Men at Arms Page 14

  ‘Goodness it was fun,’ said. Virginia. ‘I don’t think anything has been quite such fun since. How things just do happen to one!’

  In February 1940 coal still burned in the grates of six-guinea hotel sitting-rooms. Virginia and Guy sat in the fire-light and their talk turned to gentle matters, their earliest meeting, their courtship, Virginia’s first visit to Broome, their wedding at the Oratory, their honeymoon at Santa Dulcina. Virginia sat on the floor with her, head on the sofa, touching Guy’s leg. Presently Guy slid down beside her. Her eyes were wide and amorous.

  ‘Silly of me to say you are drunk,’ she said.

  It was all going as Guy had planned, and, as though hearing his unspoken boast, she added: ‘It’s no good planning anything,’ and she said again : ‘Things just happen to one.’

  What happened then was a strident summons from the telephone.

  ‘Let it ring,’ she said.

  It rang six times. Then Guy said: ‘Damn. I must answer it.’

  Once again he heard the voice of Apthorpe:

  ‘I’m doing what you advised, old man; I’ve had a drink. Rather more than one as it happens.’

  ‘Good. Continuez, mon cher. But for Christ’s sake don’t bother me.’

  ‘I’ve met some very interesting chaps. I thought perhaps you’d like to join us.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Still engaged?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘Pity. I’m sure you’d like these chaps. They’re in Ack-Ack.’

  ‘Well, have a good time with them. Count me out.’

  ‘Shall I ring up later to see if you can give your chaps the slip?’

  ‘No’

  ‘We might all join forces.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you’re missing a very interesting palaver.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Good night, old man.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Guy, turning from the telephone.

  ‘While you’re there you might order some more to drink,’ said Virginia.

  She rose to her, feet and arranged herself suitably for the waiter’s arrival. ‘Better put on the lights,’ she said.

  They sat opposite one another on either side of the fire, estranged and restless. The cocktails were a long time in coming. Virginia said: ‘How about some dinner?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘It’s half past eight.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘If you like.’

  He sent for the menu and they ordered. There was half an hour in which waiters came and went, wheeling a table carrying an ice bucket, a hot-plate, eventually food. The sitting-room suddenly seemed more public than the restaurant below. All the fire-side intimacy was dissipated. Virginia said: ‘What are we going to do afterwards?’

  ‘I can think of something.’

  ‘Can you indeed?’

  Her eyes were sharp and humorous, all the glowing expectation and acceptance of an hour ago quite extinguished. Finally the waiter removed all his apparatus; the chairs on which they had sat at dinner were back against the wall; the room looked just as it had when it was first’ thrown open to him, costly and uninhabited. Even the fire, newly banked up with coal and smoking darkly, had the air of being newly lit. Virginia leaned on the chimney piece with a cigarette training a line of smoke between her fingers. Guy came to stand by her and she moved very slightly away.

  ‘Can’t a girl have time to digest?’ she said.

  Virginia had a weak head for wine. She had drunk rather freely at dinner and there was a hint of tipsiness in her manner, which, he knew from of old, might at any minute turn to truculence. In a minute it did.

  ‘As long as you like,’ said Guy.

  ‘I should just think so. You take too much for granted.’

  ‘That’s an absolutely, awful expression;’ said Guy. ‘Only tarts use it.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather what you think I am?’

  ‘Isn’t it rather what you are?’

  They were both aghast at what had happened and stared at one another, wordless. Then Guy said: ‘Virginia, you know I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I must have gone out of my mind. Please forgive me. Please forget it.’

  ‘Go and sit down,’ said Virginia. ‘Now tell me just what you did mean.’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything at all.’

  ‘You had a free evening and you thought I was a nice easy pick-up. That’s what you meant, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact I’ve been thinking about you ever since we met after Christmas. That’s why I came here. Please believe me, Virginia.’

  ‘And anyway what do you know about picking up tarts? If I remember our honeymoon correctly, you weren’t so experienced then. Not a particularly expert performance as I remember it.’

