by Alec Waugh
She rose to her feet. She walked over to the window; she flung up the sash and stood, her hands upon the sill. He crossed to join her. Outside the light had faded. It was a good night for bombers. Already there was a red glow in the North, the houses round Paddington, he supposed. He put his arm about her shoulders.
“I don’t know what you felt then or what you didn’t feel. There’s only one thing I know for certain, what I feel now. I’ve found you at last. I’ve found what marriage to you could be. I’m not going to let you go again.”
Outside, the red glow to the North was heightening, deepening and widening. There was a kinship, a linked association between his own problem and this tortured city’s.
‘We’ve played for safety you and I all our lives,’ he thought; ‘and why else is London in flames to-night but because we as a nation played for safety, because we put second things in front of first things, as you and I put second things in front of love; property, convention, social interest, the opinion of other people. “There’s only one way to love,” he said, “for two people to give up everything for each other, to live in and for each other. There’s no other way.”
She sighed, a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of a deep happiness.
His arm tightened about her shoulders, above them and about them the fury of the blitz was heightening.
“Nothing matters, nothing,” he said, “except our being together now for always.”
She sighed. She drew closer against his shoulder. The whine of the falling bombs grew louder, nearer, so that he barely heard her as she began to answer him. He leant over close to catch her words. “Nothing else in the world matters, nothing.” She rose on tiptoe as she spoke, so that he could hear above the bomb’s loudening whine, though it was barely whispered, that final ‘nothing’.
It was the biggest moment of his life. In that one word at last, after fifteen years, they had become complete, had found each other, had found themselves, had become one person.
It was that whispered ‘nothing’, the pitch and tone and the vibration of it that echoed through his brain and heart now six years later, in the spring of 1946, as he stood at this same window, pondering the question that this young officer had set him, the question of a companionate alliance.
“Can’t you put yourself back,” the young man had asked, “. . . out of your own experience.”
Out of his own experience, out of all this room had seen: Franklin on the eve of his two departures; Daphne on the eve of her operation; the Abdication speech; Barbara bringing Norman round, the tweed coat, the corduroy trousers, the red beard; Lucy with Rex in prison; all those talks with Margery: Margery on his return from Fernhurst, ‘By and large you and I have come off best’: out of all this room had seen, out of all the moods that he had lived through here, all the confidences that had been brought to him; out of it all, out of twenty-one years of living it was that whispered ‘nothing’ that spoke with the final urgency, the ultimate authority. It was under that influence that he turned back to the young man behind him.
“I’m an ageing bachelor,” he said, “and where love’s concerned ageing bachelors are usually either cynical or sentimental. I don’t think I’m either. And I’m not a moralist. But this I’m certain of, that when two young people really love each other, there’s only one chance of that love lasting; that’s in marriage. There has to be a complete giving, on both sides, and that, outside marriage, there never can be.”
He spoke quietly but very seriously. He could see that the young man had been impressed. He had been given the advice that probably, in the last analysis, in his own heart of hearts he had been hoping for. Most likely he would act upon it.
Guy turned away, to look below him; standing where he had stood twenty-one years ago watching for the first time for a grey-green Chevrolet; standing as he had stood on that November evening with Renée in his arms, with the blitz roaring over them, leaning to catch her whisper.
That final ‘nothing’. It was the last word he was to hear her speak. For the bomb whose whine had almost deadened that last sentence, had been succeeded before the house had ceased its quivering by another and swifter impact that had crashed them senseless to the floor. Beside him in his arms when he recovered consciousness was a lifeless body.
“Nothing else in the world matters, nothing.”
It was in the light of that final ‘nothing’ that Renée would, he felt very sure, have wanted him to advise her son.
Author’s Note
In making the central character of this book a Rugby footballer who was ‘capped’ for England in the early twenties, I have falsified the facts of football history. The captain of the Harlequins in 1924–5 was my very good friend Howard Marshall who knows that no reference is intended to himself; nor is any reference intended to any of the forwards who played for Oxford at Queen’s Club in 1919, or for England at Twickenham between 1921-3. Guy Renton is completely fictional.
There did, however, exist in the 1930s an organization called ‘The English Mistery’.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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ISBN: 9781448203307
eISBN: 9781448202973
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