Guy Renton

by Alec Waugh

  He knew that he was being silly, that there might be the simplest explanation for Renée’s silence; something, anything, might have happened in the middle of the day: she might have had to go out of London at a moment’s notice; or fulfil some engagement that had kept her away from the telephone while he had been with Margery; perhaps she had tried to call him at his office to find the number busy. There were a hundred explanations, each far likelier than the one that tortured him, but his nerves were jangled. He’d better run himself a bath, that might make him sleepy.

  As the water splashed into the bath, the telephone began to ring. His heart lifted. Only one person would ring so late.

  “Darling,” she said, “I’ve had the oddest feeling all the evening. I’ve felt you were unhappy. I started getting it at half-past eight.”

  Half-past eight, the exact moment when he had come into Bolton’s to find Roger there. “Such an odd feeling and it grew stronger. I tried to ring you at your flat; there was no answer. I tried your parents’ house and I tried the Wanderers. I was getting desperate.”

  “I was at Bolton’s.”

  “So I’ve just learnt. I ought to have remembered that but I’d forgotten you were a member. There are so many things I ought to know about you and I don’t.”

  Her voice had taken on a fond and railing note: it was like a warm cloak flung about cold shoulders.

  “But where have you been all the evening?”

  “I’ve been at home.”

  “At home?”

  “Um-um.”

  “Then, darling, why——?” She cut him short.

  “You wouldn’t have understood. It’s one of those feminine things: I like to be alone occasionally, by myself; have food sent up to me on a tray, sit on the floor, spread all my letters out, decide which ones I’ll answer; do some sewing: myself to myself. I need an evening like that, every now and then. That’s why I didn’t tell you. You might have laughed at me, or you might have tried to persuade me to come out with you: as of course I’d have wanted you to do. I’d have been furious if you hadn’t. And you would have succeeded. I’d have been glad you had. But at the back of my mind I’d have been resentful. You’d have infringed my privacy. So I didn’t tell you. And I didn’t see how you could find out. It was a thousand to one chance you did. But as it was, well the moment Roger came in and told me that he’d met you I knew why I had been worrying. If it’s any consolation to you, I can assure you that you spoilt my evening. I’ll have to have another to make up next week.”

  They laughed together: a laugh that told him how little need there was for him to attempt any explanation. She knew what he had felt: she always knew what he had felt: there was that strange telepathy. She must love me, he thought, if she’s so aware of me.

  There was a pause: the kind of pause that came in their closest moments when they were side by side, smoking a cigarette, unutterably at one. As always it was she who broke the pause. “It’s a long time since we met,” she said.

  “It’s far too long.”

  “If I could disengage myself for lunch to-morrow, could you too?”

  He had a long-standing business engagement but he did not hesitate.

  “I hope you won’t be in too much of a hurry to get away,” he said.

  “Oh no, I’ll stay for tea.”

  11

  Guy had expected that Margery’s plan to take a flat would be met with parental opposition. It wasn’t. Mrs. Renton on the contrary welcomed the move.

  “We’ve seen more of you, Guy, since you took a flat; and a much nicer side of you. Before you only dined at home when you had nothing to do more amusing or because some plan had broken down. In one case you’d be disappointed and short-tempered, in the other you’d be overtired and go to bed early. Now you come out when you want to see us; we make an occasion of it. And because we haven’t been seeing you for odd five minutes every day you’ve a lot to tell us. I’m sure I’m much more in touch with you now than I was two years ago. I hope it’ll be the same with Margery.”

  As regards himself very certainly it was. Margery took a flat off the Fulham Road, within three minutes’ walk of a 14 bus-stop, the bus that passed within a minute of his flat and it was easy for her to drop in on him on her way back from work. The advertising proposition put by her new friends had been approved; she had joined their firm and when they had any work to discuss they found it pleasanter to sit in a flat than in an office. Sometimes they would dine together afterwards. He enjoyed those dinners. He had never seen her looking, he would not say prettier, but more vivid. Her eyes were brighter, her hair had a gloss, her cheeks a new transparency: “You must be in love,” he said.

  “I’ve never been so happy.”

  One morning she asked if she could bring round a friend.

  “A male?”

  “A male.”

  The male was called Michael Drummond. He was twenty-nine, just old enough to have served overseas, tall, dark, broad-shouldered, pale-faced, and very thin. He had a short dark moustache and a military manner. He was well-dressed in a quiet urban way. He smoked continually. His conversation consisted largely of setting questions and the telling of anecdotes of which he possessed a large repertoire. He had been at Marlborough and knew a number of men with whom Guy had played football. There was nothing Guy felt remarkable about him. There were so many men rather like him that he suspected he might fail to recognize him at a second meeting. But he quite liked him. Drummond seemed a straightforward decent kind of man who if there had been no war would have become an empire builder, going up to one of the smaller Oxford colleges and then passing into the Colonial Service, in Malaya, the Sudan, or India, to a life that Somerset Maugham had recently described in his latest collection of short stories The Casuarina Tree.

