The Balliols

by Alec Waugh

  As he clattered noisily downstairs, Jane came out on to the landing, a velvet dressing-gown pulled round her shoulders. It was scarcely a minute since she had been woken. Yet her hair was smooth and her eyes clear. It was extraordinary, Balliol reflected, that women should demand that twenty minutes before a mirror over those final touches that made no appreciable difference, yet be able, literally, at a moment’s notice to present themselves with the poise and finish of a mannequin. Even her voice was level.

  “What’s the matter, Edward? Is there anything wrong? Didn’t I hear Hugh’s voice?”

  “He’s going to France: to-morrow, or this morning rather. He’s downstairs telephoning.”

  “Telephoning? Whatever about?”

  “How should I know? There! Listen!”

  The bell from the hall was faintly tinkling, the receiver clasp was being rattled. But there was no sound of talking. They waited, shivering slightly in the cold passage, not speaking; waiting. Balliol took a sidelong glance at Jane. What was she thinking? What was she feeling? A son going to the war.… Her face wore its habitual, vague, impassive look. Once again, as at other crises of their lives, he marvelled at the way in which a man and a woman can live for years in happy, contented harmony and yet remain strangers to each other.

  There was a final tinkle of the bell. Then the sound of a chair pushed roughly back along a polished surface, the scrape of nailed shoes on oak, and Hugh was bounding up the stairs.

  “No luck. I’ll have to try again, later. Now look here, you two; you run along and get some sleep. I’m expecting you both to come and see me off. I’ll call you when it’s time to start. I’ve got a hundred and one things to do: packing, letter-writing and all that; barely three hours to do it. So you run along and leave me to it. I’ll see that you’re not late.”

  He stood between them, an arm round each of their shoulders. He gave them a friendly, an affectionate squeeze. He was clearly resolved not to make a sentimental occasion of it.

  “Now run along.”

  He half-led, half-pushed them towards the door.

  It was after two, and in little more than three hours they would have to start getting up. It was barely an hour since Balliol had folded away his Times and put the key beneath the door. But Balliol had reached the age when a man sleeps fitfully; when sleep, once disturbed, is not easily recaptured. Through the long hours of the night he lay sleepless, hearing the occasional sounds of Hugh’s footsteps, of a moved chair, a suitcase, hearing every ten minutes through that long three hours the vain tinkle of the telephone. When Hugh tapped on his door to tell him that it was a quarter-past five, he had already begun to shave.

  The next two hours passed very quickly; so quickly that he did not feel they were quite real He had read so many descriptions of the last morning, so many fathers had described their feelings as a train carried their sons away from them, that he could not believe it was really happening to him.

  It was so much of a rush; the dressing, the breakfast, the last things to be remembered, the good-bye to Helen. The small child being roused out of her slumber, not realizing what was to happen to the large, khaki-clad brother who lifted her in his arms to tell her that he was going to France and that he would be soon back, bringing her a helmet.

  “A spiked helmet?” she murmured drowsily.

  “Yes, a beautiful spiked helmet.”

  He had lowered her back into her bed. She was fast asleep long before the front door had shut behind her brother.

  It was still dark when they came out into the street. The lamps were throwing their cones of light on to a deserted roadway. The searchlights were sweeping the sky; their beams, now crossing, now throwing up the edges of a cloud in sharp relief. As they walked down the hill Hugh maintained an eager, excited flow of talk. Of what was he thinking, Balliol wondered. Was he aware of the last-time feeling which was fretting his mother and himself? He had taken no last look back at the house as he shut the garden gate behind him. As they walked to the station he never once cast round him that taking-of-it-all-in-for-the-last-time look with which usually one fixed a familiar landscape that one may not see again. As the tube train ran into the tunnel of Golders Hill there was just a second when you could, by craning your neck, catch a last glimpse of Ilex. On going back to school Hugh had always craned his neck. He did not now. Was it out of the Englishman’s reluctance to display emotions: a resolve to appear cold rather than sentimental? Was it because he was only too well aware that now it might be really a last look, that he had not the heart to see the roof of the tunnel cut across the vistaed outline of his home? Or was it far more simply that he was not thinking about that at all, that he was what he appeared to be, a young officer thoroughly excited to be going to the war at last? Balliol had never seen quite such an excited light in his face before; not since boyhood had he heard him talk with such eagerness and enthusiasm.

