‘I’m probably being silly, but – well, I thought I ought to ask someone. Look – you’re John McAuslan’s platoon commander, aren’t you?’
I hadn’t expected that, at any rate – it was nearly as surprising as hearing someone use McAuslan’s Christian name – bad platoon commander that I was, I’d never really thought of his having one. But the surprises hadn’t really started.
‘I know I’m being stupid,’ she said, looking embarrassed, ‘but I had a rather odd experience this afternoon. No, please don’t laugh. It’s just – well, he’s been helping me quite regularly lately, down at the market, carrying parcels and that sort of thing, you know, being generally useful . . .’
‘I know, your mother told me.’
‘Yes, well, then you know he helped me out with some beastly Arab – and he seemed very anxious to go on helping, and well, he did know his way around the market, you know . . .’ She shrugged, and spilled some drink from her glass. ‘Oh, damn, sorry . . . but, well, he seemed all right, although he looked pretty awful – well, he does, doesn’t he? And then . . . this afternoon . . .’
‘What about this afternoon?’ I asked, feeling all sorts of nameless dreads.
‘Well, this afternoon – ’ she looked me in the eye ’ – he proposed to me.’
For a moment I nearly laughed, and then, very quickly, I didn’t want to. She wasn’t even smiling – her pretty face was perplexed and unhappy. I was relieved, and astonished, and angry, and – no other word for it – fascinated.
‘Let me get it right. McAuslan proposed to you – marriage?’
‘Yes, on the way home. We usually come back by horsecarriage, and it was a nice afternoon, and I thought it would be nice to drive along the front, and look at the wrecks in the bay – and on the way . . . he asked me to marry him.’
Oh, God, McAuslan, I thought. Think of the improbable, and he’ll do it every time.
‘I didn’t really understand at first – you know he doesn’t talk very much – well, he hasn’t to me, at least. Just when we were in the market, and so on, and I don’t understand a lot of it anyway – it’s his accent. And when he started talking this afternoon, I couldn’t make much of it out, and then it dawned on me . . . there wasn’t any doubt of it. He was proposing.’
‘You’re sure?’ I was trying to hold on to reality. ‘What did he say, exactly?’
‘Oh, gosh, I couldn’t reproduce it.’ She was very much a schoolgirl, really. ‘But he said, ‘We could get married’ – merit, he called it. He said it again.’
‘You’re sure . . . he wasn’t being funny?’
‘Oh, no. No. He was dead serious. I’ve been proposed to before – once – not half as seriously as he did. He meant it. It never even occurred to me to treat it as a joke.’ She looked uncertain, frowning. ‘I couldn’t have.’
‘What did you say – I mean, if it’s any of my business?’
‘Well, when I’d got over the surprise, and realised he was being serious, I said – I said no. Look, honestly, I know this sounds terribly silly to you, and you probably think I’m an idiot, or that I think it’s all a big giggle, or something, but I don’t – really, I don’t. I mean, if I had, I wouldn’t have wanted to tell you, would I?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Well – why are you . . . telling me?’
‘Because I’m worried. All right, you probably think it’s a great hoot, but it isn’t. I said no, you see . . . and he asked me again, in that sort of dogged way, and I said, “No, look, please, it isn’t on. I mean, I don’t want to get married.” And he asked me again, very seriously, and I said no, and tried to explain . . . and then – you won’t believe this . . .’
‘I’ll believe anything,’ I said, and meant it.
‘Well, he started to cry. He just looked at me, very steadily, and then tears started to run down his cheeks. Positive tears, I mean. He didn’t sob, or anything like that. He just . . . well, wept. I asked him not to, but he just stared at me, and then he climbed out of the carriage, and walked away. I didn’t know what to think. And then he came back, and looked at me, and said, “It’s no’ bluidy fair.” That’s what he said. And then he said, “Good afternoon” and walked off. I mean, it’s mad, isn’t it?’
She stood smiling at me, with that puzzled look in her big, blue eyes, and I wondered for an instant if this was some fearful joke thought up by her and Messrs MacKenzie and Grant to take the mickey out of me. But it wasn’t, and she was worried.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know about mad – but it’s certainly unexpected. I don’t really know . . .’
