Guy Renton (39 page)

Two days later Guy dined at No. 17. His mother was in high spirits. She had decided to take a small flat in a vast new block that had been built on the summit of the hill.

“Young people don't want an old lady in their house. I want to live on in Highgate, naturally. My friends are here. I like St. Michael's. I like the Institute. I like the Heath. I shall be seeing a great deal of you, much too much you'll probably be deciding before long. But I needn't be more of a nuisance than I have to be.”

“But, Mummy darling, we aren't going to be here for ever. This is only a short term project.”

“I daresay it is. In fact I know it is. But until you want to start travelling again, No. 17 must be your own home; don't think I'm making a martyr of myself. I've been waiting for years to have a minute flat of my own that I can run exactly as I like.”

There was a soft purr of self-satisfaction in her voice: but it was inspired, Guy felt, not so much by the prospect of a small flat on
her own as by the prospect of having three grandchildren settled within half a mile of her.

“It's darling of you,” Barbara was saying, “and of course it is going to be heaven for me to have a real home of my own: this one of all others.”

Her mother did not force home her point. She had got it the way she wanted, had banked on the certainty of Barbara's motherhood asserting its need for ‘a real home', ousting the vagabond truancy of the young girl in love. But she did not allow any suspicion to become apparent that she had been playing her cards with care and foresight.

“Very likely,” she said, “Guy himself will be wanting to move out here just about the time you want to start travelling again. You never can tell. Guy isn't forty yet. His father was nearly forty when we married.”

No suggestion was allowed that Norman would give up painting.

“He'll have two clear days over the week-end,” said Barbara. “I'll see to it that he spends the whole time sketching; on summer evenings there'll be our studio; then there'll be the holidays. We'll go where he can find good subjects; he'll be travelling quite often for the firm; he'll get subjects that way.”

Guy nodded. “I daresay that's how most of the best pictures are painted, at any rate at the start of a career, in one's spare time.”

He tried to make his voice sound convincing, but the shaving of that red beard was ominously like the hoisting of a white flag.

His mother, when she chose to exert herself, had the energy of a young girl in her teens. Within a month she was settled into a two-room fifth floor flat, with a kitchenette, and maid-service supplied by the hour. There was also a restaurant attached. It was the latest thing in flats, built on the American model. “It's what I've wanted all my life,” she said. “But I never thought that flats like this would ever be built in England.”

They had only indeed made their appearance in London in the last few years, to cope with the servant shortage, diminished incomes, increased mobility through the motor car, and the preference of the middle-class family for a small house in the country, with a perch in London. There had been no such block
of flats when Guy had house-hunted. From the window there was a superb view looking across Hendon.

“I'm going to be very happy sitting here,” his mother said. “My life's work's done; Lucy married, Franklin settled down, you running the business. Of course I wish Margery could find the right kind of man for her. But I think she's happy: no one could say she isn't leading a useful life. There
is
a shortage of men nowadays and to have two daughters out of three married and both mothers—it's a good proportion.”

She sighed. “It's a very comfortable feeling to have one's life's work behind one, to feel contented with it on the whole, to be able to face the future confidently. ... I hope that Barbara and Lucy when their times come will be able to say as much.”

It was in the summer of 1936 that she said that. In retrospect, Guy was to reflect that it was one of the last times that she or any other Englishwoman had been able to talk of facing the future in security.

On the 18 th of July the Spanish Civil War began.

Life from then on became a different business. The world lived in terms of headlines.

Up to then Guy, with many million others, had lived his postwar life independently of big events. The General Strike of 1926, the abandonment of the gold standard in 1931, were the only clear dates in those fifteen years. He remembered separate years in terms of the cricket champions and the Derby winner: the marriage of that friend, the divorce of this: the years blurred one into another against the fabric of a personal existence. But after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, each individual had the sense of leading his private life under the shadow of a public cloud: there was a sense of omen.

