The Complete McAuslan (50 page)

‘Aye, well,’ said Mrs McGilvray, looking down at her cup. ‘I aye worry aboot him.’

‘Ach, women!’ cried Uncle, winking at me. ‘Aye on aboot their weans. See yersel’ anither potato scone, L‘tenant. Ma Goad, ma Goad.’

‘Does he . . .’ Mrs McGilvray hesitated, ‘does he . . . do his work well? I mean . . . looking after you, Mr MacNeill?’

‘Oh, indeed he does. I think I’m very lucky.’

‘Ah’d sooner hae a cairter lookin’ efter me!’ wheezed Uncle. ‘Heh-heh! Aye, or a caur conductor! Ma Goad, ma Goad.’

‘Wheesht, Uncle! Whit’ll Mr MacNeill think?’

‘He’ll think yer an auld blether, gaun on aboot Cherlie! The boy’s no’ a bairn ony langer, sure’n he’s no’. He’s a grown man.’ He glinted at me. ‘Sure that’s right? Here . . . will ye tak’ a wee dram, L’tenant? Ach, wheesht, wumman – can Ah no’ gie the man a right drink, then? His tongue’ll be hingin’ oot!’ At his insistence she produced a decanter, shaking her head, apologising, while he cried to gie the man a decent dram, no’ just dirty his gless. He beamed on me.

‘Here’s tae us! Ninety-Twa, no’ deid yet!’

‘Whisky at tea-time – whit’ll Mr MacNeill think o’ ye?’ wondered his niece, half-smiling.

‘He’ll no’ think the worse o’ me for gie’n him a wee dram tae the Ninety-Twa,’ said Uncle comfortably. He raised his glass again. ‘An’ tae the Bantam’s, hey, L’tenant? Aye, them’s the wee boys! Ma Goad, ma Goad . . .’

Mrs McGilvray saw me to the door when I left, Uncle crying after me no’ tae shoot ony cheeses gaun doon the stair. When I had thanked her she said:

‘I wonder . . . Charlie doesnae write very often. D’you think . . . ?’

‘He’ll write every week,’ I assured her. ‘He’s a great lad, Mrs McGilvray. You’re very lucky.’

‘Well,’ she said, clasping her hands, ‘he’s always been right enough. I’m sure you’ll look after him.’ We shook hands and she pecked me quickly on the cheek. ‘Take care, laddie.’

Uncle’s hoarse chuckle sounded from the inner room. ‘Come ben, wumman! Whit’ll the neebors say, you hingin’ aboot the stairheid wi’ sojers!’

She gave me a despairing look and retreated, and I went down the stairs, stepping over the children and reflecting that I was certainly not going to be able to change my batman now.

The final visit was to MacKenzie’s people, who lived in a fifteenth-century castle-cum-mansion in Perthshire, a striking piece of Gothic luxury in beautiful parkland with a drive a mile long through banks of cultivated heather; it contained its own salmon river, a fortune in standing timber, and a battalion of retainers who exercised dogs, strolled about with shotguns, and manicured the rhododendrons. Sir Gavin MacKenzie was his son thirty years on, tall, commanding, and with a handshake like a mangle; the red had apparently seeped from his hair into his cheeks, but that was the only difference. In manner he was cordial and abrupt, a genuine John Buchan Scottish aristo – which is to say that he was more English than any Englishman could ever hope to be. If you doubt that, just consider such typical ‘Englishmen’ as Harold Macmillan, David Niven, Alec Douglas-Home, Jack Buchanan, Stewart Granger, and Charles II.

This was the only visit on which I actually stayed on the premises overnight. We dined at a long candle-lit table in a large and clammy hall with age-blackened panelling covered with crossed broadswords, targes, and flintlocks, with silent servitors emerging occasionally from the gloom to refuel us. At one end sat Sir Gavin in a dinner jacket and appalling MacKenzie tartan trews cut on the diagonal; at the other, Lady MacKenzie, an intense woman with a staccato delivery who chain-smoked throughout the meal. From time to time she and her husband addressed each other in the manner of people who have met only recently; it was hard to believe that they knew each other well enough to be have begotten not only their son but a daughter, seated opposite me, a plain, lumpy sixteen-year-old with the magnificent MacKenzie hair, flaming red and hanging to her waist. The only other diner was a pale, elderly man with an eye-glass whose name I didn’t catch – in fact, looking back, I’m not sure he was there at all, since he never spoke and no one addressed him. He drank most of a bottle of Laphroaig during the meal, and took it with him when the ladies withdrew, leaving old man MacKenzie and me to riot over the port.

