Guy Renton (15 page)

To his surprise he had not found himself missing it. He had thought it would be a wrench; it wasn't. He did however find himself now and again missing certain of his friends—particularly Jimmy Grant. They had had more than football in common with each other. Jimmy would complete his party very adequately; moreover he might be the right kind of man for Margery, since she had this prejudice against unmarried Englishmen of her own class. She could find no one who looked less like what he actually was than Jimmy Grant.

Jimmy arrived the first. He had put on weight appreciably during the last eighteen months.

“Yes, I know it's terrible,” he said. “If I weren't captain they'd drop me from the side. I'll be retiring in April. Heaven knows what I'll look like by midsummer. How on earth have you managed to stay thin? Yes, I know: don't tell me. No bread, no beer, no butter, no potatoes. Is life worth living under those conditions? Yes, I know, the alternative's much worse. I'll have to do the same next year. Till April though I can tell myself that as long as I'm fit to play on Saturdays I can do what I like during the week. Have beer and enjoy it while I can. You've a nice place here: fine shrine for super-dick. I hope it's proving it.”

He rattled on with his old exuberance. He was wearing a fawn-grey double-breasted waistcoat and a maroon tie decorated with pale blue elephants: no one would take him for an Englishman. He might well be right for Margery.

“I'm going to enjoy myself to-night. Cocktail parties are the greatest invention since the wheel,” he was continuing. “If you don't meet anyone exciting there's always the club and a reasonable evening with the chaps. But if you do find a girl without a date, you take her on to dinner with half your work done or you; the evening's yours, or at least up to you. Compare that with those evening parties that began at nine. You'd dine a girl, get her in a congenial temper, take her to someone's party, be separated by your hostess, some wolf who'd come without an
escort would benefit by the party mood you'd got her into, reaping where he. hadn't sown; you wouldn't see her again till the party's end and then you'd probably find yourself in a taxi with another couple; anyhow the mood had gone. No fun at all. Give me a cocktail party every time.”

It was a successful party: at first there was general conversation, then a splitting into twos and threes, a mingling into a three there and a four here. Barbara gave Pamela a personally-conducted tour of the flat, showing her the books, the pictures, the ornaments along the bookshelves; Rex was in an uncontentious mood. Franklin made an obviously favourable impression upon Roger; Margery paired off with Jimmy. Himself he had a long quiet talk with Renée.

In early days, he had felt shy of meeting her in public, he had found it almost impossible to talk with her. That period was over now. They had several mutual friends; had indeed made a point of cultivating acquaintances that they could share. They were constantly meeting not only at each other's parties, but in the houses of these acquaintances. Their friendship, approved by Roger, was an established fact: quite often a hostess would say in reply to Renée's ‘We'd have loved to come but Roger has to attend a conference in Cambridge', ‘Well, what about that nice friend of yours, Guy Renton?'

They met now naturally under such conditions. Arriving at a party separately, Guy would play his part normally as a guest; no longer perpetually glancing over his shoulder to the door and breaking off a conversation to exchange a word with her: he had now no need for such reassurance. He would catch her eye and smile, continue his conversation, let himself be introduced to another guest, then gradually work his way towards her; to talk for three, five minutes; then let the party catch them up again. Those few moments of casual talk in crowded rooms were as much a cement to their relationship as the telephone calls which they managed to make at some point or another of every day. The earlier restlessness had gone, but the hours that they spent alone were no less vivid; they had now a confidence, a sureness in each other. He had no longer the desperate fear that she might lose interest in him, that someone would take her from him.

He felt no awkwardness, no sense of haste or urgency as he sat beside her at his party. They had made no definite date for their next meeting, but as far as he could be sure of anything he knew that next morning or the morning after she would ring up to say, “Why don't I come round to tea with you on Wednesday?”

He was lucky to have a job that did not tie him to fixed hours. He had every excuse for going out.

“I'm so glad to have seen your family,” she was saying now. “It's going to make it so much easier for you to talk about them. I've always felt a little worried, knowing so little about your home. I felt myself shut out.”

