Men at Arms Read online

  He spoke of the extinction (in the male line), some fifty years back, of an historic Catholic family.

  ‘…They were a connexion of yours through the Wrottmans of Garesby. It was a most curious case. The last heir took his wife from a family (which shall be nameless) which has an unfortunate record of instability in recent generations. They had two daughters and then the wretched girl eloped with a neighbour. It made a terrible ado at the time. It was before divorce was common. Anyway they were divorced and this woman married this man. If you’ll forgive me I won’t tell you his name. Then ten years later your kinsman met this woman alone, abroad. A kind of rapprochment occurred but she went back to her so-called husband and in due time bore a son. It was in fact your kinsman’s. It was by law the so-called husband’s, who recognized it as his. That boy is alive today and in the eyes of God the rightful heir to all his father’s quarterings.’

  Guy was less interested in the quarterings than in the morality.

  ‘You mean to say that theologically the original husband committed no sin in resuming sexual relations with his former wife?’

  ‘Certainly not. The wretched girl of course was guilty in every other way and is no doubt paying for it now. But the husband was entirely blameless. And so under another and quite uninteresting name a great family has been preserved. What is more the son married a Catholic so that his son is being brought up in the Church. Explain it how you will, I see the workings of Providence there.’

  ‘Mr Goodall,’ Guy could not resist asking, ‘do you seriously believe that God’s Providence concerns itself with the perpetuation of the English Catholic aristocracy?’

  ‘But, of course. And with sparrows too, we are taught. But I am afraid that genealogy is a hobby-horse I ride too hard when I get the chance. So much of my life is spent with people who aren’t interested and might even think it snobbish or something – one evening a week for the Vincent de Paul Society, one evening at the boys’ club; then I go to the Canon one evening to help him with his correspondence. And I have to keep some time for my sister who lives with me. She’s not really interested in genealogy. Not that it matters. We are both unmarried and the last of our family, such as it was. Oh dear, I think your hospitality has made my tongue run away with me.’

  ‘Not at all, dear Mr Goodall. Not at all. Some port?’

  ‘No more, thank, you.’ Mr Goodall looked crestfallen. ‘I must be on my way.’

  ‘You’re quite sure about that point you raised. About the husband committing no sin with his former wife?’

  ‘Quite sure, of course,. Think it out, for yourself. What possible sin could he have committed?’

  Guy did think long and late about that blameless and auspicious pseudo-adultery. The thought was still with him when he woke next day. He went to London by a morning train.

  The name of Crouchback, so lustrous to Mr Goodall, cut no ice at Claridge’s: Guy was politely informed that there was no room available for him. He asked for Mrs Troy and learned that she had left instructions not to be disturbed. He went crossly to Bellamy’s and explained his predicament at the bar, which, at half past eleven, was beginning to fill.

  Tommy Blackhouse said: ‘Who did you ask?’

  ‘Just the chap at the desk.’

  ‘That’s no good. When in difficulties always take the matter to a higher level. It never fails. I’m staying there myself at the moment. In fact I’m going round there now. Would you like me to fix it for you?’

  Half an hour later the hotel telephoned to say that there was a room awaiting him. He returned and was welcomed at the desk. ‘We are so grateful to Major Blackhouse for telling us where to find you. There was a cancellation just as you left the hotel and we had no address for you.’ The receptionist took a key from his rack and led Guy to the lift. ‘We are fortunate in being able to offer you a very nice little suite.’

  ‘I was thinking of a bedroom only.’

  ‘This has a very nice little sitting-room that goes with it. I’m sure you will find it more quiet.’

  They reached the floor; doors were thrown open on rooms which in all points proclaimed costliness. Guy remembered why he had come and the laws of propriety which govern hotels; a sitting-room constituted a chaperon.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think these will do very nicely.’

  When he was left alone, he asked on the telephone for Mrs Troy.

  ‘Guy? Guy. Where are you?’

  ‘Here in the hotel.’

  ‘Darling, how beastly of you not to let me know.’

  ‘But I am letting you know now. I’ve only this minute arrived.’

