Guy Renton (3 page)

“Perhaps you've never danced it with a Viennese.”

Later, in the writing-room, he looked up Roger Burton in
Who's Who
.

‘Roger Burton,' he read, ‘C.B. 1919;
b
. 10 May, 1881;
e.s.
of Sir Francis Burton, K.C. (q.v.).
Educ:
Eton and King's College, Cambridge. 1st Class History Tripos. Fellow of King's College.
m
. 1921, Renée,
e.d.
of Mr. and Mrs. Reginald van Rintaller of East Haddam, Connecticut, U.S.A.; one
s.
Board of Trade. Member of Coal Commission 1912; Member of Economic Delegation to Washington 1917; Financial Adviser at the Peace Conference 1919.
Publications:
Adam Smith: his place in History, 1904; The Economic Implications of Lloyd George's Budget, 1912; France and the Gold Standard, 1921;
Recreations:
Skating, Court Tennis.
Address:
59 Albion Street, W.i.
Clubs:
Reform, Beef-steak, Prince's, Ye Sette of Odde Volumes.'

He remembered now where he had seen the name: under-neath
a neat ambassadorial head-and-shoulders photograph in the left-hand top corner of articles on International Finance.

Born 1881. More than twice her age. He remembered the way she danced. How could an economist of forty-four match that quality? Thoughtfully he closed the book. Her husband was not arriving until the Friday: the day he was flying back to London. An imaginary scene, an imaginary conversation rose before his eyes, about his ears. Saturday afternoon, the changing-room at the Old Deer Park. Jimmy, with inquiry in his eyes. “Any luck, old boy?” Himself nodding his head knowingly, “I'll tell you afterwards.”

Always after the match, the team would collect in Dehem's Oyster Bar: Jimmy and he would corner themselves away from the group of footballers who would be hailing their victory or explaining away their defeat in pints of lukewarm beer. He would lean sideways confidentially, “Perfect setting. She'd come there four days ahead of her husband. He was arriving the afternoon of the day I was to leave. I'd never have to meet him that's to say. Of course I can't tell you who he was, but he's quite a big snot in his own line. Rich? I'd imagine so, judging from her jewellery. Older than she, oh yes, a good deal older: more than twice her age. She'd been married four years, but she couldn't have been more than twenty-three, if that: half Austrian, half American. You know what Austrians are. Yes, of course you do! I remember your story about that Viennese widow in Rapallo: being half American explains her independence. I imagine she was beginning to be rather bored with being married to a man twice her age, and finding herself four days alone in that playground atmosphere, well, I suppose she thought she'd enjoy herself while she had the chance. I had the good luck, or the good sense, to be the fellow who got there first. Super-dick? I should say it was.”

He smiled wryly to himself as he imagined the conversation. It wasn't like that. She wasn't like that. With a quarter of himself he wished she was: with three-quarters of himself he was glad she wasn't.

He was nervous on the following morning as he stood at the top of the slope which had been-selected for the second class test
candidates. It was not a very long slope nor a very steep one. Half a dozen flags had been placed along its length, between which candidates had to zig-zag their way to the hill's foot. Marks were awarded for both speed and accuracy. There were six candidates; he was fourth upon the list.

With growing nervousness he watched his predecessors slither their way between the flags. It was ridiculous to be nervous. He was never nervous before a football match. And before a match there was cause for nervousness. A personal error of one's own might discount the value of fourteen players' effort. Nothing was at stake now. It wouldn't matter if he passed or didn't pass. He could try again another day. It wasn't like a football match, where a mistake was irremediable. “Don't be a fool,” he told himself. But all the same his nervousness mounted as he watched the others one by one glide off.

He watched them enviously. They seemed so good, so accurate, so swift. He'd never do it as well as that. He'd fall or shoot past the post. He would not gauge his speed; he was not used to gauging speed; he was used to crashing straight ahead till he was brought up hard; he was not used to guiding himself, edging in between things. I'll shoot past the post: or crash right into it, then I'll have to go back; climb up the hill and start again. What a fool I'll look.

