Guy Renton

by Alec Waugh

  He recalled an afternoon that summer when he had driven Norman out to Highgate at the end of the day’s work. It was one of those July days that following half a week of rain open to chilly mist and lowering skies, but that dissolve suddenly about one o’clock into a cloudless prelude to a heatwave. They had driven up Fitzjohn’s Avenue. They had paused at the White-stone pond. On one side the heath sloped past the old pound towards the Vale of Health; on the other towards Harrow. The grass was green and sparkling. Children were racing their small boats in the pond; dogs were barking at the edge. The whole world had seemed reborn. He had quoted Shelley: ‘When after the rain and with never a stain the pavilion of heaven lies bare.’

  They had driven on past the Spaniards. Barbara was in the garden; the herbaceous border was blue with larkspur. ‘The toads’ were tumbling over one another in their pen. The baby was in a pram beside her, sleeping. Barbara jumped to her feet as she saw Norman coming through the French windows on to the lawn. She ran to greet him. It hadn’t been a calm affectionate wifely welcome; it had been the kiss of reunited lovers.

  They had stood side by side; his arm about her; her head rested against his shoulder, watching the children play. It was like a posed picture of married love; Barbara’s beauty was at its peak of rich fulfilment; she had recovered her figure, she had never lost her looks. The scene was the embodiment of happiness. It was absurd of him to regret at such a moment the carefree couple in the South of France; to wish that red beard back and all that it had symbolized. The sun could not stay always in the east.

  “And how’s your world now? Still ‘no reply’?” he asked.

  Margery laughed, a little wryly. “Ask any girl in my age group and position how she feels when a new man says, ‘I think it would be easier if you wrote me at my club.’ There it goes, she thinks, the old routine again.”

  “You seem to thrive on it.”

  “Oh, I’m resilient.”

  Two days later Franklin rang Guy up. “They’ve signed me on,” he said. “I leave within a week. Have you told Mother yet?”

  “I’ll do it right away.”

  He went out to tea that afternoon. She met him with an anxious look. He had told her that he wanted to see her about something urgent.

  “Don’t tell me that Franklin wants to be divorced.”

  “Heavens no, nothing as serious as that. He’s joined the International Brigade. He’s going to Spain next week.”

  “You call that less serious!”

  She sat forward, her elbows on her knees; her fingers intertwined. She looked very old. “What made him do it?” she asked.

  “He’s very worked up about this war. He’s been organizing all these committees. He thinks that the fate of Europe depends on what’s happening in Spain. He couldn’t stand being a non-combatant any longer.”

  His mother shook her head. “No,” she said, “that’s not the reason.”

  For a moment he considered the idea of telling her how it had come about. But it would serve no purpose; it would only put her against Rex and Lucy. It was better to leave Franklin with his own story of having enlisted of his own volition. The last thing Franklin would want would be to have Rex suspect that the whole episode had been a ‘dare’. Franklin knew that for the first time Rex respected him. He would not want that altered.

  “Isn’t there someone who could get him out?” Mrs. Renton asked. “There must be somebody with influence. They’ve got Englishmen out of the foreign legion.”

  “But Franklin doesn’t want to be got out.”

  “That doesn’t matter. We could go over his head. We could get his passport cancelled.”

  “Mother darling, he’s done this of his own accord.”

  “Oh no, he hasn’t; there’s something at the back of this, though I don’t know what.”

  There was a pause. She understood Franklin as acutely as Daphne did.

  “If only I knew what was the right thing to do,” she was going on. “If I knew why he’d done it, it would be simple; I feel so helpless. I’m the only one on his side. All the rest of you, even your father, you’ve only seen his faults; you haven’t understood why he was like that. You’ve all been so hard on him.”

  She was talking to herself in a blind, impotent misery. He tried to interrupt her but in vain.