‘Look, I’m awfully sorry even mentioning it. . . I feel an awful fool . . . but . . . I mean he’s really a terribly nice person – I think – but, well, it worries me. He can be pretty savage, you know – if you’d seen him with that Arab, I mean, just for a minute he was really berserk. I mean, he seemed pretty badly cut-up this afternoon – he really looked awful – more awful, I mean.’ She suddenly put down her glass. ‘Look, I don’t think I’m a femme fatale, or anything, and I know it sounds like something out of Red Letter, but he wouldn’t do anything silly, would he?’
The answer to that was yes, of course, he being McAuslan, but whatever it was, it would be some folly no one had thought of yet.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘Please, don’t think I’m being stupid – well, I am, I suppose, getting all in a tizzy about nothing. Only I wanted to tell someone – and you’re his platoon commander – and he said something about you once – not today – and well . . . I wouldn’t want him to think that I was laughing at him, or anything like that. I mean most boys . . .’ She gave a gesture that would have belted Grant and MacKenzie right in the ego’. . . you know how it is. But, he’s so serious . . . he really is. It’s really silly, isn’t it? And I’m the genuine dumb blonde, aren’t I?’
No, I thought, you’re a rather nice girl; dumb, yes, in some ways, but nice with it.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you didn’t laugh at him, so . . .’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t laugh.’
‘So that’s all there is to it,’ I said.
‘Look . . . maybe I shouldn’t have said anything . . . I mean, he won’t get into any kind of trouble, will he?’
‘Why should he? Proposing isn’t a crime.’
‘No, I suppose not . . . but if Daddy knew, he’d be hopping mad. Mummy,’ she added elegantly, ‘would bust a gut. And I hate to think what Jimmy Grant or Kenny would do about it.’
‘If either Lieutenant Grant or Lieutenant MacKenzie were ill-advised enough to try to do anything about a member of my platoon,’ I said, ‘you would be bringing fruit and flowers for them in the afternoons.’
‘Good. Could you get me another punch, please? I feel I need it after all this confessional stuff. Look, do you think I’m barmy? It all sounds so dam’ silly, doesn’t it?’
Take anyone’s proposal of marriage, and the chances are it will sound silly. Hollywood has overworked the truth of how people talk to the extent that reality, when you come across it, usually sounds corny. I remember a fellow in Burma being shot in the leg, and he rolled over shouting: ‘They got me! The dirty rats, they got me!’ Put that into fiction and people will laugh at it, but I heard it happen.
Similarly, the remarkable conversation I had just had with Ellen Ramsey. It was, as she said, damned silly, but I knew it was true, and that to McAuslan it had probably been a bit of a tragedy, and in no way funny. The thought of her and McAuslan doing the Jane Austen bit – and no doubt looking like something left out for the cleansing department while he did it – should, in theory, have been ludicrous. But she didn’t think so, and neither did I. It was pathetic, and rather touching, and not for the first time I found myself uncomfortably moved by that uncertain, unhappy, vulnerable little tatterdemalion. It must have hurt him, and I wondered how he was taking it.
It wasn’t just a sentimental consideration, either. I knew my McAuslan; under the bludgeonings
of fate, in whatever form, his normal reaction was to go absent, and I didn’t want that. He had been over the wall too often in the past, and if he did it again he could be in serious trouble. So I took the precaution of checking the guardroom list that midnight, and sure enough, his name was among those who had failed to book in by 2359 hours.
Normally, when a man does that, you expect to see him returned within a few hours, full of flit and defiance, by the gestapo. But I decided to take no chances; I rang a friend in the provost marshal’s office, one of the half-human ones, and asked him to do a quick sweep with his redcaps for one McAuslan, J., that well-known wanderer, and whip him back to barracks as fast as possible.
‘I don’t want him going A.W.O.L., Charlie,’ I explained. ‘His record won’t stand it. Try the Old Suk; he’s probably rolling in some gutter with a skinful of arak.’
‘It beats me why you want him back,’ said Charlie, ‘but leave it to me; my boys’ll find him.’
But they didn’t. Sunday noon came, without result, and McAuslan’s name went up on the board as absent without leave. That was bad enough; my next fear was that he had done something really daft, like hopping an outward-bound ship, in which case his absence would become desertion. He couldn’t, I asked myself, do anything worse, could he? Jilted people are capable of anything, and I began to see visions of McAuslan a la Ophelia, floating belly-up with rosemary and fennel twined in his hair. It had got to the point where I was trying to translate ‘Adieu, cruel world’ into Glasgow patter, when the mess phone rang.
