Read Online Guy Renton by Alec Waugh - Free Book Online

squares—Brompton, Rutland, Trevor, Mont-pelier. It was easy to reconstruct the life of the adjacent cottages, the bustling world of grooms and ostlers. Very definitely this was the kind of thing he wanted. The conversion was obviously recent. The stucco was new, the front doors and windows freshly painted. He rang at the second house and the bell was answered by a neat, trim maid.
    â€œI’ve an order to view,” he said.
    â€œI’ll get Mrs. Stevenson.”
    He looked round the hall as he stood waiting. It was comfortably warm after the damp chill street. The staircase had a new red-brown carpet. The stair rods shone. On the walls were gilt-framed coloured reproductions of French eighteenth-century engravings. There was a general air of competence and comfort.
    A large fat woman in the later forties came bustling from the basement. She was out of breath; her forehead damp, and her sparse hair dishevelled.
    â€œI’m sorry, sir, to be caught this way, but I’ve only just done me dinner. Stevenson and I don’t get down to it till after three. We don’t like to start till all the tenants’ meals is cleared. I wouldn’t ‘ave come up at all if I could ‘ave trusted Alice to show you round. She’s new: not got the run of things. Who was it you came from? Did they tell you what the arrangements was? Fifteen shillings a week for service. Then you give the maid what you like. Half-a crown’s plenty—then if she does anything extra, you gives her what you likes. There’s a fixed charge for meals: one-and-six breakfast, three shillings lunch, four shillings dinner, but when you ‘ave company, that’s different. All grist to the mill, I say, and I likes young people to enjoy themselves. Mrs. ‘obson now, she’s in Number Fifty, gave a dinner party foreight last week. Eight, I ask you. I ‘ad a maid waiting on her all the time. Six shillings a ‘ead and she said she couldn’t ‘ave been done no better in the Ritz; and she a lady too what knows what’s what.”
    She maintained the flow of talk breathlessly but uninterruptedly as she led him up the stairs. The first floor flat to which he had an order was composed out of an L-shaped drawing-room; it was high with moulded ceilings, divided with connecting doors. There were tall French windows at each end. You can best judge a room’s proportions whenit is bare; and the house had been built at the close of a great architectural period; the room had a harmony of line.
    He stood on the narrow balcony. It had no view. The mews buildings to the back of Rutland Square were facing it. To the left Rutland Street ran into Cheval Place, to the right into Mont-pelier Square. There was no view either at the other end, only the roofs and backyards of the Brompton Road. He would not need a view; he would not be here much in daytime; houses with views were far too often on a ‘bus route.
    He took stock of the flat. It looked small, as houses do before they have been furnished. But when he stepped it out, he realized that it would suit his purpose. Standing there looking round him, trying to visualize it furnished, he was conscious of impending destiny. How much might happen, how much of the drama of his life be staged here.
    â€œThank you very much,” he told Mrs. Stevenson. “I’ll let you know.” But his mind was made up already. He knew very well that he was not going to use any of those other orders.
    He turned east into the Brompton Road. The rain had ceased, but it was cold and windy; women as they came out of Harrod’s huddled into their high-collared coats, their stumpy umbrellas tucked under their arms, hesitated for a moment in the shelter of its doorway before butting into the wind with their pudding-bowl close-fitting hats. It was March at its very worst, the pavements greasy, the buses splashing mud out of the gutters. But his heart was jubilant with a sense