Guy Renton

by Alec Waugh

  “I’m counting minutes. I must rush now, darling.”

  He rose thoughtfully from beside the telephone. Was that true, he wondered. Had Roger had seats for Hamlet; or had he felt angry that he hadn’t, on learning that someone had planned to take his boy there? Hadn’t Renée told him all those years ago that Roger could be jealous, though not where she was herself concerned. He could understand Roger wanting to take his own son to his first Hamlet. At the same time Guy wondered whether the situation had ever developed to that point. Wasn’t it far likelier that when Eric had come back garrulous with the prospect of a treat, Renée had sensed danger, had said, ‘As a matter of fact, darling, your father already has seats for that, he was keeping it as a surprise’. Yes, it was far likelier that she had been on her guard against anything that would make Roger antagonistic towards himself, anything that might imperil their relationship, his and hers: she had sensed danger and averted it. He should feel grateful; flattered too. Yet all the same he would have enjoyed taking Renée’s son to his first Hamlet.

  The call had come through to him at the Wanderers. The telephone boxes were in the hall. He mounted the wide stairway leading to the Drawing-Room. It was close on ten and the long book-lined room was nearly empty. Nobody was talking. One member was asleep, with the evening paper on his lap. Half a dozen others were seated in self-imposed seclusion with at least one empty chair dividing them from their nearest neighbour: they were all of them reading Library novels, detective stories for the most part. On several of the occasional tables were empty glasses; there was the smell of staling cigar-smoke on the air. He had heard it often said that nothing was more dreary than the drawing-room of a Ladies’ Club, “clustered with women that no man had a use for”. But was anything more depressing than the average man’s club at ten o’clock at night? Wouldn’t any reasonable woman take one look at it and flee? He felt lonely and disgruntled and the prospect of a return to Rutland Street depressed him.

  It was a feeling that was to return to him quite often during that long sunsoaked summer of 1934. It was a period, in a sense, of rejuvenation, but also of awakening anxiety. The depression was seemingly at an end. Franklin Roosevelt was in the saddle. The blue eagles of the New Deal were scattered throughout the Union. Prohibition had been repealed. The Communist Party in Berlin was underground or behind barbed wire; the Communists in Vienna had been shelled out of the Karl Marx building. In England the ban on foreign travel had been lifted. The faith in property had been restored. Money was being earned, money was being spent. Champagne was returning to the supper tables. Mayfair dances were ending in fast drives along macadamed highways to the road houses and bathing pools of the Great West Road, the Ace of Spades and Knave of Diamonds. Back to 1927 again. Yet behind the surface gaiety there was a sense of omen. Where was all this headed, these rallies at Nuremberg, these blaring megaphones, these marching feet? Were they not as much a portent of disaster as those breadlines in Times Square? For the first time for fourteen years there was talk of war. No one seemed to know who was going to fight whom for what. But there was talk of it: the cloud no bigger than a hand on the horizon.

  The tense combined atmosphere of boom and of anxiety matched Guy’s mood. The succession of bright days made him nostalgic for the cricket field. He wished he had not given up the game; but he had not the time for net practice. You had to get yourself into form. Cricket was a game that you had to play regularly or not at all.

  Then Roger took a house in Scotland for the summer holidays. Renée was away six weeks: London was hot, crowded by tourists yet empty as far as he was concerned. The Wanderers was closed. The family was scattered: Lucy in Devonshire: Barbara trailing around Europe: Franklin entertaining ‘smarties’ on the Riviera; Margery in Brittany, or at least he thought she was. Margery had become illusive. She would cancel invitations at the last moment; her telephone rang in vain; letters would remain unanswered.

  “You seem to be leading an erratic life,” he said.

  She shrugged. “In most relationships one of the two has to be ready to fit into last minute changes of plan. It happens to be my turn this time.”

  From which he presumed that she was involved either with a married man or with someone who did a great deal of travelling. He presumed that it was a married man.

