The Balliols

by Alec Waugh

  So he argued, savagely, trying to convince himself, not succeeding wholly, turning his ill-humour upon Francis, resolved to convince somebody of something.

  “Well, what’s your trouble? That girl again?”

  Francis nodded.

  “And what’s gone wrong? Has she turned you down?”

  “Not that exactly.”

  “But she doesn’t love you?”

  “It doesn’t look as though she did.”

  “Why not?”

  “She won’t marry me.”

  Hugh laughed: scornfully, savagely.

  “Marry you! Why should she marry you? You don’t want to marry her.”

  “I do.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. You may think you do. But you don’t really. You don’t want a house, babies, servants, responsibilities. That’s what marriage is. And you don’t want that. You’re in love with her. You want to go to bed with her. And you think you can’t go to bed with her till you’ve married her. That’s the only reason that you’re talking about marriage. Come now, isn’t it?”

  Francis flushed. There were times when he almost hated Hugh; or rather, hated things about him: the spite, the loose-lipped sneer, the mottled blurring red lines below his eyes, the bullying manner that was a kind of shield to conceal weakness. Yet even when Hugh was most aggressive, there was a certain vigour and masculinity about him that Francis against his will respected. He tried not to lose his temper.

  “It’s silly to talk like that, with a girl like Marjorie.”

  “A girl like Marjorie, indeed! That old-world nonsense. The two kinds of girl. The girls that one’s sister knows and the other sort. That may have been all very well fifty years ago. It isn’t now. Girls know too much. They’ve got their eyes open. They’ve worked pretty hard to be independent. They mean to stay free. They’re out for a good time just like you and I are. They don’t want houses, children, servants, responsibilities, any more than you do; not till the settling down time comes. And that time’s a long way off as far as you and your Marjorie are concerned. Don’t you make any bones about it. She’s got her head screwed on the right way. Stop talking to her about marriage and start talking about a week-end at Brighton. Then you’ll both get what you want. And good luck to you.”

  He spoke on a note of rising heat; his face mottled, his eyes half closed; transported to an earlier period of his life; to a front line dugout to the north of Albert. It was the voice of a dead man that he was echoing. It was of another girl that he was thinking. It was that earlier self of his he was admonishing.

  “Be honest with yourself,” he said. “You don’t really want marriage any more than she. Have a good time, the two of you. They’re only three things a man needs in London to enjoy himself. Enterprise; enough pocket money to run to taxis; and a comfortable place of his own where he can take a girl. Arrange it so that it won’t be squalid. That’s all that matters.”

  And on that note of admonition he stumped angrily from the room.

  Thought Francis: “Of all the silly nonsense.…”

  He did not forget it all the same. Turning it over in his mind he was forced to admit that a great deal of it was common sense. He might be in love with Marjorie; but he was not particularly in love with the prospect of a life that included flats, babies, servants, responsibilities. He enjoyed his independence. He had no wish to forfeit it. At the same time he wanted Marjorie. He had been brought up to believe that if you wanted a girl like Marjorie you proposed marriage; that if she was in love with you she accepted you. But though Marjorie might be in love with him, she certainly did not want to be talking about marriage. “Darling, is there any need to talk about that now?” she had said.

  He had imagined that it was because she was not in love with him that she would not answer his proposals. But suppose that it was not that; that it was not she was not in love with him, but that she was not in love any more than he was with the prospect of a life devoted to babies, flats, servants, responsibilities? It had been assumed that women wanted marriage, that women wanted children. But might it not be that women wanted independence; that in the days of chaperones and parental authority they had more independence as wives than débutantes? Now they had more freedom as bachelor girls. And as regards children, since in those days women had not known how to prevent them, they had persuaded themselves that they had desperately needed what after all was the unavoidable corollary to an independence achieved through matrimony. Men did not want homes and children while they were in the twenties. But girls he had been told felt differently about these things. Why should they? Why should they, he thought. Why shouldn’t they want the same amusing time that men had? Like men they wanted marriage, home, children; one day; but not at once. Why should Marjorie because she was a girl feel differently from a man about those things? Why? He could see no reason. Girls did so many things that men did. They drove cars, they played games, they had votes, they sat in Parliaments, they had careers and cheque books. Why shouldn’t they feel the same way that men did; that the twenties was a time to be enjoyed?

