Guy Renton (10 page)

The final whistle went. He raised his arm. “Harlequins, three cheers for London Irish.” Never again, he thought, as he walked slowly off the field, in the declining sunlight. He should, he knew, be indulging a mood of sentimental reverie, but he could not summon up the appropriate emotions.

On his last evening at No. 17, Guy was the only one of the family to dine at home. Margery was out with one of her young men, Franklin had taken Barbara to see
The Vortex
at the Everyman. Guy's move was in no sense an occasion, it did not mark a break in a tradition. He had been away so much, at school, at the war, at Oxford. No. 17 had been a perch, rather than a home for him: a place where he kept his clothes and books. It had been always understood that he would move out one day; sooner or later he would marry. No feelings were hurt when he told his father of his plans.

“I'll be leading a rather different life when I give up football. I won't have to keep in training. I'll be going out more in the evenings. I need to be nearer in. I ought to do some entertaining.”

His father had agreed. “A very sound idea. From the firm's point of view especially; you ought to be taking my place now, in that kind of way. Small dinner parties to special customers, in a way that you can't manage when you are living here. I'll see about raising your expense account.”

The actual move would only involve a couple of trunks, and a few cases of books and pictures. There was no good-bye atmosphere, no ‘sending off'. At the same time there was inevitably an air of sentiment about the last night at home; Mr. Renton grew reminiscent as he and Guy sat alone over their port. He talked of his own last evening here, on the eve of
marriage. “I was sitting in that very chair. I can see your grandfather so clearly, with his white hair and whiskers, and his velvet coat. There was just the two of us.”

“Was he very sentimental about it all?”

Mr. Renton smiled.

“You know what your grandfather was, you know what those Victorians were like.”

Guy did not need reminding. His grandfather was always talking about death. He would preface remarks about the future with a ‘when this exhausted frame is at last at rest under the trees in Highgate Cemetery, I hope, my dear boy, you will remember. . . .'

Most Sundays Guy and Lucy had been brought out to High-gate from their house in Kensington; matins first, then lunch with their grandfather at No. 17. Those lunches were among his most vivid memories. The house in Highgate had been as much his home as the one in Kensington. He had always thought of it as the house that would be one day his. His grandfather had encouraged him. On his way back from church he would point out the May tree in front of the village coaching inn, “In time to come, my dear boy, when I am no longer here and you walk back from church with the lady who is to be your wife, I hope you will tell her how much your grandfather loved that tree.” He would point to a picture over the mantelpiece in the smoking-room, of a British soldier, his head bound with a blood-stained bandage, helping a wounded comrade at Balaclava. “I had that picture in my rooms at Oxford. It was the first picture I ever bought. I was very proud of it. I'm not sure now that it is a particularly good picture. But it has been with me all my life. I hope, my dear boy, that when your father has come to join me in the Highgate Churchyard and this house is yours, you will leave that picture there above the mantelpiece. I should like to think of you pointing it out to your son and saying, ‘This was the first picture that your great-grandfather ever bought.'

It was his way of cheating death. And in a sense he had succeeded. Living in this house which his grandfather had loved and furnished, Guy was constantly reminded of him, whereas little else remained to recall his childhood. He hardly ever had occasion now to visit the section of Kensington, between
Olympia and High Street Station where he had spent his first thirteen years. The house where he had been born no longer stood. Gone too were the grocery where he had bought ginger beer—stone bottles with the corks wired down, such as no shop sold nowadays—and the tobacconist's where he had bought his penny ‘shockers'—the green
Boy's Friend
on Tuesdays, the white
Boy's Herald
on Thursdays, the pink
Boy's Realm
on Saturdays. Nothing was left in Kensington to remind him of the small boy in the sailor suit whose photograph stood on the desk in his father's study. But here at No. 17 there was a solid continuity.

