favourite dishes were ordered and champagne served. “By the way,” Guy remarked, “I’ve put you down for the Hampstead Cricket Club.”

  “Fine. Have they got a tennis court?”

  “Yes, but what’s that to do with it?”

  “I’ve got to take some exercise, and you surely don’t imagine now that I’ve left school that I’m going to give up a whole day to cricket.”

  “I thought you loved the game.”

  Franklin laughed.

  “I liked it well enough; being out in the sun, and the general feel of it; white flannels and green grass and trees. Then when you timed one right, the way the ball went when you got it in the drive; oh yes, I enjoyed all that, and at school there wasn’t anything else to do in summer. In London there’ll be quite a lot.” He paused and chuckled: “I really believe that I only made myself fairly good at cricket to get one back at those stuffy schoolmasters. They thought it so important. I didn’t think it important in the least: yet I was as good as they were at it. Every time I made a fifty, I felt I’d scored off them.”

  Heavens, thought Guy, this younger generation! He mustn’t, he warned himself, get like Rex. But even so, it was a different generation.

  That Saturday Guy played in his last football match, at Twickenham, against the London Irish. ‘I shall never do this again,’ he thought as he laced on his boots.

  It was a warm, sunny day, almost cricket weather and too hot for football. The London Irish were a weak side that year, and very few spectators were on the touchline. There was an end-of-season atmosphere about it all. Within ten minutes the Harlequins had scored three times, then the pace slackened off. At half-time Guy noticed that his knees were clean. He remembered how as a fag in his first term at Fernhurst he had rubbed them with mud to acquire a battle-scarred appearance.

  At the start of the second half, the Irish rallied, scoring from a penalty; but the rally soon petered out and Jimmy Grant was across the line again.

  Guy glanced at the clock over the northern terrace. Sixteen minutes left. How often at the finish of a hard fought game, had he not looked anxiously towards it, urging it to hurry when his side held a narrow lead, to delay when they were two points down. Now it was marking off his last quarter of an hour as a footballer. He felt he should be making an occasion of this last game, heading a series of dramatic dribbles. But the ‘Quins were too far ahead. He could work up no excitement.

  The final whistle went. He raised his arm. “Harlequins, three cheers for London Irish.” Never again, he thought, as he walked slowly off the field, in the declining sunlight. He should, he knew, be indulging a mood of sentimental reverie, but he could not summon up the appropriate emotions.

  On his last evening at No. 17, Guy was the only one of the family to dine at home. Margery was out with one of her young men, Franklin had taken Barbara to see The Vortex at the Everym
an. Guy’s move was in no sense an occasion, it did not mark a break in a tradition. He had been away so much, at school, at the war, at Oxford. No. 17 had been a perch, rather than a home for him: a place where he kept his clothes and books. It had been always understood that he would move out one day; sooner or later he would marry. No feelings were hurt when he told his father of his plans.

  “I’ll be leading a rather different life when I give up football. I won’t have to keep in training. I’ll be going out more in the evenings. I need to be nearer in. I ought to do some entertaining.”

  His father had agreed. “A very sound idea. From the firm’s point of view especially; you ought to be taking my place now, in that kind of way. Small dinner parties to special customers, in a way that you can’t manage when you are living here. I’ll see about raising your expense account.”

  The actual move would only involve a couple of trunks, and a few cases of books and pictures. There was no good-bye atmosphere, no ‘sending off’. At the same time there was inevitably an air of sentiment about the last night at home; Mr. Renton grew reminiscent as he and Guy sat alone over their port. He talked of his own last evening here, on the eve of marriage. “I was sitting in that very chair. I can see your grandfather so clearly, with his white hair and whiskers, and his velvet coat. There was just the two of us.”

  “Was he very sentimental about it all?”

  Mr. Renton smiled.

  “You know what your grandfather was, you know what those Victorians were like.”

  Guy did not need reminding. His grandfather was always talking about death. He would preface remarks about the future with a ‘when this exhausted frame is at last at rest under the trees in Highgate Cemetery, I hope, my dear boy, you will remember. . . .’

  Most Sundays Guy and Lucy had been brought out to High-gate from their house in Kensington; matins first, then lunch with their grandfather at No. 17. Those lunches were among his most vivid memories. The house in Highgate had been as much his home as the one in Kensington. He had always thought of it as the house that would be one day his. His grandfather had encouraged him. On his way back from church he would point out the May tree in front of the village coaching inn, “In time to come, my dear boy, when I am no longer here and you walk back from church with the lady who is to be your wife, I hope you will tell her how much your grandfather loved that tree.” He would point to a picture over the mantelpiece in the smoking-room, of a British soldier, his head bound with a blood-stained bandage, helping a wounded comrade at Balaclava. “I had that picture in my rooms at Oxford. It was the first picture I ever bought. I was very proud of it. I’m not sure now that it is a particularly good picture. But it has been with me all my life. I hope, my dear boy, that when your father has come to join me in the Highgate Churchyard and this house is yours, you will leave that picture there above the mantelpiece. I should like to think of you pointing it out to your son and saying, ‘This was the first picture that your great-grandfather ever bought.’