by Alec Waugh
He asked her if she was free for dinner. She shook her head. “I wish I could. I’m hours late already: the poor man will be furious. But I couldn’t hurry this excellent champagne.”
She was dining, she told him, at the Hambone Club.
“I haven’t been there for three years. Is it just the same?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Rugger hearties in plus-fours, pansies in high-neck jumpers and notices round the walls about work being the problem of the drinking classes.”
His car was garaged, so he took a taxi. He dropped her at Ham Yard, then told the driver to turn back up Piccadilly: there was a traffic block and he tapped the window. “All right,” he said, “you can let me out.”
It was a cold dry night: moonless, but starlit. He stood for a moment at the top of St. James’s Street looking to his right, past the lighted shop-windows; the Sandeman’s Port sign; the dazzle of the Circus: Fortnum’s gilded clock. He turned to the left. On one side lay the dark stretches of the park, the street lamps dipping in a long, narrowing vista—it was only at night that you could see the shape of streets—on the other, the jagged skyline of Piccadilly. It had altered a lot, that skyline, since the war. ‘The proposed site of the Park Lane Hotel’ no longer presented its note of bankruptcy; the Savile Club had been driven northwards beyond Berkeley Square: the bow windows were vanishing, superseded by straight tall blocks of masonry. It wasn’t the same place any longer, so his father said; to his father, that notice board ‘Last days of Devonshire House’ had been the death-knell of a whole way of life; but to himself London was no less magical: it had still the same sense of imminent adventure. He wondered where he should dine: it was a choice between the Wanderers and Bolton’s, a supper club in St. James to which he had been recently elected. How pleasantly London was organized for the man with enough money to indulge his preferences: a city of easy credit and wide alternatives; always something different to do, some new atmosphere to be savoured; the sense too of being at the core of things, of being in touch with the men who were behind events.
He decided on the supper club. Bolton’s in itself was a typical example of the variety of London’s life. Until a year ago he had not even been aware of its existence. Privately owned by a member of the Upper House, it consisted of the ground floor and basement of a small house in a side street, south of White’s. On the ground floor was a billiard table that was rarely used and a number of chairs that served as a repository for hats and cloaks. The sitting-room, the original kitchen, was arranged in a series of alcoves and settees; its walls were decorated with stuffed fish and’ birds and Vanity Fair Spy cartoons; a large dresser decorated with a Spode dinner service faced an open range at which you watched your dinner being cooked. Its dining-room contained only two tables: the larger one seated ten and conversation there was general. The other table seated two and was rarely used.
The club was catholic in its membership; it drew upon the Brigade of Guards, and the junior ranks of the Conservative party, but it also enrolled athletes, musicians, barristers. Though its membership was large, rarely more than twenty were there at any given time. It stayed open late and could be very lively when the House was sitting and junior cabinet ministers came in after a debate for a late supper, with the talk informal and informed.
Guy never knew whom he might meet there. On this occasion and very much to his surprise he found Roger sitting by himself, beside a glass of sherry, reading the evening paper. Neither had realized that the other was a member. It was typical, they agreed, of the privacy of London life that two friends could be members of the same club a year and never know it. “I presume that you haven’t dined,” said Roger.
Guy shook his head.
“A fortunate eventuality. I wish I could consider it prudent to suggest that we should share a bottle.” It was tradition in Bolton’s that you drank beer with your supper and vintage port with your coffee, and the wine list was mediocre. Nor were cocktails served.
Guy ordered himself a double whisky. His nerves were jumpy. He was not only surprised but upset at finding Roger here. Why hadn’t Renée told him that Roger was dining out? He had been home since six o’clock. Was anything wrong? He could not ask straight out; he had to be devious.
“Did you and Renée enjoy that party of the Armstrongs? I found it rather dull,” he said.
“I am afraid you must be getting blasé: why not indeed? a recherché bachelor like yourself: particularly now that you are out of training. Renée and myself with our simpler standards found it not unamusing.”