  Oh, but that’s nonsense, he told himself. They are different. They must be. Of course they are.

  At the same time he began to consider very seriously the idea of taking a small flat on his own somewhere. Not because of Marjorie, or at least Marjorie was not the reason that he ostensibly offered to his conscience. He told himself that it would be fun to have a place where he could see his friends; that Ilex was too far out; that he had barely time to get home and change and get back again into London at the end of his day’s work. He must spend two hours a day of his limited leisure in tubes and buses. At Ilex he saw his parents’ friends, and his brother’s friends. He did not live his life, he lived theirs. Half the other fellows he knew had places of their own. And it was the fellows on their own, who were the most alert, had the most to tell one, had the most to say for themselves. Naturally, they lived more interesting lives. He’d never amount to anything till he was on his own. So he argued, never admitting to himself the itch, the curiosity to put Hugh’s contention to the test.

  It was clear that he must find a flat.

  What one looks out for usually one finds. It was a fellow in the Selfridge Rugger side who put him on to it. Some friends of his were running a communal establishment in Bayswater; not far from Irongate. They had a room to let. He didn’t think they were asking more than a pound a week for it, and it was furnished. It would be worth while having a look at it, anyhow. Francis went.

  There was an improvised quality about all immediately post-war living of which this particular establishment was a typical example. The house was owned to the extent of a ninety-nine years’ lease of which seventy-one years had still to run, by a family who had lost two sons and most of their capital in the war. They could no longer afford, nor did they need, a four-storied, basemented house for which in peace-time a staff of two servants had been required. They had decided to live on the two top floors and let off the two bottom floors as maisonettes. Their sub-tenants had in their turn over-estimated their assets, and under-estimated their expenses. The maisonettes had been sub-divided into flats and the flats let off as single rooms. So much so had it become a case of lesser fleas having lesser fleas and so on ad infinitum, that there were as many as ten distinct families living beneath one roof, engaging in periodic forms of guerilla battle about noise and gramophone parties and bath taps which took the shape of complaints to a senior sub-tenant or letters from a solicitor, in accordance with the nature of the grievance and the dimension of their bank account.

  The room that was available for Francis was on the ground floor and was originally part of a three-roomed flat with a bathroom and kitchenette. His room had been the spare bedroom. It communicated with the bathroom, as did the room beyond which had been the connubial chamber. The other room, the living-room, was across a narrow passage. Each of the three rooms had been converted into a bed-sitting-room with a gas fire. The flat was tended by a charwoman who arri
ved every morning at eight, got her young gentlemen’s breakfasts, scoured the flats after they had left, and departed before midday. For this she received five shillings from each tenant. The charge for breakfast was a shilling a head. If the young gentlemen wanted any meal but breakfast they must prepare it themselves on their own gas ring. Any dirty plates left in the kitchen would be washed up by the charwoman next morning. Strict privacy was ensured between the occupants of the three rooms by a system of signals. Each door had three cards: Out, In, Busy. A similar system arranged for an equitable allotment of the morning bath water.

  “You don’t have to take it for longer than a month at a time,” Francis was told. “So that if things aren’t comfortable, you don’t stand to lose much.”

  To Francis it seemed the kind of scheme that depended for its success entirely on the behaviour of the other tenants. It might be hell. It might be fun. Anyhow, it would be an experience. And though the room itself in its present condition might not be particularly attractive, the expenditure of a very few pounds would make it cosy and comfortable and picturesque. It was the kind of room which was worth taking a little trouble over. Its proportions were good: high, with a pleasantly moulded ceiling and a marbled fireplace: an Adams copy. The wall-paper was inoffensive: a neutral buff colour against which pictures would stand out well. “If I were to get some decent curtains, a standard lamp, a covering for that divan and a few cushions.…”

  Francis made his decisions quickly.

