Men at Arms (9 page)

‘Now we’re out of earshot of the Captain-Commandant,’ he began, but a passing train put him out of earshot of his two companions. When he could next be heard he was saying ‘… altogether too much flannel in the Corps. Necessary in peace time. No use for it in war. You want more than automatic obedience. You want Grip. When I commanded a company and a man came up to me on a charge I used to ask him whether he’d take my punishment or go to the C.O. He always chose mine. Then I’d bend him over and give him six of the best with a cane. Court-martial offence, of course, but there was never a complaint and I had less crime than any Company in the Corps. That’s what I call “Grip”.’ He strode on. Neither companion found any suitable reply. At length he added: ‘I shouldn’t try that out yourselves though – not at first.’

The walk continued mostly in silence. When Ritchie-Hook spoke it was mostly to recount practical jokes or
gaffes raisonnées
. For this remarkable warrior the image of war was not hunting or shooting; it was the wet sponge on the door, the hedgehog in the bed; or, rather, he saw war itself as a prodigious booby trap.

After twenty-five minutes Colonel Ritchie-Hook looked at his watch.

‘We ought to be crossing now. I’m getting slow.’

Soon they came to an iron foot-bridge. On the farther side of the line was a similar cinder track, bounded by corrugated iron. They turned along it towards home.

‘We’ll have to spurt a bit if we’re going to keep the scheduled time.’

They went at a great pace. At the barrack gates he looked at his watch. ‘Forty-nine minutes,’ he said, ‘Good going. Well, glad to have got to know you. We’ll be seeing plenty of each other in the future. I left my motor-bike at the guard-room.’ He opened his respirator haversack and showed them a tight wad of pyjamas and hair brushes. ‘That’s all the luggage I carry. Best use for this damn silly thing. Good-bye.’

Guy and Sarum-Smith saluted as he drove off.

‘Regular old fire-eater, isn’t he?’ said Sarum-Smith. ‘Seems to have made up his mind to get us all killed.’

That evening Guy looked in on Apthorpe to see if he was coming to dinner.

‘No, old man. Going slow today. I think I can shake this thing off but I’ve got to go slow. How was lunch?’

‘Our future brigadier was there.’

‘I’m sorry I missed that, very sorry. But it wouldn’t have been much of a first impression. I shouldn’t want him to see me under the weather. How did things go?’

‘Not so badly. Largely because he thought I was you.’

‘I don’t quite get you, old man.’

‘He’d heard one of us lived in Italy and the other in Africa. He thinks I’m the African one.’

‘I say, old man, I don’t much like that.’

‘He began it. Then it had gone too far to put him right.’

‘But he
must
be put right. I think you ought to write and tell him.’

‘Don’t be an ass.’

‘But it’s not a joking matter at all. It seems to me you’ve pulled rather a fast one, taking advantage of another chap’s illness to impersonate him. It’s just the sort of thing that might make a lot of difference. Did you take my name, too?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Well, if you won’t write, I will.’

‘I shouldn’t. He’d think you were mad.’

‘Well, I shall have to consider what is best? The whole thing’s extremely delicate. I can’t think how you let it happen.’ Apthorpe did not write to Colonel Ritchie-Hook but he nursed his resentment and was never again quite off his guard in Guy’s company.

SHORTLY
before Christmas the course of elementary training came to an end and Guy and his batch were sent on a week’s leave. Before they left and largely in their honour, there was a guest night. They were urged to bring guests to what, for the time being at any rate, was to be their last night in the barracks. Each felt on his mettle to provide someone creditable to himself. Apthorpe, in particular, was proud of his choice.

‘Great bit of luck,’ he said, ‘I’ve got hold of “Chatty” Corner. I didn’t know he was in England till I saw it in the paper.’

‘Who’s Chatty Corner?’

‘I should have thought you would have heard of him. Perhaps it’s different in the posh ranches of Kenya. If you asked that question in
Real
Africa anywhere between Chad and Moçambique people would think you were chaffing. He is a great character, Chatty. Queer sort of devil to look at. You wouldn’t think he knew how to use a knife and fork. Actually he’s a Bishop’s son, Eton and Oxford and all that, and he plays the violin like a pro. He’s mentioned in all the books.’

‘Books on music, Apthorpe?’

‘Books on gorillas, of course. And who are you bringing, old man, if one may ask?’

‘I haven’t found anyone yet.’

‘Funny. I should have thought a chap like you would have known quite a number of people.’

He was still huffy over the affair of mistaken identity.

