The Valley of Bones

3

THE TRAIN, LONG, GRIMY, CLOSELY PACKED, subject to many delays en route, pushed south towards London. Within the carriage cold fug stiflingly prevailed, dimmed bulbs, just luminous, like phosphorescent molluscs in the eddying backwaters of an aquarium, hovering above photographic views of Blackpool and Morecambe Bay: one of those interiors endemic to wartime. At a halt in the Midlands, night without still dark as the pit, the Lancashire Fusilier next to me, who had remarked earlier he was going on leave in this neighbourhood, at once guessed the name of the totally blacked-out station, collected his kit and quitted the compartment hurriedly. His departure was welcome, even the more crowded seat now enjoying improved leg-room. The grey-moustached captain, whose leathery skin and several medal ribbons suggested a quartermaster, eased himself nearer to where I occupied a corner seat, while he grunted irritably under his breath, transferring from one pocket to another thick sheaves of indents classified into packets secured by rubber bands. Additional space offered hope of less fitful sleep, but, when the engine was getting up steam again, the carriage door slid open. A figure wearing uniform looked in.

‘Any room?’

There was no definite denial of the existence of a spare place, but the reception could not be called welcoming. The light grudgingly conceded by the fishy globules flickering in the shallows was too slight to distinguish more than a tall man wearing a British Warm, the shoulder straps of which displayed no badges of rank. The voice was authoritative precise, rather musical, a voice to be associated with more agreeable, even more frivolous circumstances than those now on offer. One might even have heard it against the thrumming of a band a thousand years before. If so, the occasion was long forgotten. While he shook himself out of his overcoat, the new passenger made a certain amount of disturbance before he settled down, among other things causing the quartermaster to move his kit a few necessary inches along the rack, where it was certainly taking up more than a fair share of room. The quartermaster made some demur at this. His reluctance was confronted with absolute firmness. The man in the British Warm had his way in the end. The kit was moved. Having disposed of his own baggage, he took the place next to me.

‘Last seat on the train,’ he said.

He laughed; then apparently passed into sleep. We rumbled on for hours through the night. I slept too, beset with disturbing dreams of administrative anxieties. The quartermaster left his seat at five, returning after an age away, still muttering and grumbling to himself. Morning came, a sad, pale light gently penetrating the curtains. Some hidden agency extinguished the blue lamps. It grew warmer. People began to stretch, blow noses, clear throats, light cigarettes, move along the corridor to shave or relieve themselves. I examined the other occupants of the carriage. Except for the middle-aged captain, all had one pip, including the new arrival next to me. I took a look at him while he was still asleep. His face was thin, rather distinguished, with a hook nose and fairish hair. The collar badges were ‘Fortnum & Mason’ General Service. The rest of the compartment was filled by two officers of the Royal Corps of Signals, a Gunner, a Green Howard (Ted Jeavons’s first regiment in the previous war, I remembered) and a Durham Light Infantryman. The thin man next to me began to wake up, rubbing his eyes and gently groaning.

‘I think I shall wait till London for a shave,’ he said.

‘Me too.’

‘No point in making a fetish of elegance.’

‘None.’

We both dozed again. When it was light enough to read, he took a book from his pocket. I saw it was in French, but could not distinguish the title. Again, his manner struck me as familiar; again, I could not place him.

‘Is there a breakfast car on this train?’ asked the Green Howard.

‘God, no,’ said the Durham Light Infantryman. ‘Where do you think you are — the Ritz?’

One of the Signals said there was hope of a cup of tea, possibly food in some form, at the next stop, a junction where the train was alleged to remain for ten minutes or more. This turned out to be true. On arrival at this station, in a concerted move from the carriage, I found myself walking along the platform with the man in General Service badges. We entered the buffet together.

‘Sitting up all night catches one across the back,’ he said.

‘It certainly does.’

‘I once sat up from Prague to the Hook and swore I’d never do it again. I little knew one was in for a lifetime of journeys of that sort.’

‘Budapest to Vienna by Danube can be gruelling at night too,’ I said, not wishing to seem unused to continental discomforts. ‘Do you think we are in a very strategic position for getting cups of tea?’

‘Perhaps not. Let’s try the far end of the counter. One might engage the attention of the lady on the second urn.’

‘Also stand a chance of buying one of those faded, but still beautiful, sausage rolls, before they are all consumed by Other Ranks.’

We changed our position with hopeful effect.

‘Talking of Vienna,’ he said, ‘did you ever have the extraordinary experience of entering that gallery in the Kunsthistorisches Museum with the screen across the end of it? On the other side of the screen, quite unexpectedly, you find those four staggering Bruegels.’

‘The Hunters in the Snow is almost my favourite picture.’

‘I am also very fond of the Two Monkeys in the Kaiser Friedrich in Berlin. I’ve just been sharing a room with a man in the Essex Regiment who looked exactly like the ape on the left, the same shrewd expression. I say, we’re not making much headway with the tea.’

There were further struggles at the counter, eventually successful. The reward was a sausage roll apiece.

‘Should we return to the train now? I don’t feel absolutely confident about that corner seat.’

‘In that case I shall take this sausage roll with me.’

Back in the carriage, the quartermaster went to sleep again; so did the two Signals and the Gunner. Both the Durham Light Infantryman and the Green Howard brought out button-sticks, tins of polish, cloths, brushes. Taking off their tunics, they set to work energetically shining themselves up, while they discussed allowances.

‘Haven’t we met before somewhere?’ I asked.

‘My name is Pennistone — David Pennistone.’

I knew no one called that. I told him my own name, but we did not establish a connexion sufficiently firm to suggest a previous encounter. Pennistone said he liked Moreland’s music, but did not know Moreland personally.

‘Are you going on leave?’

‘To a course — and you?’

‘I’ve just come from a course,’ he said. ‘I’m on leave until required.’

‘That sounds all right.’

‘I’m an odd kind of soldier in any case. Certain specific qualifications are my only excuse. It will be rather nice to be on one’s own for a week or two. I’m trying to get something finished. A case of earn while you learn.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Oh, something awfully boring about Descartes. Really not worth discussing. Cogito ergo sum, and all that. I feel quite ashamed about it. By the way, have you ever read this work? I thought one might profit by it in one’s new career.’

He held out to me the book he had been reading. I took it from his hand and read the title on the spine: Servitude et Grandeur Militaire: Alfred de Vigny.

‘I thought Vigny was just a poet — Dieu! que le son du Cor est triste au fond des bois!…’

‘He also spent fourteen years of his life as a regular soldier. He ended as a captain, so there is hope for all of us.’

‘In the Napoleonic wars?’

‘Too young. Vigny never saw action. Only the most irksome sort of garrison duty, spiced with a little civil disturbance — having to stand quietly in the ranks while demonstrators threw bricks. That kind of thing.’

‘I see.’

‘In some ways the best viewpoint for investigating army life. Action might have confused the issue by proving too exciting. Action is, after all, exciting rather than interesting. Anyway, this book says what Vigny thought about soldiering.’

‘What were his conclusions?’

‘That the soldier is a dedicated person, a sort of monk of war. Of course he was speaking of the professional armies of his day. However, Vigny saw that in due course the armed forces of every country would be identified with the nation, as in the armies of antiquity.’

‘When the bombing begins here, clearly civilians will play as dangerous a role as soldiers, if not more dangerous.’

‘Of course. Even so, Vigny would say those in uniform have made the greater sacrifice by losing the man in the soldier — what he calls the warrior’s abnegation, his renunciation of thought and action. Vigny says a soldier’s crown is a crown of thorns, amongst its spikes none more painful than passive obedience.’

‘True enough.’

‘He sees the role of authority as essentially artificial, the army a way of life in which there is as little room for uncontrolled fervour as for sullen indifference. The impetuous volunteer has as much to learn as the unwilling conscript.’

I thought of Gwatkin and his keenness; of Sayce, and his recalcitrance. There was something to be said for this view of the army. By this time, Pennistone and I were the only ones awake in the compartment. The button cleaners had abandoned their paraphernalia, resumed their tunics and nodded off like the rest. The quartermaster began to snore. He did not look particularly saintly, nor even dedicated, though one never could tell. Probably Vigny knew what he was talking about after fourteen years of it.

‘All the same,’ I said, ‘it’s a misapprehension to suppose, as most people do, that the army is inherently different from all other communities. The hierarchy and discipline give an outward illusion of difference, but there are personalities of every sort in the army, as much as out of it. On the whole, the man who is successful in civilian life, all things being equal, is successful in the army.’

‘Certainly — and there can be weak-willed generals and strong-willed privates.’

‘Look, for example, at the way you yourself compelled my neighbour to move his kit last night.’

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?’

We sat next to each other at dinner that night. Stevens asked me what I did for a living.

‘You’re lucky to have a writing job,’ he said, ‘I’ve tried writing myself. Sometimes think I might take it up, even though peddling costume jewellery is a good trade for putting yourself over with the girls.’

‘What sort of writing?’

‘Spot of journalism in the local paper — “Spring comes to the Black Country” — “Sunset on Armistice Day” — that sort of thing. I knock it off easily, just as I can pick up languages.’

I saw Stevens would go far, if he did not get killed. He was aware of his own taste for self-applause and prepared to laugh at it. The journalistic streak was perhaps what recalled Chips Lovell, whom he did not resemble physically.

‘Did you volunteer for the Independent Companies?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t think I’d be much good at them.’

The Independent Companies — later called Commandos — were small guerilla units, copiously officered. They had been employed with some success in Norway. Raising them had skimmed off the best young officers from many battalions, so that they were not popular with some Commanding Officers for that reason.

‘I was in trouble with my CO the time they were recruiting them,’ said Stevens. ‘He bitched up my application. It was really because he thought me useful to him where I was. All the same, I’ll get away into something. My unit are a lot of louts. They’re not going to prevent me from having what fun the army has to offer.’

Here were dreams of military glory very different from Gwatkin’s. After all this talk, it was time to go to bed. The following morning there was drill on the square. We were squadded by a stagey cluster of glengarry-capped staff-sergeants left over from the Matabele campaign, with Harry Lauder accents and eyes like poached eggs. Amongst a couple of hundred students on the course, there was hope of an acquaintance, but no familiar face showed in the Mess the previous night. However, slow-marching across the asphalt I recognised Jimmy Brent in another squad moving at right-angles to our own, a tallish, fat, bespectacled figure forgotten since Peter Templer had brought him to see Stringham and myself when we were undergraduates. Brent looked much the same. I had not greatly liked him at the time. Nothing heard about him since caused me, in a general way, to want to see more of him. Here, however, any face from the past was welcome, especially so veteran a relic as Brent. After the parade was dismissed, I tackled him.

