by Alec Waugh
During the following summer I was to miss Raymond on the visits I paid to Evelyn on what was to prove his last term at Oxford. But through Judy I was to meet him fairly often. He had decided, he was to tell me, not to go back to Oxford. ‘After six months on my own it would be a putting back of the clock. I’ve embarked on other things.’ One of the things on which he had embarked was as a wireless announcer—the BBC had not yet imposed its autocratic dictatorship and was run by a group of semi-amateurs operating from Savoy Hill. It was found that Raymond had just the right pitch of voice for this medium.
‘How’s the novel going?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘The back of it’s broken, but I want to put it away for a little, and then come fresh to it. Don’t you think that would be wise?’
‘Very wise. Most of us when we read our proofs wish we could have the typescript back.’ But can’t afford to, I felt like adding.
In October I was to ask him again how it was progressing. Again he shrugged. ‘An extra month or two in storage won’t do it any harm. Let it rest awhile.’
In January my father was to say, ‘I’ve just seen a copy of Duckworth’s spring list. I don’t see your friend Peronne’s book in it.’
‘He’s lying fallow for a while,’ I said. My father shook his head. ‘Poor Gerald,’ he said. ‘Poor, poor Gerald.’
My news put him in the best of spirits.
In retrospect 1925 has come to appear as the start of a glamorous and carefree period. The Bright Young People were starting to take over. Scott Fitzgerald was in Paris, so was Hemingway, getting his material for The Sun Also Rises. A pound bought a lot and quite a number of people had quite a lot of them. I had my share, and most weeks I threw a party of some kind, with Raymond, and Judy customary guests. They were an attractive couple. There was a glow about her, the result of happiness. She had also a number of new clothes. Raymond had come of age and into his inheritance shortly before Christmas. He must also have had good credit. Judy profited. They looked so happy together that no one looked ahead. He was after all only just twenty-one; she was three or four years older. They could afford to live in the moment; there was no need to wonder yet ‘where will all this lead ?’ Judy’s jobs continued to be shortlived, but she had no difficulty in finding a new one when a firm collapsed. She could always pick up the three pounds a week that settled her basic needs of rent and light and heat, laundry and morning coffee. Nothing could have been more ‘set fair’. Then, to her astonishment, a Hollywood scout offered her a secretarial job in his Montreal office at seventy-five dollars a week. ‘We want someone with an English accent, to give us class,’ he said. He had noticed her when she was employed in the Box Office at the Everyman Theatre. ‘I’ve been waiting till the right opening came,’ he told her.
‘Are there any strings attached ?’ I asked.
‘There always are, aren’t there ?’
She had slipped back into her rôle of ‘the knowing one’.
‘At any rate, it’ll get me to Canada,’ she said.
We discussed it at length over a Russian tea. ‘What does Raymond think about all this?’ I asked.
‘He doesn’t know yet; that’s something I’d like to have you do for me.’
‘Have me do what?’
‘Break the news to him.’
It was then I realised that she really loved him. Had she been irritated, offended by his refusal to talk of marriage, how she would have relished the opportunity of walking out on her own terms. Had she not said on the evening after their first meeting, ‘One of the great things about starting a new affair is the walking out on someone who has begun to bore you.’ Here was her chance of the most satisfactory of all feminine revenges and she was letting it go by.
‘I don’t know how he’ll take it,’ she said. ‘I’ve no idea how much it’ll mean to him. He may be relieved at getting rid of me so easily. I may have become a drag. If I have … well I couldn’t bear seeing a look of relief on his face. On the other hand it may be a shock to him, he may have gone on from day to day, not looking ahead, assuming that I’d always be around. If that’s how it is, if he was suddenly to feel he needed me... I don’t mean in terms of marriage—no, I really don’t; I’ve never thought of him in terms of marriage, though I do realise, of course, that one of these days I must get married. I’m twenty-four, after all, but that’s not what I was feeling about Raymond. I’m quite happy to go on as we are, but this trip to Canada is a chance, I oughtn’t to pass it up. If, on the other hand, he genuinely feels he needs me, he well might after all… It’s so hard to tell with him, but if he did need me, I could hardly leave him. That’s why I want you to tell him. He’ll be off his guard with you; you’ll be able to see what his first reaction is, and that’s what I need to know, what I’ve got to know.’