  During August and September he found himself marking off on the calendar the days to Renée’s return in the same way that as a schoolboy he had marked off the days to the end of term. It was a lovely period of reunion. They had never been away for so long from one another. “It’s a miracle,” he said. “I’m more in love with you now than I was nine years ago. There must be such a thing as ‘the real thing’.” But even so as autumn changed into winter, his moods of vague personal dissatisfaction became more frequent.

  A number of little incidents conspired to make them more acute. He found when he changed into heavy-weight winter clothes that the waistcoat of a dark blue suit would only button with discomfort; the trousers were tight too. He had had the suit two years but it had still a lot of wear in it. He took it round to Savile Row to be let out. His tailor took his measurements. “An inch and a half different, I’m afraid, sir.”

  “Is that round the chest or round the waist?”

  “Round the waist. It’s an inch round the chest.”

  “But I’ve been dieting and I’ve been taking exercise; morning exercises I mean to say.”

  “Well, sir, one does begin to thicken after a certain point.”

  “Don’t tell me I’ve got middle-aged spread.”

  “Of course not, sir. At the same time . . .”

  “I know, I know. I’ll take a serious diet. No, I won’t have that suit let out. I’ll get myself back to fit it.”

  He remembered Daphne’s diet. Those pre- and post-prandial pills and not even a glass of water during meals. He hoped that he would not have to go to those extremes. Renée procured him a Hollywood seventeen-day diet. His temper worsened during his treatment till it was an effort not to snap: by the end of it there was not even a strain upon his waistcoat buttons. His mother, however, commented unfavourably on his appearance. “You’re looking thin and drawn.”

  “That’s how I meant to look.”

  “But, darling, it doesn’t suit you, and I’m sure it can’t be good for you.”

  “It’s better than looking like a balloon.”

  “There’s a half-way house, there must be; at a certain age men look better if they’re a little plump. They look so lined otherwise.”

  At a certain age. Me. An ex-International.

  A few weeks later he was worried by a twinge of toothache. The dentist could find nothing wrong. “I think I’d better X-ray your mouth,” he said.

  It was the first time Guy had had such a suggestion made.

  “What do you suspect?”

  “I don’t suspect anything but it would be as well to look.”

  The next three days were anxious ones. When the dentist shook his head, he felt like a condemned criminal who had been reprieved. “But why have I had that toothache?”

  “The gums have begun to recede a little. A little massage ought to put that right. A minute night and morning.”

  “Then there is nothing really wrong?”

  “Your teeth ought to last you at least fifteen years.”

  “Only fifteen years?”

  The dentist laughed. “Most people are wearing dentures at that age, or ought to be.”

  On the way back from his dentist’s he ran into Jimmy Grant. It was the first time they had met for two years. “You’re looking well,” he said.

  “I ought to be, I’ve just got married.”

  “Married, you?”

  “Don’t look so surprised, we all come to it in the end, old boy.”

  All come to it in the end. Dentures, middle-aged spread, a certain age; hell, he thought, I’m only thirty-eight. Jimmy Grant married. As most of his contemporaries were, he supposed, by now. He never saw them anywhere. That wa
s probably why; all going back to their wives at the end of the day’s work. Whom was he seeing now, of the men he went around with in the early ‘twenties? Who had they been for that matter? Men he’d played games with for the most part. He had drifted apart from them as he and they gave up first football and then cricket: he had been on the lists of certain hostesses: he’d been asked to dances; gradually the invitations had fallen off: the hostesses had stopped entertaining when their daughters married or became bachelor girls like Margery; while he, he supposed, had ceased to be an eligible bachelor.

  Whom was he seeing now? He ran over his diary for the last few weeks: a heterogeneous conglomeration of names, men he played golf with, men he played squash with, wine merchants from abroad whom he showed the town. There were a number of houses at which he dined two or three times a year. There were cocktail parties, which might end in his joining up with a group and going on to the Café Royal, but more often ended in his going on alone to Bolton’s. He often went away for the weekend. He repaid hospitality. But no one running their eye through his list of engagements would detect a pattern.

