Guy Renton Page 8

  It was his way of cheating death. And in a sense he had succeeded. Living in this house which his grandfather had loved and furnished, Guy was constantly reminded of him, whereas little else remained to recall his childhood. He hardly ever had occasion now to visit the section of Kensington, between Olympia and High Street Station where he had spent his first thirteen years. The house where he had been born no longer stood. Gone too were the grocery where he had bought ginger beer—stone bottles with the corks wired down, such as no shop sold nowadays—and the tobacconist’s where he had bought his penny ‘shockers’—the green Boy’s Friend on Tuesdays, the white Boy’s Herald on Thursdays, the pink Boy’s Realm on Saturdays. Nothing was left in Kensington to remind him of the small boy in the sailor suit whose photograph stood on the desk in his father’s study. But here at No. 17 there was a solid continuity.

  He could visualize very clearly his father’s last dinner here, thirty-two years ago. How different that occasion was: his father on the eve of marriage, the start of a new life, the founding of a family: while he was only moving across London for convenience’s sake. In the year to come he would probably dine as often at this table as he had in the last twelve months. He would be certainly more punctilious in the observance of the Sunday ritual matins at St. Michael’s, then the roast joint of beef. To his father and his mother, to Margery and Barbara and Franklin there would seem no break of continuity. Yet in actual fact he was as much on the brink of a new life as his father had been thirty-two years ago. He was committed to a very serious engagement.

  What would his father say if he were to tell him the real reason for his move? He could not believe his father would be shocked, but his father had been brought up in an age that considered that certain subjects were better left undiscussed. What, he wondered, had his father’s own life been when he was young? He had married in his later thirties. He had had fifteen years of adult life in London; living in this house, going down each morning to the offices in Soho Square; sitting down between his parents night after night to a long and heavy Victorian dinner. That had been the framework of his life. What had lain beneath the surface? Sitting here, in this same chair, at this same table on that Oc’tober evening, thirty-two years ago, surely his father must have thought of chapters closing now for ever.

  Sixteen hours later, on an afternoon of mingled rain and sunshine, Guy stood at the window of his flat, looking down the street into which any minute now a grey-green Chevrolet would turn. Margery had wanted a formal house-warming with champagne scattered about his furniture. Later, he had said; in a week or two, when I’ve got used to being here myself. She had started to protest, then checked and smiled. “I see, darling, but of course, how dense of me.”

  Only another ten minutes now, he told himself.

  She was dead on time; she was wearing a tight-fitting mauve felt hat, the brim pierced by a diamond arrow. As she came up the stairs, she pulled it off, shaking loose her hair so that it fell in a corn-coloured wave across her forehead. She paused in the doorway, looking slowly round her, taking it all in, detail by detail. He stood beside her, the blood pounding along his veins. He let his hand rest along her shoulder, but she moved away. “No, darling, not yet, please, not till I’ve seen it all. You know how a kitten is in a new home. You have to put butter on its feet.”

  She moved along the shelves, picking up a tea-caddy, then a paper-weight: taking out a book: glancing at it, putting it back again; looking at each picture. “So these are your things,” she said.

  She handed him his copy of Notre Cœur. “I think you’ll see why I’ve given it you,” she said. He tried to make conversation, but the sentences trailed off: he knew that what he was saying made no sense; yet he felt no nervousness; he was sure of himself, as he was of her. She was here; that was all that mattered. She was here.

  “You haven’t offered me a cigarette?” she said. She smiled as he held the match for her: she raised her hand, laid it against his cheek, then moved away. “I must see everything,” she said. She picked up a copy of Pape’s Jurgen. “I’m glad that you’ve got this.” She stood in the centre of the room, turning slowly round, taking it all in again, in a final inventory.

  He moved beside her; put his hands under her elbows: “Surely all that butter’s gone by now,” he said.

  6

  Nineteen-Twenty-Five, the year in which Guy met Renée, was one of which the English historian would record that nothing in particular had happened anywhere.

  In retrospect, Guy was to consider it appropriate that so important a landmark in his life should have fallen in such an eventless year. Historians recounting the rise and fall of nations in terms of battles, revolutions, the deaths of kings and Acts of Parliament, fit the lives of individuals against a frame of dates; as though England, France, Italy, and Spain were separate personalities to whose victories and defeats the individual Englishman, Frenchman, Spaniard, and Italian responded as a corporate member of the body politic. Yet in point of fact the happiest moments of the individual might well coincide with an hour of national disaster, his periods of most profound despair with a complacent epoch of prosperity. The General Strike of 1926, the most important political event between the end of the first war and the Abdication, was only memorable to Guy for the part that Franklin played in it.

