“It’s no business of yours.”
“It was made my business by being offered.”
“My dear Guy, the world is full of unwanted children. Half the population of Europe are homeless—refugees and prisoners. What is one child more or less in all that misery?”
“I can’t do anything about all those others. This is just one case where I can help. And only I, really. I was Virginia’s last resort. So I couldn’t do anything else. Don’t you see?”
“Of course I don’t. Ian is quite right. You’re insane.”
And Kerstie left more angry than she had come.
It was no good trying to explain, Guy thought. Had someone said: “All differences are theological differences”? He turned once more to his father’s letter: Quantitative judgments don’t apply. If only one soul was saved, that is full compensation for any amount of “loss of face.”
Ten
The Last Battle
I
The Dakota flew out over the sea, then swung inland. The listless passengers, British and American, all men, of all services and all of lowly rank, stirred and buckled themselves to the metal benches. The journey by way of Gibraltar and North Africa had been tedious and protracted by unexplained delays. It was now late afternoon and they had had nothing to eat since dawn. This was a different machine from the one in which Guy had embarked in England. None of those who had traveled with him that first sleepless night had continued to Bari. Crouching and peering through the little porthole, he caught a glimpse of orchards of almond; it was late February and the trees were already in full flower. Soon he was on the ground beside his kit-bag and valise, reporting to a transport officer.
His move order instructed him to report forthwith to the Headquarters of the British Mission to the Anti-Fascist Forces of National Liberation (Adriatic).
He was expected. A jeep was waiting to take him to the somber building in the new town where this organization was installed. Nothing reminded him of the Italy he knew and loved; the land of school holidays; the land where later he had sought refuge from his failure.
The sentry was less than welcoming.
“I have orders to report to a Brigadier Cape.”
“He’s not here today. You’ll have to wait and see the security officer. Ron,” he said to a colleague, “tell Captain Gilpin there’s an officer reporting to the brigadier.”
For some minutes Guy stood in the dark hall. This building was a pre-fascist structure designed in traditional style round a sunless cortile. A broad flight of shallow stone steps led up into the darkness, for the glass roof had been shattered and replaced by tarred paper. “The light ought to come on any time now,” said the sentry. “But you can’t rely on it.”
Presently Gilpin appeared in the gloom.
“Yes?” he said. “What can we do for you?”
“Don’t you remember me at the parachute school with de Souza?”
“De Souza’s in the field. What exactly is it you want?”
Guy showed him his move order.
“First I’ve seen of this.”
“You don’t imagine it’s a forgery, do you?”
“A copy ought to have come to me. I don’t imagine anything. It is simply that we have to take precautions.” In the twilight of the hall he turned the order over and studied its back. He read it again. Then he tried a new attack. “You seem to have taken your time getting here.”
“Yes, there were delays. Are you in command here?”
“I’m not the senior officer if that’s what you mean. There’s a major upstairs—a Halberdier like yourself.”—He spoke the name of the corps in a manner which seemed deliberately to dissociate himself from the traditions of the army; with a sneer almost.—“I don’t know what he does. He’s posted as G.S.O. II (Co-ordination). I suppose in a way you might say he was ‘in command’ when the brig. is away.”
“Perhaps I could see him?”
“Is that your gear?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to leave it down here.”
“Do you suppose I wanted to carry it up?”
“Keep an eye on it, corporal,” said Gilpin, not, it seemed, from any solicitude for its preservation; rather for fear of what it might contain of a subversive, perhaps, explosive, nature. “You did quite right to hold this officer for examination,” he added. “You can send him up to G.S.O. II (Co-ordination)”—and without another word to Guy he turned and left him.
The second sentry led Guy to a door on the mezzanine. Four and a half years of the vicissitudes of war had accustomed Guy to a large variety of reception. It had also accustomed him to meet from time to time the officer whose name he had never learned, who now greeted him with unwonted warmth.
