The Balliols (70 page)

“That any Englishmen can get. Have you thought how many people there are who, for various reasons at a time like this, want to remain in this country but cannot, because they have not a British nationality? Captain Balliol, I will come to the point. I have a client, a very charming lady. She is thirty-three. She is handsome. She is not poor. It is very important that she should have British nationality. It is very important that she should have a husband who will not interfere with her, but will appear with her in public on certain stipulated occasions; and will do her credit there. She is prepared to make a substantial allowance to her husband. I may add that my client is an honourable, law-abiding person. It is for personal, not public or political reasons that she wishes to take up her domicile in England. I want to know whether you would be prepared to consider becoming the husband of my client.”

Hugh's heart sank.

“So that's what it is,” he thought. “And I daresay there are a lot of chaps who'd leap at it. I'm sure Burke's got a hundred and one reasons to explain why it's quite all right. And because I'd give anything to believe it was, if I listened I'd start agreeing with him. I might accept. If I once start listening I'm done for. There's only one thing for me to do and that is this!”

He rose to his feet.

“I just can't think how you managed to get elected to a club like this,” he said.

But it was less of Burke's election to the St. Charles's Club, he thought, than of the position of the ex-officer to whom such an
offer could be made with the confident assurance of its acceptance.

When you think what we were six years ago: nothing was too good for us. We were the white-headed boys, They were going to make it up to us when the war was over. Only six years ago; less than that. Look where we are now. Thank heaven I haven't reached the point where I've got to accept an offer of that kind. Not yet, anyhow.

With Francis's establishment in a flat, Ilex became technically unoccupied except by Helen and her parents. In fact, however, it was as crowded, as it had ever been. Francis had followed Hugh's advice; he was soon to follow Hugh's example. A depleted bank account drove him to sub-let his room and return to Ilex. He lived like Box and Cox, a perpetual letting and sub-letting. One week in his flat, the next week not. On the whole more in than out. In contrast to Hugh, whose flat was now sub-let on a yearly tenancy, and might almost be called a resident at Ilex.

Lucy was back in England, now that the rubber slump was over, waiting for her husband's retirement and the knighthood that rewards the colonial administrator's renunciation of the pomp of official dignities for the obscurity of a chair beside the fireplace in the Oriental Club. She spent the summer in a furnished villa at Frinton, her winter in West Kensington hotels. There were crises however: financial and domestic; a cook that had given notice; an overdraft; an inability to find the kind of house she wanted: the children and their Nanny would then be despatched to Ilex. Sometimes, when the crisis was particularly acute, she would come herself.

Quite often Ruth would ring up during the afternoon and invite herself to dinner. Victor had to go and look after some business organization. Now and then his business would take him for a day or two to the north or Midlands. He was playing a great deal of golf. There were tournaments at Le Touquet to be run across for. On such occasions Ruth would spend a night or so at Ilex. She felt lonely by herself, she said.

In a way the life of Ilex was very much what it had been during the war; with the family technically scattered in houses and flats and seaside villas, yet with the house never really empty with one or other ringing up to invite him or her self for a meal, a week-end, a night or two. There were always bags and unexpected greatcoats in the hall, and messages scribbled on the pad beside the telephone.

This there was of difference, though; a difference that completely altered the atmosphere of Ilex. In the war Ilex had been home; the place to which Ruth had returned from her canteen, Hugh from his
training camp, Francis from school, that Lucy far away in Malaya dreamed about. It was the first place they went to. They would be rather there than anywhere. Now their thoughts were in other places. Ilex was a last resort. They came there because there was nowhere else to go, because they were lonely, because the person they wanted to be with was somewhere else, because something had gone wrong: a nurse had been given notice; because they couldn't afford to be where they wanted; because of rents and overdrafts. The atmosphere of a happy reunion had been replaced by one of discontent. To have one's suit case unpacked at Ilex was an admission of failure. One had tried to do something and one had failed to do it. Here one was, back again.

Hugh, who was at Ilex nearly all the time, most closely typified this spirit. While for the others Ilex represented their periods of discouragement—the dark hours, days, weeks in a year that was for the most coloured—Hugh was never apart from the atmosphere of Ilex. He and it were one. It was because of him very largely that the others came to think of their old home in terms of failure. The moment they stepped across the hall they were conscious of his depression.

And, indeed, Hugh during those months was a despondent figure. He was rapidly becoming the typical ex-officer type; the man who, though young in years, is, and knows himself to be, a failure. He is not potential any longer. He is ambitionless. He is in the last analysis unhelpable. Every month Hugh's commission account grew less. He had less money to spend. And money is, for the majority of men, the measure of their self-confidence. It is hard not to feel that the world has got the better of you when halfway through the month your account is overdrawn. Every time Hugh went into a Soho instead of a West End restaurant, he would think “So this is all I'm good enough for now.”

His appearance had altered, too. He was growing fat, unhealthily, with mottled cheeks, with puffiness under the eyes, with a thickened chin. His clothes were too tight. To conceal it he wore jumpers instead of waistcoats and left his coat unbuttoned. But even so, he had a puffed look. He had lost his athletic look, acquiring a kind of slouch that was half hang-dog, half aggressive, as though at the slightest provocation he would draw a gun. And in point of fact, he had become excessively splenetic.

He was always angry about something: about the government, the behaviour of a football crowd, a stage success. He read through
the paper in the morning as though he were hunting for an opportunity to say, “I ask you now, isn't this the limit?” He usually found such a peg for his irritation. And invariably he would address whoever happened to be in his company as though they were the defendants of that of which he disapproved. “Now tell me, what on earth does Baldwin consider to be the point.…” It was like a counsel's cross-examination; so challenging that you found yourself driven to retort; very often to find yourself in the end defending something which you on the whole disliked. Hugh was rapidly becoming an extremely uncomfortable person. You felt when you were in his company that you had no right to find life amusing, that the only way to enjoy yourself was to have a thoroughly good grouse. It was not much good going out with him unless you were prepared to make a heavy evening of it. He grew angry with you if you did not drink glass for glass with him, and if you did drink glass for glass with him he got so angry with things in general that you had to hold yourself in pretty carefully to avoid a row.

