The Soldier's Art (20 page)

“You’ve heard what’s happened?” she said abruptly.

Her manner, too, so out of place in ordinary social relations, had
equally come into its own.

“Molly’s …”

“And Priscilla.”

“God.”

“One of the Polish officers too – the nice one. The other’s pretty well
all right, just a bang over the head. That wretched girl who got into trouble
with the Norwegian has been taken to hospital. She’ll be all right, too, when
she’s recovered from the shock, I don’t know whether she’ll keep the baby.”

It was clear all this briskness was specifically designed to carry
Eleanor through. She must have been having a very bad time indeed.

“A man at the door – one of the wardens – said Ted was down at the
post.”

“He was there when it happened. They may have taken him on to the
hospital by now. How did you hear about it? I didn’t know you were in London.”

“I’m passing through on leave.”

“Is Isobel all right?”

“She’s all right. She’s in the country.”

Just for the moment I felt unable to explain anything very lucidly, to break through the barricade of immediate
action and rapid talk with which Eleanor was protecting herself. It was like
trying to tackle her in the old days, when she had been training one of her
dogs with a whistle, and would not listen to other people round her. She must
have developed early in life this effective method of shutting herself off from
the rest of the world; a weapon, no doubt, against parents and early attempts
to make her live a conventional sort of life. Now, while she talked, she
continued to move about the hall, clearing up some of the debris. She was
wearing a pair of green rubber gloves that made me think of the long white ones
she used to draw on at dances.

“We shall have to have a talk as to who must be told about all this – and
in what order. Are you in touch with Chips?”

“Eleanor – Chips has been killed too.”

Eleanor stopped her tidying up. I told her what had happened at the
Madrid. She began to take off the green gloves. People were passing through the
passage all the time. Eleanor put the rubber gloves on the top of the marquetry
cabinet Molly’s sister had left her when she died, the one Ted Jeavons had
never managed to move out of the hall.

“Let’s go upstairs and sit down for a bit,” she said. “I’ve had just
about as much as I can take. We can sit in the drawing-room. That was one of
the rooms that came off least badly.”

We went up to the first floor. The drawing-room, thick in dust and fallen
plaster, had a long jagged fissure down one wall. There were two rectangular
discoloured spaces where the Wilson and the Greuze had hung. These pictures had
presumably been removed to some safer place at the outbreak of war. So, too,
had a great many of the oriental bowls and jars that had formerly played such a
part in the decoration. They might have been valuable or absolute rubbish;
Lovell had always insisted the latter. The pastels, by some unknown hand, of
Moroccan types remained.
They were hanging at all angles, the glass splintered of one bearing the
caption
Rainy Day at Marrakesh
. Eleanor and I sat on the sofa. She began to cry.

“It’s all too awful,” she said, “and I was so fond of Molly. You know,
she usen’t to like me. When Norah and I first shared a flat together, Molly
didn’t approve. She put out a story I wore a green pork-pie hat and a bow tie.
It wasn’t true. I never did. Anyway, why shouldn’t I, if I wanted to? There I
was in the country breeding labradors and bored to death, and all my parents
wanted was for me to get married, which I hadn’t the least wish to do. Norah
came to stay and suggested I should join her in taking a flat. There it was.
Norah was always quite good at getting jobs in shops and that sort of thing,
and I found all the stuff I knew about dogs could be put to some use too when
it came to the point. Besides, I’d always adored Norah.”

I had sometimes wondered how Eleanor’s ménage with Norah Tolland had
begun. No one ever seemed to know. Now it was explained.

“Where’s Norah now?”

“In Scotland, driving for the Poles.”

She dried her eyes.

“Come on,” she said. “We must get out some sort of plan. No good just
sitting about. I’ll find a pencil and paper.”

She began to rummage in one of the drawers.

“Here we are.”

We made lists of names, notes of things that would have to be done. One
of the wardens came up to say that for the time being the house was safe to
stay in, they were going home.

“Where are you spending the night, Nick?”

“A club.”

“There might be someone who could take you part of the way. The chief
warden’s got a car.”

