Guy Renton (37 page)

“This is the most ridiculous performance of the entire season. There are those boys, the flower of our aristocracy, selected specimens of a ruling class vying in the nation's proudest sport with one another, yet none of the spectators can bother to watch them play: look at Britain's bluest blood parading a hard asphalt roofed-in roadway, breathing an air contaminated by stale beer. As there's only one hour of the day, at lunch and tea, when they can stroll across the grass and show off their dresses, they queue up for a ridiculously early lunch and miss the cricket. You can't think how ridiculous it all seems to someone who's lived out of the country as long as I have. I'm sorry but it's more than I can stand. I'm going back to change into something cool.”

Guy watched him go: it was close on tea-time and he decided as soon as the play stopped to walk once across the field and then go home. His heart was heavy as he sauntered across the grass. It all looked so bright and gay, with the sky blue above the stands and the sun shining on the mound with all the fashionable ladies in their trailing dresses and parasols and floppy hats, with the young Etonians and Harrovians with their tall walking-sticks and their light blue and dark blue button holes, with the gaitered ecclesiastics and the Edwardian beaux with their heavy silver-headed canes. It was all so young and fresh. He felt himself drearily middle-aged in this atmosphere of youth, feeling that he had nothing in particular to look forward to, that nothing much mattered any longer; that one day was very like another; and
then suddenly just as he was thinking that, a gloved hand fell upon his arm, the scent of tuberose was at his side, and in his ears a voice, New England with a slight French accent, said, “Still mad at me?”

He turned and there she was, a little breathless, a little flushed under her floppy hat.

“I saw you from the mound. I hurried over. I thought the game would have started. I was afraid I'd lose you and it's been so long.”

“Over six weeks.”

“Forty-seven days.”

From the pavilion rang the five-minutes bell to clear the ground. The white-coated umpires were passing through the wicket gate. The spectators began to file back to their coaches and seats and tents.

“Shall we walk round the ground,” she said, “just once.”

Her hand was upon his arm as they moved towards the screen; they did not speak, but the soft pressure of her fingers was soothing little by little the malaise that had weighed on him. He half closed his eyes, feeling that at last after all these weeks he had come home, that he was back where he belonged. As they joined the slow-moving parade behind the stands, she began to speak.

“You shouldn't be mad at me,” she said. “I was selfish I know, but for a purpose. My grandmother said once that in every marriage there was a point where the husband turned towards a younger woman, and that it was up to the wife to make it difficult rather than easy for the husband to run away from her. There was another thing too, she said. If your husband really wants to go, there's nothing to be done about it. It's no good trying to hold him against his will. I thought of both those things when I saw you in that restaurant with that girl. I couldn't see your face, but I could see hers. I knew what that look meant. I knew how she felt about you, or at least what she was on the brink of feeling.”

She paused and they walked on in silence. Out in the centre, the match was once more in progress. They could hear the crack of the bat against the ball and the burst of clapping that applauded a clever stroke or a good piece of fielding. The varying fortunes of the cricket match seemed to belong to happenings in another world.

“I didn't want to be selfish,” she said. “I've often felt I'm
standing in your way, that I'm ruining your life. No, darling, don't interrupt. You're nearly forty. You ought to marry soon if you're going to, and most men want to after all. I've always told myself that when the time came for me to stand aside, I'd do it. . . But. . . Well, even so, I can't say that my experience has taught me that marriage simply as marriage is something to be valued highly. I didn't want to let you go into just any marriage. And if I'd stood aside right now you would have got yourself entangled. Before you knew where you were, you'd have found yourself under an obligation to that girl; I wanted to be quite sure that you really did want her before I stood aside. I said to myself, ‘If he's in love with her, if she's essential to his happiness, he won't let anything stand in his way of getting her. He'll take my advice. He'll stop her sailing.' As you could have stopped her, if you'd really wanted her. Only you didn't want her quite enough. Don't think too badly of me. Ten years is a long time. Longer than many marriages.”