  Yet there was a pattern; through all his lunches, dinners, theatres, cocktail parties, there was the need to be accessible, within range of a telephone at any hour of the day: almost like a deputy duty officer in a regiment. The need to be within reach of Renée; that was the pattern running through his diary. Who were his friends, his real friends? He had a vast acquaintance; his life had, through them, a constant eventfulness, but if any one of those acquaintances were to be sent abroad on a five years’ chukka, would he even be conscious of his absence? He hadn’t even known that Jimmy Grant was married.

  That previous year had seen the founding of the Wine and Food Society, an attempt encouraged though not financed or directly organized by the Wine Trade to educate the British palate. A number of lunches, dinners, and tastings of special wines were organized: regional dishes were offered with the appropriate wines: Guy was invited to join the Council and subsequently to sit on the committee.

  He joined for professional reasons, thinking it was the kind of thing he ought to do. He expected to be bored; but to his surprise he found himself enjoying the succession of informal lunches and the dinners that preceded and followed the set committee meetings. He enjoyed meeting the same people every two or three weeks, getting to know them, mixing in a new group; enlarging his acquaintance. He enjoyed the atmosphere of a committee room when nothing was at stake. It reminded him of those old meetings of the Harlequins at the R.A.C. on Mondays. He must be getting middle-aged, he thought, if he enjoyed this kind of thing. All the same he did enjoy it.

  17

  Winter went by with the first Christmas since Prohibition showing so rapid a rise in the volume of Duke and Renton’s trading that Guy began to wonder whether they would be able to keep their cellars filled, so much wine from Rheims and Burgundy and the Medoc was pouring legitimately across the Atlantic. Rarely had business been more prosperous, but all the time there was the sense of omen.

  Rex alone was calm; pontifical but undisturbed. He had, he said, the greatest confidence in the common sense of the British public when it realized what the essential issue was. “But what is the essential issue?” Guy inquired.

  Rex pursed his lips. “That will be apparent when the right time comes.”

  Rex was highly mysterious about it all. Guy knew him well enough to guess that he had some new scheme hatching. He rarely saw Lucy nowadays, only during the holidays when she brought the boys up to see the dentist or ‘do a theatre’. The next time he saw her he asked what Rex was on to. She shook her head.

  “There’s something but I’m not quite certain what. Some very smart people come down for the week-end. They’re very secretive. It’s something to do with royalty.”

  “With royalty?”

  “I once heard Rex say something about when the time came for the King to take over his own country.”

  “You must have mis-heard him.”

  “I don’t think I did.”

  “But that’s high lunacy.”

  “I confess I don’t understand it, but they seem quite important people in their own ways.”

  ‘Ask the King to take over his own country.’ It sounded the most fantastic drivel. Yet what would one have thought had one been told in 1924 that the house-painter turned demagogue, who was busily writing in a prison cell a vainglorious account of the steps by which he was to restore a defeated and humbled nation to world supremacy, would within ten years be menacing the world’s peace of mind? And what would one have thought twenty years earlier could one have attended at Geneva the dreary academic conferences of shabby Siberian expatriates and been told that the decisions being taken there on the rival claims of Bolsheviks and Menshivists were to settle the fate of all the Russians?

  In fifteen years time, in 1948, everyone would know what of real importance had happened in this year of grace. The plant would be in flower and you could tell when the seeds were sown; but how could you tell now when the ground was covered with so many sprouts? Looking back he could not recall that in his own prophecies his guesses had been very accurate. Rex was often right, but always, so it seemed to him, for the wrong reasons.

  Early in the spring Guy received a notification that did not in the least surprise him, either in its contents or in the manner of its delivery. On the back of a picture postcard of Cagnes-sur-mer was scrawled above the signature ‘Barbara’: ‘Having wonderful time. Norman is painting wonderful pictures. I am going to have wonderful baby in October. Isn’t it fun!’

  Guy rang up his mother.

  “Have you heard from Barbara?”

  “Yes, this morning.”

  “A postcard or a letter?”

