Private's Progress (19 page)

“The Splendid Hotel, please,” said Stanley.

“
Achchha,
sahib
,”
said the Sikh. He flicked the tourer into gear and they stormed down Chowringhee to the hotel.

The Splendid was a large place, very much an
hotel
de
luxe
,
with a palm court and a white-jacketed civilian staff, but reserved for service officers.

At the desk Stanley said to the Indian clerk:

“Does the name Charlie convey anything to you?”

“It does to me,” grunted a pouch-eyed, moustached major, emerging from the office behind. “I’m Major Charleston. You want to stay?”

He pushed over some forms.

“How long?” he grunted.

“Well,” said Stanley, “I ought to be getting back to Chotanagar.”

“Say a couple of days,” said the major, without
looking
up. “Apply to me for any extension if necessary.”

He handed Stanley a certificate of authorised delay and went back to his office. The clerk handed a key and said: “Room 281.”

Stanley found his way to the room and noticed
uncomfortably
that it contained twin beds. A battledress hung over one of them, and some oddments of toilet
gear were spread about. There was a bathroom attached and in the bath, fully clothed, slept an Australian officer, a bush hat tipped forward over his closed eyes. Stanley decided against disturbing him, arguing that there was no water in the bath, went downstairs for lunch and ate ravenously.

After lunch he slept fitfully, perspiring, with the fan fully on. At five he was awakened by metallic booms, and he found the Australian in the bath awake and shifting.

“Hullo, cobber,” said the Australian.

“Hullo,” said Stanley.

The Australian clambered out and flexed his limbs. Then he pulled down the lower lid of one eye and looked closely at it in the mirror.

“I had a night,” he announced. “Crikey, I had a night.”

He began exercising all his limbs in turn and then said:

“A bairth. A bairth and a shave and I’ll be all set.”

After an hour he appeared, considerably smartened. He was ready for action again and keen to waste no time.

“Let’s eat out,” he suggested.

His whole air conveyed an unshakeable
determination
on entertainment. He was not to be denied.

“We’ll warm up a bit first,” he decided, outside the hotel, making for a flashing neon sign.

Some time later it became apparent that all thoughts of food had evaporated. He treated Stanley to a series of gins, fixing him with a vigilant eye to ensure that his hospitality was being fully accepted, expatiating the
while on the varied night life which the city offered. In time they went from the bar to tables. A cabaret of sorts had begun, and on the floor an
Anglo-Indian
couple gave a display of exhibition dancing. The man wore brown Army P.T. shoes and from time to time attempted to lift his partner into ballet poses. Any grace they had would then vanish, and the light, poetic motions would become full-scale, perspiring heaves. Once or twice he was clearly unsuccessful and the movement would be clumsily and quite transparently abandoned.

The audience talked loudly and incessantly
meanwhile
, partly drowning the music. A party of American sergeants had a piece of trelliswork which they
expanded
at other tables. There was a white glove on the end, which waggled under the noses of their victims. The whole scene was, however, decorous, and not excessively noisy, but the Australian said:

“Mark my words, cobber, there’ll be trouble here tonight.”

“Oh, but surely,” protested Stanley.

“You wait and see,” said the Australian. “You mark my words. That’s why I brought this.”

He half pulled a revolver from his pocket.

“You got to be prepared, cobber,” he said solemnly, and poured gin into his own glass, Stanley’s, and a small vase of flowers on the table.

“There’ll be trouble here tonight,” he repeated unsteadily.

The cabaret went on: a male singer, then a female singer, and relative decorum was maintained. By ten, the Australian had joined in the dancing; and Stanley,
avid for dinner, took the opportunity to go out to a Chinese restaurant for food. Then he went back to bed.

There was no sign of the Australian in the morning. At breakfast Stanley encountered some odd looks, and at the desk Major Charleston emerged to ask:

“What happened with that bushwhacker of yours in 281? Weren’t you with him at Carlo’s?”

“Why, what’s the matter, sir?” asked Stanley.

Major Charleston grunted.

“At midnight last night,” he said. “He shot three American sergeants. He’s in the cooler.”

Stanley packed, booked out and looked round Chowringhee distractedly for a taxi.

“Howrah Station,” he said to the driver. “Quick.”

B
ACK IN THE
rural calm of Chotanagar Stanley thankfully took up again the broken threads of his hibernation. His bearer told him a tale of loose wallahs who had stolen several of his books, and brought the
bhisti
to confirm the story. He also appeared to have married in the preceding week and was deploring the costs of the celebration.

There was a letter from Catherine. 

Several days later his father wrote.

Three months slipped by.

After the monsoons the Commanding Officer of the Depot sent a number of officers and men away on courses, and planned a series of harsh fieldcraft exercises to boost morale. He took to inter-company postings to keep people occupied with constant kit-checks and the handing back and forth of stores. On more than one occasion he held long cross-country runs for the entire unit, and awarded extra P.T. to those officers who failed to finish in the first fifty.

Coming exhausted from the gymnasium one day, Stanley was called to the adjutant and told that his release had come through.

