Guy Renton
Authors: Alec Waugh
A LONDON STORY
BY
ALEC WAUGH
Preface to Guy Renton
I wrote this novel in 1951.
With England becoming adjusted to its postwar pattern, it was possible by then to review the two prewar decades in detached perspective. For someone of my age and background, who had served in the first war as a frontline subaltern, it was impossible to do that without nostalgia. For me, and for very many others, it had been a dramatic and exciting period, quite often lit by glamour. We had worked hard and we had played hard. We had had a lot of fun. At the same time it had been a self-doomed period. In a natural reaction after fifty months of war we had lived in the moment, not looking ahead, shutting our eyes to the penalty we might have to pay. I could see that now.
And in the nostalgic mood that was upon me I wanted not only to relive those twenty years on paper, but to explain them, to interpret them. And how better could I do that, I thought, than by telling the story of a self-doomed love affair â of a couple who lived in the moment, refusing to face the implications of their predicament, a love affair that would be symbolic of the London that was its background.
I wrote this novel with genuine emotion. I am hoping that today, quarter of a century later, some of that emotion will prove contagious for the contemporary reader for whom those years are history.
Alec Waugh 1976
At half-past four on the twenty-seventh of April, 1946, a Londoner in his early fifties rose from a deck chair on the balcony of the Wanderers' Club. It was a Saturday and he had been sitting there since lunch, dozing over a magazine. He would have preferred to linger, enjoying after a long bleak winter, the warmth of the sun upon his face, but he had an appointment in his flat at half-past five with a young man who had rung him up that morning in a tone suggesting urgency.
âI wonder what the boy wants,' he thought. He had heard it argued that the world of 1946 was a completely different place from that of 1939; that a whole manner of living, thinking, feeling had vanished in the last six years. He doubted it. Fashions changed but the essential issues were recurrent. He did not believe that the particular problem which awaited himâthe perplexity of a young man in his early twenties returning to civilian life after five years in khakiâwould be very unlike that which he had himself had to face at the end of the first war.
Slowly he crossed the drawing-room. He was stiff after his siesta, and as he came down the broad central stairway, he steadied himself against the banisters. He was tall and heavily built. Though he had lost weight during the war, he was still corpulent. His thick, rather long grey hair gave him a benign and venerable look, but the network of broken blood vessels about the nose produced a qualifying and contradictory impression of modified self-indulgence. His dark pinstripe suit, like that of most Londoners in '46, was shabby; his tie was faded and the corners of his collar frayed; but the cut and quality of the material made him look well dressed. He had an air of being someone.
He turned to the right, into Waterloo Place, on his way
towards the Mall. The almond trees in Carlton Gardens were in flower. The statue above the Athenaeum glinted in the sun. A long red stream of buses circled into Lower Regent Street. How unchanged it looked.
No, it was not difficult for Guy Renton walking home through London on this warm spring afternoon to believe that only the surface of things had altered since he was young. The railings round the parks were gone; the houses were shabby and un-painted; every street and square and crescent bore somewhere along its length, like a mouth out of which a tooth was missing, the gap of bomb damage. But there was the same stir of animation along the streets; the same sense of being in a capital; the same sense of varied, integrated life. London was London still; a city that for nine centuries had known neither siege nor conqueror, that had faced plague and fire and assault, but had maintained unbroken the tradition of its own way of living, changing and adapting it out of its own necessity, out of its own experience, out of its own decisions, out of its own choice.
For the foreign visitor, even for the provincial Englishman, London might well seem tawdry now with its crowded hotels, its casual service, its restaurants where only a well-established client could get a meal worth eating, its lack of night life, theatres starting at half-past six, restaurants closing down at ten. But London never had appealed to the foreigner and the provincial visitor. It had never catered for the tourist. It had been a city for its own inhabitants. And even now for its own people it had retained nearly everything that had made it and that had kept it the most personal city in the world. What it had been, it was and would be.
The pride of being a Londoner warmed his heart as he walked back slowly towards his flat.
His flat was in the network of small streets that lie to the right of the Brompton Road as you turn south from Knightsbridge. Rutland Square was to its north, Montpelier Square was to its east. Cheval Place traversed it. It was a two-room flat, with a bathroom and a pantry, on the first floor of a three-storied late Georgian house that had been converted with three others into service flats.
He had lived there since the spring of '25. As he fitted his key into the lock, he wondered how many other Londoners of that day were living within the same walls still. Not so many, he supposed. And he was lucky, in that immediately opposite through a great rent in Rutland Street he could see the Park; a scar running across his face from chin to temple was his private souvenir of that raid. His cul-de-sac of alleyways had had its share of bombs. But his own flat, apart from broken windows, had been untouched.
