Guy Renton (29 page)

“We're going to live like gipsies in the sun,” she said. “That's what his painting needs: sunlight and bright colours.”

She took Guy round to his studio to see his pictures. They were only moderately modern: they were representational to the extent that you could recognize the objects that they were intended to represent. They were decorative. Guy felt that he would be glad to have one on his walls, but he had no idea how good they were. He'd like to have Roger's opinion on them.

“Now you've seen how good he is, you'll be able to tell Father
how lucky he is to have such a talented son-in-law,” Barbara told him.

The only reference that his father made to the progress of his illness came when Guy acted as his sister's emissary.

“I wish they could be married now,” he said. “I should have liked to walk down the aisle beside her. But it would be very selfish of me to try to hurry things, and perhaps that fool Martin's made a mistake with his diagnosis.”

The engagement was announced in June: but by then it was abundantly apparent that Dr. Martin's diagnosis was not incorrect. Mr. Renton was losing weight so rapidly that he no longer cared to leave the house. “I don't like being stared at,” he said.

It was a warm summer; but he refused to go to Lord's. “I shouldn't enjoy it. People would see me, hesitate, wonder whether it was me or not, whether to come up or not. How I'd hate that.”

He preferred to sit in the garden, in the sun, with a rug wrapped round his knees. He started to re-read Dickens. “I'd forgotten how good he was,” he said. “I'd certainly never realized how well he wrote; the gusto and the humour yes, but I'd never appreciated before the quality of the actual writing. Of course I was only a schoolboy when I read him first.”

It was largely, Guy suspected, because he had read David Copperfield as a schoolboy that he was returning to it now. His thoughts were turning more and more towards his childhood. He took an active day-to-day interest in current events, reading the daily and the evening papers as though he were following a serial story, but he had lost interest in the middle years. He turned the pages of old albums, looked at the Fernhurst register and at bound copies of the school magazine. He talked more to his wife than he had been wont to do, reminding her of things that had happened before the children had been born. It was not that his grasp of what was happening was less acute; it was simply that he was remembering different things. He seemed much closer to his wife, seemed to rely more on her than Guy remembered. In a surprising way his mother seemed happier, more at peace in herself than she had been for a long time. She never referred to her husband's illness. But she proved that she was conscious of it, by making no reference to the future.

By July it was apparent even to Barbara that her father had not very long to live. “What am I to do?” she asked her brother.

“Behave exactly as though nothing were happening. That's the kindest thing. Go on with your plans to marry in October.”

“But suppose ...” She checked. She could not bring herself to use the actual word ‘die'.

“You would be very selfish if you let him feel he was being a nuisance. You know how he hates fussing.”

“But to go on a honeymoon when any day one might get the news ...”

“Wouldn't it be much worse for him to have you waiting for him to die: he wants to have life going on around him just the same.”

“It seems so heartless to be happy at a time when he . . .”

“You can make him happiest by being happy, by letting him know that you are happy.”

That however was a decision she was not to be called upon to make. As August became September Mr. Renton's weakness rapidly increased. In the second week he passed into a coma. A nurse came into residence. On a warm sunny Saturday while the nurse took her afternoon walk over the Heath, Guy sat watching by his bedside; his thoughts were in the past, in childhood, remembering how he and his father had put down a deck chair on the study floor, pretended that it was a boat, and gone out ‘shooting sausages' for tea, with the fire-irons as their muskets; remembering their first visit to Lord's and how he had burst into tears when ‘Plum' Warner had been bowled; remembering being taken to
Peter Pan
and the huge tea afterwards at the Criterion where for the inclusive charge of a shilling you could eat as many sandwiches and éclairs as you could manage: he thought of all their walks at Fernhurst, over the slopes, comparing the Fernhurst of his father's day with his; remembering himself as a fourth former, in an Eton collar hurrying out of school on the Saturdays when his father had come down for the week-end, to see pacing outside the Abbey the tall, erect figure in the grey homburg hat; he recalled that first Saturday in August 1914 when they had gone down to Blackheath to watch Kent play Surrey at the Rectory field.