‘We met years ago, when you came over in Peter Templer’s second-hand Vauxhall, and he drove us all into the ditch.’

I told him my name. Brent clearly did not recognise me. There was little or no reason why he should. However, he remembered the circumstances of Templer’s car accident, and seemed pleased to find someone on the course who had known him in the outside world.

‘There were some girls in the car, weren’t there,’ he said, his face lighting up at that happy memory, ‘and Bob Duport too. I knew Peter took us to see a couple of friends he’d been at school with, but I wouldn’t be able to place them at this distance of time. So you were one of them? What a memory you’ve got. Well, it’s nice to find a pal in this god-forsaken spot.’

‘Do you ever see Peter now? I’d like to hear what’s happened to him.’

‘Peter’s all right,’ said Brent, speaking rather cautiously, ‘wise enough not to have mixed himself up with the army like you and me. Got some Government advisory job. Financial side. I think Sir Magnus Donners had a hand — Donners hasn’t got office yet, I’m surprised to see — Peter always did a spot of prudent sucking-up in that direction. Peter knows which side his bread is buttered. He’s been quite useful to Donners on more than one occasion.’

‘I met Peter once there — at Stourwater, I mean.’

‘You know Donners too, do you. I’ve done a little business with him myself. I’m an oil man, you know. I was in the South American office before the war. Did you ever meet Peter’s sister, Jean? I used to see quite a bit of her there.’

‘I knew her ages ago.’

‘She married Bob Duport,’ said Brent, ‘who was with us on the famous occasion when the Vauxhall heeled over.’

There was a perverse inner pleasure in knowing that Brent had had a love affair with Jean Duport, which he could scarcely guess had been described to me by her own husband. Even though I had once loved her myself — to that extent the thought was painful, however long past — there was an odd sense of power in possessing this secret information.

‘I ran into Duport just before war broke out. I never knew him well. I gather they are divorced now.’

‘Quite right,’ said Brent.

He did not allow the smallest suggestion of personal interest to colour the tone of his voice.

‘I heard Bob was in some business mess,’ he said. ‘Chromite, was it? He got across that fellow Widmerpool, another of Donners’s henchmen. Widmerpool is an able fellow, not a man to offend. Bob managed to rub him up the wrong way. Somebody said Bob was connected with the Board of Trade now. Don’t know whether that is true. The Board of Trade wanted me to stay in Latin America, as a matter of fact.’

‘You’d have had a safe billet there.’

‘Glad to leave the place as it happened, though I was doing pretty well.’

‘How do you find yourself here?’

‘Managed to get into this mob through the good offices of our Military Attaché where I was. His own regiment. Never heard of them before.’

I supposed that Brent had been relieved to find this opportunity of moving to another continent after Jean had abandoned him. That disappointment, too, might explain his decision to join the army as a change of occupation. He was several years older than myself, in fact entering an age group to be reasonably considered beyond the range of unfriendly criticism for remaining out of uniform; especially if, as he suggested, his work in South America was officially regarded as of some national importance. I remembered Duport’s story clearly now. After reconciliation with Jean, they had sailed for South America. Brent had sailed with them. At that time Jean’s affair with Brent had apparently been in full swing. Indeed, from what Duport said, there was every reason to suppose that affair had begun before she told me of her own decision to return to her husband. So far as that went, Jean had deceived me as much as she had deceived Duport. Fortunately Brent was unaware of that.

‘How do you like the army?’

‘Bloody awful,’ he said, ‘but I’d rather be in than out.’

‘Me, too.’

The remaining students of the course were an unexceptional crowd, most of the usual army types represented. We drilled on the square, listened to lectures about the German army, erected barbed wire entanglements, drove 3-ton lorries, map read. One evening, preceding a night exercise in which one half of the course was arrayed in battle against the other half, Stevens showed a different side of himself. The force in which we were both included lay on the ground in a large semi-circle, waiting for the operation to begin. The place was a clearing among the pine woods of heathery, Stonehurst-like country. Stevens and I were on the extreme right flank of the semi-circle. On the extreme left, exactly opposite us, whoever was disposed there continually threw handfuls of gravel across the area between, which landed chiefly on Stevens and myself.

‘It must be Croxton,’ Stevens said.

Croxton was a muscular neurotic of a kind, fairly common, who cannot stop talking or creating a noise. He sang or ragged joylessly all the time, without possessing any of those inner qualities — like Corporal Gwylt’s, for example — required for making such behaviour acceptable to others. He was always starting a row, playing tricks, causing trouble. There could be little doubt that Croxton was responsible for the hail of small stones that continued to spatter over us. The moon had disappeared behind clouds, rain threatening. There seemed no prospect of the exercise beginning.

‘I think I’ll deal with this,’ Stevens said.

He crawled back into the cover of the trees behind us, disappearing in darkness. Some minutes elapsed. Then I heard a sudden exclamation from the direction of the gravel thrower. It was a cry of pain. More time went by. Then Stevens returned.

‘It was Croxton,’ he said.

‘What did you do?’

‘Gave him a couple in the ribs with my rifle butt.’

‘What did he think about that?’

‘He didn’t seem to like it.’

‘Did he put up any fight?’

‘Not much. He’s gasping a bit now.’

The following day, during a lecture on the German Division, I saw Croxton, who was sitting a few rows in front, rub his back more than once. Stevens had evidently struck fairly hard. This incident showed he could be disagreeable, if so disposed. He also possessed the gift of isolating himself from his surroundings. These lectures on the German army admittedly lacked light relief-after listening to many of them, I have preserved only the ornamental detail that the German Reconnaissance Corps carried a sabre squadron on its establishment — and one easily dozed through the lecturer’s dronings. On the other hand, to remain, as Stevens could, slumbering like a child, upright on a hard wooden chair, while everyone else was clattering from the lecture room, suggested considerable powers of self-seclusion. Another source of preservation to Stevens — unlike Gwatkin — was an imperviousness to harsh words. He and I had been digging a weapon pit together one afternoon without much success. An instructor came up to grumble at our efforts.

‘That’s not a damned bit of use,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t give protection to a cat.’

‘We’ve just reached a surface of rock, sir,’ said Stevens, ‘but I think I can say we’ve demonstrated the dignity of labour.’

The instructor sniggered and moved on, without examining the soil. Not everyone liked this self-confident manner of Stevens. Among those who disapproved was Brent.

‘That young fellow will get sent back to his unit,’ Brent said. ‘Mark my words. He’s too big for his boots.’

When the whole course was divided into syndicates of three for the purposes of a ‘tactical exercise without troops’, Brent and I managed to be included in the same trio. To act with an acquaintance on such occasions is an advantage, but it was at the price of having Macfaddean as the third partner. However, although Macfaddean, a schoolmaster in civilian life, was feverishly anxious to make a good impression on the Directing Staff, this also meant that he was prepared to do most of the work. In his middle to late thirties, Macfaddean would always volunteer for a ‘demonstration’, no matter how uncomfortable the prospect of crawling for miles through mud, for instance, or exemplifying the difficulty of penetrating dannert wire. When the task was written work, Macfaddean would pile up mountains of paper, or laboriously summarize, whichever method he judged best set him apart from the other students. He was so tireless in his energies that towards the end of the day, when we had all agreed on the situation report to be presented and there was some time to spare, Macfaddean could not bear these minutes to be wasted.

‘Look here, laddies,’ he said, ‘why don’t we go back into the woods and produce an alternative version? I’m not happy, for instance, about concentration areas. It would look good if we handed in two plans for the commander to choose from, both first-rate.’

There could be no doubt that the anonymity of the syndicate system irked Macfaddean. He felt that if another report were made, the second one might be fairly attributed to his own unaided efforts, a matter that could be made clear when the time came. That was plain enough to both Brent and myself. We told Macfaddean that, for our part, we were going to adhere to the plan already agreed upon; if he wished to make another one, that was up to him.

‘Off you go, Mac, if you want to,’ said Brent. ‘We’ll wait for you here. I’ve done enough for today.’

When Macfaddean was gone, we found a place to lie under some withered trees, blasted, no doubt, to their crumbling state by frequent military experiment. We were operating over the dismal tundra of Laffan’s Plain, battlefield of a million mock engagements. The sky above was filled with low-flying aircraft, of outlandish colour and design, camouflaged perhaps by Barnby in a playful mood. Lumbering army reconnaissance planes buzzed placidly backwards and forwards through grey puffs of cloud, ancient machines garnered in from goodness knows what forgotten repository of written-off Governmental stores now sent aloft again to meet a desperate situation. The heavens looked like one of those pictures of an imagined Future to be found in old-fashioned magazines for boys Brent rolled over on his back and watched this rococo aerial pageant.

‘You know Bob Duport is not a chap like you and me,’ he said suddenly.

He spoke as if he had given much thought to Duport’s character; as if, too, my own presence allowed him at last to reach certain serious conclusions on that subject. Regarded by Templer, and Duport himself, as something of a butt — certainly a butt where women were concerned — Brent possessed a curious resilience in everyday life, which his exterior did not reveal. This was noticeable on the course, where, unlike Macfaddean, he was adept at avoiding work that might carry with it the risk of blame.

‘What about Duport?’

‘Bob’s really intelligent,’ said Brent earnestly. ‘No intention of minimising your qualifications in that line, or even my own, but Bob’s a real wonder-boy.’

‘Never knew him well enough to penetrate that far.’

‘Terrific gifts.’

‘Tell me more about him.’

‘Bob can do anything he turns his hand to. Wizard at business. Pick up any job in five minutes. If he were on this course, he’d be the star-turn. Then, girls. They simply lie down in front of him.’

‘I see.’

‘But he’s not just interested in business and women.’

‘What else?’

‘You wouldn’t believe what he knows about art and all that.’

‘He never gave the impression of being that sort.’

‘You’ve got to know him well before he lets on. Have to keep your eyes open. Did you ever go to that house the Duports had in Hill Street?’

‘Years ago, when they’d let it to someone else. I was taken to a party there.’

‘That place was marvellously done up,’ said Brent. ‘Absolute perfection in my humble opinion. Bob’s got taste. That’s what I mean. All the same, he isn’t one of those who go round gushing about art. He keeps it to himself.’

