Guy Renton

by Alec Waugh

  His secretary, a lively blonde in the later twenties, was well supplied with beaux. Flowers and telegrams and presents kept arriving for her; she always left the office at lunchtime arrayed as for a date. But that did not prevent her from being, in her work, punctilious, practical, and punctual. One afternoon, however, he was instructed by the Controller to reprimand her. It was one of the rules of the office, for security reasons, that no secretary should be called for at the office, or be driven back to it. She must be dropped two streets away. The Controller had observed her that afternoon being handed out of a car by a young man in striped trousers and a short black coat whom he did not know.

  “You know it’s against the office rules,” Guy told her.

  “It was raining and I was wearing a new hat.”

  “Why not carry an umbrella?”

  “It was fine when I started out this morning.”

  “It’s an office rule, you know.”

  Her eyes flashed angrily. “For security’s sake this office is called ‘Aliens’ Registration’. That may fool our friends in London, but does it fool the people we mean to fool? Do you think Berlin doesn’t know the kind of thing that goes on here? Your face is familiar to everyone who’s played Rugby football. It’s even been on cigarette cards. Yet you call yourself Major Ducat. My friends know I work here. They can telephone me, send me flowers here: the address is in the telephone book. But they can’t drop me here: wouldn’t my date have thought it far more odd if I’d asked to be dropped two streets away when it was pouring cats and dogs?”

  “Have you read a book by Compton Mackenzie called Water on the Brain?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Then I’ll send it you for Christmas.”

  “Does that mean you think this is all nonsense too?”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “Fine. I think we shall get on together very well. I’ll try not to get you into trouble with the boss.”

  It all seemed unreal. These Arabs in Ankara; this Major Ducat, secretaries who were expected to ruin hats, and this unlikely war which now in its fourth month had numbered more road accidents in the black-out than front-line casualties.

  In January Guy received an invitation to the wedding of Daphne’s daughter to Captain the Hon. John Meredith. Guy looked the name up in Who’s Who: the third son of a second Baron. The entry against the name was short. Military service in the first war. A couple of directorships. Hobbies: golf and yachting. Clubs: The Reform and R.A.C. The Barony had been created in 1918. A Lloyd George creation: a rich one probably. The heir had been born in 1906. Julia’s bridegroom was probably in the later twenties. It sounded very suitable.

  Julia a bride! Well, she was twenty now, and it was five years since they had discussed Dowson in the sun at Mougins. All the same it was hard to realize how quickly the years were passing.

  The wedding took place in the Old Church, Chelsea. With its dark woodwork and dull brasses, its dignity of line and stained-glass windows, it had the air of a college chapel. There were close upon two hundred guests, evenly divided between the two sides of the church. The bridegroom was a Grenadier, and there was a good deal of uniform on his side, but the bride’s supporters had more chic. In wartime as in peace-time Daphne’s friends had a well-groomed, well-fed air. A few of them Guy had met before at Avenue Road parties. But he saw no one whom he could directly associate with Franklin. All the Rentons had been asked, but a bitterly cold spell had struck the country. Margery was in bed with influenza. One of the toads had measles, and Mrs. Renton was helping a nurseless Barbara. Norman was in camp. Only Lucy and Rex were there, besides himself.

  The reception was in Tedworth Square. It was a house that Guy had rarely visited, into which Daphne had moved only a very few weeks before Franklin left for Spain. Most of its furniture had come from Daphne’s parents; it had been stored on their deaths while she had lived in trunks and suitcases. Good, solid, unostentatious, lit up here and there with an eighteenth-century cabinet or set of chairs, it made Guy curious about her background. She had never talked about her childhood. He had never thought of her as having roots. The furniture made him wonder.

  The reception was on the first floor. There was a wartime feeling against elaborate weddings, but Julia had available the dress worn by her grandmother, that Daphne herself had never had a chance of wearing. She looked very pretty in her lace and satin. As he took his place in the queue he wondered whether she remembered that last talk they had had here, after Franklin’s death. There was a twinkle in her eye as he came up to her.