“Well,” he said, “well, we do run across one another, don’t we? I expect you’re more surprised than I am. I saw your name on a bit of bumf. We’ve been expecting you for weeks.”
“Gilpin wasn’t.”
“We try to keep as much bumf as we can from Gilpin. It isn’t always easy.”
At that moment, as though symbolically, the bulb hanging from the ceiling glowed, flickered, and shone brilliantly.
“Still a major, I see,” said Guy.
“Yes, dammit. I was lieutenant-colonel for nearly a year. Then there was a reorganization at brigade. There didn’t seem a job for me there anymore. So I drifted into this outfit.”
The electric bulb, as though symbolically, flickered, glowed, and went out. “They haven’t really got the plant working yet,” said the major superfluously. “It comes and goes.” And their conversation was carried on in intermittent periods of vision and obscurity as though in a storm of summer lightning.
“D’you know what you’re going to do here?”
“No.”
“I didn’t when I was posted. I don’t now. It’s a nice enough outfit. You’ll like Cape. He’s not long out of hospital—got hit at Salerno. No more active soldiering for him. He’ll explain the set-up when you see him tomorrow. He and Joe Cattermole had to go to a conference at Caserta. Joe’s a queer fellow, some sort of professor in civil life; frightfully musical. But he works like the devil. Takes everything off my shoulders—and Cape’s. Gilpin is a pest as you saw. Joe’s the only man who can stand him. Joe likes everyone—even the Jugs. Awfully good-natured fellow, Joe; always ready to stand in and take extra duty.”
They spoke of the Halberdiers, of the achievements and frustrations of Ritchie-Hook, of the losses and reinforcements, recruiting, regrouping, reorganization and cross-posting that was changing the face of the corps. The light waxed, waned, flickered, expired as the familiar household names of Guy’s innocence resounded between them. Then the anonymous major turned his attention to Guy’s affairs and booked him a room at the officers’ hotel. When the light next went out, the sun had set and they were left in total darkness. An orderly came in bearing a pressure-lamp.
“Time to pack it up,” said the major. “I’ll see you settled in. Then we can go out to dinner.”
*
“I’ll just sign you in,” said the major at the entrance of the club. Guy looked over his shoulder but the signature was as illegible as ever; indeed Guy himself, entered in his writing, shared a vicarious anonymity. “If you’re going to be in Bari any time, you’d better join.”
“I see it’s called the ‘Senior Officers’ Club.’ ”
“That doesn’t mean anything. It’s for fellows who are used to a decent mess. The hotel is full of Queen Alexandra’s nurses in the evenings. Women are a difficulty here,” he continued as they made their way into the ante-room—this new, rather outlandish building had been made for a seminary of Uniate Abyssinians, who had been moved to Rome at the fall of the Italian Ethiopian Empire; the chief rooms were domed in acknowledgment of their native tukals and fanes. “The locals are strictly out of bounds. No great temptation, either, from what I’ve seen. Thoroughly unsavory, and, anyway, they only want Americans. They pay anything and don’t mind what
they’re getting. There are a few secretaries and ciphereens but they’re all booked. I have to rely on W.A.A.F.s mostly; they come through sometimes on the way to Foggia. They talk a lot of rot about Italy.”
“The W.A.A.F.s do?”
“No, no. I mean people who’ve never been here. Romantic—my God. That’s where the club comes in. It is like a mess at home, isn’t it? English rations, of course.”
“No wine?”
“There’s a sort of local red vino if you like it.”
“Fish, surely?”
“That’s kept for the wops. Good thing, too, by the smell of it.”
The exhilaration which Guy had experienced at finding himself abroad after two years of wartime England flickered and died like the bulb at Headquarters.
A civilian waiter brought them their pink gins. Guy asked him in Italian for olives. He answered in English almost scornfully: “No olives,” and brought American peanuts.