  “All along I’ve had to fight his battles, particularly against you, Guy. You wanted him to go abroad when he left Fernhurst. It would have been fatal, I knew that; then when he had that trouble, with that night club, you wouldn’t back me up: because you wouldn’t back me up, your father wouldn’t either. He always took your advice. It wasn’t Franklin’s fault, that was obvious; he was led astray by a much older man. But you took the other side: so he was sent abroad; in disgrace; that’s how he met Daphne, that’s why he married Daphne: she’s been a good wife to him, I know. But she was too old for him. He ought to have married someone younger: he ought to have had children. This wouldn’t have happened if he had. Everything dates back to that decision of yours to send him out of England; you refused to listen to me. And you see what’s happened. If anything terrible happens to him now, you’ll be to blame. I’ll never forgive you, never. You were a good son to your father, you’ve tried to be a good son to me; but you’ve been unjust and unrelenting as a brother, driving him out of his own house. I’ve never been able to feel about you in the same way since.”

  It had been said; one of those things that cannot be unsaid; that may be forgiven but cannot be forgotten; that rankle, that itch like a festered sore. She hardly knew what she was saying. She was talking to herself.

  “There’s no friendship, no relationship in the world,” Renée had once said, “that you can’t ruin in two minutes.” This was that two minutes. He sat in silence; he had ceased to listen. He was following his own thoughts: to have had this said to him by his own mother; that all this time she had thought this about him; it poisoned the memory of half the times that they had shared.

  Two nights before he sailed Franklin dined with Guy. “Where would you like to go?” Guy asked. “You can choose your restaurant and pick your menu.”

  “Let’s have it in your flat. I’ve come to think of it as a second home.”

  It was what Barbara had said once; what Margery had said more than once. He was glad Franklin felt like that. He was reminded of that dinner, eight years ago now, on the eve of Franklin’s sailing for Oporto.

  Franklin was in a quiet mood. “It’s a great weight off my mind,” he said. “I’m tired of being an onlooker. There’s no place for non-combatants in wartime. I was sick of London too, the smugness and complacence of it all; everyone so self-important. On personal grounds too I’m glad. Something might have gone wrong between me and Daphne. How I’d have loathed it if it had.”

  That came as a considerable surprise to Guy.

  “You seemed to get on so well, to be such a team.”

  “We do. We are: but it’s not been the same in London. Daphne’s absorbed in Julia. I’m one of those who have to come first; if someone else had turned up with whom I did—and when you are in that mood somebody usually does—well, I suppose I’d have gone off with her; I’d not have wanted to but I would have gone.”

  What a feminine remark. Guy remembered Daphne’s saying on the eve of her operation, ‘Sometimes when I’ve been out with Franklin shopping, I’ve felt I was with another woman.’ How incalculable human beings were. You would come across these retired colonels, bovine in their stupidity with a mental horizon bound by golf and fishing, who would spend their evenings, you would imagine, pursuing brainless blondes, yet actually hung around Knightsbridge barracks on the watch for guardsmen; while in contraposition you would find some languid and affected æsthete with a fluted voice and a fancy flat who was only out of one girl’s bed to pop into another’s. What was it that Daphne’d said? That Lesbian streak.

  “I suppose I missed my one real chance when I let Pamela go,” Franklin was continuing. There was a reminiscent express
ion on his face. “You remember that big scene at Highgate, when Pamela and I went out into the garden. That was the turning point. ‘I love you, I believe in you,’ she said. ‘You only got into this trouble because I wasn’t there. Let’s start our life together now: show them what we can make of it. It won’t be the same thing after a year’s trial. Let’s take a dare, show them we believe in one another, now, when no one else does.’”

  It was the first time that Guy had heard what actually transpired on that decisive morning. He could understand now what Franklin had meant by describing it as the turning point.

  “Why didn’t you?” he asked.

  Franklin shrugged. “I funked it. I didn’t trust myself. I could not face the fear of failing her; to lose that hero worship. Besides, if I had failed she’d have stuck by me, she was such a loyal creature. She’d have tried to pick up the pieces: and that’s what I couldn’t face. Being organized; sustained by Pamela. After I’d been a hero to her; I had to go on being that: or nothing. It was different with Daphne. She had no illusions. She was in love with me, but with her eyes wide open; she knows the world. We were so right for one another. Why had we got to come to London?’’

