Men at Arms (3 page)

‘But I’m not the pick of the nation,’ said Guy. ‘I’m natural fodder. I’ve no dependants. I’ve no special skill in anything. What’s more I’m getting old. I’m ready for immediate consumption. You should take the 35s now and give the young men time to get sons.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not the official view. I’ll put you on our list and see you renotified as soon as anything turns up.’

In the following days Guy’s name was put on many lists and his few qualifications summarized and filed in many confidential registers where they lay unexamined through all the long years ahead.

England declared war but it made no change in Guy’s routine of appeals and interviews. No bombs fell. There was no rain of poison or fire. Bones were still broken after dark. That was all. At Bellamy’s he found himself one of a large depressed class of men older than himself who had served without glory in the First World War. Most of them had gone straight from school to the trenches and spent the rest of their lives forgetting the mud and lice and noise. They were under orders to await orders and spoke sadly of the various drab posts that awaited them at railway stations and docks and dumps. The balloon had gone up, leaving them on the ground.

Russia invaded Poland. Guy found no sympathy among these old soldiers for his own hot indignation.

‘My dear fellow, we’ve quite enough on our hands as it is. We can’t go to war with the whole world.’

‘Then why go to war at all? If all we want is prosperity, the hardest bargain Hitler made would be preferable to victory. If we are concerned with justice the Russians are as guilty as the Germans.’

‘Justice?’ said the old soldiers. ‘Justice?’

‘Besides,’ said Box-Bender when Guy spoke to him of the matter which seemed in no one’s mind but his, ‘the country would never stand for it. The socialists have been crying blue murder against the Nazis for five years but they are all pacifists at heart. So far as they have any feeling of patriotism it’s for Russia. You’d have a general strike and the whole country in collapse if you set up to be just.’

‘Then what are we fighting for?’

‘Oh we had to do that, you know. The socialists always thought we were pro-Hitler, God knows why. It was quite a job in keeping neutral over Spain. You missed all that excitement living abroad. It was quite ticklish, I assure you. If we sat tight now there’d be chaos. What we have to do now is to limit and localize the war, not extend it.’

The conclusion of all these discussions was darkness, the baffling night that lay beyond the club doors. When the closing hour came the old soldiers and young soldiers and the politicians made up their same little companies to grope their way home together. There was always someone going Guy’s way towards his hotel, always a friendly arm. But his heart was lonely.

Guy heard of mysterious departments known only by their initials or as ‘So-and-so’s cloak and dagger boys’. Bankers, gamblers, men with jobs in oil companies seemed to find a way there; not Guy. He met an acquaintance, a journalist, who had once come to Kenya. This man, Lord Kilbannock, had lately written a racing column; now he was in Air Force uniform.

‘How did you manage it?’ Guy asked.

‘Well, it’s rather shaming really. There’s an air marshal whose wife plays bridge with my wife. He’s always been mad keen to get in here. I’ve just put him up. He’s the most awful shit.’

‘Will he get in?

“No, no, I’ve seen to that.. Three blackballs guaranteed already. But he can’t get me out of the Air Force.’

‘What do you do?’

‘That’s rather shaming too. I’m what’s called a “conducting officer”. I take American journalists round fighter stations. But I shall find something else soon. The great thing is to get into uniform then you can start moving yourself round. It’s a very exclusive war at present. Once you’re
in
, there’s every opportunity. I’ve got my eye on India or Egypt. Somewhere where there’ s no black-out. Fellow in the flats where I live got coshed on the head the other night, right on the steps. All a bit too dangerous for me. I don’t want a medal. I want to be known as one of the soft-faced men who did well out of the war. Come and have a drink.’

So the evenings passed. Every morning Guy awoke, in his hotel bedroom, early and anxious. After a month of it he decided to leave London and visit his family.

He went first to his sister, Angela, to the house in Gloucestershire which Box-Bender bought when he was adopted as Member for the constituency.

‘We’re living in the most frightful squalor,’ she said on the telephone. ‘We can’t meet people at Kemble any more. No petrol. You’ll have to change and take the local train. Or else the bus from Stroud if it’s still running. I rather think it isn’t.’

But at Kemble, when he emerged from the corridor in which he had stood for three hours, he found his nephew Tony on the platform to greet him. He was in flannels. Only his close-cropped hair marked him as a soldier.