He could visualize very clearly his father's last dinner here, thirty-two years ago. How different that occasion was: his father on the eve of marriage, the start of a new life, the founding of a family: while he was only moving across London for convenience's sake. In the year to come he would probably dine as often at this table as he had in the last twelve months. He would be certainly more punctilious in the observance of the Sunday ritual matins at St. Michael's, then the roast joint of beef. To his father and his mother, to Margery and Barbara and Franklin there would seem no break of continuity. Yet in actual fact he was as much on the brink of a new life as his father had been thirty-two years ago. He was committed to a very serious engagement.

What would his father say if he were to tell him the real reason for his move? He could not believe his father would be shocked, but his father had been brought up in an age that considered that certain subjects were better left undiscussed. What, he wondered, had his father's own life been when he was young? He had married in his later thirties. He had had fifteen years of adult life in London; living in this house, going down each morning to the offices in Soho Square; sitting down between his parents night after night to a long and heavy Victorian dinner. That had been the framework of his life. What had lain beneath the surface? Sitting here, in this same chair, at this same table on that Oc'tober evening, thirty-two years ago, surely his father must have thought of chapters closing now for ever.

Sixteen hours later, on an afternoon of mingled rain and sunshine, Guy stood at the window of his flat, looking down the
street into which any minute now a grey-green Chevrolet would turn. Margery had wanted a formal house-warming with champagne scattered about his furniture. Later, he had said; in a week or two, when I've got used to being here myself. She had started to protest, then checked and smiled. “I see, darling, but of course, how dense of me.”

Only another ten minutes now, he told himself.

She was dead on time; she was wearing a tight-fitting mauve felt hat, the brim pierced by a diamond arrow. As she came up the stairs, she pulled it off, shaking loose her hair so that it fell in a corn-coloured wave across her forehead. She paused in the doorway, looking slowly round her, taking it all in, detail by detail. He stood beside her, the blood pounding along his veins. He let his hand rest along her shoulder, but she moved away. “No, darling, not yet, please, not till I've seen it all. You know how a kitten is in a new home. You have to put butter on its feet.”

She moved along the shelves, picking up a tea-caddy, then a paper-weight: taking out a book: glancing at it, putting it back again; looking at each picture. “So these are your things,” she said.

She handed him his copy of
Notre Cœur.
“I think you'll see why I've given it you,” she said. He tried to make conversation, but the sentences trailed off: he knew that what he was saying made no sense; yet he felt no nervousness; he was sure of himself, as he was of her. She was here; that was all that mattered. She was here.

“You haven't offered me a cigarette?” she said. She smiled as he held the match for her: she raised her hand, laid it against his cheek, then moved away. “I must see everything,” she said. She picked up a copy of Pape's
Jurgen
. “I'm glad that you've got this.” She stood in the centre of the room, turning slowly round, taking it all in again, in a final inventory.

He moved beside her; put his hands under her elbows: “Surely all that butter's gone by now,” he said.

Nineteen-Twenty-Five, the year in which Guy met Renée, was one of which the English historian would record that nothing in particular had happened anywhere.

In retrospect, Guy was to consider it appropriate that so important a landmark in his life should have fallen in such an eventless year. Historians recounting the rise and fall of nations in terms of battles, revolutions, the deaths of kings and Acts of Parliament, fit the lives of individuals against a frame of dates; as though England, France, Italy, and Spain were separate personalities to whose victories and defeats the individual Englishman, Frenchman, Spaniard, and Italian responded as a corporate member of the body politic. Yet in point of fact the happiest moments of the individual might well coincide with an hour of national disaster, his periods of most profound despair with a complacent epoch of prosperity. The General Strike of 1926, the most important political event between the end of the first war and the Abdication, was only memorable to Guy for the part that Franklin played in it.

For himself it was an undramatic episode. Whereas most of the Harlequins had joined a special squad based on Hyde Park, attached to the Horse Police, he on the first morning of the strike went down to the East End, booked a room in Poplar and enrolled as a Limehouse special constable. He made, he was soon to realize, a considerable mistake. Limehouse was tough all right. A number of cars were smashed and their occupants told to ‘bloody well walk home'; the police station on the first night was a shambles of bleeding scalps; it was indeed so tough that the regular police could not run the risk of having an inexperienced constable, even if he were a Rugby international, on duty at a time when there was trouble brewing. While the Harlequin
squad, from its central position, was moved quickly to points where danger threatened, Guy was given the patrolling of the power station during the safe hours between midnight and 4 a.m. and again between 8 a.m. and noon. He had rarely spent nine duller days.