  “A letter naturally in view of the news in it. I want to talk it over with you.”

  His mother wore the same look of inflexible resolve that he had seen ten years earlier when there was the discussion of Franklin’s going abroad after leaving Fernhurst.

  “She’s got to come home,” she said. “I made no comment when she talked about living like a gipsy. I don’t believe in discussing problems until they have arrived. I had a feeling I must say that they wouldn’t want to have a baby quite so soon. I’m delighted, of course, they have. It’ll make it a real marriage. Now that they’ve done this, they’ve got to behave sensibly. She can’t go and have a baby down there with no proper doctors to look after her.”

  It was as typically insular a remark as you could hear. The mid-Victorian idea that there were no doctors except in England. “It’s a bad time of year too down there, especially for the convalescence,” she went on. “A lot of rain: then an unexpectedly warm day. You sit out in a café. The sun goes down abruptly and a cold wind blows off the Alps. That half-hour on the Riviera between four and half-past four in winter has killed as many men of fifty as the war did young men of twenty. It would be most dangerous for Barbara to be there in her condition. I tell you what you must do; go down there for a short holiday, see how Franklin’s getting on; don’t say you’re going for any special reason; but while you’re there you can get Norman to see that he’d be most selfish if he doesn’t bring his wife back home. Personally I think she should return in June. That long train journey you know, those French trains can be very bumpy. But late July at the very latest. Now you’ll do that, won’t you? But don’t go down too soon. She mustn’t get the idea that there’s a plot; that anything’s being hatched.”

  He went down in early May before the season had begun. A few weeks earlier when Lucy had told him about Rex’s Royalist activities, he had reflected on the unpredictable quality of life: that you never recognized the significant incident until it was a long way past. He would have been astonished had he been told, as he took his seat in the Golden Arrow at Victoria Station, that he was on his way to meet the second crisis of his life.

  He planned to be away two weeks, looking in on Daphne and Franklin first, in their villa behind Cannes. He had not s
een his brother for thirty months. Franklin had been on a cruise in the Aegean when his father died, and had sensibly if selfishly decided that he could do no good by coming back, and that it would be awkward for Daphne and her daughter to be stranded in mid-Mediterranean on a small Greek island.

  The first sight of his brother was something of a shock. Franklin had put on weight. At least a stone. His jowl was heavy; he had lost his greyhound slimness. He had not a paunch, but the line of his body was now straight, not curved. He had no longer that air of race that made him once so strikingly good-looking. At the same time he looked very well, with a full dark suntan, in a silk short-sleeved shirt with his initials embroidered on the pocket in a darker blue. The silver grey Mercedes was standing like a gazelle outside the station.

  “So Daphne lets you drive her car,” Guy said.

  “This isn’t hers. This is mine.”

  “It looks very like hers.”

  “It does: exactly the same model: painted the same colour. Don’t you think it’s chic? They look so cute parked side by side outside the Carlton. Jump in.”

  The villa was six miles away lying to the north of the main Grasse road up a narrow dusty track that mounted between terraced olive groves and vineyards. It was an old reconstructed Provençal cottage that still retained with its thick walls and uneven tiling, a sense of age. From its shaded courtyard you looked across the valley towards the fortified town of Mougins with its cypress trees standing like sentinels along the cemetery. On the far hills you could see the town of Grasse climbing back above its flowered slopes. Daphne was lying out in a long chair, very elegant and lithe in rust-red slacks: her daughter was seated cross-legged on a cushion beside a gramophone with a cluster of records upon the rug. Daphne waved her hand in welcome but did not get up.

  “Take Guy right up and get him changed out of those hot things. By the time he’s done I’ll have the cocktails ready. Be an angel, Julia dear, and get the ice.”

  It was the first time Guy had seen Julia; she was dark and slim like her mother, but she had not that sharp division that her mother had between the lower and upper part of her face. She had a softer and a rounded face; more attractive at a first glance, but possibly less persuasive. She was wearing shorts and a loose-fitting short-sleeved blouse. She might have been eighteen.