Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (23 page)

Gerald winced. 'Sorry, old thing,' Dollie said. 'I know you don't like me to say things like that. But you make too much of words, Gerrie. Nobody, not even fools like me, really think it merry. Only we've got to see it through, haven't we?'

Gerald didn't answer her question. 'I think a lot of people at home find it quite merry,' he said bitterly.

'Meaning me,' she said. 'Oh, yes, Gerrie, you did. Or if you didn't you should have done.'

'You're unfair on yourself. You've done a wonderful job nursing.'

'Please, Gerrie,' she said, and she lit a cigarette. 'A wonderful job. And a wonderful job playing mixed doubles with the Canadians. And a wonderful job giving good times to the boys on leave. Dancing and shows and sleeping with the brigadier.'

Gerald looked shocked. 'Sorry, old thing,' she said, 'but you knew it wasn't only you. Or is it just my language that upsets you? You forget that I'm fast. Haven't you heard the old hens cackle?'

'I don't listen to gossip',' Gerald said. 'Besides, you've been through a lot, Dollie.'

'Oh, yes,' she said. 'I'm a young war widow. Haven't you heard the pater talking about it? It's quite moving. Only he forgets that there are two million others. Most of them at least kept the home fires burning. I couldn't even have the decency to do that for his darling Gilbert.'

'Your marriage was washed up long before Gilbert went out,' said Gerald. 'You should never have married him. And what's more, he treated you like a brute. I say that even though he was my friend. Yes, even though he was killed and it was a shameful waste.'

'Yes,' said Dollie, 'you said it to me before. Even though he was your friend and even though he
hadn't
been killed then. You said it to me in bed, to be exact.'

Gerald seized her wrist and twisted it in his anger. 'Shut up,' he said. 'You're being a little fool. You can't go on torturing yourself about that for ever.'

'Can't I?'  Dollie asked. 'Don't you be so sure.'

Gerald struck the side of his leg with his cane. Then, calmed, he put it to her. 'Look, Dollie,' he said, 'try to remember what happened. You were lonely,and unhappy and so was I. You knew that Gilbert wasn't faithful to you, even on that last leave. Why should you blame yourself? We were in love, Dollie. And we are,' he added vehemently.

'Oh, yes,' said Dollie, ignoring his words, 'we had a high old time all right. I enjoyed myself. But then I would. Haven't you heard about little Mrs Stokesay? No? But then I forgot you don't listen to gossip. You, should, you know. You ask at the club. Anyone'll tell you. Little Mrs Stokesay's hot stuff.'

Gerald leaned back in his deck-chair and sighed. He stared out where the blue was flecked with white edgings below Beachy Head.

'Don't say
you
can hear them,' Dollie cried. 'Oh, they say you
can
on a still day, you know. Even respectable Eastbourne can't quite forget what's going on over there,' she added bitterly.

'I'm not going on this damned mission,' Gerald said abruptly. He got up and stood over her. 'I don't care if it means a court martial. I'm not going to leave you in this unhappy, bitter state.'

'Thank you kindly,' she said. 'But napoo! I can look after myself. I didn't leave home yesterday and I'm not going
back
to the shack. I'm having a good time, Gerrie, like all the women now. You told me so.'

'Oh, for God's sake!' he cried, and then, surprising the strollers on the promenade, surprising even himself, he went down on his knees beside her and took both her hands in his. 'Marry me, Dollie!' he cried. 'I can, I will make you happy.'

Dollie's face puckered for a second and then set in hard lines. She pushed his hands away. 'No, Gerrie. For God's sake, get up!' she said. 'I made one man unhappy. Not another. You're brainy like Gilbert. I'm not. I couldn't help you in your career. I should only get in the way.' When he seemed about to speak again, she turned away and said violently, 'Oh! for heaven's sake! can't you see what I'm trying to tell you? I don't want to marry you, Gerrie. I should be bored to tears in a week.'

She got up from her deck-chair and, as he rose from his knees and stood beside her, she said, 'As a matter of fact, I'm bored to tears already. Do you know what I fancy? I fancy a cocktail. Let's make for the American bar. So you're to wear mufti,' she said, 'because the dear little Danes might not care to be reminded of the war.

Robin and John had won the day. Despite all attempts to deter them, they had brought the conversation back to Pelican again.

John, munching
marrons glacés,
looked like the spoilt, sweet-stuffed boy of their childhood arguments. As then, he answered Robin's assumptions of senior experience by the condescension of brilliant youth to dull-witted age.