  War had broken up that pattern for him. As an ex-officer, used to the independence of an adult life, reluctant to put himself back under scholastic discipline, Drummond had jumped, on demobilization, at the offer from a senior officer of a post as junior sales director. The post had folded up in the first post-war slump of 1920, but by then he had made other contacts; filling various employments on a commission basis, he was now allowed in lieu of salary to occupy a room and use a telephone in a Kings-way office. He shared a flat in Kensington with two other men.

  He had moved from job to job but there had been no time when he could not order a new suit, when he had had to worry about catching the last Tube to avoid the taking of a taxi home. He always had enough loose change to stand a round of drinks or lunch a girl. But all the same he was living on a shoestring.

  How long could it go on, Guy wondered. Might not Drummond be the seed cast on stony ground, that grew up too fast, that had no roots in itself and withered in the sun. He might, but at the same time he was highly personable; they made a good team, he and Margery, inviting each other’s opinions, without deferring to them, meeting upon equal terms. They genuinely seemed, apart from everything else, to like each other—and from the way that every now and again they looked at one another there seemed to be a good deal else.

  Next morning Margery called Guy up. “Like to give me lunch?” she asked.

  They lunched at the Isola Bella; at one of the tables in the narrow corridor extension by the picture of a monkey grabbing at a bottle of Chianti beside a girl with head backlifted, a butterfly hovering above her lips. It was presumably one of the pictures that restaurateurs receive from painters in settlement of overdue accounts. “I don’t suppose it’s any good,” he said, “but it’s always appealed to me; that hovering butterfly symbolizes something; like the Grecian Urn.”

  “I expect you dined here for the first time with somebody romantic.”

  “On the contrary, I was all by myself. I’d just got commissioned. I’d arranged to meet a brother officer. He was sent suddenly overseas.”

  “Perhaps that’s why you liked it then. You had a long while alone to brood; to think of all the wild things that you’d be doing now you were an of
ficer with a bank balance of your own. I suppose you did have a wild time, didn’t you?”

  He shook his head. “I was two years too young. I hadn’t had any pre-war life. I’d no friends of my own in London. I was in France half the time. I spent my leaves at No. 17; when I was in camp in England, it was usually in some dreary place like Salisbury Plain.”

  “And I’d pictured you having the gayest time. Don’t you feel cheated sometimes?”

  “I used to. But not these last three years. If I’d had that kind of time I might not have appreciated Mürren quite so much.”

  “Perhaps she guessed that herself.”

  “Did she? I don’t know. Even now I don’t know what it was she saw in me.”

  He paused, turning back his thoughts: that first time he had lunched here by himself he had, as Margery had guessed, brooded over the romances that waited him. How surprised he would have been could he have foreseen the future: the ten celibate years relieved by the occasional climax to a rowdy Rugger night at Brett’s or Dalton’s: then only Renée. How dull it would have seemed. How thrilling in comparison would have seemed the football laurels, the blue at Oxford, the cap at Twickenham that then he’d not even dared to hope for. Yet in retrospect how shadowy and unsubstantial were those triumphs in comparison with these months with Renée, and the hope of all the years with her that stretched ahead. But he hadn’t, he reminded himself, come here to discuss his problems.

  “I liked your friend,” he said.

  She flushed. “I’m glad you did, I hoped you would.”

  “He seems to have none of those disabilities that you were complaining about in your other beaux.”

  “He’s my best bet so far.”

  “Am I to take that to mean . . .?”

  He paused, his eyebrows raised interrogatively. She shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m afraid of marriage. So much is attached to it; it’s all so public. If, your first season out, you fall for someone eligible, well, that’s fine. But if you miss it then, as I did, if you’ve been around, you’ve seen so many marriages go wrong; you’ve been in love yourself and fallen out; you don’t think of love any longer as a miracle that’ll go on for ever; and as for marriage itself, for its own sake, one can get along nowadays so very well without it: anyhow when one is young. Flats of one’s own, no chaperones, no one minding what one does unless one makes an exhibition of oneself; and if it all breaks up, why no one’s hurt except oneself. There’s no publicity, no family conference, no feeling awkward when you meet mutual friends. You do see what I mean?”

  He nodded; yes, he saw all right. If it were anyone but his own sister, he’d encourage her; with one’s own family one was overcautious, arguing against their taking risks that one would take oneself. He mustn’t start being stodgy. “Why don’t we have a party one day soon? I’ll get another girl: dine at the flat and then go dancing somewhere.”

  “That would be fine. Michael would love that. He thought you marvellous—old blue, old international,”

  “I’ve almost forgotten I was ever that. None of Franklin’s set would have ever heard of me. How did you meet Michael by the way?”

  “Oddly enough through Franklin.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought they had much in common.”

  “You’d be surprised. Franklin gets around.”

  “Nothing about Franklin would surprise me. I’ve no idea how that boy lives.”

  They had their party; but thanks to Franklin it was very different from the one that he had had in mind.

  A week later Franklin came into his office with a triumphant grin across his face. “Well, old boy, I told you, didn’t I, that I was going to fool you all by making a highly suitable alliance. You can congratulate me. I’m engaged.”

