Guy Renton (19 page)

“It'll be steadying too for Franklin; his status as a married man. Up to now he's always been in the second place; he's always been ‘your brother'; he's never shown any jealousy, but it must have irked him. The Athenians got tired of hearing Aristides called the Just. No, I'm sure it's the best thing possible. Pamela seems very girlish sometimes, or she does to me; but that'll pass. She comes of such sound stock. From the firm's point of view, of course, it's a most fortunate alliance: keeps Pamela's shares within the family: yes, frankly, I'm delighted. I hope old Duke is. Does he know by the way? Quite like these children to have forgotten to tell him. I know that before I proposed to your mother I saw her father first: but of course times have changed. I wonder if he has heard. He'll be at the board meeting, of course . . .”

Mr. Renton paused; a fussed expression on his face. “Don't
run away afterwards, dear boy, I'm very bad at this kind of thing. Stay by and back me up.”

But there was no need for any backing up. That was obvious from the expression on Mr. Duke's face as he came into the board-room. It was not exactly a smirk for there was mischief in it. Self-satisfaction mingled with a kind of impudence. There was a long agenda, none of it of a controversial nature: business was going well: the Chancellor of the Exchequer might pile fresh duties on to wine and spirits but the public was still adopting the profitable policy of economizing on necessities and not on luxuries. It could have been in fact a boring meeting, and was, no doubt, for the other five directors; but between the three senior partners there was an entertaining undertone of dramatic irony.

The twinkle never left Duke's eye: the look of a man who had something up his sleeve. When the meeting finally broke up and tea was brought, he purposely delayed the departure of the other directors, as though he were trying to keep his old colleague upon tenterhooks. When at last they were alone, his smirk became a grin. “Wouldn't the best thing be to have that young rascal up here right away,” he said, “so that we can ask him what he means by it?”

If he had expected his future son-in-law to be embarrassed he was disappointed. Franklin checked when he came into the room and saw the three of them alone. He had not expected this kind of interview, but he was equal to it. He smiled, his disarming smile.

“If this were a magazine story, this is the point where the hero is offered a junior partnership,” he said. As before, when they had lunched at the R.A.C., Guy had the sense of Franklin being in control of the situation. He was putting them at their ease, not they putting him.

A week later in honour of the engagement there was a family dinner at No. 17. Guy drove out Margery. “I'm happy about it,” she said, “as far as I can be happy about any marriage.”

“You say these disillusioned things but you don't sound bitter.”

“Me, bitter? Why should I be bitter? I'm leading the rich full
life.” Indeed he had never seen her looking happier. There was a glow of health, a fulfilled look, about her. “Young Pamela's got a job,” she said. “But maybe she'll never realize what a job it is. Franklin is kind, you know; a useful characteristic in a husband.”

They arrived to find champagne cocktails being served. It was the first time that Guy had seen Pamela for a year. He would not have recognized her if he had met her in the street. With her hair cut short in an Eton crop and wearing a straight tubular tunic frock, with the fringes of her skirt shaking against her knees, she looked with her long slim legs like a schoolboy in fancy dress, particularly when she was next to Barbara who had adopted a wind-blown shingle, and was wearing a widespread panier skirt and a tight-fitting bodice. But no one could have been more feminine than Pamela. She had been given her engagement ring that morning. A simple hoop of diamonds and rubies: half the time she held her hand upon her knee so that she could take surreptitious glances at it; the rest of the time, fearing that she was being ostentatious, she sat with her arms crossed; but when she did, Guy noticed she kept rubbing the back of her left hand against the soft skin of her underarm to remind herself that a ring was there. Her eyes were bright: there was a glow upon her cheeks: the same glow that he had noticed upon Margery. Did men who were in love have the same look for women; were they recognizable by a kind of aura?

Guy felt a sudden qualm as he looked at Pamela. She was so very young, Franklin was so erratic: he alone in that room knew how erratic. Was it fair to Pamela? Might not some grisly shock be waiting her? He shrugged. Franklin was kind, as Margery had said: and maybe that was more important in a husband than rigid rectitude; women needed to be needed; maybe those wives were happier who had problem husbands: they felt left out by the husbands who ran their lives by rule, never got into debt, never drank, never chased other women.

