The Complete McAuslan (35 page)

‘That’s awfully kind of you,’ I said, ‘but I’ve a dreadful feeling I’m orderly officer this weekend. If I can’t make it, please accept my apologies in advance.’

I wasn’t going to make it, which was petty, if you like, but somehow I suddenly felt I’d had just a trifle too much of Mrs Ramsey’s hospitality – house-trained though I presumably was. Poor McAuslan – he wouldn’t bat an eye when confronted with half a dozen Arabi thugs, but he must have been scared stiff in the presence of the gracious Mrs Ramsey and her best bone china. I thought of that scruffy, awkward figure glowering uncertainly at the thin brown bread and mumbling incoherently over his cup, and found I was cutting at the air with my walking-stick as I walked down the hospital drive.

Poor unseemly Glasgow Galahad. He had done a very proper, brave thing – gallant, if you like – and his eventual reward had been to feel uncomfortable and humiliated in the presence of the Colonel’s lady – not that she could help being what she was any more than he could. And fairly obviously he had been sore smitten by Ellen Ramsey, which no private soldier of McAuslan’s social undesirability could afford to be – not even in the democratic aftermath of the Second World War. We are meant to pretend that social distinctions are a thing of the past, but as in all things it depends who are the individuals involved. Take McAuslan, and you might as well apply the conventions of the Middle Ages. You wouldn’t want him hanging round your daughter, I’ll tell you.

Still, I found myself disliking Mrs Ramsey’s
grande dame
implications. And also regretting – as I’d often done – Private McAuslan’s thick-headedness; why hadn’t he just faded out gracefully, after doing his good deed? But he hadn’t, and he didn’t – the day after I had been at the hospital I happened to be driving down town to the Stadium, and saw Ellen Ramsey obviously coming back from her afternoon’s shopping. She was sitting in one of those two-person horse-gharries, looking like the front row of the chorus, and who should be in the other seat, half-hidden under a load of parcels, but Old Man Karloff himself. He was grinning, in a bashful sort of way, and obviously as pleased as Punch – no wonder he had started taking baths and went about the place singing.

I wondered if I should do something about it. It seemed to me that McAuslan was liable to get himself hurt. But what to do? He was infringing no military rule; he wouldn’t, poor soul, have understood what it was all about – neither, I think, would Ellen Ramsey. It was all so trivial and unimportant – but so are many potentially disastrous things, and they become disasters simply because, being trivial at the outset, you can’t take hold of them.

Anyway, it all came to a head a few days later, in a way which, looking back, seems totally unreal. I went to Mrs Ramsey’s cocktail party after all – well, it was free drink and liver on sticks, and I wasn’t going to face the Saturday night cold meat in the mess with the prospect of being roped in to the second-in-command’s bridge game afterwards. So I went to the hospital, where the garrison’s finest were circulating and knocking back the gin; there were about thirty people on the Ramseys’ verandah, making the usual deafening cocktail-party chatter, and I latched on to a glass and made heavy play among the cheese and grapes and wee biscuits with paste on them. In between I heard about adrenalin from old man Ramsey, his wife told me that she didn’t know what she was going to do about the Arab hospital sweepers who were certainly pilfering from the stores not that she minded the loss so much as the fact that they would certainly contaminate the foodstuffs, the Padre from the Fusiliers wanted to know, in a round-about way, what provision was made for the spiritual nourishment of Anglicans in a Highland battalion, and the dockyard captain, plashing with gin, told me about his early training days on a windjammer. All the usual stuff, and then, having done my duty, I retired to a corner to chat up one of the nurses – you can’t be a misogynist for ever.

It was then I noticed Ellen Ramsey. She was, as usual, between MacKenzie and Grant, but I noticed she kept glancing in my direction – well, poor butterfly, I thought, it was bound to happen sooner or later. And then she gave me an undoubted look, and I detached myself and went over to a quiet corner of the verandah. She slipped away from MacKenzie and Grant and came across.

‘You’re Dand MacNeill, aren’t you?’ she said, and I found myself reflecting comfortably that two centuries earlier some fair Venetian had probably said, ‘You’re Giacomo Casanova, aren’t you?’ in just the same way. So I gave my nonchalant bow, and then she ruined the effect by saying,

‘Yes, Jimmy said you were.’ Jimmy was Grant, the Terraplane-driver.

‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ she went on. Frankly, I didn’t; faced with something that looks like the young Lana Turner, I’m as impressionable as the next man.