I did not immediately grasp the point of this great buildup of Duport. It certainly shed a new light on him. I did not disbelieve the picture. On the contrary, in its illumination, many things became plainer. Duport’s professional brutality of manner, thus interpreted in Brent’s rough and ready style, might indeed conceal behind its façade sensibilities he was unwilling to reveal to the world at large. There was nothing unreasonable about that supposition. It might to some extent explain Duport’s relationship with Jean, even if Brent’s own connexion with her were thereby made less easy to understand. I thought of the views of my recent travelling companion, Pennistone, so plainly expressed at Mrs Andriadis’s party:

‘… these appalling Italianate fittings — and the pictures — my God, the pictures …’

However, such things were a matter of opinion. The point at issue was Duport’s character: was he, in principle, regardless of personal idiosyncrasy, what Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson used to call a ‘man of taste’? It was an interesting question. Jean herself had always been rather apologetic about that side of her married life, so that presumably Brent was right: Duport, rather than Jean, had been responsible for the Hill Street decorations and pictures. This was a new angle on Duport. I saw there were important sides of him I had missed.

‘When you last met Bob,’ said Brent, using the tone of one about to make a confidence, ‘did he mention my name to you?’

‘He said you and he had been in South America together.’

‘Did he add anything about me and Jean?’

‘He did, as a matter of fact. I gather there was an involved situation.’

Brent laughed.

‘There was,’ he said. ‘I thought Bob would go round shooting his mouth off. Just like him. It’s Bob’s one weakness. He can’t hold his tongue.’

He sighed, as if Duport’s heartless chatter about his own matrimonial situation had aroused in Brent himself a despair for human nature. He gave the impression that he thought it too bad of Duport. I was reminded of Barnby, exasperated at some woman’s behaviour, saying: ‘It’s enough to stop you ever committing adultery again.’ The deafening vibrations of an insect-like Lysander just above us, which seemed unable to decide whether or not to make a landing, put a stop to conversation for a minute or two. When it sheered off, Brent spoke once more.

‘You said you knew Jean, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wonderful girl in her way.’

‘Very nice to look at.’

‘For a while we were lovers,’ said Brent.

He spoke in that reminiscent, unctuous voice men use when they tell you that sort of thing more to savour an enjoyable past situation, than to impart information which might be of interest. It must have been already clear to him that Duport had already revealed that fact.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Bob said that?’

‘He put it more bluntly.’

Brent laughed again, very good-naturedly. The way he set about telling the story emphasised his least tolerable side. I tried to feel objective about the whole matter by recalling one of Moreland’s favourite themes, the attraction exercised over women by men to whom they can safely feel complete superiority.

‘Are you hideous, stunted, mentally arrested, sexually maladjusted, marked with warts, gross in manner, with a cleft palate and an evil smell?’ Moreland used to say. ‘Then, oh boy, there’s a treat ahead of you. You’re all set for a promising career as a lover. There’s an absolutely ravishing girl round the corner who’ll find you irresistible. In fact her knickers are bursting into flame at this very moment at the mere thought of you.’

‘But your description does not fit in with most of the lady-killers one knows. I should have thought they tended to be decidedly good-looking, as often as not, together with a lot of other useful qualities as well.’

‘What about Henri Quatre?’

‘What about him?’

‘He was impotent and he stank. It’s in the histories. Yet he is remembered as one of the great lovers of all time.’

‘He was a king — and a good talker at that. Besides, we don’t know him personally, so it’s hard to argue about him.’

‘Think of some of the ones we do know.’

‘But it would be an awful world if no one but an Adonis, who was also an intellectual paragon and an international athlete, had a chance. It always seems to me, on the contrary, that women’s often expressed statement, that male good looks don’t interest them, is quite untrue. All things being equal, the man who looks like a tailor’s dummy stands a better chance than the man who doesn’t.’

All things never are equal,’ said Moreland, always impossible to shake in his theories, ‘though I agree that to be no intellectual strain is an advantage where the opposite sex is concerned. But you look into the matter. Remember Bottom and Titania. The Bard knew.’

Brent, so far as he had been a success with Jean, seemed to strengthen Moreland’s argument. I wondered whether I wanted to hear more. The Jean business was long over, but even when you have ceased to love someone, that does not necessarily bring an indifference to a past shared together. Besides, though love may die, vanity lives on timelessly. I knew that I must be prepared to hear things I should not like. Yet, although where unfaithfulness reigns, ignorance may be preferable to knowledge, at the same time, once knowledge is brutally born, exactitude is preferable to uncertainty. To learn at what precise moment Jean had decided to take on Brent, in preference to myself, would be more acceptable than to allow the imagination continually to range unhindered through boundless fields of disagreeable supposition. Even so, I half hoped Macfaddean would return, full of new ideas about terrain and lines of communication. However, the choice did not lie with me. The narrative rested in Brent’s own hands. Whether I wanted to listen or not, he was determined to tell his story.

‘You’d never guess,’ he said apologetically, ‘but Jean fell for me first.’

‘Talk about girls lying down for Bob Duport.’

‘Shall I tell you how it happened?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Peter Templer asked me to dine with him to meet a couple called Taylor or Porter. He could never remember which. Peter subsequently went off with Mrs Taylor, whoever she was, but that was later. He also invited his sister, Jean, to the party, and a woman called Lady McReith. I didn’t much take to the latter. We dined at the Carlton Grill.’

Brent paused. I remembered perfectly the occasion of which he spoke. One evening when we were out together, Jean had remarked she was dining with her brother the following night. The fact that the dinner party was to be at the Carlton Grill pinpointed the incident in my mind. I had noted at the time, without soreness, that Peter Templer, as a result of his exertions in the City, could afford to entertain at restaurants of that sort, while I frequented Foppa’s and the Strasbourg. It was one of several differences that had taken shape between us. I remembered thinking that. Then the whole matter had passed from my mind until Jean and I next met, when she had made rather a point of emphasising what a boring evening she had had to endure with her brother and his friends. In fact the party at the Carlton Grill appeared to have been so tedious she could not keep off the subject.

‘Who was there?’

‘Two businessmen you’d never have heard of, one of them married to a very pretty, silly girl, whom Peter obviously has his eye on. Then there was a rather older woman I’ve met before, who might be a lesbian.’

‘What was she called?’

‘You wouldn’t know her either.’

‘What made you think she was a lesbian?’

‘Something about her.’

Jean knew perfectly well I had met Lady McReith when, as a boy, I had stayed at the Templers’ house. Even had she forgotten that fact, Lady McReith was an old friend of the Templer family, especially of Jean’s sister, Babs. It was absurd to speak of her in that distant way. By that time, too, Jean must have made up her mind whether or not Gwen McReith was a lesbian. All this mystification was impossible to ascribe to any rational form of behaviour. Possibly the emphasis on an unknown lesbian was to distract attention from the unmarried businessman — Brent. Jean wanted to talk about the party simply because Brent had interested her, yet instinct told her this fact must be concealed. It was rather surprising that she had never before met Brent with her brother. Certainly, if she had named him, I should have had no suspicion of what was to follow. If that were the reason — a desire to talk about the party, but at the same time not to mention Brent by name — she could have stated quite simply that Lady McReith was present, gossiped in a straightforward way about Lady McReith’s past, present and future. In short, this utterly unnecessary, irrational lie was a kind of veiled attack on our own relationship, a deliberate deceiving of me for no logical reason, except that, by telling a lie of that kind, truth was suddenly undermined between us; thus even though I was unaware of it, moving us inexorably apart. It was a preliminary thrust that must have satisfied some strange inner urge.

‘Poor Peter,’ Jean had said, ‘he really sees the most dreary people. One of the men at dinner had never heard of Chaliapin.’

That musical ignoramus was no doubt Brent too. I made up my mind to confirm later his inexperience of opera, even if it meant singing the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’ to him to prove that point. At the moment, however, I did no more than ask for his own version of the dinner party at the Carlton Grill.

‘Well, I thought Mrs Duport an attractive piece,’ Brent said, ‘but I’d never have dreamt of carrying things further, if she hadn’t rung me up the next day. You see, it was obvious Peter had just given the dinner because he wanted to talk to the other lady — the one he ran away with. The rest of us had been got there for that sole purpose. Peter’s an old friend of mine, so I just did the polite as required, chatted about this and that. Talked business mostly, which Mrs Duport seemed to find interesting.*

‘What did she say when she rang up?’

‘Asked my opinion about Amparos.’

‘Who is Amparos?’

‘An oil share.’

‘Just that?’

‘We talked for a while on the phone. Then she suggested I should give her lunch and discuss oil investments. She knows something about the market. I could tell at once. In her blood, I suppose.’

‘And you gave her lunch?’

‘I couldn’t that week,’ said Brent, ‘too full of business. But I did the following week. That was how it all started. Extraordinary how things always happen at the same time. That was just the moment when the question opened up of my transfer to the South American office.’

I saw the whole affair now. From the day of that luncheon with Brent, Jean had begun to speak with ever-increasing seriousness of joining up again with her husband; chiefly, she said, for the sake of their child. That seemed reasonable enough. Duport might have behaved badly; that did not mean I never suffered any sensations of guilt.

‘How did it end?’

Brent pulled up a large tuft of grass and threw it from him.

‘Rather hard to answer that one,’ he said.

He spoke as if the conclusion of this relationship with Jean required much further reflection than he had at present been able to allow the subject.

‘The fact is,’ he said, ‘I liked Jean all right, and naturally I was pretty flattered that she preferred me to a chap like Bob. All the same, I always felt what you might call uneasy with her, know what I mean. You must have come across that with girls. Feel they’re a bit too good for you. Jean was too superior a wench for a chap of my simple tastes. That was what it came to. Talked all sorts of stuff I couldn’t follow. Did you ever go to that coloured night-club called the Old Plantation?’

‘Never, but I know it by name.’

‘A little coloured girl sold cigarettes there. She was more in my line, though it cost me a small fortune to get her.’

‘So the thing with Jean Duport just petered out?’

‘With a good deal of grumbling on her side, believe me, before it did. I think she’d have run away with me if I’d asked her. Didn’t quite see my way to oblige in that respect. Then one day she told me she didn’t want to see me again. As a matter of fact we hadn’t met for quite a time when she said that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t know. Suppose I hadn’t done much about it. There’d been some trouble at one of our places up the river. Production dropped from forty or fifty, to twenty-five barrels a day. I had to go along there and take a look at things. That was one of the reasons why she hadn’t heard from me for some time.’

