The Valley of Bones (14 page)

Pennistone laughed.

‘One can just
imagine Vigny romanticising that fat sod,’ he
said, ‘but
that is by the way. Probably Vigny, while emphasising
that we are back with the citizen army of classical
times which he himself envisaged, would agree with
what you say. He was certainly aware that
nothing is absolute in
the army – least of all obeying orders. Take my own
case. I was instructed to wait until this
morning for a train, as
there had been local complaints of army personnel overcrowding
the railways over weekends to the detriment of
civilian travel facilities. I made careful
enquiries, found chances
of retribution remote and started the night before, thus
saving a day of my journey.’

‘In other
words, the individual still counts, even in the army.’

‘Although
consigned to circumstances in which, theoretically, no individuality – though
much will-power – exists.’

‘What would
Vigny have thought of your disobeying that order?’

‘I could have
pleaded that the army was not my chosen profession, that my ill-conduct was a
revulsion from uniform, drum, drill, the ritual of the parade ground, the act
of an unworthy, amateur neophyte of war.’

We both went
to sleep after that. When the train reached London, I said goodbye to
Pennistone, who was making his way to the country and his home, there to stay
until recalled to duty.

‘Perhaps we’ll
meet again.’

‘Let’s decide
to anyway,’ he said. ‘As we’ve agreed, these things are largely a matter of
will.’

He waved, and
disappeared into the crowds of the railway station. Later in the morning, while
attending to the many odd jobs to be done during my few hours in London, I was
struck by a thought as to where I might have seen
Pennistone before. Was it at Mrs Andriadis’s
party in Hill Street ten
or twelve years ago? His identity was revealed. He was the young man with the
orchid in his buttonhole with whom I
had struck up a conversation in the small hours.
This seemed our characteristic
relationship. Stringham had taken me to the party, Pennistone informed me that
the house itself belonged to the Duports. Pennistone had told me, too, that Bob
Duport had married Peter Templer’s sister, Jean. It was Pennistone, that same
evening – when all was confusion owing to Milly Andriadis’s row with Stringham
– whom she had pushed into an armchair when he had tried to tell her an
anecdote about Prince Theodoric and the Prince of Wales. By then Pennistone was
rather tight. It all seemed centuries ago: the Prince of Wales now Duke of
Windsor, Prince Theodoric, buttress of pro-Allied sentiment in a country
threatened by German invasion, Pennistone and myself second-lieutenants in our
middle thirties. I wondered what had happened to Stringham, Mrs Andriadis and
the rest. However, there was no time to ponder long about all that. Other
matters required attention. I was glad – overjoyed – to be back in England even
for a month or so. There would be weekend leaves from the course, when it
should be possible to get as far as my sister-in-law Frederica Budd’s house,
where Isobel was staying until the child was born. The London streets, empty of
traffic, looked incredibly bright and sophisticated, the tarts in Piccadilly
dazzling nymphs. This was before the blitz. I knew how Persephone must have
felt on the first day of her annual release from the underworld. An RAF officer
of unconventional appearance advancing up the street turned out to be Barnby.
He recognised me at the same moment.

‘I thought you
were a war artist.’

‘I was for a
time,’ he said. ‘Then I got sick of it and took a job doing camouflage for this
outfit.’

‘Disguising
aerodromes as Tudor cottages?’

‘That sort of
thing.’

‘What’s it
like?’

‘Not bad. If I’m
not able to paint in the way I want, I’d as soon do this as anything else.’

‘I thought
war artists were allowed to paint whatever they wanted.’

‘They are in a
way,’ said Barnby, ‘I don’t know. I prefer this for some reason, while there’s
a war on. They let me go on an occasional operational flight.’

I felt a pang.
Barnby was a few years older than myself. I had nothing so lively to report. He
looked rather odd in his uniform, thick, square, almost as if he were still
wearing the blue overalls in which he was accustomed to paint.

‘Where are
you, Nick?’ he asked.

I gave him
some account of my life.

‘It doesn’t
sound very exciting.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘I’ve got a
wonderful new girl,’ he said.

I thought how,
war or peace, nothing ever really changes in such aspects.

