by Alec Waugh
She stopped. They had passed behind the mound and had reached the newstand. The crowd was thick before the Tavern. From the terraced stands rose suddenly a whoop of triumph, followed by a burst of clapping. A wicket had gone down. But he did not turn his head to the scoreboard to see who was out. Had he looked he could not have read the figures. There was a mist before his eyes. He could barely trust himself to speak. The words, when the power to speak came, were the same that he had used ten years before, the first time he had dined at Albion Street.
“I can’t think what it is you see in me.”
19
Daphne went straight from the London Clinic to a small cottage-type house in Wiltshire.
“What a relief to be out of London,” Franklin said as he drove away from Highgate in a car piled high with luggage.
He was back within two weeks. “It’s all rather a bore, but Daphne’s taken it into her head that she wants to take a house in London and spend at least a year in it; she wants Julia to go to College, she wants to be at hand to supervise.”
“Does she realize that she’ll be liable to English income tax?”
“We’ve all told her that. She says that Julia is more important; that Julia’s next years are the crucial ones. I suppose she’s right. Where do you think we ought to live?”
“Where the air’s fresh. Somewhere near Regent’s Park. You can get to anywhere from Baker Street.”
“Can you? I suppose you can. Have you heard by the way that Barbara’s coming back to have her baby?”
“No, but I thought she might.”
“It’s twins, apparently. Helping to adjust the balance for you and Margery and me.”
“How’s Daphne?”
“Fine. Never seen her fitter; eating like a schoolgirl and knocking back martinis. She ought to have had it done months ago, as the nurse said she should; full of plans for parties and theatres and picking up with her old friends.”
“How will you like it here?”
“I’ll manage. I’m adaptable.” He wore his habitual insouciance. At the same time, Guy thought, it was going to be a change for him.
Barbara came back at the end of August. Her figure was elephantine. Yet she looked even younger than she had in Villefranche. There was a glow upon her cheeks, a luminous inner radiance. She was in the liveliest spirits. She hadn’t had half an hour’s illness. She didn’t know what women made all this fuss about. She continued to lead her gipsy life. She sent Norman sketching on the Heath and joined him at lunchtime with a basket. She was enchanted with his pictures of the yellowing landscape.
“He’s seeing it with new eyes, after all that sunlight. You might think he was the first person who’d seen an English autumn.” It would provide the perfect contrast for his exhibition.
They had agreed to have a showing in the spring; before they resumed their travels. Maybe not the South of France this time. Brittany might be healthier for ‘the toads’ as she’d already nicknamed them. She arranged the old nursery as a studio. “Then you’ll have somewhere to work while I’m being very busy.” He had to be very busy, she insisted. There must be at least six London canvases. She was happier than Guy had ever seen her. Her mother could not take her eyes off her.
In mid-September Daphne and Franklin were back in London in a modern two-story house in Avenue Road. They announced their return with a large cocktail party. The décor was elaborate; great banks of chrysalthemums and pom-poms; champagne in an unceasing flow, hot savouries supplementing smoked-salmon canapés. There were over a hundred guests, most of them between the ages of fifty-five and thirty, all well produced and prosperous; all talking on the same high-pitched note of febrile animation.
Guy wondered who they were; they looked the kind of people that he would have expected himself to know. But in point of fact he scarcely saw a familiar face. Had Franklin known a single one of them before his marriage? Guy moved among the guests looking for someone that he knew. Julia was busy handing dishes. She looked completely adult. When he’d been young, and girls wore pigtails—flappers they’d been called—there was a definite line of demarcation between the schoolgirl and the young woman. She put her hair up and came out. Nowadays a girl of fourteen looked twenty-one. Julia welcomed him on equal terms. She was thrilled at the thought of settling in London. “It’ll be lovely to have a real home at last.” He smiled to himself. He looked round him at the impersonal decoration of a house that had been furnished with the intention of being let. ‘A real home at last.’ Could you have a better indication of a wandering unrooted childhood?
