Guy Renton

by Alec Waugh

  They arrived to find champagne cocktails being served. It was the first time that Guy had seen Pamela for a year. He would not have recognized her if he had met her in the street. With her hair cut short in an Eton crop and wearing a straight tubular tunic frock, with the fringes of her skirt shaking against her knees, she looked with her long slim legs like a schoolboy in fancy dress, particularly when she was next to Barbara who had adopted a wind-blown shingle, and was wearing a widespread panier skirt and a tight-fitting bodice. But no one could have been more feminine than Pamela. She had been given her engagement ring that morning. A simple hoop of diamonds and rubies: half the time she held her hand upon her knee so that she could take surreptitious glances at it; the rest of the time, fearing that she was being ostentatious, she sat with her arms crossed; but when she did, Guy noticed she kept rubbing the back of her left hand against the soft skin of her underarm to remind herself that a ring was there. Her eyes were bright: there was a glow upon her cheeks: the same glow that he had noticed upon Margery. Did men who were in love have the same look for women; were they recognizable by a kind of aura?

  Guy felt a sudden qualm as he looked at Pamela. She was so very young, Franklin was so erratic: he alone in that room knew how erratic. Was it fair to Pamela? Might not some grisly shock be waiting her? He shrugged. Franklin was kind, as Margery had said: and maybe that was more important in a husband than rigid rectitude; women needed to be needed; maybe those wives were happier who had problem husbands: they felt left out by the husbands who ran their lives by rule, never got into debt, never drank, never chased other women.

  He looked at Lucy. She was sitting beside his mother; she had brought up some snapshots of the children for ‘Granny’ to choose which she’d like. He remembered her as she had been in girlhood. What had happened to all that gaiety; withered, wilted because marriage had not watered it. Rex had no doubt been ‘fast’ in the way that a pre-war regular Army officer had understood the word, in terms of the Empire Promenade, the Continental, Maxim’s, and the Indian Hill Stations. Rex saw marriage in terms of a giving up of things, of a retirement; not as a beginning, not as an enlargement of horizons. A wife might be a necessary adjunct to the cut and dried routine of an English country squire, but she could never be the framework of it in the way that Pamela might be of Franklin’s life.

  He looked at Pamela giggling now beside Barbara at some schoolgirl joke; then across the room at her own mother. Mrs. Duke was in the early forties; slim with tightly-shingled silvering hair. She had a brittle, mondaine manner. In features she was in no way like her daughter. She was hard and practical. You felt that she had run her marriage. It was difficult to realize that once she had been a giggling schoolgirl flaunting an engagement ring. Her husband was fifteen years older than herself. She had had to be his slave, or ‘to wear the trousers’. Though Pamela would never look like her mother as regards actual features, she might develop, not into a domineering, not into a managing wife, but into someone who could organize her husband. Perhaps that was what Franklin needed.

  Rarely had Guy seen Franklin in higher spirits. He was smiling, gracious; not over-exuberant, but clearly delighted with himself. He was even being affable to Rex; asking questions, listening to the answers as though he actually set store by them. Guy overheard a section of their conversation. Rex was discussing the New York stock market collapse.

  “It’s far more serious than anyone over here realizes,” he was saying. “We haven’t felt it yet. In a sense we started it with that Hatry trouble: but we’re well cushioned: in a way that in America they aren’t. They rise higher and fall faster. They’ve had a number of bad slumps in their time, but the one they’re heading for is without precedent, because the boom it’s following was the most fantastic that even America has ever known. It’ll have bad repercussions here.”

  “Why do you say that? Why more than any other time?” asked Franklin.

  “Because European finance is dependent upon American in a way that it never was before. In the Edwardian era we were the bankers of the world, but now with war debts, reparation plans, and what not, the centre has moved to Wall Street. If American economy wobbles, European economy may collapse. Think how the Communists will exploit it. It bears out all they’ve said, the Marxist theory of the mounting spiral of alternating booms and slumps that ultimately leads to war.”

