A Proper Marriage (30 page)

She was herself, though a new self; and Caroline, as the rules said she ought to be, was content to take milk from bottles at stated hours. The nights were calm. Martha was lifting her head to look about her, with the burden of maternity properly regulated and herself free to see what life might have to offer, when authority spoke again: all of Douglas’s generation were whisked into uniform and into a camp just outside the city. It was said they might train there for some months; that was the rumour. Martha was adjusting herself to a life which would receive a husband released for afternoons or an occasional weekend, when a fresh surge of rumours settled into a decision.

All the men were to be sent at once up north. At one stroke, two evenings from now, several hundred of them, the junior civil servants, administrators and executives, the clerks and the businessmen and the lawyers - that firm masculine cement that held the community safe and steady - would be sent away. After the long months of waiting for precisely this moment, of eagerness held in check but fed steadily by the phrases, the ritual dancing and drinking, it was as if a bell had struck, but on the wrong note. For, while it was understood that the boys would be given a bang of a send-off, and the clubs and the dance halls dedicated themselves for the occasion, it was observable that there was a curious look of uncertainty, even anticlimax, on faces hitherto lit by wild excitement.

Late that last evening, in the crowded gilded halls of McGrath’s Hotel, while the band played from its bower of ferns, Binkie Maynard, his fat body encased in tight khaki, sat at the head of a long packed table, fingering a glass, his heavy reddened face solemn with thought.

‘I don’t get it,’ he observed, frowning,
‘They
must know something we don’t.’ Heads nodded around the table; to relinquish authority to
them
would come easily to none of these men. ‘I mean to say, what’s the good of just getting us together and sending us off? Where are we going to be trained? It’s not good enough, they don’t tell us anything.’

‘It’s wartime, kid,’ observed Maisie, who sat, plump and fair, beside him, smiling maternally.

‘Well, but all the same. They’re pushing us around. I’m not going to fight a parcel of …’ But complete lack of information made it impossible to finish. ‘I mean to say, I’m all for fighting the Huns — ‘ He paused; the words had given off the wrong echo. ‘The Jerries, I mean,’ he amended carefully. ‘They’ve got to be put in their place. They want to take our colonies away, that’s all they’re after. But there’s the Wops - they’re not even worth fighting as far as I can see.’

There was a pause. The fifty people listening waited hopefully for that one word from the pastor of their days of youth which would allow them with good grace to board that train the next day. The violins, which had been sobbing through the changes of ‘Black Eyes’, stopped, were joined by a drum, and swung into ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’. That song, whose impertinent, cocky mood expressed a Britain whose vigour was still in mortgage, sounded an alien note here. Half the table took it up; it petered out weakly.

‘It’s all very well,’ concluded Binkie indignantly, his black locks untidy over flushed civilian brows, his buttons undone, his shoulder tab crooked - Maisie reached over to straighten it - ‘it’s all very well, but somebody’s messed something up, that’s what I think.’ Instantaneous agreement. It was the anguished wail of the administrator who must become a pawn, the administrator who has no reason to have much faith in the process of government.

‘What I mean to say,’ pursued Binkie with difficulty, ‘it’s not fair!’

The band had exhausted ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’, and offered ‘The Siegfried Line’. It was no good - the mood was wrong. The violins retired a little, the drums and saxophones came forward and stood looking at Binkie.

Binkie tipped back his head, drained his beer, and produced automatically, ‘Well, to hell with everything!’ Then, in a chant:
‘I’m
all right, are
you
all right?’

The crowd chanted back, ‘We’re all right, we’re all right!’

Binkie, having abandoned the difficulties of politics to his
betters for the duration, climbed on a chair. He raised his arms; his tunic strained; a button flew off and Maisie stooped to pick it up.

‘Isn’t he a crazy kid?’ she crooned admiringly.

The room stilled, grinning at the familiar sight, waiting for the moment when those commanding arms would descend.

‘“Roll Out the Barrel”!’ shouted Binkie; and the obedient orchestra crashed into the familiar tune, as Binkie’s arms descended, releasing the din of thumping feet and yelling voices.