Coming on the evening of the day I had spent with the McGilvrays, it was an odd contrast. Lady MacKenzie had chattered non-stop about her son, but without asking any questions, and his sister had not, I think, referred to him at all, but since she had the finishing-school habit of talking very quickly to her armpit it was difficult to be sure. Sir Gavin had spoken only of the Labour Government. Now, when we were alone, he demanded to know why, in my opinion, Kenny had not joined the Scots Guards, in which he, Sir Gavin, had held an exalted position. Why had he chosen a Highland regiment? It was extraordinary, when he could have been in the Brigade; Sir Gavin couldn’t understand it.

I said, trying not to smile, that it was possible some people might prefer a Highland regiment, and Sir Gavin said, yes, he knew
that,
but it wasn’t the point. Why young Kenneth? It seemed very odd to him, when the family had always been in the Brigade, and he could have kept an eye on the boy – ‘I mean, I don’t know your Colonel – what’s his name? No, don’t know him. Good man, is he?’

‘They don’t come any better,’ I said. It seemed fairly obvious to me why young Kenneth, a firebrand and a maverick, had chosen not to be in father’s regiment, but that could not be said. Sir Gavin looked glum, and said he didn’t know anything
about
Highland regiments – fine reputation, of course, but he didn’t know how they
were
, d’you see what I mean? With the Guards, you knew where you were. Life for a young officer was cut and dried . . . Highland regiment, he wasn’t so sure. Suddenly he asked:

‘Is he a
good
officer?’

‘Kenny? Yes. His Jocks like him.’

‘His what?’

‘His Jocks – his men.’

‘Oh.’ He frowned. ‘What about your Colonel?’

‘I’m sure he thinks Kenny’s a good officer.’ Indeed, Sir Gavin didn’t know about Highland regiments, where the opinion of the men is the ultimate test, and every colonel knows it. Sir Gavin chewed his cigar and then said:

‘You were a ranker, weren’t you? Very well – in Burma, would you have . . . accepted Kenneth as your platoon commander? ’

I mentally compared Kenny with the brisk young man who’d once challenged me to a spelling bee and caught me out over ‘inadmissible’, and who’d died in a bunker entrance the next day. A good subaltern, but no better than MacKenzie.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Kenny would have done.’

‘You think so?’ he said, and suddenly I realised he was worried about his son. In the Guards, he could have served
with
him in spirit, so to speak – but he didn’t know how Highland regiments
were
, he’d said. Did the boy fit into that almost alien background? Was he a good officer? Like Mrs McGilvray, he aye worried about him, if for a different reason. So it seemed sensible to start talking about Kenny, describing how he got on in the regiment, how he and his platoon sergeant, McCaw, the Communist Clydesider, formed a disciplinary alliance that was a battalion byword, recalling incidents in which Kenny had figured, our own companionship, things like that, no doubt babbling a bit, while Sir Gavin listened, and kept the decanter going, now and then asking a question, finally sitting in silence for a while, and then saying:

‘Well, I’m glad he’s all right. Thank you.’

It was two in the morning when we finally rose, port-bloated and drowsy-he must have been partially kettled, for he insisted on a frame of snooker with accompanying brandies before we parted for the night. ‘John’ll look after you,’ he said, hiccoughing courteously, and I was aware of a dim sober figure at the foot of the massive staircase, waiting to conduct me to my room – which brings me back, after this digression of homecoming, to where I was in the first place.

John was a footman, the only one I have ever encountered outside the pages of Georgette Heyer and Wodehouse, and he would have fitted into them perfectly, along with the rest of the MacKenzie menage. No doubt I was a trifle woozy with tiredness and Croft’s Old Original, but I have no impression that I had to stir so much as a finger in order to get into bed. His shadow flitted about me, my clothes vanished, towel and soap and warm water swam into my ken, followed by pyjamas and a cup of some bland liquid, and then I was between the sheets and all was dark contentment. When I woke two hours later there was a tray at the bedside with various mineral waters, biscuits, and a glass of milk, all under a dim night-light. I think the milk had been spiked, for the first two hours after waking next morning passed in a beatific haze; I seem to remember curtains being drawn and a cup of tea appearing, and then I was borne up gently into a sitting position and presently subsided, shaven, while a voice murmured that my bath had been drawn – not filled or running, you understand, but drawn. At that point he vanished, and when I emerged from the bathroom, more or less awake, there was a breakfast tray on the window table, with porridge and Arbroath smokies and ham and eggs and such morning rolls as God’s Own Prophet eats only in Glasgow bakeries; the
Scotsman
and the
Bulletin
lay beside it (not that I was fit for more than the Scottykin comic strip), my clothes were laid out, pressed, brushed, and beautiful, my shoes a-gleam, and even my cap badge and sporran chains had been polished.