“Everything’s conditional, of course,” remarked the adjutant. “You must be clear of all discrepancies and unfinished business or it will all be delayed. Let’s see, what are you this week? Signals officer? Right. Well, see all the wireless sets, batteries, stores and whatnot are handed over to Kimber.”

For a week Stanley tried to hand over his equipment to Lieutenant Kimber, a dim, trembly man in thick glasses who was extremely anxious not to be done over the transaction.

Neither of them could identify the majority of the strange parts of equipment for which Stanley had hurriedly signed the previous week, and Kimber insisted on the signals sergeant vouching for everything of which he was uncertain. He consistently refused to sign without a series of final checks to ensure that nothing had disappeared. Something always had.

“You’ll never get away, sir, at this rate,” said the signals sergeant. “Only thing to do is blind ’im with science. You want to get some u/s parts from, say, Kirkee Arsenal, and work ’em in.”

“Well, see what you can do,” said Stanley.

Within two days the sergeant had acquired some strange and complicated apparatus which he took to pieces. Lieutenant Kimber peered doubtfully and shortsightedly at the unrecognisable parts and finally, in some trepidation, signed.

Stanley packed, paid his mess bill, the bearer, the
bhisti
,
the sweeper, the book-wallah and several
hangers-on
. At six the truck to the station came to his verandah and the kit was loaded. He looked round for people to say good-bye to. There were one or two not out on
schemes, but he did not know them. He was considering saying good-bye to Kimber, but when he looked towards the signals office he saw Kimber come out, expostulating with the sergeant. He recognised Stanley and began crying out with a loud voice and waving a sheaf of papers. In almost the same instant Stanley saw in the distance two scruffy figures, laden with kit, trudging cheerfully towards the orderly room. They were instantly recognisable as Isles and Bailey.

The sudden concatenation of events moved him to instant action. He saw himself journeying for ever on Eastern railway trains, or running round a gymnasium, pursued always by Kimber with his accusing sheaf of papers, and Isles and Bailey with their kitbags. Against the tidal wave there is but one defence: flight.

Stanley jumped into the truck.

“Don’t stop at the orderly room,” he said. “Drive like hell to the station.”

The remainder of his kit, sent by sea from England, arrived a week later in Chotanagar. Although
ant-proof
and securely locked, the more valuable contents were missing when it reached him in England six months later.

I
N THE GARDEN
quadrangle of Apocalypse
undergraduates
were coming back from the Buttery with their little white jugs of ration milk. Some of them had military moustaches now, and wore their former service dress trousers without turnups, dyed green or brown. Next winter, thought Stanley, watching the gardener in his ventilated hat, busy at his geraniums, they’ll wear their British Warms.

He was back in his old rooms, but alone. Egan, it appeared, was staying on in the Army and trying for a permanent commission. Stanley was sitting in the window seat, in the chalk-stripe grey suit he had been given at his demobilisation at Woking. They had also given him a gaudy tie, a blue shirt made by the
Scottish
Co-operative Wholesale Society, and a peculiarly stiff green pork-pie hat which he was not able to wear without painful abrasions.

He half decided to give this hat to the college gardener.

From Woking he had gone up to Town. Catherine and Philip’s flat was in some disorder. They were moving back to Sussex. Of College Sid and Herbert the
Wykehamist there had been no sign for a year, but Nita was back again with her lettuce and nuts.

“I think it’s partly to get rid of her that Philip’s so keen to move, darling,” said Catherine.

They told him of Uncle Bertram’s last visit before his death.

“Now I get it,” said Philip, when Stanley explained about the Trip to Scarborough. “Do you know, by the way, that the latest thing is there’s some scandal about Vermeers. They say a lot of them are by a chap called Van Meegeren, some dealer.”

Their son Michelin, rising two, took a dislike to Stanley.

“I don’t like you,” he said. “You’re nasty.”

“So are you,” said Stanley.

Michelin burst into tears of rage.

They gave Stanley his father’s holiday address.

“Sunnyglades,” said Catherine. “Some sort of guest-house, I imagine. He seems to like it.”

Stanley travelled down into Surrey to see him.

“Sunnyglades?” said the taxi-driver. “O.K. Are you one too?”

“One what?” asked Stanley.

“You’ll see,” said the taxi-driver.

He drove down woodland lanes and stopped at a gate.

“Up the drive, guv,” he said. “Four and a tanner.”

It was a nature camp.

“I’m sorry,” said the venerable old man at the reception-room gently. “If you wish to see Mr.
Windrush
you must abide by the rules. It wouldn’t be fair to our members. We do not have
visitors
in the ordinary
way at all. What,” he continued, fixing Stanley with a kindly eye, “have you to be ashamed of, young man?”

“Oh, very well,” said Stanley.

“Of course, if it were cold,” said the old man, spreading his hands, “one has to keep warm. But here is God’s sunlight.”

“That’s better,” he said later. “You’ve cast your overburdening cares away, too. Now come with me.”