‘Hullo, Uncle Guy. I hope I’m a pleasant surprise. I’ve come to save you from the local train. They’ve given us embarkation leave and a special issue off petrol coupons. Jump in.’

‘Shouldn’t you be in uniform?’

‘Should be. But no one does. It makes me feel quite human getting out of it for a few hours.’

‘I think I shall want to stay in mine once I get it.’

Tony Box-Bender laughed innocently. ‘I should love to see you. Somehow I can’t imagine you as one of the licentious soldiery. Why did you leave Italy? I should have thought Santa Dulcina was just the place to spend the war. How did you leave everyone?’

‘Momentarily in tears.’

‘I bet they miss you.’

‘Not really. They cry easily.’

They bowled along between low Cotswold walls. Presently they came into sight of the Berkeley Vale far below them with the Severn shining brown and gold in the evening sun.

‘You’re glad to be going to France?’

‘Of course. It’s hell in barracks being chased round all day. It’s pretty good hell at home at the moment – art treasures everywhere and Mum doing the cooking.’

Box-Bender’s house was a small, gabled manor in a sophisticated village where half the cottages were equipped with baths and chintz. Drawing-room and dining-room were blocked to the ceiling with wooden crates.

‘Such a disappointment, darling,’ said Angela. ‘I thought we’d been so clever. I imagined us having the Wallace Collection and luxuriating in Sèvres and Boulle and Bouchers. Such a cultured war, I imagined. Instead we’ve got Hittite tables from the British Museum, and we mayn’t even peep at them, not that we want to, heaven knows. You’re going to be hideously uncomfortable, darling. I’ve put you in the library. All the top floor is shut so that if we’re bombed we shan’t panic and jump out of the windows. That’s Arthur’s idea. He’s really been too resourceful. He and I are in the cottage. I know we shall break our necks one night going to bed across the garden. Arthur’s so strict about the electric torch. It’s all very idiotic. No one can possibly see into the garden.’

It seemed to Guy that his sister had grown more talkative than she had been.

‘Ought we to have asked people in for your last night, Tony? I’m afraid it’s very dull, but who is, there? Besides there really isn’t elbow room for ourselves now we eat in Arthur’s business-room.’

‘No, Mum, it’s much nicer being alone.’

‘I so hoped you’d say that. We like it of course, but I do think they might give you two nights.’

‘Have to be in at reveille on Monday. If you’d stayed in London…’

‘But you’d sooner be
at home
your last night?’

‘Wherever you are, Mum.’

‘Isn’t he a dear boy, Guy?’

The library was now the sole living-room. The bed already made up for Guy on a sofa at one end consorted ill with the terrestrial and celestial globes at its head and foot.

‘You and Tony will both have to wash in the loo under the stairs. He’s sleeping in the flower-room, poor pet. Now I must go and see to dinner.’

‘There’s really not the smallest reason for all this,’ said Tony. ‘Mum and Dad seem to enjoy turning everything topsy-turvy. I suppose it comes from having been so very correct before. And of course Dad has always been jolly close about money. He hated paying out when he felt he had to. Now he thinks he’s got a splendid excuse for economizing.’

Arthur Box-Bender came in carrying a tray. ‘Well, you see how we’re roughing it,’ he said. ‘In a year or two, if the war goes on, everyone will have to live like this. We’re starting early. It’s the greatest fun.’

‘You’re only here for week-ends,’ said Tony. ‘I hear you’re very snug in Arlington Street.’

‘I believe you would sooner have spent your leave in London.’

‘Not really,’ said Tony.

‘There wouldn’t have been room for your mother in the flat. No wives. That was part of the concordat we made when we decided to share. Sherry, Guy? I wonder what you’ll think of this. It’s South African. Everyone will be drinking it soon.’

‘This zeal to lead the fashion is something new, Arthur.’

‘You don’t like it?’

‘Not very much.’

‘The sooner we get used to it the better. There is no more coming from Spain.’

‘It all tastes the same to me,’ said Tony.

‘Well, the party is in your honour.’

