Guy Renton (33 page)

He repeated that afterwards to Daphne.

“That shouldn't be very difficult for me, do you think?”

Daphne smiled. “If it isn't like that now at the start of everything, when can it be?”

“Was that how it was with you?”

“Of course. Wasn't it with you, the first time?”

He shook his head. There had been no first time: not at least, this kind of a first time. This was something that he had never
known; something that he would never know; the shared delight of two young people, coming fresh to one another, discovering themselves, revealing each to other; the delight deepening and growing; exploring and explored.

He changed the subject. “My mother wants Barbara to come back to have her baby. That's one of the chores she's given me: to try and persuade her to. I hope you'll take my side.”

Guy spent a week with Franklin, a friendly, happy week. Every night there was a party somewhere, either at their villa or at some friend's along the coast. By day they bathed and picnicked and played golf on the mountainous scenic course above Monte Carlo with its freak one-shot holes, or at Cagnes, on the level course between the shore and railway line, with its narrow fairways between pines and olive trees and its twelve-year-old girl caddies who cried ‘Hoopla' every time a shot went out of bounds.

“This is the healthiest week I've had in months,” said Franklin.

“Don't you normally play much golf?”

Franklin shook his head. “Daphne doesn't care for it now. She prefers sunbathing at the Roc. I like to do the same things she does.”

He said it without any sense of martyrdom. He was, as Margery had prophesied, a kind husband. He always planned his day round Daphne, played their golf near to where she wished to bathe, so that they could lunch with her. He made the plans moreover in a way that did not give the impression that she was being selfish. If for instance they had one day played at Cagnes and picnicked at the Garoupe beach, next day he would say, “We'd rather like to play at Mont Agel, wouldn't it be a good idea for you to get your hair fixed in Monte Carlo, then we could lunch at the Sporting?”

He would make that suggestion on the eve of a particular party where she would be anxious to look her best, and he would have planned to play at Cagnes the day before so that she could have her hair fixed for it.

“Daphne used to play games, didn't she?” Guy asked.

“Certainly. She was quite good too. Shefinds it tires her now.”

She ought to eat more, Guy thought. This endless dieting must
be a strain on her vitality. Yet her talk was as bright as ever. She was excellent company. It was nice to see her with Franklin. They were good together.

It was not only the first time that Guy had seen anything of Franklin since his marriage, but it was the first time they had met on any equality of terms. Up to now Guy had always been the elder brother; arbitrating, negotiating, remonstrating; the exponent of the adult attitude. Now the positions were to some extent reversed. Guy was the guest: Franklin was the host: Franklin with the background of an establishment and responsibilities had a stake in stability that Guy as a bachelor lacked. Franklin had always been composed, always self-assured, but whereas his confidence as an undergraduate had been aggressive, a gesture of defiance, it was now quiet and settled, the outcrop of an interior calm of mind.

They got on very easily together. They were able to remain silent in each other's company, the surest proof that they were in tune. For the most part they talked about the family, largely about earlier days: about their father; about Lucy before her marriage; about Barbara in the nursery. It was in a detached way, however, that he asked about them; as though he were a part of their life no longer, as though his English life had closed with* marriage.

When he and Daphne were together, the conversation turned on the day to day events of Riviera life: a life that was completely cut off from the current of main events. They had no radio; they took in no newspaper; only buying the
Continental Daily Mail
when it occurred to them, and the
Eclaireur de Nice
to see what films were showing. They showed no curiosity as to what was happening, politically, in England. But on the few occasions when Franklin did refer to ‘the world situation' there came into his voice the slight undertone of a sneer that expatriates invariably use in reference to the country of their birth.

“I saw a copy of the
Tatler
the other day,” he said. “All those pictures of hunt balls and house parties and ducal mansions, as though there were no such people as Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin for that matter.” A sneer as though he were gloating over the fate in store for his compatriots: a sneer too of superiority, as
though he, living in France, had a broader outlook than the insular inhabitants of Britain. Yet it was self-defensive too: there was envy at the back of it: everyone in the last analysis wants the approval of the village, the town, the country where he has been brought up.

It was only on rare occasions that Franklin struck that note. For the most part he was gay, unworried, and relaxed. Once, however, he did throw a different light upon his state of mind. It was on the last day: they had played their round of golf in the afternoon instead of in the morning, and they were sitting in the club house over a glass of beer in the cool of approaching sundown.

“You've given me a marvellous time,” Guy said. “I shall take the most glowing reports back to our mother.”

“She's happy about me, isn't she?”

“Extremely.”

“I don't think she minds the family name not being carried on: Father might have done. But she changed her own name after all. Someone like yourself would think this a fairly futile life, but it suits me.”

His last sentence though not delivered as a question seemed to necessitate an answer.

“I don't think it a futile life at all. Why shouldn't you live the way you want?”

“Even if it's living on a woman?”

“You aren't. You've an income of your own under our father's will.”

“That doesn't run to a supercharged Mercedes.”

“I daresay it doesn't, but it makes you independent: you could walk out of it any day you chose.”

“Walk into what?”

“A very reasonable life. You've enough to feed and clothe and house yourself.”

“That is a point, but all the same I can't imagine you not working even if you married a millionairess or became the heir of one. That's the way you were brought up. Work was a religion. They tried to bring me up that way, but it didn't work: the world was a different place by my time; it may not have been to them, but it was to me. I didn't think the structure stable.
I felt it was undermined; and I was right, wasn't I? You've only got to look round you. It's happened in Russia. It's happened in Germany: it's half happened in Italy. It'll be happening here quite soon; in Spain, probably, a little earlier. We shan't be able to stop the rot in England so much longer. Another war and we'll be finished. Why shouldn't I live here in the sun for the short while I can?”

