by Alec Waugh
“Shut out, you, out of my life!”
She nodded. “Just a little.”
“If you’d given me the slightest hint.”
“I didn’t want to hurry things. I knew the right time would come of its own accord. I’m taking a long view, a very long view of us.”
Yes, it was a successful party. Roger was impressed by Franklin. “One of the most intelligent young men I’ve met in a long time, such natural charm. I prophesy a very brilliant career for him. I hope when he comes down that you’ll bring him round to see us.” Jimmy asked Margery to dinner. Guy was left with the two girls and Franklin.
“An agreeable old quean,” was Franklin’s comment upon Roger. “Wants to come down to Oxford and meet the younger generation. Who’ll I invite, aesthetes or hearties; think he’s got a taste for rough stuff?”
They went to the Café Royal. “Wonderful,” said Pamela. “It’s very wicked, isn’t it?”
She looked round eagerly, trying to pick out the dope-pedlars and the courtesans. “Surely that man with the beard is something. Look at that woman with the short hair and the brocaded coat and the high collar, I’ve never seen anyone like her, not anywhere.” She and Barbara kept up a running duet of comment and interrogation. They were enchantingly young. Most of their conversation was directed towards Franklin. They worked on him like a pair of gangsters, talking about him to one another. “Do you think we could persuade him to ask us up for Eights Week?”
“Hasn’t he someone else he’d rather ask: is he keeping some dark secret from us?”
“Do you look at his post? Does he get letters in scented envelopes?”
“Don’t you think you ought to steam them open?”
Franklin played up with relish: talking to Guy as though they did not exist, but with his talk entirely directed at them. “Remember that Polish countess who sent me the gold cigarette-case,” and “Remember the time we were playing baccarat in Monte with the P.O.W.” It was all very juvenile and very gay and there was a lot of laughter.
It was over two weeks before he again saw Margery.
“How’s your ‘walk-out’ with Jimmy Grant?” he asked.
“It isn’t.”
“Wasn’t it a success?”
“We had a pleasant enough evening. But it’s always the same with me and that kind of Englishman.”
“I’d have thought that Jimmy was as unlike that kind of Englishman as anyone could be. He looks like an Argentine.”
“I daresay; but he isn’t one, and that’s the trouble. We’d too much in common. The first time a man takes you out, he doesn’t quite know what’s in his mind. But no man ever asked a girl out unless he was a bit attracted. If it’s a foreigner who takes you out, he finds by the time you’ve reached the coffee that he’s run out of small talk and starts being gallant; but with an Englishman you’ve discovered so many mutual friends that you’re comparing notes about Arthur this and Susan that and really having such a good time doing it that the man forgets his ulterior motives; you don’t get anywhere and he doesn’t ring you up again.”
“The English do manage sometimes you know to fall in love with one another. The race isn’t dying out.”
“I know, I’m exaggerating, but actually that’s what did happen with Jimmy Grant; there was a kind of flicker when we met; but we finished it up amiably chatting about Betty Forrester.”
“I’d better arrange another meeting.”
“Don’t bother. I’m not uncherished.”
It was said with a quick, near-truculence. For a moment her mouth hardened. Then she smiled again. “I thought Mürren charming, by the way.”
That made him start. “How did you guess?”
“Darling, I’m not quite blind.”
“Is it so obvious?”
“Only to me and because I know you. There was just that difference about you. It wasn’t exactly that you were gentler; no, I can’t explain. There was a kind of serenity about you. The way it ought to be. I am so happy for your sake.”
That May, chaperoned by Margery, Barbara and Pamela went up for Eights Week. They returned with impressive accounts of Franklin’s charm and hospitality, they planned to go up next year. Their plans did not mature. Franklin failed to pass ‘history previous’: and the college authorities discontinued his residence. ‘There are times,’ the dean wrote, ‘when it is considered to be in the interests of the college to allow one of its members a second chance. This is not one of them.’
Franklin received the news not only with equanimity but relief. “I’ve been sitting in classrooms long enough. It’s time I began an adult life. At my age,” he reminded Guy, “you were a captain in the line in France, independent, your own master.”
“That’s hardly the way I looked on it. I was subject to military discipline.”
“No one questioned the use you made of your spare time.”
“I wasn’t aware that anyone minded your spending half your last vac. in Paris.”
“That isn’t the same thing. Besides, there’s a great deal of difference between the spending of Army pay and an allowance from your father. As long as you are drawing an allowance, a parent feels he has control of you.”
Guy wondered what was the difference between an allowance from a father, and a salary drawn from a father’s firm. He recognized that there was a difference and did not press the point.
“From the firm’s point of view,” Franklin was continuing, “I feel that I’ll be far more use to them having led the kind of life I’ve led at Oxford than if I’d spent two years with a sported oak.”
“What kind of life did your lead?”
“A social one. I broadened myself. Met the most amusing people up there. Several of them will be rich one day. They are as likely as not to bring us their accounts. For all we know I may have started the firm off on an entirely new branch.”
“I don’t suppose you can expect our parents to see it in that light.”