On the fourth morning of the strike he went up to his club for lunch. He wanted to hear some informed gossip. He felt himself completely in the dark. The wireless was government controlled. The only two papers available were extremist—the
British Worker,
the mouthpiece of the strike, and the
British Gazette,
which the government issued from the offices of the reactionary
Morning Post. The Times
was still appearing in a curtailed form but it was unobtainable in Limehouse. That morning the
Worker
leaderette had asserted: ‘The Government-owned wireless and the Government-owned Press claim that normal life is continuing to function; and perhaps it is in the West End of London, in that small, self-centred and ultimately unimportant little world that lies between Oxford Street and the River, between Sloane Street and the Haymarket, between Regent Street and Kensington. But what about the docks, the heart of London that now lie idle? What about the industrial cities of the north that now lie paralysed? No smoke is rising from Sheffield's chimney stacks; let those who to-day will be eating their caviare in the Ritz and Berkeley remember how at harvest the rabbits cluster in the centre of the cornfield, imagining themselves immune, though every minute the blades of the circling thresher are approaching.'

To Guy, patrolling his power station in Limehouse, there was an ominous ring about that passage. It might be true. He remembered reading that in Petrograd in 1917 on the day of the October Revolution, as many lunches were served in the fashionable restaurants as had been on the same day the week before. He decided that a lunch in his club would give him some idea of what was really happening.

His sphere of duty ended at midday. The Tube only ran to Aldgate. Aldgate was two miles away. But he would be in time if he walked fast, for a late lunch. He set off at a brisk pace up the Commercial Road. He had only been walking a few minutes when a motor-bicycle that was moving at a great pace in the
opposite direction, checked, swung round and drew up at his side. “Like a lift?” asked a familiar voice.

He turned, and there was Franklin; begoggled, dusty, in corduroy trousers, and a college blazer.

“What on earth are you doing here?”

“Delivering newspapers.”

“The
Gazette
?”

“Good heavens, no; you don't think I'd be on the side of those stuffed shirts. The
Worker,
naturally. If you're going up West, jump up behind: provided you don't mind sitting on my nefarious news-sheet.”

Guy perched himself on the back, and the machine roared up the deserted thoroughfare.

“What do the Oxford authorities think of this excursion?” he inquired.

“I haven't told them: half the university's in town.”

“Won't they mind your working for the strikers?”

“Heavens, no. Oxford's changed since your day. We're all very left.”

They were at Aldgate Station within three minutes.

“Thank you very much. I can manage from now on.”

“I can take you to where you're going, unless you're ashamed of being seen in Pall Mall on a machine like this.”

“What about those papers; isn't someone waiting for them?”

“They can wait a little longer. It's not often I get a chance of doing a good turn for my big brother.”

In retrospect it was to seem very typical, both that Franklin should have taken sides against the stuffed shirts and that he should have been so casual in the performance of his duties.

Franklin was Guy's high spot during the General Strike: during the next few years he was to provide several more.

In the following October shortly after Oxford had gone up, the chief accountant came into Guy's office in a manner that was at the same time truculent and apprehensive.

“Yes, Mr. Pilcher?” he asked. “What is it?”

Pilcher was a white-haired man in the late sixties, on the verge of retirement. He was conscious that his mind did not work as quickly as it had; distrustful of new ideas he was ready to welcome
any slips made by the new regime. As much a stickler for detail as any Treasury official, he was always difficult when you wanted a point stretched. He handed Guy a sheet of paper. It bore the arms and inscription of New College Oxford. Signed by Franklin, it was a request for two cases of vintage Clicquot, a case of Duke and Renton's proprietory whisky, two cases of their gin, two cases of dark sherry, two of tawny port, and three dozen of a ‘good, sound Burgundy'.