He hated looking a fool, hated being conspicuous, particularly at a game. He felt impatient with the whole performance. Skiing was a fiddling kind of show. It wasn't his line. Why had he taken it up? Why hadn't he gone to St. Moritz, had a real holiday, enjoying the sun and the keen air, the excitement and the dangers of the Cresta run? Why was he bothering to pass these tests; to qualify for the Kandahar? He was an ex-international, wasn't he? Why on earth should an ex-international be bothering with the Kandahar? Why on earth. . .

“Next please. G. S. Renton ...”

The starter's voice cut across his reverie, interrupted and dispersed it. At the sound of it his self-questioning was put aside. He crouched, his knees bent forward. “Now,” he told himself. He had forgotten that ten seconds before he had been wondering why on earth he should be doing this. He was taut and concentrated;
resolved as he always was at any game to succeed at the thing that he had set himself.

“One . . . two . . . three. . . . Go!”

He drove himself off with a dig and drive of his sticks. He struck out once, twice, then began to travel. He was going fast—too fast—he told himself. The first flag was a hundred yards away, was fifty, twenty. I must slow down now. It was a right-hand turn. He used a stop cristie, checking with his right foot, driving his right stick into the snow, leaning outwards away from the slope, so as to keep upright. A cloud of snow blew outwards, in his eyes, half blinding him; he was almost stationary; but he was on his skis, with the flag behind him, the slope below him, the stretch of the five flags in front; a mounting exhilaration in his head. This was a grand sport; it had everything; employed every muscle; it had speed, and the need for controlling speed: it had risk, and even danger; and the sun was warm and the air was keen. Slowly now, he warned himself, as he drove his sticks into the snow; there are five flags still. Don't lose your head because you've got round one. Steady now, steady, steady . . .

As he came to the foot of the slope there was a little spatter of clapping from the dozen or so spectators. He had navigated the six flags without mishap. He had not fallen. He had not overshot his mark. “Quite good time,” the starter told him. “Two minutes seven seconds.”

“Very impressive,” said a contralto voice, deep-toned and transatlantic with a foreign pitch.

It surprised as much as it delighted him. “I didn't expect you here.”

“I've been skating. I heard someone say the second-class tests were on. I thought I'd come across and see.”

She was wearing a short black skirt and a high-necked, long-sleeved Fair Isle jumper: ochre brown with a dark threaded pattern in the front. She had no hat, but was wearing hornrimmed sunglasses. She looked sixteen. They stood together watching his successor: a girl who had missed her first flag, but had returned, had made good her error and had just turned the third successfully.

“You're all very good. I couldn't do that trick work. We never went in for that kind of thing.”

“You have ski-ed quite a little then?”

“Oh yes, at home, but it's different there. We have more snow, great stretches of it. We go on long expeditions.”

“We might go on one ourselves.”

“That would be fun.”

“To-morrow I've another test. A run. What about Thursday?”

“Thursday would be fine.”

“Then that's a date.”

He hesitated. He looked at his watch. It was ten to twelve. Ordinarily he did not go back to the hotel till lunch-time. But it was too late now for the ‘Alibubble' and with his test taken and passed presumably, there was no point in practising Christianas on the nursery slopes.

“What about our going back to the hotel and having a cocktail before lunch?” he asked.

“Why not?”

The next day broke grey and rainswept; for a few hours at any rate ski-ing would be impossible. “We'll have to put off your test until this afternoon,” said Hansom.

It was nine o'clock and there was a listless aimless atmosphere about the lounge with its scattered, disconsolate groups brooding behind their newspapers. Mürren existed for the winter sports. There was nothing else to do. Guy walked into the hall. It was chill and damp, outside not a single pair of skis was stuck into the snow. The path leading up to the village was a quagmire. He turned away. Four hours till lunch. He wished he was back in London. As he recrossed the hall, a contralto voice hailed him from the stairs. “Don't look so like a funeral.”

She was wearing a long black heavy mackintosh and a sou'wester hat.

“I'm going shopping,” she informed him.

