Guy Renton (46 page)

A crazy war, an unreal war. It still seemed unreal, even after the balloon went up, and in the course of a few days there came to Guy and Renée, to Barbara and Margery and the rest of England the feeling that they were living not only in a different world but in a different planet, with England on her own, a solitary fortress in the Atlantic, the last custodian of freedom with the Home Guard mustering in every village and invading aircraft circling over London.

Event followed event with bewildering catastrophic swiftness. Holland out of the war, Belgium out of the war, the Dunkirk beaches. But the sequence of disasters in France and Belgium did not alter Guy's own routine. He was still concerned over Iraqi Kirds who went up as students into Turkey to be cajoled by enemy agents into delivering inflammatory nationalist addresses on the radio. Crocodile's reports came in week after week like
the instalments of a serial. He did his best not to ask himself what Rufus mattered, when German troops were encircling Paris.

Every few hours a Most Secret report of the present position of the battle front would reach him. It seemed incredible; he would study it in relation to the map. He remembered those half-mile advances on the Somme. On his way to the Wanderers' he would buy a paper to see how much the public had been told, to find out what he was supposed to know in contrast to what he actually did know, so that he should not make a slip at lunch.

In one of these reports he had read that the Queen Victoria Rifles had been rushed across the Channel. That, he presumed, meant Norman. A few hours later they were in action. He rang up Barbara. He wished she and Norman would have lunch or dinner with him. Would they let him know when he was next on leave?

“We'd love to,” Barbara said. “But I think leave's been stopped. As a matter of fact, I haven't heard from Norman for a week.”

So, Norman had gone. Guy had his own sources of information. He knew that very few of them had got back to the Dunkirk beachhead. He learnt before Barbara did, that Norman was among the missing.

He went out to see her. The Heath looked very fresh and green in the late spring sunlight. He had never seen the rhododendrons in fuller flower.

“The chances are a hundred to one on his being a prisoner,” he told Barbara. “There
was
heavy fighting, but we know more or less where the casualties were.”

It was not strictly true, but it was better to pad the blow.

“Do you think I should be a coward if I took the children away to Canada or to Australia?” she said.

“You'd be very wise. You could do no good here; if this island's to be a fortress, the fewer, well, shall I say useless mouths, the better.”

“That's what I thought. If Norman is a prisoner, he'd be happier in his own mind, if he could think of the children being properly fed. I wouldn't mind in the least on my own account.
I'd enjoy war work, but my war work's looking after these four children.”

“You've got to give them the best chance you can.”

“Where would you suggest my going?”

“Canada, the firm's got links there. You'd be all right for money.”

“What about this house?”

“I've an idea for that.”

His office in view of the possibility of invasion and the danger of large scale bombing was billeting its staff on the outskirts of London. Highgate was a little close, but it was not near a railway or any military objective.

“You might do very much worse,” he told the Controller.

“I'll go and see it. You'd like to live there yourself I suppose, to see that we respect your sister-in-law's furniture.”

He shook his head. There was still that same obstacle. High-gate was too far from Albion Street.

Barbara left early in July, a week after she had learnt that Norman was a prisoner. Guy went down to Euston to see her off. The train was crammed with mothers and their children.

“I feel an awful rat,” she said.

“You shouldn't. Everything will depend on this next generation. It will be up to them to readjust the balance.”

He returned to his office to find a message from Lucy. Would he ring her at once? She was staying at the International Sportsmen's Club. Her voice sounded distracted. She did not want to talk about it on the telephone. Could she come round and see him?

“It would be better if you came to my flat. Could you have dinner with me?”

“I'msorry, no. I'm going out to Highgate. I could come round for a cocktail, or after dinner. Mother likes going to bed early.”

“After dinner would be more convenient.”