  He was talking about himself in the past tense, or at least of his London life in the past tense. “How often will you get leave, do you suppose?” Guy asked.

  “None, I should think; as far as England is concerned. Local leave in Tangiers possibly. You’d better come across and see me there. It’s late, I’d better be going. Daphne will be staying up.”

  “I’ll drive you home.”

  “No, thanks. It isn’t far. I’d like to walk.” Guy watched him from his window, hurrying with a quick long stride through the October night. What was passing through Franklin’s mind? Had he chosen to walk back so that he could take his own farewell of London’s streets, saying to himself, ‘Maybe this is the last time that I shall ever walk here’?

  Across twenty years there came to him the memory of his own last leave. October ’17. Just after Passchendaele: on the eve of Cambrai. He had stood at the corner of Regent Street and Piccadilly watching the traffic swing into the Quadrant. ‘Tomorrow,’ he had thought, ‘it’ll all look just the same, with me not here to see it.’ Then it had been his turn to go, now it was his turn to stay.

  23

  Guy often thought of that last leave during the next few weeks. Everything looked the same in London. Autumn passed into winter. There was talk of an approaching slump. The Daily Express introduced into its daily cartoon a villain called Major Crisis, a character with a large handlebar moustache who was discomfited by the sound common sense of ‘the little man’. Anthony Eden rushed from capital to capital: Baldwin was transferred to the House of Lords. Hitler and Mussolini sent each other bouquets. The Left Wing screeched for intervention, attacking through Spain the obstinate refusal of the propertied classes to desert their interests with a virulence that was inspired far less by regard for the Spanish people than by a hatred for their own ruling classes.

  The tension in the Press grew keener; but trade showed no slackening in Soho Square. For Guy there were the daily telephone talks with Renée; the same dovetailing of their diaries, their lunches or their dinners two or three times a week. The Wine and Food Society was no less active. As often as not when he looked across a restaurant, he would see one of its neophytes, studying the wine list in juxtaposition to a little ivory card on which were inscribed the relative merits of each vintage year. From the outside it all looked the same. Yet a few hundred miles away his brother was training to be a front-line soldier with more than water, more than miles dividing him from these familiar streets.

  During the first weeks Franklin’s letters were eagerly awaited, read, and the news in them passed round. Most days someone asked someone what his news was.

  The news after the first days was slight. He was in Barcelona, at the depot, training with a polyglot collection of whom only a few had had any previous military training. Franklin on the strength of a Certificate A earned in the O.T.C. at Fernhurst had been made a sergeant. It was a boring life, he said.

  Guy understood that well. Kitchener’s recruits had expected to take the King’s shilling one week and ambush Uhlans in the next. They had not been prepared for the dreary weeks on the barrack square, the points of aiming, the endless exercises; even when they had got to France there had been the Bull Ring. Franklin might well not find himself in action for six months. He sent him out a food parcel from Fortnum’s: forwarded any book that might amuse him; but gradually, as the weeks went by he ceased to think of him as somebody in danger but as someone who was on a trip abroad.

  Christmas came and January: Teruel was captured; and recovered. Then Hitler marched into Austria, and Spain left the headlines. It was not till the sensation had subsided that the Rentons realized that no one had heard anything from Franklin for a full month. Guy was deputed to make inquiries.

  Among the many pro-Loyalists organizations was one that supplied medical services for the International Brigade. Its offices were in Soho, only a few yards from Duke and Renton. There was a brisk air of animation about the place when Guy called on them. It was a small congested room, its walls placarded with propaganda posters; its bookshelves sagging under pamphlets and the orange-yellow paperbacks of the Left Book Club.

  At a central desk, in an armchair, sat a well dressed woman in the thirties whose features were socially familiar. At a small table with a typewriter at each end were two youngish girls, hatless, with an air of Bloomsbury. The attention of all three was concentrated upon a tall good-looking baldish but longhaired young man who was sitting across the desk, one leg swinging loose. He was just back from Spain. He had landed at Barcelona with an ambulance and driven it to Madrid himself. He was full of his experiences; he had actually been to University City, and seen some units of the International Brigade. The spirit of the men was wonderful. “It justifies everything we are doing here. It gave me hope and faith.”