He thought of all the jokes and confidences that they had
shared: of all the incidents and characters of whom he would now never talk again. A closed book, never to be reopened.

At his mother's request he went through his father's papers. They were kept separate in a series of small tin boxes: they were locked, but his father had only a few keys and these were ticketed. Each tin box bore a label: Family. Fernhurst. Oxford: there were three tin boxes each marked London with the dates 1878-1885, 1885-1890, 1890-93. His father had come down from Oxford in 1878, as a young man of twenty-three. He had been on the brink of forty, on the brink of middle age as the Victorians saw it, when he married. Fifteen years of London: all his youth. A lot must have happened during that long period.

He opened the box marked Family. A nursery collection of Christmas cards, programmes, letters home, the scores of nursery cricket games. There was a letter he had written to his mother his first Sunday at his Dame's school. It was dated 1865. Apathetic little note written in a large handwriting between ruled lines, ‘Darling muz, I cold cream my lips every day the way you told me . ..' it ended, ‘I will do my best to be a good and dutiful son to you.' ‘Dutiful,' what an odd word for a ten-year-old boy to use. How it typified that era of decorum. He ought to keep this box. It might have a period value for Lucy's children, and for Barbara's.

He opened the box marked Fernhurst. There was a stack of school reports on the familiar dark blue paper. The usual comments ‘Fair', ‘Marked improvement', ‘could do much better'. He read the house reports. The earlier ones were very good: nearly everybody got good reports during his first terms, when he was on his best behaviour, in a strange, hostile world: later came the falling off, when a boy began to find his feet, grew noisy and obstreperous.

His father's reports followed the universal pattern, a rapid deterioration starting after the fifth term: then a sense of responsibility intervening; caps and colours and seniority. ‘I have every confidence that he will make a good house prefect.'

Guy shuffled through the final sheets, to be arrested by a sudden phrase. ‘I am glad to say there has been no recurrence of the trouble about which last term I had to invite your co-operation.'

What had that trouble been? He had no idea. He would never know. There was no one in the world now who could tell him. If he himself had been in a similar predicament, his father would no doubt have said, “As a matter of fact I was in rather a similar position once myself.” But he never had been.

He laid the sheaf of reports down on the desk, turned over the other papers. There was a house list dated 1873. His father was in the first section, in the Upper Fifth. He ran his eyes down the names: some of them, several of them, must be still alive: one or two of the names were in a vague way familiar. Why had this one list survived out of the many his father must have had? Was another in existence anywhere? Had some other Old Fern-hurstian got one among his papers, to be read over occasionally on winter evenings by someone who reading last week of his father's death had thought, ‘Ah yes, I remember him; caned me once for reading a novel during hall,' someone who remembered his father as a tall slim prefect in a high white collar, in a way that his son could not even from photographs imagine him.

He held the papers between his hands: why keep them? If he had had a son who would go to Fernhurst, or if Franklin had cared about the place, in the way that he and his father had; no, there was no point in keeping them. He tossed them into the fire, watched the stiff blue papers curl, shrivel, blacken. There it went, the record of his father's five years at Fernhurst.

In a quick flash he saw the different figures that that record told of; the shy and grubby fag, with the ink always running down his penholder; the house cap, proudly privileged to put his hands in his trouser pockets; the school colour with his gold-tassel cap; watched in a swift second that five years procession from childhood into manhood; seeing it against the background of Fern-hurst's cloisters and high garden walls; the lichened studies that had been an Abbot's quarters; the rainswept courts; the fresh green of the linden trees in spring; the statue of Edward VI in the School House dining-hall; the king-cup meadows by the river; the beech trees browning on the slopes; the gold stone of the Abbey Tower. Gone now and no one to remember it.