‘We got your lad,’ said Charlie. ‘Not in the Suk, not in Puggle Alley, not on the harbour – guess where? Out on the beach, looking at the wrecks, for God’s sake. Talk about eccentrics.’
‘Thanks, Charlie. How is he?’
‘Tight as a coot, but past the fighting stage – now. We had a little trouble. He should be arriving at your rest home any minute. O.K.?’
I thanked him and hung up, quite unreasonably relieved. Then after a few minutes I went round to the guardroom, and Sergeant McGarry admitted me to a cell to view the remains.
Even by McAuslan standards, his condition was deplorable. He had evidently got extremely wet, and thereafter spent the night on a well-nourished compost heap, his sporran and one boot were missing, his matted hair hung over a face that looked like a grey-washed cathedral gargoyle, and he had a new black eye. He was also three-parts drunk, and swayed to and fro on the edge of his plank-bed, making awful sounds.
Becoming aware of me he tried to focus, made an effort to get up, and wisely desisted.
‘Ah’m – Ah’m awfy – sorry, sir,’ he said at last, articulating with difficulty.
‘So am I,’ I said, and he groaned.
‘Ah’m gaunae – gaunae be sick,’ he announced.
‘Sergeant McGarry!’ I shouted. ‘He’s going to be sick. Get a bucket, or something —’
McGarry’s face appeared at the grille in the cell door, scowling horribly.
‘Spew on my floor, ye beast, and I’ll tear the bones from your body.’
‘Ah’m no’ gaunae be sick,’ McAuslan decided, and McGarry vanished. Psychologists take note.
I doubted if there was much to be accomplished in the prisoner’s present condition, but you have to go through the motions. He would be before the Colonel in the morning, and if by previous inquiry you can discover some extenuating circumstance, or even coach the accused in what to say – or what not to say – it all helps.
‘McAuslan,’ I said, ‘this is the fourth time this year. You’ll be for detention, you realise that? Maybe in barracks, maybe in the glasshouse. You got fourteen days last time. You don’t want to go to the Hill, do you?’
No reply. He was gargling to himself, staring down at his hands in a bemused way, giving occasional small hiccups. I didn’t seem to be getting through.
‘McAuslan, you were absent nearly a whole day. That’s serious. How are you going to explain it to the Colonel?’
He looked vacantly at me, and began to mumble, at first incoherently, but then words began to come out. I don’t know what I expected – I’ve heard guardroom depositions that you wouldn’t believe, including a confession of murder, and poured-out grievances going back in harrowing detail to infancy – but none that astonished me more than McAuslan’s. And yet, it was perhaps perfectly natural — but I’d never have heard it if he hadn’t been deep in drink.
‘. . . no good enough,’ he muttered. ‘No’ good enough. It’s no’ bluidy fair, so it’s no’. Never done nuthin’.’ His eyes were unnaturally bright, but didn’t seem to be seeing anything. ‘Ah’m – no’ good enough. No’ bluidy fair. Lot o’ bluidy snobs. Thinkin’ Ah’m jist a yahoo. Ah’m no’. Thought she wiz different, but, no’ like the rest o’ them bluidy snobs. See her mither, an’ her sang-widges – bluidy awfy, they wiz.’ He gulped resoundingly. ‘Auld cow. No’ good enough for her. Jist a yahoo. Sergeant Telfer says Ah’m jist a yahoo – a‘body does. And her, she thinks Ah’m no’ good enough. And Ah’m jist — jist . . .′ He began to sob, deep in his chest, ‘. . . no′ good enough. No’ good enough.’
I just stood listening; there was nothing else to do.
‘Never got made lance-corporal – an’ Boyle did, an’ him’s scruffy as – as – as me. Wisnae fair – wisnae my fault – no’ bein’ good enough. Ah didnae think she mindit, though – an’ Ah sortit that wog oot, doon the bazaar. Ah did. “You leave the lassie alone, ye black bastard,” Ah says, “or Ah’ll banjo ye. Git up tae me, son,” Ah says, “ye’ll git the heid oan ye.” That sortit him, right enough. Aye, but Grant an’ MacKenzie an’ them, bet ye they couldnae ‘a sortit him. But they’re good enough – toffee-nosed an’ talkin’ posh – good enough, aye. Ah’m no’ good enough – Ah’m a yahoo – no’ good enough. Sno’ bluidy fair, so it’s no’ – no’ bein’ good enough!’