‘Fact was you were tired of it.’

‘Jean seemed to think so, the way she carried on. She was bloody rude when we parted. Anyway, she had the consolation of feeling she broke it off herself. Women like that.’

So it appeared, after all, the love affair had been brought to an end by Brent’s apathy, rather than Jean’s fickleness. Even Duport had not known that. He had supposed Brent to have been, in his own words, ‘ditched’. It had certainly never occurred to Duport, as a husband, that Brent, his own despised hanger-on, had actually been pursued by Jean, had himself done the ‘ditching’. I, too, had little cause for self-congratulation, if it came to that.

‘How did Duport find out about yourself and his wife?’

‘Through their dear little daughter.’

‘Good God — Polly? I suppose she must be twelve or thirteen by now.’

‘Quite that,’ said Brent. ‘Fancy you’re remembering. I expect Bob spoke of her when you saw him. He’s mad about that kid. Not surprising. She’s a very pretty little girl. Will need keeping an eye on soon — perhaps even now.’

‘Did Bob find out while it was still going on?’

‘Just before the end. Polly let out something about a meeting between Jean and me. Bob remarked that if it had been anyone else he’d have been suspicious. Then Jean flew off the handle and told him everything. Bob couldn’t believe it at first. Didn’t think I was up to it. He always regarded me as an absolute flop where women were concerned. It was quite a blow to him in a way. To his pride, I mean.’

In this scene between the Duports, I saw a parallel to the occasion when I had myself made a slighting remark about Jimmy Stripling, and Jean, immediately furious, had told me of her former affair with him. The pattern was, as ever, endlessly repeated. There was something to be admired in Brent’s lack of vanity in so absolutely accepting Duport’s low estimate of his own attractions, even after causing Duport’s wife to fall in love with him. Whatever other reason Brent might have had for embarking on the matter, a cheap desire to score off Jean’s husband had played no part whatever. That was certain. Duport, cuckolded or no, remained Brent’s ideal of manhood.

‘I think it’s just as well Bob finally got rid of her,’ Brent said. ‘Now he’ll probably find a wife who suits him better. Work Jean out of his system. Anyway he’ll have a freer hand to live the sort of life he likes.’

The tramp of men and sound of singing interrupted us. A detachment of Sappers were marching by, chanting their song, voices harsh and tuneless after those of my own Regiment:

‘You make fast, I make fast, make fast the dinghy,

Make fast the dinghy, make fast the dinghy,

You make fast, I make fast, make fast the dinghy,

Make fast the dinghy pontoon.

For we’re marching on to Laffan’s Plain,

To Laffan’s Plain, to Laffan’s Plain,

Yes we’re marching on to Laffan’s Plain,

Where they don’t know mud from shit…’

The powerful rhythms, primitive, incantatory, hypnotic, seemed not only the battle hymn of warring tribes, but also a refrain with obscure bearing on what Brent had just told me, a general lament for the emotional conflict of men and women. The Sappers disappeared over the horizon, their song dying away with them. From the other direction, Macfaddean approached at the double. He was breathless when he arrived beside us.

‘Sorry to keep you laddies waiting,’ he said, still panting, ‘but I’ve found a wizard alternative concentration area. Here, look at the map. We won’t revise our earlier plan, just show up this as a second choice. It means doing the odd spot of collating. Give me the coloured pencils. Now, take down these map references. Look sharp, old man.’

Meanwhile, the problem of how best to reach Frederica’s house when leave was granted remained an unsolved one. I asked Stevens whether he were going to spend the weekend in Birmingham.

‘Much too far,’ he said, ‘I’m getting an aunt and uncle to put me up. It won’t be very exciting, but it’s somewhere to go.

He named a country town not many miles from Frederica s village.

‘That’s the part of the world I’m trying to reach myself. It’s not going to be too easy to get there and back in a weekend. Trains are rotten.’

‘Trains are hopeless,’ said Stevens. ‘You’ll spend the whole bloody time going backwards and forwards. Look here, I’ve got a broken-down old car I bought with the proceeds of my writing activities. It cost a tenner, but it should get us there and back. I can put my hand on some black market petrol too. Where exactly do you want to go?’

I named the place.

‘I’ve heard of it,’ said Stevens. ‘My uncle is an estate agent in those parts. I’ve probably heard him talk of some house he’s done a deal with in the neighbourhood — your sister-in-law’s perhaps. I can drop you there easily, if you like. Then pick you up on Sunday night, when we’re due back here.’

So it was arranged. The day came. Stevens’s car, a Morris two-seater, started all right. We set off. It was invigorating to leave Aldershot. We drove along, while Stevens talked about his family, his girls, his ambitions. I heard how his mother was the daughter of a detective-inspector who had had to leave the force on account of drink; why he thought his sister’s husband, a master in a secondary school, was rather too keen on the boys; what a relief it had been when he had heard, just before taking leave of his unit for the Aldershot course, that he had not got a local girl in the family way. Such confidences are rare in the army. Narcissistic, Stevens was at the same time — if the distinction can be made — not narrowly egotistical. He was interested in everything round him, even though everything must eventually lead back to himself. He asked about Isobel. It is hard to describe your wife. Instead I tried to give some account of Frederica’s household. He seemed to absorb it all pretty well.

‘Good name, “Frederica”,’ he said, ‘I was christened ‘Herbert”, but a hieroglyphic like “Odo” was put on an envelope addressed to me when I was abroad, and I saw at once that was the thing to be called. I was getting fed up with being “Bert” as it was.’

Apart from the unexpected circumstance that Stevens and I should be driving across country together, the war seemed far away. Frederica had lived in her house, a former vicarage, for a year or two. A widow, she had moved to the country for her children’s sake. Not large, the structure was splayed out and rambling, so that the building looked as if its owners had at some period taken the place to pieces, section by section, then put it together again, not always in correct proportions. A white gate led up a short drive with rose bushes on either side. The place had that same air of intense respectability Frederica’s own personality conveyed. In spite of war conditions, there was no sign of untidiness about the garden, only an immediate sense of having entered a precinct where one must be on one’s best behaviour. Stevens stopped in front of the porch. Before I could ring or knock, Frederica herself opened the door.

‘I saw you coming up the drive,’ she said.

She wore trousers. Her head was tied up in a handkerchief. I kissed her, and introduced Stevens.

‘Do come in for a moment and have a drink,’ she said. ‘Or have you got to push on? I’m sure not at once.’

Frederica was not usually so cordial in manner to persons she did not already know; often, not particularly cordial to those she knew well. I had not seen her since the outbreak of war. The war must have shaken her up. That was the most obvious explanation of this new demeanour. The trousers and handkerchief were uncharacteristic. However, it was not so much style of dress that altered her, as something within herself. Robin Budd her husband had been killed in a fall from his horse nine or ten years before. By now not far from forty, she had never — so far as her own family knew — considered remarriage, still less indulged in any casual love affair; although those rather deliberately formidable, armour-plated good looks of hers were of the sort to attract quite a lot of men. Her sister, Priscilla, had some story about Jack Udney, an elderly courtier whose wife had died not long before, getting rather tight at Ascot after a notable win, and proposing to Frederica while the Gold Cup was actually being run, but the allegation had never been substantiated. It was true Frederica had snapped out total disagreement once, when Isobel met Jack Udney somewhere and said she thought him a bore. In short, Frederica’s most notable characteristic was what Molly Jeavons called her ‘dreadful correctness’. Now, total war seemed slightly to have dislodged this approach to life. Frederica’s reception of Stevens showed that. Stevens himself did not need further pressing to come in for a drink.

‘Nothing I’d like better,’ he said. ‘It’ll help me to face Aunt Doris’s woes about shortages and ration cards. Half a sec, I’ll back the car to a place where I’m not blocking your front door.’

He started up the car again.

‘How’s Isobel?’

‘Pretty well,’ said Frederica. ‘She’s resting. She’ll be down in a moment. We’re rather full here. Absolutely packed to the ceiling, as a matter of fact.’

‘Who have you got?’

‘Priscilla is here — with Caroline.’

‘Who is Caroline?’

‘Priscilla’s daughter, our niece. You ought to know that.’

‘Ah, yes, I’d forgotten her name.’

‘Then Robert turned up unexpectedly on leave.’

‘I’ll be glad to see Robert.’

Frederica laughed.

‘Robert has brought a lady with him.’

‘No?’

‘But yes. One of my own contemporaries, as a matter of fact, though I never knew her well.’

‘What’s she called?’

‘She married an American, now deceased, and has the unusual name of Mrs Wisebite. She was nee Stringham. I used to see her at dances.’

‘Charles Stringham’s sister, in fact.’

‘Yes, you knew him, didn’t you. I remember now. Well, Robert has brought her along. What do you think of that? Then the boys are home for the holidays — and there’s someone else you know.’

‘Who is that?’

‘Wait and see.’

Frederica laughed shrilly again, almost hysterically. That was most unlike her. I could not make out what was happening. Usually calm to the point of iciness, rigidly controlled except when she quarrelled with her sister, Norah, Frederica seemed now half excited, half anxious about something. It could hardly be Robert’s morals she was worrying about, although she took family matters very seriously, and the fact that Robert had a woman in tow was certainly a matter for curiosity. That Robert should be associated with Stringham’s sister was of special interest to myself. I had never met this sister, who was called Flavia, though I had seen her years before at Stringham’s wedding. Chips Lovell, our brother-in-law, Priscilla’s husband, had always alleged that Robert had a taste for ‘night-club hostesses old enough to be his mother’. Mrs Wisebite, though not a night-club hostess, was certainly appreciably older than Robert. By this time, after several changes of position, Stevens had parked the car to his own satisfaction. As he joined us, another possible explanation of Frederica’s jumpiness suddenly occurred to me.

‘Isobel hasn’t had the baby yet without anyone telling me?’

‘Oh, no, no, no.

However, something about the way I asked the question must have indicated to Frederica herself that her manner struck me as unaccustomed. While we followed her through the hall, she spoke more quietly.

‘It’s only that I’m looking forward to your meeting an old friend, Nick,’ she said.

