The military philosophers (15 page)

From first beginnings, this particular raid made an unusually obnoxious din and continued to do so. While bombs and flak exploded at the present rate there was little hope of dropping off to sleep again. I lay in the dark, trying to will them to go home, one way, not often an effective one, of passing the time during raids. My interior counter-attack was not successful. An hour went by; then another; and another. So far from decreasing, the noise grew greater in volume. There was a suggestion of more or less regular bursts of detonation launched from the skies, orchestrated against the familiar rise and fall of gunfire. It must have been about two or three in the morning, when, rather illogically, I decided to go downstairs. A move in that direction at least offered something to do. Besides, I could feel myself growing increasingly jumpy. The ground floor at this hour was at worst likely to provide, if nothing else, a certain anthropological interest. The occasion was one for the merest essentials of uniform, pockets filled with stuff from which one did not want to be separated, should damage occur in the room while away. I took a helmet as a matter of principle.

On one of the walls of the lift, incised with a sharp instrument (similar to that used years before to outline the caricature of Widmerpool in the
cabinet
at La Grenadière), someone quite recently – perhaps that very night – had etched at eye-level, in lower case letters suggesting an E. E. Cummings poem, a brief cogent observation about the manageress, one likely to prove ineradicable as long as the life itself remained in existence, for no paint could have obscured it:

old bitch wartstone

Quite a few people were below, strolling about talking, or sitting on the benches of the hall. No doubt others were in the basement, a region into which I had never penetrated, where there was said to be some sort of ‘shelter’. This crowd was in a perpetual state of change: some, like myself, deciding they needed a spell out of bed; others, too tired or bored to stay longer chatting in the hall, retiring to the basement or simply returning to their own flats. Clanwaert, smoking a cigarette, his hands in the pockets of a rather smart green silk dressing-gown, was present. Living on the ground floor anyway, he had not bothered to dress.

‘This raid seems to be going on a long time.’

‘Of course it is, my friend. We are getting the famous Secret Weapon we have heard so much about.’

‘You think so?’

‘Not a doubt of it. We knew it was coming in Eaton Square. Had you not been informed in Whitehall? The interesting thing will be to see how this fine Secret Weapon really turns out.’

It looked as if Clanwaert were right. He began to talk of the Congo army and the difficulties they had encountered in the Sudanese desert. After a while the subject exhausted itself.

‘Is there any point in not going back to bed?’

‘Hard to say. It may quiet down. I am in any case a bad sleeper. One becomes accustomed to doing without sleep, if one lives a long time in the tropics.’

He put out his cigarette and went to the front door to see how things were looking in the street. A girl with a helmet set sideways on her head, this headdress assumed for decorative effect rather than as a safety measure, came past. She wore an overcoat over trousers in the manner of Gypsy Jones and Audrey Maclintick. It was Pamela Flitton.

‘Hullo.’

She looked angry, as if suspecting an attempted pickup, then recognized me.

‘Hullo.’

She did not smile.

‘What a row.’

‘Isn’t it.’

‘Seen anything of Norah?’

‘Norah and I haven’t been speaking for ages. She’s too touchy. That’s one of the things wrong with Norah.’

‘Still doing your secret job?’

‘I’ve just come back from Cairo.’

‘By boat?’

‘I got flown back.’

‘You were lucky to get an air passage.*

‘I travelled on a general’s luggage.’

A youngish officer, in uniform but with unbuttoned tunic, came into the hall from the passage leading to the ground floor flats. He was small, powerfully built, with hair growing in regular waves of curls, like Jeavons’s, though fair in colour.

‘We seem to be out of fags,’ he said to Pamela.

‘Oh, Christ.’

He turned to me. I registered a crown on his shoulder, MC and bar above the pocket.

‘Haven’t got a cigarette by any chance, pal?’ he said. ‘We’ve smoked our last – why, Nicholas? I’ll be buggered. Caught you trying to pick up Pam. What cheek. How are you, old boy. Marvellous to meet again.’

‘Pamela and I know each other already. She used to drive me in her ATS days, not to mention my practically attending her christening.'