  “I’ll take it, from to-morrow week. Have you got a tape measure? I want to take the measurement of the windows.”

  He knew exactly what he wanted. Back at the store he did not waste one second of the salesman’s time. “I want dark green damask: sage green, with a faint gold pattern. Yes, that’s it. And I want it to run on wooden rods: black, with a big kind of blobule on the end. You know. Now, how long will that take? Ten days? Now, couldn’t you do it in a week for me? As an exception? It really is important. Eight days? That’s splendid. This is the address.”

  The curtains would cost him a good twenty pounds. The standard lamp, the divan spread, the cushions. There wouldn’t be much left out of fifty pounds. But there was that fifteen hundred in the bank in War Loan. They’d let him overdraw against it. There was no need to worry. And he’d got to make this place as jolly as he could.

  He didn’t tell his parents what he had done: not in so many words. A friend had lent him his place for a month, he said, which was in its way true. No, it wasn’t really a flat, he explained. A bed-sitting-room. Oh yes, there’d be someone to look after him. An old woman who’d do his breakfast. He’d probably be back at Ilex most nights for dinner. Yes, there was quite nice furniture there, but the pictures were pretty awful. He thought he’d take one or two just to cheer it up a little. But he must rush now, really. He’d got to pack.

  He took a well-stocked trunk. Half a dozen pictures, a cushion or two, a rug out of a room that nobody bothered to use now. The curtains would be up when he arrived. He was trembling with nervous excitement. He did hope it looked all right. He’d never furnished anything before: only a school study, and that was different. “Wait here,” he told the cab driver. “I’ll be back in a moment to help you with that trunk.” He could not wait to see what his room looked like. He did not want to share that first sight of it with anyone. He shut his eyes as he flung wide the door, kept them shut till he had closed the door, then opened them.

  He gave a gasp of pleasure. It was better than he had dreamed: the curtains falling in heavy gold-shot folds, the cushions green and black and primrose against the dark shadow of the divan; the standard lamp with its bright brass stem, and the coloured parasol effect of its silk shade. And it’ll look even better when the pictures are up, when the rug’s down. It’ll look better still to-night when it’s lighted up.

  He had not told Marjorie that he had taken the flat. He had made no plans for the evening. He had arranged to meet her at the junction of Edgware Road and Oxford Street. It was a half-way house for both of them.

  He took care always to arrive there first. “Well, and what’s it to be this evening?” That was her first question. It was put rather petulantly. It was a typical May evening; cold and windswept, with a suspicion of rain. The prospect of a long slow twilight. She was shivering, her coat drawn tightly round her, huddling; her face half buried below its collar. A forlorn expression. Francis was glad that it was such an evening, that sunlight and blue skies were not luring them to the Heath, to Richmond, to the river. He chuckled to himself, placing his hand guidingly on her arm.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you. You wait.”

  She looked up quickly, questioningly.

  “A surprise? What? Tell me!”

  “You wait.”

  The house was barely five minutes’ walk away. He talked with an intangible fluency all the way; not really knowing what he was saying; very conscious of the quick, puzzled glances that she kept casting up at him; her bewilderment increased with every step they took. She could not understand why she was being led away from the bright lights, the crowded thoroughfares where restaurants and cinemas abounded.

  When he turned from the pavement, towards the steps of an imposingly-porticoed mansion, she stopped dead.

  “Now what is all this about? Am I being kidnapped, or what?”

  “It’s all right. I live here.”

  “You … what?”

  But he did not give her time to dispute the point. He had taken her by the arm, he had led her down the passage, had guided her through the matchboard partition of the sub-tenancy, had flung open the door of his own flat.

  “This is my flat. I’ve just taken it.”