“Shut out, you, out of my life!”

She nodded. “Just a little.”

“If you'd given me the slightest hint.”

“I didn't want to hurry things. I knew the right time would come of its own accord. I'm taking a long view, a very long view of us.”

Yes, it was a successful party. Roger was impressed by Franklin. “One of the most intelligent young men I've met in a long time, such natural charm. I prophesy a very brilliant career for him. I hope when he comes down that you'll bring him round to see us.” Jimmy asked Margery to dinner. Guy was left with the two girls and Franklin.

“An agreeable old quean,” was Franklin's comment upon Roger. “Wants to come down to Oxford and meet the younger generation. Who'll I invite, aesthetes or hearties; think he's got a taste for rough stuff?”

They went to the Café Royal. “Wonderful,” said Pamela. “It's very wicked, isn't it?”

She looked round eagerly, trying to pick out the dope-pedlars and the courtesans. “Surely that man with the beard is something. Look at that woman with the short hair and the brocaded coat and the high collar, I've never seen anyone like her, not anywhere.” She and Barbara kept up a running duet of comment and interrogation. They were enchantingly young. Most of their conversation was directed towards Franklin. They worked on him like a pair of gangsters, talking about him to one another. “Do you think we could persuade him to ask us up for Eights Week?”

“Hasn't he someone else he'd rather ask: is he keeping some dark secret from us?”

“Do you look at his post? Does he get letters in scented envelopes?”

“Don't you think you ought to steam them open?”

Franklin played up with relish: talking to Guy as though they did not exist, but with his talk entirely directed at them. “Remember that Polish countess who sent me the gold cigarette-case,” and “Remember the time we were playing baccarat in Monte with the P.O.W.” It was all very juvenile and very gay and there was a lot of laughter.

It was over two weeks before he again saw Margery.

“How's your ‘walk-out' with Jimmy Grant?” he asked.

“It isn't.”

“Wasn't it a success?”

“We had a pleasant enough evening. But it's always the same with me and that kind of Englishman.”

“I'd have thought that Jimmy was as unlike that kind of Englishman as anyone could be. He looks like an Argentine.”

“I daresay; but he isn't one, and that's the trouble. We'd too much in common. The first time a man takes you out, he doesn't quite know what's in his mind. But no man ever asked a girl out unless he was a bit attracted. If it's a foreigner who takes you out, he finds by the time you've reached the coffee that he's run out of small talk and starts being gallant; but with an Englishman you've discovered so many mutual friends that you're comparing notes about Arthur this and Susan that and really having such a good time doing it that the man forgets his ulterior motives; you don't get anywhere and he doesn't ring you up again.”

“The English do manage sometimes you know to fall in love with one another. The race isn't dying out.”

“I know, I'm exaggerating, but actually that's what did happen with Jimmy Grant; there was a kind of flicker when we met; but we finished it up amiably chatting about Betty Forrester.”

“I'd better arrange another meeting.”

“Don't bother. I'm not uncherished.”

It was said with a quick, near-truculence. For a moment her
mouth hardened. Then she smiled again. “I thought Mürren charming, by the way.”

That made him start. “How did you guess?”

“Darling, I'm not quite blind.”

“Is it so obvious?”

“Only to me and because I know you. There was just that difference about you. It wasn't exactly that you were gentler; no, I can't explain. There was a kind of serenity about you. The way it ought to be. I am so happy for your sake.”

That May, chaperoned by Margery, Barbara and Pamela went up for Eights Week. They returned with impressive accounts of Franklin's charm and hospitality, they planned to go up next year. Their plans did not mature. Franklin failed to pass ‘history previous': and the college authorities discontinued his residence. ‘There are times,' the dean wrote, ‘when it is considered to be in the interests of the college to allow one of its members a second chance. This is not one of them.'

Franklin received the news not only with equanimity but relief. “I've been sitting in classrooms long enough. It's time I began an adult life. At my age,” he reminded Guy, “you were a captain in the line in France, independent, your own master.”