Nobody went to bed that night. All over the city next day wives and mothers waited for the hour of sunset in the condition of hypnotized calm that the hilarious mood of the men made necessary.

The train was to leave at six. By five-thirty the long grey platform was packed. The train was waiting, its empty windows like so many frames waiting to be filled, and the sky over it tumultuous with a gold-and-crimson sunset. A band was playing, hardly audible in the din of talk and singing. A warm breeze smelling of sun and petrol stirred a hundred yellow streamers that idled above the heads of the crowd, which parted, shouting greetings, as the men in uniform came roaring through. They were all drunk and singing. With them came the girls, running alongside, singing and flushed with the same intoxication.

Someone had blundered again, for there were only five minutes before the train was supposed to leave. A wave of khaki washed up over the train; the frames were filled with grinning soldiers. The relatives and friends shook themselves out into groups below the windows. The band was playing ‘Tipperary’.

There was a sardonic cheer. Binkie and Perry appeared on the roof of one of the carriages, and stood swaying there, grinning, arms outstretched.

‘Go it, Binkie!’ shouted a shrill voice. ‘Give the Jerries stick!’ roared the female chorus. Meanwhile the sober families smiled steadily.

Binkie and Perry were doing a war dance, and singing
‘Hold Him Down, the Zulu Warrior’; while the band joined in half a bar behind. A group of officers, smiling but cautionary, appeared at the edge of the crowd; and Binkie and Perry clung to each other in a parody of fright, and staggered up and down like clowns on a tightrope. The officers were shouting some orders; Binkie craned forward, blinking foolishly, one hand behind his ear. His foot slipped, someone shrieked; he rolled down over the roof into the crowd. Perry staggered back and forth like a man trying to get his balance, his great handsome blond face wooden with deliberate stupidity; then he took a neat nosedive off into a group, which caught him. For a moment Perry and Binkie were tossed up and down, yelling and laughing, while the officers gesticulated futilely on the edge of the crowd.

The train shrieked, Douglas, who was holding Martha’s hand out of the window, was laughing appreciatively at Perry and Binkie. She held up her face, he bent to kiss it; but the train jerked forward a foot, and they both laughed, while their eyes met in regret that it was impossible to be serious at this last moment. Two paces away, Binkie and Perry were locked in embrace, singing in thick wobbling voices, ‘Kiss me goodbye …’ But the crowd took it up seriously for a few bars; then someone shouted, ‘Get on the train, you silly buggers, it’s going.’ Mr Maynard stood forward and held out his hand to his son. Binkie dropped his fooling, and came to meet him, looking responsible. Mrs Maynard, blinking away tears, impulsively flung her arms around him in a convulsive embrace. Binkie remained still, then made a joke in her ear, so that she stepped back, grimacing with laughter as the tears fell.

Binkie and Perry began running down the creeping train in slow motion, with exaggeratedly lifted legs and pumping arms. The train stopped again. A sardonic cheer from the soldiers in it, who were leaning out waving beer bottles. Perry and Binkie swung themselves on to the back bumpers. The train jerked, nearly flinging them off, then let out another shriek, and began to move in earnest. It rumbled along the platform with its burden of soldiers, who were hanging from their waists in every window or clustered on
the foot plates. As the train gathered speed, Binkie and Perry appeared on the roof of the last carriage, through a cloud of filthy grey smoke. They were dancing and waving beer bottles. An epoch was going out to the strains of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’; and the crowd on the platform left facing the empty rails were silent.

The band stopped, then played ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’. The crowd eddied and thinned. In a few moments there remained a group of young wives with babies, looking with determined stoicism after their husbands. A group of girls who had run some way along the train now returned, wild-eyed, untidy, tipsy. Maisie was among them, and she greeted Martha cheerfully as she passed, with ‘So now we’re all girls without men. What a life, hey?’

Stella, Martha and Alice looked at each other, and smiled; smiled steadily. The train, a black snake blotched with khaki, was now far away over the veld. A wave of blue gritty smoke came drifting back. The sun, a heavy orange ball, dropped behind the mountain, and the white station lights came on. Yellow flags still idled under the roof; the band had gone.