“What about you?”

“I shall be all right. There’s a room fitted up with a bed in the
basement. Ted used it sometimes, if he had to come in very late.”

“Will you really be all right?”

She dismissed the question of herself rather angrily. The A.R.P.
official with the car was found.

“Good-bye, Eleanor.”

I kissed her, which I had never done before,

“Good-bye, Nick. Love to Isobel. It was lucky I was staying here
really, because there’ll be a lot that will have to be done.”

The fire-engines had driven away. The street was empty. I thought how
good Eleanor was in a situation like this. Molly had been good, too, when it
came to disaster. I wondered what would happen to Ted. The extraordinary thing
about the outside of the house was that everything looked absolutely normal.
Some sort of a notice about bomb damage had been stuck on the front-door by the
wardens; otherwise there was nothing to indicate the place had been subjected
to an attack from the air, which had killed several persons. This lack of
outward display was comparable with the Madrid’s fate earlier that evening,
when a lot of talking in a restaurant had been sufficient to drown the sound of
the Warning, the noise of the guns. This must be what Dr. Trelawney called “the
slayer of Osiris and his grievous tribute of blood.” I wondered if Dr.
Trelawney himself had survived: when Odo Stevens would receive the news:
whether the Lovells’ daughter, Caroline, would be brought up by her
grandparents. Reflecting on
these things, it did not seem all that long time ago that Lovell, driving back
from the film studios in that extraordinary car of his, had suggested we should
look in  on the Jeavonses’, because “the chief reason I want to
visit Aunt Molly is to take another look at Priscilla Tolland, who is quite
often there.”

The first meal
eaten in Mess after return from leave is always dispiriting.
Room, smell, food, company, at first seemed unchanged; as ever, unenchanting. On
taking a seat at table
I
remembered with suddenly renewed sense of internal discomfort that Stringham
would be on duty. In the pressure of other things that had
been happening, I had forgotten about him. However, when the beef appeared, it
was handed round by a red-haired gangling young soldier with a hare-lip and
stutter. There was no sign of Stringham. The new waiter could be permanent, or
just a replacement imported to F Mess while Stringham himself was sick, firing
a musketry course, temporarily absent for some other routine reason. Opportunity
to enquire why he was gone, at the same time to betray no exceptional interest
in him personally, arose when Soper complained of the red-haired boy’s
inability to remember which side of the plate, as a matter of common practice,
were laid knife, fork and spoon.

“Like animals,
some of them,” Soper said. “As for getting a message delivered, you’re covered
with spit before he’s half-way through.”

“What happened
to the other one?”

If asked a
direct question of that sort, Soper always looked suspicious. Finding, after a
second or two, no grounds for imputing more than idle curiosity to this one, he
returned a factual, though reluctant, reply.

“Went to the
Mobile Laundrv.”

“For the
second time of asking, Soper,” said Macfie, “will you pass the water jug?”

“Here you are,
Doc. Those tablets come in yet?”

Macfie was
gruff about the tablets, Soper persuasive. The Cipher Officer remarked on the
amount of flu about. There was general agreement, followed by some discussion
of prevalent symptoms. The subject of Stringham had to be started up again from
scratch.

“Did you sack
him?”

“Sack who?”

“The other
Mess waiter.”

“What’s he got
to do with you?”

“Just
wondered.”

“He was
transferred to the Laundry from one day to the next. Bloody inconvenient for
this Mess. He’d have done the job all right if Biggy hadn’t been on at him all
the time. I complained to the D.A.A.G. about losing a waiter like that, but he
said it had got to go through.”

Biggs, present
at table, but in one of his morose moods that day, neither denied nor confirmed
his own part in the process of Stringham’s dislodgement. He chewed away at a
particularly tough piece of meat, looking straight in front of him. Soper, as
if Biggs himself were not sitting there, continued to muse on the aversion felt
by Biggs for Stringham.

“That chap
drove Biggy crackers for some reason,” he said. “Something about him. Wasn’t
only the way he talked. Certainly was a dopey type. Don’t know how he got where
he was. Had some education. I could see that. You’d think he’d have found
better employment than a Mess waiter. Got a bad record, I expect. Trouble back
in Civvy Street.”