We can all of us call to mind someone out of our acquaintance who, during the war, typified gallantry, courage, a spirit of youth and of adventure, but whom time has changed into a querulous, ill-humoured, spiteful failure; who drinks too much, borrows money, hates afterwards the people he borrowed from, develops an inferiority complex, fancies that everybody is against him, runs down and has suspicions of everyone who tries to help him; who has become, in short, impossible. We have all of us one such acquaintance. And in each case the verdict on him must be the same. “If there had been no war, he would have not become this person. Weaknesses to begin with there may have been. But had it not been for the war, those weaknesses would not have been developed in this way. Circumstances placed too heavy a strain upon him.”

Certainly in Hugh Balliol's case this was so. And certainly during those immediate post-war years he was degenerating into the kind of person over whom shoulders are shrugged to-day. “It's just no good. We've tried our best. He's impossible. He must be let go to the devil in his own way. There's nothing to be done about him.”

Whether Balliol was aware of this change in the atmosphere of his home, it was impossible to tell. Ageing now, he maintained that same impersonally interested attitude to his work, his family and the curious trance-like manner in which his wife watched the current of events that streamed past her. But to his friends and his acquaintances, his life, or such of it at least as was centred in his home at Ilex,
gave the impression of some force rushing rapidly to the point of disintegration.

On a warm, sunny morning in the spring of 1924 Ruth rang up Hugh, asking if he could lunch with her that morning. Hugh was disengaged. He usually was nowadays. He could not afford to ask people out himself, and he had grown such bad company that his friends rarely bothered to invite him. He accepted the invitation with a bad grace. He had grown touchy, easily offended. “There's no need now for her to bother to ask me a day or two ahead. She knows I'll be doing nothing. She wouldn't run the risk of having to refuse something that was really amusing because of me. She thinks she can use me as a last resort, when everything else falls through. And she can, of course. I'm not going to refuse a decent lunch.”

Ruth may have noticed his lack of grace, but she did not show that she had.

“That will be lovely. The Ritz grill at 1.15. It's years since we really saw each other.”

He arrived there at twenty past. As he had expected, she had not arrived. He ordered himself a cocktail, and leant back against the green and white cushioned settee, thinking that it was over a year since he had sat there, over six months, for that matter, since he had been inside a West End restaurant; remembering the days when his life had been lived against such a setting; listening with amusement to the apologies with which woman after woman hurried in with frantic breathlessness. “I'm sorry. I'm dreadfully late, I know I am,” and the conviction with which men who had been waiting twenty minutes assured them that they had only just arrived.

He was glad that Ruth made no excuses of that kind. She was late, she knew she was late. And she didn't care. She looked at Hugh's glass, saw that it was empty. “Then let's go straight in to lunch,” she said. “I've already had a cocktail.” But she hesitated in the glass doorway of the restaurant. “No,” she said. “On second thoughts I think we'll have lunch upstairs.” She turned quickly and walked down the passage towards the staircase. “It will be cooler upstairs,” she said.

But Hugh knew well that that was not the reason. In that moment's hesitation in the doorway he had seen, as she had done, across the room at the centre of the three tables under the flowered dais, Victor alone with an extremely pretty girl. So it was true, then; that whispering he had heard that it wasn't only business and golf that took Victor to the Midlands and Le Touquet; that were
responsible for Ruth's sudden self-invitations to her parents' house. Victor's love of danger and a gamble
had
led him in post-war England to its most obvious expression.

Ruth's manner had not changed at the sight of Victor. Perhaps there had been many such episodes to shrug away. But the fact that there had been such an episode dissolved Hugh's irritation. There was no need for him to be on the defence with her. If he had his troubles, she had hers. They were in the same boat in their separate ways. He felt in tune with her as for many months he had not done, so that they were able to talk freely, openly, intimately.

They talked about themselves, about their family, comparing notes. “We've none of us done the kind of things we thought we would,” he said. “If we could turn back the clock to that first Christmas party when you put your foot through the ceiling and Francis would explain to the conjuror how he did all his tricks, and I bribed that fellow to put out the light, and see ourselves as we were then, we'd wonder ‘What could have happened in between to turn us into this?'”

“Yet nothing's happened that might not have happened to anyone living through our period.”

“I thought Lucy'd do something rather grand.”

“And there she is now unable to talk about anything except her children.”

“And that appalling husband.”

“And how mother's changed. From the day Francis went to school. She might be in a trance.”

“And who'd have thought Francis would develop into a kind of Casanova?”

“I saw him with another different girl last week.”

“What was she like?”

Ruth laughed.

“Fairly obvious.”

“If I'd been told fifteen years ago that one of us had to go wild, I'd have sworn it would be you.”

“One would have thought that, wouldn't one?”

It even surprised her sometimes, how exemplary her life was. It wasn't that she hadn't met men who'd attracted her. It wasn't that she had any scruples in particular. It was.… Well, perhaps if Victor had been different. … If I'd married the staid, correct kind of Englishman who boasted that since he'd met his wife, he'd never looked at another woman, I might have thought, “Heavens, but this is dull. I've got to do something to relieve this. We can't both qualify for haloes.” But with Victor chasing after his “bits of nonsense.” No, it did seem that he was enough for one family, that dignity if nothing else, demanded that someone should keep a hand upon the brake. All the same, it was surprising.