He looked at Lucy. She was sitting beside his mother; she had brought up some snapshots of the children for ‘Granny' to choose which she'd like. He remembered her as she had been in girlhood. What had happened to all that gaiety; withered, wilted
because marriage had not watered it. Rex had no doubt been ‘fast' in the way that a pre-war regular Army officer had understood the word, in terms of the Empire Promenade, the Continental, Maxim's, and the Indian Hill Stations. Rex saw marriage in terms of a giving up of things, of a retirement; not as a beginning, not as an enlargement of horizons. A wife might be a necessary adjunct to the cut and dried routine of an English country squire, but she could never be the framework of it in the way that Pamela might be of Franklin's life.

He looked at Pamela giggling now beside Barbara at some schoolgirl joke; then across the room at her own mother. Mrs. Duke was in the early forties; slim with tightly-shingled silvering hair. She had a brittle, mondaine manner. In features she was in no way like her daughter. She was hard and practical. You felt that she had run her marriage. It was difficult to realize that once she had been a giggling schoolgirl flaunting an engagement ring. Her husband was fifteen years older than herself. She had had to be his slave, or ‘to wear the trousers'. Though Pamela would never look like her mother as regards actual features, she might develop, not into a domineering, not into a managing wife, but into someone who could organize her husband. Perhaps that was what Franklin needed.

Rarely had Guy seen Franklin in higher spirits. He was smiling, gracious; not over-exuberant, but clearly delighted with himself. He was even being affable to Rex; asking questions, listening to the answers as though he actually set store by them. Guy overheard a section of their conversation. Rex was discussing the New York stock market collapse.

“It's far more serious than anyone over here realizes,” he was saying. “We haven't felt it yet. In a sense we started it with that Hatry trouble: but we're well cushioned: in a way that in America they aren't. They rise higher and fall faster. They've had a number of bad slumps in their time, but the one they're heading for is without precedent, because the boom it's following was the most fantastic that even America has ever known. It'll have bad repercussions here.”

“Why do you say that? Why more than any other time?” asked Franklin.

“Because European finance is dependent upon American in a
way that it never was before. In the Edwardian era we were the bankers of the world, but now with war debts, reparation plans, and what not, the centre has moved to Wall Street. If American economy wobbles, European economy may collapse. Think how the Communists will exploit it. It bears out all they've said, the Marxist theory of the mounting spiral of alternating booms and slumps that ultimately leads to war.”

Guy turned aside. Poor Lucy. Something happened to military men when they retired; they were lost without the discipline of regimental life. He'd rather have a daughter of his marry Franklin.

At dinner Franklin sat between Pamela and Mrs. Duke. He was very attentive to his future mother-in-law, addressing the greater part of his conversation to her, but Guy noticed that whenever he was turned to her, he ate with his left hand while Pamela ate with her right. Guy was reminded of the dinner party in
War and Peace,
on the evening of Peter's betrothal to Helena. No one was really conscious of what he was saying to his neighbour. Everything seemed trivial in comparison with the mingling of these two young lives.

The dinner was in keeping with the occasion: delicate but substantial; clear soup, a salmon soufflé, saddle of lamb, a Charlotte Russe. Three wines were served, Chablis, a claret, then champagne.

As the champagne glasses were filled, Mr. Duke stood up. “I don't know whether it is proper for me as a guest to propose a toast: but as I am about to lose a daughter I have the right to say how happy I am to be not really losing her: that she is to remain part of this our larger family. In more than one way this is a unique occasion. For over a century and a half the house of Duke and Renton has contributed to the conviviality of mankind. How many engagements, weddings, christenings, birthdays, have not been toasted in our wines, but this I must remind you is the very first time that a wine of ours has been raised to honour the union of a Duke and a Renton.