Guy proposed himself for Christmas to the Box-Benders. In her reply Angela said that Tony was coming on Christmas leave. Guy was able at the last moment to intercept him in London and lure him down to the Halberdiers for the night. It was the first time either had seen the other in uniform.

‘I wouldn’t miss seeing you masquerading as a young officer for anything in the world, Uncle Guy,’ he said on arrival.

‘Everyone else here calls me “Uncle” too, you’ll find.’

They were walking across the gravel to the quarters where the guests had been given rooms. A Halberdier passed them at the salute and Guy shrank to see his nephew’s careless flick of acknowledgement.

‘I say, Tony, that may be all right in your regiment. Here we return the salute as smartly as it’s given.’

‘Uncle Guy, do I have to remind you that I am your superior officer?’

But that evening he was proud of his nephew, conspicuous in green patrols and black leather, as he led him up to the Mess President in the ante-room.

‘Back from France, eh? I’m going to exercise my presidential privilege and put you next to me. I’d very much like a first-hand account of what’s going on out there. Can’t make head or tail of the papers.’

The identity of Chatty Corner was apparent to all without introduction; a brown man with grizzled hair
en brosse
stood morosely at Apthorpe’s side. It was easy to see how he had gained a footing among the gorillas; easy, too, to recognize English irony in his nickname. He swung his head from side to side, gazing about him from under shaggy brows as though seeking some high path by which he could swing himself aloft and lie cradled in solitude among the rafters. Not till the band struck up ‘the Roast Beef of Old England’ did Chatty seem at ease. Then he beamed, nodded and gibbered confidentially into Apthorpe’s ear.

The band was in the minstrels’ gallery. They passed under it to enter the mess and met its full force as they took their places at the table. The Mess President was in the centre opposite the Vice. Tony, next to him, began to sit down before Grace and was hastily restrained by his uncle. The band ceased, the hammer struck, the chaplain prayed. Band and general conversation burst out once more together.

Drawn out by the senior officers round him, Tony began to talk about his service in France, of field-craft, night patrols, and booby traps, of the extreme youth and enthusiasm of the handful of enemy prisoners whom he had seen, of the admirable style and precision of their raiding tactics. Guy looked down, the table to Chatty Corner to see whether he was displaying any notable dexterity with his knife and fork and saw him drink with an odd little rotary swirling motion of head and wrist.

At length when the cloth was drawn for dessert, the brass departed and the strings came down from the minstrel’s gallery and stationed themselves in the window embrasure. Now there was silence over all the diners while the musicians softly bowed and plucked. It all seemed a long way from Tony’s excursions in no-man’s-land; farther still, immeasurably far, from the frontier of Christendom where the great battle had been fought and lost; from those secret forests where the trains were, even then, while the Halberdiers and their guests sat bemused by wine and harmony, rolling east and west with their doomed loads.

They played two pieces, in the second of which a carillon was brightly struck. Then the Captain of the Musicke presented himself in traditional form to the Mess President. Room was made for him on a chair placed next to Tony’s and a bumper of port brought by the corporal-of-servants. He was a shiny, red man no more to be recognized as a man of the arts, Guy thought, than Chatty himself.

The Mess President hammered the table. All rose to their feet.

‘Mr Vice, our Colonel-in-Chief, the Grand-Duchess Elena, of Russia.’

‘The Grand-Duchess, God bless her.’

This ancient lady lived in a bed-sitting-room at Nice, but she was still as loyally honoured by the Halberdiers as when, a young beauty, she had graciously accepted the rank in 1902.

Smoke began to curl among the candles. The horn of snuff was brought round. This huge, heavy-mounted object was hung about with a variety of little silver tools – spoon, hammer, brush – which had to be employed ritualistically and in the right order on pain of a half-crown fine. Guy instructed his nephew in their proper use.

‘Do you have all this sort of thing in your regiment?’

‘Not quite all this. I’m awfully impressed.’

‘So am I,’ said Guy.

No one was quite sober when he left the dining-room; no one was quite drunk except Chatty Corner. This man of the wilds, despite his episcopal origin, succumbed to the advance of civilization, was led away and never seen again. Had he been competing for prestige, as Apthorpe thought he was, this would have been an hour of triumph for Guy. Instead the whole evening was one simple sublime delight.

In the ante-room there was an impromptu concert. Major Tickeridge gave an innocently obscene performance called ‘The One-Armed Flautist’, an old favourite in the Corps, new to Guy, a vast success with all. The silver goblets, which normally held beer, began to circulate brimming with champagne. Guy found himself talking religion with the chaplain.

