The Complete McAuslan (64 page)

‘Tae listen tae because.’

‘So help me God, if you use that word again I’ll forget myself.
What
were you listening
to
?’

‘Ah’m tellin’ ye, sur! Because!’ His simian brow was bedewed with sweat, and he was plucking lumps from the blanket as he strove to enlighten me. ‘Ah wis listenin’ tae because! Onna gramyphone. Ye know, Because Goad made thee mine Ah′ll cherish thee, but. Itsa song onna record onna gramyphone. Ye must hae heard it, sur!’ He regarded me in desperate appeal. ‘Because?’

It dawned. In the library the Padre maintained a portable gramophone and a selection of records for the battalion’s music-lovers, of whom the battered wretch before me was apparently one – and that was enough to beggar belief, but that’s McAuslan for you.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, McAuslan, I didn’t understand. I must be slow today. You went to the library to listen to a record of the song entitled “Because”, and – ’

‘Onna gramyphone.’

‘As you say, on the gramophone. Then what happened?’

‘Aye, weel, like Ah’m sayin’, Ah’m listenin’ tae ra record – here it’s a smashin’ record, but! Ye know it, sur? Yon man Tawber – he’s a Hun, but jeez, whit a voice!’ His pimpled countenance took on a look of holy rapture. ‘He minds me a bit o’ Jackie O’Connell that used tae be in C Company, ye mind him? Irish boy, sang like a lintie, “Ah’m on’y a Wanderin’ Vagabond” an’ “Bless this Hoose” an’ – ’

‘Hold it, McAuslan! You were listening to “Because”, sung by Richard Tauber. Fine. Then what happened?’

‘Aye, weel, sur, like Ah tellt ye, Ah’m listenin’ tae ra record, an’ wee Tawber’s givin’ it lalldy, when Chisholm comes in an’ starts pickin’ oot some o’ the ither records that’s there – there’s some right bummers, Ah’m tellin’ ye, bluidy screechin’ Eyeties, ye widnae credit it – an’ efter a bit he sez: “Ye gaunae play that record a’ night, then?” “Take yer time, pal,” Ah sez, “Ah’m listenin’ tae ra music here.” So he stauns aroon’ an’ then sez: “Ye’ve played it hauf a dozen times a‘ready. Hoo aboot givin’ some ither buddy a chance?” “Look, mac,” sez Ah, ”just haud on an’ ye’ll get the gramyphone when Ah’m finished, see? Whit ye in such a hurry to play, onywye?” “Ah’ve got some
music
here,” sez he, nasty-like, “jazz classics an’ chamber music, for your information.” “Jazz classics?’ sez Ah. “There’s no such thing, an’ Ah can mak’ better chamber music in a latrine bucket.” “Ah suppose ye think that cheap syrup ye’re playin’ is music?” sez he. “Cheap syrup?” sez Ah – an’ that wis when Ah stuck one oan him.’

As Wanger used to say, no doubt. Well, it was fascinating, all right, and revealed a side to McAuslan which I had never dreamed of. And yet why not? Breasts didn’t come any more savage than his, and if Tauber soothed it, splendid. But that wasn’t really the point.

‘In other words, you were hogging the gramphone, and he objected, and you belted him. You’re just a hooligan, aren’t you?’

‘Oh, haud on, sur, it wasnae that, but!’ he protested. ‘Ah’d hiv let him hiv the gramyphone if he hadnae been so sniffy, the toffy-nosed Embro git! But Ah wisnae havin’ him sayin’ that aboot the greatest song ever wrote! No’ on yer life!’ His unwashed face quivered with outrage. ’ “Cheap syrup”, sez he! That wis why Ah clocked him, an’ then he clocked me, an’ we got tore in, an’ then the Gestapo came an’ beltit the both o’ us an’ pit us in the tank.’ He snorted and sat down abruptly, plainly much moved. ‘The cheek o’ him! No, Ah wisnae havin’ that, no’ aboot “Because”.’ He gave a rasping sigh, scratching himself in a way that determined me to have a shower presently. ‘Think mebbe Sarn′t McGarry’d gi’e us a cuppa chah, sur?’

‘Try asking him and see what you get,’ I suggested, and he shuddered. He and the Provost Sergeant were old acquaintances. ‘But, look here, McAuslan, you can’t clock people just because they don’t like “Because”.’ Now I was doing it. ‘People are entitled to express their opinions – I mean, it’s a nice song, but – ’

‘Itsa greatest music onybody ever made up.’ He said it with a grim intensity that quite startled me. ‘It’s marvellous. Nuthin’ like it. No’ even in Church.’