Its interior had changed little in twenty years. On the sitting-room floor there was the same black pile carpet, with the cream and white circular modernistic rugs. Over the windows there were the same dark blue damask curtains, contrasting with grey-blue walls and primrose ceiling. The same Chippendale mirror hung over his mantelpiece. On either side of an open fireplace white bookshelves ran elbow high along the wall, supporting a collection of Staffordshire miniatures and Toby jugs. His library was a key to his tastes and temperament. In the early âtwenties as a Rugby footballer, he had been âcapped' for England; to-day as the chairman of Duke and Renton, he was an influential figure in the wine trade. There were the obvious books that you would expect from an athlete and a wine merchant. A row of yellow
Wisden's;
Saintsbury's
Cellar Book;
Constable's wine lovers library, André Simon's
Dictionary of Wine:
several cricket autobiographies and accounts of tours. But there was also a number of books that you would expect to find only on the shelves of a near-highbrow: George Moore's limited white-bound
Avowals;
a complete Turgenev; Bosschère's
Apuleius
; Pape's
Jurgen
; the minor poets of the eighteen-ninetiesâDowson, Symons, and le Gallienne.
Only the pictures indicated a change of taste. He had started with a group of Medici reproductions, and a Nevinson landscape of the Somme, a grey-brown stretch of shellholes, the horizon cut by an occasional boughless tree, which he had bought to remind him of the war, but which he had gradually come to value not for its subject, but as a piece of painting. From a later Nevinson exhibition he returned with a picture of the Embankment painted from a window in the Savoy, showing Cleopatra's Needle through a screen of rain, against a dappled sky. It was the start of a collection. One by one a series of London canvases
replaced the Medici reproductions. But apart from them it might well have seemed that time had stood still here for its owner during the twenty-one years in which a small boy who had once played with its china ornaments upon the floor had grown into a tall, sturdily-built young man in uniform who, during the two years since Guy had seen him last, had led his men first as a platoon commander and later as a company commander from the Normandy beachhead to the Rhine, and had now come to consult his âuncle' on an adult problem.
It was a problem, as the young man set it out, that would have been no less valid in 1919. She was twenty-one; he twenty-four; the right age to marry; they came from the same worlds; but, she had pointed out, he had been only seventeen when the war began and though he had been an officer four years and a captain eighteen months, he would on his release from khaki be in precisely the same position from the world's point of view that he would have been six years earlier, an undergraduate of eighteen going up to Cambridge. “You are not,” she had concluded, “in a marrying position.”
For two hours they had argued it over dinner on the previous evening. “If you go up to Cambridge as of course you should, you will be dependent for two years on an allowance from your father. It'll be, at least, four years before you've got yourself established in any settled work. The last thing you want is to be saddled with obligations.”
The story took a long time telling, with many interpolations and digressions, many a âwhat you've got to realize is', and âthe point there you see was this' and âif you'd met her, you'd, of course, understand'.
Sitting there, listening, nodding, occasionally interjecting a remark, Guy Renton could recreate the sceneâthe absorbed young couple at a corner table, unconscious of the glances turned to them, he in his blue patrols, she in a four-year-old âone good black frock' that a new scarf and Victorian jewellery set off; she leaning forward, talking, talking: he smiling as he listened, moving at length his knee under the table against hers, holding it there with an increasing pressure, his eyes upon her face, noting how her eyes half closed as the pressure deepened.
“It's all very well for you to talk like that,” he said. “But if we don't get married soon something pretty dramatic will be happening.”
“I'm not denying that.”
Her eyes had twinkled as they laughed together, a gay and bubbling laugh that more than one person in that crowded room had recognized enviously and nostalgically as the passport to an enchanted country.
“Then why suggest a four years' engagement?” he had asked.
“I wasn't.”
“What are you suggesting then?”
The twinkle flashed again as she produced her solution.
“Haven't you ever heard of companionate marriages?” she asked.
“There's no such thing.”
“Perhaps, officially. But why shouldn't two young people make a personal and private treaty with one another. After all you see ...”
One by one she brought out the arguments with which in the days of âThe Coolidge dollar' Judge Lindsay had fluttered the domestic dovecotes.
“These next four years are going to be desperately important to you. I refuse to be a hindrance. But I want to be with you, you know that. We could have a lovely time, seeing each other when we can, not undertaking responsibilities, not taking the world into our confidence, not tying ourselves, keeping it all gay and free. It could be such heaven.”
“Now listen, idiot...”
He had produced his counter-arguments, but Guy Renton could guess how her words âit could be such heaven' had echoed through his brain. It could be, such a halcyon heaven. And what young man wanted, in the last analysis, the paraphernalia of a social wedding, the interviews with prospective parents-in-law, the visits to relatives, the ties of an establishment?