'So you live in this dump, too, and suffer from old Wartstone? If I wasn't leaving the place at any moment, I'd carve up that woman with a Commando knife in a way that would make Jack the Ripper look like the vicar cutting sandwiches for a school treat.'

I was not specially pleased to see Odo Stevens, whose conduct, personal and official, could not be approved for a variety of reasons, whatever distinction he might have earned in the field. At the same time, there was small point in attempting to take a high moral line, either about his affair with Priscilla or the part he had played over Szymanski. Priscilla and Chips Lovell were dead: Szymanski too, for all one knew by this time. Besides, to be pompous about such matters was even in a sense to play into the hands of Stevens, to give opportunity for him to justify himself in one of those emotional displays that are always part of the stock-in-trade of persons of his particular sort. With characteristic perspicuity, he guessed at once what was going through my mind. His look changed. It was immediately clear he was going to bring up the subject of Priscilla.

'It was simply awful,' he said. 'What happened after we last met. That bomb on the Madrid killing her husband- then the other where she was staying. I even thought of writing to you. Then I got mixed up with a lot of special duties.'

He had quite changed his tone of voice from the moment before, at the same time assuming an expression reminiscent of Farebrother's 'religious face', the same serious pained contraction of the features. I was determined to endure for as short a time as possible only what was absolutely unavoidable in the exhibition of self-confessed remorse Stevens was obviously proposing to mount for my benefit. He had been, I recalled, unnecessarily public in his carryings-on with Priscilla, had corroded what turned out to be Chips’ last year alive. That might be no very particular business of mine, but I had liked Chips, therefore preferred the circumstances should remain unresurrected. That was the long and the short of it.

‘Don’t let’s talk about it. What’s the good?’

Stevens was not to be silenced so easily.

‘She meant so much to me,’ he said.

‘Who did?’ asked Pamela.

‘Someone who was killed in an air-raid.’

He put considerable emotion into his voice when he said that. Perhaps Priscilla had, indeed, ‘meant a lot’ to him. I did not care. I saw no reason to be dragged in as a kind of prop to his self-esteem, or masochistic pleasure in lacking it. Besides, I wanted to get on to the Szymanski story.

‘You’re always telling me I mean more to you than any other girl has,’ said Pamela. ‘At least you do after a couple of drinks. You’ve the weakest head of any man I’ve ever met.’

She spoke in that low almost inaudible mutter employed by her most of the time. There was certainly a touch of Audrey Maclintick about her, at least enough to explain why Stevens and Mrs Maclintick had got on so comparatively well together that night in the Café Royal. On the other hand, this girl was not only much better looking, but also much tougher even than Mrs Maclintick. Pamela Flitton gave the impression of being thoroughly vicious, using the word not so much in the moral sense, but as one might speak of a horse – more specifically, a mare.

‘I don’t claim the capacity for liquor of some of your Slav friends,’ said Stevens laughing.

He sounded fairly well able to stand up to her. This seemed a suitable moment to change the subject.

‘You were in the news locally not so long ago – where I work, I mean – about one Szymanski.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re with the Poles, Nicholas?’

‘I’d left them by the time you got up to your tricks.’

Pamela showed interest at the name Szymanski.

‘I sent you a message,’ she said. ‘Did you get it?’

When she smiled and spoke directly like that, it was possible to guess at some of her powers should she decide to make a victim of a man.

‘I got it.’

‘Then you were in on the party?’ asked Stevens.

‘I saw some of the repercussions.’

‘God,’ he said. ‘That was a lark.’

‘Not for those engaged in normal liaison duties.’

One’s loyalties vary. At that moment I felt wholly on the side of law and order, if only to get some of my own back for his line of talk about the Lovells.

‘Oh, bugger normal liaison duties. Even you must admit the operation was beautifully executed. Look here …’

He took my arm, and, leaving Pamela sitting sullenly by herself on a bench, walked me away to a deserted corner of the hall. When we reached there, he lowered his voice.

‘I’m due for a job in the near future not entirely unconnected with Szymanski himself.’

‘Housebreaking?’

Stevens yelled with laughter.

‘That’ll be the least of our crimes, I’d imagine,’ he said. ‘That is, the least of his – which might easily not stop at manslaughter, I should guess. Actually, we’re doing quite different jobs, but more or less in the same place.’