  Right up till they reached Victoria, even against the noise and rattle of the tube, he continued his excited flow of comment and conjecture. Then suddenly his manner changed, he grew nervous, worried, fretful. They had twenty minutes to spare before the train went, but he became impatient with the porter who was getting his luggage out of the cloak-room with very tolerable speed. “Hurry, hurry! I haven’t all day to wait. For God’s sake get a move on.” He walked to the platform with a quick stride that looked likely at any moment to break into a trot He looked about him quickly, anxiously; the stride broke into a trot. “Want to make sure of my Pullman seat,” he called over his shoulder in explanation.

  Balliol and Jane followed beside the luggage. It was the first time that Balliol had been to see the departure of a leave train, but the scene had no novelty for him, so often had it been described to him: in articles, in speeches, in offices and clubrooms. It was exactly as he had expected: the noise; the lights; the bustle; the groups of soldiers singing to keep their spirits up; the mothers dabbing at their eyes with rolled-up handkerchiefs; the lovers silent, hand in hand; girls with Tommies’ caps stuck on the backs of their heads, dancing and tossing up their skirts; a couple of soldiers who a few hours earlier had been uproariously and gloriously drunk, supporting each other like twin towers of Pisa on a staggering excursion down the platform: the military police, very brisk and smart, casting quick warning looks from side to side. It was all just as he had known it would be.

  In the doorway of one of the Pullman carriages Hugh was waiting with the same nervous, impatient expression on his face. He was glancing first in one direction, then in another.

  “There ought to be some people I know on this train. Can’t see them, though. One or two from the same draft. I expect they’ll cut it pretty close. Still, there should be someone. Leave train’s rather like a club. Certain to meet somebody you know. Hi, boy! Yes, I’d better have magazines. Tatler. That’ll be Fish. And the Bystander. That’ll be the new Bairnsfather. Oh, and you’d better throw in a couple of story magazines. Nash’s and the Strand. I suppose it’ll be all right about my breakfast. Not that I’m hungry. I’ve had one. Still, it passes the time and when the other men are eating.…”

  The flow of talk rattled on continuously, but there was no longer the same happy look at the back of his excitement. He was restless, worried, looking about him, hardly conscious of his parents. “Wish I could have seen Ruth before I’d gone. I suppose I can expect to be an uncle any day now. Fancy that. Uncle of a peer. I wonder if they’ll make me a godfather. Get a nice mug for him anyhow, in my name, for the christening. And you might tell Victor…” But Balliol never knew what he was to tell Victor. The worried look had gone out of Hugh’s face, replaced suddenly by an eager, bright-eyed excitement.

  “Look, there she is!”

  He pointed towards a girl who was hurrying towards them down the platform. She was bare-headed, close-gathered in a fur; very high-heeled shoes gave her a quick, shuffled, top-heavy movement. It was the first time that Balliol had ever seen her. She was young, in the early twenties. With her dark hair,
dark eyes, pale skin, her teeth very white and even against full, parted lips, with the suggestion of plump shoulders, she seemed to him a honey-pot kind of girl. She ran forward to Hugh, one hand outstretched towards him, the other held close beneath her chin, keeping her fur in place. Hugh with both his hands took hers in his.

  “Oh, my dear, and I thought you’d never come!”

  There was a richness in his voice, on his face a transfigured look of which Balliol had not believed him capable. It was as though no one else existed on that crowded platform; as though an enchanted instant were islanded beyond space and time.

  “I got your telegram.” Her voice had an eager breathlessness.

  “I didn’t think you’d get it. I’d been ringing you up all the morning.”

  “Have you? I’ve only just got back. I’ve been dancing. I’ve only just got your wire. Look!”