  ‘I mean let me know in advance. Are you here for a lovely long time?’

  ‘Two days.’

  ‘How beastly.’

  ‘When am I going to see you?’

  ‘Well, it’s rather difficult. You should have let me know. I’ve got to go out almost at once. Come now. Number 650.’

  It was on his floor, not a dozen rooms away, round two corners. The doors all stood ajar.

  ‘Come in, I’m just finishing my face.’

  He passed through the sitting-room – also a chaperon? he wondered. The bedroom door was open; the bed unmade; clothes and towels and newspapers all over the place. Virginia sat at a dressing-table covered with powder and wads of cotton wool and crumpled paper napkins. She was staring intently in the glass doing something to her eye. Tommy Blackhouse came unconcernedly from the bathroom.

  ‘Hullo, Guy,’ he said. ‘Didn’t know you were in London.’

  ‘Make a drink for us all,’ Virginia told him. ‘I’ll be with you in a second.’

  Guy and Tommy went into the sitting-room where Tommy began cutting up a lemon and shovelling ice into a cocktail shaker.

  ‘They fixed you up all right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m most grateful to you.’

  ‘No trouble at all. By the way, better not say anything to Virginia’ – Guy noticed that he had shut the bedroom door behind him – ‘about our having met at Bellamy’s. I told her I came straight from a conference, but as you know I stopped on the way. She’s never jealous of other women, but she does hate Bellamy’s. Once, while we were married, she said: “Bellamy’s. I’d like to burn the place down.” Meant it, too, bless her. Here for long?’

  ‘Two nights.’

  ‘I go back to Aldershot tomorrow. I ran into a brigadier of yours the other day at the War Office; they’re scared stiff of him there. Call him “the one-eyed monster”. Is he a bit cracked?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so either. They all say he’s stark crazy at the War Office.’

  Soon from the disorderly slum of her bedroom Virginia emerged spruce as a Halberdier.

  ‘I hope you haven’t made them too strong, Tommy. You know how I hate strong cocktails. Guy, your moustache.’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘It’s perfectly awful.’

  ‘I must say,’ said Tommy, ‘it took me aback rather.’

  ‘It’s greatly admired by the Halberdiers. Is this any better?’

  He inserted the monocle.

  ‘I think it is,’ said Virginia. ‘It was just plain common before. Now it’s comic.’

  ‘I thought that, taken together, they achieved a military effect!’

  ‘There you’re wrong,’ said Tommy. ‘You must accept my opinion on a point of that kind.’

  ‘Not attractive to women?’

  ‘No,’ said Virginia. ‘Not to nice women.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘We ought to be going,’ said Tommy. ‘Drink up.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Virginia. ‘What a short meeting. Am I going to see you again? I shall be free of this burden tomorrow. Couldn’t we do something in the evening?’

  ‘Not before?’

  ‘How can I, darling, with this lout around? Tomorrow evening.’

  They were gone.

  Guy returned to Bellamy’s as though to the Southsand Yacht Club. He washed and gaze
d in the glass over the basin as steadfastly as Virginia had done in hers. The moustache was fair, inclined to ginger, much lighter than the hair of his head. It was strictly symmetrical, sweeping up from a neat central parting, curled from the lip, cut sharp and slightly oblique from the corners of his mouth, ending in firm points. He put up his monocle. How, he asked himself, would he regard another man so decorated? He had seen such moustaches before and such monocles on the faces of clandestine homosexuals, on touts with accents to hide, on Americans trying to look European, on business-men disguised as sportsmen., True, he had also seen them in the Halberdier mess, but on faces innocent of all guile, quite beyond suspicion. After all, he reflected, his whole uniform was a disguise, his whole new calling a masquerade.

  Ian Kilbannock, an arch-imposter in his Air Force dress, came up behind him and said: ‘I say, are you doing anything this evening? I’m trying to get some people in for cocktails. Do come.’

  ‘I might. Why?’

  ‘Sucking up to my air marshal. He likes to meet people.’