‘I’m probably being silly, but – well, I thought I ought to ask someone. Look – you’re John McAuslan’s platoon commander, aren’t you?’

I hadn’t expected that, at any rate – it was nearly as surprising as hearing someone use McAuslan’s Christian name – bad platoon commander that I was, I’d never really thought of his having one. But the surprises hadn’t really started.

‘I know I’m being stupid,’ she said, looking embarrassed, ‘but I had a rather odd experience this afternoon. No, please don’t laugh. It’s just – well, he’s been helping me quite regularly lately, down at the market, carrying parcels and that sort of thing, you know, being generally useful . . .’

‘I know, your mother told me.’

‘Yes, well, then you know he helped me out with some beastly Arab – and he seemed very anxious to go on helping, and well, he
did
know his way around the market, you know . . .’ She shrugged, and spilled some drink from her glass. ‘Oh, damn, sorry . . . but, well, he seemed all right, although he looked pretty awful – well, he does, doesn’t he? And then . . . this afternoon . . .’

‘What about this afternoon?’ I asked, feeling all sorts of nameless dreads.

‘Well, this afternoon – ’ she looked me in the eye ’ – he proposed to me.’

For a moment I nearly laughed, and then, very quickly, I didn’t want to. She wasn’t even smiling – her pretty face was perplexed and unhappy. I was relieved, and astonished, and angry, and – no other word for it – fascinated.

‘Let me get it right. McAuslan proposed to you – marriage?’

‘Yes, on the way home. We usually come back by horsecarriage, and it was a nice afternoon, and I thought it would be nice to drive along the front, and look at the wrecks in the bay – and on the way . . . he asked me to marry him.’

Oh, God, McAuslan, I thought. Think of the improbable, and he’ll do it every time.

‘I didn’t really understand at first – you know he doesn’t talk very much – well, he hasn’t to me, at least. Just when we were in the market, and so on, and I don’t understand a lot of it anyway – it’s his accent. And when he started talking this afternoon, I couldn’t make much of it out, and then it dawned on me . . . there wasn’t any doubt of it. He was proposing.’

‘You’re sure?’ I was trying to hold on to reality. ‘What did he say, exactly?’

‘Oh, gosh, I couldn’t reproduce it.’ She was very much a schoolgirl, really. ‘But he said, ‘We could get married’ – merit, he called it. He said it again.’

‘You’re sure . . . he wasn’t being funny?’

‘Oh, no. No. He was dead serious. I’ve been proposed to before – once – not half as seriously as he did. He meant it. It never even occurred to me to treat it as a joke.’ She looked uncertain, frowning. ‘I couldn’t have.’

‘What did you say – I mean, if it’s any of my business?’

‘Well, when I’d got over the surprise, and realised he was being serious, I said – I said no. Look, honestly, I know this sounds terribly silly to you, and you probably think I’m an idiot, or that I think it’s all a big giggle, or something, but I don’t – really, I don’t. I mean, if I had, I wouldn’t have wanted to tell you, would I?’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Well – why are you . . . telling me?’

‘Because I’m worried. All right, you probably think it’s a great hoot, but it isn’t. I said no, you see . . . and he asked me again, in that sort of dogged way, and I said, “No, look, please, it isn’t on. I mean, I don’t want to get married.” And he asked me again, very seriously, and I said no, and tried to explain . . . and then – you won’t believe this . . .’

‘I’ll believe anything,’ I said, and meant it.

‘Well, he started to cry. He just looked at me, very steadily, and then tears started to run down his cheeks. Positive tears, I mean. He didn’t sob, or anything like that. He just . . . well, wept. I asked him not to, but he just stared at me, and then he climbed out of the carriage, and walked away. I didn’t know what to think. And then he came back, and looked at me, and said, “It’s no’ bluidy fair.” That’s what he said. And then he said, “Good afternoon” and walked off. I mean, it’s mad, isn’t it?’

She stood smiling at me, with that puzzled look in her big, blue eyes, and I wondered for an instant if this was some fearful joke thought up by her and Messrs MacKenzie and Grant to take the mickey out of me. But it wasn’t, and she was worried.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know about mad – but it’s certainly unexpected. I don’t really know . . .’