Under the blue-washed cupola where the dusky, bearded clerics had lately pursued their studies, Guy surveyed the heterogeneous uniforms and badges and saw his own recent past, his probable future. This was Southsand again; it was the transit camp, the Station Hotel in Glasgow; it was that lowest circle where he had once penetrated, the unemployed officers’ pool.
“I say,” said Guy’s host, “cheer up. What’s wrong? Homesick?”
“Homesick for Italy,” said Guy.
“That’s a good one,” said the major, puzzled, but appreciative that a joke had been made.
They went into what had been the refectory. Had Guy been homesick for wartime London, he would have found solace here, for Lieutenant Padfield was dining with a party of three Britons. Since Christmas the lieutenant had not been seen about London.
“Good evening, Loot. What are you up to?”
“I’ll join you later, may I?”
“You know that Yank?” asked the major.
“Yes.”
“What does he do?”
“That no one knows.”
“He’s been hanging round Joe Cattermole lately. I don’t know who’s brought him here tonight. We try to be matey with the Yanks in office hours but we don’t much encourage them off duty. They’ve got plenty of places of their own.”
“The Loot’s a great mixer.”
“What d’you call him?”
“Loot. It’s American for lieutenant, you know.”
“Is it? I didn’t. How absurd.”
Dinner, as Guy had been forewarned, included no succulent, redolent Italian dishes but he gratefully drank the “vino,” poor as it was; wine in any form had been scarcer and more costly than ever in the last two months in London. The major drank nothing with his food. He told Guy in detail of his last W.A.A.F. and of the W.A.A.F. before her. The differences were negligible. Presently the lieutenant came across to them, bearing a cigar-case. “I can’t wear them myself,” he said. “I think these are all right. Not from the P.X. Our minister in Algiers gave me a box.”
“A woman’s only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke,” said the major.
“Which reminds me,” said the lieutenant, “that I have never written to congratulate you and Virginia. I read about you in The Times when I was staying with the Stitches in Algiers. It’s very good news.”
“Thank you.”
The Halberdier major having accepted, bitten and lit the cigar he was offered, felt obliged to say: “Bring up a pew. We haven’t met, but I’ve seen you with Joe Cattermole.”
“Yes, he’s the most useful fellow here in my job.”
“Would it be insecure to ask what that is?”
“Not at all. Opera. We’re trying to get the opera going, you know.”
“I didn’t.”
“It’s the most certain way to the Italian heart. There’s not much difficulty about orchestras. The singers seem all to have gone off with the Germans.” He spoke of the various opera houses of occupied Italy; some had been gutted by bombs, others had escaped with a little damage. Bari was unscathed. “But I must rejoin my hosts,” he said, rising.
The major hesitated on the brink of so private a topic; then plunged: “Did I gather from what that fellow said that you’ve just got married?”
“Yes.”
“Rotten luck being posted abroad at once. I say, I’m afraid I was talking out of turn a bit, giving you advice about the local market.”
“I don’t think my wife would mind.”
“Wouldn’t she? Mine would—and I’ve been married eleven years.” He paused, brooding over that long stretch of intermittent rapture, and added: “At least, I think she would.” He paused again. “It’s a long time since I saw her. I daresay,” he concluded with the resigned, cosmic melancholy that Guy had always associated with him, “that she wouldn’t really care a bit.”
They returned to the ante-room. The major’s spirits had sunk at the thought of the possibility of his wife’s indifference to his adventures with the W.A.A.F.s. He called for whisky. Then he said: “I say, what does that fellow mean about ‘the way to the Italian heart’? We’ve just beaten the bastards, haven’t we? What have they got to sing about? I don’t believe even the Yanks would be so wet as to lay on entertainments for them. If you ask me, it’s cover for something else. Once you leave regimental soldiering, you run up against a lot of rum things you didn’t know went on. This town’s full of them.”