This, it slowly dawned on me, was living, and it took an immense effort to decline the MacKenzies’ invitation to stay on, but I suspected that after a few days of John’s attention I would have forgotten how to tie my shoe-laces and wave bye-bye. As I travelled south again, and later on the flight to Cairo, I had day-dreams in which the press-gang had been reintroduced, and John had been crimped into my personal service; it would give me a new outlook on life, and I would rise effortlessly to general rank and a knighthood, possibly even C.I.G.S., for nothing less was conceivable with that mysterious retainer sorting me out; I would have to live up to the ambience he created. At that point the dreaming stopped, as I realised that I simply wasn’t made for that kind of destiny, or for the ministrations of people like John.

This was driven home with a vengeance in Benghazi, of all unlikely places, where I had to spend three days between flights on the way back to the battalion. I had just entered the room allotted me in the transit camp when there was a clump of martial feet on the verandah, and into the doorway wheeled a gigantic German prisoner-of-war. From the crown of his blond shaving-brush skull to his massive ammunition boots and rolled socks must have been a cool six and a half feet; in between he wore only tiny khaki shorts and a shirt which appeared to have been starched with concrete. He crashed to attention, stared at the wall, and shouted:

‘Saar, Ai em yewer betmen. Mai nem is Hans. Pliz permit thet Ai unpeck yewer kit.’

My immediate reaction was: how the hell did we ever beat this lot? For what I was looking at was one of Frederick William’s Prussian giants, the picture of a Panzer Grenadier, the perfect military automaton. He was, I learned later, captured Afrika Korps, waiting to be repatriated and meanwhile employed to attend transients like myself. When I had recovered and told him to carry on, he stamped again, ducked his head sharply, and went at my valise like a great clockwork doll, unpacking and stowing with a precision that was not quite human; it was a relief to see that there wasn’t a knob on the side of his neck.

It was my first encounter with the German military, and I didn’t mind if it was the last. In his heel-clicking way he was as perfect a servant as John had been, for while John had worked his miracles without actually being there, apparently, and never obtruding his personality, Hans succeeded by having no personality at all. It was like having a machine about the place, bringing tea by numbers; you could almost hear the whirr and click with every action. In fact, he was a robot-genie, with the gift of sudden shattering appearance; he would be out on the verandah, standing at ease, and if I so much as coughed he would be quivering in the doorway shouting ‘Saar!’, ready to fetch me a box of matches or march on Moscow. I began to understand Frederick the Great and Hitler; given a couple of million Hanses at your beck and call, the temptation to say ‘Occupy Europe at once!’ must be overpowering.

I say he had no personality, but I’m not so sure. In three days he never betrayed emotion, or even moved a facial muscle except to speak; if he had a thought beyond the next duty to be performed, you would never have known it. But on the last night, I had gone up to the mess in khaki drill, having left my kilt hanging by its waist-loops on the cupboard door. Coming back, I glanced in at my window, and there was Hans standing looking at the kilt with an expression I hadn’t seen before. It was a thoughtful, intense stare, with a lot of memory behind it; he moved forward and felt the material, traced his thumb-nail along one of the yellow threads, and then stepped back, contemplating it with his cropped head on one side. I may be wrong, but I believe that if ever a man was thinking, ‘Next time, you sons-of-bitches’, he was. I made a noise approaching the doorway, and when I went in he was turning down the bed, impassive as ever.

But whatever secret thoughts he may have had in his Teutonic depths, Hans, as a servant, was too much for me – just as the disembodied John had been. As I observed earlier, you have to be a Junker, or its social equivalent (with all that that implies) to be able to bear having the Johns and Hanses dance attendance on you; if you are just a gentleman for the working day, you must stick to your own kind.

I reached the battalion the following evening, asked the jeep driver to drop off my kit at my billet, and walked over to 12 Platoon barrack-room. They were there, loafing about, lying on their cots, exchanging the patter, some cleaning their kit, others preparing to go out on the town: the dapper Fletcher was combing his hair at a mirror, fox-trotting on the spot; Forbes, in singlet and shorts, was juggling a tennis ball on his instep; Riach was writing a letter (to the Wee Frees’ Grand Inquisitor, probably) ; Daft Bob Brown was sitting on his bed singing ‘Ah’ve got spurrs that jingle-jangle-jingle, so they doo-oo!’ and at the far end Private McAuslan, clad à la mode in balmoral bonnet and a towel with which he had evidently been sweeping a chimney, was balanced precariously on his bed-end, swiping furiously at moths with his rifle-sling; from his hoarse vituperations I gather he blamed their intrusion on Sergeant Telfer, the Army Council, and the Labour Government of Mr Attlee. He and Sir Gavin MacKenzie should have got together.