“What it is to have influence!” said the sister.
“She tried to kidnap me,” said Tommy. “I love Julia, but you have to be jolly well to stay with her.”
Guy had heard this warning on Ivor’s lips and discounted it. Coming from the sturdier Tommy it made him hesitate, but it was then too late. The stretcher-bearers stood remorselessly at his side. Within half an hour he was at Mrs. Stitch’s luxurious official residence.
Her grandparents had spent their lives in the service of Queen Victoria and in that court had formed standards of living which projected themselves over another generation and determined Mrs. Stitch’s precocious but impressionable childhood. Mrs. Stitch grew up with the conviction that comfort was rather common. She enjoyed the sumptuous and, within certain incalculable limits, the profuse—no one at her table could ever be quite sure which course of a seemingly classic dinner might not disconcertingly prove to be the last; she enjoyed change and surprise, crisp lettuce-freshness and hoary antiquity, but she did not like male guests to live soft.
This was apparent when she led the stretcher-party down to the room prepared for Guy; down it was, well below ground-level. Mrs. Stitch danced lightly from cockroach to cockroach across the concrete floor, squashing six on her way to the window. This she threw open on the kitchen yard. At eye level the bare feet of Berber servants passed to and fro. One squatted near, plucking a goose whose feathers caught by the north-west breeze floated in among them.
“There,” she said. “Lovely. What more could anyone ask?—I know, flowers.” She was gone. She was back, laden with tuberoses. “Here,” she said, putting them in the basin. “If you want to wash, use Algie’s loo.” She surveyed the room with unaffected pleasure. “All yours,” she said. “Join us when you feel like it.” She was gone. She was back. “Fond of cats? Here’s some. They’ll keep down the beetles.” She threw in two tiger-like animals and shut the door. They stretched and scornfully left by the window.
Guy sat on the bed feeling that things had been too much for him that day. He still wore the pajamas and dressing-gown which seemed to be the correct rig for this move. The stretcher-bearers now returned with his luggage.
“Can we help with your gear, sir? There doesn’t seem anywhere to put anything much, does there, really?”
No cupboard, no drawer; a peg. One of the men hung up his equipment; they saluted and left.
Guy’s kit had followed him—much pilfered, it transpired—from camp to hospital. There was also the bundle containing the laundered rags he had worn in Crete and the neat packet of possessions taken from his pockets and haversack; with the red identity disc lay his manumission from Chatty Corner and the pocket-book in which he had kept the notes for his War Diary. The elastic band had gone. The covers were blistered and limp and creased and tattered, some of the pages stuck together. Guy carefully separated them with a razor-blade. It was all there. On the blotched maths-paper he could follow in the deterioration of his writing the successive phases of exhaustion. As he grew feebler he had written larger and more heavily. The last entry was a deep scrawl, covering a sheet, recording the appearance of an aeroplane over the boat. This was his contribution to History; this perhaps the evidence in a notorious trial.
Guy lay on his bed, too much shaken by the physical events of the day to concentrate on the moral issues. For Julia Stitch there was no problem. An old friend was in trouble. Rally round. Tommy had his constant guide in the precept: never cause trouble except for positive preponderant advantage. In the field, if Ivor or anyone else were endangering a position, Tommy would have had no compunction in shooting him out of hand. This was another matter. Nothing was in danger save one man’s reputation. Ivor had hurt no one but himself. He was now out of the way. His troop was out of the way too, until the end of the war. It did not much matter, as far as winning the war went, what they said in their prison camp.
Guy lacked these simple rules of conduct. He had no old love for Ivor, no liking at all, for the man who had been his friend had proved to be an illusion. He had a sense, too, that all war consisted in causing trouble without much hope of advantage. Why was he here in Mrs. Stitch’s basement, why were Eddie and Bertie in prison, why was the young soldier lying still unburied in the deserted village of Crete, if it was not for Justice?
So he lay pondering until Mrs. Stitch called him up to cocktails.
