‘AND THIS,’ said the adjutant, ‘is Lieutenant Acting-Captain Holl, known as Sam. Sam, this is Alan Mart, just arrived, first posting from the Cadet College. I’ll be detailing him off to you to learn how an infantry battalion in the Indian Army should be run.’
Holl rose from his chair. He seemed to go on rising for an interminable time, lurching from one side to the other, before he found his stature. He was a large-boned man, corded with muscle unsoftened by any spare flesh; his khaki bush-shirt and slacks looked flimsy on him, and his rather small squarish head inadequate as a terminal for the torso. He had pale grey eyes, a thin pale mouth and a thin pale feathering of hair, delicate and shallow as seedlings. His teeth were yellowish, with an exclamation of pure gold on the left-hand side, and he sucked a great deal at them. He was looking cautiously down at Alan, seeming to reserve malevolence rather than judgment.
Alan held out his hand. It was taken in a dry and solid grip.
‘What’ll you have?’ said Holl. He tended to flatten his a’s.
Alan saw that Holl seemed to be drinking a small lemonade.
‘I’m on the wagon,’ said Holl. ‘I been naughty. Don’t let it fuss you.’
Alan had a beer, and nervously started to ask questions about the unit, which was now his unit. Holl ignored the questions, staring all over Alan in dispassionate stocktaking, and sucking at his teeth.
‘You’re a bit frail, lad,’ he said at last. He put his fingers round Alan’s upper arm. ‘Christ, what a twig! Come from a good home, three months in the ranks and never a word fired in anger, into a cadet college, and here you are an officer and a gentleman. Well, I wish you luck, son, I wish you luck.’ He laid a finger on the side of his nose, waggled his small head, and suddenly turned and left the bar.
‘It’s all right,’ said the adjutant, soothing. ‘He’s a lamb really; heart of gold as true as his tooth. And the best soldier in the brigade. Drinks too much, that’s all; the C.O. had to lay him off alcohol during the week. There was an incident at a tennis party a couple of Sundays ago.’
‘Our Sam,’ said the adjutant, ‘was stinking. The C.O.’s aunt would tell him about the trouble she was having with one of her sweepers, and Sam in the end told her straight out she was a flatchested Tory.’
Alan said he didn’t know you could say that to your C.O.’s aunt.
‘You can’t. But Sam said, and he stuck to it, that the words he had really used were: What a fascinating story. And as the aunt is deafish and I perjured myself in favour of Sam’s version, all the C.O. did was to blow Sam up to the ceiling, and put him on the water wagon.’
‘Oh. You still have tennis parties.’
It was October, 1941, and even in India the war had been on officially for over two years.
‘Yes. The women like it. And you may well ask, do we still have women and the answer still is, yes, the women like it.’ The adjutant smoothed his moustache cleverly; it was an elusive, rather wispy, job; he looked barely twenty though he was in fact twenty-five, with some years of planting in Assam to his credit. ‘But it only happens on Sunday afternoons. Otherwise, you’ll find, we work solid. By the way, you’ve got visiting cards, of course?’
‘Of course.’ Second-Lieutenant Mart, they said; he had had them engraved in Bombay during his leave. ‘I think I’d better go back to my room now and see if my kit’s turned up.’
Alan’s room was a small wooden box that contained a bed with a wire framework on which was furled, like a canopy, his mosquito net; there was a wooden chair, a table, a rudimentary chest of drawers, and a washbowl on a metal tripod stand. Set in the ceiling was a large electric fan.
Not much of his kit had come.
He walked about his room. He switched a switch and a naked light bulb shone palely. He switched it off, and tried the second switch. With a grunt, the fan heaved into action. He lay down and looked at the fan through the mosquito net. After a while he took a crumpled airmail letter from his breast-pocket and started to read it.
I’ve come up early before term started and I wish I hadn’t.
