Guy Renton (7 page)

Because it was the furthest away, he went there first, walking from Knightsbridge Station, through Montpelier Square with all its Galsworthian memories of Irene Forsyte. There was something that was very London about this quiet backwater between the turmoil of Harrod's Depository and the Knightsbridge Barracks. There was a village atmosphere about Cheval Place with its small two-storied cottages and Howell's grocery where you could buy everything. He liked the feudal survival of Box Cottage with its black-faced, gilt-handed clock. He liked the feel of this small world, whose existence you would not suspect as you drove along Brompton Road or Piccadilly. A good home for a man who had been born in London, through whose veins
ran deep and warm a love of London: an appropriate place too as the setting for a private life.

It was the first time that he had walked through Rutland Street. It was a short alley of small three-storied early Victorian houses, stucco-fronted, with balconies in front of their first-story windows and short flights of steps running up to their front doors. It was part of a mews, designed for the services of the comfortably-incomed upper middle class families who had lived in the four adjacent squares—Brompton, Rutland, Trevor, Mont-pelier. It was easy to reconstruct the life of the adjacent cottages, the bustling world of grooms and ostlers. Very definitely this was the kind of thing he wanted. The conversion was obviously recent. The stucco was new, the front doors and windows freshly painted. He rang at the second house and the bell was answered by a neat, trim maid.

“I've an order to view,” he said.

“I'll get Mrs. Stevenson.”

He looked round the hall as he stood waiting. It was comfortably warm after the damp chill street. The staircase had a new red-brown carpet. The stair rods shone. On the walls were gilt-framed coloured reproductions of French eighteenth-century engravings. There was a general air of competence and comfort.

A large fat woman in the later forties came bustling from the basement. She was out of breath; her forehead damp, and her sparse hair dishevelled.

“I'm sorry, sir, to be caught this way, but I've only just done me dinner. Stevenson and I don't get down to it till after three. We don't like to start till all the tenants' meals is cleared. I wouldn't ‘ave come up at all if I could ‘ave trusted Alice to show you round. She's new: not got the run of things. Who was it you came from? Did they tell you what the arrangements was? Fifteen shillings a week for service. Then you give the maid what you like. Half-a crown's plenty—then if she does anything extra, you gives her what you likes. There's a fixed charge for meals: one-and-six breakfast, three shillings lunch, four shillings dinner, but when you ‘ave company, that's different. All grist to the mill, I say, and I likes young people to enjoy themselves. Mrs. ‘obson now, she's in Number Fifty, gave a dinner party for
eight last week. Eight, I ask you. I ‘ad a maid waiting on her all the time. Six shillings a ‘ead and she said she couldn't ‘ave been done no better in the Ritz; and she a lady too what knows what's what.”

She maintained the flow of talk breathlessly but uninterruptedly as she led him up the stairs. The first floor flat to which he had an order was composed out of an L-shaped drawing-room; it was high with moulded ceilings, divided with connecting doors. There were tall French windows at each end. You can best judge a room's proportions whenit is bare; and the house had been built at the close of a great architectural period; the room had a harmony of line.

He stood on the narrow balcony. It had no view. The mews buildings to the back of Rutland Square were facing it. To the left Rutland Street ran into Cheval Place, to the right into Mont-pelier Square. There was no view either at the other end, only the roofs and backyards of the Brompton Road. He would not need a view; he would not be here much in daytime; houses with views were far too often on a ‘bus route.

He took stock of the flat. It looked small, as houses do before they have been furnished. But when he stepped it out, he realized that it would suit his purpose. Standing there looking round him, trying to visualize it furnished, he was conscious of impending destiny. How much might happen, how much of the drama of his life be staged here.

“Thank you very much,” he told Mrs. Stevenson. “I'll let you know.” But his mind was made up already. He knew very well that he was not going to use any of those other orders.