Each day had its fresh sensation: Hitler was planning this,
Mussolini was plotting that, and the Left Wing propagandists harnessed the anti-war temper of the country against the threat to peace implied in Fascism. Accusing fingers pointed to Abyssinia. ‘This is where Fascism leads.' The Socialists and fellow travellers of the Left were vocal with their arguments: capitalism led to unemployment, through its spiral of booms and slumps; in self-defence capitalism resorted to a totalitarian régime which again in self-defence resorted to aggressive war to obtain new markets. A Socialist economy did not need such devices. Socialism had not to maintain a luxurious self-indulgent minority. There was not an Englishman or Englishwoman, there was no one in France, there was no one in America who did not dread the outbreak of a second war. The Left Wing exploited their natural and healthy pacifism. ‘Unite against Fascism and War' the slogan ran.

There were manifestos and parades and public meetings. Every day brought Guy some fresh inducement to subscribe to this society or that publication or to sign this protest. He appeared to be on the mailing list of every Left Wing group. It puzzled him until a pamphlet reached him addressed in a familiar script. Franklin; that explained it.

He called Franklin up, but Daphne answered. He was out, she told him, at his office. “His office?”

“Yes; the Look Left to Freedom League.”

“What on earth is that?”

“Doesn't its name tell you?”

They laughed together.

“How long has this been going on?”

“Six weeks.”

It was about a month ago that this spate of literature had begun to clutter up his mail box.

“Would you like his telephone number?” Daphne asked.

“No, no, you needn't bother.”

A few days later Guy heard from Rex.

‘You remember my sending you some while ago a pamphlet about the English Mistery. You answered that though you were interested in the project, you felt that it lay outside your radius.
Perhaps recent events may have led you to look on this and certain other issues in a different light. I remember your saying to me many years ago when we were lunching at the Rag that you let things drift till an actual crisis has arrived. Surely that has happened, or at least is happening now? I think you ought to give the Mistery a further trial.

‘We are having a dinner on Saturday the 17th: why not come to it? You needn't dress, unless you want to: though most of us will. Men only. Do try. Even if the idea doesn't appeal to you, it'll be a good evening. And it will be a great pleasure to me to have the chance of a real talk with you. We don't sec nearly enough of one another, but the bonds that were forged in Flanders are not to be broken lightly. Do come, at eight o'clock. At the Cannon Street Station Hotel.'

The Cannon Street Station Hotel. What a place to choose. Curiosity made him accept the invitation but he went there with the gloomiest expectations.

He could not have been more surprised. There was a company of at least two hundred. Half of them were in evening dress: the remainder in dark suits; a third of them were very young and belonged to what thirty years earlier would have been called ‘the lower orders'. There were quite a few cockney accents. Their owners were strong and lusty, yet at the same time Guy was conscious of a slightly unhealthy atmosphere; the same undercurrent of abnormality that had characterized the black-shirted, black-trousered bodyguard that had paraded the King's Road, Chelsea.

There were a number of oldish men: some of military appearance: some with long thin faces who looked like the diplomats of a Lyceum melodrama. There were a few men whom Guy knew by sight. There were two fellow-members of the Wanderers. Rex and some half dozen others were wearing a kind of Court dress: black silk knee breeches and stockings and silver buckled shoes. “What does all that mean?” Guy asked.

“I'm one of the officers.”

“Are the rest rank and file?”

“Some are guests, some are supporters without being enrolled.”

“Fellow-travellers in fact.”

“That's not a label that we'd quite approve of.”

“That kind of thing, though.”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“What does being enrolled involve?”

“That's more than I can explain now. There are various stages of initiation. You have to take some very serious oaths.”

“Like masonry?”

“Not in the least like masonry.”

That was the only completely definite reply that Rex vouchsafed.

“You'll get a clearer idea before the evening's through,” he said.

