by Alec Waugh
Even next morning he could hardly believe that it had happened. So Hugh was right, then. He could never have believed it was so easy; that the fortress would fall at the first really resolute assault. It was so much easier than he had ever thought. At the same time it was so much lovelier than he had ever dreamed. It was the sudden discovery of an enchanted garden.
As he sauntered slowly that morning during his luncheon hour from the Marble Arch eastwards towards Orchard Street, it was with new, awakened eyes that he watched the eddying flow of shoppers that thronged that crowded pavement; the exquisite and languid ladies with their chauffeured cars drawn up waiting by the kerb; the shop-girls, secretaries, typists, in their trim office clothes, spending their hour of liberty before shop windows. Girls in light summer frocks and floppy hats hurrying, a smile upon their lips, as though happiness were on its way to meet them. It was a familiar enough scene. Yet these girls with their set or smiling faces; with their slow or hurrying steps, their Paquin or cheap muslin frocks; on this morning of revelation seemed new to him; were the creatures of another world: a world that he had just discovered. An enchanted garden was bright with colour; rich and many-scented; its fruit and flowers waiting to be picked.
VII
A few days later the agony column of The Times contained the following advertisement:
Opportunity for ex-officer to improve position. Qualifications: bachelor between thirty and fifty employed continuously during last two years at salary of not less than £400 not more than £ 600. Write Box 773.
Thought Hugh: “That seems to meet my case.”
He scarcely expected to receive an answer to his application. An advertisement such as that would fill a mail bag. He was considerably surprised to open in the following week a typewritten letter, signed “P. Burke” and bearing the heading of the St. Charles’s Club.
“Dear Captain Balliol,” (it ran) “I thank you for replying to my advertisement. If you will call on me here to-morrow afternoon (Tuesday) at 3.45, I will discuss my proposal with you.”
Hugh believed that a slight unpunctuality makes a good impression. He arrived at the St. Charles’s Club at seven minutes to four.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Burke is expecting you,” the porter told him. “Page, show this gentleman where to leave his hat and gloves.”
He was received by a tall, ample man with a bald head, a paunch, a white imperial, a waxed Shakespearian moustache and an ambassadorial manner.
“The kind of man who doesn’t ask you anywhere unless he’s meaning business” was Hugh’s mental verdict.
The tone of his reception was encouraging.
“Ah, yes, Captain Balliol. It is charming of you to come. It was charming of you to answer my advertisement. I have made some inquiries about you, naturally. I will recapitulate what I have discovered. You will interrupt me if I make a mistake. You are thirty-three years old. You are of a Wessex family. You are an old Fernhurstian. You served in the Machine Gun Corps. You were wounded and awarded the M.C. You are now a director of Peel & Hardy’s. You receive a commission on the wine that your friends purchase. Times are not good. The last balance sheets of Peel & Hardy’s were not encouraging. You probably, all things considered, account yourself lucky to be able to earn as much as five hundred pounds a year.”
Mr. Burke paused. His speech was fluent, his manner smooth, his smile urbane.
“Summing me up,” thought Hugh; “talking, so as to gain time; talking, so as to create a congenial atmosphere. I don’t like him. I quite definitely don’t like him. But I’m prepared to put up with a good deal from anyone who’ll make it possible for me to run my flat again.”
“You’re right so far,” he said.
Mr. Burke inclined his head.
“I have received, naturally, a number of answers to my advertisement. There are, alas, a great many ex-officers anxious to better their positions. But simple though my requirements were, a great many of the applicants did not satisfy them, particularly as regards marriage. Several seemed to imagine that a man living apart from his wife could claim to be a bachelor. In many cases he can claim to be, no doubt. But not in this. Now, there is one point on which I want to make quite sure before I go any further. You are, I know, a bachelor. But have you complications of any other sort?”
The small lines round Hugh’s eyes wrinkled into a smile.
“It is many moons since romance tarried upon my pillow,” he replied.
Mr. Burke’s smile was a wintry sally. “Not much sense of fun, this fellow,” was Hugh’s thought.
“Admirable,” said Mr. Burke. “In that case …” He paused again, then looking Hugh very directly between the eyes, began to speak more slowly. “As you will probably have guessed from my advertisement, I am looking for a man of breeding and education, old enough to have common sense, young enough to have as much of life before him as at his back. The stipulation that he should have held a post of over four hundred pounds for a couple of years is a proof of capacity and reliability. A man with a salary of over six hundred pounds would scarcely be interested in my proposition.”
He paused.
Hugh made no comment, but the pulse of his heart was beating hurriedly. “Don’t be a fool,” he warned himself. “Don’t excite yourself. Nothing’s going to come of this. Don’t build castles in the air. Don’t be a fool; don’t get yourself worked up.” But all the same he was absurdly, desperately excited.
Mr. Burke continued: “Have you ever considered what is your most valuable possession?”
“He’s coming to the point now,” Hugh thought. “Whatever answer I give will be the wrong one. I’d best be flippant.”