  For himself it was an undramatic episode. Whereas most of the Harlequins had joined a special squad based on Hyde Park, attached to the Horse Police, he on the first morning of the strike went down to the East End, booked a room in Poplar and enrolled as a Limehouse special constable. He made, he was soon to realize, a considerable mistake. Limehouse was tough all right. A number of cars were smashed and their occupants told to ‘bloody well walk home’; the police station on the first night was a shambles of bleeding scalps; it was indeed so tough that the regular police could not run the risk of having an inexperienced constable, even if he were a Rugby international, on duty at a time when there was trouble brewing. While the Harlequin squad, from its central position, was moved quickly to points where danger threatened, Guy was given the patrolling of the power station during the safe hours between midnight and 4 a.m. and again between 8 a.m. and noon. He had rarely spent nine duller days.

  On the fourth morning of the strike he went up to his club for lunch. He wanted to hear some informed gossip. He felt himself completely in the dark. The wireless was government controlled. The only two papers available were extremist—the British Worker, the mouthpiece of the strike, and the British Gazette, which the government issued from the offices of the reactionary Morning Post. The Times was still appearing in a curtailed form but it was unobtainable in Limehouse. That morning the Worker leaderette had asserted: ‘The Government-owned wireless and the Government-owned Press claim that normal life is continuing to function; and perhaps it is in the West End of London, in that small, self-centred and ultimately unimportant little world that lies between Oxford Street and the River, between Sloane Street and the Haymarket, between Regent Street and Kensington. But what about the docks, the heart of London that now lie idle? What about the industrial cities of the north that now lie paralysed? No smoke is rising from Sheffield’s chimney stacks; let those who to-day will be eating their caviare in the Ritz and Berkeley remember how at harvest the rabbits cluster in the centre of the cornfield, imagining themselves immune, though every minute the blades of the circling thresher are approaching.’

  To Guy, patrolling his power station in Limehouse, there was an ominous ring about that passage. It might be true. He remembered reading that in Petrograd in 1917 on the day of the October Revolution, as many lunches were served in the fashionable restaurants as had been on the same day the week before. He decided that a lunch in his club would give him some idea of what was really happening.

  His sphere of duty ended at midday. The Tube only ran to Aldgate. Aldgate was two miles away. But he would be in time if he walked fast, for a late lunch. He set off at a brisk pace up the Commercial Road. He had only been wa
lking a few minutes when a motor-bicycle that was moving at a great pace in the opposite direction, checked, swung round and drew up at his side. “Like a lift?” asked a familiar voice.

  He turned, and there was Franklin; begoggled, dusty, in corduroy trousers, and a college blazer.

  “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Delivering newspapers.”

  “The Gazette?”

  “Good heavens, no; you don’t think I’d be on the side of those stuffed shirts. The Worker, naturally. If you’re going up West, jump up behind: provided you don’t mind sitting on my nefarious news-sheet.”

  Guy perched himself on the back, and the machine roared up the deserted thoroughfare.

  “What do the Oxford authorities think of this excursion?” he inquired.

  “I haven’t told them: half the university’s in town.”

  “Won’t they mind your working for the strikers?”

  “Heavens, no. Oxford’s changed since your day. We’re all very left.”

  They were at Aldgate Station within three minutes.

  “Thank you very much. I can manage from now on.”

  “I can take you to where you’re going, unless you’re ashamed of being seen in Pall Mall on a machine like this.”

  “What about those papers; isn’t someone waiting for them?”

  “They can wait a little longer. It’s not often I get a chance of doing a good turn for my big brother.”

  In retrospect it was to seem very typical, both that Franklin should have taken sides against the stuffed shirts and that he should have been so casual in the performance of his duties.

  Franklin was Guy’s high spot during the General Strike: during the next few years he was to provide several more.

  In the following October shortly after Oxford had gone up, the chief accountant came into Guy’s office in a manner that was at the same time truculent and apprehensive.

  “Yes, Mr. Pilcher?” he asked. “What is it?”

  Pilcher was a white-haired man in the late sixties, on the verge of retirement. He was conscious that his mind did not work as quickly as it had; distrustful of new ideas he was ready to welcome any slips made by the new regime. As much a stickler for detail as any Treasury official, he was always difficult when you wanted a point stretched. He handed Guy a sheet of paper. It bore the arms and inscription of New College Oxford. Signed by Franklin, it was a request for two cases of vintage Clicquot, a case of Duke and Renton’s proprietory whisky, two cases of their gin, two cases of dark sherry, two of tawny port, and three dozen of a ‘good, sound Burgundy’.

  Guy raised his eyebrows. “The young man’s doing himself pretty well. What’s the rough cost of this?”

  “Seventy-three pounds, fifteen shillings.”

  “So much. It looks as though he were laying down a cellar.”

  “His account stands at the moment to our credit to the extent of more than twice that amount.”

  “What?”

  Pilcher handed him a document that filled three type-written pages. Guy read the final figure, £163 os. 6d. How on earth could Franklin have run up a bill of that size. He glanced at the dates. Two-thirds were in May. The amount brought forward from the Lent term was under £20. £150 in a single term; what had the boy been doing? And then to put in another order, for £75. Pilcher was looking at him very straight. There was only one thing to be said, and he said it, promptly. “We can’t possibly fill this second order, till something has been done about the first.”