He noticed Rex across the room and edged his way towards him; though it was close upon twenty years now since Rex had been his colonel he still found it difficult at the first exchange of greetings not to use the prefix ‘sir’. He felt himself momentarily a twenty-year-old subaltern. And as always at a first meeting Rex seemed a man of consequence and stature.
Rex wrung his brother-in-law’s hand warmly. “Delighted to see you, my dear fellow; first person here I know. Didn’t really want to come; feel lost among all these fellows: not my type, you know. Lucy insisted; wanted to pay her compliments. Believe it or not, but this is only the second time they’ve met. Hoped I should find you here. Something rather special I wanted to discuss. Ever heard of a concern called the English Mistery? Spelt with an ‘i’? Yes, that’s it. mistery. Might be worth your investigating; more your line possibly than some of the projects we’ve discussed. I’ll send you some of their literature. Then let’s lunch one day.
“You’ve heard about Barbara, of course. Fine, isn’t it? I suppose she won’t be here. No, I thought as much. What about Norman? I’d have thought this party rather his dish of tea. Good chap, though, thoroughly good chap. Wish we could find someone like that—not someone like that—but someone suitable, for Margery. I know she’s doing excellently in that firm of hers, but she should marry. Every girl should marry. Lucy and I have been trying to introduce her to some suitable young men, but she’s very difficult. She keeps breaking her appointments. We’ve asked her down for several week-ends now; she’s got an open invitation. But she either rings up at the last moment to put us off; or she’ll invite herself for a week-end when the house is full and I have to give up my dressing-room. Can’t rely on her.”
Guy knew what that meant. He had rowed in that galley; was rowing in it still. He moved across to Margery. “Your brother-in-law has just been complaining about you,” he said.
“What’s he been saying?”
“That you aren’t the kind of girl who can be booked for a week-end a month in advance.”
She laughed. “The old military man wanting to organize us all. I know. Wherever I am, I’m waiting on a telephone. I’ve got to put a call through now. Don’t run away. I won’t be long.”
He watched her as she edged her way towards the hall. She moved with a smooth jungle tread. She was a handsome creature. He watched as she stood beside the telephone, her shoulders slightly bent as her finger dialled. She straightened herself, stood still; then put the receiver back. There was an ironic smile on her lips as she came back. “No reply. If I were to write a story about my kind of girl, that would be the title that I’d give it. ‘No Reply,’ or else ‘No Message Left.’”
They could talk in shorthand. There was no need for her to explain to him what her position was. “People like Rex oughtn’t to worry about girls like me,” she said. “I don’t fit into their pattern. I’m not any use for people who have patterns. Thank heavens, there are some people who haven’t them, like you. There’s Franklin. Let’s join him. He hasn’t got a pattern, though he thinks he has.”
It was the first time that Guy had seen Franklin in a month. He had lost his suntan, and without it the thinning of his hair had become apparent. He looked slightly pasty but he had not lost his elegance. A new check suit was striking without being loud. Guy remarked on it.
Franklin laughed. “I’ll be surprising you all the next few months. Chic’s not the word fo
r me. All my town clothes were tight; I’ve ordered an entire trousseau. Then I’ll lose weight and have so many sacks upon my hands; but for the next three months ...”
He paused, looking over Margery’s shoulder, abstracted, the conscientious host. “I think it’s going all right. They seem to be enjoying themselves. They’re making enough row and that’s the test. At the start of a party I always have the radio turned on; it makes everyone talk louder, then as the room fills up I turn it down: I turned it off altogether half-an-hour ago. Yes, I think it’s going all right. Daphne seems pleased with it.”
Daphne seemed very pleased. She was back in her own element, surrounded by people, dispensing hospitality; in a friendly but impersonal way. There was nothing in her cool and collected welcoming of him to suggest the woman who a few weeks ago had talked uninterruptedly about herself through a lunch à deux. She looked as chic, as well produced as ever; in the invariable neutral-coloured dress with the one bright spot of jewellery to heighten but not subdue her personality.