‘Look, I’m awfully sorry even mentioning it. . . I feel an awful fool . . . but . . . I mean he’s really a terribly nice person – I think – but, well, it worries me. He can be pretty savage, you know – if you’d seen him with that Arab, I mean, just for a minute he was really berserk. I mean, he seemed pretty badly cut-up this afternoon – he really looked awful – more awful, I mean.’ She suddenly put down her glass. ‘Look, I don’t think I’m a
femme fatale,
or anything, and I know it sounds like something out of
Red Letter
, but he wouldn’t do anything silly, would he?’

The answer to that was yes, of course, he being McAuslan, but whatever it was, it would be some folly no one had thought of yet.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘Please, don’t think I’m being stupid – well, I am, I suppose, getting all in a tizzy about nothing. Only I wanted to tell someone – and you’re his platoon commander – and he said something about you once – not today – and well . . . I wouldn’t want him to think that I was laughing at him, or anything like that. I mean most boys . . .’ She gave a gesture that would have belted Grant and MacKenzie right in the ego’. . . you know how it is. But, he’s so serious . . . he really is. It’s really silly, isn’t it? And I’m the genuine dumb blonde, aren’t I?’

No, I thought, you’re a rather nice girl; dumb, yes, in some ways, but nice with it.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you didn’t laugh at him, so . . .’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t laugh.’

‘So that’s all there is to it,’ I said.

‘Look . . . maybe I shouldn’t have said anything . . . I mean, he won’t get into any kind of trouble, will he?’

‘Why should he? Proposing isn’t a crime.’

‘No, I suppose not . . . but if Daddy knew, he’d be hopping mad. Mummy,’ she added elegantly, ‘would bust a gut. And I hate to think what Jimmy Grant or Kenny would do about it.’

‘If either Lieutenant Grant or Lieutenant MacKenzie were ill-advised enough to try to do anything about a member of my platoon,’ I said, ‘you would be bringing fruit and flowers for them in the afternoons.’

‘Good. Could you get me another punch, please? I feel I need it after all this confessional stuff. Look, do you think I’m barmy? It all sounds so dam’ silly, doesn’t it?’

Take anyone’s proposal of marriage, and the chances are it will sound silly. Hollywood has overworked the truth of how people talk to the extent that reality, when you come across it, usually sounds corny. I remember a fellow in Burma being shot in the leg, and he rolled over shouting: ‘They got me! The dirty rats, they got me!’ Put that into fiction and people will laugh at it, but I heard it happen.

Similarly, the remarkable conversation I had just had with Ellen Ramsey. It was, as she said, damned silly, but I knew it was true, and that to McAuslan it had probably been a bit of a tragedy, and in no way funny. The thought of her and McAuslan doing the Jane Austen bit – and no doubt looking like something left out for the cleansing department while he did it – should, in theory, have been ludicrous. But she didn’t think so, and neither did I. It was pathetic, and rather touching, and not for the first time I found myself uncomfortably moved by that uncertain, unhappy, vulnerable little tatterdemalion. It must have hurt him, and I wondered how he was taking it.

It wasn’t just a sentimental consideration, either. I knew my McAuslan; under the bludgeonings of fate, in whatever form, his normal reaction was to go absent, and I didn’t want that. He had been over the wall too often in the past, and if he did it again he could be in serious trouble. So I took the precaution of checking the guardroom list that midnight, and sure enough, his name was among those who had failed to book in by 2359 hours.

Normally, when a man does that, you expect to see him returned within a few hours, full of flit and defiance, by the gestapo. But I decided to take no chances; I rang a friend in the provost marshal’s office, one of the half-human ones, and asked him to do a quick sweep with his redcaps for one McAuslan, J., that well-known wanderer, and whip him back to barracks as fast as possible.

‘I don’t want him going A.W.O.L., Charlie,’ I explained. ‘His record won’t stand it. Try the Old Suk; he’s probably rolling in some gutter with a skinful of arak.’

‘It beats me why you want him back,’ said Charlie, ‘but leave it to me; my boys’ll find him.’

But they didn’t. Sunday noon came, without result, and McAuslan’s name went up on the board as absent without leave. That was bad enough; my next fear was that he had done something really daft, like hopping an outward-bound ship, in which case his absence would become desertion. He couldn’t, I asked myself, do anything worse, could he? Jilted people are capable of anything, and I began to see visions of McAuslan a la Ophelia, floating belly-up with rosemary and fennel twined in his hair. It had got to the point where I was trying to translate ‘Adieu, cruel world’ into Glasgow patter, when the mess phone rang.