  It was her turn to gasp. As she stood in the doorway, looking round her.

  “Your flat … but … oh, darling … it is lovely … really!”

  And it was. In a cosy, intimate, friendly way. Though the month was May and the light had not faded in the sky, the curtains were drawn, the fire lit, the lamp turned on. It was a room of warmth and light and kindly shadows. The kind of room where you could relax, where you could be yourself, where you could leave your troubles behind you in the passage, where you could feel that nothing existed outside this circle of warmth and friendliness.

  “I must see everything,” she was saying. “You must show me all of it.” She had taken off her coat, tossed her hat on to a chair, was busy opening cupboards, peering behind curtains, examining the material of the cushions, the curtains, the divan spread; looking at the pictures; opening the bathroom door; asking to have everything explained to her: how he managed about meals, insisted on seeing the kitchen. “What fun one could have with a place like this.” Returning to the room, resuming her examination, finding a bowl of eggs and rows of tins behind a curtain: New Zealand whitebait, a tongue, peaches.

  “You’ve got food here?”

  “I thought we might have a picnic.”

  “Do let’s.”

  “I’ve got frying-pans and things.”

  She helped him collect plates and knives and glasses. They got in each other’s way and laughed. He opened a bottle of white wine that he had borrowed from his father’s cellar.

  “I don’t know what it is, but it’s better than what my father’s friends give me when they take me to the Ritz,” she said.

  And the omelet tasted better than anything he had eaten there

  “Now let’s open one of those tins,” she said.

  “One ought to dance between courses,” he reminded her. “I’ve got a gramophone.”

  They pulled back the rug: the narrow square of boarding did not make them envious for the ivory-smooth floors of Brook Street.

  They laughed and danced, opened more tins than they could need possibly, finished the wine, vowed they had never enjoyed themselves as much at any restaurant.

  “Let’s move these plates away into the kitchen,” he said. “There’ll be more room to dance.”

  But when they were back again she
said that no, she’d like to rest a little.

  “I’ll pull the divan round, then we can throw cushions on the floor and lean against it.”

  He pulled it round. “That’s it. No, that light’s shining in your face. I’ll cover it.” He draped a thick school scarf above the globe; so that its light was as dimmed as the moon’s is when a cloud conceals it. The glow from the fire shone ruddily warm upon them. He opened his arms to her.

  Close, close against his heart he held her. His kisses soft at first and gentle, barely a touching of the lips, grew longer, more lingering, tenser. “Ah, my sweet. If you only knew how much I loved you.” It was such a moment as he had used at other times as the prelude to what she had described as his “forever speeches”; protestations of how he would love her always; of how he would work for her; how he would arrange their life for them; of the happiness of being with her at last for always. He made no such speeches now. The memory of his brother’s tirade fired his enterprise. His kisses grew fiercer, deeper; his words wilder, tenser. “You’re so lovely,” he whispered, “the loveliest thing beneath the sun. I want to kiss you, all of you, here and here and here.” His fingers fluttered along her body. She sighed; shuddered; drugged by his words and kisses. He was fired, in part by her nearness, by the touch and the response of her; half by the dizzy, heady excitement of an approaching conquest. He had not believed it possible, he could not now believe it possible. And yet it was possible. If he kept his head, if he kept his courage. In his arms she grew weaker, limper, as he grew bolder; her very weakness a response. Her closed eyes, a challenge; her quick breathing, her arms limp-hanging by her sides, a call to courage. Even now he could scarcely believe that it was really happening, that it was his lips that were pleading. “Darling, you are so lovely now; as you really are you would be so much lovelier. Please, my darling, please!“ Was it his lips that whispered that, was it his ears that heard her low, scarcely articulated murmur: “Look away then, darling, for a moment, please.”? Was it his ears that a moment later heard her whisper, half-shy, half-proud, “Am I really as lovely as you thought?” Was it to his eyes, his lips, his hands that loveliness was yielded?