Guy Renton (20 page)

Roger was indeed at his most gracious. At dinner placed next to Pamela, he put himself out to charm her; asking her about her plans, her tastes, her preferences; not in a patronizing manner but as though he were sincerely interested. Yet though so much of his talk was a deferring to her, he retained his advantage of age and of position, every now and again talking with an authority that was not unimpressive, every now and again dropping into the conversation an important name with a lack of concern that was even more impressive. It was probably the first time that anyone of such consequence had taken the trouble to talk to Pamela with such attention. It would send up Franklin's stock with her. No, he was not surprised that Renée as a young girl with her American training, her half-European background, and with her ignorance of England and the English, should have been dazzled by Roger Burton.

There were eight in the party. It was the first time Barbara had been to a night club.

“Will it be as full of wicked people as the Café Royal was?” she asked. It was the first time that she had broken the law, and she was fascinated by the whole procedure; the form that Guy signed at the door stating that he had been invited by Major McEvoy to a bottle party and that he was contributing £I to its expenses; by the order form that he filled up at the table, instructing a wine merchant, Messrs. Frisby and Dunkin, to deliver to him at the Flamingo Club two bottles of champagne and one of whisky.

He explained to Barbara the system on which the evasion
worked. You had to have a special licence to serve drinks up to half-past twelve; you could only serve them with a meal: on an occasional extension night you could stay open till 2 a.m. But such extensions were granted only to reputable hotels and restaurants. If you had such a licence you were liable to supervision, you had to keep the law: there was nothing however to prevent a private person from inviting his friends to a bottle party at his house. “The assumption is that this Major McEvoy has asked us to his party and that instead of bringing a bottle with us, we have asked our wine merchant to deliver our contribution here, which is what we probably would do at a bottle party. Actually of course they keep a stock of bottles in the cellar and serve them to meet individual orders.”

“But there is a real firm of wine merchants called what-was-their-name?—Frisby and Dunkin.”

“I imagine there is but I've never heard of them.”

“If you buy a bottle of whisky and don't finish it, what happens then?”

“The assumption is that you keep it here in a locker until the next time you come. You can take it away with you if you like. Usually there's only a little left and the waiter swipes it.”

“I see.” She looked round her with eager eyes. “It isn't quite what I expected.”

“You thought there would be bright lights and candelabra and glass mirrors.”

“It's smaller, darker.”

“Dingier too?”

“No, I'd not say that. It's a nice place. It's only that. . .”

“Only that you've seen too many films. Night clubs in a film are twice the size of the Savoy.”

He looked round him. It was the first time he had been here, but it was so like so many other places; the Quadrant, Chez Victor, Rector's, Murray's, the Silver Slipper, that within three weeks he would have forgotten where its particular difference from those others lay. It was well enough; a small oval ebony dancing floor, banquette tables round the wall: shaded lights, muted music, alternating blues and foxtrots; distant favourites like ‘Oh you Limehouse Kid' spaced between ‘Let's Do It' and ‘All the King's Horses'. At a round table in a corner were the
hostesses: five of them, each a different type; two of them slightly plump; one platinum blonde, one Andalusian with very white shoulders, jet black hair, eyelashes and eyebrows thick with mascara; there was a boyish red-head with short cropped hair; there was a minute brunette, all bones and knees and elbows like a restless monkey; there was one tall and willowy.

“Are they what I think they are?” asked Barbara.

“More or less.”

“It's the first time I've ever seen one.” She stared, fascinated. “The red-haired one looks very young.”

“Twenty-five, I'd say.”

“Isn't it strange that eight years ago she may have looked just like Pamela: engaged to somebody, full of hope. How do girls get like that?”

He shrugged. “There's a man shortage since the war. Perhaps there always was in England. The young men with enterprise went abroad. Perhaps they had stage ambitions, and either couldn't act or were too lazy to learn how to act. Perhaps they got mixed up with a married man.”

“Isn't that the unluckiest thing that can happen to a girl?”

