Guy Renton (47 page)

Guy, watching each move, from the centre of his web, was reminded of a poem read once in an anthology about a courtier who pretended to be asleep in a garden under his love's scrutiny which ended with the line, ‘She thought I thought she thought I slept.' That problem was simpler than his own. Sooner or later the Germans would discover that the British knew they knew. Then Aunt Mildred would have to change her tactics, and start telling lies again. Later there might be another switch, when the Germans realized that the British knew this too. Where would it all end, Guy asked himself; in hopeless confusion surely.

Ten years later he was to learn the extent of the confusion, from the published story of one of Crocodile's-contacts who as valet to an allied Minister obtained in 1944 precise information on the D-day landings, information that, had the Germans exploited it with skill, might well have delayed the ending of the war by eighteen months. Ribbentrop refused, however, to believe that the documents were not supplied by the British deception services.

Each day brought to Guy's desk a new instalment of one or other of the cases, similar to Crocodile's, that he was handling. If he found it at times hard to reassure himself that he was not fiddling with Rome in flames, to remind himself that the Middle East had always been a sphere of German intrigue, with a Berlin-Baghdad Axis one of the Kaiser's fondest dreams, he found it even harder to believe that Britain was threatened by real danger. He knew she was, but it seemed impossible. Everything looked so very much the same in London: the same brisk bustle along the streets, the coffee-room at the Wanderers' at lunch three-quarters full, scarcely a free table at dinner in the Café Royal. The sun shone and the sky was blue. Renée's Eric came back for his holidays: his final holidays but one. His age group would be called up at Christmas. Some good one-day matches were being played at Lord's, and Guy took him there. Once the three of them drove out to Epping Forest for a picnic. The Battle of Britain had begun. Each day brought in its cricket score of German losses, but the blue sky was clear and cloudless. The war seemed very far away.

Then, on the first Saturday in September, the brazen fury broke loose upon London.

In the third week of the bombardment, a few days after Eric had gone back to Eton, Guy was rung up by Renée at his office.

“I'm in trouble,” she said. “I've been bombed out. No one's been hurt, but there's not much left.”

Her voice was as calm as ever. It was as though she had said, “It's raining. I've no umbrella. Could you send round a car to pick me up?”

In silence they stood together on the pavement; a direct hit had torn away the whole frontage of the house. It looked like a stage set, with the exposed frescoes, splintered lacquer, the velvet curtains hanging loose, and high on the top floor, the nursery wallpaper with its serial fairy story showing through the laths and plaster beneath the conventionally-patterned paper that had been superimposed when Eric had become a schoolboy.

“I'm glad that Roger isn't here,” she said. “It would have broken his heart. He loved that house. By the time he gets back from Washington, they'll have the whole thing demolished.”

“What are you going to do yourself?”

“Find a flat or go to a hotel.”

“There's room in my place. Everyone's left except the caretaker. You could move in on the ground floor.”

“Could I, yes, I suppose I could.” She looked at him pensively. He could tell what she was thinking. In the past she had always been careful to maintain appearances, but now . . . with the house that was the symbol of her marriage in ruins before her eyes, with Roger away in Washington, with her son about to join the army, with an air-raid Alert in progress, with a ‘dog fight' being waged above their heads, with the blue of the sky criss-crossed with the white trails of the exhausts . . .

“Do those things matter now?” he asked.

Both knew what he meant by ‘those things'—convention, appearance, the maintenance of a social code, the things by which up to now they had run their lives. She shrugged.

“No,” she said. “There's nothing matters now, nothing that's personal, that's to say, nothing except that,” and she pointed upwards towards the Spitfires' spirals.

She had said that nothing personal mattered any more, yet it was a curiously personal, curiously intimate life that started for them in that October of 1940 in Rutland Street. Only three remained out of the sixteen tenants for whose benefit the service of the four houses had been organized. The management had left when the blitz began; a single char ‘did' for them. Renéeand Guy had an entire building to themselves.

There was nothing they did not share. Returning at night to a house empty except for themselves, they were as isolated during the hours of black-out as any two refugees from a torpedoed ship on a deserted island. At one moment they would be heating themselves some cocoa; at the next throwing sand over an incendiary bomb that had pitched in the backyard. Windows would be smashed by blast. They would return from dinner to find a lump of shell casing in the hall. There would be the whine over their heads of a screaming shell and before the noise of the explosion reached them, the house under the impact of its explosion would be quivering in its foundations. On their way back from dinner, as they turned a corner there would be a quick
succession of explosions and the street in front of them would be a cloud of rubble.

They were completely dependent on each other. There was a last-time sense about everything they shared, with danger rendering every sensation more acute. It was in varying moods that they faced the bombing. There were times when simultaneously they would want to dive under tables; there were times as they sat over a glass of sherry before going out to dinner that the roar of aeroplanes would so get upon their nerves, that they would gulp down their wine and almost run to the shelter of a basement restaurant. There were other times when the roar of the aeroplanes overhead was like a sedative.

It was a picnic life they shared, doing the greater part of their own housework, fixing their own breakfasts, often cooking themselves kitchen suppers, ringing themselves up during the day to decide the shopping; never during the black-out going outside a five minutes radius, never seeing anyone except themselves, with no one for those fourteen hours between half-past-six and half-past-eight existing for them outside themselves; with everything that happened during the working day made harmonious, significant by the memory, by the prospect of those fourteen hours.

Once he was sent out of London on a tour of duty. “It'll give you a chance of a night's sleep,” the Colonel said.

But he could not sleep. He felt restless, away from London. He tried to ring up Renée but the line was blocked. He cut his tour short and was back by the following afternoon.