‘…Do you agree,’ he asked earnestly, ‘that the Supernatural Order is not something added to the Natural Order, like music or painting, to make everyday life more tolerable? It is everyday life. The supernatural is real; what we call “real” is a mere shadow, a passing fancy. Don’t you agree, Padre?’

‘Up to a point.’

‘Let me put it another way …’

The chaplain’s smile had become set during Major Tickeridge’s performance; it was like an acrobat’s, a professional device concealing fear and exhaustion.

Presently the adjutant started a game of football with a waste-paper basket. They changed from soccer to rugger. Leonard had the basket. He was tackled and brought down. All the young officers began to leap on the struggling bodies. Apthorpe leapt. Guy leapt. Others leapt on them. Guy was conscious of a wrench in the knee; then the wind was knocked out of him and he lay momentarily paralysed. Dusty, laughing, sweating, panting, they disentangled themselves and got to their feet. Guy felt a remote but serious pain in his knee.

‘I say, Uncle, are you hurt?’

‘No, no, it’s nothing.’

Somewhere the order had been given to disperse. Tony gave Guy his arm across the gravel.

‘I hope you weren’t too bored, Tony?’

‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. D’you think you ought to see a doctor?’

‘It’ll be all right in the morning. It’s just a twist.’

But in the morning, when he awoke from deep sleep, his knee was swollen large and he could not walk with it.

TONY
was driving home. He took Guy with him as they had arranged, and for four days Guy lay up at Box-Bender’s with his leg bandaged stiff. On Christmas Eve they bore him to midnight mass and then put him back on his bed in the library. There was anti-climax in Tony’s return., All the stage properties remained, the crates of Hittite tablets, the improvised beds, but there was no drama. After the spacious life of his barracks Guy felt himself penned and straightened so that when after Boxing-Day his brother-in-law returned to London, Guy went with him and spent the last days of his leave in an hotel.

Those days of lameness, he realized much later, were his honeymoon, the full consummation of his love of the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. After them came domestic routine, much loyalty and affection, many good things shared, but intervening and overlaying them all the multitudinous, sad little discoveries of marriage, familiarity, annoyance, imperfections noted, discord. Meanwhile it was sweet to wake and to lie on in bed; the spirit of the Corps lay beside him: to ring the bell; it was in the service of his unseen bride.

London had not yet lost its store of riches. It was the same city he had avoided all his life, whose history he had held to be mean, whose aspect drab. Here it was, all round him, as he had never seen it before, a royal capital. Guy was changed. He hobbled out into it with new eyes and a new heart.

Bellamy’s, where last he had slunk in corners to write his begging letters, offered him now an easy place in the shifting population of the bar. He drank hard and happily, saying mechanically ‘Cheerioh’ and ‘Here’s how’, quite unconscious of the mild surprise these foreign salutations roused.

One evening he went alone to the theatre and heard behind him a young voice say: ‘Oh my prophetic soul, my uncle.’

He turned and saw immediately behind him Frank de Souza. He was dressed in what the Halberdiers called ‘plain clothes’ and civilians, more exotically, ‘mufti’. His clothes were not particularly plain – a brown suit, a green silk shirt, an orange tie. Beside him sat a girl. Guy knew Frank de Souza little. He was a dark, reserved, drily humorous, efficient young man. He remembered vaguely hearing that Frank had a girl in London whom he visited at week-ends.

‘Pat, this is my Uncle Crouchback.’

The girl smiled, without humour or welcome.

‘Must you be facetious?’ she said.

‘Enjoying it?’ Guy asked. They were at what was known as an ‘intimate revue’.

‘Quite.’

Guy had thought it very bright and pretty. ‘Have you been in London all the time?’

‘I’ve got a flat in Earls Court,’ said the girl. ‘He lives with me’

‘That must be nice,’ said Guy.

‘Quite,’ said the girl.

Further conversation was stopped by the return of their neighbours from the bar and the rise of the curtain. The second half of the programme seemed less bright and pretty to Guy. He was conscious all the time of this cold odd couple behind him. At the end he said: ‘Won’t you come and have some supper with me?’

‘We’re going to the Café from here,’ said the girl.

‘Is that far?’

‘The Café Royal,’ Frank explained. ‘Come too.’

‘But Jane and Constant said they might be meeting us there,’ said the girl.

‘They never do,’ said Frank.

‘Come and eat oysters with me,’ said Guy. ‘There’s a place just next door.’

‘I hate oysters,’ said the girl.

‘Perhaps we’d better not,’ said Frank. ‘Thanks all the same.’

‘Well, we’ll meet again soon.’

‘At Philippi,’ said Frank.