Maybe I’m soft, but I felt my eyes stinging. I squatted down in front of him as he rocked on the bench, working his hands between his knees. Self-pitying drunks are ten a penny, but what was coming out of him wasn’t just ordinary self-pity. All right, he was abysmally stupid, and by exhibiting a phenomenal degree of wooden-headedness he had got himself hurt. So what do you do – tell him to get hold of himself and not be a fool? Perhaps. But when someone has spent a young life-time getting hurt, in ways which most of us can’t imagine, then when he commits a really outstanding folly, and is reduced to utter abject misery, it may be as well to go easy.
‘Of course you’re good enough, son,’ I said, and presumably he heard, for he shook his head.
‘Ah’m no’ like Grant an’ MacKenzie an’ them. Bluidy wee snobs – her an’ her sang-widges. Thinkin’ Ah’m jist a yahoo – Ah’ll show them – Ah’m no’ jist a yahoo – mebbe Ah didnae go tae a posh school, an’ talk toffee-nosed, but Ah’ll dae a’right. When Ah git oot, Ah’ll dae a‘right – there a fella in the Garngad – wi’ a haulage business – gimme a job. Ah’ll be fine, nae fear. Ah’ll no’ be oan the burroo —′ that is, unemployed. ‘See Grant an’ MacKenzie, but, bluidy wee toffee-noses, see them oan the burroo. Thinkin’ Ah’m no’ good enough. An’ Ah’m no’! She disnae think Ah’m – Ah’m – good enough. Oh, Goad, Ah feel awfy! Oh, Goad, Ah’m awfy ill!’
He clutched himself and rolled around for a moment, but then steadied up, called on his Maker a few times, and observed fearfully that he was for the hammer the morn.
‘Darkie’ll nail me. He’s a bastard, yon Darkie, so he is. He’ll dae me. He’s done me afore. They – they like daein’ me!’
Since I was Darkie, this was slightly disturbing. It also suggested that McAuslan was well beyond the bounds of comprehension, so I decided to take my leave. I kicked on the door for Sergeant McGarry, and as he was opening up, I looked at McAuslan, crouched on his bench, sunk in dejection. It always comes as a shock when you see into someone’s mind – it can be terribly corny, and trite, and obvious, and yet totally unexpected. It never seems quite real. It wasn’t, I could agree with him,
bloody fair.
‘No’ good enough,’ he muttered again, as the door closed.
The Colonel evidently agreed with him, for next morning he heaved the book at him – twenty-eight days’ cells, which was the maximum he could do in the guardroom, without being sent to the military prison at Heliopolis. Sensibly, McAuslan took it without comment, beyond a mumbled apology, and that was that. He laboured, for the ostensible good of his soul and the damage of the battalion gardens, for his daily eight hours, and McGarry locked him up at night. I kept an eye on him, to see how he was bearing up, but beyond the fact that he got filthier by the day – which was absolutely normal — there was nothing to report. No signs of unhinged personality, or anything, although with him it was always difficult to tell. Whatever had been working in him that night, he seemed to have got over it.
It must have been in the last week of his sentence, and I was in company office late in the afternoon, when the battalion post clerk brought in the mail. It was a big batch, because there had been some mix-up at the airport that had delayed things for several days; I sent for one man from each platoon to help sort it, splitting it into platoon bundles. The man from my platoon was Daft Bob Brown; he carried off a great heap of letters for his barrack-room, and as I was leaving the office I met him going down the company steps, a bundle of envelopes still in his hand.
‘Where away with those?’ I asked.
‘Guardroom, sir. McAuslan’s mail.’
I was surprised. ‘He gets plenty, doesn’t he?’
‘No kiddin’, sir. If it wisnae for him, postie wid be oot o’ a job.’
‘But —′ I said. ‘How’s that? He can’t read or write.’
‘That’s right, sir. Ah write his letters for him — me an’ the fellas.’
‘And read them, too – the one’s he gets, I mean?’
‘Aye, sure. It’s a helluva job, too. Ye should see the amoont he gets – shake ye rigid.’
‘Well, I’m damned.’ This was intriguing. ‘Who writes to him – his people?’
Daft Bob guffawed. ‘No’ on yer nelly. It’s the birds.’