“I'd like to join you.”

“Why don't you? I'm going to buy my son a cuckoo clock.”

Seeing her huddled up into her mackintosh, it was more than ever difficult to think of her as a mother. She looked a schoolgirl.

“How old's your boy?”

“Three. The right age for a cuckoo clock.”

Half the shops that were not
patisseries,
were devoted to the
sale of clocks. They spent a little time deciding which one to patronise.

“I don't like turning a shop inside out and then not buying anything,” she explained.

She certainly turned the shop inside out. It was a full half-hour before she made her choice. As the shopkeeper did up the parcel, he turned aside to examine a cabinet of watches. A second saleswoman came across to him. “We have a new model that might interest you,” she said.

It was an elaborate wrist–watch. It told the day of the month it chimed the hours and had a stop-watch hand; it was gold and it cost thirty pounds. He had an impulse to buy it, not because he needed a wrist-watch—he had bought a very adequate one during the war—but because the purchase of this particular watch might impress Renée Burton. It would show her that he was someone capable of buying a thirty-pound watch for ‘the hell of it'. He suppressed the impulse. He did not want to impress her that way. He shook his head. He moved along the counter, glancing at a tray of pocket watches. One caught his attention. “Can I look at that?” he said. It was gold, and very thin with an old-fashioned face. It was wound with a key. It had initials on the back. “It belongs to a tourist who wants a wrist-watch that he can't afford,” the saleswoman told him. “I'm trying to sell it for him.”

Guy turned it over in his hand: old and smooth and the gold butter pale: made in London, dated 1880. He took it across to Renée. “Isn't it curious that at a time when the standard of taste in England was at its lowest, they should have made anything as handsome as this watch.”

She shrugged. “Emigré workmanship most likely. Europe was in a ferment then. It's the year my grandparents left Vienna.”

Eighteen hundred and eighty. The year in which his own grandfather had decided that it was time to stop living above his business in Soho and had taken a house in Highgate; 1880, the start in England of an unparalleled period of financial prosperity and architectural bad taste. How calm and assured and stable the world had seemed to the average Londoner at the very time when innumerable Austrians, Germans, Swedes, Italians, Poles were deciding that there was no future for them in the countries of
their birth and were crossing the Atlantic to build a new world that could disown Europe. He turned the watch over in his hand.

“It's very handsome.”

“Why don't you buy it then?”

She said it in the casual tone of one who had never considered that there was any point to be discussed with regard to the acquisition of an object except the degree and nature of one's fancy for it. If one saw anything that one liked below a certain price, one bought it. Below what price though? There must be a line drawn somewhere. Albion Street wasn't a rich address.

He walked back to the counter. “How much does he want for it?” he asked.

“The one he wants to buy costs three hundred francs.” ‘In Swiss francs, over twenty pounds; oh well,' he thought, ‘I want it.'

Renée came across to him.

“I'm taking your advice,” he said.

“How wise of you.”

“I'd like to have a souvenir of this trip.”

It was said lightly, or rather it was meant to be said lightly. But into his voice, unexpectedly, unsought, came an inflection suggesting that it was not lightly felt. She looked at him, as though she were surprised. Her eyes were almost on a level with his own. Her look was thoughtful, as though she were asking herself a question. She did not look away or drop her eyes but he had the feeling suddenly that she was not looking at him any longer. She half closed her eyes and her lips parted. It was as though she were inhaling an agreeable odour. It was a fleeting look. Her eyes opened and she smiled.

“I hope you're as pleased with your purchase as I am with mine,” she said.

It had been raining as they walked up from the hotel. It was raining harder now. They paused in the shop doorway. He did not want to go back to the hotel right away.

“There's a bookshop over there. Let's see if they've anything amusing.”

He was curious to know in what kind of book she took an interest. He also wanted a chance of showing her that he was not merely a hearty with no interest in life outside the football field.
He was surprised and a little disappointed when she went straight across to the table where the magazines were stacked.

“Ah, the new number of
Cosmopolitan.
I must see who's in it.”