‘How long are
you in London?’ he said. ‘I’d like to tell you about her. She’s got one
extraordinary trait. It would amuse you to hear about it. Can’t we dine
together tonight?’

‘I’ve got to
report to Aldershot this afternoon. I’ve been sent there on a course. Are you
stationed in London?’

‘Up for the
night only. I have to see a man in the Air Ministry about some special
camouflage equipment. How’s Isobel?’

‘Having a baby
soon.’

‘Give her my
love. What happened to the rest of the Tolland family?’

‘George is in
France with a Guards battalion. He was on the Regular Reserve, of course, now a
captain. Robert always a mysterious figure, is a lance-corporal in Field
Security, believed to be on his way to getting a commission. Hugo doesn’t want
to be an officer. He prefers to stay where he
is as a gunner on the South Coast – bombardier now, I believe. He says you meet
such awful types in the Officers’ Mess.’

‘What about
those chaps Isobel’s sisters married?’

‘Roddy Cutts –
as an MP – had no difficulty about getting into something. His own county
Yeomanry, I think. I don’t know his rank, probably colonel by now. Susan is
with him. Chips Lovell has joined the Marines.’

‘That’s an unexpected
arm. Is Priscilla with him?’

‘So far as I
know.’

We spoke of
other matters, then parted. Talking to Barnby increased the feeling that I had
been released from prison, at the same time inducing a new sensation, that
prison life was all I was fit for. Barnby’s conversation, everything round
about, seemed hopelessly unreal. There was boundless relief in being free, even
briefly free, from the eternal presence of Gwatkin, Kedward, Cadwallader, Gwylt
and the rest of them; not to have to worry whether the platoon was better
occupied digging themselves in or attacking a hill; whether Davies, G., should
have a stripe or Davies, L., lose one; yet, by comparison, the shapes of Barnby
and Pennistone were little more than figments of the imagination, shadows flickering
on the slides of an old-fashioned magic-lantern. I had scarcely arrived in
London, in any case, before it was time to leave for Aldershot. In the train on
the way there, I reflected on the ideas Pennistone had put forward: the ‘occasional
operational flights’ of Barnby. How would one feel on such aerial voyages? It
might be like Dai and Shoni in their balloon. In the army, as up to now
experienced, danger, although it might in due course make appearance, at
present skulked out of sight in the background; the foreground for ever
cluttered with those moral obligations outlined by Vigny. I envied Pennistone,
who could turn from war to Descartes, and back again, without perceptible
effort. I knew myself incapable of writing a line of a novel – by then I had
written three or four – however long released from duty. Whatever inner
processes are required for writing novels, so far as I myself was concerned,
war now utterly inhibited. That was one of the many disagreeable aspects of
war. It was not only physically inescapable, but morally inescapable too. Why
did one envy Barnby his operational flights? That was an absorbing question.
Certainly not because one wanted to be killed, nor yet because the qualities of
those who excel in violent action were the qualities to which one had any
claim. For that matter, such qualities were not specially Barnby’s. There was
perhaps the point. Yet it was absurd to regard war as a kind of competition of
just that sort between individuals. If that was the aim in war, why not in
peace? No doubt there were plenty of individuals who felt that sort of
emulation in peacetime too, but their preoccupations were not one’s own. Looked
at calmly, war created a situation in which the individual – if he wished to be
on the winning side – was of importance only in so much as he contributed to
the requirements of the machine, not according to the picturesque figure he cut
in the eyes of himself and others. It was no more reasonable, if you were not
that sort of person, to aspire to lead a cavalry charge, than, without
financial gifts, to dream of cornering the pepper market; without scientific
training, split the atom. All the same, as Pennistone had said, these things
are largely a matter of the will. I thought of Dr Trelawney, the magician, the
night Duport and I had helped him to bed after his asthma attack, when he had
quoted as all that was necessary: ‘To know to dare, to will, to be silent.’
Armed with those emblems of strength, one might, however out of character, lead
a cavalry charge, perhaps even corner the pepper market and split the atom too.
Anyway, I thought, it would be a dull world if no one ever had dreams of glory.
Moreland was fond of quoting Nietzsche’s opinion that there is no action
without illusion. Arrival at Aldershot brought an end to these reflections.
Most of the train’s passengers turned out to be officers on their way to the
same course as myself. After reporting to the Orderly Room, we were shown the
lines where we were to sleep, a row of small redbrick houses built round a sort
of square. Their interiors were uninviting.