That Stringham
had himself engineered an exchange from F Mess to avoid relative persecution at
the hands of Biggs was, I thought unlikely. In his relationship with Biggs,
even a grim sort of satisfaction to Stringham might be suspected, one of those
perverse involutions of feeling that had brought him into the army in the first
instance. Such
sentiments were hard to unravel. They were perhaps no more tangled than the
rest of the elements that made up Stringham’s life – or anybody else’s life
when closely examined. Not only had he disregarded loopholes which invited
avoidance of the Services – health, and, at that period, age too – but, in face
of much apparent discouragement from the recruiting authorities, had shown
uncharacteristic persistence to get where he was. One aspect of this
determination to carry through the project of joining the army was no doubt an
attempt to rescue a self-respect badly battered during the years with Miss
Weedon; however much she might also have accomplished in setting Stringham on
his feet. An innate restlessness certainly played a part too; taste for change,
even for adventure of a sort; all perhaps shading off into a vague romantic
patriotism that especially allured by its own ironic connotations, its very
lack, so to speak, of what might be called contemporary intellectual prestige.

“Awfully chic
to be killed,” he had said.

Death was a
prize, at least on the face of it, that war always offered. Lovell’s case had
demonstrated how the unexpected could happen within a few hours to those who
deplored a sedentary job. Thinking over Stringham’s more immediate situation,
it seemed likely that, hearing of a vacancy in the ranks of the Mobile Laundry,
he had decided on impulse to explore a new, comparatively exotic field of army
life in his self-imposed military pilgrimage. Bithel could even have marked
down Stringham as a man likely to do credit to the unit he commanded. That, I
decided, was even more probable. These speculations had taken place during one
of the Mess’s long silences, less nerve-racking than those at the general’s
table, but also, in most respects, even more dreary. Biggs suddenly, unexpectedly,
returned to the subject.

“Glad that
bugger’s gone,” he said. “Got me down. It’s a fact he did. I’ve got worries
enough as it is, without having him about the place.”

He spoke as if
it were indeed a great relief to him. I had to admit to myself that Stringham’s
physical removal was a great relief to me too. This sense of deliverance, of
moral alleviation, was at the same time tempered with more than a trace of
guilt, because, so far as potential improvement in his state was in question,
Stringham had left F Mess without the smallest assistance from myself. I
dispelled such twinges of conscience by reflecting that the Mobile Laundry, at
least while Bithel remained in command, led for the moment a raggle-taggle
gipsy life, offering, at least on the face of it, a less thankless daily prospect
than being a Mess waiter. If absorbed into the Divisional Concert Party, he
might even bring off a vocalist’s stage debut, something he used to talk of on
the strength of having been briefly in the choir at school. In short, the
problem seemed to me to resolve itself – after an honourable, even quixotic
gesture on Stringham’s part – to finding the least uncongenial niche available
in the circumstances. That supposition was entirely my own. It was probably far
removed from Stringham’s personal ambitions, if these were at all formulated.

“What’s on
your mind, Biggy?” said Soper. “You’re not yourself to-day.”

“Oh, stuff it
up,” said Biggs, “I’ve got a pile of trouble. Those lawyers are going to skin
me.”

When I saw
Widmerpool that afternoon I spoke about Stringham going to the Mobile Laundry.

“It was my
idea to send him there.”

“A very good
one.”

“It seemed the
solution.”

Widmerpool did
not elaborate what he had done. I was surprised, rather impressed, by the speed
with which he had taken action, especially after earlier remarks about leaving
Stringham where he was. It looked as if Widmerpool
had thought things over and decided there was something to be said for trying
to make Stringham’s existence more agreeable, however contrary that might be to
a rule of life that taught disregard for the individual. I felt I had for once misjudged
Widmerpool, too readily accepted the bleak façade displayed, which, anyway in
Stringham’s case,
might screen a complex desire to
conceal good nature, however intermittent.