‘Oh God,’ said the girl. ‘Come on.’

On his last evening, the last day of the old year, after dinner Guy was at Bellamy’s, standing at the bar, when he heard: ‘Hullo, Tommy, how are the staff officer’s piles?’ and turning, found at his side a major of the Coldstream.

It was Tommy Blackhouse, whom he had last seen from his solicitor’s window in Lincoln’s inn when he and Tommy’s soldier-servant had been summoned to make a formal recognition during the divorce proceedings. Tommy and Virginia had come through the square laughing, had paused at the door by arrangement showing their faces, Virginia’s under a bright new hat, Tommy’s under a bowler, and had immediately gone on, without looking up towards the windows from one of which, they knew, they were being watched. Guy had testified: ‘That is my wife.’ The guardsman had said ‘That is Captain Blackhouse and the lady with him is the one I found when I called him on the morning of the 14th.’ Each had then signed a statement and the solicitor had stopped Guy from giving the guardsman a ten shilling note. ‘Entirely irregular, Mr Crouchback. The offer of an emolument might jeopardize the action.’

Tommy Blackhouse had had to send in his papers and leave the Brigade of Guards, but, because his heart was in soldiering, he had transferred to a line regiment. Now, it seemed, he was back in the Coldstream. Before that time Guy and Tommy Blackhouse had known one another very slightly. Now they said:

‘Hullo, Guy.’

‘Hullo, Tommy.’

‘So you’re in the Halberdiers. They’re very efficient, aren’t they?’

‘Much too efficient for me. They nearly broke my leg the other night. I see you’re back in the Coldstream.’

‘I don’t know where I am. I’m a sort of shuttlecock between the War House and the Lieutenant Colonel. I got back to the Brigade all right last year – adultery doesn’t matter in wartime apparently – but like an ass I spent the last two or three years at the Staff College and somehow managed to pass. So I’m called “G.2. Training” and spend all my time trying to get back to regimental soldiering. I knew one of yours at the Staff College. Awfully good chap with a big moustache. Forget his name.’

‘They’ve all got big moustaches.’

‘You’re in for a pretty interesting role it seems to me. I saw a file about it today.’

‘We know nothing.’

‘Well, it’ll be a long war. There’ll be fun for us all in the end.’

It was all quite effortless,

Half an hour later the group broke up. In the hall Tommy said: ‘I say you
are
going lame. Let me give you a lift.’

They drove up Piccadilly in silence. Then Tommy said: ‘Virginia’s back in England.’

Guy had never considered what Tommy thought about Virginia. He did not know precisely in what circumstances they had parted.

‘Has she been away?’

‘Yes, for quite a time. In America. She’s come back for the war.’

‘Typical of her – when everyone else is running the other way.’

‘She’s in great form. I saw her this evening in Claridge’s. She asked after you but I didn’t know then where you were.’

‘She asked after me?’

‘Well, to tell you the truth she asked after all her old boy friends but you especially. Go and see her if you’ve got time. We all ought to rally round.’

‘Where is she?’

‘At Claridge’s, I imagine.’

‘I don’t suppose she wants to see me really.’

‘I got the impression she wants to see the whole world. She was all over me.’

Here they reached Guy’s hotel and parted. Guy in correct Halberdier fashion absurdly saluted this superior officer in the utter darkness.

Next morning, New Year’s Day, Guy awoke, as always now, at the hour when the bugles were sounding reveille in barracks; his first thought was of Virginia. He was full of overmastering curiosity, but after eight years, after all that he had felt and left unsaid, he could not pick up the telephone at his bedside and call her as, he had no doubt, she would have called him had she known where to find him. Instead he dressed and packed and settled his hotel bill with his head full of Virginia. He had until four that afternoon before setting out to his new destination.

He drove to Claridge’s, asked at the desk, learned that Mrs Troy had not yet come down, and stationed himself in the hall where he could watch both lifts and staircase. From time to time people he knew passed, stopped asked him to join them, but he kept his unwinking vigil. At length someone who might be she came swiftly from the lift and crossed to the desk. The concierge pointed towards where Guy was sitting. The woman turned and immediately beamed with pleasure. He limped forward; she came to meet him with a skip and a jump.

‘Guy,
pet
; what a treat! How lovely London is!’ She hugged him; then examined him at arm’s length. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very nice indeed. I was asking about you only yesterday.’

‘So I heard. Tommy told me.’

‘Oh, I asked absolutely everyone.’

‘But it was funny hearing of it from him.’

‘Yes, come to think of it, I suppose it was in a way. Why are your clothes a different colour from everyone else’s?’