  “Don’t think,” she said, “I’ve let you off that promise. I may need you yet.”

  She squeezed his hand, then to his complete surprise and quite real pleasure she raised herself upon her toes and kissed him.

  The wedding presents were on the same floor, across the passage; a sumptuous assortment of plate and glass and silverware. Perhaps there were more cheques than usual, but nothing else suggested that this was a wartime wedding. The display of gifts assumed a continuity of picnics, dinners, and cocktail parties.

  He walked downstairs. It was strange to think that thirteen months ago this had been his brother’s home, that his brother had thought of this as home as he shivered in his trench under a winter sky. There was no sign of Franklin, nothing to remind him of Franklin, no book, or chair or picture: nor for that matter an acquaintance. Franklin had made no friends, accumulated no possessions. He had been loved, he had been liked, but he had put down no roots. He had moved into other people’s lives, and then moved on: leaving no trace. In very much the same way that Daphne had done in the Rentons’.

  Yes, they were of a type those two: they had been well mated. What would happen to her now? She might re-marry, but he doubted it. She would not be worried by loneliness, as most other women would be on their daughter’s marriage. She was self-sufficient. She was very unlikely to find another man so adaptable as Franklin and even he had found the situation beyond him, towards the end. Perhaps she had too. She would probably concentrate on war work. She was the kind of person who’d finish with an O.B.E. He caught her eye across the room. She had people round her. She held his glance seeming to hesitate, as though she were wondering whether to break away from them. She smiled then shook her head and waved her hand, as though in leave-taking. He turned away. Yes, she was right, he thought. They hadn’t any more to say to one another: for the moment anyhow.

  On the ground floor at the buffet table he found Rex standing by himself.

  “Ah, there you are. Knew you’d get down here soon. Good champagne, none of your non-vintage stuff. Lanson ’29. How’s everything? Why no uniform?”

  “I’m cloak and dagger.”

  “Are you? Yes, of course you are. ‘Old Smoky’ fixed you up all right. Thought he would. Good fellow ‘Smoky’.”

  “Why don’t you come and join us? He thinks the world of you.”

  “Does he, that’s good of him. I’m glad he does. One of the very best. My first company commander. Always say, don’t they, that a subaltern’s made or marred by his first company commander. Wish I could come in with you. You can guess how a chap like me feels not doing anything in wartime. Avoid the Rag these days, feel ashamed going there; I’m an air warden and all that of course. Not the same thing though. Realize of course that I’m too old for fighting. Trouble as regards the staff is, my dear fellow, that I’ve been mixed up with too many people who backed the wrong horse. M.I.5 must have a double file about it. Best I can do is to lie low I fancy.”

  He paused: a look that was almost furtive crossed his face.

  “I oughtn’t to ask you. And of course it’s not your pigeon. But just as a matter of curiosity, have you heard my name mentioned in your outfit?”

  Guy shook his head. “We’re like monks, you know: each living in his little cell, working out his nefarious projects.”

  “Are you? I suppose you are. Well, it’s a relief anyhow that I’m not one of the birds whose tail you’re saltin
g. What about some more champagne? Yes, I think so. Yes.”

  It was very good champagne. And by the time the bride had driven away into the dark frostbound night, Guy was in no mood for a return to ‘Aliens’ Registration’. A report from Ankara had, however, come in that morning that he had to deal with. It had arrived a few minutes before lunch and he had barely glanced at it.

  It presented what Galsworthian lawyers had described as “a pretty point”. A pullman porter on the Taurus Express who went by the code name of ‘Crocodile’ was acting as a double agent. In the pay of both sides, he was supplying the British with useful information by telling them what the Germans wanted to know about the political atmosphere in Iraq and Syria. The British learnt from ‘Crocodile’ what the Germans did not know and in return ‘Crocodile’ supplied the Germans with the kind of information about French and British plans and policy in the Middle East that the British wanted Germany to have. The British in Ankara had a useful private-life blackmail hold on ‘Crocodile’ and believed that he was playing straight by them.