He had an idea he would be working late. Crocodile was still a problem. Aunt Mildred had done her stuff. But the French armistice had raised an issue. The Taurus Express ran into Syria at Aleppo, went back into Turkey, then crossed Syria by the Duck's Bill into Iraq. Crocodile had had useful contacts both in
Aleppo and Kamechle. No one knew how these contacts would behave now that France was no longer a belligerent.

Lucy arrived shortly before eleven.

“You've heard the news?” she said.

“That Norman's a prisoner. Yes, of course.”

“No, that they've arrested Rex.”

“Whatever for?”

“Being a danger to the realm.”

“But what's he done?”

“Nothing, it's what he might do.”

I8B. The law that allowed you in wartime to arrest without trial anyone who might be considered dangerous. Rex would be vulnerable under that definition. He had been mixed up with so much that was so near to Fascism.

“I should have thought you would have heard,” she said.

“No, that's M.1.5.”

“I thought you all worked hand-in-glove.”

“On the very top level yes, but on my level the right hand does not know what the left hand's doing.”

“Then you can't do anything about it?”

“Not a thing.”

“I'd hoped . . .” she checked. “Have you any idea what'll happen to him?”

Actually he had none. But he did his best to put her mind at rest. “He's not a criminal. This isn't Germany. There's no law under which he can be tried. He's not a traitor. He'll be treated like an officer prisoner of war, in honourable confinement. He probably won't be in prison very long. This is a moment of crisis; of near-panic. They're roping in everyone about whom they feel the least suspicion. They'll review the cases later. They'll release three-quarters of them. You'll probably have him back by Christmas.”

“Do you think I shall? That's wonderful. You're very consoling.”

“If there's anything I can do to help——”

“There is one thing. You could tell the boys.”

“I could do that easily.”

“I'd be so grateful if you would. It would come better from
you. The masculine point of view. I'm so afraid they may get a sense of inferiority about it. The other boys sneering at them. They mustn't be ashamed of Rex. They must be able to stay proud of their father.”

“I think I can put it right for them.”

“I'll be so grateful.” She rose to her feet. She had not been in the flat fifteen minutes.

“Don't go,” he said. “Let's have a drink and gossip.”

“Thank you, I'd rather not. I'd be bad company. I'm worried and it's late.”

“All right, I'll drive you back.”

“No, really no. I know how valuable your petrol is.”

“One of the advantages of my racket is getting all the petrol that I need.”

“In that case then, well, I think I would like a whisky.”

She stayed on for half an hour, but she had been right in thinking she would be bad company. There were awkward pauses in the conversation. How completely they had grown apart.

Guy took his day off on the following Tuesday. It would be a half-holiday at Fernhurst. It was a warm, bright day, the spell of unclouded sunshine still unbroken. The familiar landscape looked very calm and static; the cattle dozing in the shade; vans lumbering between hedges along winding roads, villages clustering round their spires, large red-brick houses on the hills, with their stables and outhouses and high garden walls, their parks and trees. It was hard to realize that across twenty miles of water an arrogant victorious enemy was planning the destruction of this fertile peace.

He had not been down to Fernhurst for fifteen years, not since he had come to see Franklin about his ‘embroidered bag'. You lost touch with your old school when you gave up games and had no son or brother there. He arrived soon after twelve. Everyone was in school and the courts were empty. He stood in the corner of the cloisters, by the studies, waiting for the half-hour to strike, and the classrooms to spill out their horde of shouting, hurrying boys. He had wondered that last time he had stood here, whether he would stand here next at Renée's side, waiting for their son, fifteen years from then, in the autumn of 1940.

On the way down he had thought out what he would tell his nephews; how he would explain that this war was not like the last; it was a fight not between nations but ideologies. There was nothing disgraceful, nothing even discreditable in a man's having believed in 1937 that a different ideology held the solution for the world's and his country's problems. On the contrary it was very much to their father's credit that he had concerned himself so intensely with his country's problems, when so many others, like himself, had selfishly led their private lives, busied with race meetings and football pools. He phrased and rephrased the sentences in which he would try to show that their father was guilty of nothing worse than backing the wrong horse.