“I rather thought Renée looked a little tired.”
“You did? I had not noticed. Only this morning she was remarking on how very well she felt.”
She could not be ill in that case. Was something the matter with the boy? The nurse’s evening off, Renée sitting in the nursery while Roger went to his club. “It’s a while since I’ve seen that boy of yours,” he said. “Does he show any signs of being mathematical?”
“At the moment he seems destined for the ring rather than the dais. An exceedingly tough young man.”
So that wasn’t the explanation either. What on earth could she be doing? She had talked to him that morning on the telephone. Why hadn’t she mentioned that she would be free that evening? He felt anxious, worried, fussed. He gulped his whisky. It no more calmed his nerves than would ginger ale have done.
The steward came up to warn them that their soup was ready. Five other places at the table were already filled. The discussion was political. A junior Conservative candidate was just back from Italy. “The best run country in Europe,” he was saying. “The lira’s stabilized: the streets are clean, the trains run on time: the Pontine marches are being drained; in a few years there’ll be no Roman fever: and they’re making a real colony out of Libya. They’re encouraging Italians to settle; but they expect them to work when they get out there.”
It was the kind of talk that he had heard from Rex; he would have liked to have asked some questions, but Roger was a bad listener. At his own table he encouraged his guests to talk: but there he was in the position of a conductor, controlling an orchestra, welding the various instruments into a harmony. When he was a guest, and when he was in a neutral atmosphere he liked to dominate the conversation. When that was impracticable, as now, he concentrated upon a duologue: detaching himself from general talk.
“I scarcely suppose that you have made any summer plans as yet,” he said. “But I’m meditating a villa in the South of France. There is a considerable summer season now, so I’m assured. At one time everyone had fled by Easter. But now the craze for sunbathing is turning Juan les Pins into a resort. Couldn’t we lure you for a week before you go to Bordeaux for the harvest?”
“It’s an idea.”
Guy tried to make his acceptance sound enthusiastic, but dark thoughts were chasing through his brain. What was Renée doing? Surely Roger would not be dining here unless she had some date. Roger went out to formal dinners, giving Renée warning in advance, but he would only come to a casual place like Bolton’s if Renée had said: “Darling, could you amuse yourself alone to-night, there’s something special that I want to do.”
What could be special? She had no parent over here; no relative as far as he knew. If there was a friend who wanted her advice, why hadn’t she mentioned it that morning? Why hadn’t she said, “It’s such a bore but that ass Sybyl Forsythe has got herself in the absurdest jam and I’ve got to hold her hand this evening”?
They telephoned each other practically every day. They discussed their separate routines. How often had she not said, “I want to be able to picture you doing whatever it is you are doing. I want you to be able to picture me.” There was only one reason for not having told him. She had not wanted him to know. What reason could there be but one?
“Fashions in places always follow the same course,” Roger was continuing. “In the first place they are discovered by Bohemians, by painters and by writers who want a plac
e out of the way, somewhere unspoilt that’s picturesque and cheap. They find one, then they paint it and set novels there. Society starts to patronize it because it’s heard it’s quaint. Soon it’s the mode. Then it becomes expensive, the Bohemians can’t afford it any longer, they move on somewhere else. That’s what’ll happen to the Riviera now. The Bohemians will be deserting Villefranche and St. Tropez.”
Guy nodded in agreement. “It’s the same with Soho restaurants. I can remember the Isola Bella when the food came up in a lift right in front under the street window.”
He did his best to keep the talk light and easy: but his thoughts were tangled. What other reason but one could Renée have for not wanting him to know that she had a date that evening? It was five days since they had met. Those five days, two of them a week-end, had passed for him with the hurry of eventlessness. For him nothing had happened. But what a lot could happen in five days. Had not four days framed that whole Mürren episode? In what spirit had she come to Mürren? Had there been someone already in her life when she left London? Someone of whom she had begun to weary, perhaps without even knowing it, of whom she would not be sorry to be rid? She was not secretive, but she was reserved. She only told him about herself the things she wanted him to know. She discouraged anything that came within the remotest range of cross-examination. She had led him to assume that he was the only man in her life since her marriage. But she had never actually said so. How was he to know? How quickly it had all come about at Mürren. There had been no resistance, no long campaign. She had sat at her dressing-table, waiting. “So you have come then,” she had said.