  “I thought you’d say that, Mr. Guy, but I didn’t like to make such a decision on my own authority.”

  “Quite, Mr. Pilcher, quite. Don’t you think the best idea would be for me to drop him a little note about it?”

  “I’d appreciate that, Mr. Guy. I’d appreciate that very much. Myself, I wouldn’t quite know how to phrase a letter; in the case of Mr. Franklin, that’s to say. He’s so disarming. You couldn’t find a nicer-mannered young gentleman anywhere than he.”

  Guy’s letter was conciliatory.

  ‘Dear Franklin,’ it ran. ‘Our accounting staff is a little worried at the way your account has run into the red. Do you really need such a big new order? Or couldn’t you send in something on account, £50, say? I’m sorry to bother you about this. I know how it is at Oxford. Everyone runs up bills and spends the first years after he comes down paying them off in relays—which is something that someone like Pilcher who was trained in a hard school, finds hard to understand. It would be best really if you could run up your bills with hosiers and tailors, and keep things balanced here. That’s what I do myself,’ He wrote three drafts before he was satisfied. He did not want to be the heavy brother.

  Next morning while he was still dictating his correspondence, a toll call came through from Oxford. “I’m sorry to trouble you so early: but this matter you referred to in your letter isn’t as straightforward as you imagine. I’d better come up and see you. When can you give me lunch?”

  “The Tuesday of next week?”

  “That’s rather far away. Couldn’t you make it sooner?”

  “What about this Thursday.”

  “Fine. Where’U we meet?”

  “The R.A.C. at one.”

  “I’ll be punctual.”

  His voice was calm, assured, friendly: not a trace of nervousness.

  Guy chose the R.A.C. in preference to the Wanderers’ because he was uncertain as to what sartorial eccentricity Franklin might commit. In the R.A.C. there were three separate lunch rooms. If it came to the worst they could have a buffet lunch beside the swimming pool. Franklin however was dressed quietly if unusually, in light grey flannel trousers, a short black coat, a lavender grey waistcoat, a white shirt with a semi-stiff collar, a blue and white check tie, a crasis of the fashions of two cities. As always after a period of not seeing him for a little while, Guy was struck with his extreme good looks; he looked so well, so healthy with his fresh complexion and light hair; moved too with such an easy elegance.

  ‘I’d better do him well,’ Guy thought. ‘We’ll go into the restaurant.’

  They got a table in the window, looking across the Mall. It was a warm bright day, and the yellowing leaves shone in the amber sunlight. The large high-ceilinged room was filling fast; most of the women wore summer frocks; there was a garden atmosphere about it all. “This is the kind of day to drink Moselle, don’t you think?” Guy said.

  “You always have the right ideas, anyhow about that kind of thing.”

  Franklin paused before the qualifying clause, and the nature of his smile changed, becoming conspiratorial in a teasing way, as though he were saying, ‘It’s an awful bore, isn’t it, having to discuss these serious problems? We both of us recognize, don’t we, how ridiculous the whole thing is?”

  Franklin looked round him slowly, appreciatively. “All very agreeable,” he said. “The kind of thing I miss in my city. Let’s not spoil it by having this sword above our heads. Let’s get it all cleared up, then we can enjoy ourselves.”

  As eighteen months before at Fernhurst, Guy had the feeling that his young brother was in control of the situation, putting instead of being put at ease. Pilcher was right. Franklin was disarming, always able to wheedle people into doing what he wanted, and in a way that left them with no feeling of resentment.

  “How’s it all come about?” he asked.

  Franklin shrugged. It was very simple. They had formed a club. They were short of capital so he had offered to stock the cellar: he could get wine, he had explained, on credit, and thanks to his trade discount, supply it cheaper than the Oxford merchants. “Duke and Renton would get the same price as the trade gives them. Half of the discount would go to the club, and half would go to me. Everyone would be pleased.”

  The plan was so simple in appearance that Guy had to think fast before he saw the snag to it.

  “Surely you realize that’s illegal: you’re acting as a wine merchant without a licence.”

  “That’s a mere t
echnicality.”

  “Oh no it isn’t. We supply wine at trade terms to the family and a few shareholders on the understanding that they’ll be drinking it themselves. We don’t expect them to make a profit on it.”

  “As long as Duke and Renton make their profit I don’t see they’ve any cause to grumble.”

  “Maybe they haven’t. Anyhow what went wrong?”

  “Nothing, as far as I know. Everyone was delighted with the wines. They said they were better than they could get in Oxford. I’ve probably got the firm a number of life-long customers. Everyone was so pleased that another club to which I’ve just been elected made me their vintner and asked me to get the same wine that we had in ours. Which is why, you see, it’s so important that that order should be met at once. My new club will be out of wine unless it is.”

  “But surely these clubs don’t bank on being given wine. Don’t the members pay for it?”

  “Naturally, but you know what Oxford is. Everyone lives on credit. Members sign their bills: they don’t settle them till the end of term and not always then.”