“My wardrobe, I suppose.”
Mr. Burke smiled.
“In a sense, yes; but your wardrobe is scarcely a marketable asset. It is not in the same category as your passport.”
Hugh stared at him.
“A passport? That’s something that anyone can get.”
“That any Englishmen can get. Have you thought how many people there are who, for various reasons at a time like this, want to remain in this country but cannot, because they have not a British nationality? Captain Balliol, I will come to the point. I have a client, a very charming lady. She is thirty-three. She is handsome. She is not poor. It is very important that she should have British nationality. It is very important that she should have a husband who will not interfere with her, but will appear with her in public on certain stipulated occasions; and will do her credit there. She is prepared to make a substantial allowance to her husband. I may add that my client is an honourable, law-abiding person. It is for personal, not public or political reasons that she wishes to take up her domicile in England. I want to know whether you would be prepared to consider becoming the husband of my client.”
Hugh’s heart sank.
“So that’s what it is,” he thought. “And I daresay there are a lot of chaps who’d leap at it. I’m sure Burke’s got a hundred and one reasons to explain why it’s quite all right. And because I’d give anything to believe it was, if I listened I’d start agreeing with him. I might accept. If I once start listening I’m done for. There’s only one thing for me to do and that is this!”
He rose to his feet.
“I just can’t think how you managed to get elected to a club like this,” he said.
But it was less of Burke’s election to the St. Charles’s Club, he thought, than of the position of the ex-officer to whom such an offer could be made with the confident assurance of its acceptance.
When you think what we were six years ago: nothing was too good for us. We were the white-headed boys, They were going to make it up to us when the war was over. Only six years ago; less than that. Look where we are now. Thank heaven I haven’t reached the point where I’ve got to accept an offer of that kind. Not yet, anyhow.
VIII
With Francis’s establishment in a flat, Ilex became technically unoccupied except by Helen and her parents. In fact, however, it was as c
rowded, as it had ever been. Francis had followed Hugh’s advice; he was soon to follow Hugh’s example. A depleted bank account drove him to sub-let his room and return to Ilex. He lived like Box and Cox, a perpetual letting and sub-letting. One week in his flat, the next week not. On the whole more in than out. In contrast to Hugh, whose flat was now sub-let on a yearly tenancy, and might almost be called a resident at Ilex.
Lucy was back in England, now that the rubber slump was over, waiting for her husband’s retirement and the knighthood that rewards the colonial administrator’s renunciation of the pomp of official dignities for the obscurity of a chair beside the fireplace in the Oriental Club. She spent the summer in a furnished villa at Frinton, her winter in West Kensington hotels. There were crises however: financial and domestic; a cook that had given notice; an overdraft; an inability to find the kind of house she wanted: the children and their Nanny would then be despatched to Ilex. Sometimes, when the crisis was particularly acute, she would come herself.
Quite often Ruth would ring up during the afternoon and invite herself to dinner. Victor had to go and look after some business organization. Now and then his business would take him for a day or two to the north or Midlands. He was playing a great deal of golf. There were tournaments at Le Touquet to be run across for. On such occasions Ruth would spend a night or so at Ilex. She felt lonely by herself, she said.
In a way the life of Ilex was very much what it had been during the war; with the family technically scattered in houses and flats and seaside villas, yet with the house never really empty with one or other ringing up to invite him or her self for a meal, a week-end, a night or two. There were always bags and unexpected greatcoats in the hall, and messages scribbled on the pad beside the telephone.
This there was of difference, though; a difference that completely altered the atmosphere of Ilex. In the war Ilex had been home; the place to which Ruth had returned from her canteen, Hugh from his training camp, Francis from school, that Lucy far away in Malaya dreamed about. It was the first place they went to. They would be rather there than anywhere. Now their thoughts were in other places. Ilex was a last resort. They came there because there was nowhere else to go, because they were lonely, because the person they wanted to be with was somewhere else, because something had gone wrong: a nurse had been given notice; because they couldn’t afford to be where they wanted; because of rents and overdrafts. The atmosphere of a happy reunion had been replaced by one of discontent. To have one’s suit case unpacked at Ilex was an admission of failure. One had tried to do something and one had failed to do it. Here one was, back again.
Hugh, who was at Ilex nearly all the time, most closely typified this spirit. While for the others Ilex represented their periods of discouragement—the dark hours, days, weeks in a year that was for the most coloured—Hugh was never apart from the atmosphere of Ilex. He and it were one. It was because of him very largely that the others came to think of their old home in terms of failure. The moment they stepped across the hall they were conscious of his depression.
And, indeed, Hugh during those months was a despondent figure. He was rapidly becoming the typical ex-officer type; the man who, though young in years, is, and knows himself to be, a failure. He is not potential any longer. He is ambitionless. He is in the last analysis unhelpable. Every month Hugh’s commission account grew less. He had less money to spend. And money is, for the majority of men, the measure of their self-confidence. It is hard not to feel that the world has got the better of you when halfway through the month your account is overdrawn. Every time Hugh went into a Soho instead of a West End restaurant, he would think “So this is all I’m good enough for now.”
