Parade's End (35 page)

‘I don’t,’ Christopher said. ‘Besides he’s probably in heaven and don’t need my forgiveness. Ten to one he’s in heaven. He was a good man.’

‘One of the best,’ Mark said. ‘It was I that called in Ruggles though.’

‘I don’t forgive you either,’ Christopher said.

‘But you
must
,’ Mark said – and it was a tremendous concession to sentimentality – ‘take enough to make you comfortable.’

‘By God!’ Christopher exclaimed. ‘I loathe your whole beastly buttered-toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted, hot-house aired beastliness of fornication… .’ He was carried away, as he seldom let himself be, by the idea of his amours with Valentine Wannop which should take place on the empty boards of a cottage, without draperies, fat meats, gummy aphrodisiacs… . ‘You won’t,’ he repeated, ‘be a penny the poorer by me.’

Mark said:

‘Well, you needn’t get shirty about it. If you won’t you won’t. We’d better move on. You’ve only just time. We’ll say that settles it… . Are you, or aren’t you, overdrawn at your bank? I’ll make that up, whatever you damn well do to stop it.’

‘I’m not overdrawn,’ Christopher said. ‘I’m over thirty pounds in credit, and I’ve an immense overdraft guaranteed by Sylvia. It was a mistake of the bank’s.’

Mark hesitated for a moment. It was to him almost unbelievable that a bank could make a mistake. One of the great banks. The props of England.

They were walking down towards the embankment. With his precious umbrella Mark aimed a violent blow at the railings above the tennis lawns, where whitish figures, bedrabbled by the dim atmosphere, moved like marionettes practising crucifixions.

‘By God!’ he said, ‘this is the last of England… . There’s only my department where they never made mistakes. I tell you, if there were any mistakes made there there would be some backs broken!’ He added: ‘But don’t you think that I’m going to give up comfort, I’m not. My Charlotte makes better buttered toast than they can at the club. And she’s got a tap of French rum that’s saved my life over and over again after a beastly wet day’s racing. And she does it all on the five hundred I give her and keeps herself clean and tidy on top of it. Nothing like a Frenchwoman for managing… . By God, I’d marry the doxy if she wasn’t a Papist. It would please her and it wouldn’t hurt me. But I couldn’t stomach marrying a Papist. They’re not to be trusted.’

‘You’ll have to stomach a Papist coming into Groby,’ Christopher said. ‘My son’s to be brought up as a Papist.’

Mark stopped and dug his umbrella into the ground.

‘Eh, but that’s a bitter one,’ he said. ‘Whatever made ye do that? … I suppose the mother made you do it. She tricked you into it before you married her.’ He added: ‘I’d not like to sleep with that wife of yours. She’s too athletic. It’d be like sleeping with a bundle of faggots. I suppose though you’re a pair of turtle doves… . Eh, but I’d not have thought ye would have been so weak.’

‘I only decided this morning,’ Christopher said, ‘when my cheque was returned from the bank. You won’t have read Spelden on Sacrilege, about Groby.’

‘I can’t say I have,’ Mark answered.

‘It’s no good trying to explain that side of it then,’ Christopher said, ‘there isn’t time. But you’re wrong in thinking Sylvia made it a condition of our marriage. Nothing would have made me consent then. It has made her a happy woman that I have. The poor thing thought our house was under a curse for want of a Papist heir.’

‘What made ye consent now?’ Mark asked.

‘I’ve told you,’ Christopher said, ‘it was getting my cheque returned to the club; that on the top of the rest of it. A fellow who can’t do better than that had better let the mother bring up the child… . Besides, it won’t hurt a Papist boy to have a father with dishonoured cheques as much as it would a Protestant. They’re not quite English.’

‘That’s true too,’ Mark said.

He stood still by the railings of the public garden near the Temple station.

‘Then,’ he said, ‘if I’d let the lawyers write and tell you the guarantee for your overdraft from the estate was stopped as they wanted to, the boy wouldn’t be a Papist? You wouldn’t have overdrawn.’

‘I didn’t overdraw,’ Christopher said. ‘But if you had warned me I should have made enquiries at the bank and the mistake wouldn’t have occurred. Why didn’t you?’

‘I meant to,’ Mark said. ‘I meant to do it myself. But I hate writing letters. I put it off. I didn’t much like having dealings with the fellow I thought you were. I suppose that’s another thing you won’t forgive me for?’

‘No. I shan’t forgive you for not writing to me,’ Christopher said. ‘You ought to write business letters.’