“Can’t I, why not? Anyhow, Mother’s delighted that I’ve come down. She thinks modern Oxford’s a sink of vice. She’s glad to have me under her eye. And as for Father, he’s never really cared for me, you know; as long as I don’t cause a crashing scandal he won’t worry.”
“Fathers like talking in their clubs; a son who leaves Oxford without a degree and his school before he’s been made a prefect, well, it does not give him a great deal to talk about.”
Franklin laughed. “Poor Father. Yes, I suppose that’s so. But think how he could talk about your football. He got much more than he bargained for out of you, he’s getting less than he hoped for out of me. It evens out. I’ll pay him back some day. You wait a year or two and you’ll find me marrying someone unbelievably eligible. When he’s got grandchildren to carry on his name, he’ll forget all about my misdemeanours now. And he won’t live long enough to see what rascals some of my sons are bound to be.”
Franklin took the whole matter so lightly that it was impossible for anybody else to take it seriously; he had so much self-confidence. It was impossible to believe that things would not turn out well for him in the end.
10
That autumn Franklin entered the firm of Duke and Renton with a yearly salary of three hundred pounds on account of any business he might introduce on commission. His mother furnished a bed-sitting-room at No. 17 where he could see his friends and read quietly after dinner if he preferred. He joined the Wellington, prefatory to his election to the Oxford and Cambridge; and began his life as a Londoner, with his mother giving a small dinner-party every Friday so that he should meet ‘nice people’.
It was a happy, family autumn, in which nothing very much appeared to happen; Barbara was ‘finishing’ in Paris, Franklin getting the feel of London and of office life. Guy had fallen into a routine. His golf game was improving. He got his handicap down to seven, he hoped to play for the old Fernhurstians in the Halford-Hewitt. Two or three days a week he would go down to the Golf School in the Strand in an attempt to ‘groove h
is swing’. He entertained the firm’s more prosperous clients and exploited the advantage of an ‘expense account’. He never wished when Saturday came round that he was going to Twickenham. He sometimes wondered if he was slipping into a rut. Was he at the age of thirty-one moving within the range of middle age? Certainly in the home he had begun to occupy an increasingly avuncular position. His father, now nearing seventy, was ageing fast. At Christmas, though he retained his chairmanship, he retired from daily duties. Guy became managing director.
Retirement was the start of a big change in Mr. Renton. He breakfasted now in bed, sitting propped among his pillows, pretending to read the newspapers, but actually working out the crossword puzzle. On warm days he strolled over the heath. On wet days he would read the weeklies in the Highgate Institute. At first he made a practice of lunching at the Travellers’ twice a week. “I’m not going to lose touch,” he said. For the first month he did so; then a very cold spell intervened, and he caught a chill. For three weeks he had to stay indoors. When the weather grew warm, and his chill was cured, he preferred a sauntering stroll in the April sunlight. He made excuses for not going into London. He had not realized, he said, how pleasant it could be to sit on the edge of the Heath, behind Ken Wood, and look out over London, thinking of all the people hunched over their office desks.
When he did go into London, he invariably returned tired and with some complaint, his Chablis had been over-iced, his chicken pie tepid, he had had to sit next to that ‘old bore Tomkins’. By the summer he had fallen into the habit of only lunching in his club before the weekly board-meetings, when he would ensure congenial company by inviting Guy to join him. In the boardroom he was still effective. He had the chairman’s technique of drawing out in turn each member of the board, of keeping the board happy, of tactfully cutting short a member who grew too diffuse; of holding the discussion to the point, of choosing the right moment to put the issue to the vote. The comments that he injected were wise and pertinent, carrying the authority of long experience. He was still an asset to the firm; he was able to brace himself for a periodic effort; but he had reached the age when he forgot names and places, when he would address Margery as Lucy and Guy as Rex. He would spend warm summer afternoons on the gallery at Lord’s; sometimes Guy would join him to find that his father in the very middle of a discussion had dozed off to sleep.
At home Guy noticed that his mother during the year that followed turned more and more to himself as the head of the family, recognizing that her husband without actually losing interest in his children had come to feel that his own job in relation to them was finished; that there was nothing more that he. could do. Mrs. Renton, nearly twenty years his junior, knew, however, that there was still a great deal to be done; and that Guy must do it.
“These next years are all-important for Barbara and Franklin,” she said. “It’s hard to know exactly what to do with Barbara. We all talk about women having the vote, about women’s emancipation, about women being able to go into competition with men on equal terms; but in point of fact what is there for a girl like Barbara? She can become a secretary, or a model. But she isn’t the kind of girl to take up a career like the law or medicine, in the way that a man would.
“Whatever they may say there still is a difference between men and women. When a man enters a profession he knows that he stands or falls by his success in it. His whole life is graded by it. That isn’t so with a woman. She has always at the back of her mind the thought that she will probably marry in the end. Her life depends not on what she makes of her career but on what her husband makes of his. She can’t be as wholehearted about a career as a man can be: not a normal attractive-looking girl like Barbara. I suppose she should go up to Oxford: yes, I’m sure she should. But I don’t know what exactly she’ll do afterwards. I hope that she’ll have the luck to meet early someone who’s right for her like Lucy did.”