  ‘Well, I’m not much of a catch.’

  ‘He won’t know that. He just likes meeting people. I’d be awfully grateful if you could bear it.’

  ‘I’ve certainly nothing else to do.’

  ‘Well, come then. Some of the other people won’t be quite as awful as the marshal.’

  Later, upstairs in the coffee-room, Guy watched Kilbannock going round the tables, collecting his party.

  ‘What’s the point of all this, Ian?’

  ‘Well, I told you. I’ve put the marshal up for this club.’

  ‘But they aren’t letting him in?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘But I thought it was all fixed.’

  ‘It’s not quite as easy as that, Guy. The marshal is rather fly in his way. He’s not giving anything away except for value received. He insists on meeting some members and getting their support. If he only knew, his best chance of getting in is to meet no one. So it’s all in a good cause really.’

  That afternoon Guy had his moustache shaven. The barber expressed professional admiration for the growth and did his work with reluctance, like the gardeners who all over the country had that autumn ploughed up their finest turf and transformed herbaceous borders into vegetable plots. When it was done, Guy studied himself once more in the glass and recognized an old acquaintance he could never cut, to whom he could never hope to give the slip for long, the uncongenial fellow traveller who would accompany him through life. But his naked lip felt strangely exposed.

  Later he went to Ian Kilbannock’s party. Virginia was there with Tommy. Neither noticed the change until he called attention to it.

  ‘I knew it wasn’t real,’ said Virginia.

  The air marshal was the centre of the party, in the sense that everyone was introduced to him and almost immediately withdrew. He stood like the entrance to a bee-hive, a point of vacuity with a constant buzzing movement to and from it. He was a stout man, just too short to pass for a Metropolitan policeman, with a cheerful manner and shifty little eyes.

  There was a polar-bear rug before the fire.

  ‘That reminds me of a clever rhyme I once heard,’ he said.

  ‘Would you like to sin

  With Eleanor Glyn

  On a tiger skin?

  Or would you prefer

  With her

  To err

  On some other fur?’

  All in his immediate ambience looked at the rug in sad embarrassment.

  ‘Who’s Eleanor Glyn?’ asked Virginia.

  ‘Oh, just a name, you know. Put in to make it rhyme, I expect. Neat, isn’t it?’

  When he came to go, Guy found himself at the door with Ian and the marshal.

  ‘My car’s here. Can I give you a lift?’

  It was snowing again and dark as the grave.

  ‘That’s very good of you, sir. I was going to St James’s Street.’

  ‘Hop in.’

  ‘I’ll come too, sir, if I may,’ said Ian, surprisingly for there were still guests lingering upstairs.

  When they reached Bellamy’s, Ian said: ‘Won’t you come in for a final one, sir?’

  ‘A sound idea.’

  The three of them went to the bar.

  ‘By the way, Guy,’ said Ian, ‘Air Marshal Beech is thinking of joining us here. Parsons, got the Candidates Book with you?’

  The book was brought and the marshal’s virgin page presented to view. Ian Kilbannock’s fountain pen was gently put into Guy’s hand, He signed.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll find it amusing here, sir,’ said Ian.

  ‘I’ve no doubt I shall,’ said the air marshal. ‘I often thought of joining in the piping days of peace, but I wasn’t in London often enough for it to be worth while. Now. I need a little place like this where I can slip away and relax.’

  It was St Valentine’s Day.

  Februato Juno, dispossessed, has taken a shrewish revenge on that steadfast clergyman, bludgeoned and beheaded seventeen centuries back, and set him in the ignominious role of patron to killers and facetious lovers. Guy honoured him for the mischance and whenever possible went to mass on his feast-day. He walked from Claridge’s to Farm Street, from Farm Street to Bellamy’s and settled down to a bleak day of waiting.

  The newspapers were still full of the Altmark, now dubbed ‘the Hell Ship’. There were long accounts of the indignities and discomforts of the prisoners, officially designed to rouse indignation among a public quite indifferent to those trains of locked vans still rolling East and West from Poland and the Baltic, that were to roll on year after year boating their innocent loads to ghastly unknown destinations, And Guy, oblivious also, thought all that winter’s day of his coming meeting with his wife. In the late afternoon when all was black, he telephoned to her room.