“By and large it is.” Though obversely it was generally conceded to be the luckiest thing that could happen to a young man.

Barbara looked away from the group of hostesses to the dance floor where Pamela and Franklin were executing a tango with a languid grace. They moved with the harmony of a dance team. “When you look at them, you can't help feeling that it's tragic there should be girls like those,” said Barbara. “Why can't everyone have the same chance as that? They look so right together.”

The same thought had occurred to Margery. “I wish I'd met Michael Drummond when I was that age,” she said.

“You're not so very ancient now.”

“I daresay, but one gets wary after one's been hurt. Let's dance or I'll be getting morbid.”

On his return to the table he sat next to Renée. Her glass was empty and he refilled it. “I notice that you're drinking whisky,” she remarked. “Isn't that unusual?”

“So's Roger. We're both wise. We don't trust the champagne you get in night clubs.”

“This is rather good.”

“Is it? I'm glad to hear it.” He raised the bottle from the bucket and glanced at the label. “It should be, it's one of ours. I wonder how they got it?”

“Why shouldn't they? You keep open doors.”

“I know but it's a new shipper that we're introducing. The trade is still a little cagey. May I sip?” Or course.

He raised her glass, sniffed, inhaled the bouquet. “Yes, it is rather good. I wonder if Franklin's noticed it.” He looked down the table to call his attention to it, but Franklin was very occupied with his fiancée. “Let's dance,” he said.

There had been a time when he had felt shy of dancing with her in public. He was afraid that they would betray their secret, that on their return to the table there would be a revealing look upon his face. Those days were past. They could now dance together with the same casualness that they could make conversation at a party. He no longer felt the need to hold her tightly, but they had nevertheless their own technique of courtship. The pressure of his hand against her shoulder, the response of her fingertips against his palm were their own silent language, so that now as then, apart where they had been once close-locked, a shiver ran along their nerves. “I should be finding this very tantalizing if I hadn't to-morrow to look forward to,” he said.

It was now well after midnight and the club was filling up. By the type of person who was coming in he could gauge the kind of place it was. “A night club is an afterthought,” he explained to Barbara. “The main party of the evening has broken up, but you aren't yet in a mood for bed. That's why you don't order drinks to be sent to a bottle party in advance. You can't tell if you'll feel in the mood. That's why a bottle party is always an evasion of the law.”

The fact that the club was already three-quarters full was an indication that it was not fashionable. Fashionable people would not get the afterthought of a night club till two o'clock when a private dance was ending, or the extension night at one of the big restaurants had closed. It was mostly men who were coming here, from Old Boys' and Masonic dinners, interspersed with an
occasional theatre party who had already dined and did not want to stay out late. Most of the men were middle-aged.

“It's their one night out a month,” Guy said, “They want to make the most of it. It's the job of the girls to see that they keep ordering wine till the place closes.”

“But don't the girls . . .?” She paused interrogatively; shy of using a technical word incorrectly. He shook his head.

“Not very often. They tell the men they can't leave till the place is closed, that they're under contract to the management. By the time the place does close, the men are half asleep and glad to be packed off to their wives. That kind of man is very easy game for them. The kind that's coming in here now, well that's another matter.”

The two men to whom he had called her attention were youngish, under thirty. They were tall, athletic-looking, muscular: they were wearing dinner jackets. They looked completely sober. They had probably done a theatre, had supper somewhere quiet, possibly in Soho, and had felt the need for gaiety. They stood in the doorway, looking round them in search of an empty table. The taller of them caught Guy's eye, stared at him, then turned, touched his companion's arm; there was a moment's consultation, then they came across together. The shorter one looked familiar, but it was the taller who held out his hand. “Guy Renton, isn't it?”

“That's right.”

“I thought it was. I played against you once or twice, for Richmond. Eric Masterman.”

“Of course.”

“I thought you wouldn't have forgotten. Though it's easier for me to remember you. I never tackled you the way you brought me down that time at the Old Athletic ground. You remember Tucker, don't you—Rosslyn Park?”