The steward was leaning forward at his side with an inquiry. “Yes, I’ll have a port, a large one.”
“Could you recognize this for what it is?” asked Roger.
Guy lifted the glass, inhaled its flavour, sipped it, rolled it round his tongue. “It’s got me fooled,” he said. “I’d say either a vintage character, or a vintage wine that’s being drunk too soon. A Boa Vista ‘twenty-three perhaps.”
“Or again an older wine that has been decanted carelessly.”
“It might be that.”
The talk turned to wine. For Guy it was like the playing of a record. He could hear himself talking, without needing to follow what he said. He was reliving that last time he had seen Renée.
Roger was at a Masonic Banquet. Renée had called for him shortly after six. He had bought a jar of caviare at Fortnum’s. Instead of drinking cocktails they had sat over the fire sipping a light, cool Chablis. He could not remember anything particular that they had said. It had been an intimate casual drifting from one subject to another. They had gone out to dinner early. Renée had suggested the Café Royal. It was the first time he had been there since his cocktail party. “Barbara and Pamela were so thrilled,” he told her. “They thought it was very wicked. They asked me to point out the dope fiends and the white slavers.”
She laughed. “Those friendly kittens. Franklin dined with us by the way the other night.”
“He did?”
“Roger was very struck with him. He thinks he can do something for him, though I don’t quite know what.”
Intimate, casual chatter, and then just when they were finishing their dinner, she had caught across the room the eye of an acquaintance.
“Darling, do you mind terribly, I must ask him over. He’s a friend of Roger’s. He’d be hurt if I didn’t. Besides, it might look suspicious.”
The acquaintance had been joined by another acquaintance; then a couple. Soon it became a party, with a pile of chicken sandwiches upon the table. They had planned to go back to his flat early, and had piled up the fire in expectation, but it was close on midnight before the group dispersed.
“It’s late,” she said. “Do you mind very much if I go straight back, I’m rather tired.”
At the time he had felt happy that they should be on such easy terms, that they could have such confidence in each other that she could ask him that: that love-making could be so unpremeditated that even as you might go out to dinner prepared to make an occasion of it, and then have acquaintances upset your plans, find yourselves tired at midnight and drop her at her door, you might on another occasion buy a book or ornament, take it back to your flat to have her say, “I can’t stay more than a second but I must see how it looks,” and then suddenly, unexpectedly find yourselves making love. That was the way it was with them, the way it should be. When she’d called up next morning he had said, “It shows how in love with you I am, if I can think of last night as a perfect evening.”
That was how it had struck him then; but how did he know that she had not specially chosen the Café Royal because she had visualized the possibility of an acquaintance interrupting them, of a party forming at their table, so that she should have an excuse for saying she felt tired.
Was she already bored with him, feeling the need for change? Was history repeating itself: had there been during these last five days some equivalent for Mürren? Had she on the evening before she came out to Switzerland dined with some man who had counted the days to her return, in the happy confidence that he could pick up the threads where he had dropped them? With bitter vividness he recalled a play in which he had heard a woman say, ‘The start of a new love affair loses half its kick if it doesn’t involve walking out on someone, if I can’t say to myself, “I’ll never need to ring that number again ever.”’
“How do you find your 1915 Burgundies?” Roger was inquiring. “They should be at their peak. But I’m not at all sure that they are not a little passé.”
The use of the word ‘passé’ and the ultra-French way that he pronounced it sent a shiver of irritation along Guy’s nerves. That precise dilettante voice; that mincing manner and those swaying shoulders. If only he had had a real man to deal with there would have been a show-down long ago: a real man would not have stood for a wife living across a passage, or if he had, whatever woman he had got involved with wouldn’t have. She would not be satisfied with a man’s spare time. She’d want a whole man or nothing.
