Guy Renton (28 page)

Having adopted a certain way of living, she had organized it to a point of supreme efficiency. It was a way of life like any other. Work did not enter it. She was aware that a number of the men she met had professions and responsibilities that reclaimed
them to Berlin, London, Paris, New York, even though it meant the missing of an amusing party. But she never saw them when they were working. Work was something that you had to do if you were unfortunate enough to have no money. She would have been astonished if Franklin had insisted on continuing his work in Jerez. Had he been the kind of person who would have had such feelings, she would not have considered him as matrimonial timber. For the running, Guy fancied, must have been made by her.

During the eleven years since the war, she had never stayed in any single place for longer than three months, but she was now looking for a villa in Antibes. It was time her daughter had a home. They could always let it, besides there were legal advantages about having a fixed residence.

“France is the best place to have one,” she maintained. “No one really bothers to pay Income Tax; it's a question of finding the right person for the
douceur.”
She was modest and unaffected about her possessions, accepting them as she accepted herself and her way of life. It would never occur to her that her way of living required any explanation or apology; nor would she consider it anything to boast about. It was Franklin who did the boasting.

“I must show you, Mother darling, the cigarette-case Daphne's given me.”

It was long, thin, in white and yellow gold, with his initials in the corner. Inside was inscribed the date of their first meeting.

“That was my engagement present: look at my wedding one.” It was a gold wrist-watch with an intricate self-locking band. He was also wearing a pair of cuff links that Guy had not seen before: “And do you know what she's promised me for my birthday. No, I won't tell you, you must wait and see it.”

Daphne listened to him with an indulgent smile. She enjoyed spoiling him and Franklin enjoyed being spoilt. Guy remembered his remark with reference to Pamela, “I could be in love with anyone who was crazy about me.”

Was Daphne crazy about him? He doubted it. He suspected that she had acquired him in the same way that she had acquired her car and jewellery, and was about to acquire a villa in Antibes. It was time she had a husband. Up to a certain age, an unattached
woman—particularly a widow—fitted easily into other people's plans: but later she became more manageable if she had a husband. Franklin had happened to be around at the moment she was coming to this decision. A piece of luck for him.

Guy kept his eye on Franklin through the evening. Daphne had coached him in his new role of host. He was proving an apt pupil. He had always known how to put people at their ease; as a host he was expansive but unostentatious. Daphne and he ought to make a team. Each had to give precisely what the other wanted. There was no reason at all why it should not be a great success.

“What about your daughter?” Guy inquired.

At school in Zürich, Daphne told him. “We're going out there for her Christmas holidays. We'll probably take her to St. Moritz. She's always spent her holidays with me. One day I suppose I shall have to bring her here, have her presented, give a dance for her. But I'll cross that river when I get to it.”

It was a cordial evening. As far as Guy could judge his mother got on well with Daphne. She made no comment then or afterwards, but Mr. Renton was held to have summed up the general family attitude when he remarked at lunch on the following Sunday: “For the first time for several years I have been able to join wholeheartedly in the general thanksgiving. It's a great weight off my mind, a great, great weight.”

It was in the last week in November that Daphne and Franklin came to London. They were leaving in time for Julia's holidays. The next three weeks were crowded. Every night ‘the young couple', as Mr. Renton persisted not very appropriately but at the same time not cynically in calling them, were engaged in some form of celebration, usually at their own invitation. There were frequent lunch parties as well.

“We had no wedding reception,” Franklin said, “and Daphne has so many friends. She wants them to see the kind of bird she's picked.”

To quite a number of these parties Guy found himself invited, “to back me up,” so Franklin pleaded.

They were gay and noisy parties: unmarred by the depression whose continuing presence every paper was headlining. Everybody
was prosperously sleek with good living and good health. It surprised Guy to find how few of the guests he knew, even by name. A few of them were Americans; there were one or two Spaniards; but the majority were English; members of the international set who were constantly meeting one another at Biarritz, Le Touquet, Eden Roc, St. Moritz. There was only, so Guy supposed, such a preponderance of English because London was not at the moment a social centre: Christmas was a closed period for the set; its component members scattered to family hearths.

To one of these parties the Burtons were invited. Roger was delighted with the match. “The very thing for Franklin. He needs guiding. That pretty child was altogether wrong for him.”

Renée was less committal.

“She knows how to dress. She doesn't overload. She gives her best points a chance to speak for themselves. Only a person who was very rich could afford to wear such good and so little jewellery.”

Guy rather wondered as to the provenance of all this wealth. The second son of somebody in Cumberland whose name could not be traced in Kelly's could hardly be expected to leave a widow in a state bordering upon millionairedom. Renée laughed when he told her that. “Darling, you're very innocent. Money attracts money and your sister-in-law has spent eleven years moving from one international playground to another. I hope you're going to invite me to an
intime
lunch to meet her. I'd like to see what she's really like.”

It took a little time before a date suitable to all five could be agreed; but finally a lunch party was arranged. “We'll have it in my flat,” he said. “That's cosier, and I can promise you that the wine will be served at the right temperature. What would you soonest have? You can choose your menu and the wines to go with it.”

Daphne shook her head. “I'm sorry, I never drink.”

“Never?”

“Not for the last two years. My doctor's very firm.”

To make the numbers even he invited Margery. Two days before Roger was forced to call off on account of a conference in Liverpool. Guy rang Margery. “Roger's fallen through. Can you bring a beau?”

“I expect I could.”

“What about Michael Drummond?”

There was a short laugh at the other end, indicative of shrugged shoulders. “That's water over the mill now,” she said, “but don't you worry. I'll find somebody.”