A gardener’s wife and a girl from the village were now the only servants. Angela did all the lighter and cleaner work of the kitchen.. Presently she called them in to dinner in the little study which Arthur Box-Bender liked to call his ‘business-room’. He had a spacious office in the City; his election agent had permanent quarters in the market town; his private secretary had files, a typewriter and two telephones in South-West London; no business was ever done in the room where they now dined, but Box-Bender had first heard the expression used by Mr Crouchback of the place where he patiently transacted all the paper work of the estate at Broome. It had an authentic rural flavour, Box-Bender rightly thought.

In the years of peace Box-Bender often entertained neat little parties of eight or ten to dinner. Guy had memories of many candle-lit evenings, of a rather rigid adequacy of food and wine, of Box-Bender sitting square in his place and leading the conversation in humdrum topical subjects. Tonight with Angela and Tony frequently on their feet moving the plates, he seemed less at his ease. His interests were still topical and humdrum but Guy and Tony had each his own preoccupation.

‘Shocking thing about the Abercrombies,’ he said. ‘Did you hear? They packed up and went to Jamaica bag and baggage.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’ said Tony. ‘They couldn’t be any use here. Just extra mouths to feed.’

‘It looks as though I am going to be an extra mouth,’ said Guy. ‘it’s a matter of sentiment, I suppose. One wants to be with one’s own people in war time.’

‘Can’t see it,’ said Tony.

‘There’s plenty of useful work for the civilian,’ said BoxBender.

‘All the Prentices’ evacuees have gone back to Birmingham in a huff,’ said Angela. ‘They always were unnaturally lucky. We’ve got the Hittite horrors for life, I know.’

‘It’s an awful business for the men not knowing where their wives and families are,’ said Tony. ‘Our wretched Welfare Officer spends his whole day trying to trace them. Six men in my platoon have gone on leave not knowing if they’ve got a home to go to.’

‘Old Mrs Sparrow fell out of the apple-loft and broke both legs. They wouldn’t take her in at the hospital because all the beds are kept for air-raid casualties.’

‘We have to keep a duty officer on day and night doing P.A.D. It’s a ghastly bore. They ring up every hour to report “All clear”.’

‘Caroline Maiden was stopped in Stroud by a policeman and asked why she wasn’t carrying a gas-mask.’

‘Chemical Warfare is the end. I’m jolly grateful I had a classical education. We had to send an officer from the battalion on a C. W. course. They had me down for it. Then by the mercy of God a frightfully wet fellow turned up in C Company who’d just got a science scholarship, so I stood the adjutant a couple of drinks and got him sent instead. All the wettest fellows are in C.W.’

Tony was from another world; their problems were not his.

Guy belonged to neither world.

‘I heard someone say that this was a very exclusive war.’

‘Well, surely, Uncle Guy, the more who can keep out of it the better. You civilians don’t know when you’re well off.’

‘Perhaps we don’t want to be particularly well off at the moment, Tony.’

‘I know exactly what I want. An M.C. and a nice neat wound. Then I can spend the rest of the war being cosseted by beautiful nurses.’

‘
Please
, Tony.’

‘Sorry, Mum. Don’t look so desperately serious. I shall begin to wish I’d spent my leave in London:’

‘I thought I was keeping such a stiff upper lip. Only please, darling, don’t talk like that about being wounded.’

‘Well, it’s the best one can hope for, isn’t it?’

‘Look here,’ said Box-Bender, ‘aren’t we all getting a bit morbid? Take Uncle Guy away while your mother and I clear the table.’

Guy and Tony went into the library. The french windows were open on the paved garden. ‘Damn, we must draw the curtains before we put on the light.’

‘Let’s go out for a minute,’ said Guy.

It was just light enough to see the way. The air was scented by invisible magnolia flowers, high in the old tree which covered half the house.

‘Never felt less morbid in my life,’ said Tony, but as he and Guy strolled out into the gathering darkness, he broke the silence by saying suddenly, ‘Tell me about going mad. Are lots of Mum’s family cuckoo?’

‘ No.’

‘There was Uncle Ivo, wasn’t there?’

‘He suffered from an excess of melancholy.’

‘Not hereditary?’

‘No, no. Why? Do you feel your reason tottering?’

‘Not yet. But it’s something I read, about an officer in the last war who seemed quite normal till he got into action and then went barking mad and his sergeant had to shoot him.’

‘“Barking” is scarcely the word for your uncle’s trouble. He was in every sense a most retiring man.’