The Soldier''s Art

  “Very well, sir.”

  “Knocking the Division into shape?”

  “That’s it, sir.”

  “Territorial Division, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He’ll get a Corps soon.”

  “You think so, sir?”

  Major Finn nodded He seemed a little embarrassed about something. Although he gave out an extraordinary sense of his own physical strength and endurance, there was also something mild, gentle, almost undecided, about his manner.

  “You know why you’ve been sent here?” he asked.

  “It was explained, sir.”

  He lowered his eyes to what I now saw was my translation. He began to read it to himself, his lips moving faintly. After a line or two of doing this, it became clear to We what the answer was going to be. The only question that remained was how long the agony would be drawn out. Major Finn read the whole of my version through to himself: then, rather nobly, read it through again. This was either to give dramatic effect, or to rouse himself t0 the required state of tension for making an unwelcome announcement. Those, at least, were the reasons that occurred to me at the time, because he must almost certainly have gone through the piece when the captain had first brought it to him. I appreciated the gesture, which indicated he was doing the best he could for me, including not sparing himself. When he came to the end for the second time, he looked across the desk, and, shaking his head, sighed and smiled.

  “Well…” he said.

  I was silent.

  “Won’t do, I’m afraid.”

  “No, sir?”

  “Not as your written French stands.”

  He took up a pencil and tapped it on the desk.

  “We’d have liked to have you…”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Masham agrees.”

  “Masham” I took to be the I. Corps captain.

  “But this translation …”

  He spoke for a second as if I might have intended a deliberate insult to himself and his uniform by the botch I had made of it, but that he was prepared magnanimously to overlook that. Then, as if regretting what might have appeared momentary unkindness, in spite of my behaviour, he rose and shook hands again, gazing into the middle distance of the room. The vision to be seen there was certainly one of total failure.

  “… not sufficiently accurate.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You understand me?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “A pity.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Otherwise I think you would have done us well.”

  Major Finn paused. He appeared to consider this hypothesis for a long time. There did not seem much more to be said. I hoped the interview would end as quickly as possible.

  “Perfectly suitable …” he repeated.

  His voice was far away now. There was another long pause. Then a thought struck him. His face lighted up.

  “Perhaps it’s only written French you’re shaky in.”

  He wrinkled his broad, ivory-coloured forehead.

  “Now let us postulate the 9th Regiment of Colonial Infantry are on the point of mutiny,” he said. “They may be prepared to abandon Vichy and come over to the Allies. How would you harangue them?”

  “In French, sir?”

  “Yes, in French.”

  He spoke eagerly, as if he expected something enjoyably dramatic.

  “I’m afraid I should have to fall back on English, sir.”

  His face fell again.

  “I feared that,” he said.

  Failure was certainly total. I had been given a second chance, had equally bogged it. Major Finn stroked the enormous bumpy contours of his nose.

  “Look here,” he said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make a note of your name.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “There may be certain changes taking place in the near future. Not here, elsewhere. But don’t count on it. That’s best I can say. I don’t question anything General Liddament suggests. It’s just the language.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He smiled.

  “You’re on leave, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Wouldn’t mind some leave myself/’

  “No, sir?”

  “And my respects to General Liddament.”

  “I’ll convey them, sir.”

  “A great man.”

  I made a suitable face and left the room, disappointed and furious with myself. The fact that such an eventuality was in some degree to be expected made things no better. To have anyone in the army – let alone a general – show interest in your individual career is a rare enough experience. To fall at the language hurdle – just the field in which someone like myself, anyway in the eyes of General Liddament, might be expected to show reasonable proficiency – seemed to let down the General too. There would be little hope of his soliciting further candidatures in my interest. Why should he? I wondered why I had never taken the trouble in the past to learn French properly; as a boy, for instance, staying with the Leroys at La Grenadière, or in the course of innumerable other opportunities. At the same time, I was aware that a liaison officer at battalion level would be required to show considerable fluency. Perhaps it was just Fate. As for having a note made of my name, that was to be regarded as a polite formula on the part of Major Finn – an unusually likeable man – an echo of civilian courtesies from someone who took a pride in possessing good manners as well as a V.C.; a gesture to be totally disregarded for all practical purposes.

  I returned to the captain’s room. Pennistone was still there. He was about to leave, standing up, wearing his cap.

  “Well then,” he was saying. “On the first of next month Szymanski ceases to serve under the Free French authority, and comes under the command of the Polish Forces in Great Britain. That’s settled at last.”

  Masham, the I. Corps captain, turned to me. I explained deal was off. He knew, of course, already.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Thanks for looking in. I hear you and David know each other.”

  After taking leave of him, Pennistone and I went out together into the street. He asked what had happened. I outlined the interview with Major Finn. Pennistone listened with attention.;

  “Finn seems to have been well disposed towards you,” he said.

  “I liked him – what’s his story?”