‘That’s your opinion, but the fact that Chisholm doesn’t share it is no reason to start a brawl and break up the library. Or for getting a man with a clean sheet into trouble, you horrible article. Not that he isn’t to blame, too. Anyway, whatever the Colonel gives you – and I hope it’s plenty – the first thing you and Chisholm do when you get out is apologise to the Padre, pay for the damage, and put in seven nights fatigue at the Church. Got that?’

‘Yessur, rightsur! But Chisholm shouldnae hiv insultit – ’

‘Shut up about Chisholm! Anyway, what the hell’s so special about “Because”?’ I asked out of irritated curiosity, and was given the brooding, reproachful stare of the great anthropoid at zoo spectators; he even stopped scratching.

‘It’s bluidy great,’ he said solemnly. ‘Wonderfullest song ever wrote. ‘Atsa fac’, sur.’

He really meant it, and I knew McAuslan well enough to be aware that when he believed something, it was engraved on marble, or whatever his brain was made of. And while musical obsession was something new, well, different strains work their magic on different ears, and if he was enthralled by ‘Because’, I wasn’t going to argue – on his recent showing, it wouldn’t have been safe. I left his cell thinking there were many things that I knew not, and the deeps of McAuslan’s mind was the first of them. Why ‘Because’? Was I missing something? I whistled the tune absently, and paused, repeating the words under my breath.

Because you come to me
With naught save lo-ove . . .

‘Beg pardon, sir?’ said Sergeant McGarry anxiously, and I left hurriedly, still pondering why that ordinary (even syrupy, as Chisholm had said) little tune should stir such passion in my platoon’s answer to Karloff. Tauber sang it beautifully, to be sure, but hardly well enough to justify battery. Having nothing better to do, I turned off to the library, which was empty at that time of night and still bore signs of the evening’s discord; ‘Because’ was still on the gramophone, so I cranked the handle and let her rip, and Tauber hadn’t unleashed more than a couple of sobs before there was a cry of alarm from the inner office and the Padre shot out, pale-faced and hiding his spectacles; he stopped with a gasp of relief and subsided on a chair.

‘Thank God it’s yourself – for a minute I thought it was yon Gorbals troglodyte back again. Has McGarry bound him with fetters of brass, I hope?’

‘Sorry I startled you, bishop. Just doing some research on Tauber.’

The Padre cocked a critical ear. ‘Ah, the Cherrnan lieder. Chust so. Fine voices, but they aye sound to me as though they’ve got something trapped. I’m an Orpheus Choir man myself, and a wee bit of Brahms, but I’ve no taste. “Because”, eh? I once knew a tenor who sang it in the Gaelic . . . mind you, he was from Tiree . . .’

‘Wonder why it appeals to McAuslan?’

‘Who can say?’ The Padre prepared to go into a Hebridean philosophic trance. ‘Barrack-room sentiment? Childhood memory? Maybe his mother sang him to sleep wi’ it.’ He shivered. ‘Can ye picture such a woman? Mrs Medusa McAuslan. Aye, well, I could have seen her son far enough this night, the ruffian. And yet,’ he gave a reflective sigh, ‘there’s consolation in it, too. Better that he and Chisholm should thrash each other over music than over cards or drink or the Rangers and the Celtic. D’ye not think so, Dand?’

One who didn’t was the Colonel. He gave them three days in close tack, with stoppage of pay for damages. The platoon, when the cause of the brawl became known, waxed hilarious over McAuslan’s Orphean tendencies, but when I heard that Private Fletcher had serenaded beneath his cell window with a ribald version of ‘Because’, I thought it time to warn them that they were playing with dynamite, and added that if in future McAuslan was provoked to violence by musical humour, the joker could expect no mercy, d’you get that, Fletcher? I probably needn’t have bothered, for soon after his release the episode was forgotten in a new sensation from which McAuslan emerged, briefly, as something of a celebrity.

I have described the great Inter-Regimental Quiz elsewhere. What happened was that, to settle a bet between our colonels, a team from the neighbouring Fusiliers was matched against one from our battalion in a general knowledge competition, held in the presence of the Brigadier, garrison society, and a baying mob of supporters from both regiments. After a gruelling struggle in which I, for one, was drained of my great store of trivia, and the Padre was reduced to the point where he couldn’t tell the Pentateuch from the Apocrypha, the contest ended in a tie, at which stage the Brigadier, who was the biggest idiot ever to wear red tabs, said the thing should be settled by one sudden-death question which he would put to both sides and, if they couldn’t answer, to their supporters. Naturally we all cried sycophantic agreement, and the Brigadier, bursting with self-satisfaction, propounded the most fatuous hypothetical trick-question you ever heard: how can one player score three goals at football without anyone else touching the ball in between?