II
In London at that moment there was being enacted a scene of traditional domesticity. Virginia was making her layette. It was a survival of the schoolroom, incongruous to much in her adult life, that she sewed neatly and happily. It was thus she had spent many evenings in Kenya working a quilt that was never finished. Uncle Peregrine was reading aloud from Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? Presently she said: “I’ve finished my lessons, you know.”
“Lessons?”
“Instructions. Canon Weld says he’s ready to receive me any time now.”
“I suppose he knows best,” said Uncle Peregrine dubiously.
“It’s all so easy,” said Virginia. “I can’t think what those novelists make such a fuss over—about people ‘losing their faith.’ The whole thing is clear as daylight to me. I wonder why no one ever told me before. I mean it’s all quite obvious really, isn’t it, when you come to think of it?”
“It is to me,” said Uncle Peregrine.
“I want you to be my godfather, please. And that doesn’t mean a present—at least not anything expensive.” She plied her needle assiduously showing her pretty hands. “It’s really you who have brought me into the Church, you know.”
“I? Good heavens, how?”
“Just by being such a dear,” said Virginia. “You do like having me here, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course, my dear.”
“I’ve been thinking,” said Virginia. “I should like to have the baby here.”
“Here? In this flat?”
“Yes. Do you mind?”
“Won’t it be rather inconvenient for you?”
“Not for me. I think it will be cozy.”
“Cozy,” said Peregrine aghast. “Cozy.”
“You can be godfather to the baby too. Only, if you don’t mind, if he’s a boy I shouldn’t think I’ll call him Peregrine. I think Guy would like him to be called Gervase, don’t you?”
III
And Ludovic was writing. Since the middle of December he had without remission written 3,000 words a day; more than a hundred thousand words. His manner of composition was quite changed. Fowler and Roget lay unopened. He felt no need now to find the right word. All words were right. They poured from his pen in disordered confusion. He never paused; he never revised. He barely applied his mind to his task. He was possessed, the mere amanuensis of some power, not himself, making for—what? He did not question. He just wrote. His book grew as little Trimmer grew in Virginia’s womb without her conscious collaboration.
IV
It was the aim of every Barinese to obtain employment
under the occupying forces. Whole families in all their ramifications had insinuated themselves into the service of the officers’ hotel. Six senile patriarchs supported themselves on long mops from dawn to dusk gently polishing the linoleum floor of the vestibule. They all stopped work as Guy passed between them next morning and then advanced crab-like to expunge his foot-prints.
He walked to the office he had visited the evening before. The morning sunlight transformed the building. There had once been a fountain in the cortile, Guy now observed; perhaps it would one day play again. A stone triton stood there gaping, last poor descendant of grand forebears, amid spiky vegetation. The sentry was engaged in conversation with a dispatch-rider and let Guy pass without question. He met Gilpin on the stairs.
“How did you get in?”
“I’m attached here, don’t you remember?”
“But you haven’t got a pass. How long will it take those men to learn that an officer’s uniform means nothing? They had no business to let you through without a pass.”
“Where do I get one?”
“From me.”
“Well, perhaps it might save trouble if you gave me one.”
“Have you got three photographs of yourself?”
“Of course not.”
“Then I can’t make out a pass.”
At this moment a voice from above said: “What’s going on, Gilpin?”
“An officer without a pass, sir.”
“Who?”
“Captain Crouchback.”
“Well give him a pass and send him up.”
This was Brigadier Cape. The voice became a man on the landing; a lame, lean man, wearing the badges of a regiment of lancers. When Guy presented himself, he said: “Keen fellow, Gilpin. Takes his duties very seriously. Sorry I wasn’t here yesterday. I can’t see you at the moment. I’ve got some Jugs coming in with a complaint. The best thing you can do is to get Cattermole to put you in the picture. Then we’ll find where you fit in.”
Major Cattermole had the next room to Brigadier Cape. He was of the same age as Guy, tall, stooping, emaciated, totally unsoldierly, a Zurbarán ascetic with a joyous smile.