“Every time I see your sister-in-law I say the same thing to myself,” Renée said. “There’s a woman who knows how to make the most of herself. Only a woman can tell how negligible she might have been if she had not had that knowledge.”
He only had time for a bare exchange of words with Renée. They had reached the point now when they scarcely bothered to see each other when they were in public.
“We’ve become like a husband and wife,” he said, “who are separated the moment they reach a party, are seated at the opposite ends of a dining-table and don’t exchange two words till they’re in the car going back.”
“Isn’t that supposed to be one of the things about marriage, the talking of it over afterwards?”
Was it? He wouldn’t know. Perhaps it was. Three-quarters of the pleasure of this as of so many other parties would be the telephone talk to-night or to-morrow morning, or the gossip across a lunch table at this or the other restaurant or in his flat. He had scarcely begun to talk to her before Margery had rejoined them. “Have you a dinner date?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Then you can take me out. I feel like being done rather well to-night. Wait just a moment though. I’ve got to try that number once again, though I know what the answer’ll be.”
This time, however, on her return there was a very different expression on her face. Her eyes shone. “You needn’t bother. I’m going to let you off. You can dine in one of those stodgy clubs of yours.” She laid her hand upon his arm, above the elbow, pressing it with an impulsive fondness. “Thank you,” she said, “for your lack of pattern.”
Three days later Guy received a large envelope from Rex containing a thin green pamphlet entitled ‘The English Mistery’.
“I would like this back,” the covering letter ran. “And I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention it to any of your friends. We are in an embryo stage as yet.”
Guy glanced at the pamphlet; read a paragraph or two; then decided to study it more carefully at his leisure. This presumably was what Lucy had called ‘waiting to have the King take over’.
‘The Crown,’ he read, ‘the ancient and only source of authority and loyalty which English men can accept and serve has been shackled and abused by the usurping sovereign “the money power” and the King has been shut off from the people by the mockery of Parliament. The Lords, who alone can give hope to the people and lead by example, have lost real nobleness since political parties seized from the King the power to appoint peers, and the House of Lords now includes men who have neither the will nor the knowledge to lead and protect people.’
He skipped a page or two. ‘The task of the Mistery,’ he learnt, ‘is to organize enough service to enable the King to govern again according to English tradition and the ancient laws of our people. This task cannot be accomplished by voting ... it will be long, difficult, and probably dangerous.’
The Mistery had been founded in 1930. The nature of its constitution was not clear to Guy. There was a Chancellor who was responsible for what was called ‘the thinking functions’. The Chief Syndic was the principal exponent of the art of Statecraft. There was a High Steward who supervised expulsions. There were Lords of the Mistery, local leaders, companions, and associates. Each initiate joined a ‘kin’ in his own district. ‘The Communist cell idea,’ Guy thought. His stupefaction increased as he read on. If this wasn’t lunacy, what was?
“I suppose,” Barbara had said, “that when those toads actually do take the stage, I’ll find out what women make all that fuss about.”
She did. It was a long confinement and a painful one, followed by one complication after another. It was three months before she was well enough to go out of doors. “I’m afraid I won’t be much of a gipsy for you for quite a while,” she said to Norman.
The twins too, a boy and a girl, were weakly. They would need constant care. “I couldn’t take them with me, and I couldn’t leave them, you see that, don’t you, darling. And besides,” she added, “with your exhibition coming on so soon you may not want to go away. You’ll be getting so many commissions. I’m sure that every man who sees your pictures of me will want to have his wife’s portrait painted by you.”