Evidently Robert was not the point at issue. We entered a sitting-room full of people, including a lot of children. These younger persons became reduced, in due course, to four only; Frederica’s two sons, Edward and Christopher, aged about ten and twelve respectively, together with a couple of quite little ones, who played with bricks on the floor. One of these latter was presumably Priscilla’s daughter, Caroline. Priscilla herself, blonde and leggy, quite a beauty in her way, was also lying on the floor, helping to build a tower with the bricks. Her brother, Robert Tolland, wearing battle-dress, sat on the sofa beside a tall, good-looking woman of about forty. Robert had removed his gaiters, but still wore army boots. The woman was Flavia Wisebite. Not noticeably like her brother in feature, she had some of Stringham’s air of liveliness weighed down with melancholy. In her, too, the melancholy predominated. There was something greyhound-like about her nose and mouth. These two, Robert and Mrs Wisebite, seemed to have arrived in the house only a very short time before Stevens and myself. Tall, angular, Robert wore Intelligence Corps shoulder titles, corporal’s stripes on his arm. The army had increased his hungry, even rather wolfish appearance. He jumped up at once with his usual manner of conveying that the last person to enter the room was the one he most wanted to see, an engaging social gesture that often caused people to exaggerate Robert’s personal interest in his fellow human beings, regarding whom, in fact, he was inclined to feel little concern.

‘Nick,’ he said, ‘it’s marvellous we should have struck just the moment when you’ve been able to get away for a weekend. I don’t think you’ve ever met Flavia, but she knows all about you from her brother.’

I introduced Odo Stevens to them.

‘How do you do, sir,’ said Robert.

‘Oh, blow the sir, chum,’ said Stevens. ‘You can keep that for when we’re on duty. I’m rather thick with the lance-corporal in your racket who functions with my Battalion. I’ve borrowed his motor bike before now. Where are you stationed?’

‘Mytchett,’ said Robert, ‘but I hope to move soon.’

‘My God, so do I,’ said Stevens. ‘They train your I. Corps personnel at Mytchett, don’t they?’

He seemed perfectly at ease in this rather odd gathering. Before I had time to say much to Mrs Wisebite, a middle-aged man rose from an armchair. He had a tanned face, deep blue eyes, a very neat grey moustache. The sweater worn over a pair of khaki trousers seemed very natural clothes for him, giving somehow the impression of horsy elegance. It was Dicky Umfraville. Frederica was right. His presence was certainly a surprise.

‘You didn’t expect to find me here, old boy, did you?’ said Umfraville. ‘You thought I could only draw breath in night-clubs, a purely nocturnal animal.’

I had to agree that night-clubs seemed the characteristic background for our past encounters. There had been two of these at least. Umfraville had turned up at Foppa’s that night, ages before, when I had taken Jean Duport there to play Russian billiards; then, a year or two later, Ted Jeavons had brought me to the club Umfraville himself had been running, where Max Pilgrim had sung his songs, Heather Hopkins played the piano:

‘Di, Di, in her collar and tie …’

I had not set eyes on Umfraville since that occasion, but he seemed determined that we were the oldest of friends. I tried to recall what I knew of him: service in the earlier war with the Foot Guards, I could not remember which; some considerable reputation as gentleman-rider; four wives. Like many men who have enjoyed a career of more than usual dissipation, he had come to look notably distinguished in middle years, figure slim, eyes bright, face brown with Kenya sun. This bronzed skin, well brushed greying hair emphasised the blue of his eyes, which glistened like Peter Templer’s, as Sergeant Pendry’s had done before his disasters. I could not recall whether or not Umfraville’s moustache was an addition. If so, it scarcely altered him at all. His face, in repose, possessed that look of innate sadness which often marks the features of those habituated to the boundless unreliability of horses. I asked him how he was employed in the army.

‘On the staff of London District, old boy.’

He spoke with an exaggerated dignity, squaring his chest and coming to attention. Frederica, who was handing round drinks, now joined us. Once more she began to laugh helplessly.

‘Dicky’s got a very grand job,’ she said, ‘haven’t you?’

She slipped her arm through Umfraville’s. This was unheard-of licence for Frederica, something to be regarded as indicating decay of all the moral and social standards she had defended so long.

‘It’s certainly one of the bigger stations,’ Umfraville agreed modestly.

‘Of course it is, darling.’

‘And should lead to promotion,’ he said.

‘Without doubt.’

‘Collecting the tickets perhaps.’

‘Dicky is an RTO,’ said Frederica.

She was quite unable to control her laughter, which seemed not so much attributable to the thought of Umfraville being a Railway Transport Officer, as to the sheer delight she took in him for himself.

‘He’s got a cosy little office at one of those North London stations,’ she said. ‘I can never remember which, but I’ve visited him there. I say, Dicky, we’d better tell Nick, hadn’t we?’

‘About us?’

‘Yes.’

‘The fact is,’ said Umfraville speaking slowly and with gravity, ‘the fact is Frederica and I are engaged.’

Isobel came through the door at that moment, so the impact of this unexpected piece of news was to some extent lessened by other considerations immediately presenting themselves. Then and there, no more was said than a few routine congratulations, with further gigglings from Frederica. Isobel looked pale, though pretty well. I had not seen her for months, it seemed years. We went off to a corner together.

‘How have you been?’

‘All right. There was a false alarm about ten days ago, but it didn’t get far enough to inform you.’

‘And you’re feeling all right?’

‘Most of the time — but rather longing for the little brute to appear.’

We talked for a while.

‘Who is the character on the floor playing bricks with the children and Priscilla?’

‘He’s called Odo Stevens. He’s on the course and brought me over in his car. Come and meet him.’

We went across the room. Stevens got to his feet and shook hands.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I must go. Otherwise Aunt Doris will be upset something’s happened to me.’

‘Don’t rush off, Mr Stevens,’ said Priscilla, still prone on the carpet, ‘hullo, Nick, I’ve only had a wave from you so far. How are you?’

Frederica joined us.

‘Another drink,’ she said.

‘No, thank you, really,’ said Stevens, ‘I must be moving on.’

He turned to say goodbye to Priscilla.

‘I say,’ he said, ‘you’ll lose your brooch, if you’re not careful.’

She looked down. The brooch hung from its pin. It was a little mandoline in silver-gilt, ornamented with musical symbols on either side, early Victorian keepsake in style, pretty, though of no special value. Priscilla used to wear it before she married Chips. I had always supposed it a present from Moreland in their days together, that the reason for the musical theme of its design. While she glanced down, the brooch fell to the ground. Stevens stooped to pick it up.

‘The clasp is broken,’ he said. ‘Look, if I can take it with me now, I’ll put it right in a couple of ticks. I can bring it back on Sunday night, when I turn up with the car.’

‘But that would be wonderful,’ she said. ‘Do you know about brooches?’

‘All about costume jewellery. In the business.’

‘Oh, do tell me about it.’

‘I must be off now,’ he said. ‘Some other time.’

He turned to me, and we checked the time he would bring the car for our return to Aldershot. Then Stevens said goodbye all round.

‘I’ll come to the door with you,’ said Priscilla. ‘I want to hear more about costume jewellery, my favourite subject.’

They went off together.

‘What a nice young man,’ said Frederica. ‘He really made one feel as if one were his own age.’

‘Take care,’ said Umfraville. ‘That’s just what I was like when I was young.’

‘But that’s in his favour,’ she said, ‘surely it is.’

‘Barely twenty,’ said Umfraville, in reminiscence. ‘Blind with enthusiasm. Fighting like a hero on Flanders fields.’

‘Oh, rot,’ said Frederica. ‘You said you were nearly twenty-four when you went to the war.’

‘Well, anyway, look at me now,’ said Umfraville. ‘A lot of good my patriotism did me, a broken-down old RTO.’

‘Cheer up, my pet.’

‘Ah,’ said Umfraville, ‘the heroes of yesterday, they’re the maquereaux of tomorrow.’

‘Well, you’re my maquereau anyway,’ said Frederica, ‘so shut up and have another drink.’

Later, when we were alone together upstairs, Isobel gave a fuller account of herself. There was a lot to talk about. The doctor thought everything all right, the baby likely to arrive in a couple of weeks’ time. There were, indeed, far more things to discuss than could be spoken of at once. They would have to come out gradually. Instead of dealing with myriad problems in a businesslike manner, settling all kind of points that had to be settled, making arrangements about the future — if it could be assumed there was to be a future — we talked of more immediate, more amusing matters.

‘What do you think about Frederica?’ Isobel asked.

‘Not a bad idea.’

‘I think so too.’

‘When did she break the news?’

‘Only yesterday, when he arrived on leave. I was a bit staggered when told. She’s mad about him. I’ve never seen Frederica like that before. The boys get on well with him too, and seem to approve of the prospect.’

Frederica and Dicky Umfraville getting married was something to open up hitherto unexplored fields of possibility. The first thought, that the engagement was grotesque, bizarre, changed shape after a time, developing until one saw their association as one of those emotional hook-ups of the very near and the very far, which make human relationships easier to accept than to rationalize or disentangle. I remembered that if Frederica’s husband, Robin Budd, had lived, his age would not have been far short of Umfraville’s. I asked Isobel if the two of them had ever met.

‘Just saw each other, I think. Rob looked a little like Dicky too.’

‘Where did Frederica pick him up?’

‘With Robert. Dicky Umfraville knew Flavia Wisebite in Kenya. Her father farms there — or did, he died the other day — but of course you know that.’

‘Do you suppose Flavia and Dicky—’

‘I shouldn’t wonder. Anyway, it was an instantaneous click so far as Frederica was concerned.’

‘Frederica is aware, I suppose, that the past is faintly murky.’

‘One wife committed suicide, another married a jockey. Then there was the wife no one knows about — and finally Anne Stepney, who lasted scarcely more than a year, and is now, I hear, living with J. G. Quiggin.’

‘That’s as many as are recorded. But where did Robert contract Mrs Wisebite? That is even more extraordinary.’

‘One never knows with Robert. Tell me about her. She is sister of your old school pal, Charles Stringham. What else?’

‘Charles never saw much of her after they were grown up. She first married a notorious character called Flitton, who lost an arm in the war before this one. A great gambler, also a Kenya figure. Dicky must know him well. Flitton ran away with Baby Wentworth, but refused to marry her after the divorce. Flavia had a daughter by Flitton who must be eighteen or nineteen by now.’

‘Flavia told me the late Mr Wisebite, her second husband, came from Minneapolis, and died of drink in Miami.’

‘Is she sharing a room with Robert?’

‘Not here. There isn’t one to share. The beds are too narrow. But, in principle, they seem to be living together. How did you think Priscilla was looking?’

‘All right. She was being a bit standoffish, except to Stevens. Who was the other child playing bricks? The Lovells have only Caroline, haven’t they?’

‘That’s Barry.’

‘Who is Barry?’

