Guy Renton (16 page)

When he did go into London, he invariably returned tired and with some complaint, his Chablis had been over-iced, his chicken pie tepid, he had had to sit next to that ‘old bore Tomkins'. By the summer he had fallen into the habit of only lunching in his club before the weekly board-meetings, when he would
ensure congenial company by inviting Guy to join him. In the boardroom he was still effective. He had the chairman's technique of drawing out in turn each member of the board, of keeping the board happy, of tactfully cutting short a member who grew too diffuse; of holding the discussion to the point, of choosing the right moment to put the issue to the vote. The comments that he injected were wise and pertinent, carrying the authority of long experience. He was still an asset to the firm; he was able to brace himself for a periodic effort; but he had reached the age when he forgot names and places, when he would address Margery as Lucy and Guy as Rex. He would spend warm summer afternoons on the gallery at Lord's; sometimes Guy would join him to find that his father in the very middle of a discussion had dozed off to sleep.

At home Guy noticed that his mother during the year that followed turned more and more to himself as the head of the family, recognizing that her husband without actually losing interest in his children had come to feel that his own job in relation to them was finished; that there was nothing more that he. could do. Mrs. Renton, nearly twenty years his junior, knew, however, that there was still a great deal to be done; and that Guy must do it.

“These next years are all-important for Barbara and Franklin,” she said. “It's hard to know exactly what to do with Barbara. We all talk about women having the vote, about women's emancipation, about women being able to go into competition with men on equal terms; but in point of fact what is there for a girl like Barbara? She can become a secretary, or a model. But she isn't the kind of girl to take up a career like the law or medicine, in the way that a man would.

“Whatever they may say there still is a difference between men and women. When a man enters a profession he knows that he stands or falls by his success in it. His whole life is graded by it. That isn't so with a woman. She has always at the back of her mind the thought that she will probably marry in the end. Her life depends not on what she makes of her career but on what her husband makes of his. She can't be as wholehearted about a career as a man can be: not a normal attractive-looking girl like Barbara. I suppose she should go up to Oxford: yes, I'm sure
she should. But I don't know what exactly she'll do afterwards. I hope that she'll have the luck to meet early someone who's right for her like Lucy did.”

“Are you so very sure that Lucy did?”

“Why of course: a man like Rex, with money. Look what a success it's been. Those three delightful children.”

Guy smiled. His mother viewed the success or failure of her children's marriages in terms of grandchildren.

“I only hope Franklin has the luck to find someone soon,” she said.

“But, Mother darling, he's not come of age.”

“He may not have. But I see nothing against young marriages. They are as likely to turn out well as mature considered marriages. They talk about not knowing one's own mind, but when does one know one's mind in that respect? You'll see a man of fifty who's been married happily for twenty years, throwing over everything for someone young enough to be his daughter. A boy of twenty can fall in love every bit as deeply as a man of thirty. There's a quality about first love that you don't find in a second love or in a third. There's a lot to be said for marrying a first love. You've shared something that you can't share with anybody else. There's no equivalent bond between two people and Franklin needs a steadying influence. It's dangerous for anybody to be as charming as he is. If one's weak that's to say, and he is weak. We can't pretend that he was a success at Fernhurst, he got into the worst set at Oxford, and I'm not at all happy about the kind of people that he's meeting now.”

“What kind of people is he meeting?”

“The kind of people you read about in modern novels, the bright young people. Oh, I'm sure they're all very smart and clever; but they're irresponsible. None of them do any work.”

“Franklin's working very well with us. He's bringing in a number of new accounts.”

“Is he? I'm glad to hear it, but those new accounts probably come from these very young people that I'm worried over. It's a dangerous profession for a boy like Franklin. He goes about with this wild group, and he has the excuse that he's doing business with them. The best thing for Franklin would be to find some nice young girl who'd steady him, who'd provide a base for him.”

“Is there any particular girl he goes around with?”

She shook her head. “I wish there was. I'm not at all happy about the kind of girl that he is seeing.”

“What, the cheap actress type?”

“Not at all, I'd be much happier if it were. It would be much healthier. No, it's these girls with short-cut hair; Eton crops don't you call them; who drink all the time and go to night clubs. They go about with such unhealthy men; I don't see how they can put up with them. Such unmanly men. The kind of girl who could tolerate the society of that kind of man could never make a satisfactory wife. And Franklin is drinking too much. Much too much. He doesn't look well. I wish he could have gone into some other kind of business. A civil servant or a lawyer——”

“He'd need a University degree for that.”

“I know. It's a great, great pity. But everything will turn out right, I'm sure of that. You must keep an eye on him.”

His mother rarely nowadays, Guy noted, talked to him of Margery. She was concerned exclusively with Barbara and Franklin, the young ones with their way to make. Margery had apparently been written off as a potential wife, as he had been as a husband. It seemed absurd to be deciding that Margery, who was only just twenty-two, would never marry. It was equally unreasonable on the surface to have dismissed as a prospective family man at thirty-two someone like himself whom nature had obviously destined for a home and children.

When he had looked ahead in the first years after his return from France, wondering what he would be like at fifty, he had always seen himself against the background of a home; going down to Fernhurst with a son, sitting in Big School on prize-giving, watching his son walk out from the pavilion in the blue and gold cap of the Eleven. He could not even now believe that that would never happen; and yet he could not imagine himself apart from Renée: his mother knew nothing about his life or his plans for it, but she had an intuitive awareness. She might take a narrow view but she took a deep one. It was an odd sensation; to feel that one had been docketed and shelved—at thirty-two. That was in the autumn of 1928.