“There used to be an English idea that one's home life and one's business were separate, that one did not talk shop at home. And so the Dukes and the Rentons all through the Victorian and
the Edwardian eras met in Soho Square and then at six o'clock scattered to their separate homes. It was a practice that does not seem to have had any unfortunate repercussions on the conduct of the business. On the contrary indeed. But it was a practice that has, I am very sure, no place in this day and age. And I am more happy than I can say that this, shall we say, stuffy and antediluvian tradition should have been broken by the youngest of us. My friends, let us toast Pamela and Franklin, let us toast Duke and Renton.”

As Guy rose to his feet, he remembered other times when he had remained sitting when first his grandfather and then his father had raised a glass to him, at school when he had got his colours, on his return from France with the white and purple ribbon of the Military Cross, when he had got his blue at Oxford, and his cap for England. It was the first time Franklin had been in the limelight. But there was no air of self-consciousness or over-self-satisfaction in his manner as he turned to Pamela.

“I don't think we'll make a speech. Do you?” he said. “Shall we just stand up and thank them?” It was easily and smoothly done. They rose together, hand in hand, smiled and sat down. Yes, Guy thought, the auspices were very fair.

The party went on late. Everyone was happy about the engagement. Barbara was exuberant. She regarded the whole business as something she had herself originated. “It all began that evening I brought round Pamela to your flat,” she said. Rex for the first time was unqualified in his approval of anything in connection with his younger brother-in-law. “Shows the boy's got character. You can judge a man by his dog and by the wife he chooses. To be quite honest I never thought he had it in him. Shows how wrong one can be where the younger generation is concerned. His innings is about to start.”

Lucy asked Franklin to come down for the week-end, “and of course bring Pamela,” a suggestion she had never made before.

Mrs. Renton was suffused with a bland smile that seemed to come from some interior deep-based source of happiness. She was doing her best to resist the temptation to say, “I told you so.”

Mr. Renton nodded his head slowly. “It does me good to see your mother looking so happy about anything. She keeps things
to herself, you know: too proud to show her feelings; but she's worried a lot about your brother. Oh yes, a great, great deal.” It was one of the very happiest evenings Guy could recall. His memory was often to return to it in the years ahead.

On the way back he said to Margery, “Why don't we make an engagement party of that evening of ours with Michael Drummond?”

“Why not? Michael's running a new bottle-party club. We could go on there afterwards.”

At the end of the week Guy rang up the Burtons. Roger answered him. “I'm having a celebration party. I want it to be on a day you both can come.”

“We'd love to, what are you celebrating?”

“Franklin's engagement.”

“His what?”

“He's marrying Pamela Duke; the daughter of our chief partner.”

“Franklin engaged? He never told me.”

“He didn't tell any of us. It was a complete surprise.”

“I should say it was.”

Roger sounded not only astonished but indignant. He recovered quickly. “It's the best thing for him. Particularly for anybody so attractive. I shall be most interested to meet the lady.”

“But you have met her.”

“When?”

“At a cocktail party of mine, eighteen months ago.”

“Did I? How very stupid of me, I can't remember.”

It was like Roger to have forgotten meeting a pretty girl. There was a thoughtful expression on Guy's face as he rang off. He remembered that curious remark of Franklin's about being able to like anybody who liked him. He remembered how impressed Roger had been at that cocktail party where Franklin had first met Pamela. How suitable a friend had Roger been for anyone so young and volatile? He shrugged. It wasn't his job to interfere with other people. If they wanted his advice, that was another thing. Anyhow it was a closed chapter now. Pamela would look after that.

On the night of the party he watched closely the first meeting of Roger and his brother. Nothing could have been more natural or unembarrassed. Roger had bought Franklin a volume of Rimbaud's poems bound in dark green morocco lined with watered silk. To Pamela he handed a long thin packet. “Shall I tell you what I said when I heard of your engagement?—that Franklin's taste in his choice of a bride is as exquisite as his appreciation of the best in pictures. I hope that you will find occasion for the use of this.” ‘This' was an eighteenth-century French fan; tortoiseshell and enamel, figured in the style of Fragonard, an enchanting object.