He stood up from his chair and the two naked figures stalked over the turf to a poetry-reading group near a lake. Stanley hung back.

The old man, walking ahead, went over and brought back Mr. Windrush.

Stanley’s father came majestically over, removing his pipe as he came, and shook Stanley’s hand warmly.

“My dear boy,” he said, “how good to see you. Mr. Habakkuk told me you were here. We’re reading some most interesting works. Young chap there, reading his own stuff.”

“How are you?” asked Stanley.

“I’m very fit,” said Mr. Windrush, stretching his toes, “very fit indeed. And you? I’ll bet it’s grand to get out of uniform.”

He showed Stanley enthusiastically over the place.

“Perfect liberty,” he said. “Where would you find it outside? I am going to stay here,” he added. “All the time those outside are enchained by a Socialist
government
.”

“But surely you’ll have to put clothes on to go out and vote?” asked Stanley.

“I expect so,” said Mr. Windrush. “But it’s grand here. We have games, too. Basketball and table tennis.”

“Mixed?” asked Stanley incredulously.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean, both sexes?”

“Naturally,” said his father, surprised. “Why not?”

“No reason at all,” said Stanley.

He tried to put out of his mind the picture of the detailed vibrations the more vigorous games would induce.

“My pipe’s gone out,” said his father. “Do you
happen
to have any matches about you? Oh, no, of course you haven’t. I’ll go to my cabin for some.”

They sat for a while on the bench outside his hut.

“Would you care to stay for a meal this evening?” asked his father. “People drop in sometimes.”

Stanley was tortured with anxiety.

“Do they—er, well, dress for dinner?” he asked carelessly.

In the end he had stayed to tea. His father brewed it on a little brick fire in the open, and they sat drinking it on the bench.

“How are you for time?” asked his father. “I’m afraid I haven’t all my time-tables here yet, but I can probably organise you a good train.”

“They’re twenty past the hour,” said Stanley. “But really, Father, what do you mean,
yet
? You’re not really going to stay here indefinitely?”

“I am,” said his father pleasantly. “Another cup?”

Stanley had said good-bye, dressed and asked Mr. Habakkuk to telephone for a taxi.

The Bursar at Apocalypse had been able to accept Stanley again in time for the summer term and had
arranged for him to move in a fortnight before the term started. There were few people up during the Easter Vacation, and Stanley read undisturbed in the Library and Junior Common Room.

He had passed the Warden in the quadrangle.

“Good morning, Wilson,” said the Warden. “Let me know about your Fellowship. You must come to tea.”

The Warden had always confused him with other people.

His former tutor, who had not seen him for three years, got off his bicycle in the Broad and said to him:

“Windrush, I’ve been meaning to say for some time. I can’t think what interrupted me from saying it. You described Richardson in an essay you wrote for me as a
thin
little printer who took to writing. I can’t think why I didn’t stop you when you were reading it out. It’s been worrying me for some time, and I’ve been trying to get hold of you. He was
chubby
.
Chubby
is the word. Well, I’m glad I’ve told you.”

There had been a letter waiting for him at the Lodge. It had a Bolivian postmark. 

Stanley had always found it difficult to believe in Uncle Bertram’s death. He had intended to visit the two military graves at Queen’s Wetherfold on his return to England, but had not so far gone there. But if Uncle Bertram was in Bolivia, what of Cox?

In Eights week Nobby brought in a visitor.

“A Mr. de Cameron,” he announced.

It was Cox.

“Nice surprise,” said Cox. “Your uncle said this was your college, and as I was motoring up I thought, ‘Well’.”

Cox appeared very opulent, a white carnation in the buttonhole of his pearl-grey double-breasted suit.

“I’m in Army surplus,” he explained. “Course, you want capital for a start off, but I was lucky there. You see, my old Stan, what it was: there was this other truck we brought back from Germany that time, you remember.”

“Yes, I think I get it,” said Stanley. “You and my uncle disposed of it.”

“There was these two mates of mine, couple of educated blokes, been to college, like you,” said Cox. “Course, it all fetched a fair bit. Then I drove the truck round another mate of mine’s—a garage, and ’e broke it all down into components. Then a few days later just after your uncle fixed you being posted East we done this accident.”

Cox was vague about the two bodies.

“A china of mine got them for me,” he explained sketchily. “We dressed them up, run the old jam-jar
into this telegraph pole, soaked the lot in petrol, lit a full box of matches and chucked it on.”

Stanley thought it better not to pursue the question of the origin of the bodies, but he recalled that Herbert and College Sid had not been seen for a year.

Cox gazed complacently round Stanley’s room.

“I’m not in Camberwell any more,” he said. “I moved to Campden Hill. Look me up, eh?”

He handed Stanley a card.

“Now I’m here,” he went on, “meet the wife, and ’owbout takin’ us to see the races?”

They drove in his Daimler with Mrs. de Cameron in purple taffeta, down to Folly Bridge.

And from the top deck of the gilded Apocalypse barge the three of them sat watching the eights skim past in the warm kindliness of an Oxford summer afternoon.