  For an instant she pulled back her fur. She was in evening-dress. They burst out laughing. Her hand was still held in his. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said. “Not here.”

  Beyond the bookstall, hand in hand, they stood facing one another.

  “This isn’t the place to be saying this,” he said. “It isn’t the place I’d meant to say it. I didn’t know it was going to be so soon. But it’s what I’ve been wanting to say to you ever since that first day. You’re marvellous. I’m crazy about you. I’ve only known you three months. I’ve only seen you half a dozen times. But I knew the first time, within twenty minutes, that there never had been anyone like you. There never could be anyone like you. I’ve not thought of anything but you since: planning how I could see you, living over our last meeting. Darling, when I come back on my first leave, you’ve got to marry me.”

  She gave a laugh, that was half a sigh, that was a catch of breath.

  “If you knew how I’d been longing for you to ask me that!”

  “You will?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “I suppose I couldn’t kiss you with all these people here?”

  “Idiot!”

  Balliol, standing by the Pullman’s mouth, saw the girl lift herself upon her toes, saw the fleece-lined arm clasped tight round the chinchilla cloak, saw the dark head crushed close under the low peak of the khaki cap, saw the high heels sink back upon the platform reluctantly, as though something that was winged had been forced to earth; then watched them, still hand in hand, turn back towards the train.

  Above their heads the minute-hand of the clock was nearing twelve. A station-master was waving the soldiers into their carriages, waving the civilians back. “I’ve got to get in,” said Hugh. Since the girl’s arrival, he had said nothing to his parents, had scarcely noticed their existence; and now as he kissed his mother’s cheeks, as he shook his father’s hand, it did not seem that there was anything to say. His last word was for the girl. “I’ll send you a ring from Amiens,” he said. “Do that,” she answered. Then he was at the window, one head among a row of heads. A waved hand, features that grew indistinct, a white blur, were cut from view by the curved swing of following carriages. The three who had come to see Hugh Balliol off stood beside empty rails. They turned, taking stock of one another. There had been no introduction. It was the girl who spoke.

  “So you’re Hugh’s parents. I’ve just got engaged to him. No, don’t look so alarmed. I’m not a tart or anything.”

  She laughed: the kind of laugh that did not tell you whether she were on the brink of breakdown or was simply nervous and on defence.

  “And it’s now seven and I’ve got to be typing letters in Whitehall at ten. And I’ve had no sleep. Good-bye. I must be rushing.”

  She was gone as dramatically as she had come. Balliol’s eyes followed as she scuttled away at the tripping pace that made him expect that every step she would fall forward on her face.

  “Have you any idea who that is?” he asked.

  “None.”

  “I suppose that in the course of time Hugh will enlighten us.”

  Said Jane: “I may be quite wrong, of course. One can’t see very clearly in this light, one shouldn’t judge anyone hastily, but I must say that I believe that girl wore make-up.”

  Through a window misted with heat and smoke, Hugh Balliol watched the oast-houses of west Kent take on colour and distinctness in the morning light. It was nearly two years since he had made this journey; since this journey had been a part of his life’s ordinary routine; since he had talked casually of “having to run over to France this week to see our shippers” when friends had asked him to do this or that. How surprised he would have been had he been told, when he made that last journey in the spring of 1914, that it would be twenty months before he would see Napoleon’s column over the hills behind Boulogne; and then as an officer, in khaki, on his way to a front-line trench. He wondered how long it would be before he saw it again, in civilian clothes, as a London merchant, carrying his little attaché case with its pile of invoices. He wondered, but with no precise sense of time. You could not look that far ahead. You enlisted for the duration. You lived for the duration. “Après la guerre.” The troops might sing their “When this bloody war is over” but that was a time distant beyond computation. You could see, you could plan, no further than your next leave. If he were back in those days when you could say, at a moment of indecision, “Yes, this may be all very well now, but how shall I be feeling about it in ten years’ time?” would he be engaged to a girl that he’d known three months, that he’d met six times? There’d have been interviews with parents, considerings of ways and means, the slow ritual of courtship, a careful test of the ground, with love unfolding slowly; not this eager, hungry snatching at fruit that might know no morrow. That’s how it would have been.