  Guy turned aside. Poor Lucy. Something happened to military men when they retired; they were lost without the discipline of regimental life. He’d rather have a daughter of his marry Franklin.

  At dinner Franklin sat between Pamela and Mrs. Duke. He was very attentive to his future mother-in-law, addressing the greater part of his conversation to her, but Guy noticed that whenever he was turned to her, he ate with his left hand while Pamela ate with her right. Guy was reminded of the dinner party in War and Peace, on the evening of Peter’s betrothal to Helena. No one was really conscious of what he was saying to his neighbour. Everything seemed trivial in comparison with the mingling of these two young lives.

  The dinner was in keeping with the occasion: delicate but substantial; clear soup, a salmon soufflé, saddle of lamb, a Charlotte Russe. Three wines were served, Chablis, a claret, then champagne.

  As the champagne glasses were filled, Mr. Duke stood up. “I don’t know whether it is proper for me as a guest to propose a toast: but as I am about to lose a daughter I have the right to say how happy I am to be not really losing her: that she is to remain part of this our larger family. In more than one way this is a unique occasion. For over a century and a half the house of Duke and Renton has contributed to the conviviality of mankind. How many engagements, weddings, christenings, birthdays, have not been toasted in our wines, but this I must remind you is the very first time that a wine of ours has been raised to honour the union of a Duke and a Renton.

  “There used to be an English idea that one’s home life and one’s business were separate, that one did not talk shop at home. And so the Dukes and the Rentons all through the Victorian and the Edwardian eras met in Soho Square and then at six o’clock scattered to their separate homes. It was a practice that does not seem to have had any unfortunate repercussions on the conduct of the business. On the contrary indeed. But it was a practice that has, I am very sure, no place in this day and age. And I am more happy than I can say that this, shall we say, stuffy and antediluvian tradition should have been broken by the youngest of us. My friends, let us toast Pamela and Franklin, let us toast Duke and Renton.”

  As Guy rose to his feet, he remembered other times when he had remained sitting when first his grandfather and then his father had raised a glass to him, at school when he had got his colours, on his return from France with the white and purple ribbon of the Military Cross, when he had got his blue at Oxford, and his cap for England. It was the first time Franklin had been in the limelight. But there was no air of self-consciousness or over-self-satisfaction in his manner as he turned to Pamela.

  “I don’t think we’ll make a speech. Do you?” he said. “Shall we just stand up and thank them?” It was easily and smoothly done. They rose together, hand in hand, smiled and sat down. Yes, Guy thought, the auspices were very fair.

  The party went on late. Everyone was happy about the engagement. Barbara was exuberant. She regarded the whole business as something she had herself originated. “It all began that evening I brought round Pamela to your flat,” she said. Rex for the first time was unqualified in his approval of anything in connection with his younger brother-in-law. “Shows the boy’s got character. You can judge a man by his dog and by the wife he chooses. To be quite honest I never thought he had it in him. Shows how wrong one can be where the younger generation is concerned. His innings is about to start.”

  Lucy asked Franklin to come down for the week-end, “and of course bring Pamela,” a suggestion she had never made before.

  Mrs. Renton was suffused with a bland smile that seemed to come from some interior deep-based source of happiness
. She was doing her best to resist the temptation to say, “I told you so.”

  Mr. Renton nodded his head slowly. “It does me good to see your mother looking so happy about anything. She keeps things to herself, you know: too proud to show her feelings; but she’s worried a lot about your brother. Oh yes, a great, great deal.” It was one of the very happiest evenings Guy could recall. His memory was often to return to it in the years ahead.

  On the way back he said to Margery, “Why don’t we make an engagement party of that evening of ours with Michael Drummond?”

  “Why not? Michael’s running a new bottle-party club. We could go on there afterwards.”

  At the end of the week Guy rang up the Burtons. Roger answered him. “I’m having a celebration party. I want it to be on a day you both can come.”

  “We’d love to, what are you celebrating?”

  “Franklin’s engagement.”

  “His what?”