‘They aren’t.’

‘Well from Tommy’s and his over there and his and his?’

‘They’re in the Foot Guards.

‘Well, I think your colour’s
much
more chic. And how it suits you. I do believe you’re growing a little moustache, too. It does make you look so
young
.’

‘You too.’

‘Oh yes, me more than anyone. I thrive on the war. It’s such heaven being away from Mr Troy.’

‘He’s not with you?’

‘Darling, just between us, two, I don’t think I’m going to see much more of Mr Troy. He hasn’t been behaving at all well lately.’

Guy knew nothing of this Hector Troy except his name. He knew that for eight years Virginia had floated on a tide of unruffled popularity: He willed her no evil but this prosperity of hers had stiffened the barrier between them. In destitution she would have found him at her side, but as she drifted into ever ampler felicity, Guy shrank the further into his own dry, empty place, Now in the changes of war, here she was, pretty and smart and pleased to see him.

‘Are you lunching anywhere?’

‘I was. I won’t. Come on. I say, you’re lame. Not wounded already?’

‘No. Believe it or not, I’ve been playing football with a waste-paper basket.’

‘Not true?’

‘Literally.’

‘Darling, how madly unlike you.’

‘You know, you’re the first person I’ve met who hasn’t been surprised to find me in the army.’

‘Why, wherever else would you be? Of course I’ve always known you were brave as a lion.’

They lunched together and afterwards went up to her room and talked continuously until it was time for Guy’s train.

‘You’ve still got the farm at Eldoret?’

‘I sold it at once; didn’t you know?’

‘Perhaps I did hear at the time, but you know I had such a lot on my mind just then. First divorce, then marriage, then divorce again, before I had time to look round. Tommy didn’t last any time at all, the beast. I might almost just as well have stayed put. I hope you got a big price?’

‘Practically nothing. It was the year everyone went broke.’

‘So it was. Don’t I remember! That was another of the troubles with Tommy. The chief thing was that his regiment turned so stuffy. We had to leave London and stay in a ridiculous little town full of the dreariest people. He even talked of going to India. That was the end. I really did adore him, too. You never married again?’

‘How could I?’

‘Darling, don’t pretend your heart was broken for life.’

‘Apart from my heart, Catholics can’t remarry, you know.’

‘Oh,
that
. You still keep to all that?’

‘More than ever.’

‘Poor Guy, you did get in a mess, didn’t you? Money gone, me gone, all in one go. I suppose in the old days they’d have said I’d ruined you.’

‘They might.’

‘Have you had lots of lovely girls since?’

‘Not many, not very lovely.’

‘Well, you must now. I’ll take you in hand and find you something special.’

And.

‘There’s one thing I always did feel rather bad about. How did your father take it all? He was such a lamb.’

‘He just says: “Poor Guy, picked a wrong ’un.”’

‘Oh, I don’t like that at all. What a perfectly beastly way to speak.’

And.

‘But it can’t be possible just to have done
nothing
for eight years.’

It amounted to nothing. There was nothing worth the telling. When he first came to Santa Dulcina from Kenya, with the habit of farming still fixed in him, he had tried to learn viticulture, had pruned the straggling vines, attempted to introduce a system for selection among the pickers, a new French press.

The wine of Santa Dulcina was delicious on the spot but turned sour after an hour’s travel. Guy had tried to bottle it scientifically. But it all came to nothing.

He had tried to write a book. It went well enough for two chapters and then petered out.

He had put a little money and much work into a tourist agency which a friend of his tried to organize. The intention was to provide first-rate aesthetic guides in Italy, and to take specially deserving visitors into little-known districts and to palaces normally kept shut. But the Abyssinian crisis had cut off the flow of visitors, deserving and undeserving alike.

‘No, nothing,’ he agreed.

‘Poor Guy,’ said Virginia. ‘How wretched you make it sound. No work No money. Plain girls. Anyway you’ve kept your wool. Tommy’s almost bald. It was quite a shock to see him again. And your figure. Augustus is as fat as butter.’

‘Augustus?’

‘I don’t think we ever knew, him in your time. He came after Tommy. But I never married Augustus. He was getting fat even then.’

And so on for three hours.

When they parted Virginia said: ‘But we must keep meeting. I’m here indefinitely. We mustn’t ever lose touch again.’

It was dark when Guy reached the station. Under the faint blue lamp he found half a dozen of his batch of Halberdiers.

‘Here; comes our gouty uncle,’ they said as he joined them. ‘Tell us all about this new course. You’re always in the know.’

But Guy knew no more than was typed on his move order. It was a destination quite unknown.