  Or wouldn’t it? Might there not even in those sheltered days have been a wooing as hasty, as precipitate? Hadn’t people fallen in love at a first meeting, when they had a century to make love in? Wouldn’t he have fallen in love with her just the same, even if there hadn’t been a war? Wasn’t it only that the war made it easier, gave him the right to rush his fences?” Wasn’t it simply the war made the setting different, gave one different opportunities?

  I’d have met her at some rather formal dance, in the country. There’d have been an introduction. “Joyce dear, I want you to meet Hugh Balliol. Miss Joyce Barrington.” He’d have bowed stiffly from the waist. He would have asked her if he could have the pleasure of a dance. Number seven, she would have told him. During dance six he would have thought “‘Blue dress’—who’s this I’ve got to dance the next with? There are three blue dresses that I’ve met already.” When the music for the seventh dance began he would have stood looking for a girl who seemed familiar and who seemed to have no partner, to whom after such an interval as seemed appropriate, he would walk across. “I believe that this is ours?”

  He would lead her away from the wall, into the music, he would be thinking, “Really, this kind of dance is far more trouble than it’s worth, making conversation to someone one doesn’t know.” As they danced he would open the kind of conversation that one reserves for partners at dances in the country, and she would answer in the manner that was prescribed for young women, to whom strange young men from London had been presented. Just like any other dance. Till suddenly, to his surprise, he would find that after all he was not making conversation; that he was talking easily, and enjoying talking; that he was anxious to make an effect; that he had begun to wonder about his partner; who she was, what she was, what were her interests, her ambitions; that he became impatient with the ritual dance programmes and introductions that fixed you to one dance and one dance only with a girl that you met for the first time; for the knowledge that so late as an eighth dance it was not possible to ask if she had another dance unmortgaged. “Nothing before the fourth extra,” she would say. And hours before then his party would have insisted on his going back home. “But I’ve got to see her again. I’ve got to find out about her. This isn’t going to end here. I’ve got to find
out what she’s really like.”

  That’s how it would have been if he had met her in a normal atmosphere, when it might have taken him a year or eighteen months to get to know her, when any step had to be taken thoughtfully.

  Nothing could have been more different from that, externally, than the whirlwind courtship that had just ended in his proposal and its acceptance. Yet the essential situation was the same.

  He had met her to the sound of music; only it had not been at a hunt ball in the Shires, but at a crowded restaurant in London. There had been the same reluctance at the start. He had just come up from Grantham for a week-end leave. He and another officer. They had decided to make a night of it; to order the best dinner that a London restaurant had upon its menu; then “see life.” He had been resentful when another officer, a man in the same mess, whom he rather liked, had come across to him towards the end of dinner with the request that they should join up with his party afterwards. Two of his party had had their leaves cancelled at the last moment. They were two girls too many. Their whole evening was being spoilt; it ought to have been such fun. It could be such fun. It would be, if only Hugh would come across.

  Hugh had resented the interference with his plans. “What kind of girls were they?” he had asked.

  “Very jolly. Lots of fun and really pretty. Everard’s sister.…”

  But that was enough for Hugh. He didn’t want that kind of party. People’s sisters indeed! He wanted to enjoy himself, “see life.”

  “Oh, but come on. Be a sport,” it had been insisted. “It’ll be fun, really it will. I promise you. And if you don’t enjoy yourself, you can always go. You can make some excuse. I won’t try and keep you. Give it a chance, anyhow.”

  In the end, reluctantly, Hugh had yielded. And to begin with, it had been, just as the hunt ball would have been, a tedium and a strain. There were strange faces. There were introductions. There was a flow of talk from which he felt himself excluded because he had not the necessary links with it of mutual friends and settings. There was the making of conversation. There were the attempts at dancing, impossibly unsatisfactory on that narrow, crowded floor. “How soon can I decently get out of this?”