  At that point Guy interrupted. He had been in the room three minutes without attracting notice.

  “Perhaps, then, you could give me some information about my brother, Franklin Renton, a sergeant. When he last wrote he was at the base. We’ve not heard from him for a month. Do the lists of casualties reach you?”

  The man and the three women swung round to face him. They were most obliging. They did not see the casualty lists themselves but they could make inquiries: would Mr. Renton be kind enough to leave them his address? They would do anything they could do to help. They were so proud of the young Englishmen who had answered the call. Did he realize that in the last engagement over a hundred Englishmen had fallen? Mr. Surridge, as he must have overheard, was just back from the very firing line. If only more people in England could have the opportunity, they’d realize then what was at stake. Did he know that an anthology of ‘Soldier Poets’ was shortly to be published?

  Guy remembered all the sermons he had listened to in 1917 about the cup of sacrifice. At how many shareholders’ meetings had not the chairman reported the dimensions of ‘The Roll of Honour’ as though it were a credit entry on the balance sheet. He remembered all the politicians and publicists who had been sent on a Cook’s tour round the trenches to return with moving accounts of how a shell had pitched ‘only two traverses away’. People like this Mr. Surridge got a great kick out of wars: the spice of danger; a sense of self-importance, and the knowledge that within a week they would be enjoying the comfort and immunity of their Pall Mall club. One war was very like another.

  Guy left his address and a subscription to the fund and expressed appropriate appreciation of their kindness. On his return to the office he found a letter with a Spanish postmark, in Franklin’s handwriting. ‘I’m sorry to have left you all so long without a letter; but that leave in Tangiers did materialize. You ought to go there. It’s fantastic. Both sides dancing in the same night clubs; nearly fraternization but not quite.’

  That was in early April, the same
week that an Australian cricket side arrived in England. A few weeks later along with thirty thousand others Guy watched Hammond bat through a long day, after an early morning of disasters, and was to see for the first time in his experience the whole pavilion rise to its feet to applaud a batsman as he left the field.

  The news in the papers grew more ominous. But the public was now inoculated. There had been so many scares during the last eight years: the gold standard crisis; the Hoare-Laval Pact; the militarization of the Rhine; the Abdication; the Anschluss; so many panics; and hadn’t everyone heard on the best possible authority that three-quarters of the German tanks that had gone into Austria were built of cardboard?

  August came and the final Test Match at the Oval and Hutton batting for three days; the sun shone steadily, and though the Evening Standard carried a cartoon by Low of a young man at the seaside in a blazer and open shirt lying on the sand, with the caption ‘To Hell with Czechoslovakia’, while down the cliff at his back was rolling a boulder marked ‘Czechoslovakia’, its sister the Daily Express assured its three million readers that ‘There will be no war this year or next year either’; and then suddenly before anyone could realize it was happening, a genuine crisis was upon the country and Chamberlain was flying out to Germany to confer with Hitler.

  During the week-end when the crisis was at its height, Guy went down into the country to stay with Rex and Lucy. He took down Margery. The Great West Road was thronged. It was rumoured that on the first air raid there would be in London alone thirty thousand casualties. The evacuation seemed to have begun.

  It was a warm week-end. Rarely had the English countryside appeared more tranquil. It was impossible to believe that in a week these quiet towns, Hungerford, Marlborough, Devizes might be laid low by bombs.

  Rex, however, was reassuring. “No need to worry. None at all. There are enough sensible people in control here and in France, in Germany too for that matter, to ensure that nothing so insane could happen. I can’t of course give my sources of information, but I can assure you that Hitler is only a front; the men who really run the country, the Junkers, the landowners, the industrialists, the General Staff, are using him to keep the rabble quiet, to stamp out Communism; the moment he has ceased to serve their purpose, the moment they find he’s dangerous, they’ll get rid of him.”