He need not have put himself to so much trouble.

“Will it be in the papers?” That was the first thing Digby asked.

“I'm afraid it will, but only a small paragraph.”

“Gibson's father got more than that when he drew the second favourite in the Irish Sweep. There was a photograph and an interview.”

“It's much grander though,” George countered, “to have a father who's so important that they have to put him into prison before he's done a thing, only because they're afraid he might.”

“Poor Daddy. How he'll hate it.”

“I don't expect that he'll be there very long,” Guy said. “I expect you'll have him home for Christmas.”

“Do you think he'll be back these ‘hols'?” Digby asked.

“I'm afraid not as soon as that.”

“Then I'll ride the chestnut.”

Margery dined with him that night. He had anticipated the need after an exacting day of family support. He did not, but he was grateful for her company.

“Young people take a very immediate view of things,” she said. “They can't see further than next holidays and then in terms of their own interests.”

“That sounds like an M. of I. ‘report'.”

“Well, and why not? Everybody makes fun of us. We're fair game. Better journalists are outside than in, and they resent our official status. But we are, you know, quite efficient.”

“I've never known quite what you do?”

“Questions are asked in the House on that very point.”

“I don't mean the Ministry. I mean you yourself.”

“Me, oh, I'm rather grand. I organize people's work. I decide on policy. If we were an army unit, I'd be a major. I'll be a half-colonel soon.”

Margery a Lieutenant-Colonel. Well, she was thirty-five. She had a mature air of authority. Her hair was beginning to turn grey. He had a swift prophetic snap of her at fifty: silver-haired, taut and lean, with lines between mouth and nostrils, composed, executive, high-up in some Government Department. She was one of those who get and take their chance in wartime—a stern disciplinarian, her staff in awe of her, yet with an unquenched gamine quality that would make some girl who'd been reprimanded admit afterwards “she made me feel pretty small, but all the same she's not inhuman. She might even have been fun when she was young. Wonder what happened. I suppose someone jilted her.”

“You like it, don't you, in your Ministry?” he said.

She nodded.

“There's a lot that's maddening; so much red tape: approaches having to be made through the right channel; but it is exciting; you're behind the scenes; and there's camaraderie. I wouldn't change my job. I often thank heaven that I'm not married. Poor Lucy, marooned there in that vast house, and Barbara in a strange country with those four children. I don't deny that I haven't felt sometimes sorry for myself this last five years. I've sometimes sworn I'd marry the first reasonable man that asked me. Thank God, I didn't. I wouldn't change places now with the woman I would have been if I had. Marriage for love's sake, yes, but marriage for the sake of marriage, no, no thank you.”

She paused. “They say that no girl's unmarried who's had a chance of marrying. What rubbish that is. Do you remember Father's remark all those years ago about it not being true any longer that a girl's better off married unhappily than not married? There's not all that difference nowadays between a man and a woman. By and large, you and I, we, the unmarried ones, have come off best.”

That was in mid-July. For Guy it was a calm period that
followed. Never, he felt, had the contrast been more acute between the tempo of his private life and of the nation's. The Home Guard was mustering, coast defences being built, new age groups called-up, the factories working overtime. He read of the Dunkirk spirit, the tremendous drive of energy inspired by Churchill's speeches and Herbert Morrison's ‘Go to it'. But for himself the collapse of France and the threat of imminent invasion brought no change in the smooth rhythm of his routine.

Crocodile was presenting at the moment a very pretty problem. The contact at Kamechle had compromised with necessity and the Germans had learnt that he was in British pay. The Germans were now using Crocodile as a means of finding out what the British wanted them to know. That was of use to them. They did not know, however, that the British knew they knew. As they would now discount any information that was sent up, it behoved the British to tell them the truth, knowing that they would not believe it. Aunt Mildred in Baghdad would decide on the actual information that would be supplied, but Aliens' Registration with their all-in picture would decide the policy.