  “Some fantastic episode in the first war, when he got his V.C. After coming out of the army, he decided to go into the cosmetics business – scent, face powder, things like that, the last trade you’d connect him with. He talks very accurate French with the most outlandish accent you ever heard. He’s been a great success with the Free French – liked by de Gaulle, which is not everyone’s luck.”

  “Surprising he’s not got higher rank.”

  “Finn could have become a colonel half-a-dozen times over since rejoining the army,” said Pennistone. “He always says he prefers not to have too much responsibility. He has his V.C., which always entails respect – and which he loves talking about. However, I think he may be tempted at last to accept higher rank.”

  “To what?”

  “Very much in the air at the moment. All I can say is, you may be more likely to hear from him than you think.”

  “Does he make money at his cosmetics?”

  “Enough to keep a wife and daughter hidden away somewhere.”

  “Why are they hidden away?”

  “I don’t know,” said Pennistone, laughing. “They just are. There are all kinds of things about Finn that are not explained. Keeping them hidden away is part of the Finn system. When I knew him in Paris, I soon found he had a secretive side.”

  “You knew him before the war?”

  “I came across him, oddly enough, when I was in textiles, working over there.”

  ‘Textiles are your job?”

  “I got out in the end.”

  “Into what?”

  Pen
nistone laughed again, as if that were an absurd question to ask.

  “Oh, nothing much really,” he said. “I travel about a lot – or used to before the war. I think I told you, when we last met, that I’m trying to write something about Descartes.”

  All this suggested – as it turned out rightly – that Pennistone, as well as Finn, had his secretive side. When I came to know him better, I found what mattered to Pennistone was what went on in his head. He could rarely tell you what he had done in the past, or proposed to do in the future, beyond giving a bare statement of places he had visited or wanted to visit, books he had read or wanted to read. On the other hand, he was able to describe pretty lucidly what he had thought – philosophically speaking – at any given period of his life. While other people lived for money, power, women, the arts, domesticity, Pennistone liked merely thinking about things, arranging his mind. Nothing else ever seemed to matter to him. It was the aim Stringham had announced now as his own, though Pennistone was a very different sort of person from Stringham, and better equipped for perfecting the process. I only found out these things about him at a later stage.

  “Give me the essential details regarding yourself,” Pennistone said. “Unit, army number, that sort of thing – just in case anything should crop up where I myself might be of use.

  I wrote it all down. We parted company, agreeing that Nietzschean Eternal Recurrences must bring us together soon again.

  Even by the time I reached the Café Royal that evening, I was still feeling humiliated by the failure of the Finn interview. The afternoon had been devoted to odd jobs, on the whole tedious. The tables and banquettes of the large tasteless room looked unfamiliar occupied by figures in uniform. There was no one there I had ever seen before. I sat down and waited. Lovell did not arrive until nearly half-past seven. He wore captain’s pips. It was hard not to labour under a sense of being left behind in the military race. I offered congratulations.

  “You don’t get into the really big money until you’re a major,” he said, “That should be one’s aim.”

  “Vaulting ambition.”

  “Insatiable.”

  “Where do you function?*

  “Headquarters of Combined Operations,” he said, “that curious toy fort halfway down Whitehall. It’s a great place for Royal Marines. A bit of luck your being on leave, Nick. One or two things I want to talk about First of all, will you agree to be executor of my will?”

  “Of course.”

  “Perfectly simple. Whatever there is – which isn’t much, I can assure you – goes to Priscilla, then to Caroline.”

  “That doesn’t sound too complicated.”

  “One never knows what may happen to one.”

  “No, indeed.”

  The remark echoed Sergeant Harmer’s views. There was a pause. I had the sudden sense that Lovell was going to broach some subject I should not like. This apprehension turned out to be correct,

  “Another small matter,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “It would interest me to hear more of this fellow Stevens. You seem to be mainly responsible for bringing him into our lives, Nick.”

  “If you mean someone called Odo Stevens, he and I were on a course together at Aldershot about a year ago. I didn’t know he was in our lives. He isn’t in mine. I haven’t set eyes on him since then.”

  I had scarcely thought of Stevens since he had been expelled from the course. Now the picture of him came back forcibly. Lovell’s tone was not reassuring. It was possible to guess something of what might be happening.

  “You introduced him into the family,” said Lovell.

  He spoke calmly, not at all accusingly, but I recognised in his eye the intention to stage a dramatic announcement.

  “One weekend leave from Aldershot Stevens gave me a lift in his very brokendown car as far as Frederica’s. Then he took me back on Sunday night. Isobel was staying there. It was just before she had her baby. In fact, the birth started that night. Stevens got R.T.U.-ed soon after we got back on the course. I haven’t seen or heard of him since.”

  “You haven’t?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Priscilla was at Frederica’s then.”

  “I remember.”

  “She met Stevens.”

  “She must have done.”

  “She’s been with him lately up in a hotel in Scotland,” said Lovell, “living more or less openly, so there’s no point in not mentioning it.”