'My dear Robin,' he said, 'I'm not entirely inexperienced in these things. I have hundreds of hard-luck stories every week. Many of them turn out to be bogus, the results of folly or knavery. I investigate them all very thoroughly. You tend to assume that you're the only one who knows how to do his job. I'm afraid that isn't so. I happen to know mine. I don't say much about it because I take that part of an intelligent man's life for granted. I investigated Cressett's claim thoroughly. It's genuine.'

'Yes, yes,' said Robin impatiently, 'I'm sure it is.' He had hoped that it might not be; but looking at John, he reflected that his younger brother was a successful careerist idealist, not a bungling, overweening small boy. He was unlikely to support a bogus claim. Robin shifted his ground. 'No one doubts that Pelican or one of his staff has slipped up. I'm simply appealing to the adult in you to put side by side the small effects of his mistake and the serious consequences of your publicity - the possible ruin of the career of a man who is doing a useful job. Of course, you have to take my word for that.'

'Oh, no,' said John, 'I know the men I'm dealing with. I've made it my business to find out about Pelican. He's a good civil servant. That's why it's all the more important to make an example of him. It underlines the fact that the executive, even the most able and conscientious of them, is responsible before the bar of public opinion.'

'But Johnnie dear,' said Kay, 'you speak as though the man
knew
that he'd made a mistake. Surely that's very unlikely. A head of a department or whatever he is probably never sees any of these individual cases. It was almost certainly some clerk who slipped up.'

'Then,' said John and he pulled at his pipe, 'Pelican or his successor will insist on better clerks or more clerks or whatever's at fault. Good heavens! I'm not against the civil service. I just want a good one. Besides,' he added, 'I don't believe that there wasn't some moment when the papers passed through Pelican's hands and, for some reason or other, because he was too busy or going on leave or what-have-you, he let a thing go by that he knew was incorrect. It may be only for a fraction of a second, you know, when it's revealed to us, but I believe that there's always a moment of truth....'

Or a moment of untruth, or a moment of untruth that looks like truth, thought Gerald. His contempt for John rose to bursting-point at this piece of glibness. It was intolerable that this smart-alec son of his should follow up hunches and take action on risks, when his own life had been riddled and twisted with scrupulosity and weighed decisions. If John had been in his place, he would have been pursuing a wild will-o'-the-wisp half his life, upsetting the balance of the English historical profession, destroying the reputation of a remarkable historian like Stokesay and God knows what else on the evidence of a few words. And yet, he reflected, even if God did not know,
he
did. He had told himself all these years that these weighty results would follow any action he took; and yet, was it really so serious a matter? Was it not after all a small point of historical truth that mattered really very little to medieval specialists and nothing, but absolutely nothing at all, to anyone else? So much the more reason for taking no action on so little evidence. 'A moment of truth!' What did it mean? A moment of personal conviction that may have been the result of hostility or drink or imagination or any psychological quirk.

After all these years he remembered quite distinctly his momentary conviction that Gilbert was telling the truth; but how could he estimate the worth of his own convictions when he had changed so much in the years that followed? Gilbert was only a shadow now and his own personality as it was then would seem equally shadowy if it were not for the false, absurd ideas of the continuity of human existence.

The tables he could see still, with their little pink-shaded lamps and their Chianti bottles. They were probably still there today, unless they had suddenly invested in chromium in these last years. And the ill-scrawled, purple-marked menu. The Rendezvous, had it been, or the Chanticleer, or, perhaps, Pinoli's? anyway, one of Gilbert's famous little places in Soho. And the cockney Italian waitress, she couldn't have been more than sixteen, of whose seduction Gilbert boasted, probably truthfully. But Gilbert himself?

'My dear Middleton,' Gilbert affected the use of surnames even for his most intimate friends, 'don't, for heaven's sake, be the prize ass of all time. Can't you see it's the greatest thing that's ever happened? We've been asking to have our legs pulled for a long time now, with our deadly tame-cat ways and our cheap little suburban civilization. A world that's come to accept the dyspeptic rumblings of a lot of City business men and political old women for wisdom, a world that buys its painting at a guinea a yard and takes the cheeping of a lot of constipated half-men for poetry, is asking for one thing and one thing only - a mammoth practical joke. And, by God, we've got it. The biggest practical joke of all time, that'll let a hell of a lot of blood out of an overfed world, one that'll purge our wretched constipated culture for good and all. And
you
hope that it'll be over in a few months.'

