Guy Renton (24 page)

It was done as everything he did with ease and grace.

There was silence as the door closed behind them.

“How on earth did she find out?” Mr. Renton asked.

“I told her.”

Mrs. Renton said it on a note of proud defiance. This was her trump card. “I said it at the time and I repeat it, we had no right to keep all this from Pamela. It's her business far more than it is ours. Up to now Franklin has been my responsibility, but now he's hers. I'm very proud of her: and I'm proud that my son has made a girl as fine as that feel in the way she does about him.”

Within less than ten minutes Franklin and Pamela had returned.

“We've talked this over,” he said. “We've agreed that we'll postpone our wedding for a little longer: that I'll go out there, see how things are: it'll mean a good deal of adjusting on my part to start with, I'll have to learn the language, then as soon as I'm settled in, I'll come back and fetch Pamela. I won't be long. It's going to make all the difference to me knowing that she's here waiting.”

“I think,” said Mr. Renton, “that this is one of the occasions that demand champagne.”

The wine was poured and glasses clinked: Mrs. Renton sat back in her chair, a smile of quiet triumph about her mouth. She had not quite won her point, but she very nearly had. At any rate Franklin was not leaving in disgrace. They went into lunch in a more united spirit than they had known since the raid on the Flamingo; but even so Guy was conscious of an ill-omened
premonition. He would have given a lot to know exactly what had taken place between Franklin and Pamela during that ten minutes in the garden. Eight years were to pass before he did.

He drove Margery back afterwards. “We all seem to have been thinking about Pamela and Franklin. No one's been asking how this will affect you,” he said.

“You're the only one who realizes that it might.”

“How is it going to?”

“It'll leave things exactly as they were.”

“You mean as regards Michael Drummond.”

“It's going to make things difficult for him for a while. But he's used to that. He's always got a number of irons in the fire. Within a year he'll be on his feet again.”

“But what about your own plans: yours and his? From the way that you were talking that night at the Flamingo ...”

“This has put paid to that.”

“I don't see why.”

“For my kind of person, a marriage has to be something very solid, that looks solid too, or there's no point to it. Think of all the bickering there'd be; think of what Mother'd feel. We'd start on the wrong basis. It's all very well for someone like Pamela to make a gesture, to go off into the wilds with her man who's going to make good. I'm too far down the course.”

“Isn't that rather tough on Michael?”

“I don't see why. Don't they say that where women are concerned, there's only one thing a man really wants.”

“That isn't true, you know.”

“I know it isn't, but at the same time if a man's had that, if he's still having it, he's no right to grumble.”

It was said with a brutal frankness: with a level voice: but without vindictiveness. She bore life no grudge. He turned his thoughts back to their first post-war Christmas; she had been fourteen then, complaining that she had been born too late for all the fun that the girls in uniform had had. She had been so buoyant and expectant. What had happened since to harden her?

On the evening before he left for Portugal, Franklin dined alone with Guy. He had specially asked for that. He could not stand a family evening, he had said, yet he wanted to be in an atmosphere of the family. He had asked too that they should dine at Guy's flat rather than in a restaurant. He wanted to see familiar things about him.

“What about Pamela?” Guy asked.

“I couldn't stand that either. All too taut and tense.”

“But she might like that, girls enjoy a chance every now and then of putting on an act. You may have hurt her feelings.”

“I'd hurt her feelings more if I was in the wrong mood for her act. No, she saw my point.”

Or rather, Guy suspected, Franklin knew so exactly what he wanted for himself that he was convinced that everyone would be agreed that he should have it. Franklin was constitutionally unable to imagine that anyone who cared for him would ever have any object other than the finding out of what he might choose to want and then the trying to give it him. To-night he wanted to talk about himself.

“I suppose if this had happened to you, you'd think you were in disgrace,” he said. “The adult equivalent of being expelled from school. You would now, wouldn't you?”

“I might.”

“That's what I thought you'd say. That's what's worrying Mother. She's afraid I'll go away with a hangdog woe-begone expression; as a matter of fact I'm rather excited about going to a new place, meeting new people; getting away from London. I'm a little tired you know of having to live at home.”

“Won't you miss Pamela?”

“Of course, but perhaps that's a good thing too. We couldn't
have got married right away, and a long engagement, well, it might have been a strain, you know.”

He paused, but it was clear that he had more to say: something to get off his chest. It was the first time that Guy had seen him in this mood.

“I can understand why you should think I might be feeling in disgrace. It's the difference between our generations,” he went on.

“How am I to interpret that?”

“You were brought up to believe in solid things; duty to the family, duty to the business, duty to the Empire. Things that you believed would last.”

“And so were you.”

“Perhaps, but by the time I was half-adult, I couldn't believe that they would last. You were eighteen when the war began. You'd never questioned all those simple faiths. You went and fought for them. What was that phrase of Housman's, you ‘saved the sum of things for pay'. But I was six when the war began. Eleven when it ended. By then the whole structure was about to topple. I can't see those loyalties in the way that you did, as being ‘the sum of things'.”

‘The sum of things.' Duty to family, duty to the business, duty to the Empire; the crown, the altar, and the hearth. Guy let his thoughts slip backwards into reverie. He remembered the daily ritual in their home in Kensington: morning prayers before breakfast in the drawing-room: ‘the family' beside the fire; ‘the staff' in their starched aprons and white caps beside the door; his father in a black frock coat reading the day's psalm.

He remembered being taken as a boy to Soho Square where his grandfather and great-grandfather had lived above their shop. “Founded in 1773,” his father told him, “and in all those years the words ‘shipped by Renton' has been a guarantee of merit.” He had been introduced to the members of the staff, the accountants, the packers, and the cellarmen; most of them had been with the firm all their lives. He went on their yearly picnic, kept their cricket score. He thought of them as members of his family. “They take the same pride in the firm's good name as we,” his father said.

