Guy Renton (41 page)

It came so pat that Guy was not sure whether or not there had been a moment's hesitation before it came; a moment of shock, of deliberation; of terror, then resolve: Had there been? He wasn't sure. But one thing there was no mistaking, the note of triumph on which Franklin had flung down, like a glove in the acceptance of the challenge, those seven words, “as a matter of fact I have”. For twenty years Franklin had been waiting for an opportunity to make that kind of retort to Rex. At last he'd beaten Rex on his own ground, on his own terms.

Rex and Lucy were the first to leave; there was a feeling of relief when the door closed behind them. It was now just the family. Daphne, for all that she had lived so much abroad and such a separate life, had become a part of the family in a way that Rex never had. She looked thoughtfully at her husband. “You haven't enlisted, have you, in the International Brigade?”

He shook his head. “If I'd said ‘No, but now I'm going to' it would have looked like a dare. You'd all have told me not to be silly and dramatic. Rex would have apologized and despised me afterwards.”

“I thought as much. You did it the only way you could; if you had to do it. There's no way now of getting out of it.”

How well, Guy thought, she understands him. It was a real marriage theirs. She would take his side. At the same time there was a surprising measure of detachment about her attitude. Franklin's enlistment, his probable absence for several months, did not appear to affect her personally. She was behaving not like a lover but a friend.

“This is going to be a shock to your mother,” she was saying. “I suppose Guy'd better break the news to her.”

“And that's a fairly tough assignment,” he said to Margery after they had gone.

She nodded. “Franklin's still her favourite.”

“In spite of all those grandchildren?”

“In spite of all of them.”

“Barbara's going to have yet another, did you hear?”

“I hadn't.”

“Norman told me yesterday.”

“Is he pleased about it?”

“Delighted.”

“It's the end of that gipsy life of his.”

“That's why he welcomes it, I rather think. He wanted the issue settled.”

“Does he paint now at all?”

“He makes a pretence of it to make Barbara happy. He wouldn't like her to think he'd sacrificed a career on her account. He adores her, you know. They're still crazily in love.”

“Would he have been any good, do you think?”

Guy shrugged. “You remember what Roger said about him; that every year a hundred students of promise signed in at the Slade; the Slade's only one art school out of twenty. It's a question, Roger said, of how much a student stands or falls by what he paints. You have to be pretty ruthless if you're going to succeed. You can't serve two masters. If you put a wife first. . .”

“Do you think it matters?”

“Not when two people are as happy as they are.”

He recalled an afternoon that summer when he had driven Norman out to Highgate at the end of the day's work. It was one of those July days that following half a week of rain open to chilly mist and lowering skies, but that dissolve suddenly about one o'clock into a cloudless prelude to a heatwave. They had driven up Fitzjohn's Avenue. They had paused at the White-stone pond. On one side the heath sloped past the old pound towards the Vale of Health; on the other towards Harrow. The grass was green and sparkling. Children were racing their small boats in the pond; dogs were barking at the edge. The whole
world had seemed reborn. He had quoted Shelley: ‘When after the rain and with never a stain the pavilion of heaven lies bare.'

They had driven on past the Spaniards. Barbara was in the garden; the herbaceous border was blue with larkspur. ‘The toads' were tumbling over one another in their pen. The baby was in a pram beside her, sleeping. Barbara jumped to her feet as she saw Norman coming through the French windows on to the lawn. She ran to greet him. It hadn't been a calm affectionate wifely welcome; it had been the kiss of reunited lovers.

They had stood side by side; his arm about her; her head rested against his shoulder, watching the children play. It was like a posed picture of married love; Barbara's beauty was at its peak of rich fulfilment; she had recovered her figure, she had never lost her looks. The scene was the embodiment of happiness. It was absurd of him to regret at such a moment the carefree couple in the South of France; to wish that red beard back and all that it had symbolized. The sun could not stay always in the east.

“And how's your world now? Still ‘no reply'?” he asked.