Early in the following spring Margery rang him through at his office to ask what evening it would be convenient for her to take a cocktail with him. He arranged to keep the rest of the evening free in case she should feel like dining with him. It was cold and he stoked up the fire. He also had a bottle of champagne cooling. Margery gave a sigh of pleasure as she came in. “Oh, how cosy this all looks. It makes it all the easier for me to say what I have to. I want a flat of my own, and I want you to back me up. I can't go on trailing out to Highgate. I need independence.”

They sat before the fire slowly sipping at their wine, discussing where she could get a flat, what kind of a flat, how much she would need to pay for it. It was a great break in her life, he realized that: and the fact that she felt this need for independence was as significant an indication as you could wish of the way that she was living now. She had become a bachelor girl all right. But he made no reference to the obvious implications of the change. They discussed it as a practical situation, of how best the news was to be broken to her parents.

“There's one other thing I want to talk about,” she said. “You can say ‘no' right away, and I shan't be offended. Are you perfectly satisfied with the way your advertising's handled?”

“As a matter of fact I'm not.”

“I wondered if you were. Some of it looks antediluvian to me. In that case, I'll say my piece. There's an opening for me in a firm that's beginning to expand. If I could bring your account, they'd take me in for certain. Will you see one of their men and let him put up his proposition?”

“It can't do any harm.”

“Good. I'll send him round. There'd be no need, would there, to let Daddy know that I'm connected with the firm in any way?”

“No need at all.”

“That's just as well. He's the most generous man in the world where his own pocket is concerned, but when it's the shareholders' money, even if he owns half the shares himself. . . Well, do your best for me.”

He asked her if she was free for dinner. She shook her head. “I wish I could. I'm hours late already: the poor man will be furious. But I couldn't hurry this excellent champagne.”

She was dining, she told him, at the Hambone Club.

“I haven't been there for three years. Is it just the same?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Rugger hearties in plus-fours, pansies in high-neck jumpers and notices round the walls about work being the problem of the drinking classes.”

His car was garaged, so he took a taxi. He dropped her at Ham Yard, then told the driver to turn back up Piccadilly: there was a traffic block and he tapped the window. “All right,” he said, “you can let me out.”

It was a cold dry night: moonless, but starlit. He stood for a moment at the top of St. James's Street looking to his right, past the lighted shop-windows; the Sandeman's Port sign; the dazzle of the Circus: Fortnum's gilded clock. He turned to the left. On one side lay the dark stretches of the park, the street lamps dipping in a long, narrowing vista—it was only at night that you could see the shape of streets—on the other, the jagged skyline of Piccadilly. It had altered a lot, that skyline, since the war. ‘The proposed site of the Park Lane Hotel' no longer presented its note of bankruptcy; the Savile Club had been driven northwards beyond Berkeley Square: the bow windows were vanishing, superseded by straight tall blocks of masonry. It wasn't the same place any longer, so his father said; to his father, that notice board ‘Last days of Devonshire House' had been the death-knell of a whole way of life; but to himself London was no less magical: it had still the same sense of imminent adventure. He wondered where he should dine: it was a choice between the Wanderers and Bolton's, a supper club in St. James to which he had been recently elected. How pleasantly London was organized for the man with enough money to indulge his preferences: a city of easy credit and wide alternatives; always something different to do, some new atmosphere to be savoured; the sense too of being at the core of things, of being in touch with the men who were behind events.

He decided on the supper club. Bolton's in itself was a typical example of the variety of London's life. Until a year ago he had not even been aware of its existence. Privately owned by a member of the Upper House, it consisted of the ground floor and basement of a small house in a side street, south of White's. On
the ground floor was a billiard table that was rarely used and a number of chairs that served as a repository for hats and cloaks. The sitting-room, the original kitchen, was arranged in a series of alcoves and settees; its walls were decorated with stuffed fish and' birds and
Vanity Fair
Spy cartoons; a large dresser decorated with a Spode dinner service faced an open range at which you watched your dinner being cooked. Its dining-room contained only two tables: the larger one seated ten and conversation there was general. The other table seated two and was rarely used.

The club was catholic in its membership; it drew upon the Brigade of Guards, and the junior ranks of the Conservative party, but it also enrolled athletes, musicians, barristers. Though its membership was large, rarely more than twenty were there at any given time. It stayed open late and could be very lively when the House was sitting and junior cabinet ministers came in after a debate for a late supper, with the talk informal and informed.

Guy never knew whom he might meet there. On this occasion and very much to his surprise he found Roger sitting by himself, beside a glass of sherry, reading the evening paper. Neither had realized that the other was a member. It was typical, they agreed, of the privacy of London life that two friends could be members of the same club a year and never know it. “I presume that you haven't dined,” said Roger.

Guy shook his head.

“A fortunate eventuality. I wish I could consider it prudent to suggest that we should share a bottle.” It was tradition in Bolton's that you drank beer with your supper and vintage port with your coffee, and the wine list was mediocre. Nor were cocktails served.

Guy ordered himself a double whisky. His nerves were jumpy. He was not only surprised but upset at finding Roger here. Why hadn't Renée told him that Roger was dining out? He had been home since six o'clock. Was anything wrong? He could not ask straight out; he had to be devious.

“Did you and Renée enjoy that party of the Armstrongs? I found it rather dull,” he said.

“I am afraid you must be getting blasé: why not indeed? a
recherché
bachelor like yourself: particularly now that you are out
of training. Renée and myself with our simpler standards found it not unamusing.”

“I rather thought Renée looked a little tired.”

“You did? I had not noticed. Only this morning she was remarking on how very well she felt.”

She could not be ill in that case. Was something the matter with the boy? The nurse's evening off, Renée sitting in the nursery while Roger went to his club. “It's a while since I've seen that boy of yours,” he said. “Does he show any signs of being mathematical?”