The '44 Vintage (9 page)

The colonel looked at Audley curiously. Possibly he wasn’t sure he’d heard the challenge—that his ears had deceived him. But the silence in the barn must surely confirm his suspicion, thought Butler: no one wanted to breathe for fear of missing his reaction.

“Two and two”—the colonel’s curiosity got the better of him—“Mr. Audley?”

“Yes, sir. We’re not going to fight the Germans—and we’re not going to tell the … French. So … neither of them … knows about it— the property, I mean.” Audley paused. “Not yet, anyway. So we’re just going to nip in and p-p-p-pinch it from under their noses.”

Bulging with brains, decided Butler.

And arrogance.

And innocence.

He stared at Colonel Clinton quickly—

The colonel was smiling. Or at least half smiling.

“Well … I hope you’re right.” The colonel shook his head. “Because if you aren’t, then Chandos Force is going to have to fight an awful lot of Germans and Frenchmen during the next week.”

How Corporal Butler tasted the wine of Touraine

SERGEANT PURVIS
shouldered his way through the crowd towards Butler.

“Harry Purvis,” he announced, thrusting out a large hand.

The voice and the hand were friendly, which was a double relief when the two bandits on whose feet Butler had trodden had been watching him with what could only be hostile intentions.

“Jack Butler, Sergeant.” He released his equipment for a moment in order to accept the hand.

“Harry,” the sergeant corrected him. “Glad to meet you, Jack. Here —give us that”—he reached down and lifted the tangle of webbing pouches and pack before Butler could stop him—“and come along with me. Have you had anything to eat yet?”

Butler began to feel better. Irregular units like Chandos Force were bound to be informal, and no doubt Sergeant Purvis had been told to look after him. But this easy comradeship was morale-raising. “Not since this morning,” he admitted.

“Christ! You must be bloody starving. We’ll soon put that right,” Harry Purvis nodded encouragingly. “And thirsty too, eh? Well, Taffy will fix that double quick.”

Better and better, Butler congratulated himself as he strode through the bandit encampment beside the sergeant. Obviously he had let appearances deceive him; he should have known better that a man like Major O’Conor wouldn’t run a sloppy show. Misfits they might be (his Rifleman’s lessons couldn’t be unlearnt in an hour), but the excellence of their commanding officer was bound to rub off on them as it did in any unit.

“That young sprig of yours—with the stutter—he’s a bloody caution,” confided Purvis, steering Butler round the corner of the barn towards the back of the house. “Does he always chance his arm like that?”

“I don’t know,” said Butler. “I only met him for the first time this evening. He’s supposed to be very clever.”

“Too clever by half, if you ask me. Lucky for him he was cheeking that colonel they just sent us, and not our Willy—he’ll take a joke with the best of ‘em, Willy will”—Purvis pointed to a doorway—“but he can’t abide clever buggers. … In here, Jack.”

Butler pushed open the door and stepped into a large lamplit room. The farmhouse kitchen it must be, he thought, as the warmth he always associated with kitchens engulfed him. The scrape of his iron-shod boots on the stone floor and the glint of lamplight on pots and pans hanging on the wall confirmed the thought.

There was a group of bandits clustered round something at the far end of the room to his right—clustered almost guiltily, like schoolboys, so it seemed to him as they turned towards him. Harry Purvis came from behind him, and the schoolboys relaxed. “What the hell are you lot up to?”

“Trying to get a cork out of a bottle without a corkscrew, boyo,” said Corporal Jones.

“What have you done with the corkscrew?”

“Our Willy’s taken it, that’s what,” said Jones with feeling. “And a couple of bottles to go with it, too.”

Judging by the number of bottles at Jones’s feet generosity was not one of his virtues.

“Well, push the bloody cork in then—haven’t you got any sense?” snapped the sergeant. “Jack here’s got a terrible thirst on him.”

“Push the cork in? Man, you can’t do that! This here is good wine—Grand Vin de Touraine, it says. You can’t treat it like it was London beer, that would be a crime. Besides, it doesn’t pour properly if you do that.”

Butler felt in his pocket for his clasp knife. “I’ve got a corkscrew,” he said. “It’s not a very good one, but …”

“No such thing as a not-very-good corkscrew.” Jones advanced towards him. “Jack is it? Well, I can see you’re a man to know, Jack boyo. A man to keep in with … so you shall have the first drink from this bottle, by God!”

