The military philosophers (14 page)

‘Who was the other?’

‘Some fellow from MEW,’ said Widmerpool. ‘No real experience of the world.’

There was something to be said for Widmerpool’s views, though there had been a time when he had argued the other way. This contempt for those uninstructed in moral licence was new too. It was the sort of subject he was inclined to avoid. His own sex life had always been rather a mystery. There was nothing so very unusual about that. Most people’s sex life is a mystery, especially that of individuals who seem to make most parade of it. Such is the conclusion one finally arrives at. All the same, Widmerpool had more than once shown himself an exceptional mixture of vehemence and ineptitude; the business of Gypsy Jones, for example, in his early days; then the disastrous engagement to Mrs Haycock or his romantic love for Barbara Goring. Few subjects are more fascinating than other people’s sexual habits from the outside; the tangled strands of appetite, tenderness, convenience or some hope of gain. In the light of what he had been saying, a direct question could sound not unreasonably inquisitive.

‘How do you organize that side of your own life these days?’

I did not feel absolutely at ease making this unconcealed attempt to satisfy curiosity, but, in supposing Widmerpool might be embarrassed, evasive or annoyed, I was wholly wrong. The enquiry delighted him. He clapped me on the back.

‘Plenty of pretty little bits in the black-out.’

‘Tarts?’

‘Of course.’

The solution was the same as Borrit’s. I remembered now that Widmerpool had commented favourably, years before, when I told him my own rooms in Shepherd Market were flanked by a large block of flats housing prostitutes. At the time, I had supposed that remark bombast on his part. Now, such a diagnosis seemed less positive. Perhaps, anyway in the course of the years, his remark, ‘How convenient’, had acquired a certain authenticity. One wondered what cumbersome burden of desire, satisfied or unsatisfied, possibly charged in its fulfilment with some elaborate order of ritual, Widmerpool carried round with him.

‘I suppose you have to be rather careful.’

It was a lame comment, which Widmerpool treated with the contempt it deserved.

‘I am careful,’ he said. ‘Is there anything about my life that would lead you to suppose I should not be careful? I believe in thinking things out. Arranging my life, but arranging it in such a way that I do not fall into a groove. By the way, there is a probability I shall go red in the near future.’

‘Go red?’

I had not the least idea what he meant. It seemed possible he might have returned to the subject of sexual habits, planning something in that line embarrassing even to himself.

‘Become a full colonel.’

He snapped the words out. Failure to recognize a colloquialism had irritated him. The phrase was peculiar to himself. Usually people spoke of a ‘red hat’ or ‘taking flannel’.

‘Only a tanner a day more in pay,’ he said, recovering his good humour, ‘but it’s the real jump in rank.’

It was no doubt specifically to inform me of this imminent promotion that he must have come out of the way across the Horse Guards Parade, I thought. By now we had nearly reached the arch leading into Whitehall. He suddenly lost his high spirits, sinking all at once to the depths of gloom, as I had known him do before, one of those changes of mood that would overcome him without warning.

‘You never know about promotion till it’s in the bag,’ he said. ‘There are occupational risks where I work. There are anywhere where you may find yourself in the CIGS’s entourage.’

‘Why him specially?’

‘He’s quite ruthless, if he doesn’t like the look of you. The other day he said, “I don’t want to see that officer again. I don’t like his face”. Perfectly good man, but they had to get rid of him.’

Widmerpool spoke with infinite dejection. I saw what he meant. Given the CIGS was easily irritated by the faces of staff-officers, Widmerpool’s, where survival was in question, was a bad bet, rather than a good one.

‘No use worrying,’ he said. ‘After all, I was not affected by all the trouble Liddament made.’

‘His Corps seem to have done well in the desert.’

‘No doubt Liddament has his points as a commander in the field. Unfortunately, I was blind to them when serving on the staff of his Division. Tell me – talking of those days made me think of Farebrother – had you left the Poles at the time of the Szymanski scandal?’

‘Yes.’

‘You heard Farebrother was largely responsible?’

‘That was being said.’

‘He’s been unstuck in consequence. Not without some action on my part.’

‘I didn’t know you were involved.’

‘I made it my business to be involved. Strictly between ourselves, the whole disgraceful affair was not unconnected with Prince Theodoric whom we saw at that musical performance the other night.’

‘Where does Theodoric come in?’

‘That is naturally secret, but I don’t mind telling you that the Prince is bringing a lot of pressure to bear one way and another.’

‘You mean from the Resistance point of view.’

‘I hold my own views on that subject,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I hear that young woman in red, whose name I asked, is said to be Theodoric’s mistress.’