“I've never realized,” he said, “till now what marriage was. I've always thought of it in terms of obligations. I've never thought of it as a coming home to someone.”

It was on a Saturday in November that he said that; one of those warm November days when summer seems to have returned. They had each had a half-day off; they had strolled through the park as the day was dying. The moon was three-quarters full; the sky was cloudless. London looked very lovely in the silvered dusk, the eye undistracted by the glare of street lamps. The night was warm, so warm that back in the flat they did not bother to light the fire. They sat sipping at their sherry, with the black-out curtains undrawn even though an Alert had
gone. A waxing moon was high over the roof-tops filling the room with twilight. It was easy in that atmosphere to say tender things, as easy with the width of half a room between them, with the aeroplanes droning above their heads, with searchlights sweeping the sky, with the clatter of anti-aircraft fire splitting every sentence, as ever it had been in the dusk of their close-locked moments. Never had he felt more at one with her.

“Half the novels I've read,” he said, “have talked about love changing, becoming a different kind of love, about ‘being in love' giving way to ‘loving'. It's fifteen and a half years since Miirren yet I feel no differently.”

“That's how I meant it to be,” she said.

“Meant?”

“I meant you to stay in love with me.”

Her head was against the light, in profile and silhouette; which was a symbol he supposed of what she had always been to him. He'd never known what she was thinking.

“I've never known what you saw in me,” he said.

Though she was still in silhouette, he could tell from her profile that she was smiling.

“That's the third time that you've said that,” she said.

“It's not the third time that I've wondered it.”

“You've never guessed the answer? Haven't you read in any of those novels about ‘love coming afterwards'?”

“Where would that apply?”

“That I might have been lonely, that I might have needed someone; just as a girl who's been let down in love might say, ‘I'll marry the next decent man who asks me and I'll make a go of it.' Mightn't I have thought, in my special and particular position, ‘The next man I meet who's wholesome in mind and body and who's attracted by me, I'm going to make fall in love with me and stay in love with me.' Did it never occur to you that I might have felt just that?”

“Is that what you did feel then?”

“I didn't say I did. I asked if you hadn't ever wondered whether I mightn't have.”

She rose to her feet. She walked over to the window; she flung up the sash and stood, her hands upon the sill. He crossed to join her. Outside the light had faded. It was a good night for bombers.
Already there was a red glow in the North, the houses round Paddington, he supposed. He put his arm about her shoulders.

“I don't know what you felt then or what you didn't feel. There's only one thing I know for certain, what I feel now. I've found you at last. I've found what marriage to you could be. I'm not going to let you go again.”

Outside, the red glow to the North was heightening, deepening and widening. There was a kinship, a linked association between his own problem and this tortured city's.

‘We've played for safety you and I all our lives,' he thought; ‘and why else is London in flames to-night but because we as a nation played for safety, because we put second things in front of first things, as you and I put second things in front of love; property, convention, social interest, the opinion of other people. “There's only one way to love,” he said, “for two people to give up everything for each other, to live in and for each other. There's no other way.”

She sighed, a sigh that seemed to come from the depths of a deep happiness.

His arm tightened about her shoulders, above them and about them the fury of the blitz was heightening.

“Nothing matters, nothing,” he said, “except our being together now for always.”

She sighed. She drew closer against his shoulder. The whine of the falling bombs grew louder, nearer, so that he barely heard her as she began to answer him. He leant over close to catch her words. “Nothing else in the world matters, nothing.” She rose on tiptoe as she spoke, so that he could hear above the bomb's loudening whine, though it was barely whispered, that final ‘nothing'.

It was the biggest moment of his life. In that one word at last, after fifteen years, they had become complete, had found each other, had found themselves, had become one person.

It was that whispered ‘nothing', the pitch and tone and the vibration of it that echoed through his brain and heart now six years later, in the spring of 1946, as he stood at this same window, pondering the question that this young officer had set him, the question of a companionate alliance.

“Can't you put yourself back,” the young man had asked, “. . . out of your own experience.”

Out of his own experience, out of all this room had seen: Franklin on the eve of his two departures; Daphne on the eve of her operation; the Abdication speech; Barbara bringing Norman round, the tweed coat, the corduroy trousers, the red beard; Lucy with Rex in prison; all those talks with Margery: Margery on his return from Fernhurst, ‘By and large you and I have come off best': out of all this room had seen, out of all the moods that he had lived through here, all the confidences that had been brought to him; out of it all, out of twenty-one years of living it was that whispered ‘nothing' that spoke with the final urgency, the ultimate authority. It was under that influence that he turned back to the young man behind him.

“I'm an ageing bachelor,” he said, “and where love's concerned ageing bachelors are usually either cynical or sentimental. I don't think I'm either. And I'm not a moralist. But this I'm certain of, that when two young people really love each other, there's only one chance of that love lasting; that's in marriage. There has to be a complete giving, on both sides, and that, outside marriage, there never can be.”

He spoke quietly but very seriously. He could see that the young man had been impressed. He had been given the advice that probably, in the last analysis, in his own heart of hearts he had been hoping for. Most likely he would act upon it.

Guy turned away, to look below him; standing where he had stood twenty-one years ago watching for the first time for a grey-green Chevrolet; standing as he had stood on that November evening with Renée in his arms, with the blitz roaring over them, leaning to catch her whisper.

That final ‘nothing'. It was the last word he was to hear her speak. For the bomb whose whine had almost deadened that last sentence, had been succeeded before the house had ceased its quivering by another and swifter impact that had crashed them senseless to the floor. Beside him in his arms when he recovered consciousness was a lifeless body.

“Nothing else in the world matters, nothing.”