The Balliols (68 page)

“To both your questions, the answer's ‘yes,'“ said Balliol.

“Then in that case,” said his son-in-law, “I consider we should elect him. I consider that we should try to forget that he laid these plans. You may say he was working behind our backs. But a person in his position knows that he is fighting a lonely battle; that he has to depend upon his own resources. He had no reason to believe that we would meet him half way. What reason, indeed, had we given? He asked himself—and what ambitious man in his position would not have done the same—'How can I force these people to elect me to their board?' He has thought of us, if not as enemies to him, at least as enemies to his ambition. I hope that you agree with me.”

He looked from Hugh to Prentice. Prentice, like so many men of academic training, could only argue along a groove; against arguments that accept certain given premises. He could not argue when expediency rather than inherent rectitude was the standard by which actions and decisions were to be measured.

“I suppose you're right. If you argue from that point of view.”

Hugh also was in agreement.

“I didn't learn much from the war, but I did learn this. It's worth eating quite a lot of humble pie to avoid actual fighting. One talks about going to war to save one's dignity. Actually one's cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. I'd rather put up with Smollett, than start a fight with him. It'll probably turn out better than one expects. Things usually do. Neither as well nor as badly as one expects.”

At least that's what one says, he thought. One pretends that that's the way things go; half way between what one fears and hopes; that one muddles through. I suppose we do: most of us. And we talk about the lessons that the war's taught us. But have we? Life's still a fight. However we may cover it over. A preying and a being preyed on. Plotting and being plotted against. People like Smollett laying their plans years ahead. He had thought that when the war was over that he had done with fighting. But he hadn't. He had ended one fight only to begin another.

He returned to Ilex in a disgruntled mood to find his younger brother in a state of even more profound despondency. Francis was lolling back in an arm chair, his hands crossed behind his head, his
legs driven straight against the fender, his mouth drooping in a surly pout.

His depression irritated Hugh. When he was feeling in a bad temper, he liked others to be laughing and happy, so that he could contrast their gaiety with his gloom. To meet someone even more bowed with sorrow was being beaten at one's own game. He eyed his young brother with disfavour. What the devil had he to be grousing over? He was young, he had his health. Debts, he supposed, or women! That girl who had worked in Selfridge's. She had gone to a theatre ticket agency; had got the sack from that and was talking about a walking-on job at the Hepworth Studios. Francis seemed to be spending most of his spare time with her. He had brought her out here once. She had seemed well enough: lively and companionable. She was not his own type exactly; too young, expecting too much, too much attention, too many presents; always wanting to be taken somewhere. He hadn't the time for that kind of thing. It was only another way of buying women. You always bought women in one way or another. He preferred the old-fashioned way: ringing up a flat in Jermyn Street, making an appointment. It was the same thing you bought. They were nice to you for just so long as you were there; as long as you were useful to them. Which was all any woman was. All this nonsense about the real thing; being loved for one's own sake. It was only that one was buying in a different market.

So he argued, savagely, trying to convince himself, not succeeding wholly, turning his ill-humour upon Francis, resolved to convince somebody of something.

“Well, what's your trouble? That girl again?”

Francis nodded.

“And what's gone wrong? Has she turned you down?”

“Not that exactly.”

“But she doesn't love you?”

“It doesn't look as though she did.”

“Why not?”

“She won't marry me.”

Hugh laughed: scornfully, savagely.

“Marry you! Why should she marry you? You don't want to marry her.”

“I do.”

“Oh, no, you don't. You may think you do. But you don't really. You don't want a house, babies, servants, responsibilities. That's what marriage is. And you don't want that. You're in love with her.
You want to go to bed with her. And you think you can't go to bed with her till you've married her. That's the only reason that you're talking about marriage. Come now, isn't it?”

Francis flushed. There were times when he almost hated Hugh; or rather, hated things about him: the spite, the loose-lipped sneer, the mottled blurring red lines below his eyes, the bullying manner that was a kind of shield to conceal weakness. Yet even when Hugh was most aggressive, there was a certain vigour and masculinity about him that Francis against his will respected. He tried not to lose his temper.

“It's silly to talk like that, with a girl like Marjorie.”

“A girl like Marjorie, indeed! That old-world nonsense. The two kinds of girl. The girls that one's sister knows and the other sort. That may have been all very well fifty years ago. It isn't now. Girls know too much. They've got their eyes open. They've worked pretty hard to be independent. They mean to stay free. They're out for a good time just like you and I are. They don't want houses, children, servants, responsibilities, any more than you do; not till the settling down time comes. And that time's a long way off as far as you and your Marjorie are concerned. Don't you make any bones about it. She's got her head screwed on the right way. Stop talking to her about marriage and start talking about a week-end at Brighton. Then you'll both get what you want. And good luck to you.”

He spoke on a note of rising heat; his face mottled, his eyes half closed; transported to an earlier period of his life; to a front line dugout to the north of Albert. It was the voice of a dead man that he was echoing. It was of another girl that he was thinking. It was that earlier self of his he was admonishing.

“Be honest with yourself,” he said. “You don't really want marriage any more than she. Have a good time, the two of you. They're only three things a man needs in London to enjoy himself. Enterprise; enough pocket money to run to taxis; and a comfortable place of his own where he can take a girl. Arrange it so that it won't be squalid. That's all that matters.”

And on that note of admonition he stumped angrily from the room.

Thought Francis: “Of all the silly nonsense.…”

He did not forget it all the same. Turning it over in his mind he was forced to admit that a great deal of it was common sense. He might be in love with Marjorie; but he was not particularly in love with the prospect of a life that included flats, babies, servants, responsibilities. He enjoyed his independence. He had no wish to forfeit it. At the same time he wanted Marjorie. He had been brought up to believe that if you wanted a girl like Marjorie you proposed marriage; that if she was in love with you she accepted you. But though Marjorie might be in love with him, she certainly did not want to be talking about marriage. “Darling, is there any need to talk about that now?” she had said.