He remembered those Sunday lunches at Highgate after
church; his grandfather at the table's head, lifting his glass of port against the light, moving it below his nose, inhaling its aroma, slowly sipping at it, savouring its bouquet on his palate; a glow of appreciation coming into his eye as he wiped his long white moustache; a glow that was inspired no more by the excellence of the wine than by a pride in the knowledge that the cork that had bottled it bore the imprint ‘Duke and Renton.'

He remembered his preparatory school headmaster, a stern messianic figurehead whose history classes became under the slightest encouragement a lecture on the school's development. “We study history,” he would begin, “so that by understanding the past, we may be competent to judge the present and foresee the future. In thirty years you fellows—or some of you—will be helping to run this country. And how do you expect to run it competently as men, if while you are boys, you behave in the way that you ...” and here he would pause and his eye would travel along the class to alight on the delinquent of the moment, “in the way that you, Wuffy, are behaving now.

“This morning during break I looked in your locker. Never have I seen such a disorder of books, letters, papers, compasses. It was a disgrace. Suppose I had been coming round the classrooms with a parent who was thinking of sending his son here. Suppose, as I might have done, I had opened one of the lockers so that the parent could get some idea as to the space a boy had to keep his things: suppose that locker had been yours. What impression would that parent have formed of our discipline? Would he have wanted to send his own son here? I doubt it. I doubt it very much. Because you, Wuffy, are a member of this school, that parent would decide that it was a bad school. In the same way that people would say your family had bad blood if you were to do something dishonourable in business. Is that, Wuffy, what you'd want to have people say about your family? Of course it isn't. You'd do anything to prevent that wouldn't you. Then why shouldn't you feel in the same way about your school?

“You're proud of your parents. You want your parents to be proud of you. You want people to think well of your parent because of you. You're proud of your country. You want your country to be proud of you. You want people to think more highly of your country because of you. When you go abroad, as
you will go sooner or later, you want people to say, ‘If that's a typical Englishman, then England must be a fine country.' Don't you want them to feel in just that way about your school? Don't you want your school to be proud of you? Don't you want the outside world to think more highly of your school because of you? When you go home for your holidays don't you want to have people say, ‘That's a well-mannered boy. I wonder what school he comes from?'

“When you go to your public schools don't you want to have your new masters say, ‘That's a good scholar, that's a good athlete. He must have been trained at a good prep.' Isn't that what you want? Of course it is. Your family, your school, your country. You're proud of them. You want them to be proud of you. You want the world at large to think more highly of them because of you. That's why you study history; so that you can learn how to make your country proud of you, so that you'll learn how you can best serve your country. In this present case now of Walpole's foreign policy ...”

Everything had seemed very clear-cut in that classroom. A map hung above the mantelpiece; a quarter of it was painted red. The path of duty was defined. The family first, the unit of the home; the preparatory school to fit you for the public school; Oxford or Cambridge next; you took your degree, then entered upon the post or calling for which birth and talent fitted you, confident that whatever work you undertook would make its own contribution to the nation and the Empire's welfare. One thing led to the next thing on a mounting stair.

That was the tradition to which he had been brought up. The Left Wing Press invariably pictured the life of ‘the propertied and privileged classes' in terms of the pleasures and immunities which that property and those privileges provided. No reference was made to the obligations which the enjoyment of them entailed, yet actually it was on those obligations that his whole training, his whole education had been focused.

He remembered those final July days of 1914. He was eighteen, back from school, with another year presumably to run; a year that would see him a prefect, and captain of the XV; a year that should be the crown and climax of his schooldays.

On the Saturday he went down to Blackheath with his father
to watch Kent play Surrey. It was a sunny day and a big holiday crowd was there to watch the cricket. A week earlier when he had worked out the percentages of the County championship, he had decided that on the outcome of this match the fate of the championship might well depend. It was hard to realize sitting here on the familiar ground, in the familiar stand watching the familiar figures, Hay ward and Hobbs and Hitch in their chocolate coloured caps, and Blythe with his short tripping run and his left arm tucked behind his back, it was hard to believe, here where everything seemed the same, that within a week's time no one would care whether a cricket match was lost or won.

They were joined shortly before lunch by an old friend of his father's, Philip Trevor, the cricket correspondent of the
Daily Telegraph.

“I suppose I shall have to write a report about this match,” he said, “but it won't be printed. By Monday morning there'll be nothing but war news in the papers. I imagine that it's the last game I'll watch. I've got my orders. I'm still on the reserve. I know exactly what I have to do, the moment the word is given.”

In the course of the morning's play a number of telegrams were brought out to players. Each time a murmur went round the field. The same question was being asked by everyone, “Were they calling-up orders?” As the day wore on, and the news in the papers worsened, the sky clouded over. Guy and his father drove back in silence, in one of the decrepit ‘bob a nob' fourseater horse-drawn carriages that only appeared on match days to convey spectators from the station to the rectory field.

As they paced the platform waiting for the London train, Guy set the question that all day had been in both their minds.

“I'm wondering, Father, what exactly I ought to do about getting in the army.”

The use of the word ‘exactly' was a precise definition of the spirit in which many thousands of similar Englishmen were setting themselves that question at that moment. There was no question of whether to go or not. It was a question of ‘how'. There was no question of the justice or injustice of the quarrel. To get yourself into uniform the moment your country was at war and then to get yourself as near as possible to the enemy was
an integral part of the whole system of privilege and obligation to which people like himself had been brought up.