‘A slip-up of Frederica’s maid, Audrey. Audrey had to bring him along with her, owing to war circumstances. Barry comes in very useful as an escort for Caroline. You know how difficult it always is to find a spare man, especially in the country.’

‘Does Barry’s mother do the cooking?’

‘No, Frederica. She found herself without a cook and no prospect of getting one. She’s always been rather keen on cooking, you know. Now she could get a job in any but the very best houses.’

I had an idea, from the way she spoke, that all this talk about Barry, and Frederica’s cooking, was, on Isobel’s part, a means of temporarily evading the subject of Priscilla. I could tell, from the way she had mentioned her sister, that, for some reason, Priscilla was on Isobel’s mind. She was worried about her.

‘Any news of Chips?’

‘Priscilla isn’t very communicative. Where do Marines go? Is he on a ship? She seems to hold it against him that he hasn’t been able to arrange for them to have a house or a flat somewhere. I don’t think that’s Chips’s fault. It’s all this bloody war. That’s why Priscilla is here. She is very restless.’

‘Is she having a baby too?’

‘Not that I know of. Audrey is, though.’

‘Audrey sounds a positive Messalina.’

‘Not in appearance. She is a good-natured, dumpy little thing with spectacles.’

‘A bit too good-natured, or her lenses need adjusting. Is it Barry’s father again?’

‘On the contrary, but we understand it may lead to marriage this time.’

‘I suppose Frederica will be the next with a baby. What about Robert and Mrs Wisebite?’

‘No doubt doing their best. Robert, by the way, is on embarkation leave. He’s only spending some of it here. He arrived with Flavia just before you did.’

‘Where is he going?’

‘He doesn’t know — or won’t say for security reasons — but he thinks France.’

‘How on earth has he managed that?’

‘He decided to withdraw his name from those in for a commission, as there was otherwise no immediate hope of a posting overseas.’

‘I see.’

‘Hardly what one would expect of Robert,’ Isobel said.

His own family regarded Robert as one of those quietly self-indulgent people who live rather secret lives because they find themselves thereby less burdened by having to think of others. No one knew much, for example, about his work in an export house dealing with the Far East. The general idea was that Robert was doing pretty well there though not because he himself propagated any such picture. He would naturally be enigmatic about a situation such as that which involved him with Mrs Wisebite. It was fitting that he should find himself in Field Security. Enterprise must have been required to place himself there too. I wondered what the steps leading to the Intelligence Corps had been. At one moment he had contemplated the navy. No less interesting was this attempt on Robert’s part to move closer to a theatre of war at the price of immediately postponing the chance of becoming an officer.

‘The war seems to have altered some people out of recognition and made others more than ever like themselves,’ said Isobel.

‘Have you ever heard of someone called David Pennistone? He was a man in the army I talked to on a train. He said he was writing an article on Descartes.’

‘Haven’t I seen the name at the end of reviews?’

‘That’s what I thought. We didn’t manage to find anyone we knew in common, but I believe I met him years ago for a minute or two at a party.’

‘Didn’t the Lovells talk about someone called Pennistone when they came back from Venice? I remember Chips explaining that he was no relation to the Huntercombes, because the name was spelt with a double-n. I have an idea Pennistone lives in Venice — some story of a contessa, beautiful but not very young. That’s how I’m beginning to feel myself.’

‘Anyway, it’s nice to meet again, darling.’

‘It’s been a long time.’

‘A bloody long time.’

‘It certainly has.’

Later that weekend, when I found him pacing the lawn, Umfraville himself supplied some of the background wanting in his own story.

‘Look here, old boy,’ he said, when I joined him, ‘how do you think you and the others are going to stand up to having me as a brother-in-law?’

‘A splendid prospect.’

‘Not everyone would think so,’ he said. ‘You know I must be insane to embrace matrimony again. Stark, staring mad. But not half as mad as Frederica to take me on. Do you realize she’ll be my fifth? Something wrong with a man who keeps marrying like that. Must be. But I really couldn’t resist Frederica. That prim look of hers. All the same, fancy her accepting me. You’d never expect it, would you. All that business of her emptying the royal slops. She’ll have to give up that occupation of course. No good trying to be an Extra Woman of the Bedchamber with me in the offing. Not a bloody bit of use. You can just picture H.M. saying: “Why’s that fellow turned up again? I remember him. He used to be a captain in my Brigade of Guards. I had to get rid of him. He’s a no-gooder. What does he mean by showing his ugly face again at Buck House? I won’t stand it. Off with his head.” You agree, don’t you?’

‘I see what you mean.’

Umfraville stared at me with bloodshot eyes. When we had first met at Foppa’s, I had wondered whether he was not a little mad. The way he spoke now, even though it made me laugh, created the same disquieting impression. He nodded his head, smiling to himself, still contemplating his own characteristics with absolute absorption. I suddenly saw that Umfraville had been quite right when he said he was like Odo Stevens. Here again was an almost perfect narcissism, joined in much the same manner to a great acuteness of observation and relish for life.

‘You’re going to have a professional cad for a brother-in-law, old boy,’ he said, ‘make no mistake about that. Just to show you I know what I’m talking about when I apply that label to myself, I’ll confide a secret. I was the one who took our little friend Flavia’s virginity in Kenya years ago. Still, if that were the worst thing that ever happened to poor Flavia, she wouldn’t have had much to complain about. Fancy being married to Cosmo Flitton and Harrison F. Wisebite in one lifetime.’

‘Isobel and I had already discussed whether you and Mrs Wisebite had ever been in bed together.’

‘You had? That shows you’re a discerning couple. She’s a bright girl, your wife. Well, the answer is in the affirmative. You knew Flavia’s brother Charles, didn’t you?’

‘I used to know him well. I haven’t seen him for years.’

‘Met Charles Stringham in Kenya too. Came out for a month or two when he was quite a boy. I liked him very much. Then he took to drink, like so many other good chaps. Flavia says he has recovered now, and is in the army. Charles used to talk a lot about that bastard, Buster Foxe, whom their mother married when she and Boffles Stringham parted company. Charles hated Buster’s guts.’

‘I haven’t seen Commander Foxe for ages.’

‘Neither have I, thank God, but I hear he’s in the neighbourhood. At your brother-in-law, Lord Warminster’s home, in fact. He’ll soon be my brother-in-law, too. Then there’ll be hell to pay.’

‘But what on earth is Buster, a sailor, doing at Thrubworth? I thought it was a Corps Headquarters.’

‘Thrubworth isn’t an army set-up any longer. It’s still requisitioned, but they turned the place into one of those frightfully secret inter-service organisations. Buster has dug himself in there.’

‘Are they still letting Erry and Blanche inhabit their end of the house.’

‘Don’t object, so far as I hear.’

No very considerable adjustment had been necessary when Thrubworth had been taken over by the Government at the beginning of the war. Erridge, in any case, had been living in only a small part of the mansion (seventeenth-century brick, fronted in the eighteenth century with stone), his sister, Blanche, housekeeping for him. Although the place was only twenty or thirty miles from Frederica’s village, there was little or no communication between Erridge and the rest of his family. Since the outbreak of war he had become, so Isobel told me, less occupied than formerly with the practical side of politics, increasingly devoting himself to books about the Anabaptists and revolutionary movements of the Middle Ages.

‘Buster’s a contemporary of mine,’ said Umfraville, ‘a son-of-a-bitch in the top class. I’ve never told you my life story, have I?’

‘Not yet.’

‘You’ll hear it often enough when we become brothers-in-law,’ he said, ‘so I’ll start by revealing only a little now.’

Once more I thought of Odo Stevens.

‘My father bred horses for a living,’ said Umfraville. ‘It was a precarious vocation and his ways were improvident. However, he had the presence of mind to marry the daughter of a fairly well-to-do manufacturer of machinery for the production of elastic webbing. That allowed for a margin of unprofitable deals in bloodstock. If I hadn’t learnt to ride as a boy, I don’t know where I should have been. There was some crazy idea of turning me into a land-agent. Then the war came in 1914 and I got off on my own. Found my way into one of the newly formed Guards battalions. There had been terrific expansion and they didn’t turn up their noses at me and many another like me. In fact some of my brother officers were heels such as you’ve never set eyes on. I never looked back after that. Not until I fell foul of Buster Foxe. If it hadn’t been for Buster, I might have been major-general now, commanding London District, instead of counting myself lucky to be a humble member of its Movement Control staff.’

‘You remained on after the war with a regular commission?’

‘That was it,’ said Umfraville. ‘I expect you’ve heard of a French marshal called Lyautey. Pacified North Africa and all that. Do you know what Lyautey said was the first essential of an officer? Gaiety. That was what Lyautey thought, and he knew his business. His own ideas of gaiety may not have included the charms of the fair sex, but that’s another matter. Well, how much gaiety do you find among most of the palsied crackpots you serve under? Precious little, you can take it from me. It was my intention to master a military career by taking a leaf out of Lyautey’s book — not as regards neglecting the ladies, but in other respects. First of all it worked pretty well.’

‘But what has Buster Foxe to do with Marshal Lyautey?’

‘I’m coming to that,’ said Umfraville. ‘Ever heard of a girl called Dolly Braybrook?’

‘No.’

‘Dolly was my first wife. Absolute stunner. Daughter of a fellow who’d formerly commanded the Regiment. Bloody Braybrook, her father was universally termed throughout the army, and with reason. She wouldn’t have me at first, and who should blame her. Asked her again and again. The answer was always no. Then one day she changed her mind, the way women do. That pertinacity of mine has gone now. All the same, its loss has confirmed my opinion that the older I get, the more attractive I am to women.’

‘It certainly looks like it.’

‘Formerly, there was all that business of “Not tonight, darling, because I don’t love you enough”, then “Not tonight, darling, because I love you too much” — Christ, I’ve been through the whole range of it. The nearest some women get to being faithful to their husband is making it unpleasant for their lover. However, that’s by the way. The point is that Dolly married me in the end.’

‘How long did it last?’

‘A year or two. Happy as the day’s long, at least I was. I’d been appointed adjutant too. Then Buster Foxe appeared on the horizon. He was stationed at Greenwich at the time — the Naval College. I used to play an occasional game of cards with him and other convivial souls when he came up west. What should happen but under my very nose Dolly fell in love with Buster.’

The exaggerated dramatic force employed by Umfraville in presenting his narrative made it hard to know what demeanour best to adopt in listening to the story. Tragedy might at any moment give way to farce, so that the listener had always to keep his wits about him. When I first met Umfraville I had noticed some resemblance to Buster Foxe, now revealed as that similarity companionship in early life confers on people.