Cambridge is unbearable without you though I ought to be used to it by now what with fifteen months already without you. But the trees have turned and are burning and the river so slow you’d think it must stop and the leaves fall one by one very slowly too. Punting last summer term wasn’t at all the same without you, and the food’s awful. But it’s funny what a lot of people there are about because with the war you’d think there wouldn’t be. Of course they’re all awful and only ghostly pretenders in your gap and they muck up all the places that belonged to us, but some are less awful than others. Oh, George sends you his love; he’s in the… [two lines were here covered by the censor’s broad black bar]. Isn’t it marvellous? And he says… [another blank]. There was a wonderful party in Gibbs’ Building last night at least it would have been wonderful if you had been there and Jimmy said… [deleted by censor]. But you must be having some fun, darling. I do hope even in stuffy old India, and I know you’ll think I’m a mean old bitch gadding while you serve, but oh, my lamb, it’s the nights that are not so good when I can’t get away from you and you aren’t there. …
There was a lot more; but he had read it all through several times already, and it read on the whole less well each time. That bit about the nights particularly which was so pleasing and sad at first reading; but when he came to think about it, they had only ever spent three nights together, and those three nights had been extremely confused. Still, he knew what she meant; it was put like that because she was reading English, no doubt. He sighed, and laid the letter on his breast, and began to count his fingers. He had just registered them all present and correct, and was starting to check on his toes, pressing them one by one against the hot inner soles of his boots, when he realised that he was not alone.
A small round Indian boy stood by his bed; he was wearing a khaki shirt with the tails out over his shorts, and nothing on his feet. His head was shaven of hair except for one thin six-inch strand that drooped limply from the back. His face shone; his protuberant eyes swam moistly; he was of an attractive, even, warm brown, marred by a large red boil approaching its climax on his cheek. He seemed to be about fourteen.
They looked at each other. The boy was nervous, and looked away. He stood all the while stiffly to attention, but quivered constantly.
‘Sahib!’ he said suddenly, urgently, and Urdu flew out of him.
Alan failed entirely to follow.
The flow diminished, stuttered and stopped; the large eyes swam still with mute popping queries like goldfish.
‘What do you want?’ said Alan slowly, unravelling his Urdu.
‘Sahib.’
‘Oh, go away.’
‘Sahib.’
‘Go away!’ Alan was getting cross. ‘Jao! Shoo!’
The boy remained stiffly at attention.
Alan half sat up, fluttering his hands. ‘Shoo! shoo!’
From the doorway a roar interrupted him. In the gloom stood Holl.
The boy spun round, and seemed for a moment to be about to prostrate himself. Holl addressed him in fluent Urdu with an oddly cockney accent. Then he turned to Alan. ‘This is your orderly. His name’s Sundar Singh. What do you want him to do?’
‘Orderly? You mean he’s a soldier? But he’s a child. Can’t be a day more than fourteen.’
‘Oh no. A good seventeen; sixteen anyway. One of the new draft. One hundred and ninety recruits with long service of at least six weeks in the Training Battalion were posted to us last week, to replace one hundred and ninety veterans pinched from us to form the nucleus of the 11th Battalion now forming. I dare say, my boy, you realise we’re standing by to proceed overseas on active service; which will be, they do say, in a couple of months at the latest. So far, these one hundred and ninety have just about learned to wear boots. Two months from now, with luck, they’ll have learned to squeeze a trigger.’
‘Oh.’
Alan looked around his bleak room. There didn’t seem much an orderly could do in it. Then he thought it would be nice to be tucked up in bed.
‘Your kit come yet? No? He’d better go and find it.’ Holl spoke to the orderly, who vanished in a flash of eyes and a scurry.
Holl was saying that Alan shouldn’t worry about his Urdu. It would come very quickly. ‘It has to. There you are, with all those black shining faces turned up to you, waiting for the pearls to drop; you have to say something. I mean you learned the grammar at your Cadet College?’
‘Oh yes.’ Alan thought of his teacher, his munshi at the college. They used to sit for hours under a flame-of-the-forest tree; the munshi was a small man, like a spectacled tortoise with halitosis. ‘In this poem,’ he would say, ‘the lights burning in the windows of the bazaar at Bombay remind me of the flowers in my native province which are so jolly.’ And his nasal voice would escape like a daddy longlegs into the branches. ‘Most beautiful,’ he would say. ‘Now it is your turn to sing me a song, by your T. S. Eliot perhaps or W. Shakespeare.’ He had extraordinarily thick lips that moulded each word separately and a little clumsily. He was a pacifist, and Alan used to mock him about passive resistance until, realising he was being teased, the munshi would giggle helplessly. Sometimes, after a particularly gay session, they would sing Land of Hope and Glory together, in joint honour of India and of Britain.
‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘I did the grammar.’
‘Time we got over to the Mess,’ said Holl. His mood had changed now, to a rather sinister joviality. ‘Saturday and gone six-thirty. I’m allowed two whiskies tonight; and two more tomorrow.’
