The Soldier's Art (11 page)

“Peter’s said
to have some government job to do with finance.”

“Not in the
army?”

“Not as far as
I know.”

“How like
Peter. Always full of good sense, in his own way, though many people never
guessed that at first. Married?”

“First wife
ran away – second one, he appears to have driven mad.”

“Has he?” said
Stringham. “Well, I daresay I might have driven Peggy mad, had we not gone our
separate ways. Talking of separate ways, I’ll have to be getting back to my
cosy barrack-room, or I’ll be on a charge. It’s late.”

“Won’t you
really dine one night?”

“No, Nick, no.
Better not, on the whole. I won’t salute, if you’ll forgive such informality,
as no one seems to be about. Nice to have had a talk.”

He moved away
before there was time even to say good night, walking quickly up the path
leading to the main thoroughfare. I followed at less speed. By the time I
reached the road at the top of the alley, Stringham was already out of sight in
the gloom. I turned again in the direction of F Mess. This reunion with an old
friend had been the reverse of enjoyable, indeed upsetting, painful to a
degree. I tried to imagine what Stringham’s present existence must be like, but
could reconstruct in the mind only superficial aspects, those which least
disturbed, probably even stimulated him. I felt more than ever glad a week’s
leave lay ahead of me, one of those curious escapes that in wartime punctuate
army life, far more than a ‘holiday,” comparable rather with brief and magical
entries into another incarnation.

Widmeroool did not like anyone going
on leave, least of all his own subordinates. In justice
to this attitude, he appeared to treat his own leaves chiefly as opportunities
for extending freedom of contact with persons who might further his military
career, working scarcely less industriously than when on duty. I should be in
no position to criticise him in that respect, if General Liddament fulfilled
his promise in relation to this particular leave, during which I too hoped to
better my own condition. However, it was probable the General had forgotten
about his remarks during the exercise. The tactical upheaval which immediately
followed our talk would certainly have justified that. I had begun to wonder
whether I ought to remind him, and, if so, how this should be effected.
However, by the morning after the encounter with Stringham, I had still taken
no step in that direction; nor had I mentioned the meeting to Widmerpool, who
was, as it happened, in a peevish mood.

“When do you
begin this leave of yours?” he asked.

“To-morrow.”

“I thought it
was the day after.”

“To-morrow.”

“If you see
your relations, the Jeavonses, it’s as well for you to know their sister-in-law
staying as a paying guest in my mother’s cottage wasn’t a success. My mother
decided she’d rather have evacuees.”

“Has she got
evacuees?”

“She had some
for a short time,” said Widmerpool, “then they went back to London. They were
absolutely ungrateful.”

He talked of
his mother less than formerly, even giving an impression from time to time that
Mrs. Widmerpool’s problems had begun to irritate him, that he felt she was
becoming a millstone round his neck. Widmerpool had been on edge for several
days past owing to the Diplock affair turning out to be so
much more complicated than appeared on first examination. Diplock had brought
all his own notable powers of causing confusion to bear, darkening the waters
round him like a cuttlefish, so that evidence was hard to collect. Colonel
Hogbourne-Johnson, for his part, made no secret of regarding Widmerpool’s attempted impeachment
of his chief clerk as nothing more nor less than a personal attack on himself.
Indeed, Widmerpool
could not have hit on a more wounding
method of revenging
himself on the Colonel, if his suspicions about Diplock were in due
course to be substantiated. On the other hand, there was likely to be trouble
if nothing more could be proved than that Diplock had been in the habit of keeping rather
muddled accounts. Greening, the General’s A.D.C., came into the D.A.A.G.’s room
at that moment. He
handed me a small slip of paper.

“His Nibs says
you know about this,” he said.

Greening,
although he blushed easily, was otherwise totally unselfconscious. He was
inclined to express himself in a curious, outdated schoolboy slang that sounded
as if it had been picked up from some favourite book in childhood. Probably
this habit appealed to General Liddament’s taste for a touch of the exotic in
his entourage. He may even have encouraged Greening in vagaries of speech, an
extension of his own Old English. The piece of paper was inscribed with the
typewritten words “Major L. Finn, V.C.,” followed by the name of a Territorial
regiment and a telephone number. I saw I had underrated General Liddament’s
capacity for detail.