The exhibition was held at the end of April in one of the smaller galleries, the Grosvenor in Cork Street. It was elaborately launched; Margery organized its publicity, several paragraphs appeared headed ‘Wine firm’s link with Art’ and ‘Ex-International’s sister painted by her artist husband’. Daphne gave a cocktail party on its eve. Roger wrote round to everyone he knew with influence in the art world. Barbara sent out five hundred invitations to the private view. The day itself was bright and sunny, and at no time between eleven o’clock till six were there less than a dozen visitors to the gallery. By the end of the evening five of the pictures bore red wafers in their right-hand corners. Everyone said nice things. Barbara beamed. She squeezed Norman’s arm. “Darling, I’m so proud of you, I can’t wait to read the reviews.”
“You mustn’t expect too much. The papers don’t give much space to galleries. Several other painters are exhibiting this month.”
Too many painters were exhibiting. Sickert had a show at the Leicester, Eric Gill at the French Gallery, Lefevre were featuring international abstract art. The few lines that Norman received here and there were complimentary; it was by no means a bad reception, but there was no suggestion that a new force had entered the arena. By the end of the month only one other picture carried its red wafer.
“It gives one a let-down feeling,” Norman said. “It’s three years’ work; we’ve spent three months organizing the exhibition; we all got excited and worked up, and now that it’s all over it doesn’t seem as though very much had happened.”
“You’ve got yourself started,” Guy reminded him. “People have heard of you. It’s only once in a hundred times that a painter starts off with fireworks. And when he does, more often than not it’s a flash in the pan.”
“I daresay, but it does give one a let-down feeling. Oh well. There’s nothing for it but to paint some more pictures and some better pictures.”
Whenever the day was fine, he went out sketching. Sometimes Barbara joined him but oftener she stayed at home. She liked sitting in the garden, watching the toads tumble over one another. “I suppose they can’t mean anything to you,” she said to Guy, “they wouldn’t to a man; they don’t even mean much to Norman yet, but they’re so distinct to me. They’re so obviously a boy and girl, even at this age.”
A soft look came into her eyes. “Do you remember my saying that one of the nicest things in marriage was having someone of your very own; but a husband can never be your own, in the way your children are. You only meet a husband after a lot of other people have been at work on him, but with your children, that’s a start from scratch... and to have them playing round you in the very garden where you played as a child. Franklin was up here yesterday. He was so sweet with them. It took me back twenty years. It was like
our old summer holidays, sitting out on the lawn together, gossiping. Do you see much of him these days?”
“Whenever I go to Lord’s I seem to find him there.”
“Does he talk about doing anything, getting any job?”
“What is there that he could get? He’s close on thirty now.”
“Is he? I suppose he is. How the time flies. But it does seem all wrong, his doing nothing. It was all right in the South of France, in a holiday atmosphere, but everybody works in London.”
“I fancy he feels that himself.”
During the casual talks, spreading over several weeks, that they had had at Lord’s, Franklin had made a number of remarks that, negligible one by one, acquired, in their sum, significance. “It’s oddly anomalous,” he had once remarked, “in view of the extreme respectability, you might almost say the hypocritical respectability of English domestic manners, that our taxation system by lumping a husband’s and wife’s income together and taxing it as one income, should make it an economy for a couple to live in sin.”
He had elaborated the point. “If I were to take a salaried job, I should move our joint income to a level where the added surtax would be higher than my salary. I should in fact be paying the government for the privilege of slaving in an office fifty hours a week.”
He had said it lightly; but Guy knew him well enough to recognize it as a form of self-defence. Guy knew also that Daphne’s decision to stay in England must have considerably affected Franklin financially. He not only had to pay English income tax on an unearned income but at a rate determined by Daphne’s income, which must be large. Franklin was nowadays ostentatiously economical: eating a sandwich in the bar instead of lunching in the Members’ Room, drinking water instead of beer. “I spend as little as I can on myself when I’m alone,” he said. “I’ve a suspicion that we may be finding ourselves in difficulties before too long.”
He was making a martyr of himself because his conscience was not completely clear: he also had a sense of grievance.