‘Which way do you want it to be ?’
She shook her head from side to side. ‘I don’t know. Honesdy, I don’t know.’
‘Either way I shan’t be bringing you bad news.’
Again she shook her head. ‘I’m prepared for either, prepared to settle for either. The moment I know, one way or another I can carry on. But you will tell me the truth, won’t you?’
‘I’ll tell you the truth.’
‘The absolute and utter truth?’
‘The absolute and utter truth.’
I told him the following evening, when we were changing after a game of squash, which we played once a week at the RAC, of which he was a member.
‘It’s exciting news about Judy, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘What news?’
‘The job in Montreal.’
‘What job in Montreal?’
‘For a film company that wants an English voice to give it tone.’
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it. When’s she leaving?’
‘As soon as possible. They want her in a hurry.’
‘A film company. Well, that is fine for her.’
His expression could not have been more unconcerned, more personally unconcerned that is to say.
‘When did you learn this ?’ he asked.
‘Yesterday afternoon.’
‘I’m surprised she didn’t telephone me.’
‘She tried to,’ I lied. ‘She couldn’t get you.’
‘I was out a good deal yesterday. How is she taking it?’
‘She’s excited, naturally.’
‘Naturally. It’s a great chance for her.’
It did not apparently occur to him that she would not accept it.
‘But didn’t he seem surprised?’ she was to ask me afterwards.
‘Not more surprised than you would expect anyone to be when a friend has a piece of luck.’
‘He didn’t seem relieved?’
‘Not on his account. He was glad on yours.’
‘No look of disappointment, of shock ?’
‘Not that I could see.’
She shrugged. ‘That lets me out then, doesn’t it?’ She took it in her stride; she was well enough content that it had all turned out the way it had. But I did feel that she was a little aggrieved that he had not been a little bit upset. She had been cheated of a scene.
3
That was in 1925. A few months later I completely altered the general pattern of my life. Now making enough as a writer to rely upon my pen, I became a traveller, on a large scale. I gave up my flat, I gave up my directorship at Chapman & Hall’s. I was in England less than five months a year. I made new friends, but saw less of old ones. Raymond was one of those with whom I started to lose touch. Whenever I got back I called his number, but he himself was as often as not away. He kept changing jobs; or rather he kept taking jobs that were on a temporary basis; as often as not he was standing in for someone. He had occasional assignments on the air, but he had no fixed executive post. He was, for a time, a part-time gossip writer for the Sketch. Once he sold cars and once he sold insurance on commission. I asked Tom Balston about his novel. Tom shook his head. ‘I doubt if he’
ll ever finish it. Particularly now that he’s paid back that fifty pounds.’
I mentioned this to Raymond next time I saw him. ‘I was sorry to hear you’d dropped The Ungainly Wise.’
‘So was I in a way. I ought to have finished it when the idea was fresh. I re-read what I’d written the other day. Too dated.’
‘I was held by it when I read it.’
‘That was in 1924. The world’s changed since then.’ As of course it had. The early twenties had been fretted with anxiety by the fear of revolution; so many dynasties had toppled. But in May 1926 had come the General Strike. So this is it, we thought, and enlisted as special constables or engine-drivers. But the strike collapsed and the country drew a long breath of relief and went on a spree—not unlike, so the prophets of gloom warned us, the carnival on which Russia embarked after the St Petersburg massacre in 1906, the Sanine period. There was in England no precise equivalent for the New York fun fair of the later twenties when the stock market was booming; there was never that amount of money around in England, but May 1926 to September 1931 was the Vile Bodies period of ‘the Bright Young People’. No one was taking the future very seriously.
‘Are you planning anything particular?’ I once asked Raymond.