Margery laughed, a little wryly. “Ask any girl in my age group and position how she feels when a new man says, ‘I think it would be easier if you wrote me at my club.' There it goes, she thinks, the old routine again.”

“You seem to thrive on it.”

“Oh, I'm resilient.”

Two days later Franklin rang Guy up. “They've signed me on,” he said. “I leave within a week. Have you told Mother yet?”

“I'll do it right away.”

He went out to tea that afternoon. She met him with an anxious look. He had told her that he wanted to see her about something urgent.

“Don't tell me that Franklin wants to be divorced.”

“Heavens no, nothing as serious as that. He's joined the International Brigade. He's going to Spain next week.”

“You call that less serious!”

She sat forward, her elbows on her knees; her fingers intertwined. She looked very old. “What made him do it?” she asked.

“He's very worked up about this war. He's been organizing all these committees. He thinks that the fate of Europe depends on what's happening in Spain. He couldn't stand being a non-combatant any longer.”

His mother shook her head. “No,” she said, “that's not the reason.”

For a moment he considered the idea of telling her how it had come about. But it would serve no purpose; it would only put her against Rex and Lucy. It was better to leave Franklin with his own story of having enlisted of his own volition. The last thing Franklin would want would be to have Rex suspect that the whole episode had been a ‘dare'. Franklin knew that for the first time Rex respected him. He would not want that altered.

“Isn't there someone who could get him out?” Mrs. Renton asked. “There must be somebody with influence. They've got Englishmen out of the foreign legion.”

“But Franklin doesn't want to be got out.”

“That doesn't matter. We could go over his head. We could get his passport cancelled.”

“Mother darling, he's done this of his own accord.”

“Oh no, he hasn't; there's something at the back of this, though I don't know what.”

There was a pause. She understood Franklin as acutely as Daphne did.

“If only I knew what was the right thing to do,” she was going on. “If I knew why he'd done it, it would be simple; I feel so helpless. I'm the only one on his side. All the rest of you, even your father, you've only seen his faults; you haven't understood why he was like that. You've all been so hard on him.”

She was talking to herself in a blind, impotent misery. He tried to interrupt her but in vain.

“All along I've had to fight his battles, particularly against you, Guy. You wanted him to go abroad when he left Fernhurst. It would have been fatal, I knew that; then when he had that trouble, with that night club, you wouldn't back me up: because you wouldn't back me up, your father wouldn't either. He always took your advice. It wasn't Franklin's fault, that was obvious; he was led astray by a much older man. But you took the other side: so he was sent abroad; in disgrace; that's how he
met Daphne, that's why he married Daphne: she's been a good wife to him, I know. But she was too old for him. He ought to have married someone younger: he ought to have had children. This wouldn't have happened if he had. Everything dates back to that decision of yours to send him out of England; you refused to listen to me. And you see what's happened. If anything terrible happens to him now, you'll be to blame. I'll never forgive you, never. You were a good son to your father, you've tried to be a good son to me; but you've been unjust and unrelenting as a brother, driving him out of his own house. I've never been able to feel about you in the same way since.”

It had been said; one of those things that cannot be unsaid; that may be forgiven but cannot be forgotten; that rankle, that itch like a festered sore. She hardly knew what she was saying. She was talking to herself.

“There's no friendship, no relationship in the world,” Renée had once said, “that you can't ruin in two minutes.” This was that two minutes. He sat in silence; he had ceased to listen. He was following his own thoughts: to have had this said to him by his own mother; that all this time she had thought this about him; it poisoned the memory of half the times that they had shared.

Two nights before he sailed Franklin dined with Guy. “Where would you like to go?” Guy asked. “You can choose your restaurant and pick your menu.”

“Let's have it in your flat. I've come to think of it as a second home.”

It was what Barbara had said once; what Margery had said more than once. He was glad Franklin felt like that. He was reminded of that dinner, eight years ago now, on the eve of Franklin's sailing for Oporto.