  The Germans were, however, beginning to be dissatisfied with ‘Crocodile’. The time had come to give them some authentic information. What Ankara proposed was this. The British had on their payroll a young Turk, employed in the German Consulate who went by the code name ‘Rufus’. Rufus was the illegitimate son of a German Colonel who had been stationed in Istanbul during the first war. The Germans with their heraldic faith in the redeeming qualities of Teuton blood, placed implicit trust in Rufus, who in point of fact loathed the Germans with the fury of a good Moslem against the infidel who had betrayed his mother. For two years Rufus had supplied Guy’s opposite number in Ankara with highly pertinent information. But recently he had grown restive. He was meditating matrimony. He was tired of the business. He wanted to be quit of it and settle down. For three months now he had failed to provide any useful news. Would it not be a good idea if Crocodile was provided with information that would incriminate Rufus? This would re-establish Crocodile in the opinion of the Germans and Rufus would be no particular loss to the war effort.

  On the face of it the suggestion was a good one. Crocodile’s credit had to be re-established in German eyes. Rufus had ceased to be an asset. The temptation was considerable to signal Ankara ‘approved’, call it a day and go back to his flat and books. Nine times in ten he would have sent that signal. A war was on and you could not consider individuals. But this was the tenth time.

  That signal, he knew it well, would mean nine times in ten the end of Rufus. He tried to visualize Rufus; he could not: he did not know the background. Ankara, for him, sitting at his London desk, mellow with good wine, ninety minutes after a bride had kissed him out of simple fondness, was an alien universe. He saw Rufus in terms of Julia’s husband: a young man who had fallen in love and wanted to be quit of old entanglements. Rufus had never done them any harm, had done them indeed a great deal of good. Guy could not on a day like this sign that kind of a man’s death warrant.

  He wrote out the signal. ‘Disapprove operation Rufus suggest apply Aunt Mildred.’

  ‘Aunt Mildred’ was the code name for his opposite number in Baghdad. Auntie could twitch her skirts and supply some facts about the refuelling of aircraft at Habbaniya. He tried again to visualize the Rufus situation, once again he failed. He did not even know Rufus’ real name; there was always a ‘cut-out’ to intervene. He had no idea how he lived, how numerous were his dependants, what his girl was like. It was odd to think how many lives might have been affected because Daphne had served vintage Lanson instead of grocer’s ‘phiz’.

  In March Roger went to Washington on an economic mission. He had no idea how long he would be away. The problem of finding dollars with which to purchase war materials had become acute. He might not be back until midsummer.

  “‘I shall be due for a month’s leave in June,” Guy said to Renée. “Why don’t we spend it in the South of France?”

  “It might be managed.”

  That was the kind of thing that Londoners said to one another in March 1940.

  25

  A crazy war, an unreal war. It still seemed unreal, even after the balloon went up, and in the course of a few days there came to Guy and Renée, to Barbara and Margery and the rest of England the feeling that they were living not only in a different world but in a different planet, with England on her own, a solitary fortress in the Atlantic, the last custodian of freedom with the Home Guard mustering in every village and invading aircraft circling over London.

  Event followed event with bewildering catastrophic swiftness. Holland out of the war, Belgium out of the war, the Dunkirk beaches. But the sequence of disasters in France and Belgium did not alter Guy’s own routine. He was still concerned over Iraqi Kirds who went up as students into Turkey to be cajoled by enemy agents into delivering inflammatory nationalist addresses on the radio. Crocodile’s reports came in week after week like the instalments of a serial. He did his best not to ask himself what Rufus mattered, when German troops were encircling Paris.