‘I hate writing ’em,’ Mark said. Christopher was moving on. ‘There’s one thing more,’ Mark said. ‘I suppose the boy is your son?’

‘Yes, he’s my son,’ Christopher said.

‘Then that’s all,’ Mark said. ‘I suppose if you’re killed you won’t mind my keeping an eye on the youngster?’

‘I’ll be glad,’ Christopher said.

They strolled along the Embankment side by side, walking rather slowly, their backs erected and their shoulders squared because of their satisfaction of walking together, desiring to lengthen the walk by going slow. Once or twice they stopped to look at the dirty silver of
the
river, for both liked grim effects of landscape. They felt very strong, as if they owned the land!

Once Mark chuckled and said:

‘It’s too damn funny. To think of our both being … what is it? … monogamists? Well, it’s a good thing to stick to one woman … you can’t say it isn’t. It saves trouble. And you know where you are.’

Under the lugubrious arch that leads into the War Office quadrangle Christopher halted.

‘No. I’m coming in,’ Mark said. ‘I want to speak to Hogarth. I haven’t spoken to Hogarth for some time. About the transport waggon parks in Regent’s Park. I manage all those beastly things and a lot more.’

‘They say you do it damn well,’ Christopher said. ‘They say you’re indispensable.’ He was aware that his brother desired to stay with him as long as possible. He desired it himself.

‘I damn well am!’ Mark said. He added: ‘I suppose you couldn’t do that sort of job in France? Look after transport and horses.’

‘I could,’ Christopher said, ‘but I suppose I shall go back to liaison work.’

‘I don’t think you will,’ Mark said. ‘I could put in a word for you with the transport people.’

‘I wish you would,’ Christopher said. ‘I’m not fit to go back into the front line. Besides I’m no beastly hero! And I’m a rotten infantry officer. No Tietjens was ever a soldier worth talking of.’

They turned the corner of the arch. Like something fitting in, exact and expected, Valentine Wannop stood looking at the lists of casualties that hung beneath a cheaply green-stained deal shelter against the wall, a tribute at once to the weaker art movements of the day and the desire to save the ratepayer’s money.

With the same air of finding Christopher Tietjens fit in exactly to an expected landscape she turned on him. Her face was blue-white and distorted. She ran upon him and exclaimed:

‘Look at this horror! And you in that foul uniform can support it!’

The sheets of paper beneath the green roof were laterally striped with little serrated lines. Each line meant the death of a man, for the day.

Tietjens had fallen a step back off the kerb of the pavement that ran round the quadrangle. He said:

‘I support it because I have to. Just as you decry it because you have to. They’re two different patterns that we see.’ He added: ‘This is my brother Mark.’

She turned her head stiffly upon Mark: her face was perfectly waxen. It was as if the head of a shopkeeper’s lay-figure had been turned. She said to Mark:

‘I didn’t know Mr. Tietjens had a brother. Or hardly. I’ve never heard him speak of you.’

Mark grinned feebly, exhibiting to the lady the brilliant lining of his hat.

‘I don’t suppose anyone has ever heard me speak of
him
,’ he said, ‘but he’s my brother all right!’

She stepped on to the asphalt carriage-way and caught between her fingers and thumb a fold of Christopher’s khaki sleeve.

‘I must speak to you,’ she said; ‘I’m going then.’

She drew Christopher into the centre of the enclosed, hard, and ungracious space, holding him still by the stuff of his tunic. She pushed him round until he was facing her. She swallowed hard; it was as if the motion of her throat took an immense time. Christopher looked round the skyline of the buildings of sordid and besmirched stone. He had often wondered what would happen if an air-bomb of some size dropped into the mean, grey stoniness of that cold heart of an embattled world.

The girl was devouring his face with her eyes: to see him flinch. Her voice was hard between her little teeth. She said:

‘Were you the father of the child Ethel was going to have? Your wife says you were.’

Christopher considered the dimensions of the quadrangle. He said vaguely:

‘Ethel? Who’s she?’ In pursuance of the habits of the painter-poet Mr. and Mrs. Macmaster called each other always ‘Guggums!’ Christopher had in all probability never heard Mrs. Duchemin’s Christian names since his disaster had swept all names out of his head.

He came to the conclusion that the quadrangle was not a space sufficiently confined to afford much bursting resistance to a bomb.

The girl said:

‘Edith Ethel Duchemin! Mrs. Macmaster that is!’ She was obviously waiting intensely. Christopher said with vagueness:

‘No! Certainly not! … What was said?’