Alan collected himself together; as they left the room, his orderly came up, puffing under a tin trunk and a kit bag.
Holl roared, apparently by an automatic reaction, for no specific purpose. The orderly wobbled, as if attempting a salute, and passed on into Alan’s room.
‘I thought,’ said Alan, ‘one wasn’t called up till one was eighteen.’
‘Oh, they say they’re eighteen, the blockheads. I’ve got some I’ll swear aren’t more than fifteen, if that. It’s expected of them by their family. Matter of honour. Poor little sods.’
Holl stopped. He turned and faced Alan.
‘But they’re the best fighting troops in the world. Except possibly the Gurkhas. But you want to remember that, Mart. The best bloody fighting troops in the world, when trained.’
His prize-fighter head wove from side to side, as if challenging contradiction. Then he turned, and strode on towards the brightly lit windows of the Mess.
Over his shoulder, he added: ‘Properly led, of course.’
Fairly early after dinner, but a little tight perhaps, owing to the warm greeting extended to him by his new colleagues, Alan returned to his room. They were not at all like any of his normal friends. There was the second-in-command, a tall loosely built major, stooping and kindly and with an odd impression of walking in step with himself like a yak. There were the company commanders, the senior one, Harold Hockey, rather intimidating, with hauteur, boiled blue eyes and raging moustaches – a professional soldier out of Sandhurst; then a quiet, dour Scotch farmer, built short and square as if of Aberdeen granite, but with mild soft brown eyes and a reserved but very warm smile; there was a round, polished fair man called George Wilkins, like a stockbroker, or what Alan believed stockbrokers to be like, his head as if moulded in a bowler hat, but in fact also a professional Sandhurst soldier. There was Holl, and there was another subaltern well senior to Alan, rather soft and fair, with a rich red mouth that was a little too wet. Alan was not unhappy; they had all been agreeable and friendly in their various ways; only Holl remained somewhat intimidating. He had to report to Holl for horse riding at 5.30 a.m. next morning, and to the adjutant, later in the morning, for elementary initiation into the organisation of the battalion. He was tired now, a little dazed, and he still had to unpack and somehow convert his little wooden room, that smelled of insecticide and old luggage, into a habitable cell before he slept. He had strong nesting habits.
The light was on in his room. His mosquito net was down, and tucked in. Sundar Singh stood by it, looking uncertainly at little piles of clothing, books, equipment and shoes that he had taken out of the still half-full tin trunk, and put on the table.
‘You again,’ said Alan jovially.
The boy stiffened to attention.
‘Better get all this shipshape,’ said Alan. ‘Shipshape.’ The Urdu for shipshape escaped him. He began to laugh.
‘Sahib.’ His orderly looked at him, suspicious and wounded.
Alan stopped laughing and demonstrated where he wanted his clothes put. They did it together, with some merriment that at last began to infect the orderly.
‘O.K.,’ said Alan, at length. ‘Run along now.’ He added in Urdu: ‘Thank you.’
Then, as the orderly was going, he realised that he would need calling – at 5a.m. at the latest. (God! 5a.m.)
‘Sepoy!’ he said briskly. He was surprised and rather shocked to hear the word. Vividly he remembered the first time an officer had annihilated him into anonymity with the word: Soldier! do this, do that.
The boy was back.
‘Sundar,’ said Alan. He explained that his chota hazri, tea and biscuit, should be delivered at quarter of five. From where? he wondered. Where did the boy go to now, to sleep, to burrow, out in the labyrinthine Indian night.
‘Ram ram,’ he said, and put his hands together in the Hindu greeting, as his munshi had taught him.
The boy was surprised and flustered; then his face melted into rolls of fat smile, his eyes beamed and his teeth shone; he joined his hands too, and inclined gravely over them.
‘Ram ram, sahib,’ and he was gone.
Alan started undressing. He stopped. Someone was undressing alongside him. He discovered that a large looking-glass had been imported into his room since he had first arrived. Standing in his pants, he looked at himself, thin as twigs, Holl had said, stooping a little at the shoulders. This was all right for a scholar, wrong for a soldier; he straightened them. He had a long, dark, narrow head, with dark eyes looking melancholy under thick dark eyebrows that were scrupulously tidy. It was very silent. He intensified the melancholy, and ran a hand over the blue stubble on his chin. He was just twenty-one, and very old.
A large bug flew blind and loud as a bomber through the window and crashed on the light bulb, falling with a thud to the floor.