‘That’s the gossip.’

‘I have little or no time for social life, but one keeps an eye on these things.’

A full colonel, wearing the red tabs with which Widmerpool himself hoped soon to be equipped, came out of a door under the arch and turned into Whitehall. Widmerpool pointed after him and laughed.

‘Did you see who that was?’ he asked. ‘I really strolled with you across here, out of my way, in case we might catch sight of him.’

‘Was it Hogbourne-Johnson?’

‘Relegated to the Training branch, where, if he’s not kicked out from there too, he will remain until the end of the war. The man who thought he was going to get a Division. Do you remember when he was so abominably rude to me?’

‘That balls-up about traffic circuits?’

‘It won’t be long now before I’m his equal in rank. I may find an opportunity to tell him some home truths, should our paths cross, though that’s unlikely enough. It’s only on the rarest occasions like today that I’m out of my office – and, after all, Hogbourne-Johnson’s a very unimportant cog in the machine.’

He nodded and began to move off. I saluted – the uniform, as one was always told, rather than the man – and took the Belgian documents back to our room.

THREE

One day, several weeks after the Allied Forces had landed in Normandy, I was returning over Westminster Bridge on foot from transacting some minor item of Czechoslovak army business with a ministry housed on the south bank of the river in the former Donners-Brebner Building. It was lovely weather. Even the most pessimistic had begun to concede that the war, on the whole, had taken a turn for the better. Some supposed this might mean the end of raids. Others believed the Germans had a trick or two up their sleeve. Although it was London Bridge to which the poem referred, rather than Westminster, the place from which I had just come, the dark waters of the Thames below, the beauty of the day, brought to mind the lines about Stetson and the ships at Mylae, how death had undone so many. Donners-Brebner – where Howard Craggs, recently knighted, now reigned over one of the branches – had been badly knocked about in the early days of the blitz. The full extent of the damage was not visible, because the main entrance, where Barnby’s frescoes had once been, was heaped with sandbags, access by a side door. Barnby was no longer available to repaint his frescoes. Death had undone him. It looked as if death might have undone Stringham too. At Donners-Brebner he had put me off for dinner because he was going to Peggy Stepney’s parents. Peggy’s second husband was another who had been undone. She was married to Jimmy Klein now, said to have always loved her. These musings were interrupted by a tall officer falling into step with me. It was Sunny Farebrother.

‘Hullo, Nicholas. I hope my dear old Finn is not still cross with me about Szymanski?’

‘There may still be some disgruntlement, sir.’ ‘Disgruntlement’, one was told, was a word that could be used of all ranks without loss of discipline. As I heard myself utter it, I became immediately aware of the manner in which Farebrother, by some effort of the will, made those with whom he dealt as devious as himself. It was not the first time I had noticed that characteristic in him. The ply, the term, was in truth hopelessly inadequate to express Finn’s rage about the whole Szymanski affair.

‘Finn’s a hard man,’ said Farebrother. ‘Nobody I admire more. There is not an officer in the entire British army I admire more than Lieutenant-Colonel Lysander Finn, VC.’

‘Lysander?’

‘Certainly.’

‘We never knew.’

‘He keeps it quiet.’

Farebrother smiled, not displeased at finding this piece of information so unexpected.

‘Who shall blame him?’ he said. ‘It’s modesty, not shame. He thinks the name might sound pretentious in the winner of a VC. Finn’s as brave as a lion, as straight as a die, but as hard as nails – especially where he thinks his own honour is concerned.’

Farebrother said the last words in what Pennistone called his religious voice.

‘You weren’t yourself affected by the Szymanski matter, Nicholas?’

‘I’d left the Poles by then.’

‘You’re no longer in Finn’s Section?’

Farebrother made no attempt to conceal his own interest in any change that might take place in employment or status of those known to him, in case these might in some manner, even if unforeseen, react advantageously to himself.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The Belgians and Czechs. I should like to have a talk with you one of these days about those two Allies, but not now. You don’t know how sorry I am that poor old Finn was inconvenienced in that way. I hate it when friends think you’ve let them down. I remember Frenchman in the last war whom I’d promised to put in for a British decoration that never came through. No use regretting these things, I suppose, but I’m made that way. We all have to do our duty as we see it, Nicholas. Each one of us has to learn that and it’s sometimes a hard lesson. In the case of Szymanski, I was made to suffer for being too keen. Disciplined, demoted in rank, shunted off to a bloody awful job. Tell Finn that. Perhaps he will forgive me when he hears I was made to pay for my actions. You know who went out of his way to bring this trouble about – our old friend Kenneth Widmerpool.’