*
Days passed while Guy lay in the chaise-longue beside the strutting and preening peacocks. Guests came and went singly and in large parties, pashas, courtiers, diplomatists, politicians, generals, admirals, subalterns, Greek and Egyptian and Jewish and French, but Mrs. Stitch never neglected Guy. Three or four times a day she was at his side with the hypodermic needle of her charm.
“Isn’t there anybody you’d like me to ask?” she said one day, planning dinner.
“Well, there is one. Colonel Tickeridge. I hear he’s in camp at Mariout. You won’t know him but you couldn’t help liking him.”
“I’ll find him for you.”
That was early in the morning of 22 June—a day of apocalypse for all the world for numberless generations, and for Guy among them, one immortal soul, a convalescent lieutenant of Halberdiers.
Algernon Stitch brought the news of the invasion of Russia when he returned for luncheon. Only Mrs. Stitch and Guy and two secretaries were there.
“Why couldn’t the silly fellow have done it to start with?” Algernon Stitch asked, “instead of landing the lot of us in the soup first.”
“Is it a Good Thing?” Mrs. Stitch asked the simple question of the schoolroom.
“Can’t tell. The experts don’t believe the Russians have a chance. And they’ve got a lot of things the Germans will find useful.”
“What’s Winston going to say?”
“Welcome our new allies, of course. What else can he?”
“It’s nice to have one ally,” said Mrs. Stitch.
Nothing else was spoken of at luncheon—the Molotov Pact, the partition of Poland, the annexation of the Baltic republics, the resources of the Ukraine, the numbers of aeroplanes, of divisions, transport and oil, Tilsit and Tolstoi, American popular opinion, Japan and the Anti-Comintern Pact—all the topics that were buzzing everywhere in the world at that moment. But Guy remained silent.
Mrs. Stitch briefly held his hand on the tablecloth. “Feeling low today?”
“Awfully.”
“Cheer up. Your chum is coming to dinner.”
But Guy needed more than Colonel Tickeridge.
It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms.
Now that hallucination was dissolved, like the whales and turtles on the voyage from Crete, and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonor.
That afternoon he took his pocket-book to the incinerator which stood in the yard outside the window, and thrust it in. It was a symbolic act; he stood like the man at Sphakia who dismembered his Bren and threw its parts one by one out into the harbor, splash, splash, splash, into the scum.
*
Colonel Tickeridge was cheerful that evening, unworried by issues of right and wrong. The more fellows shooting Germans the better, obviously. Rotten sort of government the Russian. So it had been last time. And the Russians changed it. Probably they would again. He explained these points to Guy before dinner. Colonel Tickeridge was content and only slightly bemused. He supposed so large a party must be celebrating something; what, he never learned. He was a little awed by the eminence of some of his fellow guests, the generals in particular. He was not attracted by the lady on either side. He couldn’t understand it when they broke into French. But he tucked in. It wa
s decent of Uncle Crouchback to get him brought here. And later in the evening as he and Guy sat together under the palm trees Mrs. Stitch joined them.
“Have you your pistols?” she quoted. “Have you your sharp-edged axes? Halberdiers! O Halberdiers!”
“Eh?” said Colonel Tickeridge. “Sorry. I’m not quite there.”
“What have you been talking about?”
“I’ve been arranging my future,” said Guy. “Very satisfactorily. The colonel is taking me back.”
“We lost a lot of good fellows over there, you know. We’re busy reforming at the moment. Don’t want to take replacements out of the pool, if we can help it. Glad to have one of the old lot back again. Only hope the brigadier won’t snap him up.”
“The brigadier?” asked Mrs. Stitch, politely, vaguely. “Who is he?”
“Ben Ritchie-Hook. You must have heard of him.”
Mrs. Stitch was suddenly alert. “I think I have. Isn’t he dead? I thought that was how Tommy Blackhouse came to command whatever it was.”