‘God,’ thought Alan. ‘I shouldn’t call that boy by his Christian name. If it was his Christian name. Hindu name. Whatever. Not done.’
He raised a foot to crush the bug that lay on its back, waving feeble legs in the air. Then he did not put his foot on it, but, with infinite distaste and the aid of a sheet of paper, threw it out of the door.
He returned to his face in the glass; it was at any rate still there when he sought it.
‘You bloody hypocrite,’ he said to the long melancholy face, which thereupon looked smug. He erased the smugness. ‘Mon lecteur. Mon frère. You officer, you. You bloody murderer.’
He climbed in through the mosquito net into bed. He lay on his back, stretched stiffly out. In the dim haze of the net it was like a shrine; the sheet settled on him as a shroud. He began to think of Lettice; here was the night and here was he and here she was not. He thought of her belting down King’s Parade on a bicycle, her skirts floating, her fair hair in a flood, a predatory look in her blue eyes. Were her eyes blue? He thought about her eyes with some anguish. Maybe they were grey, but grey like an English summer morning sky unveiling to the sun. But he couldn’t remember really; his stomach began to hollow with loss, and love to mourn in him like a dog that has seen its master die. Agitated, he shifted, and cracked his fingers, and began to count them. They were all there.
‘For five and five make ten, you see, so I’m alive, and I am me,’ he muttered, but not with great conviction.
‘You clamber on,’ said Holl. ‘Once on, ensure that you’re facing to the front, that is, with a clear view between the horse’s ears, not over its arse; grasp the reins firmly but lightly with the hands, grip equally firmly with the knees, and bash the bastard with your heels. The animal will then proceed.’
Alan objected that he had always understood that horses wore saddles.
‘The trouble with the public schules,’ said Holl primly, ‘is that they don’t teach men the facts of life.’ With marvellous swiftness he blew into a red rage, and roared: ‘Get up and bash!’
With the help of a smirking sais, Alan got up. The horse’s back was unfriendly, and too wide. He seized the reins.
‘For God’s sake!’ said Holl, demonstrating. ‘You’re not reefing a windjammer! Now. Bash with your heels.’
Cautiously, Alan bashed.
The horse turned its head, and looked at him.
Holl roared, and simultaneously flicked the horse smartly with his stick. In a matter of seconds the horse had passed through all intermediary stages into full gallop, and then was airborne over a small dry gully, where Alan left it.
He lay in a windless void darkness constricted by fire. Presently a harsh braying took on red-rimmed substance, and became Holl, who stood over him, at least ten feet high, pulsating with laughter. Then Holl stooped, and helped him up with a surprisingly gentle dexterity.
‘That was really funny. I appreciated that,’ said Holl, as the sais trotted up with the recaptured horse. ‘Now. Up you get. And grip! And don’t go so fast. Trot, to start with.’
It struck Alan that Holl was mad: a dangerous lunatic. He turned and started to limp in the direction of the camp. A sibilant ejaculation of invective stopped him as if with a leash.
Rather hesitantly, he started to answer back in kind.
‘Uh’ve to remind you,’ said Holl in a sad, heavy voice, ‘that I’m your superior officer. Climb on that horse and let’s have no more argument, there’s a good gutless boy. And bash it!’
Alan stared at him. Holl’s eye leant sternly back on him, considerately but mercilessly stern as Abraham’s loving eye on Isaac before sacrifice. Then one pale blue winked like a hen’s.
Alan all but hit him. Then he swallowed, turned, and got back on the horse again. Holl nodded gravely, and mounted his own animal. Alan was still wondering sickly what it was in that eye that had compelled him to remount, when he fell off again.
‘Come, come,’ said Holl. ‘You’re not trying.’
Clumsily, Alan climbed back again. Holl looked at him.
‘Straighten your back,’ he said. Then he sniffed, and sucked, still staring. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘Oh. I thought maybe you were about eighteen.’
‘My mother always says I look younger than I really am,’ said Alan.
Holl whistled. Then he looked sharply and suspiciously at him.
They moved off.
Four more times that morning Alan fell, while the Indian sun rose higher and hotter over the brown plain, and exhaustion gradually numbed his apprehension of the high horse. All the while Holl pranced and caprioled about him, as though his horse were but a perfectly attuned extension of his own powerful thighs; when he decided at last that it was time for breakfast, he was in high spirits. He beat Alan on the back, exclaiming that there was a vague possibility they’d make a soldier out of him yet. ‘I can tell you, when you arrived yesterday, Christ, I thought, they’ve wished another wet on to us, like Johnson before you. Still drunk with his mother’s milk he was; we flogged him to Intelligence inside three weeks.’