Mark Tietjens was leaning forward over the kerb in front of the green-stained shelter, like a child over a brookside. He was obviously waiting, quite patient, swinging his umbrella by the hook. He appeared to have no other means of self-expression. The girl was saying that when she had rung up Christopher that morning a voice had said, without any preparation at all, the girl repeated, without any preparation at all:

‘You’d better keep off the grass if you’re the Wannop girl. Mrs. Duchemin is my husband’s mistress already. You keep off!’

Christopher said:

‘She said that, did she?’ He was wondering how Mark kept his balance, really. The girl said nothing more. She was waiting, with an insistence that seemed to draw him, a sort of sucking in of his personality. It was unbearable. He made his last effort of that afternoon.

He said:

‘Damn it all. How could you ask such a tomfool question?
You!
I took you to be an intelligent person. The only intelligent person I know. Don’t you
know
me?’

She made an effort to retain her stiffening.

‘Isn’t Mrs. Tietjens a truthful person?’ she asked. ‘I thought she looked truthful when I saw her at Vincent and Ethel’s.’

He said:

‘What she says she believes. But she only believes what she wants to, for the moment. If you call that truthful, she’s truthful. I’ve nothing against her.’ He said to himself: ‘I’m not going to appeal to her by damning my wife.’

She seemed to go all of a piece, as the hard outline goes suddenly out of a piece of lump sugar upon which you drop water.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it
isn’t
true. I
knew
it wasn’t true.’ She began to cry.

Christopher said:

‘Come along. I’ve been answering tomfool questions all day. I’ve got another tomfool to see here, then I’m through.’

She said:

‘I can’t come with you, crying like this.’

He answered:

‘Oh, yes you can. This is the place where women cry.’ He added: ‘Besides there’s Mark. He’s a comforting ass.’

He delivered her over to Mark.

‘Here, look after Miss Wannop,’ he said. ‘You want to talk to her anyhow, don’t you?’ and he hurried ahead of them like a fussy shop-walker into the lugubrious hall. He felt that, if he didn’t come soon to an unemotional ass in red, green, blue or pink tabs, who would have fish-like eyes and would ask the sort of questions that fishes ask in tanks, he, too, must break down and cry. With relief! However, that was a place where men cried, too!

He got through at once by sheer weight of personality, down miles of corridors, into the presence of a quite intelligent, thin, dark person with scarlet tabs. That meant a superior staff affair, not dustbins.

The dark man said to him at once:

‘Look here! What’s the matter with the Command Depots? You’ve been lecturing a lot of them. In economy. What are all these damn mutinies about? Is it the rotten old colonels in command?’

Tietjens said amiably:

‘Look here! I’m not a beastly spy, you know? I’ve had hospitality from the rotten old colonels.’

The dark man said:

‘I daresay you have. But that’s what you were sent round for. General Campion said you were the brainiest chap in his command. He’s gone out now, worse luck… . What’s the matter with the Command Depots? Is it the men? Or is it the officers? You needn’t mention names.’

Tietjens said:

‘Kind of Campion. It isn’t the officers and it isn’t the men. It’s the foul system. You get men who think they’ve deserved well of their country – and they damn well have! – and you crop their heads… .’

‘That’s the M.O.s,’ the dark man said. ‘They don’t want lice.’

‘If they prefer mutinies …’ Tietjens said. ‘A man wants to walk with his girl and have a properly oiled quiff. They don’t like being regarded as convicts. That’s how they are regarded.’

The dark man said:

‘All right. Go on. Why don’t you sit down?’

‘I’m a little in a hurry,’ Tietjens said. ‘I’m going out to-morrow and I’ve got a brother and people waiting below.’

The dark man said:

‘Oh, I’m sorry… . But damn. You’re the sort of man we want at home. Do you want to go? We can, no doubt, get you stopped if you don’t.’

Tietjens hesitated for a moment.

‘Yes!’ he said eventually. ‘Yes, I want to go.’

For the moment he had felt temptation to stay. But it came into his discouraged mind that Mark had said that Sylvia was in love with him. It had been underneath his thoughts all the while: it had struck him at the time like a kick from the hind leg of a mule in his subliminal consciousness. It was the impossible complication. It might not be true; but, whether or no, the best thing for him was to go and get wiped out as soon as possible. He meant, nevertheless, fiercely, to have his night with the girl who was crying downstairs… .