‘But you’ve left that job now?’

‘In Civil Affairs, with my old rank and a good chance of promotion.’

The Civil Affairs branch, formed to deal with administration of areas occupied by our enemies, had sprung into being about a year before. In it were already collected together a rich variety of specimens of army life. Farebrother would ornament the collection. Pennistone compared Civil Affairs with ‘the head to which all the ends of the world are come, and the eyelids are a little weary.’

‘That just describes it,’ Pennistone said. ‘“No crude symbolism disturbs the effect of Civil Affairs’ subdued and graceful mystery”.’

Among others to find his way into this branch was Dicky Umfraville, who had thereby managed to disengage himself from the transit camp he had been commanding. I asked if Farebrother had any deals with Umfraville, whom I had not seen for some little time. Farebrother nodded. He looked over his shoulder, as if he feared agents were tracking us at that very moment and might overhear his words.

‘You know Kenneth pretty well?’

‘Yes.’

‘Umfraville was talking to one of our people who’d been in Cairo when Kenneth flew out there for a day or two, as member of a high-level conference secretariat. Do you know what happened? Something you’d never guess. He managed to make a fool of himself about some girl employed in a secret outfit there.’

‘In what way?’

‘Took her out or something. She was absolutely notorious, it seems.’

‘What happened?’

‘Don’t let’s talk about it,’ said Farebrother. ‘If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a woman who lowers herself in that sort of way. I’m afraid there are quite a few of them about in wartime.’

We had by now turned into Whitehall. Farebrother suddenly raised his arm in a stiff salute. I did the same, taking my time from him, though not immediately conscious of whom we were both saluting. Then I quickly apprehended that Farebrother was paying tribute to the Cenotaph, which we were at that moment passing. The preoccupations of wartime often resulted in this formality – always rather an uncomfortable and precarious one – being allowed to pass unobserved. It was a typical mark of Farebrother’s innate regard for ceremoniousness in all its aspects that he brought out his salute as if on a parade ground march-past. However, at that moment, another – and certainly discordant – circumstance clouded the scene. Just as Farebrother had been the first to see and pay homage to the Cenotaph, he was undoubtedly the first of us also to appreciate the necessity of taking another decision, a quick one, in a similar field. This resolve also had important implications, though of a very different sort. The situation was posed by a couple walking briskly towards us from the direction of Trafalgar Square: a middle-aged civilian – almost certainly a Civil Servant of high standing – wearing a very old hat on the back of his head, beside him an officer in a full colonel’s red capband and tabs. Even at this distance the tabs could be seen to be imposed on one of the new ‘utility’ uniforms, service-dress tunics skimped at the pockets and elsewhere to save cloth. These innovations always gave the wearer, even if a thin man, the air of being too large for his clothes, and this officer, stoutish with spectacles, was bursting from them. I noticed the uniform before appreciating that here was Widmerpool ‘gone red’.

‘In life —’

Farebrother had just begun to speak. He broke off suddenly. The way in which he did this, obviously abandoning giving expression to some basic rule of human conduct, made me sure, reflecting on the incident afterwards, that he had seen Widmerpool first. There can also be no doubt that he was as ignorant as myself of his old enemy’s promotion. That must have been gazetted subsequent to the Cairo tour of duty. For a split second I had time to wonder whether Farebrother would accord Widmerpool as smart an acknowledgment or rank – after all, it was ‘the uniform’, even if only a ‘utility’ one – as he had rendered the Cenotaph. It should be explained perhaps that, although in theory majors and upwards had some claim to a salute from those of junior rank, in practice the only officers saluted by other officers in the street were those who wore red. I was therefore once more preparing to take my time from Farebrother, when he suddenly seized my arm. We were just passing ‘the Fortress’, Combined Operations Headquarters, then more or less underground, after the war covered by a building of many storeys. At first I thought he wanted to draw my attention to something happening on the other side of the road.

‘Nicholas?’

‘Sir?’

‘A moment ago I was telling you I don’t like to see a woman making herself cheap. Women’s lives should be beautiful, an inspiration. I thought of that the other night. I was taken to a film called
The Song of Bernadette
. Have you seen it?’

‘No, sir.’

He looked at me fixedly. He had put on his holy face, as was to be expected from the subject of the movie, and spoke the words in an equally appropriate tone.

‘It’s about Lourdes.’

I repeated that I had not seen the film.

‘You should, Nicholas. I don’t often get out in the evenings, much too much to do, but I think that night did me good. Made me a better man.’

I could not imagine what all this was leading up to.