Guy was reminded of that last dinner in Rutland Street before Franklin left for Portugal. That was the first time that Franklin had displayed any need to justify himself: always up to then he had disarmed criticism by his self-confident unawareness of any need for criticism. But that evening at the flat he had not spoken with the angry vindictiveness that now all of a sudden came into his voice.

Guy was to remember this tone later; was to appreciate its full significance, but now he followed his own train of thought. He remembered how in the Christmas of 1916 when there had been talk of peace, one of the strongest arguments for continuing the war had been the need ‘to keep faith with the fallen', to ensure that their children's future should be secure. A patched-up peace, so the argument had run, would only mean another war in ten or fifteen years' time, in which the sons and brothers of the men who died on the Somme would be involved.

So the war went on; another three million men, the flower of a generation, lost their lives: and heaven only knew how many million more died afterwards, by pestilence and hunger, by revolution and by civil war. And what was there to show for it? The Kaiser's tyranny had been supplanted by the Nazis'; the O.G.P.U. had taken the Cheka's place. The little finger of the new tyranny was thicker than its predecessor's loins. The victors were exhausted and impoverished. And the generation for whom the last twenty-three months of slaughter had been sustained, faced its future with shrugged shoulders; its motto was ‘Je m'en fiche'. What else but a lack of faith in the world's future had been responsible a few years back for the wild behaviour of London's Bright Young People? They had lived in the present because the future had been uncertain. That had been their inheritance: a lack of faith.

Could anyone now seriously maintain that from every point of
view it would not have been better to have ended the war in 1916, before the political collapse of Russia and Germany; before the slaughter of Passchendaele; before America had been brought in, to deliver the final blow and to get no thanks for it; to become an object of jealousy and suspicion on the part of her former friends and to be left resentful of ingratitude. Yet who could have foreseen in 1916 that the world would have reached this impasse by 1935? One lived from day to day; one acted in terms of the day after to-morrow; one acted for the best; and finally nine times in ten one saw one had decided wrongly.

Next day Guy moved down the coast to stay with Barbara. He could not have encountered a more different way of living. Barbara was being true to her promise of a gipsy-type existence. She and Norman were living in their seventh residence since marriage. They called it a studio flat. It was half-way between the waterfront and the lower Corniche road. A kitchenette opened off a rather large room with a very large divan. In one corner primitive washing arrangements were curtained off. It was not exactly untidy since it was clean: but a painter surrounds himself invariably with a litter of easels, canvases, palettes, oil tubes, brushes. The owners had left behind them a good deal of luggage. It was lucky that they themselves travelled light. A large table in the middle of the room, off one corner of which they ate, was covered with the tools of Norman's trade.

“Wouldn't Mother be horrified,” was Barbara's introduction of it. For herself, it was exactly what she wanted. She loved cooking, she insisted, though her cooking as far as Guy could see consisted of emptying a tin into a saucepan. She also loved marketing, she said; but her shopping consisted of filling a string bag with bread, fruit, cheese, and butter.

“We live continentally, we breakfast out,” she said.

They joined Guy each morning on the hotel terrace for rolls and coffee.

“Then we have a picnic lunch,” she said.

Norman went sketching every morning. Usually she went with him. Sometimes she busied herself with what she called household chores; having her hair fixed or writing letters or sunbathing under the embankment: lunch consisted of sandwiches,
a long roll sliced through to accommodate a slice of ham and lettuce; a few hard-boiled eggs and two bottles of
vin du pays.
“That's the great thing about living in France. Wine's cheap: and wine's a food,” she said. “Dinner's our main meal.”

Dinner was supposed to be the meal that Barbara cooked herself.

“I want you to tell Mother that I'm a
cordon bleu.
I'll make you
crêpes suzettes.
That's my speciality.”

It may have been, but he never sampled it. They had only one meal in the studio. Soup out of a tin, a langouste salad; brie and figs, with a bottle of champagne to make it an occasion, then they strolled down to Germaine's for coffee and a
fine.

Other times they went out to restaurants; to St. Jean Cap Ferrat, or into Nice to one of the little restaurants along the Quai des Etats-Unis.

“It seems silly when we have all this money not to spend it. One day we may not have it: then I'll do the cooking,” Barbara said.

Under her father's will, she had an income that was ample for the needs of their joint gipsy life. They accepted, both of them, as a matter of course the fact that he should be dependent upon her money. It took a long time for a painter to get established. Three, five, ten years. It would be Norman's turn later on to pay the rent and buy Hispano Suizas.

“I feel so happy being able to do something for Norman,” Barbara said. “He needs sunlight; he needs to travel; I can give him that. It must be awful for a wife when she's forced to feel that she's a hindrance to a husband, that he has to give up things for her. When his success comes, I'll know I've shared in it. Don't you think his work's improving fast?”

“As far as I can judge.”

It was a truthful answer. Though Guy went to most modern exhibitions, though he read
critiques
of modern painting and could hold his own in a discussion, he did not trust his judgment. He preferred Norman's more recent pictures, but in the main that was because he preferred the subjects. Living under the grey skies of England, he liked sunny canvases; harbours with boats awash against their moorings; café tables in the shade of a bright awning; red geraniums in contrast to a dusty street; tanned figures stretched upon the sand; a bowl of figs and peaches on a cotton
tablecloth. Guy preferred them to blue smoke-filled vistas of a London street and to leafless boughs against a winter sky: but he did not know if they were better paintings.

He had asked Roger what he thought of Norman's work. He trusted Roger's judgment. Roger shrugged. “He's promising: but so are so many others. Do you remember that passage of Matthew Arnold's, about so many promising to run well, so many seeming to run well. I think it depends on the way their lives go, on the amount of character they have, on the extent to which they stand or fall by their success as painters; there's no reason why he shouldn't get there. It depends upon himself.”