  There was nothing to be said to that. Stevens had certainly struck up some sort of an acquaintance with Priscilla on that occasion at Frederica’s. I could recall more. Some question of getting a piece of jewellery mended for her had arisen. Such additional consequences as Lovell outlined were scarcely to be foreseen when I took Stevens to the house. Nevertheless, it was an unfortunate introduction. However, this merely confirmed stories going round. No doubt Stevens, by now, was a figure with some sort of war career behind him. That could happen in the matter of a few weeks. That Stevens might be the “commando,” or whatever shape Priscilla’s alleged fancy-man took, had never suggested itself to me. Lovell lit a cigarette. He puffed out a cloud of smoke. His evident inclination to adopt a stylised approach – telling the story as we might have tried to work it out together in a film script years before – was some alleviation of immediate embarrassments caused by the disclosure. The dramatic manner he had assumed accorded with his own conception of how life should be lived. I was grateful for it. By this means things were made easier.

  “When did all this start?”

  “Pretty soon after they first met.”

  “I see.”

  “I was down at that godforsaken place on the East Coast. There was nowhere near for her to live. It wasn’t my fault we weren’t together.”

  “Is Stevens stationed in Scotland?”

  “So far as I know. He did rather well somewhere – was if the Lofoten raid? That sort of thing. He’s a hero on top of everything else. I suppose if I were to do something where I could get killed, instead of composing lists of signal equipment and suchlike, I might make a more interesting husband.”

  “I don’t think so for a moment.”

  In giving this answer, I spoke a decided opinion. To assume such a thing was a typical instance of Lovell’s taste, mentioned earlier, for the obvious. It was a supposition bound to lead to a whole host of erroneous conclusions – that was how the conjecture struck me – regarding his own, or anyone else’s, married life.

  “You may be right,” he said.

  He spoke as if rather relieved.

  “Look at it the other way. Think of all the heroes who had trouble with their wives.”

  “Who?”

  “Agamemnon, for instance.”

  “Well, that caused enough dislocation,” said Lovell. “What’s Stevens like, apart from his heroism?.”

  “In appearance?”

  “Everything about him.”

  “Youngish, comes from Birmingham, traveller in costume jewellery, spot of journalism, good at languages, short, thickset, very fair hair, easy to get on with, keen on the girls.”

  “Sounds not unlike me,” said Lovell, “except that up to date I’ve never travelled in costume jewellery – and I still rather pride myself on my figure.”

  “There is a touch of you about him, Chips. I thought so at Aldershot.”

  “You flatter me. Anyway, he seems more of a success than I am with my own wife. If he is keen on the girls, I suppose making for Priscilla would be a matter of routine?”

  “So I should imagine.”

  “You liked him?”

  “We got on pretty well.”

  “Why was he Returned-to-Unit?”

  “For cutting a lecture.”

  Lovell seemed all at once to lose interest in Stevens and his personality. His manner changed. There could be no doubt he was very upset.

  “So far as I can see there was nothing particularly wrong with our marriage,” he said. “If I hadn’
t been sent to that God-awful spot, it would have gone on all right. At least that’s how things appeared to me. I don’t particularly want a divorce even now.”

  “Is there any question of a divorce?”

  “It isn’t going to be much fun living with a woman who’s in love with someone else.”

  “Lots of people do it, and vice versa.”

  “At best, it’s never going to be the same.”

  “Nothing ever remains the same. Marriage or anything else.”

  “I thought your theory was that everything did always remain the same?”

  “Everything alters, yet does remain the same. It might even improve matters.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Not really.”

  “Neither do I,” said Lovell, “though I see what you mean. That’s if she’s prepared to come back and live with me. I’m not even sure of that. I think she wants to marry Stevens.”

  “She must be mad.”

  “Mad she may be, but that’s the way she’s talking.”

  “Where’s Caroline?”

  “My parents are looking after her.”

  “And Priscilla herself?”

  “Staying with Molly Jeavons – though I only found out that by chance yesterday. She’s been moving about among various relations, is naturally at times rather vague about her whereabouts, so far as keeping me informed is concerned.”

  “You’ve dished all this up with her?”

  “On my last leave – making it a charming affair.”

  “But lately?”

  “Since then, we’ve been out of touch more than once. We are at this moment, until I found, quite by chance, she was at the Jeavonses’. I’m hoping to see her to-night. That’s why I can’t dine with you.”

  “You and Priscilla are dining together?”

  “Not exactly. You remember Bijou Ardglass, that gorgeous mannequin, one-time girl-friend of Prince Theodoric? I ran into her yesterday on my way to Combined Ops. She’s driving for the Belgians or Poles, one of the Allied contingents – an odd female organisation run by Lady McReith, whom Bijou was full of stories about. Bijou asked me to a small party she is giving for her fortieth birthday, about half-a-dozen old friends at the Madrid.”