“Not much he forgets
about,” said Greening, with artless curiosity. “What is it?”

A.D.C.s are a
category of officer usually disparaged in Popular scrutiny of military matters.
On the whole, they are no worse than most, better than many; while the job they
do is the best possible training, if they are likely to rise in the world.
Greening was, of course, not the sort likely to rise very far. “Just a message
to be delivered in London.” Widmerpool looked up from the file in which he was
writing away busily. “What is that?”

“Something for
the General.”

“What are you
to do?”

“Telephone
this officer.”

“What officer?”

“A Major Finn.”

“And say what?”

“Give him the
General’s compliments.”

“Nothing else?”

“See what he
says.”

“Sounds odd.”

“That’s what
the General said.”

“Let me see.”

I handed him
the paper.

“Finn?” he
said. “It’s a Whitehall number.”

“So I see.”

“A V.C.’

“Yes.”

“I seem to
know the name – Finn. Sure I know it. When did the General tell you to do this?”

“On the last
Command exercise.”

“At what
moment?”

“After dinner
on the last night.”

“Did he say
anything else?”

“He talked
about Trollope – and Balzac.”

“The authors?”

I was tempted
to reply, “No – the generals,” but discretion prevailed.

“You seem to
be on very intimate terms with our Divisional Commander,” said Widmerpool
sourly. “Well, let me tell you that you will return from leave to find a pile
of work. Are you waiting for something, Greening?”

“The General
bade me discourse fair words to you, sir, anent
traffic circuits.”

“What the hell
do you mean?”

“I don’t know,
sir,” said Greening. ‘That’s exactly how the General put it.”

Widmerpool did
not answer. Greening went away. He was one of the most agreeable officers at
those Headquarters. I
never saw him much except on
exercises. Towards the end of the war, I heard, in a roundabout way, that,
after return to his regiment, he had been badly wounded at Anzio as a company
commander and – so my informant thought – might have died in hospital.

Sullen
reverberations of one kind or another – blitz in England, withdrawal in Greece
– had been providing the most recent noises-off in rehearsals that never seemed
to end, breeding a wish that the billed performance would at last ring up its
curtain, whatever form that took. However, the date of the opening night rested
in hands other than our own; meanwhile nobody could doubt that more rehearsing,
plenty more rehearsing, was going to be needed for a long time to come.
Although these might be dispiriting thoughts, an overwhelming sense of content
descended as the train reached the outskirts of London. Spring seas had been
rough the night before, the railway carriage as usual overcrowded, while we
threaded a sluggish passage through blackness towards the south; from time to
time entering – pausing in – then vacating – areas where air-raid warnings
prevailed. Viewed from the windows of the train, the deserted highways and
gutted buildings of outlying districts created to the eye the semblance of an
abandoned city. Nevertheless, I felt full of hope.

London
contacts had to be sorted out. A letter from Chips Lovell, received only the
day before, complicated an arrangement to dine with Moreland that evening.
Lovell had heard I was coming on leave, and wanted to talk about “family
affairs.” That was a motive reasonable enough in principle; in practice, a
disturbing phrase, when considered in relation to rumoured “trouble” with
Priscilla. Lovell was a Marine. He had been commissioned into the Corps at the
time of its big expansion at the beginning of ^e war, soon after this being
posted to a station on the East Coast. Evidently he had moved from there,
because he gave a London telephone exchange (with extension) to find him,
though no indication of what his new employment might be.

First, I
called up the number Greening had consigned from General Liddament. The voice
of Major Finn on the line was quiet and deep, persuasive yet firm. I began to
tell my story. He cut me short at once, seeming already aware what was coming,
another tribute to the General’s powers of transmuting thought to action.
Instructions were to report later in the day to an address in Westminster. This
offered breathing space. A hundred matters of one sort or another had to be
negotiated before going down to the country. After speaking with Major Finn, I
rang Lovell.

“Look, Nick, I
never thought you’d get in touch so soon,” he said, before there was even time
to suggest anything. “Owing to a new development, I’m booked for dinner
to-night – first date for months – but that makes it even more important I see
you. I’m caught up in work at lunch-time – only knocking off for about twenty
minutes – but we can have a drink later. Can’t we meet near wherever you’re
dining, as I shan’t get away till seven at the earliest.”