She stopped. They had passed behind the mound and had reached the newstand. The crowd was thick before the Tavern. From the terraced stands rose suddenly a whoop of triumph, followed by a burst of clapping. A wicket had gone down. But he did not turn his head to the scoreboard to see who was out. Had he looked he could not have read the figures. There was a mist before his eyes. He could barely trust himself to speak. The words, when the power to speak came, were the same that he had used ten years before, the first time he had dined at Albion Street.

“I can't think what it is you see in me.”

Daphne went straight from the London Clinic to a small cottage-type house in Wiltshire.

“What a relief to be out of London,” Franklin said as he drove away from Highgate in a car piled high with luggage.

He was back within two weeks. “It's all rather a bore, but Daphne's taken it into her head that she wants to take a house in London and spend at least a year in it; she wants Julia to go to College, she wants to be at hand to supervise.”

“Does she realize that she'll be liable to English income tax?”

“We've all told her that. She says that Julia is more important; that Julia's next years are the crucial ones. I suppose she's right. Where do you think we ought to live?”

“Where the air's fresh. Somewhere near Regent's Park. You can get to anywhere from Baker Street.”

“Can you? I suppose you can. Have you heard by the way that Barbara's coming back to have her baby?”

“No, but I thought she might.”

“It's twins, apparently. Helping to adjust the balance for you and Margery and me.”

“How's Daphne?”

“Fine. Never seen her fitter; eating like a schoolgirl and knocking back martinis. She ought to have had it done months ago, as the nurse said she should; full of plans for parties and theatres and picking up with her old friends.”

“How will you like it here?”

“I'll manage. I'm adaptable.” He wore his habitual insouciance. At the same time, Guy thought, it was going to be a change for him.

Barbara came back at the end of August. Her figure was elephantine. Yet she looked even younger than she had in Villefranche. There was a glow upon her cheeks, a luminous inner radiance. She was in the liveliest spirits. She hadn't had half an hour's illness. She didn't know what women made all this fuss about. She continued to lead her gipsy life. She sent Norman sketching on the Heath and joined him at lunchtime with a basket. She was enchanted with his pictures of the yellowing landscape.

“He's seeing it with new eyes, after all that sunlight. You might think he was the first person who'd seen an English autumn.” It would provide the perfect contrast for his exhibition.

They had agreed to have a showing in the spring; before they
resumed their travels. Maybe not the South of France this time. Brittany might be healthier for ‘the toads' as she'd already nicknamed them. She arranged the old nursery as a studio. “Then you'll have somewhere to work while I'm being very busy.” He had to be very busy, she insisted. There must be at least six London canvases. She was happier than Guy had ever seen her. Her mother could not take her eyes off her.

In mid-September Daphne and Franklin were back in London in a modern two-story house in Avenue Road. They announced their return with a large cocktail party. The décor was elaborate; great banks of chrysalthemums and pom-poms; champagne in an unceasing flow, hot savouries supplementing smoked-salmon canapés. There were over a hundred guests, most of them between the ages of fifty-five and thirty, all well produced and prosperous; all talking on the same high-pitched note of febrile animation.

Guy wondered who they were; they looked the kind of people that he would have expected himself to know. But in point of fact he scarcely saw a familiar face. Had Franklin known a single one of them before his marriage? Guy moved among the guests looking for someone that he knew. Julia was busy handing dishes. She looked completely adult. When he'd been young, and girls wore pigtails—flappers they'd been called—there was a definite line of demarcation between the schoolgirl and the young woman. She put her hair up and came out. Nowadays a girl of fourteen looked twenty-one. Julia welcomed him on equal terms. She was thrilled at the thought of settling in London. “It'll be lovely to have a real home at last.” He smiled to himself. He looked round him at the impersonal decoration of a house that had been furnished with the intention of being let. ‘A real home at last.' Could you have a better indication of a wandering unrooted childhood?