Outside the Mess he paused, and bent that kindly considerate eye on Alan again. ‘You wouldn’t by any chance be a pansy?’
Alan gaped at him. ‘No.’
‘Well, that’s all right then. No offence.’ But Holl did not at once go on into the Mess. ‘That bit about your mother. You were pulling my leg, weren’t you?’
‘No.’
Alan went on into the Mess, leaving Holl staring after him. As he washed his hands, and splashed cool water on to his face, his mind cleared a little. Sorely, he thought that perhaps he had scored a point, even if only a very small one. But when he went into breakfast, he found Holl in the middle of a vivid description, with picturesque analogies to sexual attitudes, of Alan’s falls from the horse. As Alan ate his eggs, he conducted a searching scrutiny in his memory for anyone more repulsive than Holl; he found no one. Suddenly he realised that he was being addressed.
‘Call me Sam,’ said Holl. ‘We’ll be all right. We’ll win this war.’
Later that morning, the adjutant told Alan that Scrapings had thought that Alan would be Signals officer. Scrapings was the name by which the C.O., whom Alan had still to meet, was invariably known. Very likely, the adjutant said, that was how it would be, but tomorrow was Monday, and on Mondays Scrapings was temperamental and had a way of reversing any previous week’s decisions that were reversible.
‘On Mondays, life is tricky, because Scrapings blows up punctually somewhere between eleven and twelve hundred hours. Then I scrape him off the ceiling, dust him down, and we’re all set till next Monday. Hence “Scrapings.” He knocks hell out of his liver every Sunday with too much curry. But you needn’t worry. The havildar who’s looking after the Signals platoon is the best we’ve got, and anyway you’ll be attached mainly to Sam for the first week or two. Must be able to take over a fighting company, you see.’
The adjutant walked Alan round the lines, through bleak long wooden huts and past rows of wooden bed frames, freshly scrubbed and airing in the sun; past rows and groups of Indian soldiers in various degrees of Sunday undress but stiffening to attention on their long, thin, dark legs as the officers passed. He introduced Alan to the Viceroy Commissioned Officers, the platoon commanders, sturdy men with easy smiles, and years of soldiering also easy and confident in their bearing. They abashed Alan as no British N.C.O. had ever done.
‘It’s all right,’ said the adjutant. ‘They’ll be very kind to you. Once the Hindu V.C.O.s have drunk you under the table on tumblers of desi whisky and you’ve overeaten of goat curry with the Moslem ones, they’ll love you like a son. They’ll be very kind.’
‘Why?’
‘What?’
‘They bloody well oughtn’t to be,’ Alan almost said but instead he said, he meant: good. It was a relief when they returned to the squarish hut that served as the Officers’ Mess; the Indian lines affected him almost like claustrophobia.
The battalion paraded daily for work, as Alan found with a shock, at 5a.m., or soon after, and the officers worked pretty solidly through the day until about 7p.m. He had more breaks than his colleagues, at least until a certain amount of miscellaneous office work began to be unloaded on to him, but even so was too tired to do anything at the end of the day except go to bed. Mostly he watched, which is tiring. He watched Sam Holl supervising the training of the new drafts, and was astonished and touched by the urgent, almost tender, anxiety with which Holl, and all the other officers, brooded over the training of their troops. His relations with his own Signal platoon were distant and ambivalent; in theory he was in command, in practice he was not to take over until his return from the Signals Course at Poona, which he was to attend as soon as a vacancy showed for him.
Meanwhile he agreed with what he hoped was a judicious air of wisdom to the programmes drawn up by the Signals havildar, and watched the signallers buzzing Morse nimbly to and fro, not understanding a dot of it. Sometimes he would attend the C.O., a thin man of a remarkably elderly forty-five with aggressive iron-grey moustaches and a wild, rather romantic, expression, as he walked about the battalion’s business. He watched the brown faces of the troops, puzzled like children when they did not understand, splitting open with mirth when they were amused, or greyed over with dust, bumping along like flotsam on the slow current of a route march, vacant and alien. He saw them stand high and meagre as storks, anchored on the ground by the sledge-hammer boots on their too thin legs; he saw them squat with their hands trailing in the dust over their knees in front, their khaki shirts out over their shorts behind. He heard their guttural talk, heard their hawk and saw them spit betel red; he smelled them, rancid seeming as the ghi in which they cooked. He tried to talk to them and they answered ‘Yes, sahib,’ or ‘No, sahib,’ in the gaps of his stumbling Urdu. They seemed unknowable; they seemed to wish to know, at least to understand what he wished, as much as he did; there were warm foggy smiles, gestures left incomplete in the air, but there was no contact. He got to feel very little more at home with them yet; he certainly did not feel for one moment in command of them.