  The moral balance swung sharply up and tipped. Now Virginia had gone too far, put herself in the wrong. There was another silence until she said: ‘I was wrong in thinking the army had changed you for the better. Whatever your faults in the old days you weren’t a cad. You’re worse than Augustus now.’

  ‘You forget I don’t know Augustus.’

  ‘Well, take it from me he was a monumental cad.’

  A tiny light gleamed in their dankness, a pin-point in each easy tear which swelled in her eyes and fell.

  ‘Admit I’m not as bad as Augustus.’

  ‘Very little to choose. But he was fatter. I’ll admit that.’

  ‘Virginia, for God’s sake don’t let’s quarrel. It’s my last chance of seeing you for I don’t know how long.’

  ‘There you go again. The warrior back from the wars. “I take my fun where I find it.”’

  ‘You know I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t.’

  Guy was beside her again with his hands on her. ‘Don’t let’s be beastly?’

  She looked at him, not loving yet, but without any anger; sharp and humorous again.

  ‘Go back and sit down,’ she said, giving him one friendly kiss. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet. Perhaps I do look like an easy pick-up. Lots of people seem to think so, anyway. I suppose I shouldn’t complain. But I can’t understand you, Guy, not at all. You were never one for casual affairs. I can’t somehow believe you are now.’

  ‘I’m not. This isn’t.’

  ‘You used to be so strict and pious. I rather liked it in you. What’s happened to all that?’

  ‘It’s still there. More than ever. I told you so when we first met again.’

  ‘Well, what would your priests say about your goings-on tonight; picking up a notorious divorcée in an hotel?’

  ‘They wouldn’t mind. You’re my wife.’

  ‘Oh, rot.’

  ‘Well, you asked what the priests would say. They’d say: “Go ahead.”’

  The light that had shone and waxed in their blackness suddenly snapped out as though at the order of an air-raid warden.

  ‘But this is horrible,’ said Virginia.

  Guy was taken by surprise this time. ‘What’s horrible?’ he said.

  ‘It’s absolutely disgusting. It’s worse than anything Augustus or Mr Troy could ever dream of. Can’t you see, you pig, you?’

  ‘No,’ said Guy in deep, innocent sincerity. ‘No, I don’t see.’

  ‘I’d far rather be taken for a tart. I’d rather have been offered five pounds to do something ridiculous in high heels or drive you round the room in toy harness or any of the things they write about in books.’ Tears of rage and humiliation were flowing unresisted. ‘I thought you’d taken a fancy to me again and wanted a bit of fun for the sake of old times. I thought you’d chosen me specially, and by God you had. Because I was the only woman in the whole world your priests would let you go to bed with. That was my attraction. You wet, smug, obscene, pompous, sexless, lunatic pig.’

  Even in this discomfiture Guy was reminded of his brawl with Trimmer.

  She turned to leave him. Guy sat frozen. On the silence left by her st
rident voice there broke a sound more strident still. While her hand was on the-door-knob, she instinctively paused at the summons. For the third tune that evening the telephone bell sang out between them.

  ‘I say, Crouchback, old man, I’m in something of a quandary. I’ve just put a man under close arrest.’

  ‘That’s a rash thing to do.

  ‘He’s a civilian.’

  ‘Then you can’t.’

  ‘That, Crouchback, is what the prisoner maintains. I hope you aren’t going to take his part.’

  ‘Virginia, don’t go.’

  ‘What’s that? I don’t get you, old man. Apthorpe here. Did you say, it was “No go”?’

  Virginia went. Apthorpe continued.

  ‘Did you speak or was it just someone on the line? Look here, this is a serious matter. I don’t happen to have my King’s Regulations with me. That’s why I’m asking for your help. Ought I to go out and try and collect an NCO and some men for prisoner’s escort in the street? Not so easy in the blackout, old man. Or can I just hand the fellow over to the civilian police?… I say, Crouchback, are you listening? I don’t think you quite appreciate that this is an official communication. I am calling on you as an officer of His Majesty’s Forces …’

  Guy hung up the receiver and from the telephone in his bedroom gave instructions that he was taking no more calls that night, unless by any chance he was rung up from Number 650 in the hotel.