“The Cafe
Royal – with Hugh Moreland.”

“I’ll be along
as soon as I can.”

“Hugh said he’d
turn up about eight.”

It seemed
required to emphasise that, if Lovell stayed too
long over our drink, he would encounter Moreland. This
notification was in Moreland’s interest, rather
than Lovell’s. Lovell had never
been worried by
the former closeness
of Priscilla and Moreland. Priscilla might
or might not have told her husband the whole
affair with Moreland had been fruitless
enough, had never taken physical
shape; if she had, Lovell might or might not have believed her. It was doubtful
whether he greatly minded either way. I myself accepted they had never been to
bed, because Moreland had told me that in one of his few rather emotional
outbursts. It was because Moreland was sensitive, perhaps even touchy about such
matters, that he might not want to meet Lovell. Besides, if Priscilla were now
behaving in a manner to cause Lovell concern, he too might well prefer to
remain unreminded of a former beau of his wife’s; a man with whom he had in any
case not much in common, apart from Priscilla. This turned out to be a wrong
guess on my own part. Lovell showed no sign whatever of wanting to avoid
Moreland. On the contrary, he was disappointed the three of us were not all
dining together that evening.

“What a relief
to meet someone like Hugh Moreland again,” he said. “Pity I can’t join the
party. I can assure you it would be more fun than what faces me. Anyway, I’ll
go into
that
when we meet.”

Lovell was an
odd mixture of realism and romanticism; more specifically, he was, like quite a
lot of people, romantic about being a realist. If, for example, the suspicion
ever crossed his mind that Priscilla had married him “on the rebound,” any
possible pang would have been allayed, in his philosophy, by the thought that
he had in the end himself “got the girl.” He might also have argued, of course,
that the operation of the rebound is unpredictable, some people thwarted in
love, shifting, bodily and totally, on to another person the whole weight of a
former strong emotion. Lovell was romantic, especially, in the sense of taking
things at their face value – one of the qualities that made him a good
journalist. It never struck him anyone could think or do anything but the
perfectly obvious. This took the practical form of disinclination to believe in
the reality of any matter not of a kind to be ventilated in the press. At the
same time, although incapable of seeing life from an unobvious angle, Lovell
was prepared, when necessary, to vary the viewpoint – provided obviousness
remained unimpeded,
one kind of obviousness simply taking the place of another. This relative
flexibility was owed partly to his own species of realism – when his realism,
so to speak,
“worked” – partly forced on him by another of his firm moral convictions: that
every change which took place in life – personal – political – social – was
both momentous and for ever; a system of opinion also stimulating to the
practice of his profession.

Once Lovell’s
way of looking at the world was allowed, he could be subtle about ways and
means. With the additional advantages of good looks and plenty of push, these
methods were bringing fair success in his chosen career by the time war
broke out. In marrying Priscilla, he had not, it is true, consummated a
formerly voiced design to “find a rich wife”; but then that project had never,
in fact, assumed the smallest practical shape. Its verbal expression merely
illustrated another facet of Lovell’s romanticism – in this case, romanticism
about money. He had, in any case, taken a keen interest in Priscilla even back
in the days when he and I had been working on film scripts together (none of
which ever appeared on any screen), so there was no surprise when the two of
them married. At first he lost jobs and they were hard up. Priscilla, who had
some taste for living dangerously, never seemed to mind these lean stretches.
Lovell himself used to present an equally unruffled surface to the world where
shortage of money was concerned, though underneath he certainly felt guilty
regarding lack of it. He looked upon lack of money as a failing in himself; or,
for that matter, in anyone else. From time to time, though without any strong
force behind it, his romanticism would take moral or intellectual turns too. He
would indulge, for instance, in fits of condemning material things and all who
pursued them. These moods were sometimes accompanied by reading potted
philosophies: the Wisdom of the East in one volume, Marx Without Tears, the
Treasury of Great Thought. Like everyone else of his kind he was writing a
play, an undertaking that progressed never further than the opening pages
of the First Act.