“Are you so very sure that Lucy did?”
“Why of course: a man like Rex, with money. Look what a success it’s been. Those three delightful children.”
Guy smiled. His mother viewed the success or failure of her children’s marriages in terms of grandchildren.
“I only hope Franklin has the luck to find someone soon,” she said.
“But, Mother darling, he’s not come of age.”
“He may not have. But I see nothing against young marriages. They are as likely to turn out well as mature considered marriages. They talk about not knowing one’s own mind, but when does one know one’s mind in that respect? You’ll see a man of fifty who’s been married happily for twenty years, throwing over everything for someone young enough to be his daughter. A boy of twenty can fall in love every bit as deeply as a man of thirty. There’s a quality about first love that you don’t find in a second love or in a third. There’s a lot to be said for marrying a first love. You’ve shared something that you can’t share with anybody else. There’s no equivalent bond between two people and Franklin needs a steadying influence. It’s dangerous for anybody to be as charming as he is. If one’s weak that’s to say, and he is weak. We can’t pretend that he was a success at Fernhurst, he got into the worst set at Oxford, and I’m not at all happy about the kind of people that he’s meeting now.”
“What kind of people is he meeting?”
“The kind of people you read about in modern novels, the bright young people. Oh, I’m sure they’re all very smart and clever; but they’re irresponsible. None of them do any work.”
“Franklin’s working very well with us. He’s bringing in a number of new accounts.”
“Is he? I’m glad to hear it, but those new accounts probably come from these very young people that I’m worried over. It’s a dangerous profession for a boy like Franklin. He goes about with this wild group, and he has the excuse that he’s doing business with them. The best thing for Franklin would be to find some nice young girl who’d steady him, who’d provide a base for him.”
“Is there any particular girl he goes around with?”
She shook her head. “I wish there was. I’m not at all happy about the kind of girl that he is seeing.”
“What, the cheap actress type?”
“Not at all, I’d be much happier if it were. It would be much healthier. No, it’s these girls with short-cut hair; Eton crops don’t you call them; who drink all the time and go to night clubs. They go about with such unhealthy men; I don’t see how they can put up with them. Such unmanly men. The kind of girl who could tolerate the society of that kind of man could never make a satisfactory wife. And Franklin is drinking too much. Much too much. He doesn’t look well. I wish he could have gone into some other kind of business. A civil servant or a lawyer——”
“He’d need a University degree for that.”
“I know. It’s a great, great pity. But everything will turn out right, I’m sure of that. You must keep an eye on him.”
His mother rarely nowadays, Guy noted, talked to him of Margery. She was concerned exclusively with Barbara and Franklin, the young ones with their way to make. Margery had apparently been written off as a potential wife, as he had been as a husband. It seemed absurd to be deciding that Margery, who was only just twenty-two, would never marry. It was equally unreasonable on the surface to have dismissed as a prospective family man at thirty-two someone like himself whom nature had obviously destined for a home and children.
When he had looked ahead in the first years after his return from France, wondering what he would be like at fifty, he had always seen himself against the background of a home; going down to Fernhurst with a son, sitting in Big School on prize-giving, watching his son walk out from the pavilion in the blue and gold cap of the Eleven. He could not even now believe that that would never happen; and yet he could not imagine himself apart from Renée: his mother knew nothing about his life or his plans for it, but she had an intuitive awareness. She might take a narrow view but she took a deep one. It was an odd sensation; to feel that one had been d
ocketed and shelved—at thirty-two. That was in the autumn of 1928.
Early in the following spring Margery rang him through at his office to ask what evening it would be convenient for her to take a cocktail with him. He arranged to keep the rest of the evening free in case she should feel like dining with him. It was cold and he stoked up the fire. He also had a bottle of champagne cooling. Margery gave a sigh of pleasure as she came in. “Oh, how cosy this all looks. It makes it all the easier for me to say what I have to. I want a flat of my own, and I want you to back me up. I can’t go on trailing out to Highgate. I need independence.”
They sat before the fire slowly sipping at their wine, discussing where she could get a flat, what kind of a flat, how much she would need to pay for it. It was a great break in her life, he realized that: and the fact that she felt this need for independence was as significant an indication as you could wish of the way that she was living now. She had become a bachelor girl all right. But he made no reference to the obvious implications of the change. They discussed it as a practical situation, of how best the news was to be broken to her parents.
“There’s one other thing I want to talk about,” she said. “You can say ‘no’ right away, and I shan’t be offended. Are you perfectly satisfied with the way your advertising’s handled?”
“As a matter of fact I’m not.”
“I wondered if you were. Some of it looks antediluvian to me. In that case, I’ll say my piece. There’s an opening for me in a firm that’s beginning to expand. If I could bring your account, they’d take me in for certain. Will you see one of their men and let him put up his proposition?”
“It can’t do any harm.”
“Good. I’ll send him round. There’d be no need, would there, to let Daddy know that I’m connected with the firm in any way?”
“No need at all.”
“That’s just as well. He’s the most generous man in the world where his own pocket is concerned, but when it’s the shareholders’ money, even if he owns half the shares himself. . . Well, do your best for me.”