There was nothing Butler wanted less than alcohol on an empty stomach; what he had been thinking of longingly was a huge mug of hot, sweet tea. But it would clearly be a bad mistake to reject the Welsh corporal’s offer in the circumstances, when he had made such a good beginning.

“There now!” Jones drew the cork and poured a generous measure of wine into a tumbler. “Grand Vin de Touraine—which is where we’re going to, so nothing could be more fitting for the occasion. Like a taste of things to come, you could say, eh Jack?”

He offered the glass to Butler.

Which is where we
’
re going?

Harry Purvis was off the mark a second later. “What d’you mean, Taf—where we’re going?”

“What I say, that’s what I mean, Harry boyo.” Jones drove the corkscrew into another cork.

“You know something I don’t, then.”

“I shouldn’t wonder at all.” Jones drew the next cork, put the bottle on the table beside him and seized another bottle. “I know a lot of things you don’t, and that’s just one of them.”

Butler put his glass to his lips and sipped cautiously. The wine shone pale yellow-gold in the lamplight, and it tasted pale yellow-gold too, light and dry and infinitely refreshing. It was the heavy red wines that must be dangerous, he decided—this was little more than a fruit juice. He drained the glass thirstily.

“That’s the spirit!” Jones filled his glass again, nodding his head approvingly. “This Touraine is going to be a bit of all right, I’m thinking.” He lifted a glass of his own.

“Who told you it was Touraine?” asked Harry Purvis.

“Who told me? Who told me?” Jones drank, winking at Butler as he did so. “Why, man, our Willy told me, that’s who. Who d’you think I get my information from, eh?”

“When?”

“Just now he did—just before you came in, when he took our corkscrew.” Jones snapped the clasp knife shut and returned it to Butler. “Nothing wrong with that, Jack, so you look after it carefully. I had a little knife like that once—stolen by an Albanian it was. He didn’t call it stealing though, ‘redistribution of property’ he called it, and he was a terrible redistributor of other people’s property until the Eyeties caught him at it. Then they redistributed him. So I got myself a bigger knife from one of his friends, but it doesn’t have a corkscrew, I’m sorry to say.”

Harry Purvis sighed. “What did our Willy say?”

“I was just telling you. Came in looking for a corkscrew, he did. And then he spotted these here bottles, and he said ‘I’ll have a couple of those, then,’ bold as brass.” Jones shook his head. “Of course, I didn’t say anything, but he saw the look in my eye and he says ‘Is there anything the matter, Corporal?’ as though he doesn’t know perfectly well that I had a whole case of red wine sent to the officers’ mess. And so I said, ‘I thought you liked the red better than the white, sir’—which is nothing less than the truth, although it wasn’t what I’d had in mind when he laid hold of our bottles, I can tell you.

“And he said ‘Aye, so I do. But this that you’ve kept for yourself, Corporal, comes from where we’re going, and I’ve a mind to try it’— now, isn’t that what he said, lads?” Jones appealed to the other NCOs. There was a chorus of agreement.

“Not that I disagree with him, mind you.” Jones splashed some more wine into his glass and then into the empty glasses which were stretched out towards him. “Knocks spots off what we’ve been used to, and that’s a fact—here, Jack, you’re missing out, and there’s plenty more where this came from.”

Butler’s glass had emptied itself again somehow. Two pints of beer was his self-imposed limit, but: this wasn’t in the same class as beer. And besides, he hadn’t had half a pint of it yet, so far as he could judge, so he could take no very great harm from another cup or two.

Jones nodded encouragingly as he filled the glass. “There now … so it’s Touraine for us then, wherever that is. But if there’s plenty of this”—he raised the bottle—

“And no bloody Germans,” said someone.

“All, now
there
”
—
Jones
pointed the bottle at the speaker—“now there you have put your finger on a matter of greater interest to us, I’m thinking.”

“But they’re all buggering off home, Taf. Our Willy said so.”

“So he did, boyo, so he did. And maybe it’s true, and maybe it isn’t.”

“Oh, come on, Taf! If the Yanks are over the Seine—“

“And we’ve landed in the South of France, Taf—“ Jones raised the bottle to silence them. “All right! If it’s all the Gospel truth then it’s in a mean, nasty, and disinheriting mood they’ll be in, I’m thinking—remember those Waffen SS troops that chased us that time? The ones out of Sarajevo? Nasty, they were … and I can’t see them going home without a fight, either, no matter what.”

“But they’re in Jugland, Taf.”