He shrugged. ‘I’m biding my time,’ he said.
‘Very sensible of him too,’ was Evelyn’s comment. ‘Sooner or later the right opportunity will come. This honeymoon can’t last for ever. Let him enjoy it while he can.’
He certainly seemed to be enjoying it. He was as elegant as ever. He never indulged in such sartorial eccentricities of the period as ‘Oxford bags’. He dressed conventionally, but smartly. In London he wore a bowler hat and carried gloves and an umbrella. His shoes shone. His suits looked as though he had had them for eighteen months and worn them rather seldom. He never seemed to wear the same tie twice. When he wore tails, his white waistcoat never showed below his coat. He looked as though he had been smiling a few seconds before and would be smiling again in a few seconds’ time. Gossip linked his name with those of a number of attractive females. But there were no rumours of an engagement. He was, after all, still in his middle twenties. He had time in plenty.
Friends said of him, ‘He has his serious side, you know.’ But it was not apparent what it was.
I met his father once. J. C. Squire ran a cricket side, the Invalids, of which A. G. Macdonnell‘s chapter in England, their England is more a photograph than a caricature. Squire led his side against villages and against country houses. In 1930 Charminster appeared on his fixture list.
‘I’ll be playing against you in June,’ I told Raymond.
‘What date?’
‘The second Saturday.’
‘Too bad, I’ll be away.’
It was the first time I had been to Charminster. Though no one had been impressed by it when it was built at the end of the seventeenth century, it had by the end of the nineteenth century become one of the houses that were written about and photographed, simply because it had not been altered. In the course of two centuries no one had added a bow window, an elaborate portico, a gabled wing. In that it was typical of the Peronnes who, after the stress of the religious wars, were content to have things the way they found them. It was solid, red brick, rectangular, three storeyed, with ivy trailing between its windows.
The cricket field was within the Park; a small oval paddock, its pavilion shaded by a copper beech. Lord Peronne had his own chair by the scoring table. In the early sixties, he was tall, moustached, handsome, slightly corpulent, with a high colour; he wore loose-fitting tweeds with an Old Etonian tie. I introduced myself. ‘I’m quite a friend of your son Raymond.’
‘I’m afraid he’s not here today.’
‘So he warned me. I was disappointed.’
The old man shrugged. ‘Never cared for cricket. Can’t think why. We’ve all been cricketers. His brother ought to have played at Lord’s that last summer. Cruel luck, catching measles, two weeks before. Measles, I ask you. I said to Raymond when the war began, “Now it’s up to you.” But he insisted on being a wet bob. I can’t think why. Rowing’s bad for the heart; luckily he wasn’t any good at it, so he gave it up.’
‘What about your grandson ?’
‘Ah, that’s another matter. Chip off the old block. That’s him over there.’
He pointed out to me a boy in a grey flannel suit who was stretched out on a rug, propped on his elbows, with a bag of raspberries at his side. He was light-haired, fresh-complexioned. ‘He was second in the batting averages last term, holds his catches too; what one wants these days. I’ve been having him coached at Lord’s during the Easter classes. Goes to Eton next half. I’ll be surprised if he’s not playing at Lord’s four years from now.’
His voice dropped a tone when he spoke about his grandson. It deepened, glowed, a smile crossed his face. His eyes were tender. It was touching. ‘Here comes his mother. You haven’t met her, have you ?’
She was small, slim, blonde. She was wearing a floppy hat. So this was Margaret. I rose to greet her. Her handshake was firm and friendly. As our eyes met I had a feeling … but it is impossible to describe that feeling, that meeting ‘of a stranger across a crowded room’, that instant recognition of affinity: there is no mistaking it, there is no denying it. As our eyes met, she smiled. She feels it too, I thought.
There was a vacant chair beside me, and she took it. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you from Raymond.’ Her voice was frank and firm. ‘I’ve wanted to meet you. I like your books.’
‘It’s a mistake to meet the authors of the books one likes.’