‘It was just the moment when the Battalion was moving from Buckingham Gate to Windsor,’ Umfraville said. ‘I had to go with them, of course, while Dolly stayed in London, until we could find somewhere to live. I went up to see her one day. Arrived home. The atmosphere was a shade chilly. The next thing was Dolly told me she wanted a divorce.’

‘A complete surprise?’

‘Old boy, you could have knocked me down with a swizzle-stick. Always the way, of course. Nothing I could say was any good. Dolly was set on marriage to Buster. In the end I agreed. There was no way out. I suppose I might have shot Buster through the head, if I’d got close enough to him, even though it is only the size of a nut. What the hell good would that have done? Besides, I’d have run quite a chance of swinging in this country. It’s not like France, where they expect you to react strongly. So I settled down to do the gentlemanly thing, and provide evidence for Dolly to divorce me. I was quite well ahead with that when Buster found Amy Stringham, Flavia’s mama, was just as anxious to marry him as Dolly was. Now it didn’t take Buster long to work out that marriage to a lady with some very warm South African gold holdings, not to mention a life interest in her first husband Lord Warrington’s estate, stud and country mansion, would be more profitable than a wife like Dolly, one of a large family without a halfpenny to bless herself with. Mrs Stringham was a few years older than Buster, it’s true, but she was none the less a beauty. We all had to admit that.’

Umfraville paused.

‘Next thing I heard,’ he said, ‘was that Dolly had taken an overdose of sleeping pills.’

‘Divorce proceedings had started?’

‘Not so far as that they couldn’t have been put in reverse gear. I suppose Dolly thought it too late in the day to suggest return, though there’s nothing I’d have liked better.’

‘But why did that prevent you from Commanding London District?’

‘That’s a sensible question, old boy. The reason was this. I had to leave the service — abandon my gallant and glorious Regiment. I’ll explain. You see I wasn’t feeling too good after my poor wife Dolly decided to join the angels, and naturally I looked about for someone to console me. Found several, as a matter of fact. The one I liked best was a girl I met one night at the Cavendish called Joy Grant — at least that was her professional name, and a very suitable one too — so I thought I might as well marry her. Of course, there couldn’t be any question of staying in the Regiment, if I married Joy. To begin with, I should have been hard put to it to name a brother officer who hadn’t shared the same idyllic experiences as myself in that respect. I sent in my papers and made up my mind to up stumps and emigrate with my blushing bride. Thought I’d try Kenya, the great open spaces where men are men, as Charles Stringham used to say. Well, Joy and I had scarcely arrived in the hotel at Nairobi when it became abundantly clear we had made a mistake in becoming man and wife. We were already living what’s called a cat-and-dog life. In short, it wasn’t long before she went off with a fellow called Castlemallock, twice her age, who looked like an ostler suffering from a dose of clap.’

‘The Corps School of Chemical Warfare is at a house called Castlemallock.’

‘That’s the family. They used to live there until they lost all their money a generation or two ago. Castlemallock himself, marquess or not, was a common little fellow, but what was much worse, so far as he himself was concerned, was the fact that he found he couldn’t perform with Joy in Kenya. He thought it might have something to do with the climate, the altitude, so he took her back to England to see if he could make better going there, or at least consult a competent medical man about getting a shot of something to liven him up occasionally. However, he took too long to find the right specialist, and meanwhile Joy went off with Jo Breen, the jockey, the chap who was suspended one year at Cheltenham for pulling Middlemarch. They keep a pub together now in one of those little places in the Thames Valley, and overcharge you most infamously if you ever drop in for a talk about old times.’

Umfraville paused again. He took out a cigarette case and offered it to me.

‘Now this business of wives departing was beginning to get me down,’ he said. ‘It seemed to be becoming a positive habit. This time, I thought, I’ll be the one to do the cattle rustling, so I removed from him the wife of a District Commissioner. There was no end of trouble about that. When I previously found myself in that undignified position, I’d behaved like a gent. This fellow, the husband, didn’t see things in that light at all. I found myself in a perfect rough-house.’

He lit a cigarette and sighed.

‘How did it end?’

‘We got married,’ he said, ‘but she died of enteric six months later. You see I don’t have much luck with wives. Then you were present yourself when I met little Anne Stepney at Foppa’s. You know the end of the story. That was a crazy thing to do, to marry Anne, if ever there was. Anyway, it didn’t last long. Least said, soonest mended. But now I’ve turned over a new leaf. Frederica is going to be my salvation. The model married couple. I’m going to find my way out of Movement Control, and once more set about becoming a general, just as I was before being framed by Buster. Frederica is going to make a first-class general’s wife. Don’t you agree? My God, I never dreamed I’d marry one of Hugo Warminster’s daughters, and I don’t expect he did either.’

By then, it was time for luncheon. I found myself sitting next to Flavia Wisebite. She had a quiet, rather sad manner, suggesting one of those reserved, well behaved, fairly peevish women, usually of determined character, often to be found as wives, or ex-wives, of notably dissipated men like Flitton or Wisebite. Their peevishness appears to derive not so much from a husband’s ill behaviour, as to be a trait natural to them, which attracts men of that kind. Such was mere conjecture, since I knew little or nothing of Flavia’s private life, except that Stringham had more than once implied that his sister’s matrimonial troubles were largely of her own choosing. In that she would have been, after all, not unlike himself. I asked for news of her brother.

‘Charles?’ she said. ‘He’s in a branch of the army called the RAOC — Royal Army Ordnance Corps. I expect you know about it. According to Charles, they look after clothes and boots and blankets, all that sort of thing. Is it true?’

‘Perfectly true. What rank?’

‘Private.’

‘I see.’

‘And likely to remain so, he says.’

‘He’s — all right now?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said ‘Hardly touches a drop. In fact, so cured he can even drink a glass of beer from time to time. That’s a great step. I always said it was just nerves, not real addiction.’

Familiar herself with alcoholics, she took her brother’s former state in a very matter-of-fact way; also his circumstances in the army, which did not sound very enviable. Stringham as a private in the RAOC required an effort of imagination even to picture.

‘How does Charles like it?’

‘Not much.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘He says it’s rather hell, in fact, but he was bent on getting into something. For some reason, the RAOC were the only people who seemed to want him. I think Charles is having a more uncomfortable time than Robert. You rather enjoy the I. Corps, don’t you, dear?’

‘Enjoy is rather a strong word,’ said Robert. ‘Things might be worse at Mytchett. I always like prying into other people’s business, and that’s what Field Security is for.’

Flavia Wisebite’s manner towards Robert was almost maternal. She was nearer in age to Robert than to Umfraville, but gave the impression, although so different an example of it, of belonging much more to Umfraville’s generation. Both she and Umfraville might be said to represent forms of revolt, and nothing dates people more than the standards from which they have chosen to react. Robert and Flavia’s love affair, if love affair it were, took a very different shape from Frederica’s and Umfraville’s. Robert and Flavia gave no impression that, for the moment at least, they were having the time of their lives. On the contrary, they seemed very subdued. By producing Flavia at his sister’s house, Robert was at last to some extent showing his hand, emotionally speaking, something he had never done before. Perhaps he was in love. The pressures of war were forcing action on everyone. Were his efforts to get to France part of this will to action, or an attempt to escape? The last might also be true. The telephone bell rang as we were rising from table. Frederica went to answer it. She returned to the room.

‘It’s for you, Priscilla.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Nick’s friend, Mr Stevens.’

‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Priscilla. ‘About the brooch.’

She went rather pink.

‘Priscilla’s made a hit,’ said Umfraville.

I asked Flavia whether she ever saw her mother’s former secretary, Miss Weedon, who had married my parents’ old acquaintance, General Conyers.

‘Oh, Tuffy,’ she said. ‘She used to be my governess, you know. Yes, I visited her only the other day. It is all going very well. The General read aloud to us an article he had written about heightened bi-sexuality in relation to early religiosity. He is now much more interested in psychoanalysis than in his ’cello playing.’

‘What does he think about the war?’

‘He believed a German offensive would start any moment then, probably in several places at once.’

‘In fact this Norwegian and Danish business was the beginning.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘It doesn’t sound as if things are going too well,’ Umfraville said, ‘I think we’ve taken some knocks.’

Priscilla returned.

‘It was about the brooch,’ she said. ‘Mr Stevens can’t do it himself, as one of the stones has come out, but he has arranged for someone he knows to mend it. He just wanted to warn me that he wouldn’t have it for me when he came to pick up Nick in the car.’

‘I said he was a very polite young man,’ remarked Frederica, giving her sister rather a cold look.

The rest of the weekend passed with the appalling rapidity of wartime leave, melting away so quickly that one seemed scarcely to have arrived before it was time to go. Dinner was a trifle gloomy on that account, conversation fragmentary, for the most part about the news that evening.

‘I wonder whether this heavy bombing is a prelude to a move in France,’ said Robert. ‘What do you think, Dicky?’

‘That will be the next thing.’

Towards the end of the meal, the telephone bell sounded.

‘Do answer it, Nick,’ said Frederica. ‘You’re nearest the door.’

She spoke from the kitchen, where she was making coffee. The telephone was installed in a lobby off the hall. I went out to it. A man’s voice asked if he were speaking to Frederica’s number.

‘Yes.’

‘Is Lance-Corporal Tolland there?’

‘Who is speaking?’

He named some army unit. As I returned to the dining-room, a knocking came from the front door. I told Robert he was wanted on the telephone.

‘Shall I answer the door, Frederica?’

‘It’s probably the vicar about a light showing,’ she said. ‘He’s an air-raid warden and frightfully fussy. Bring him in, if it is. He might like a cup of coffee.’

However, a tall naval officer was on the step when I opened the door. He had just driven up in a car.

‘This is Lady Frederica Budd’s house?’

‘Yes.’

‘I must apologize for calling at this hour of the night, but I believe my step-daughter, Mrs Wisebite, is staying here.’

‘She is.’

‘There are some rather urgent business matters to talk over with her. I heard she was here for a day or two, and thought Lady Frederica would not mind if I dropped in for a moment. I am stationed in the neighbourhood — at her brother, Lord Warminster’s house, as a matter of fact.’

‘Come in. You’re Commander Foxe, aren’t you. I’m Nicholas Jenkins. We’ve met once or twice in the past.’