Franklin was in a quiet mood. “It's a great weight off my mind,” he said. “I'm tired of being an onlooker. There's no place for non-combatants in wartime. I was sick of London too, the smugness and complacence of it all; everyone so self-important. On personal grounds too I'm glad. Something might have gone wrong between me and Daphne. How I'd have loathed it if it had.”

That came as a considerable surprise to Guy.

“You seemed to get on so well, to be such a team.”

“We do. We are: but it's not been the same in London. Daphne's absorbed in Julia. I'm one of those who have to come first; if someone else had turned up with whom I did—and when you are in that mood somebody usually does—well, I suppose I'd have gone off with her; I'd not have wanted to but I would have gone.”

What a feminine remark. Guy remembered Daphne's saying on the eve of her operation, ‘Sometimes when I've been out with Franklin shopping, I've felt I was with another woman.' How incalculable human beings were. You would come across these retired colonels, bovine in their stupidity with a mental horizon bound by golf and fishing, who would spend their evenings, you would imagine, pursuing brainless blondes, yet actually hung around Knightsbridge barracks on the watch for guardsmen; while in contraposition you would find some languid and affected æsthete with a fluted voice and a fancy flat who was only out of one girl's bed to pop into another's. What was it that Daphne'd said? That Lesbian streak.

“I suppose I missed my one real chance when I let Pamela go,” Franklin was continuing. There was a reminiscent expression on his face. “You remember that big scene at Highgate, when Pamela and I went out into the garden. That was the turning point. ‘I love you, I believe in you,' she said. ‘You only got into this trouble because I wasn't there. Let's start our life together now: show them what we can make of it. It won't be the same thing after a year's trial. Let's take a dare, show them we believe in one another, now, when no one else does.'”

It was the first time that Guy had heard what actually transpired on that decisive morning. He could understand now what Franklin had meant by describing it as the turning point.

“Why didn't you?” he asked.

Franklin shrugged. “I funked it. I didn't trust myself. I could not face the fear of failing her; to lose that hero worship. Besides, if I had failed she'd have stuck by me, she was such a loyal creature. She'd have tried to pick up the pieces: and that's what I couldn't face. Being organized; sustained by Pamela. After I'd been a hero to her; I had to go on being that: or nothing. It was different with Daphne. She had no illusions. She was in love
with me, but with her eyes wide open; she knows the world. We were so right for one another. Why had we got to come to London?''

He was talking about himself in the past tense, or at least of his London life in the past tense. “How often will you get leave, do you suppose?” Guy asked.

“None, I should think; as far as England is concerned. Local leave in Tangiers possibly. You'd better come across and see me there. It's late, I'd better be going. Daphne will be staying up.”

“I'll drive you home.”

“No, thanks. It isn't far. I'd like to walk.” Guy watched him from his window, hurrying with a quick long stride through the October night. What was passing through Franklin's mind? Had he chosen to walk back so that he could take his own farewell of London's streets, saying to himself, ‘Maybe this is the last time that I shall ever walk here'?

Across twenty years there came to him the memory of his own last leave. October '17. Just after Passchendaele: on the eve of Cambrai. He had stood at the corner of Regent Street and Piccadilly watching the traffic swing into the Quadrant. ‘Tomorrow,' he had thought, ‘it'll all look just the same, with me not here to see it.' Then it had been his turn to go, now it was his turn to stay.

Guy often thought of that last leave during the next few weeks. Everything looked the same in London. Autumn passed into winter. There was talk of an approaching slump. The
Daily Express
introduced into its daily cartoon a villain called Major Crisis, a character with a large handlebar moustache who was discomfited by the sound common sense of ‘the little man'. Anthony Eden rushed from capital to capital: Baldwin was transferred to the House of Lords. Hitler and Mussolini sent each other
bouquets. The Left Wing screeched for intervention, attacking through Spain the obstinate refusal of the propertied classes to desert their interests with a virulence that was inspired far less by regard for the Spanish people than by a hatred for their own ruling classes.