  He went to bed and lay restless, half awake, for half the night. But the telephone did not disturb him again.

  Next day when he met Apthorpe at the train he said: ‘You got out of your trouble last night?’

  ‘Trouble, old man?’

  ‘You telephoned to me, do you remember?’

  ‘Did I? Oh, yes, about some point of military law. I thought you might be able to help.’

  ‘Did you solve the problem?’

  ‘It blew over, old man. It just blew over.’

  Presently he said: ‘Not wishing to be personal, may I ask what’s happened to your moustache?’

  ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘Exactly. Just what I mean.’

  ‘I had it shaved off.’

  ‘Did you? What a pity. It suited you, Crouchback. Suited you very well.’

  BOOK TWO

  Apthorpe Furibundus

  1

  ORDERS were to report back at Kut-al-Imara by 1800 hours on 15 February.

  Guy travelled through the familiar drab landscape. The frost was over and the countryside sodden, and dripping. He drove through the darkling streets of Southsand where blinds were going down in the lightless windows. This was no homecoming. He was a stray cat, slinking back mauled from the rooftops, to a dark corner among the dustbins where he could lick his wounds.

  Southsand was a place of solace. Hotel and Yacht Club would shelter him, he thought. Giuseppe Pelecci would feed him and flatter him; Mr Goodall raise him. Mist from the sea and the melting snow would hide him. The spell of Apthorpe would bind him, and gently bear him away to the far gardens of fantasy.

  In his melancholy Guy had taken no account of the Ritchie Hook Seven Day Plan.

  Later in his military experience, when Guy had caught sight of that vast uniformed and bemedalled bureaucracy by whose power alone a man might stick his bayonet into another, and had felt something of its measureless obstructive strength, Guy came to appreciate the scope, and speed of the Brigadier’s achievement. Now he innocently supposed that someone of the Brigadier’s eminence merely said what he wanted, gave his orders and the thing was done; but even so he marvelled, for in seven days Kut-al-Imara had been transformed, body and soul.

  Gone were Major McKinney and the former directing staff and the civilian caterers. Gone, too, was Trimmer. A notice on the board, headed Strength, Decrease of, stated that his temporary commission had been terminated. With him went Helm and a third delinquent, a young man from the Depot whose name was unfamiliar to Guy for the sufficient reason that he had been absent without leave for the whole of the course at Southsand. In their stead were a group of regular officers, Major Tickeridge among them, many of whom Guy recognized from the barracks. They sat at the back of the mess behind the Brigadier when at six o’clock on the first evening he rose to introduce them.

  He held his audience for a moment with his single eye. Then he said: ‘Gentlemen, these are the officers who will command you in battle.’

  At those words Guy’s shame left him and pride flowed back. He ceased for the time being to be the lonely and ineffective man – the man he so often thought he saw in himself, past his first youth, cuckold, wastrel, prig – who had washed and shaved and dressed at Claridge’s, lunched at Bellamy’s and caught the afternoon train; he was one with his regiment, with all their historic feats of arms behind him, with great opportunities to come. He felt from head to foot a physical tingling and bristling as though charged with galvanic current.

  The rest of his speech was an explanation of the new organization and regime. The brigade had already taken embryonic form. The temporary officers were divided into three battalion groups of a dozen each under the regular major and captain who would eventually become respectively their commanding officer and adjutant. All would live in. Permission to sleep out would be given to married men for Saturday and Sunday nights only. All would dine in mess at least four nights a week.

  ‘That is all, gentlemen. We will meet again at dinner.’

  When they left the mess, they found that the table top over the fireplace in the hall had been covered in their brief absence with type-written sheets. Gradually spelling his way through the official abbreviations Guy learned that he was in the Second Battalion under Major Tickeridge and the Captain Sanders with whom Apthorpe had once so notably played golf. With him were Apthorpe, Sarum-Smith, de Souza, Leonard and seven others all from the barracks. Sleeping quarters had been reallocated. They lived by battalions, six to a room. He was back in Paschendael; as was Apthorpe.