She brought with her a man of about forty, with a foreign office manner; black coat, striped trousers, starched linen, polka-dot black tie. He made himself most agreeable and he and Margery seemed to be on highly easy terms with one another. He seemed to be by a long way Margery's best bet up to now. But towards the end of the meal he heard him discussing with Renée the advantages and disadvantages of sending a son to Eton if one had not been there oneself. ‘So,' he thought, ‘a married man.'

It was a successful lunch. It was the first time he had met Daphne in a small circle. She was a very civilized, very sophisticated product. He felt at ease with her. They were of the same war generation. He noticed that she ate very little; refused coffee, drank no water, but took one pill before lunch and two after. ‘What women will do,' he thought, ‘to keep their figures.'

Franklin and Daphne left on the seventeenth. On the Christmas Eve, to each member was delivered by hand from the best shop at which that particular commodity was to be acquired, a gift sufficiently expensive and thoughtfully selected to make the recipient give a start of pleasure, but not so sumptuous as to prove embarrassing. Franklin had fallen on his feet.

Mr. Renton's Christmas present from Daphne and Franklin was a bill clip made out of two gold sovereigns. He turned it over between his hands. “This would have been very useful to me in the days when I carried foreign money,” he remarked.

It was said lightly, but in the saying of it his voice, perhaps
unconsciously, took on an inflection that made Guy start, as though the remark had an undertone of dramatic irony. Guy looked at his father with a more close attention. Seeing him week in, week out, he had not noticed any change in him, but now with that odd inflection echoing in his ears, he wondered whether his father was not looking thin: his cheeks seemed flabby and his clothes to be hanging loosely. He remarked on it to his mother. She nodded. “I'm not quite happy about him. I wish he'd see Dr. Martin. But you know what he is.”

After that Guy took closer note. His father seemed less alert at the weekly board meetings. He rang up Dr. Martin. “I wish you'd pay a social call some time and tell me if you think there's any cause to worry.”

The doctor called round on the following Sunday, after church. He made it clear that he was paying a social visit. But as Guy walked with him to his car, his face was serious. “I wish your father would consult me.”

“You know what my father is. He won't go to a doctor unless there's something immediately wrong.”

“I know, but in this case I'm afraid there is.”

“Couldn't you drop him a note?”

“I think I'll have to.”

On the following Friday Mr. Renton left the board-room early. “That fusspot Martin wants me to have some X-rays taken. Nuisance the man is. Comes round and drinks my sherry, then wants to run me up a bill of costs.”

On the Tuesday Guy rang up Dr. Martin. “Have those photographs been developed?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything wrong?”

“I'm afraid there is.”

“Seriously wrong?”

“Very seriously.”

“Will you have to operate?”

“I'm afraid that an operation won't do any good.”

“Oh.”

There was a silence. “We'd better have a talk about this, hadn't we?” Guy asked.

“I think we'd better.”

Guy drove out that evening. His father might have four months to live; he might have a year. It was not likely to be as much. “Will he be in much pain?”

The doctor shook his head. “He'll just get weaker.”

“You'll give him morphia if he is in pain?”

“Of course, but I don't think he will be.”

“Have you told him yet?”

“No. I wanted to ask you how you felt.”

“I think he'd rather know.”

“I think so too.”

“I've an idea as a matter of fact that he knows already.”

“I shouldn't be surprised.”

On the Thursday afternoon Guy received a telegram.
‘Hope you will find convenient lunch with me to-morrow before board meeting Travellers one o'clock.
'

They lunched at a window table by the fire. It was a bleak day. Mr. Renton watched the scurrying figures, their heads bent into the wind under their umbrellas. “How cold they look,” he said. “On a day like this one can feel resigned to not being here much longer.”

He could not have been more matter of fact about his illness.

“I shan't tell anyone,” he said. “Why embarrass people? I shan't resign my chairmanship. Doctors make mistakes. Wouldn't I look silly if I went on living for ten more years? Most of my contemporaries have gone already. During the next few weeks I shall ask to lunch such intimates as I still have. I'd like to leave them with a happy last memory of me. And I must confess that I shall derive a good deal of interior amusement from the dramatic irony of the situation; they'll have no idea that it's the last time that they'll be seeing me. I shan't tell Barbara and I shan't tell Margery. I'd just as soon your mother didn't know until she has to. I don't want to be fussed over.”

He talked about it as calmly as though he were making his plans to start on a long journey. When they left the club the rain was driving across Pall Mall in long gusty sheets. He shivered. “I hope it's a good summer. I'd like to watch a little cricket up at Lord's. What a fuss the Australians are making about this body-line: the way I see it. . .”

On the way to the board meeting he discussed the Test Matches with unimpaired enthusiasm.

Never had Guy had more respect for his father than he had during the following weeks. His father's steadfast refusal to dramatize the situation made it difficult for him to realize that this spring was in any way different from any other. His father never made any reference to his illness, or to the progress of his illness. If his mother felt anxiety, she did not betray it. Barbara certainly had no suspicions. She was gay, radiant; bubbling over with plans and projects. Guy was soon to learn the reason for her radiance: the usual reason. “Now you're not to be prim and starchy and say that I'm too young. Half the heroines in half the novels that I read are under twenty.”

“And how old's he?”

“He's twenty-three.”

“And is he able to support you in the style . . .?”

“Now don't be tiresome, it's I who'll be supporting him, for the first years at any rate. No one expects a painter to make any money till he's at least——”

“So he's a painter then?”

“Yes and he wears a beard.”

It was a short red beard and it suited him. He was tall, loose-limbed, the kind of young man you could not imagine wearing a morning-suit, who looked supremely right in corduroys. At the same time you were not surprised when you were told that as the son of an Admiral he had been conventionally educated up to the age of eighteen, at Winchester. His name was Norman Glyn. He was studying at Heatherley's. They planned to be married in the autumn, and make straight for French North Africa.