  Every few hours a Most Secret report of the present position of the battle front would reach him. It seemed incredible; he would study it in relation to the map. He remembered those half-mile advances on the Somme. On his way to the Wanderers’ he would buy a paper to see how much the public had been told, to find out what he was supposed to know in contrast to what he actually did know, so that he should not make a slip at lunch.

  In one of these reports he had read that the Queen Victoria Rifles had been rushed across the Channel. That, he presumed, meant Norman. A few hours later they were in action. He rang up Barbara. He wished she and Norman would have lunch or dinner with him. Would they let him know when he was next on leave?

  “We’d love to,” Barbara said. “But I think leave’s been stopped. As a matter of fact, I haven’t heard from Norman for a week.”

  So, Norman had gone. Guy had his own sources of information. He knew that very few of them had got back to the Dunkirk beachhead. He learnt before Barbara did, that Norman was among the missing.

  He went out to see her. The Heath looked very fresh and green in the late spring sunlight. He had never seen the rhododendrons in fuller flower.

  “The chances are a hundred to one on his being a prisoner,” he told Barbara. “There was heavy fighting, but we know more or less where the casualties were.”

  It was not strictly true, but it was better to pad the blow.

  “Do you think I should be a coward if I took the children away to Canada or to Australia?” she said.

  “You’d be very wise. You could do no good here; if this island’s to be a fortress, the fewer, well, shall I say useless mouths, the better.”

  “That’s what I thought. If Norman is a prisoner, he’d be happier in his own mind, if he could think of the children being properly fed. I wouldn’t mind in the least on my own account. I’d enjoy war work, but my war work’s looking after these four children.”

  “You’ve got to give them the best chance you can.”

  “Where would you suggest my going?”

  “Canada, the firm’s got links there. You’d be all right for money.”

  “What about this house?”

  “I’ve an idea for that.”

  His office in view of the possibility of invasion and the danger of large scale bombing was billeting its staff on the outskirts of London. Highgate was a little close, but it was not near a railway or any military objective.

  “You might do very much worse,” he told the Controller.

  “I’ll go and see it. You’d like to live there yourself I suppose, to see that we respect your sister-in-law’s furniture.”

  He shook his head. There was still that same obstacle. High-gate was too far from Albion Street.

  Barbara left early in July, a week after she had learnt that Norman was a prisoner. Guy went down to Euston to see her off. The train was crammed with mothers and their children.

  “I feel an awful rat,�
� she said.

  “You shouldn’t. Everything will depend on this next generation. It will be up to them to readjust the balance.”

  He returned to his office to find a message from Lucy. Would he ring her at once? She was staying at the International Sportsmen’s Club. Her voice sounded distracted. She did not want to talk about it on the telephone. Could she come round and see him?

  “It would be better if you came to my flat. Could you have dinner with me?”

  “I’msorry, no. I’m going out to Highgate. I could come round for a cocktail, or after dinner. Mother likes going to bed early.”

  “After dinner would be more convenient.”

  He had an idea he would be working late. Crocodile was still a problem. Aunt Mildred had done her stuff. But the French armistice had raised an issue. The Taurus Express ran into Syria at Aleppo, went back into Turkey, then crossed Syria by the Duck’s Bill into Iraq. Crocodile had had useful contacts both in Aleppo and Kamechle. No one knew how these contacts would behave now that France was no longer a belligerent.

  Lucy arrived shortly before eleven.

  “You’ve heard the news?” she said.

  “That Norman’s a prisoner. Yes, of course.”

  “No, that they’ve arrested Rex.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “Being a danger to the realm.”

  “But what’s he done?”

  “Nothing, it’s what he might do.”

  I8B. The law that allowed you in wartime to arrest without trial anyone who might be considered dangerous. Rex would be vulnerable under that definition. He had been mixed up with so much that was so near to Fascism.

  “I should have thought you would have heard,” she said.

  “No, that’s M.1.5.”