He’d thought himself lucky at the start that Roger was that kind of man; demanding nothing of a wife once she had produced a son for him, beyond her presence at his table as a hostess, her watchfulness as a mother for his son. Guy had felt that he was getting all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of marriage: the intimate security of acknowledged love with none of its attendant responsibilities, with none of the domestic routine that dulls the fine edge of loving. He had thought he was getting it both ways; he wasn’t: you never could: he wasn’t sure that he was even getting it in one way. He was imprisoned, fettered, tied: he could never ring Renée up: he had to wait till she called him: he had to fit his programme about hers, be there when she was in the mood for him; for that clearly was the way it was: she did not always ring him up when she was free: she had not this evening after all. Where was she? What was she doing? What was the explanation? Here he was sitting beside the one man who knew, who could settle his disquiet: and he could not ask him.
“By the way,” Roger was saying, “your brother, Franklin, dined with us the other night.”
“He did? He hadn’t told me.”
“I don’t suppose he’s had a chance. It was only a few days ago, a last minute invitation. I was so glad that he could manage it. He has such charm; two or three of us remarked on that, and such intelligence.”
For the last half-hour he had been wanting to ask Roger that but hadn’t been able to since he had learnt from Renée of the party. He could, of course, have learnt from Franklin; but he had not wanted to mention it to Franklin; he had not wanted his brother to know that he was in such close touch with Renée. He was being, he knew, ultra cautious; but you had to be cautious in such a situation. He remembered Renée saying once, “I have to be very careful not to repeat to Roger any piece of gossip that I’ve had from you. He may ask me where I heard it. If I say from you, he’ll ask me when I saw you. I can say we’ve been talking on th
e telephone, thank heaven for telephones; how did Madame Bovary manage? but I must be careful not to have it happening too often.”
“Yes,” he told the steward, “another port: a small one this time.”
“In what way did you find Franklin intelligent?” he asked. He would like to be invisible to see what Franklin was like in a neutral atmosphere, away from relatives. He wondered how Franklin struck people, how Franklin behaved. “Did he talk a lot, was he a raconteur; did he make witty interjections?”
Roger shook his head.
“It’s hard to say. I think he gives an effect of being intelligent largely by the way he listens to a conversation.” How like Franklin, to give the impression of being intelligent without proving it, without making an attempt to prove it.
Usually when he went to Bolton’s Guy would sit for half an hour or so at one of the alcoved tables over a final tankard, joining one of the groups if there was anyone he knew; but to-night he felt restless, in no mood for general talk.
“Why not stay here a little and I’ll drive you back,” suggested Roger.
He shook his head. “It’s nice of you but I need a walk and I don’t want to be back too late.”
It was cold and he walked fast. Two hours earlier he had been thinking with appreciation of the variety of London’s life. Was he, himself now, a symbol of that variety, walking back to his flat, fretted by an anxiety that he could share with no one, while the stream of traffic roared past him, east and west, the long low shining limousines, the squat snorting taxis, the cumbersome swaying buses. All these different people, in their different classes, different money groups being swept in their separate conveyances on their separate private missions.
It was twenty past ten when he got back. The fire was out; the room looked very dismal with its dirty glasses; the ashtray littered with red-tipped cigarettes, a crumbled savoury upon a plate. He wished he had tidied up before he left. He had fallen out of the habit. When he came back to the flat after seeing Renée home he had liked to find traces of her—a glass with a rim of lipstick; the newspaper she had read; a cushion that her head had dinted—but now this litter of his and Margery’s accentuated his own loneliness. He moved the plate and glasses into the kitchenette; washed them up; emptied the ash-tray; changed the water in the flower vase: pottering about the flat at the rate of a slow motion film: trying to delay as long as possible his retirement, knowing he would be unable to concentrate his attention even upon a thriller, dreading the sleepless hours that awaited him.