‘Former
married quarters,’ said the gloomy C.3 lance-corporal guiding my group. ‘Condemned
in 1914, don’t half wonder.’

I did not
wonder either. 1914 was, in fact, the year when, as a child, I had last set
eyes on these weary red cantonments, my father’s regiment stationed at a hutted
camp between here and Stonehurst, the remote and haunted bungalow where my
parents lived at that time. I remembered how the Battalion, polished and
blancoed, in scarlet and spiked helmets, had marched into Aldershot for some
ceremonial parade, drums beating, colours cased, down dusty summer roads.
Afterwards, my father had complained of a sore heel caused by the rub of his
Wellington boot, an abrasion scarcely cured before
it was time to go to war. That war, too, had been no doubt the reason why these
ramshackle married quarters had never been demolished and replaced. When peace
came, there were other matters to think about. Here we were accommodated on the
ground floor, a back and front room. Of the five others who were to share this
billet, four – two from the Loyals, two from the Manchesters – were in their
late twenties. They did their unpacking and went off to find the Mess. The
remaining subaltern, from a Midland regiment, was much younger. He was short
and square, with dark skin, grey eyes and very fair curly hair.

‘Those
Lancashire lads in here with us are a dumb crowd,’ he remarked to me.

‘What makes
you think so?’

‘Do you know
they thought I talked so broad I must come from Burton-on-Trent,’ he said.

He spoke as if
he had been mistaken for a Chinese or Ethiopian. There was something of Kedward
about him; something, too, which I could not define, of my brother-in-law,
Chips Lovell. He did not have a smudgy moustache like Kedward’s, and his
personality was more forceful, more attractive too.

‘We’re going
to be right cooped up in here,’ he said. ‘Would you be satisfied if I took over
this area of floor space, and left you as far as the wall?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘My name is Stevens,’
he said, ‘Odo Stevens.’

I told him my
own name. He spoke with a North Country or Midland intonation, not unlike that
Quiggin used to assume in his earlier days, when, for social or literary
reasons, he chose to emphasize his provincial origins and unvarnished,
forthright nature. Indeed, I could see nothing inherently absurd in the mistake
the ‘Lancashire lads’ had made in supposing Stevens a native of Burton-on-Trent.
However, I laughed and agreed it was a ludicrous error. I was flattered that he
considered me a person to take into his confidence on the subject; glad, too,
that I was housed next to someone who appeared agreeable. In the army, the
comparative assurance of your own unit, whatever its failings, is at once
dissipated by changed circumstances, which threaten fresh conflicts and induce
that terrible, recurrent army dejection, the sensation that no
one cares a halfpenny whether you live or
die.

‘Where
do
you come from?’

‘Brum, of
course.’

‘Birmingham?’

‘What do you
think,’ he said, as if it were almost insulting
to suppose the matter in the smallest doubt. ‘Can’t you tell the way I say it?
But I’ve managed to keep out of my home town for quite a while, thank God.’

‘Don’t you
like it there?’

‘Finest city
in the world,’ he said, laughing again, ‘but something livelier suits me. As a
matter of fact, I was on the continent for the best part of six months before I
joined the army.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘Holland,
Belgium. Even got as far afield as Austria.’

‘Doing what?’

‘There was an
exchange of apprentices for learning languages. I pick up languages pretty
easily for some reason. They were beginning to think I’d better come home and
do some work just at the moment war broke out.’

‘What’s your
job?’

‘Imitation
jewellery.’

‘You sell it?’

‘My pa’s in a
firm that makes it. Got me into it too. A business with a lot of foreign
connexions. That’s how I fixed up getting abroad.’

‘Sounds all
right.’

‘Not bad, as
jobs go, but I don’t want to spend a lifetime at it. That’s why I wasn’t sorry
to make a change. Shall we push along to the Mess?’