His excited, high voice rose above the talk of the other diners and his hysterical laughter filled the room. His dark fringed hair had fallen over one eyebrow, and his dark eyes stared bloodshot, like a racehorse, in his long, high-cheekboned, white face. He was very drunk. 'No, no, Middleton, don't, for Christ's sake, be such a chump.' He reached across the little table and punched Gerald lightly in the chest. It was the affectionate, contemptuous gesture he had used since the days when he had flirted with Gerald at school.

Gerald, looking down at the thin, thick-veined hand, felt a repulsion for the friendship that should have ended with the school romance. 'How soon do you think it'll be before they issue us with uniforms?'

Gilbert looked at him through bleary eyes, unsteadily lighting a cigar. 'What does it matter to you, little Middleton?'  he said.

Gerald, hearing the schoolboy form of address, thought, 'He's drunker than I realized; perhaps he'll get us thrown out and I can send him home.' But Gilbert seized the wide, braided lapel of his coat. 'You've got your badge. What more do you want?'  he said. 'Inns of Court. You ought to be bloody proud. Didn't you hear what the sergeant-major said?'  He called to the waiter. 'Bring this gentleman a double brandy. They're going to make heroes of us all. They're even going to make a hero of poor bloody little Middleton.'

You could quarrel with him now, Gerald said to himself, and be rid of him. You should have done so when he came down to see you at Cambridge; he bored and disgusted you then, yes, and you thought he was a great man with his
avant-garde
poems and his contributions to
Blast,
his talk of Nietzsche and Marinetti, And now you can't because of Stokesay and Dollie. You're tied to him, a comrade in arms, until death do us part.

Gilbert said, 'How will you like to be blown up, Middleton? Never mind. We'll go together. Let's make a compact and seal it later with a mingling of our guts.' He was shouting now, so that the little Italian owner was looking worriedly towards their table.

Gerald thought, 'I must calm him,' but in the same moment he said in a pompous voice, 'Look here, Gilbert, if you're not going down to see your father, I shall. We haven't got to report back until Monday. I shall catch the 10.15 tonight.'

Gilbert leaned across the table. He spoke in quite a low voice now, but with hysterical intensity. 'Shut up about my bloody father, will you?'  he said. 'Shall I tell you what he is? He's a lecherous old fool. Oh yes, he is. Only he can't even do it. He muffed, it on his wedding night. Dear old unspotted virgin dad. But he took it out on my mother all right. Made her life ruddy hell just because he muffed it on the night of nights.'

Gerald said sharply, 'You've told me all this before. I don't want to hear it again.'

'I don't want to hear it again,' Gilbert mimicked him. 'But you must, little Middleton; it'll do your virgin heart good. Do you know why he muffed it? Because he thought that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. "My dear Gilbert,"' and he began to imitate his father, '"when I came to your mother I was a virgin. We men have no right, my dear boy, to ask of women what we're not prepared ..." No right, Middleton, no right! Well, he'll know about rights now. He and his sort that believed in scraps of paper. There's
my
rights and the rights of the people that have the guts and the brains. That's all the rights there are. The rest are the unwashed and the women.'

Gerald said, 'This is very second-rate stuff, you know, Gilbert.'

Gilbert took Gerald's brandy and began to drink it in gulps; drops ran down his chin and along his tweed coat until they came to rest on a leather button. 'You're a bastard and a bore with your civihzation and your tolerance and your tact. You'd like to have Dollie, wouldn't you?'  he asked, leering at Gerald.

'It's not fear of you that stops me,' said Gerald.

'No,' cried Gilbert, 'it's far worse than that. You're frightened of hurting someone, her or yourself. If only you'd been a little higher or a little lower in the social scale, Middleton, you wouldn't have minded about adultery. Think of it. You could have had Dollie, and no one, not even yourself, would have thought the worse of you for it. You'd have had me to reckon with - the injured husband. But you've said already that you don't care about that. Unfortunately, Middleton, you were born a dear little civilized bourgeois - a gentleman.' He began again to mimic his father, '"A gentleman, my dear Middleton, is, above all, gentle." Well, that's all over since last week. There're only two kinds of women, Middleton, whores and breeding cows. Dollie's a whore, or she would be if she didn't know I'd knock the lights out of her if I caught her at it. My mother was a breeding cow, and all my dear father could give her was one son....'