“He was lost. Not dead. Far from it. He turned up in western Abyssinia leading a group of wogs. Wanted to go on with them, of course, but the powers that be wouldn’t stand for that. They winkled him out and got him to Khartoum. He’s due in Cairo this week. We only just heard. It’s been a day of all-round good news, hasn’t it?”
“Isn’t he something of a martinet?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that exactly. Always in trouble.”
“Tommy mentioned him the other day, talking about—about something. Hasn’t he rather the reputation of a trouble-maker?”
“Only for those who need it,” said Colonel Tickeridge.
“I think I know what you mean,” said Guy.
“There was some fellow in the last war let him down,” said Colonel Tickeridge. “Not one of ours, of course. Ben was only a company commander then and this fellow was on the staff. Ben got hit immediately after and was in hospital for months. By the time he came out the fellow had got posted into an entirely different show. But Ben never let up on him. He hounded him down and got him broken. It’s the big-game hunter in him.”
“I see. I see,” said Mrs. Stitch. “And he’s really been in command of Tommy’s force all the time?”
“On paper.”
“And he’s due when?”
“Before the end of the week, I gather.”
“I see. Well now, I must go and help Algie.”
*
Two days later Guy and Mrs. Stitch sat in the sunlight with orangejuice and melon and coffee and crescent rolls when the peace of the early morning was broken by a motor-bicycle and the odorous garden was affronted with a cloud of greasy smoke. A military dispatch-rider presented a letter. It was a move order, posting Guy to a transit camp at Suez for immediate return to the United Kingdom. It emanated from Movement Control, District Headquarters. He passed it over the table to Mrs. Stitch.
“Oh dear,” she said, “we shall miss you.”
“But I don’t understand. I was due for a medical at the end of the week. They would have passed me fit to join the battalion.”
“Don’t you want to go home?”
“Of course not.”
“Everybody else seems to.”
“There’s been some mistake. D’you think I could have the car for half an hour and straighten it out?”
“Do. If you really think it’s worthwhile.”
Guy drove to headquarters and found the major who had signed the letter. Guy explained: “… Medical on Saturday… C.O. 2nd Halberdiers has applied for posting… Ritchie-Hook on the way…”
“Yes,” said the major. “It looks as though something’s gone wrong. Most of my day is spent arguing with chaps who want to go back. Homes bombed, wives unfaithful, parents insane—they’ll throw any line. It ought to be easy enough to keep someone here. I don’t quite see,” he said, turning the file, “where this order originated. Officially you’re simply on sick leave. This seems to have come from G.H.Q. Cairo. What’s it got to do with them? It isn’t as though they were in any hurry to have you at home. You’re booked for the slowest possible route. Canary Castle. She’s unloading at Suez now. Awful old hulk. She’s going into dry dock in Durban on the way back. You’ll be weeks. Have you been blotting your copy-book by any chance?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Got T.B. or anything?”
“No.”
“Well, it can’t be anything we can’t straighten out. Ring me back this afternoon.” He gave Guy the number of his extension.
Julia was still at home when he returned.
“Everything fixed?”
“I think so.”
“Good. No one’s in to luncheon. Like to be dropped at the Union Bar?”
Later that afternoon Guy succeeded in speaking to the major whose number had until then been engaged.
“I asked about you, Crouchback. Nothing I can do, I’m afraid. That order came from right up at the top.”
“But why?”
“That’s a thing you probably know more about than I do.”
“Anyway, I can wait until my brigadier arrives, can’t I? He’ll be able to do something.”
“Sorry, old boy. Your orders are to embus for Suez 0700 hours tomorrow. Report here at 0615. I shan’t be here myself but there’ll be someone about. Hope you have a good trip. The old Canary’s quite steady. You’ll find her full of wop prisoners.”
That night there was a large party. Most of the Greek royal family were there. Guy found it unusually difficult to get a word alone with Mrs. Stitch. When he did, he said: “Julia, you can do anything. Fix this thing for me.”