To Guy's surprise he was provided with one of the best dinners he had eaten in several weeks. It was plain, straightforward fare, in the best traditions of sound English cooking: turtle soup; grilled sole; a steak and kidney pie; a cheddar cheese. White burgundy was served with the fish, red burgundy with the pie. Both wines were excellent: they were not decanted; they were planted in rows along the table and each man helped himself. The red burgundy was labelled ‘Beaune'. No year, no shipper. During the last months he had heard so much semi-informed talk about vintage years and the five classified growths of the Medoc that it was a relief to find a wine that had the courage to stand on its own feet. A steady flow of bottles was maintained.

Guy was on Rex's right. On his other side was a pale-haired overbred young man with spectacles and an earnest manner, who lived in the country, was married and had three children. He had a large estate that had had to pay heavy death duties. “I should like to have sold out,” he said. “But the Controller wouldn't let me.”

“Who's the Controller?”

“I don't think I should tell you that. I'm not quite certain who he is myself: at least I'm not sure if there isn't someone over the Controller, over the one I know, I mean. It's all a little complicated in the higher hierarchy.”

“Then you're a member of the Mistery.”

He shook his head. “No, I'm not fully enrolled. I couldn't give all the time to it I'd need. I wanted to, of course. But the Controller said I'd be of greater value if I worked my estate and made it prosper: was a unit in the work; that after all is one of the
chief points of the Mistery, to get back to feudal England, restore the delight of the craftsman in his work; each man with his own plot of soil; the old loyalties of husbandry; it's only a few of us who are fitted to be leaders: a selected few. That's what the Mistery does: it selects those few.”

“What are the qualifications?”

“Birth. Good stock. I don't mean the aristocracy. Good pure yeoman stock is the best we have: that's the stock that made England great. The best cocker spaniel will never make a good greyhound. A Jew may be a good Jew, but never a good Englishman.”

So it was anti-Semitic then as well as Royalist.

“What does the Mistery propose to do?” Guy asked.

“Lead England when the call comes to it.”

Guy remembered Lucy's vague remark about the King re-assuming his old sovereignty. Was the Mistery proposing to sound the clarion outside Buck House?

He turned his attention back to Rex. “I'm still confused as to what this is all about.”

“Don't worry. You'll be much clearer after you've heard the speeches.”

He wasn't. He was even more confused. The main speech was delivered by a short, squat, very thickset man, as near to being a dwarf as could be, in the early fifties, who was, Rex informed Guy, a kind of general secretary. The speech lasted three-quarters of an hour. It was delivered with great vigour, and with considerable oratorical skill. It consisted in large part of an attack on both Communism and on Fascism, but the alternative it offered bore strong resemblances to both. “We can learn,” he said, “from the tactics of the Communist cell.”

The Mistery's chief quarrel with the Fascists appeared to be that the Fascists only wanted a limited monarchy: and their movement was one of the Left towards the equality of everyone, whereas the Mistery was a movement of the Right, basing its disposal of power on the inequality of man. Its programme, as Guy understood it, was to set up through the country small ‘Mistery Kins', round which the country would group itself when the occasion came. What the occasion was to be, and what was going to happen when it came, was vaguely outlined.

The Mistery, like Communism and Fascism, appeared to thrive on the promise of a
coup d'état;
there was historic precedent for that. But the fashion nowadays was to describe a
coup d'état
not as the medieval Barons understood it as a seizure of authority, but as the triumph of a particular political philosophy, so that each party had to explain how different was its philosophy from those of its rivals. While the General Secretary explained in his forty-five minutes speech that the Mistery was a completely new idea, Franklin would argue at equal length that Communism and Fascism were diametrically opposed, although Mussolini had started as a Communist.

To Guy it had long seemed that they were all of them in the same boat really: each felt the world was hurtling to destruction; each had a totalitarian formula for salvation; and probably they were right to this extent, that if you put men into chains, without letting them know they were in chains, you could get the world's work accomplished. The slave system built the pyramids. “We must organize for our opportunity,” the squat, tough Secretary was declaiming: And what else was being declaimed in Rome, in Berlin, in Moscow, in Vienna?