He turned east into the Brompton Road. The rain had ceased, but it was cold and windy; women as they came out of Harrod's huddled into their high-collared coats, their stumpy umbrellas tucked under their arms, hesitated for a moment in the shelter of its doorway before butting into the wind with their pudding-bowl close-fitting hats. It was March at its very worst, the pavements greasy, the buses splashing mud out of the gutters. But his heart was jubilant with a sense of spring, of life opening and budding. A sudden impulse seized him to array himself to match his mood; new clothes for a new life.

In his office he wore the usual city man's uniform of striped
trousers and short black coat. His lounge suits were for the most part brown.

“I've the very thing for you,” his tailor said, draping over his arm a dark red-brown cloth that on an ordinary occasion he might well have chosen. Guy shook his head. He wanted something unlike himself. He ran his eye along the bales: blues and reys and browns and checks, till his attention was caught and held by a smooth dark cloth with an unusual gloss. “That looks like green,” he said.

“It is, sir, a bottle green. I'll show you it in the light.” He took it to the doorway. In the dark electric-lit shop it would have passed for black, but in the daylight, the green tinge was definite. “It needs the sun though to bring out its true colour,” the tailor said. It was not only unlike any suit he had ever had himself, but it was unlike any suit that he had seen. Yet in no sense could it have been described as ‘loud'.

“I'm not sure that it's quite your style,” the tailor said.

“That's precisely what I'm looking for. Something that isn't my usual style.”

“Well, of course, sir,
you
could get away with it.”

Guy smiled. He knew what the man was thinking. That a man who had played for England could wear anything and not be misunderstood.

“I'll have it,” he said, “and single-breasted. And could you give me a cutting so that I can get some hosiery to match. Oh, and one other thing. It's most important that it should be ready in a fortnight.”

Was he counting his chickens before they were hatched? Ordering new clothes, contracting for a flat. What a fool he'd feel if Renée treated him as a casual acquaintance, and he was left with an unusual suit and a flat he did not need. He shrugged. You should always plan things on the assumption you would win, as though things were going to turn out the way you wanted.

On the Thursday Guy went down to Fernhurst. When his father had gone there in the 1870s, the school, though it had been founded by Edward VI had only recently emerged from the status of a small West Country day school. Now, half a century later, it had taken its place beside Marlborough, Uppingham, and Tonbridge in the hierarchy of the system, with four hundred names upon its roll.

It was a three-hour train journey and Guy arrived late in the afternoon. It was not a half holiday, and the whole school was in form. It was a grey chill day, but the rain had ceased and the wind had dropped. He strolled through the main gate, past the sixth-form green towards the point below Big School where you could see the square Abbey tower in silhouette above the School House studies. The Abbey had been built in the twelfth century; the studies a century later, to serve as the Abbot's quarters. It must have looked much the same when Edward VI endowed the school in 1550.

Guy let his eye travel round the courts to the succession of lighted windows in the classrooms. The Abbey clock struck three times. Quarter of an hour more to tea. He thought of all the boys behind all those windows whose hearts had quickened at the sound, just as his father's had, just as his had done, just as his son's would do. He walked on through the cloisters, up the chapel steps. A new wing had been built as a war memorial. The roll of honour was engraved upon its walls. Four hundred names: name after familiar name. Of those who had come here on the same day as he, in September 1909, over half were dead, over half had not reached their thirties.

At the head of the stairs was a lectern, with a volume of parchment sheets each one containing the photograph of a boy who
had been killed, with his school and war records inscribed below. A fresh page was turned each day. He looked at that day's page. A. T. Gresling. School House 1914-1916. He half remembered him: an inky-collared fag in his last term. He did not suppose he had ever spoken to him; he certainly had not thought of him since he left. And Gresling had been killed at Monday on 28 March, 1918: only two miles from where, at Neuville-Vitasse on that long nerve-charged day, he had held a section of machine-gun posts. A. T. Gresling.