‘That’s what I’ve been told. But a friend of mine who knows you said “When you once know him, reading a book of his is just like hearing him talk.” I was inquisitive. I asked Raymond to bring you down here. He promised that he would, but he’s bad at promises.’
‘He’s not here often, is he?’
‘Not very often, and now he’s going to New York in September.’
‘I’m going in November.’
‘You’ll be meeting, won’t you ?’
‘I’ll insist on his bringing me down here in the spring.’
‘You do just that.’
She smiled. We each knew what was in the other’s mind. Six minutes ago we had not met, and now we were on the brink of a romance. We knew nothing about each other, yet we knew each other. I remembered how Raymond had talked about her that day at lunch all those months ago. Here was the reality that he had hinted at. But it wasn’t that way at all.
‘I’ve never seen the house,’ I said. ‘Could you show me round when the game’s over ?’ It was an unforgettable half-hour, though there was not a great deal for me to see. There were suits of armour and family portraits. Watercolour landscapes by Victorian spinsters. The library was stocked by sets of the Victorian novelists and historians. There was nothing very personal about it. ‘Has Raymond a study of his own ?’
She shook her head. ‘His father wanted to fix up a suite of rooms, but he’d have none of it.’ She showed me his bedroom, an impersonal room. No photographs. A com-pactum wardrobe, a built-in hanging cupboard, a writing desk. The pictures on the walls were not his own. Clearly he had not wanted to identify himself with Charminster, to make a home in a house which would one day cease to be his own.
‘Does he have no special feeling about the house?’ I asked.
‘He doesn’t want to have any special feeling.’
That was understandable. When his nephew came into his inheritance, he wanted to be able to pack his few possessions onto a single lorry, like a Bedouin rolling up his tent.
‘How do you feel about it yourself?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘As a woman always must feel about a house that will one day be her son’s. That’s a woman’s fate, isn’t it? In England, anyhow, with the tradition of the widow’s dower house.’
She smiled as she said that, a smile that was almost wistful. Our eyes met and our looks held each other. I ha
ve seldom felt so close to anyone in my life.
‘Maybe this is what I’m looking for,’ I thought. I was free emotionally. I did not want to get married. I wanted to travel, to be out of England for at least half the year. I was the wrong man for the vast majority of the women for whom I might have been suitable in other ways. My need for independence made me impossible for the kind of woman—and that is to say the vast majority of women who need a home and ‘a man about the place’. But surely for every man there is a woman for whom, no matter what his peculiarities may be, he can be the right one. Perhaps I was right for Margaret. It was a heady prospect.
‘I’m booking to be back in England at the end of March,’ I said.
‘I’ll note that in my diary,’ she said.
The winter of 1930-31 is not one that New York remembers gratefully. The depression was mounting to its peak, with no end in sight. Soup queues were stretching in Times Square; apples at 5¢ a piece for the unemployed were on sale along the sidewalks. Each day the stock market slid a little lower. But there were those who managed to enjoy themselves, and I was one of them. In the spring my travel book Hot Countries had been a Literary Guild selection. I was in funds. Colston Leigh had booked me for a lecture tour which gave me a chance of widening my knowledge of the USA. I took a furnished flat on the eighth floor of an apartment building that still stands at the junction of Lexington and 36th. I joined a squash racquet club and kept myself in training. I wrote during the morning; every evening there was a party of some kind. I began to feel myself a part of the New York scene. The friendships that I made then have led to the friendships that were later to enrich my New York life: particularly that with Elinor Sherwin, later to marry Wolcott Gibbs. Through her I met the friends who twenty years later were to sponsor me for the Coffee House. Every day was an adventure.
I led a picnic life, very different from the one that John O’Hara was to describe in Butterfield 8—it was during my stay that BUT 7431 became BU-8 7431—I moved in far less affluent circles. But most of my opposite numbers were managing comfortably in spite of the depression. The theatre was doing well—and there were some fine plays showing— there were plenty of magazines to pay $150 for an article to $300 for a short story. As often as not the men and women whom I was meeting had some piece of good news to celebrate.