He had imagined that it was because she was not in love with him that she would not answer his proposals. But suppose that it was not that; that it was not she was not in love with him, but that she was not in love any more than he was with the prospect of a life devoted to babies, flats, servants, responsibilities? It had been assumed that women wanted marriage, that women wanted children. But might it not be that women wanted independence; that in the days of chaperones and parental authority they had more independence as wives than débutantes? Now they had more freedom as bachelor girls. And as regards children, since in those days women had not known how to prevent them, they had persuaded themselves that they had desperately needed what after all was the unavoidable corollary to an independence achieved through matrimony. Men did not want homes and children while they were in the twenties. But girls he had been told felt differently about these things. Why should they? Why should they, he thought. Why shouldn't they want the same amusing time that men had? Like men they wanted marriage, home, children; one day; but not at once. Why should Marjorie because she was a girl feel differently from a man about those things? Why? He could see no reason. Girls did so many things that men did. They drove cars, they played games, they had votes, they sat in Parliaments, they had careers and cheque books. Why shouldn't they feel the same way that men did; that the twenties was a time to be enjoyed?

Oh, but that's nonsense, he told himself. They
are
different. They must be. Of course they are.

At the same time he began to consider very seriously the idea of taking a small flat on his own somewhere. Not because of Marjorie, or at least Marjorie was not the reason that he ostensibly offered to his conscience. He told himself that it would be fun to have a place where he could see his friends; that Ilex was too far out; that he had barely time to get home and change and get back again into London at the end of his day's work. He must spend two hours a day of his limited leisure in tubes and buses. At Ilex he saw his parents' friends,
and his brother's friends. He did not live his life, he lived theirs. Half the other fellows he knew had places of their own. And it was the fellows on their own, who were the most alert, had the most to tell one, had the most to say for themselves. Naturally, they lived more interesting lives. He'd never amount to anything till he was on his own. So he argued, never admitting to himself the itch, the curiosity to put Hugh's contention to the test.

It was clear that he must find a flat.

What one looks out for usually one finds. It was a fellow in the Selfridge Rugger side who put him on to it. Some friends of his were running a communal establishment in Bayswater; not far from Irongate. They had a room to let. He didn't think they were asking more than a pound a week for it, and it was furnished. It would be worth while having a look at it, anyhow. Francis went.

There was an improvised quality about all immediately post-war living of which this particular establishment was a typical example. The house was owned to the extent of a ninety-nine years' lease of which seventy-one years had still to run, by a family who had lost two sons and most of their capital in the war. They could no longer afford, nor did they need, a four-storied, basemented house for which in peace-time a staff of two servants had been required. They had decided to live on the two top floors and let off the two bottom floors as maisonettes. Their sub-tenants had in their turn over-estimated their assets, and under-estimated their expenses. The maisonettes had been sub-divided into flats and the flats let off as single rooms. So much so had it become a case of lesser fleas having lesser fleas and so on ad infinitum, that there were as many as ten distinct families living beneath one roof, engaging in periodic forms of guerilla battle about noise and gramophone parties and bath taps which took the shape of complaints to a senior sub-tenant or letters from a solicitor, in accordance with the nature of the grievance and the dimension of their bank account.

The room that was available for Francis was on the ground floor and was originally part of a three-roomed flat with a bathroom and kitchenette. His room had been the spare bedroom. It communicated with the bathroom, as did the room beyond which had been the connubial chamber. The other room, the living-room, was across a narrow passage. Each of the three rooms had been converted into a bed-sitting-room with a gas fire. The flat was tended by a charwoman who arrived every morning at eight, got her young gentlemen's
breakfasts, scoured the flats after they had left, and departed before midday. For this she received five shillings from each tenant. The charge for breakfast was a shilling a head. If the young gentlemen wanted any meal but breakfast they must prepare it themselves on their own gas ring. Any dirty plates left in the kitchen would be washed up by the charwoman next morning. Strict privacy was ensured between the occupants of the three rooms by a system of signals. Each door had three cards: Out, In, Busy. A similar system arranged for an equitable allotment of the morning bath water.

“You don't have to take it for longer than a month at a time,” Francis was told. “So that if things aren't comfortable, you don't stand to lose much.”

To Francis it seemed the kind of scheme that depended for its success entirely on the behaviour of the other tenants. It might be hell. It might be fun. Anyhow, it would be an experience. And though the room itself in its present condition might not be particularly attractive, the expenditure of a very few pounds would make it cosy and comfortable and picturesque. It was the kind of room which was worth taking a little trouble over. Its proportions were good: high, with a pleasantly moulded ceiling and a marbled fireplace: an Adams copy. The wall-paper was inoffensive: a neutral buff colour against which pictures would stand out well. “If I were to get some decent curtains, a standard lamp, a covering for that divan and a few cushions.…”

Francis made his decisions quickly.

“I'll take it, from to-morrow week. Have you got a tape measure? I want to take the measurement of the windows.”

He knew exactly what he wanted. Back at the store he did not waste one second of the salesman's time. “I want dark green damask: sage green, with a faint gold pattern. Yes, that's it. And I want it to run on wooden rods: black, with a big kind of blobule on the end. You know. Now, how long will that take? Ten days? Now, couldn't you do it in a week for me? As an exception? It really is important. Eight days? That's splendid. This is the address.”

The curtains would cost him a good twenty pounds. The standard lamp, the divan spread, the cushions. There wouldn't be much left out of fifty pounds. But there was that fifteen hundred in the bank in War Loan. They'd let him overdraw against it. There was no need to worry. And he'd got to make this place as jolly as he could.