His appearance had altered, too. He was growing fat, unhealthily, with mottled cheeks, with puffiness under the eyes, with a thickened chin. His clothes were too tight. To conceal it he wore jumpers instead of waistcoats and left his coat unbuttoned. But even so, he had a puffed look. He had lost his athletic look, acquiring a kind of slouch that was half hang-dog, half aggressive, as though at the slightest provocation he would draw a gun. And in point of fact, he had become excessively splenetic.
He was always angry about something: about the government, the behaviour of a football crowd, a stage success. He read through the paper in the morning as though he were hunting for an opportunity to say, “I ask you now, isn’t this the limit?” He usually found such a peg for his irritation. And invariably he would address whoever happened to be in his company as though they were the defendants of that of which he disapproved. “Now tell me, what on earth does Baldwin consider to be the point.…” It was like a counsel’s cross-examination; so challenging that you found yourself driven to retort; very often to find yourself in the end defending something which you on the whole disliked. Hugh was rapidly becoming an extremely uncomfortable person. You felt when you were in his company that you had no right to find life amusing, that the only way to enjoy yourself was to have a thoroughly good grouse. It was not much good going out with him unless you were prepared to make a heavy evening of it. He grew angry with you if you did not drink glass for glass with him, and if you did drink glass for glass with him he got so angry with things in general that you had to hold yourself in pretty carefully to avoid a row.
We can all of us call to mind someone out of our acquaintance who, during the war, typified gallantry, courage, a spirit of youth and of adventure, but whom time has changed into a querulous, ill-humoured, spiteful failure; who drinks too much, borrows money, hates afterwards the people he borrowed from, develops an inferiority complex, fancies that everybody is against him, runs down and has suspicions of everyone who tries to help him; who has become, in short, impossible. We have all of us one such acquaintance. And in each case the verdict on him must be the same. “If there had been no war, he would have not become this person. Weaknesses to begin with there may have been. But had it not been for the war, those weaknesses would not have been developed in this way. Circumstances placed too heavy a strain upon him.”
Certainly in Hugh Balliol’s case this was so. And certainly during those immediate post-war years he was degenerating into the kind of person over whom shoulders are shrugged to-day. “It’s just no good. We’ve tried our best. He’s impossible. He must be let go to the devil in his own way. There’s nothing to be done about him.”
Whether Balliol was aware of this change in the atmosphere of his home, it was impossible to tell. Ageing now, he maintained that same impersonally interested attitude to his work, his family and the curious trance-like manner in which his wife watched the current of events that streamed past her. But to his friends and his acquaintances, his life, or such of it at least as was centred in his home at Ilex, gave the impression of some force rushing rapidly to the point of disintegration.
On a warm, sunny morning in the spring of 1924 Ruth rang up Hugh, asking if he could lunch with her that morning. Hugh was disengaged. He usually was nowadays. He could not afford to ask people out himself, and he had grown such bad company that his friends rarely bothered to invite him. He accepted the invitation with a bad grace. He had grown touchy, easily offended. “There’s no need now for her to bother to ask me a day or two ahead. She knows I’ll be doing nothing. She wouldn’t run the risk of having to refuse something that was really amusing because of me. She thinks she can use me as a last resort, when everything else falls through. And she can, of course. I’m not going to refuse a decent lunch.”
Ruth may have noticed his lack of grace, but she did not show that she had.
“That will be lovely. The Ritz grill at 1.15. It’s years since we really saw each other.”
He arrived there at twenty past. As he had expected, she had not arrived. He ordered himself a cocktail, and leant back against the green and white cushioned settee, thinking that it was over a year since he had sat there, over six months, for that matter, since he had been inside a West End restaurant; remembering the days when his life had been lived against such a setting;
listening with amusement to the apologies with which woman after woman hurried in with frantic breathlessness. “I’m sorry. I’m dreadfully late, I know I am,” and the conviction with which men who had been waiting twenty minutes assured them that they had only just arrived.
He was glad that Ruth made no excuses of that kind. She was late, she knew she was late. And she didn’t care. She looked at Hugh’s glass, saw that it was empty. “Then let’s go straight in to lunch,” she said. “I’ve already had a cocktail.” But she hesitated in the glass doorway of the restaurant. “No,” she said. “On second thoughts I think we’ll have lunch upstairs.” She turned quickly and walked down the passage towards the staircase. “It will be cooler upstairs,” she said.
But Hugh knew well that that was not the reason. In that moment’s hesitation in the doorway he had seen, as she had done, across the room at the centre of the three tables under the flowered dais, Victor alone with an extremely pretty girl. So it was true, then; that whispering he had heard that it wasn’t only business and golf that took Victor to the Midlands and Le Touquet; that were responsible for Ruth’s sudden self-invitations to her parents’ house. Victor’s love of danger and a gamble had led him in post-war England to its most obvious expression.