‘You really think I ought to make an effort to go, sir?’

Farebrother did not answer. Instead, he gave another of his quick glances over the shoulder. For a moment I remained at a loss to know why
The Song of Bernadette
had so much impressed him that he felt a sudden need to speak of the film so dramatically. Then all at once I grasped that the menace of saluting Widmerpool no longer hung over us. Farebrother, with all his self-control in such matters, all the years he had schooled himself to accept the ways of those set in authority over him, had for one reason or another been unable to face that bitterness in my presence. Inner disciplines, respect for tradition, taste for formality, had none of them been sufficient. The incident showed Farebrother, too, had human weaknesses. Now, he seemed totally to have forgotten about Bernadette. We walked along in silence. Perhaps he was pondering the saintly life. We reached the gates of the Horse Guards. Farebrother paused. His gay blue eyes became a little sad. ‘Do your best to make your Colonel forgive me, Nicholas. You can tell him – without serious breach of security – that Szymanski’s already done a first-rate job in one quarter and likely to do as good a one in another. Do you ever see Prince Theodoric in these days? In my present job I no longer have grand contacts like that.’

I told him I had not seen Theodoric since
The Bartered Bride
. We went our separate ways.

That night in bed, reading
Remembrance of Things Past
, I thought again of Theodoric, on account of a passage describing the Princesse de Guermantes’ party:

‘The Ottoman Ambassadress, now bent on demonstrating to me not only her familiarity with the Royalties present, some of whom I knew our hostess had invited out of sheer kindness of heart and would never have been at home to them if the Prince of Wales or the Queen of Spain were in her drawing-room the afternoon they called, but also her mastery of current appointments under consideration at the Quai d’Orsay or Rue St. Dominique, disregarding my wish to cut short our conversation – additionally so because I saw Professor E— once more bearing down on us and feared the Ambassadress, whose complexion conveyed unmistakable signs of a recent bout of varicella, might be one of his patients – drew my attention to a young man wearing a cypripeden (the flower Bloch liked to call “sandal of foam-borne Aphrodite”) in the buttonhole of his dress coat, whose swarthy appearance required only an astrakhan cap and silver-hilted yataghan to complete evident affinities with the Balkan peninsula. This Apollo of the hospodars was talking vigorously to the Grand Duke Vladimir, who had moved away from the propinquity of the fountain and whose features now showed traces of uneasiness because he thought this distant relative, Prince Odoacer, for that was who I knew the young man of the orchid to be, sought his backing in connexion with a certain secret alliance predicted in Eastern Europe, material to the interests of Prince Odoacer’s country no less than the Muscovite Empire; support which the Grand Duke might be unwilling to afford, either on account of his kinsmen having compromised himself financially, through a childish ignorance of the Bourse, in connexion with a speculation involving Panama Canal shares (making things no better by offering to dispose “on the quiet” of a hunting scene by Wouwerman destined as a birthday present for his mistress), from which he had to be extracted by the good offices of that same Baron Manasch with whom Swann had once fought a duel; or, even more unjustly, because the Grand Duke had heard a rumour of the unfortunate reputation the young Prince had incurred for himself by the innocent employment as valet of a notorious youth whom I had more than once seen visiting Jupien’s shop, and, as I learnt much later, was known among his fellow inverts as La Gioconda. “I’m told Gogo  – Prince Odoacer – has Dreyfusard leanings!” said the Ambassadress, assuming my ignorance of the Prince’s nickname as well as his openly expressed political sympathies, the momentary cruelty of her smile hinting at Janissary blood flowing in her veins. “Albeit a matter that does not concern a foreigner like myself,” she went on, “yet, if true that the name of Colonel de Froberville, whom I see standing over there, has been put forward as military attaché designate to the French Legation of Prince Odoacer’s country, the fact of such inclinations in one of its Royal House should be made known as soon as possible to any French officer likely to fill the post.” ’

This description of Prince Odoacer was of special interest because he was a relation – possibly great-uncle – of Theodoric’s. I thought about the party for a time, whether there had really been a Turkish Ambassadress, whom Proust found a great bore; then, like the Narrator himself in his childhood days, fell asleep early. This state, left undisturbed by the Warning, was brought to an end by rising hubbub outside. A very noisy attack had started up. Some residents especially those inhabiting the upper storeys, preferred to descend to the ground floor or basement on these occasions. Rather from lethargy than an indifference to danger, I used in general to remain in my flat during raids, feeling that one’s nerve, certainly less steady than at an earlier stage of the war, was unlikely to be improved by exchanging conversational banalities with neighbours equally on edge.