  “He’s marrying Pamela Duke; the daughter of our chief partner.”

  “Franklin engaged? He never told me.”

  “He didn’t tell any of us. It was a complete surprise.”

  “I should say it was.”

  Roger sounded not only astonished but indignant. He recovered quickly. “It’s the best thing for him. Particularly for anybody so attractive. I shall be most interested to meet the lady.”

  “But you have met her.”

  “When?”

  “At a cocktail party of mine, eighteen months ago.”

  “Did I? How very stupid of me, I can’t remember.”

  It was like Roger to have forgotten meeting a pretty girl. There was a thoughtful expression on Guy’s face as he rang off. He remembered that curious remark of Franklin’s about being able to like anybody who liked him. He remembered how impressed Roger had been at that cocktail party where Franklin had first met Pamela. How suitable a friend had Roger been for anyone so young and volatile? He shrugged. It wasn’t his job to interfere with other people. If they wanted his advice, that was another thing. Anyhow it was a closed chapter now. Pamela would look after that.

  On the night of the party he watched closely the first meeting of Roger and his brother. Nothing could have been more natural or unembarrassed. Roger had bought Franklin a volume of Rimbaud’s poems bound in dark green morocco lined with watered silk. To Pamela he handed a long thin packet. “Shall I tell you what I said when I heard of your engagement?—that Franklin’s taste in his choice of a bride is as exquisite as his appreciation of the best in pictures. I hope that you will find occasion for the use of this.” ‘This’ was an eighteenth-century French fan; tortoiseshell and enamel, figured in the style of Fragonard, an enchanting object.

  Roger was indeed at his most gracious. At dinner placed next to Pamela, he put himself out to charm her; asking her about her plans, her tastes, her preferences; not in a patronizing manner but as though he were sincerely interested. Yet though so much of his talk was a deferring to her, he retained his advantage of age and of position, every now and again talking with an authority that was not unimpressive, every now and again dropping into the conversation an important name with a lack of concern that was even more impressive. It was probably the first time that anyone of such consequence had taken the trouble to talk to Pamela with such attention. It would send up Franklin’s stock with her. No, he was not surprised that Renée as a young girl with her American training, her half-European background, and with her ignorance of England and the English, should have been dazzled by Roger Burton.

  There were eight in the party. It was the first time Barbara had been to a night club.

  “Will it be as full of wicked people as the Café Royal was?” she asked. It was the first time that she had broken the law, and she was fascinated by the whole procedure; the form that Guy signed at the door stating that he had been invited by Major McEvoy to a bottle party and that he was contributing £I to its expenses; by the order form that he filled up at the table, instructing a wine merchant, Messrs. Frisby and Dunkin, to deliver to him at the Flamingo Club two bottles of champagne and one of whisky.

  He explained to Barbara the system on which the evasion worked. You had to have a special licence to serve drinks up to half-past twelve; you could only serve them with a meal: on an occasional extension night you could stay open till 2 a.m. But such extensions were granted only to reputable hotels and restaurants. If you had such a licence you were liable to supervision, you had to keep the law: there was nothing however to prevent a private person from inviting his friends to a bottle party at his house. “The assumption is that this Major McEvoy has asked us to his party and that instead of bringing a bottle with us, we have asked our wine merchant to deliver our contribution here, which is what we probably would do at a bottle party. Actually of course they keep a stock of bottles in the cellar and serve them to meet individual orders.”

  “But there is a real firm of wine merchants called what-was-their-name?—Frisby and Dunkin.”

  “I imagine there is but I’ve never heard of them.”

  “If you buy a bottle of whisky and don’t finish it, what happens then?”

  “The assumption is that you keep it here in a locker until the next time you come. You can take it away with you if you like. Usually there’s only a little left and the waiter swipes it.”

  “I see.” She looked round her with eager eyes. “It isn’t quite what I expected.”

  “You thought there would be bright lights and candelabra and glass mirrors.”

  “It’s smaller, darker.”

  “Dingier too?”