“Oh, no, Guy, I never interfere with the military. Algie wouldn’t like it at all.”
Later that night, as Guy packed, he found the red identity disc he had carried out of Crete. He did not know the correct procedure, where he should send it, how addressed. Finally he wrote on a sheet of Mrs. Stitch’s thick paper: “Taken from the body of a British soldier killed in Crete. Exact position of grave unknown,” folded it unsigned and addressed the envelope simply G.H.Q.M.E. Eventually, he supposed, it would reach the right department.
But next morning when he found Mrs. Stitch up and dressed and waiting to see him off, he thought of a more satisfactory way of paying his debt.
“Julia,” he said, “do you think Algie could possibly get one of his staff to deal with this for me?”
“Of course. What is it?”
“Just a bit of unfinished business from Crete. I don’t know the right man to send it to. Algie’s secretary will know.”
Mrs. Stitch took the envelope. She noted the address. Then she fondly kissed Guy.
As he drove away she waved the envelope; then turned indoors and dropped it into a waste-paper basket. Her eyes were one immense sea, full of flying galleys.
Eight
State Sword
I
Good evening, Job.”
“Good evening, sir. Very glad to see you back.”
“Things seem pretty quiet.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, sir.”
“No air raids, I mean.”
“Oh no, sir. That’s all over now. Hitler needs all he’s got for the Russians.”
“Has Mr. Box-Bender arrived yet?”
“Yes, sir. Inside.”
“Hullo, Guy, you back?”
“Hullo, Guy, where have you been?”
“I say, Guy, weren’t you with Tommy? Awful business about Eddie and Bertie.”
“Bad luck, Tony Luxmore got caught.”
“Anyway, you got away.”
“And Tommy?”
“And Ivor?”
“I was awfully pleased to hear Ivor was all right.”
“Did you see Algie and Julia?”
“Ah, there you are, Guy,” said Box-Bender. “I’ve been waiting for you. We’ll go straight up and start dinner, if you don’t mind. I’ve got to get back to the House. Besides, everything gets eaten t
hese days if you don’t look sharp.”
Guy and his brother-in-law struggled through and up to the coffee-room. Under the chandeliers waitresses distributed the meager dinner. It was barely half past seven, but already most of the tables were taken. Guy and Box-Bender had to sit in the middle of the room.
“I hope we keep this to ourselves. There’s something I particularly want to talk to you about. Better have the soup. The other thing is made of dried eggs. Good trip home?”
“Eight weeks.”
“Eight weeks. Did you bring anything back with you?”
“I had some oranges. They went bad on the voyage.”
“Oh. Don’t look. Elderberry’s trying to find somewhere to sit… Hullo, Elderberry, you joining us?”
Elderberry sat with them.
“Heard the results of the Tanks for Russia Week?”
“Yes,” said Box-Bender.
“Great idea of Max’s.”
“I should like to have seen Harold Macmillan standing to attention while they sang the Red Flag.”
“I saw it on the news-reel. And Mrs. Maisky unveiling the picture of Stalin.”
“Well, it’s worked,” said Box-Bender. “Production was up twenty per cent. Twenty per cent—and they were supposed to be working all-out before.”
“And that strike in Glasgow. ‘Aid to Russia’ stopped that.”
“So the Express said.”
“Tanks for Russia?” asked Guy. “I’m afraid all this is new to me. They want tanks pretty badly in the desert.”
“They’ll get them, too, don’t you worry,” said Box-Bender. “Naturally the workers are keen to help Russia. It’s how they’ve been educated. It doesn’t do any harm to let them have a pot of red paint and splash round with hammers and sickles and ‘Good old Uncle Joe.’ It’ll wash off. The tanks will get to the place they’re most needed. You can be sure of that.”
“Mind you, I’m all for the Russians,” said Elderberry. “We’ve had to do a lot of readjustment in the last few weeks. They’re putting up a wonderful fight.”
“Pity they keep retreating.”
“Drawing them on, Guy, drawing them on.”