‘Good God, of course we have,’ said Buster. ‘This is your sister-in-law’s house?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were a friend of Charles’s, weren’t you. This is splendid.’

Commander Foxe did not sound as if he thought finding me at Frederica’s was as splendid as all that, even though he seemed relieved that his arrival would be cushioned by an introduction. Another sponsor would certainly be preferable, since any old friend of Stringham’s was bound to have heard many stories to his own discredit. However, Buster, although he had that chronic air some men possess of appearing to consider all other men potential rivals, put a reasonably good face on it. For my own part, I suddenly thought of what Dicky Umfraville had told me. He would hardly welcome this arrival. There was nothing to be done about that. I took Buster along to the sitting-room, where the rest of the party were now sitting. Buster had evidently planned a fairly dramatic entry.

‘I really must apologize, Lady Frederica—’ he began to say, as he came through the door.

Following him into the room, I saw at once something disagreeable had happened. Robert appeared to be the centre of attention. He had evidently just announced news consequent on his telephone call. Everyone looked disturbed. Flavia Wisebite seemed near tears. When she saw Commander Foxe, her distress turned to furious annoyance.

‘Buster,’ she said sharply, ‘where on earth have you come from?*

She sounded very cross, so cross that for a moment she forgot how upset she was. Commander Foxe must have grasped that his arrival was not altogether welcome at the moment. He was plainly taken aback by that. Smiling uneasily, he glanced round the room, as if to recover himself by finding some friendly face. His eyes rested first on Dicky Umfraville. Umfraville held out his hand.

‘Hullo, Buster,’ he said, ‘a long time since we met.’

When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards, as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance. Buster Foxe and Dicky Umfraville, between them, brought about that state. Their really overpowering mutual detestation dominated for a moment all other local agitations. The fact that neither party was going to come out in the open at this stage made the currents of nervous electricity generated by suppressed emotion even more powerful. At the same time, to anyone who did not know what horrors linked them together, they might have appeared a pair of old friends, met after an age apart. Their distinct, though imprecise, physical similarity increased this last impression. Before Buster could do more than make a gesture of acknowledgment in Umfraville’s direction, Frederica came forward. Buster began once more to apologize, to explain he wanted only a brief word with Flavia, then be gone. Frederica listened to him.

‘We’re all in rather a stew here at the moment,’ she said. ‘My brother Robert has just heard his leave is cancelled. He has to go back as soon as possible.’

Buster was obviously put out at finding himself in the disadvantageous position of having to listen to someone else’s troubles, when he had come with the express object of stating his own. It had to be admitted he looked immensely distinguished, more so even than Umfraville. I had never before seen Commander Foxe in naval uniform. It suited him. His iron-grey hair, of which he still possessed plenty, was kept short on a head almost preternaturally small, as Umfraville had pointed out. Good looks, formerly of a near film-star quality, had settled down in middle-age to an appearance at once solid and forcible, a bust of the better type of Roman senator. A DSC was among his medal ribbons. I thought of Umfraville’s lament that the heroes of yesterday are the maquereaux of tomorrow. Something had undoubtedly vexed Commander Foxe a great deal. He attempted, without much success, to assume a sympathetic expression about the subject of Robert’s leave cancellation. Clearly ignorant of any connexion between Flavia and Robert, he was at a loss to understand why Flavia was so disturbed. After her first outburst, she had forgotten about Buster again, and was gazing at Robert, her eyes full of tears.

‘Surely you can take a train tomorrow,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to leave tonight, darling. What trains are there, Frederica?’

‘Not very good ones,’ said Frederica. ‘But they’ll get you there sooner or later. Why don’t you do that, Robert?’

‘Aren’t you taking the army too seriously, Robert?’ said Umfraville. ‘Having just sent you on leave, they can’t expect you to go back at a moment’s notice. Your unit doesn’t know Nick is going back by car tonight. Even if you are a bit late, there’s nothing the authorities can do to you, if they countermand their own orders in this way.’

‘That’s not the point,’ said Robert.

This was the only time I had ever seen Robert fairly near to what might be called a state of excitement. He was knocking his closed fists together gently.

‘If I don’t get back before tomorrow night,’ he said, ‘I may miss the overseas draft. My name is only included in the list on sufferance anyway. If they’ve got an excuse, they’ll remove it. That was the Orderly Room Sergeant on the line. He’s rather a friend of mine, and was giving me warning about that. Of course he couldn’t say it straight out, but he made his meaning quite clear to me. There are rows of other corporals they can send, if a party has been ordered to move forthwith. That’s what it looks like. Besides, I don’t want to have to make all my arrangements about packing and so on at the very last moment. That was why I thought your friend Stevens might be able to fit me into his car, Nick. You could then disgorge me somewhere in the neighbourhood of Mytchett. I could walk the last lap, if you landed me reasonably near.’

‘It won’t be very comfortable in the car, but I don’t see why you shouldn’t come with us.’

‘When is Stevens arriving?’

‘Any time now.’

‘I’ll go and get my things ready,’ said Robert.

He went off upstairs. Flavia began to dab her eyes with a rolled-up handkerchief. Buster must have remembered he had met Priscilla before — at the party his wife had given for Moreland’s symphony — and he filled in the time during this discussion about Robert’s affairs by talking to her. That was also perhaps a method of avoiding Dicky Umfraville’s eye. Buster was accompanying this conversation with a great display of middle-aged masculine charm. From time to time, he glanced in Flavia’s direction to see if she were sufficiently calm to be tackled about whatever he hoped to speak. Now, Flavia, making an effort to recover herself, moved towards Buster of her own volition.

‘What’s happened?’ she said. ‘I was going to ring you up, but I’ve been dreadfully entangled with other things. Besides, I’ve only just arrived here. Now all this has upset everything.’

If Buster did not already know about Robert, that was not very enlightening, but he was probably sharp enough to have grasped the situation by this time.

‘It’s about your mother,’ he said. ‘It’s all damned awkward. I thought the sooner you knew the better. There was a lot of difficulty in getting hold of your address. When I found by a lucky chance you were in the neighbourhood of Thrubworth, I decided to try and see you, in case I lost the opportunity for months.’

‘But what is it?’

‘Your mother is behaving in a very extraordinary way. There are serious money difficulties for one thing. They may affect you and Charles. Your settlements, I mean.’

‘She’s always quite reckless about money. You must have learnt that by now.’

‘She has been unwise about all kind of matters. I had no idea what was going on.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘That’s one of the points. She has closed both houses and gone to live in a workman’s cottage to be near Norman.’

‘Norman Chandler?’

‘Of course.’

‘But I thought Norman had joined the army.’

‘He has. He has been sent to a camp in Essex. That’s why your mother has gone there. What’s more, she wants to divorce me.’

This news certainly surprised Flavia a lot.

‘But—’

‘I’ve nowhere to go,’ said Buster, speaking with great bitterness. ‘When I was last in London, I had to stay at my club. Now this news about a divorce is sprung on me. Your mother went off without a word. All kinds of arrangements have to be made about things. It is too bad.’

‘But does she want to marry Norman?’

‘How do I know what she wants to do?’ said Buster. ‘I’m the last person she ever considered. I think Norman, too, has behaved very badly to allow her to act in this way. I always liked Norman. I did not in the least mind his being what he is. I often told him so. I thought we were friends. Many men in my position would have objected to having someone like Norman about the house, doing the flowers and dancing attendance upon their wife. Norman pleased your mother. That was enough for me. What thanks do I get for being so tolerant? Your mother goes off to Essex with Norman, taking the keys with her, so that I can’t even get at my own suits and shirts. On top of all that, I’m told I’m going to be divorced.’

At that point there was another loud knock on the front door. This must be Stevens. I went to let him in. Umfraville followed me into the hall.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘tell me quickly what’s happened to Buster to upset him so.’

‘Mrs Foxe had a friend called Norman Chandler — a little dancer she adored, who was always about her house. He was quite a good actor too. It looks as if she has got fed up at last and kicked Buster out.’

‘Buster is going to get me into this secret set-up at Thrubworth. I’ve decided that.’

‘How’s it going to be managed?’

‘I once took a monkey off Buster at poker. Apart from his other misdemeanours, I’ve never seen my money. I know where I can make things unpleasant, if Buster doesn’t jump to it and get me fixed up. Boffles Stringham once said: “Mark my words, Dicky, the day will come when Amy will have to get rid of that damned polo-playing sailor.” That day has come. There are some other reckonings for Buster to pay too.’

Another knock came on the door. Umfraville went back to the sitting-room. I admitted Stevens.

‘I’m a bit late,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to bustle back.’

‘There’s rather a commotion going on here. My brother-in-law, Robert Tolland, has just had his leave cancelled. He wants to get back to Mytchett tonight. Will it be all right if he comes with us? We pass near his unit and can drop him on the way.’

‘Of course. If he doesn’t mind having his balls crushed in the back of the car. Is he ready?’

‘He’s just gone off to pack. Then there’s a naval officer making a scene with his step-daughter.’

‘Bring ‘em all on,’ said Stevens. ‘We oughtn’t to delay too long. I’d just like to have word with that lady about her brooch.’

We went into the sitting-room. By that time things had quietened down. Buster, especially, had recovered his poise. He was now talking to Frederica, having presumably settled with Flavia whatever he had hoped to arrange. Flavia and Robert had retired to a sofa and were embracing. Stevens said a word of greeting to Frederica, then made at once for Priscilla. Frederica turned again to Buster.

‘I’m glad to hear Erry is behaving himself,’ she said.

‘I agree we were all prepared to find your brother rather difficult,’ said Buster, ‘but on the contrary — anyway so far as I am personally concerned — he has done everything in his power to make my life agreeable. He has, if I may say so, the charm of all your family, though in a different manner to the rest of you.’

Umfraville interrupted them.

‘Come and talk shop with me for a moment, Buster,’ he said.

They went into a corner of the room together. Isobel and I went into another one. It was clearly time to get under way. If we did not set out without further delay, we should not be back by the required hour. Then Isobel went rather white.

‘Look here,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry to have to call attention to myself at this moment, but I’m feeling awfully funny. I think perhaps I’d better go to my room — and Frederica or someone can ring up the doctor.’

That was the final touch. In a state of the utmost confusion and disquiet we left them at last, arriving in Aldershot just in time, having dropped Robert on the way.

‘Not feeling much like going on the square tomorrow, are you?’ said Stevens. ‘Still it was the hell of a good weekend’s leave. I had one of the local girls under a hedge.’