  “No, I’d not say that. It’s a nice place. It’s only that. . .”

  “Only that you’ve seen too many films. Night clubs in a film are twice the size of the Savoy.”

  He looked round him. It was the first time he had been here, but it was so like so many other places; the Quadrant, Chez Victor, Rector’s, Murray’s, the Silver Slipper, that within three weeks he would have forgotten where its particular difference from those others lay. It was well enough; a small oval ebony dancing floor, banquette tables round the wall: shaded lights, muted music, alternating blues and foxtrots; distant favourites like ‘Oh you Limehouse Kid’ spaced between ‘Let’s Do It’ and ‘All the King’s Horses’. At a round table in a corner were the hostesses: five of them, each a different type; two of them slightly plump; one platinum blonde, one Andalusian with very white shoulders, jet black hair, eyelashes and eyebrows thick with mascara; there was a boyish red-head with short cropped hair; there was a minute brunette, all bones and knees and elbows like a restless monkey; there was one tall and willowy.

  “Are they what I think they are?” asked Barbara.

  “More or less.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen one.” She stared, fascinated. “The red-haired one looks very young.”

  “Twenty-five, I’d say.”

  “Isn’t it strange that eight years ago she may have looked just like Pamela: engaged to somebody, full of hope. How do girls get like that?”

  He shrugged. “There’s a man shortage since the war. Perhaps there always was in England. The young men with enterprise went abroad. Perhaps they had stage ambitions, and either couldn’t act or were too lazy to learn how to act. Perhaps they got mixed up with a married man.”

  “Isn’t that the unluckiest thing that can happen to a girl?”

  “By and large it is.” Though obversely it was generally conceded to be the luckiest thing that could happen to a young man.

  Barbara looked away from the group of hostesses to the dance floor where Pamela and Franklin were executing a tango with a languid grace. They moved with the harmony of a dance team. “When you look at them, you can’t help feeling that it’s tragic there should be girls like those,” said Barbara. “Why can’t everyone have the same chance as that? They look so right together.”

  The same thought had occurred to Margery. “I wish I’d met Michael Drummond when I was that age,”
she said.

  “You’re not so very ancient now.”

  “I daresay, but one gets wary after one’s been hurt. Let’s dance or I’ll be getting morbid.”

  On his return to the table he sat next to Renée. Her glass was empty and he refilled it. “I notice that you’re drinking whisky,” she remarked. “Isn’t that unusual?”

  “So’s Roger. We’re both wise. We don’t trust the champagne you get in night clubs.”

  “This is rather good.”

  “Is it? I’m glad to hear it.” He raised the bottle from the bucket and glanced at the label. “It should be, it’s one of ours. I wonder how they got it?”

  “Why shouldn’t they? You keep open doors.”

  “I know but it’s a new shipper that we’re introducing. The trade is still a little cagey. May I sip?” Or course.

  He raised her glass, sniffed, inhaled the bouquet. “Yes, it is rather good. I wonder if Franklin’s noticed it.” He looked down the table to call his attention to it, but Franklin was very occupied with his fiancée. “Let’s dance,” he said.

  There had been a time when he had felt shy of dancing with her in public. He was afraid that they would betray their secret, that on their return to the table there would be a revealing look upon his face. Those days were past. They could now dance together with the same casualness that they could make conversation at a party. He no longer felt the need to hold her tightly, but they had nevertheless their own technique of courtship. The pressure of his hand against her shoulder, the response of her fingertips against his palm were their own silent language, so that now as then, apart where they had been once close-locked, a shiver ran along their nerves. “I should be finding this very tantalizing if I hadn’t to-morrow to look forward to,” he said.

  It was now well after midnight and the club was filling up. By the type of person who was coming in he could gauge the kind of place it was. “A night club is an afterthought,” he explained to Barbara. “The main party of the evening has broken up, but you aren’t yet in a mood for bed. That’s why you don’t order drinks to be sent to a bottle party in advance. You can’t tell if you’ll feel in the mood. That’s why a bottle party is always an evasion of the law.”