The Oxford papers took longer sorting. There were names that were still remembered: undergraduates who had come to
prominence in this and the other walk of life; as statesmen, athletes, men of business. There were programmes of the O.U.D.S.: club and college groups that were part of history.

He made his selection from them, then turned to the London boxes. They too needed careful sorting. There were menus and there were cricket scores; letters from men once in the public eye, arranged in separate envelopes with the names of the correspondents marked on them. There were also a number of envelopes on which had been written christian names—Ruth, Annetta, Sally. He held them in his hand. He remembered how on the eve of his move to Rutland Street he had wondered about his father's private life during those bachelor years in London. Here lay the answer to that question.

What did these envelopes contain? It was hard to think of one's father as a young man, writing beseeching love-letters, climbing forbidden walls. Had everything been so very different in the Victorian age, in that epoch of starched propriety, of crinolines and chaperones, and all those discreet small houses in St. John's Wood, when Acacia Road was the Park Lane of the demimonde? How had his father fitted into that existence? Who was this Ruth, this Sally, this Annetta? Was there some woman still alive in London, cherishing in her desk a packet of letters half a century old, warming her last years with memories of a man whom his own family had never known in the way she had? Whoever they were these Ruths and Sallys they had made of the man that they had loved, the man who had built up as a husband and a father a happy and devoted family. His father had been what he was because of them.

The temptation to open the envelopes was very great. He stifled it: he would prefer not to know, to keep intact the memory of his father as he had known him. He tossed the three envelopes into the fire, watched them brown and curl and shrivel beside the ashes of the blue reports. There they went, the secret chambers of his father's life.

Barbara was married in October. It was a private wedding at St. Michael's, Highgate. Margery was there, and Norman's parents, and a sprinkling of relatives: fifteen altogether. No one except the family had been invited, and Norman was spared the discomfort of a morning coat. Barbara in flowered muslin looked like a sleek, clipped poodle puppy beside a year-old Newfoundland. Norman was so large, slow moving, she so spritely. “I don't feel I've any right to be so happy at a time like this,” she said. “But I know that it's what Daddy would have wanted.”

The ceremony was at twelve o'clock and there was a fork lunch afterwards. The wedding night was being spent in Norman's studio. They were starting for Marrakesh next morning. It was to be a picnic working honeymoon, satchels, easels, canvases. “And if I acquire a baby on the way I'll carry it slung over my back like an Indian squaw,” she said.

They left in no shower of confetti; in fact they left on foot: walking to the end of the Grove, Norman carrying her dressing-case, to catch the 210 bus over the Heath to Golders Green, from which point they were to proceed by a No. 2 or a No. 13 to Norman's St. John's Wood studio.

“We're going to start the way we're going on,” she said.

By three o'clock the party had broken up and Guy was left alone with his mother. It was a warm, sunny day, the kind of day for which in chilly June the Englishman so often pines. “Shall we take a stroll?” he said.

They walked past the ponds, skirting Kenwood, past the old duelling ground, and sat on a seat looking over London. The morning mist had vanished under the midday sun, and the smoke that hung above the city was a veil of thin blue gauze through which you could see the dome of St. Paul's and the tapering
spires of Wren's many churches. Even the towers of St. Pancras had a poetic look.

“This is, this was your father's favourite view,” she said.

How often must they not in the past have walked out by this same path. She had almost certainly seen it for the first time at his father's side. She was a country girl. She had married when she was under twenty. She had scarcely been to London before her marriage. Twenty years his junior, she was now only in the middle fifties. Quite likely she had another thirty years to live. “I'm afraid you're going to be rather lonely, aren't you?”

“At first, but I shall get used to it.”

“Won't you find the house very large?”

“That's something I wanted to talk to you about. As you know, your father left it me, but it's been an understood thing always that No. 17 is the home of the eldest son. If you were married, there would be no question at all of your not moving in. Your being a bachelor need not make any difference. If you'd like to make your home here, I could easily find myself a flat.”