We didn’t know, of course, and suggested politely that the thing was impossible. Not so, said the Brigadier smugly; it was unlikely, granted, but theoretically possible – and that was the great moment when McAuslan, eating chips in the audience, rose from his seat like a fly-blown prophet and gave the right answer.
⁴
It seemed he had once heard it in a Glasgow pub; what that says about the Brigadier’s intellectual circle you must judge for yourselves. Anyway, the Brigadier was delighted, and congratulated McAuslan, who won a box of Turkish Delight for his pains.

A harmless incident, apparently, but pregnant with disaster. For the Brigadier, gratified that his ridiculous question had broken the deadlock, remarked to our Colonel in the mess afterwards that he’d been impressed by that odd-looking bird who’d come up with the answer. What was his name again? McAuslan, eh? Not the kind, from his appearance. whom you’d expect to be able to solve a knotty problem like that – why, the Brigadier had been stumping people with it for years. Well, it just went to show, you couldn’t judge a sausage by its . . . by its . . . oh, dammit, he’d forget his own name next . . . yes, by its skin, that was it.

‘Kind of chap I used to watch out for in my battalion days,’ mused the Brigadier. ‘Chaps with potential often look a bit . . . well, strange. Wingate, for instance.’ I had a brief dreadful vision of McAuslan leading the Chindits, and then the Brigadier dispelled it with one of the most shocking suggestions ever made.

‘This chap McAuslan,’ he asked the Colonel, ‘ever thought of making him an N.C.O.?’

The Colonel admitted later that he hadn’t been so shaken by a question since the Japanese interrogated him on the Moulmein railway – and at least he’d been able to tell them to go to hell. With the Brigadier – whom he’d been heard to describe as an ass who ought to be put in charge of a company store and excused boots – he decided to employ controlled sarcasm.

‘Interesting idea, sir,’ he said smoothly. ‘Of course, we’ve thought long and hard about McAuslan. Haven’t we, MacNeill? We don’t overlook men of his calibre, not in this battalion. But as you know, sir, there are some men who simply won’t accept promotion. Pity, but what can one do? Waiter, another round here.’ Perfectly true, and totally misleading – there
are
men who won’t take promotion, but McAuslan was the last who was likely to get the chance.

The Brigadier frowned and said exceptional men should be persuaded; it was the Army’s duty to make them realise their full potential. The Colonel smiled – I guessed he was on the point of suggesting innocently that the Brigadier should take McAuslan into Brigade H.Q., possibly in Intelligence, but fortunately someone came up at that moment and the subject was changed.

‘That’s what they put in command of brigades nowadays,’ observed the Colonel, when the Brigadier had gone. ‘Well, thank God they kept him in Cairo during the war. Waiter, bring me another – and you can stop smirking, young Dand, and concentrate on keeping that blot McAuslan out of the public eye in future.’

That was easier said than done at the best of times, and now a combination of circumstances arose to make it impossible. First, Bennet-Bruce went off on yet another of those luxurious courses that seem to come the way of military Old Etonians - if it wasn’t Advanced French at Antibes it was water-skiing at Djerba – and our company came under the temporary command of that debonair and dangerous exquisite, Captain Errol. Secondly, the rest of the battalion, Colonel, H.Q., Support Company and all, went off on a seven-day exercise in the big desert, leaving only D Company to rattle about in the deserted barracks; officially we were maintaining a military presence, but in fact we were cleaning and decorating the transport sheds for the big occasion of the regimental year, Waterloo Night, which would be celebrated with dance and revelry on the evening of the battalion’s return. Thirdly, Private McAuslan went with a fatigue party to collect extra furniture for the dance from the Brigade quartermaster.

All innocent events in themselves; it was their coincidence that made them lethal.

The Brigadier, returning from what must have been an unusually excellent lunch, happened by just as the fatigue party were loading their truck, and recognised McAuslan (as who wouldn’t) among them. Feeling paternal, he summoned the toiler and asked him what was all this nonsense about refusing promotion, eh? What McAuslan said is not recorded; no interpreter was present, and he was presumably in his usual state of stricken incoherence before High Authority. The Brigadier shook his head kindly and spoke of ambition and advancement; he may even have told McAuslan there was a baton in his knapsack (it was his good luck he couldn’t see inside McAuslan’s knapsack, not after lunch). Finally, he said why didn’t McAuslan change his mind and accept a lance-corporal’s stripe as the first step to higher things. I assume that at this point McAuslan made some noise which was taken for assent, for the Brigadier cried capital, capital, he would see to it, and ‘Carry on, Corporal!’