The cracked bell from the Almshouses began to ring. Only five minutes now. He stood in the entrance to the cloisters, by the School House studies, waiting for the hour to strike, with the consequent spilling from every doorway of boys, books under their arms, tearing across the courts to their separate houses. He wondered when he would stand here next. Now that Franklin was leaving and that he was giving up football he did not suppose that he would come down often. He would have no link. Maybe he would not come again till he had a son here. Would Renée and he ever stand here, waiting for that son? His mind ran forward: a year for a divorce; marriage in autumn '26. October 1940. No, it was not impossible.

The Abbey chimed the hour. The empty courts were flooded with raised voices and scurrying feet. He stood aside, letting the stream pour past. Within two minutes the courts were empty, except for the few senior boys too grand to hurry, who sauntered, their hands driven deep into their pockets, scarves flung round their necks.

Franklin was among the last. He was with two other boys. He did not hurry at the sight of Guy. That would have been below his dignity, but he waved, and a broad smile lit up his face. A friendly, good-natured smile. He was really exceedingly good-looking: with the kind of figure that can make clothes bought off a peg look as though they had been tailored in Savile Row. His tie fitted neatly into the apex of his collar; his hair though a little long was neatly brushed. He had an air of elegance. Yes, he was too old for Fernhurst.

He could not have been more adult than he was that night.

“Now that I'm practically an old boy, there's no reason is there, why I shouldn't have wine with dinner?”

“I don't suppose that there is.”

“I thought not and it's time I began my education. You choose what you'd have if you were with Jimmy Grant, then tell me why you've chosen it. Is there any reason, by the way, why I shouldn't have an aperitif as well?”

“There's every reason why you shouldn't have a cocktail. Gin spoils your palate.”

“What about sherry then?”

“I've nothing against that.”

“Fine: order me the best.”

He behaved as though he had earned some high distinction instead of having been presented with the embroidered bag. He was curious to know how the news had been received at No. 17.

“Tell me everything that everybody said; I bet Rex was pompous.”

“As a matter of fact, he was.”

“How that man bores me. How did Father take it?”

“Puzzled. Rather disturbed at having something that he'd thought was settled interfered with.”

“He would. He'd like to treat me like a pipe of port, that you buy, lay down, and leave to mature until it's fit to drink. You provide your son with a nurse, enter him for your school and college, and twenty years later there's the finished product, a credit to the family. A pity it didn't work out that way.”

The analogy was disconcertingly apposite: it was said moreover with a complete absence of any criticism of their father.

“What about Barbara? I suppose she hasn't heard. What reason are you going to give her for my leaving school at Easter?”

“We haven't got around to that one yet.”

“Think a good one out. I've an idea that I'm a kind of hero to her.”

There was a slight anxiety in his voice. Guy remembered what his mother had said about Franklin feeling himself neglected. Barbara was the one before whom he could cut a dash. He was indifferent about Margery. “I suppose she's more or less neutral isn't she?”

“Entirely.”

Franklin's expression clouded; Guy had an impression that he
had not particularly relished, though he had invited, the use of the ‘entirely'. Franklin liked people to be either violently for or violently against him. Guy suspected that he was rather enjoying the whole business; the being in the centre of the stage.

His mother he had left till last. “Is she very disturbed?” he asked.

Guy nodded. “Naturally; but on your account. She's wondering what you yourself feel about it all. What do you, by the way?

It was the first direct question Guy had put to him. For the moment Franklin seemed surprised. He hedged. “What is there for me to feel? I was getting rather bored with school.”

“You mean that you're quite glad to leave.”

“Wouldn't you be in my position?”

“I'm damned if I should.”

He remembered his own disappointment in August 1914, at being robbed of his last year at school; the year that would have seen him captain of the House, the year for which his four previous years had been the prelude. He would have hated it if he'd been unable to join the army, if he'd had to stay at school with all his friends in khaki, but he'd have hated to have had to lose that year for any reason but a war; if his father for example had no longer been able to afford the fees.