Alice’s face was white; but all she said was, ‘So that’s that.’

Stella suddenly collapsed into tears, and was led away by her mother. Martha and Alice left the station. Mr Maynard stood on the pavement, beside a car where his iron-browed wife was weeping over the driving wheel.

‘There, there!’ he was saying. ‘There, there!’ As Martha went past, he looked at her, suddenly produced a heavy sarcastic smile which was like a grimace of pain, and observed, ‘So much for the happy warriors!’

‘Oh, the foolish, foolish boys,’ Mrs Maynard cried out. ‘They’ll all kill themselves before they even get to the fighting.’

‘I think not,’ said Mr Maynard patiently. He had turned back to her, and Martha went on with Alice. The two women lifted their infants into their respective cars, and drove away home.

Part Three

When a person dies for his country, then you can say he loves it.

TURGENEV
, On the Eve

Chapter One

The skies of Africa being for the most part blue and clear, and eminently suitable for aeroplanes, there were few cities in the subcontinent that did not hastily throw up on their outskirts camps of Nissen huts, hangars, runways and temporary houses, surrounded by fences and barbed wire and as self-contained and isolated as those other towns outside the city, the native locations.

For weeks before anything changed, the local inhabitants would drive out of a Sunday afternoon to watch the building; for weeks nothing was spoken of but that the Air Force was coming. That phrase, together with those others now constantly used by the newspapers, like ‘Knights of the Air’ and ‘our boys’, evoked in the minds of the population, which was now after all mostly female, an image of a tall graceful youth fitted neatly into sky-blue cloth. Certain poets were partly responsible for this charming figure - the newspapers are not to blame for everything. Besides, this was the period of the Battle of Britain; a need for heroism, starved so long, was being fed at last; it was as if the gallant youth from 1914 had donned a uniform the colour of the sky and taken wing. Their own young men who had left the colony in search of adventure were mostly dead, and killed in the air. The air was their medium, they felt. Useless to ask a country separated from the sea by hundreds of miles to think of itself as a breeder of sailors; and of that mass of young men who had departed north for land fighting, few had as yet actually fought. When they did, when those deaths and wounds were announced, the shock of it would breed a new image; in the meantime, it was an air war, and it was fitting that this colony should be asked to train airmen.

More than this lay behind their impatience for the moment when ‘the boys’ should actually arrive. Few of them had not been brought up with the words ‘Home’ and ‘England’ continually in their mouths, even if they had not been born there; it was their own people they were expecting - and more: themselves, at one remove, and dignified by responsibility and danger. They knew what to expect: the colony was being fed month by month in peacetime by immigrants who were certainly of the stock which produced rather graceful young men, even if they changed in so few weeks into people like themselves - not charming, not - but the word ‘effeminate’ was one the Battle of Britain made obsolete; it was conceded that the war and the number of deaths in the skies over London made those more sheltered cousins the equals of any veld adventurer or horizon conqueror.

But before an aeroplane can be sent into the air with its proper complement of highly trained young men, there must be so many others on the ground to provide for the welfare of both. It was this that the local people had not taken into account.

Suddenly, overnight, the streets changed. They were filled with a race of beings in thick, clumsy greyish uniforms; and from these ill-fitting cases of cloth emerged pallid faces and hands which had - to people who above all always had enough to eat and plenty of sunshine - a look of incompleteness. It was as if nature had sketched an ideal - that tall, well-fed charming youth, so easily transformed into a tough hero – and, being starved of material to complete it with, had struggled into what perfection it could. That, obscurely, was how they felt; they could not own these ancestors; their cousins from Home were a race of dwarfs, several inches shorter than themselves. They were not burnt and brown, but unhealthily pale. They were not glorious and rebellious individuals - for, above all, emigrants to the colonies have been that - but they had the look, as they strayed cautiously and curiously about the shallow little colonial streets, of a community whose oneness was only emphasized by the uniform.