“That's hardly the way I looked on it. I was subject to military discipline.”

“No one questioned the use you made of your spare time.”

“I wasn't aware that anyone minded your spending half your last vac. in Paris.”

“That isn't the same thing. Besides, there's a great deal of difference between the spending of Army pay and an allowance from your father. As long as you are drawing an allowance, a parent feels he has control of you.”

Guy wondered what was the difference between an allowance from a father, and a salary drawn from a father's firm. He recognized that there was a difference and did not press the point.

“From the firm's point of view,” Franklin was continuing, “I feel that I'll be far more use to them having led the kind of life I've led at Oxford than if I'd spent two years with a sported oak.”

“What kind of life did your lead?”

“A social one. I broadened myself. Met the most amusing
people up there. Several of them will be rich one day. They are as likely as not to bring us their accounts. For all we know I may have started the firm off on an entirely new branch.”

“I don't suppose you can expect our parents to see it in that light.”

“Can't I, why not? Anyhow, Mother's delighted that I've come down. She thinks modern Oxford's a sink of vice. She's glad to have me under her eye. And as for Father, he's never really cared for me, you know; as long as I don't cause a crashing scandal he won't worry.”

“Fathers like talking in their clubs; a son who leaves Oxford without a degree and his school before he's been made a prefect, well, it does not give him a great deal to talk about.”

Franklin laughed. “Poor Father. Yes, I suppose that's so. But think how he could talk about your football. He got much more than he bargained for out of you, he's getting less than he hoped for out of me. It evens out. I'll pay him back some day. You wait a year or two and you'll find me marrying someone unbelievably eligible. When he's got grandchildren to carry on his name, he'll forget all about my misdemeanours now. And he won't live long enough to see what rascals some of my sons are bound to be.”

Franklin took the whole matter so lightly that it was impossible for anybody else to take it seriously; he had so much self-confidence. It was impossible to believe that things would not turn out well for him in the end.

That autumn Franklin entered the firm of Duke and Renton with a yearly salary of three hundred pounds on account of any business he might introduce on commission. His mother furnished a bed-sitting-room at No. 17 where he could see his friends and read quietly after dinner if he preferred. He joined
the Wellington, prefatory to his election to the Oxford and Cambridge; and began his life as a Londoner, with his mother giving a small dinner-party every Friday so that he should meet ‘nice people'.

It was a happy, family autumn, in which nothing very much appeared to happen; Barbara was ‘finishing' in Paris, Franklin getting the feel of London and of office life. Guy had fallen into a routine. His golf game was improving. He got his handicap down to seven, he hoped to play for the old Fernhurstians in the Halford-Hewitt. Two or three days a week he would go down to the Golf School in the Strand in an attempt to ‘groove his swing'. He entertained the firm's more prosperous clients and exploited the advantage of an ‘expense account'. He never wished when Saturday came round that he was going to Twickenham. He sometimes wondered if he was slipping into a rut. Was he at the age of thirty-one moving within the range of middle age? Certainly in the home he had begun to occupy an increasingly avuncular position. His father, now nearing seventy, was ageing fast. At Christmas, though he retained his chairmanship, he retired from daily duties. Guy became managing director.

Retirement was the start of a big change in Mr. Renton. He breakfasted now in bed, sitting propped among his pillows, pretending to read the newspapers, but actually working out the crossword puzzle. On warm days he strolled over the heath. On wet days he would read the weeklies in the Highgate Institute. At first he made a practice of lunching at the Travellers' twice a week. “I'm not going to lose touch,” he said. For the first month he did so; then a very cold spell intervened, and he caught a chill. For three weeks he had to stay indoors. When the weather grew warm, and his chill was cured, he preferred a sauntering stroll in the April sunlight. He made excuses for not going into London. He had not realized, he said, how pleasant it could be to sit on the edge of the Heath, behind Ken Wood, and look out over London, thinking of all the people hunched over their office desks.