“Why, yes.”

In point of fact though Tucker's face was in a way familiar he did not remember either. He had played against so many people during his six years of first-class football. They would probably remember him because he was an international and ‘news' but he could not be expected to recall the rank and file of his opponents. Football wasn't like cricket, where you saw each member of the
opposing eleven as an individual with whom you gossiped during the lunch and tea interval. In football you played not against fifteen individuals but a side. Moreover they were both quite a little younger than himself.

“Whenever I hear your name mentioned,” Masterman was saying, “and I may say that it's pretty often, I always remember that tackle of yours in the first three minutes of the Wales match in ‘twenty-one. The way you brought that wing forward down; shook him for the whole game. I'm not sure that tackle didn't win the match.”

Guy laughed. He remembered the tackle well. It may have shaken that ‘winger', no doubt it had, but it had made his own shoulder ache right through the week.

“You didn't see that match, did you, Tucker?” Masterman was continuing. “No, I thought you didn't. I'll always say that the first ten minutes of that match when we ran up those twelve points were the most dazzling I've ever seen. That drop of Davies, the way he feinted first one way, then the other, had the whole field motionless, then dropped his goal.”

It had been Guy's first international; every minute of the first quarter of an hour was etched clean upon his memory: so many matches blurred into a haze, but he would never forget the excitement and pride of trotting out into that immense arena in his white shirt with the red rose above his heart. It was good to be reminded of those days.

“Why not sit down and have a drink?” he said.

“No, no, you're a party. We'd be butting in.”

“Not at all. These girls will be grateful for a change of partner. What'll you drink, champagne or whisky?”

“Champagne for me. What about you, Tucker?”

“Mine's whisky.” The glasses were filled and raised. Tucker asked Margery to dance. Masterman was full of reminiscences. He had watched every international at Twickenham in which Guy had played: “Do you remember that first minute try of Leo Price's?”

“That was my last international.”

“Was it? Why so it was. What happened? Why did you drop out?”

“In the best way, without being dropped. I caught a chill the
following week: couldn't shake it off, then during the summer I twisted my knee at tennis. I couldn't have risked it in an international. It was different in a club game, where nothing's at stake. Oddly enough that knee never did let me down, I could have played for two more seasons.”

Even so he was glad that it had happened that way. He had been spared the experience of playing in an international one Saturday feeling vaguely that he was not up to form, reading no reference to himself in the Sunday papers, then seeing on the Monday the list of the players for the next match and his name not in it. He had been spared that.

“What do you think was the most exciting moment in your football career?” he was being asked. He hesitated: he thought of matches at school, matches at Oxford, his nine internationals. He had perhaps felt no thrill comparable with that of getting his house cap at school, the first step to prefectship. But for the excitement of an actual game, he doubted if anything had equalled that first college trial after the war at Oxford.

It was six years since he had played and he had put on weight. He did not know whether he had lost his speed: he did not know whether two wounds, one in his hip, with more than one dose of trench fever and a whiff of gas, had not taken their toll to an extent which he had not realized under the run-of-the-mill demands of trench routine. He was anxious as he trotted towards the half-way line, watching over his shoulder, to follow the kick-off.

To his surprise he got there before the others. From the resultant line out, he caught the ball, lowered his head and butted. He made six yards before he was brought down. “I'm stronger than I was,” he thought. A loose scrum formed; as the pack wheeled, he swung out, the ball between his feet: there was a gap to the left, he kicked towards it; a three-quarter came up but he outpaced him. “I'm faster too,” he added. He wondered quite how fast. A three-quarter on his side broke clear; ordinarily as a forward he would have left it to the other three's. But now he followed up, waiting for an inside pass; he took it and was round the back. “I'm fifty per cent better than I was,” he thought. It was heady knowledge. He flung himself into the game. Half-time came and he had kept his wind. That game
had given him as big a thrill as anything that he had known upon the football field.