“Those ones are. But what about the ones that are here, eh?”

Jones shook his head mournfully, reducing the company to silence in contemplation of unpleasant possibilities. Butler was reminded suddenly of Colonel Clinton’s reference to the rules which didn’t need to be spelt out.

For once his curiosity was stronger than his shyness. “What happens if we get captured?” he inquired. “I mean … I know what the officer said, but …” he trailed off helplessly.

“Get captured?” Taffy Jones seemed highly amused. “Name, rank, and number—and just leave the rest to them.” He put the bottle down on the table and drew his finger across his throat, grinning horribly.

“Put a sock in it, Taf,” said Sergeant Purvis sharply. “We don’t get captured, Jack—that’s the short answer.”

“Ah—but he wants the long answer, Harry,” said Jones, unabashed. “And the long answer is … make sure that you’re taken by the proper German army, boyo. Not bad fellows they are—just like you and me … shoot you, they will, most like—just like we’d do in the same place —unless you’re a
very
good liar, that is …”

Butler stared at him.

“But that’s all they’ll do,” continued Jones. “But now … if it’s the Abwehr or the Feldgendarmerie—what are like our Redcaps, the Feldgendarmerie—if you’re lucky then they’ll shoot you too. But you’ve got to be lucky, mind.”

He picked up the bottle and filled Butler’s glass.

“It’s the SS you’ve got to steer clear of. Because they don’t take name, rank, and number for an answer, they don’t. They like a lot more than that, and they aren’t fussy about how they get it, either. So with them it’s like Harry says: you don’t get captured.” He smiled. “It’s like at the pictures, with the cowboys and the Indians—you save the last bullet for yourself, see?”

Butler was appalled.

Sergeant Purvis shook his head in exasperation. “I didn’t mean that at all, and you know it full well, you stupid Welsh git.” He turned towards Butler. “With the major running things we just don’t get caught, that’s what I mean, Jack. It was that bloody colonel—what’s-‘is-name—who started that bloody hare, because he doesn’t know any better. Our Willy’s always one bloody jump ahead of everyone—the bloody SS included, you take it from me, Jack. Otherwise we wouldn’t be bloody here, and that’s a fact.”

The chorus erupted again—

“Aye—“

“You’re dead right there, Harry—“

“You silly sod, Taf—“

—reassuringly. Butler smiled foolishly, ashamed of his momentary cowardice. Every unit had its Taffy Jones. What he must remember was that every unit did not have its Major O’Conor.

“All right, all right,
all right
.” Taffy Jones acknowledged defeat. “In any case, that’s not what’s really important—not what’s really
interesting
.”

He was changing the subject now the joke had gone sour on him, thought Butler. One beneficial effect of a glass or
two
of wine was that it sharpened the wits: he could see clear through the little Welshman— and out the other side.

“What’s so interesting?” he asked magnanimously.

“Ah—I can see you know, Jack,” said Jones, first pointing the empty bottle at Butler, then sweeping it round to include the other NCOs. “But they don’t—they haven’t thought of it even!”

“And what’s that then, Taf?” Someone caught the Welsh intonation, saving Butler from having to reveal that he was as much at sea as the rest of them.

“Why, man—His Majesty’s
extremely
valuable property, of course.” Jones looked round triumphantly. “What is it that we’re going to …
repossess
? That’s what I’d like to know, eh.”

His Majesty’s extremely valuable property … the Welshman was right at that—it was interesting. Butler found himself exchanging a glance in silence with Sergeant Purvis, and for a moment it was like gazing into a mirror revealing his own mystification.

Jones’s eyes settled on him. “Now you, Jack … you’ve been with our Willy all the afternoon. So it’s wondering I am whether he maybe let slip a little something, eh?”

Butler scratched his head. “Well, Corporal—“

“Taffy’s the name, Jack boyo.”

“Taffy … well, all he said was we were going to take a castle from the Germans—“ he began doubtfully.

“Ah—from the Germans. So we
are
going to fight them!”

“Not necessarily,” said Sergeant Purvis. “Could be that they’re going to move out and then we’re going to move in—before the bloody frogs do, like.”

Jones gestured with the bottle. “Now, you could be right there, Harry—that fits in with it nicely, that does. If we’re not going to have anything to do with the Frenchies, that could mean we’re more worried about them than about the Germans—and that also explains why we’ve to nip in quick-like, before they can do the same.” He nodded at the sergeant. “Ye-ess, Harry boyo—that would account for it.”