He noticed Rex across the room and edged his way towards him; though it was close upon twenty years now since Rex had been his colonel he still found it difficult at the first exchange of greetings not to use the prefix ‘sir'. He felt himself momentarily a twenty-year-old subaltern. And as always at a first meeting Rex seemed a man of consequence and stature.

Rex wrung his brother-in-law's hand warmly. “Delighted to see you, my dear fellow; first person here I know. Didn't really want to come; feel lost among all these fellows: not my type, you know. Lucy insisted; wanted to pay her compliments. Believe it or not, but this is only the second time they've met. Hoped I should find you here. Something rather special I wanted to discuss. Ever heard of a concern called the English Mistery? Spelt with an ‘i'? Yes, that's it. mistery. Might be worth your investigating; more your line possibly than some of the projects we've discussed. I'll send you some of their literature. Then let's lunch one day.

“You've heard about Barbara, of course. Fine, isn't it? I suppose she won't be here. No, I thought as much. What about Norman? I'd have thought this party rather his dish of tea. Good chap, though, thoroughly good chap. Wish we could find someone like that—not someone like that—but someone suitable, for Margery. I know she's doing excellently in that firm of hers, but she should marry. Every girl should marry. Lucy and I have been trying to introduce her to some suitable young men, but she's very difficult. She keeps breaking her appointments. We've asked her down for several week-ends now; she's got an open invitation. But she either rings up at the last moment to put us off; or she'll invite herself for a week-end when the house is full and I have to give up my dressing-room. Can't rely on her.”

Guy knew what that meant. He had rowed in that galley; was rowing in it still. He moved across to Margery. “Your brother-in-law has just been complaining about you,” he said.

“What's he been saying?”

“That you aren't the kind of girl who can be booked for a week-end a month in advance.”

She laughed. “The old military man wanting to organize us all. I know. Wherever I am, I'm waiting on a telephone. I've got to put a call through now. Don't run away. I won't be long.”

He watched her as she edged her way towards the hall. She moved with a smooth jungle tread. She was a handsome creature. He watched as she stood beside the telephone, her shoulders slightly bent as her finger dialled. She straightened herself, stood still; then put the receiver back. There was an ironic smile on
her lips as she came back. “No reply. If I were to write a story about my kind of girl, that would be the title that I'd give it. ‘No Reply,' or else ‘No Message Left.'”

They could talk in shorthand. There was no need for her to explain to him what her position was. “People like Rex oughtn't to worry about girls like me,” she said. “I don't fit into their pattern. I'm not any use for people who have patterns. Thank heavens, there are some people who haven't them, like you. There's Franklin. Let's join him. He hasn't got a pattern, though he thinks he has.”

It was the first time that Guy had seen Franklin in a month. He had lost his suntan, and without it the thinning of his hair had become apparent. He looked slightly pasty but he had not lost his elegance. A new check suit was striking without being loud. Guy remarked on it.

Franklin laughed. “I'll be surprising you all the next few months. Chic's not the word for me. All my town clothes were tight; I've ordered an entire trousseau. Then I'll lose weight and have so many sacks upon my hands; but for the next three months ...”

He paused, looking over Margery's shoulder, abstracted, the conscientious host. “I think it's going all right. They seem to be enjoying themselves. They're making enough row and that's the test. At the start of a party I always have the radio turned on; it makes everyone talk louder, then as the room fills up I turn it down: I turned it off altogether half-an-hour ago. Yes, I think it's going all right. Daphne seems pleased with it.”

Daphne seemed very pleased. She was back in her own element, surrounded by people, dispensing hospitality; in a friendly but impersonal way. There was nothing in her cool and collected welcoming of him to suggest the woman who a few weeks ago had talked uninterruptedly about herself through a lunch
à deux.
She looked as chic, as well produced as ever; in the invariable neutral-coloured dress with the one bright spot of jewellery to heighten but not subdue her personality.