  ‘What are our plans for the evening?’

  ‘Oh good, are there plans? I quite forgot. Tommy’s just left and I was thinking of a lonely early night, dinner in bed with the cross-word. I’d much rather have plans. Shall I come along to you? Everything looks rather squalid here.’ So she came to the six-guinea chaperon sitting-room and Guy ordered cocktails.

  ‘Not as cosy as mine,’ she said, looking round the rich little room.

  Guy sat beside her on the sofa. He put his arm on the back, edged towards her, put his hand on her shoulder.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked in unaffected surprise.

  ‘I just wanted to kiss you.’

  ‘What an odd way to go about it. You’ll make me spill my drink. Here.’ She put her glass carefully on the table at her side, took hold of him by the ears and gave him a full firm kiss on either cheek.

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘Rather like a French general presenting medals.’ He kissed her on the lips. ‘That’s what I want.’

  ‘Guy, are you tight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve been spending the day at that revolting Bellamy’s. Admit.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then of course you’re tight.’

  ‘No. It’s just that I want you. D’you mind?’

  ‘Oh, nobody ever minds about being wanted. But it’s rather unexpected.’

  The telephone bell rang.

  ‘Damn,’ said Guy.

  The telephone was on the writing-table. Guy rose from the sofa and lifted the receiver. Familiar tones greeted him.

  ‘Hullo, old man, Apthorpe here. I thought I’d just give you a ring. Hullo, hullo. That is Crouchback, isn’t it?’

  ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘Nothing special. I thought I could do with a change from Southsand so I ran up to town for the day. I got your address out of the Leave Book. Are you doing anything this evening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean, you have an engagement?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I couldn’t join you anywhere?’

  ‘No’

  ‘Very Well, Crouchback. I’m sorry I disturbed
you.’ Huffily: ‘I can tell when I’m not wanted.’

  ‘It’s a rare gift.’

  ‘I don’t quite get you, old man’

  ‘Never mind. See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Things seem a bit flat in town.’

  ‘I should go and have a drink.’

  ‘I daresay I shall. Forgive me if I ring off now.’

  ‘Who was that?” asked Virginia. ‘Why were you so beastly to him?’

  ‘He’s just a chap from my regiment. I didn’t want him butting in.’

  ‘Some horrible member at Bellamy’s?’

  ‘Not at all like that.’

  ‘Mightn’t he have been rather fun?’

  ‘No.’

  Virginia had now moved to an arm-chair.

  ‘What were we talking about?’ she asked.

  ‘I was making love to you.’

  ‘Yes. Let’s think of something different for a change.’

  ‘It is a change. For me, anyway.’

  ‘Darling, I haven’t had time to get my breath from Tommy. Two husbands in a day is rather much.’

  Guy sat down and stared at her.

  ‘Virginia, did you ever love me at all?’

  ‘But of course, darling. Don’t you remember? Don’t look so gloomy. We had lovely times together, didn’t we? Never a cross word. Quite different to Mr Troy.’

  They talked of old times together. First of Kenya. The group of bungalows that constituted their home, timber-built, round stone chimneys and open English hearths, furnished with wedding presents and good old pieces of furniture from the lumber-rooms at Broome; the estate, so huge by European standards, so modest in East Africa, the ruddy earth roads, the Ford van and the horses; the white-gowned servants and their naked children always tumbling in the dust and sunshine round the kitchen quarters; the families always on the march to and from the native reserves, stopping to beg for medicine; the old lion Guy shot among the mealies. Evening bathes in the lake, dinner parties in pyjamas with their neighbours. Race Week in Nairobi, all the flagrant, forgotten scandals of the Muthaiga Club, fights, adulteries, arson, bankruptcies, card-sharping, insanity, suicides, even duels – the whole Restoration scene re-enacted by farmers, eight thousand feet above the steaming seaboard.