‘Presumably it’s a secret where you’re conducting these activities.’

‘My present situation is being on twenty-four call to Cairo. I’ll release something to you, as an old pal, in addition to that. The plot’s not unconnected with one of Pam’s conquests. Rather a grand one.’

‘You remind me of the man who used to introduce his wife as
ancienne maîtresse de Lord Byron
.’’

‘This is classier than a lord – besides Pam and I aren’t married yet.’

‘You don’t have to spell the name out.’

I was not impressed by Stevens’s regard for ‘security,’ always a risk in the hands of the vain. All the same, not much damage would be done by my knowing that at last some sort of assistance was to be given to the Resistance in Prince Theodoric’s country; and that Stevens and Szymanski were involved. That was certainly interesting.

‘I’ll be playing for the village boys,’ he said. ‘Rather than the team the squire is fielding.’

‘A tricky situation, I should imagine.’

‘You bet.’

‘I saw Sunny Farebrother yesterday, who took the rap in the Szymanski business.’

‘Cunning old bugger. They pushed him off to a training centre for a bit, but I bet he’s back on something good.’

‘He thinks so. Was Szymanski a boy-friend of Pamela’s?’

I thought I had a right to ask that question after the way Stevens had talked. For once he seemed a shade put out.

‘Who can tell?’ he said. ‘Even if there’s still a Szymanski. They may have infiltrated him already and he may have been picked up. I hope not. The great thing is he knows the country like the back of his hand. What are you doing yourself, old boy?’

The change of mood, sudden fear for Szymanski – and by implication for himself – was characteristic. I told him about my job, also explaining how I knew Pamela.

‘Won’t she be cross if we leave her much longer?’

‘She’s cross all the time. Bloody cross. Chronic state, thrives on it. Her chief charm. Makes her wonderful in bed. That is, if you like temper.’

Emphasis expressed as to the high degree of sexual pleasure to be derived from a given person is, for one reason or another, always to be accepted with a certain amount of suspicion, so far as the speaker is concerned, especially if referring to a current situation. Stevens sounded as if he might be bolstering himself up in making the last statement.

‘She’s the hell of a girl,’ he said.

I wondered whether he had run across Pamela with Szymanski in the first instance. In any case, people like that gravitate towards each other at all times, almost more in war than in peace, since war – though perhaps in a more limited sense than might be supposed – offers obvious opportunities for certain sorts of adventure. Stevens, whose self- satisfaction had if anything increased, seemed to have no illusions about Pamela’s temperament. He accepted that she was a woman whose sexual disposition was vested in rage and perversity. In fact, if he were to be believed, those were the very qualities he had set out to find. We returned to where she was sitting.

‘Where the hell have you two been?’

She spoke through her teeth. There was still a lot of noise going on outside. We all three sat on the bench together. Clanwaert strolled past. He glanced in our direction, slightly inclining his head towards Pamela, who took no perceptible notice of him. He had evidently decided to return to bed and said goodnight to me.

‘That was the Belgian officer who gave me your message about Szymanski.’

‘Ask him if he’s got a cigarette.’

I called after Clanwaert. He turned back and came towards us. I enquired if he had a cigarette for Pamela, saying I believed they had met. He took a case from his dressing-gown pocket and handed it round. Pamela took one, looking away as she did so. Clanwaert showed himself perfectly at ease under this chilly treatment.

‘We could have met at the Belgian Institute,’ he said. ‘Was it with one of our artillery officers – Wauthier or perhaps Ruys?’

‘Perhaps it was,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the smoke.’

Clanwaert smiled and retired.

‘One of your
braves Belges
?’ asked Stevens. ‘Since you’ve lived here some time, you’ve probably come across the old girl standing by the door. She’s called Mrs Erdleigh. The other evening, I saw her burning something on the roof. I thought she was sending up smoke signals to the enemy – it wasn’t yet dark – but it turned out to be just incense, which seems to play some part in her daily life, as she’s a witch. We got on rather well. In the end she told my fortune and said I was going to have all sorts of adventures and get a lot of nice presents from women.’