  “Who to?”

  “Pamela.”

  “What Pamela?”

  “Pamela Duke, of course.”

  “Pamela Duke? But she’s only Barbara’s age.”

  “And that’s eighteen. A very proper age. Juliet was fourteen, our mother nineteen.”

  “But you yourself?”

  “I’m twenty-two. Four years difference. The right amount. I always felt there was far too big a difference between our parents. The auspices could not be better. Believe it or not she’s crazy over me.”

  “And how do you feel about her?”

  “I’m the kind of person who responds to what other people feel about him. I like people who like me. If a pretty girl is crazy over me, it’s almost automatic for me to be crazy over her.”

  “What a feminine remark.”

  “My dear old boy, how frantically B.M. There’s no such thing as the hundred per cent male or the hundred per cent female. Freud’s taught us that. You couldn’t find anyone normaler than Margery, but if she hadn’t got some secondary masculine characteristics she wouldn’t be able to carry on in business. The hundred per cent female is a Dora Copperfield, all tears and flutters. I’ve got my feminine streak too. But it’s going to be all right, I promise you. It’s got to be.”

  He paused before that ‘It’s got to be’. There was a look of resolution in his face Guy had not seen before: as though he recognized that he stood or fell by the outcome of this venture: a look that Guy was to remember afterwards.

  “Have you told Father?”

  “I’m leaving that chore to our mother. She’ll be ecstatic over it.”

  Guy did not need telling that.

  There was a board meeting on the following day. Early in the morning Mr. Renton rang through to ask if Guy could lunch with him. They met at the Traveller’s. “I’ve ordered a Cham-bertin,” his father said. “My doctor tells me that Port and Burgundy are too strong for me, that I should stick to white wines and claret, but I need sustaining. I suppose you’ve heard our news.”

  He talked about the need to be sustained but in point of fact he accepted the situation with considerable composure.

  “Your mother’s delighted I need hardly say. And really, my dear boy, I’ve got to a point where I’m delighted at anything that makes her happy. Besides, when all’s said and done, why shouldn’t it? In my parents’ day girls regularly married in their ‘teens; nature meant us to marry young; I’ve always maintained that it’s one of the drawbacks to our civilization that a man of our class isn’t in a position to marry till he’s nearly thirty.

  “It’ll be steadying too for Franklin; his status as a married man. Up to now he’s always been in the second place; he’s always been ‘your brother’; he’s never shown any jealousy, but it must have irked him. The Athenians got tired of hearing Aristides called the Just. No, I’m sure it’s the best thing possible. Pamela seems very girlish sometimes, or she does to me; but that’ll pass. She comes of such sound stock. From the firm’s point of view, of course, it’s a most fortunate alliance: keeps Pamela’s shares within the family: yes, frankly, I’m delighted. I hope old Duke is. Does he know by the way? Quite like these children to have forgotten to tell him. I know that before I proposed to your mother I saw her father first: but of course times have changed. I wonder if he has heard. He’ll be at the board meeting, of course . . .”

  Mr. Renton paused; a fussed expression on his face. “Don’t run away afterwards, dear boy, I’m very bad at this kind of thing. Stay by and back me up.”

  But there was no need for any backing up. That was obvious from the expression on Mr. Duke’s face as he came into the board-room. It was not exactly a smirk for there was mischief in it. Self-satisfaction mingled with a kind of impudence. There was a long agenda, none of it of a controversial nature: business was going well: the Chancellor of the Exchequer might pile fresh duties on to wine and spirits but the public was still adopting the profitable policy of economizing on necessities and not on luxuries. It could have been in fact a boring meeting, and was, no doubt, for the other five directors; but between the three senior partners there was an entertaining undertone of dramatic irony.

  The twinkle never left Du
ke’s eye: the look of a man who had something up his sleeve. When the meeting finally broke up and tea was brought, he purposely delayed the departure of the other directors, as though he were trying to keep his old colleague upon tenterhooks. When at last they were alone, his smirk became a grin. “Wouldn’t the best thing be to have that young rascal up here right away,” he said, “so that we can ask him what he means by it?”

  If he had expected his future son-in-law to be embarrassed he was disappointed. Franklin checked when he came into the room and saw the three of them alone. He had not expected this kind of interview, but he was equal to it. He smiled, his disarming smile.

  “If this were a magazine story, this is the point where the hero is offered a junior partnership,” he said. As before, when they had lunched at the R.A.C., Guy had the sense of Franklin being in control of the situation. He was putting them at their ease, not they putting him.

  A week later in honour of the engagement there was a family dinner at No. 17. Guy drove out Margery. “I’m happy about it,” she said, “as far as I can be happy about any marriage.”

  “You say these disillusioned things but you don’t sound bitter.”

  “Me, bitter? Why should I be bitter? I’m leading the rich full life.” Indeed he had never seen her looking happier. There was a glow of health, a fulfilled look, about her. “Young Pamela’s got a job,” she said. “But maybe she’ll never realize what a job it is. Franklin is kind, you know; a useful characteristic in a husband.”