  Then and later he learned of other changes. The closed rooms of the house were now thrown open. One was labelled ‘Bde. HQ’ and held a brigade major and two clerks. The headmaster’s study housed three Battalion Orderly Rooms. There were also a regular quartermaster, with an office and a clerk, three regimental sergeant majors, Halberdier cooks, new younger Halberdier servants, three lorries, a Humber Snipe, three motor-bicycles, drivers, a bugler. The day’s routine was a continuous succession of parades, exercises and lectures from eight in the morning till six. ‘Discussions’ would be held after dinner on Mondays and Fridays. ‘Night Operations’ also, were two a week.

  ‘I don’t know how Daisy will take this,’ said Leonard.

  She took it, Guy learned later, very badly, and returned heavy and cross to her parents.

  Guy welcomed the new arrangements. After the expenses of London he had been uneasy about his hotel bill at the Grand. But most of the young officers were worried. Apthorpe, who had mentioned in the train that he was suffering from ‘a touch of tummy’, looked more worried than anyone.

  ‘It’s the question of my gear,’ he said.

  ‘Why not leave it at your digs?’

  ‘At the Commodore’s? Pretty awkward, old man, in the case of a sudden move. I think I’d better have a palaver with the Q.M. about it.’

  And later: ‘D’you know, the Q.M. wasn’t a bit helpful. Said he was busy. Seemed to think I was talking about superfluous clothing. He even suggested I might have to scrap half of it when we move under canvas. He’s just one of those box wallahs. No experience of campaigning. I told him so and he said he’d served in the ranks in Hongkong. Hongkong – I ask you! About the cushiest spot in the whole empire. I told him that too.’

  ‘Why is it all so important to you, Apthorpe?’

  ‘My dear fellow, it’s taken me years to collect.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s in it?’

  ‘That, old man, is not an easy question to answer in one word.’

  Everyone dined in the mess that first eve
ning. There were three tables now, one for each battalion. The Brigadier, who from now on sat wherever his fancy took him, said Grace, banging the table with the handle of his fork and saying simply and loudly: ‘Thank God.’

  He was in high good humour and gave evidence of it first by providing a collapsible spoon for the brigade major which spilt soup over his chest, and secondly by announcing after dinner: ‘When the tables have been cleared there will be a game of Housey-housey, here. For the benefit of the young officers I should explain that it is what civilians, I believe, call Bingo. As you are no doubt aware, it is the only game which may be played for money by His Majesty’s Forces. Ten per cent of each bank goes to the Regimental Comforts Fund and Old Comrades’ Association. The price of each card will be three pence.’

  ‘Housey-housey?’

  ‘Bingo?’

  The junior officers looked at one another in wild surmise. ‘Tubby’ Blake alone, the veteran of the Depot Batch, claimed he had played the game on board ship crossing the Atlantic to Canada.

  ‘It’s quite simple. You just cross out the numbers as they’re called.’

  ‘What numbers?’

  ‘The ones they call.’

  Mystified, Guy returned to the mess. The brigade major sat at the corner, of a table with a tin cash box and a heap of cards printed with squares and numbers. Each bought a card as he came in. The Brigadier, smiling ferociously, stood at the brigade major’s side with a pillow-case in his hand. When they were all seated the Brigadier said: ‘One object of this exercise is to see how many of you carry pencils.’

  About half did. Sarum-Smith, surprisingly, had three or four, including a metal one with different coloured leads.

  Someone asked: ‘Will a fountain-pen do, sir?’

  ‘Every officer should always carry a pencil.’

  It was back to prep school again, but a better school than McKinney’s.

  At last after much borrowing and searching of pockets the game began suddenly with the command: ‘Eyes down for a house.’

  Guy stared blankly at the Brigadier, who now plunged his hand in the pillow-case and produced a little square card.

  ‘Clickety-click,’ said the Brigadier disconcertingly. Then: ‘Sixty-six.’ Then in rapid succession, in a loud sing-song tone: ‘Marine’s breakfast number ten add two twelve all the fives fifty-five never been kissed sweet sixteen key of the door twenty-one add six twenty-seven legs eleven Kelly’s eye number one and we’ll...’