The whole battalion was out, straggling across the dusty plain. There was to be an exercise involving aircraft. Alan marched with Holl, who seemed very cross. Upon Alan commenting on this, Holl said that Alan ought to be cross too when he saw what happened.
Presently there was noise like a small distant motor-bicycle. Then Alan saw a tiny two-seater Moth aeroplane cavorting along from the west as if on a rather bumpy road; it passed overhead, looking as though it must fall down at any moment. Two leather-helmeted heads were clearly visible in the cockpits.
On the ground, orders were shouted and arms made wide imperious gestures. After some confusion, during which many soldiers stood stock still, staring up, and some actually waved, brown hands friendlily fluttering, teeth shining, the battalion dispersed and went half-heartedly to ground. The Moth bumbled back, and the man in the rear cockpit began to drop white objects, one by one, over the side, leaning out carefully.
‘What on earth?’ said Alan.
‘Paper bags filled with flour,’ said Holl, snarling. He swore fiercely at two sepoys who were kneeling up to see the aeroplane properly. The plane worked its way to and fro several times until presumably it had no bags left.
Alan had started to laugh, helplessly; all the officers seemed so cross, but fifty yards away, one of the sepoys had sustained a near miss, and was showing off his whitened shirt, proudly smiling like a woman in an advertisement for washing powder.
Alan was interrupted by Holl, who tolled like bells: ‘What d’you think these poor oafs are going to do in the desert when the tanks of which they’ve never seen one – when the planes of which most of ’em have just seen their first – come at them? Christ, it makes me weep!’
Alan thought Holl was being pompous; he asked if there weren’t any other planes, more modern, in India.
Still in the same tolling voice, Holl said: ‘There is rumoured to be one. In a museum, near Karachi.’
Above them, the machine made a final run, so low that they seemed almost to be able to touch it from the ground. The man in the rear cockpit was grinning white under his goggles, and waving gaily. Holl heaved up from his prostrate position, and was crouching as if for the start of a spring. Then he slowly straightened, and his right arm came up and over, heavy as a windmill sail, in the order for his company to advance.
The next day would be Sunday again. At dinner, the adjutant announced that, not having been to bed before two all week, he personally was going to have a nice lie-in. Alan said that would suit him too.
‘Second-Lieutenant Mart,’ said Holl, ‘will report to me for horse exercise at six hundred hours sharp.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Alan said. ‘This isn’t a cavalry regiment.’
‘You heard,’ said Holl. Alan thought he said it with malice.
Later that evening, emboldened by whisky, he sought out Holl alone.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘why pick on me? I don’t like horses.’
‘I know, chum. That’s why. But you will like ’em, by the time I’ve done with you.’
Alan looked at him, bristling.
‘Trouble with you,’ said Holl, ‘you’re wet. Soft. Scared.’ He was lying back in a long wicker chair on the veranda of the Mess; he raised a smugly pacifying hand in the darkness, and Alan saw his teeth glint. ‘That’s all right. That’s all right. Eighty per cent of the battalion are the same. It’s the natural civilised condition. Or at any rate it’s what we’ve all been educated into, and very dainty too, in peacetime. All I’m going to do is to de-educate you.’
‘Therefore teach the whole army to ride gee-gees. You’re exactly like the old gentleman who interviewed me when I applied for a commission in the tanks in 1939; history had stopped at 1914, let alone 1919.’
Holl was interested. ‘What did they say?’
‘They said, very first question: Do you hunt? When I said, No, they said: Lack of opportunity or lack of inclination? That was the one vital qualification for tank officers in World War II.’
‘A bit old-fashioned,’ said Holl. ‘But the principle was sound. And they turned you down, of course?’
‘Yes.’
‘Quite right too. Only then they had to shove you in the infantry as though it were the dustbin.’ A low seething crackle came from the wicker chair, as though Holl were in conflict with it. ‘But would you imagine the bastards had the nerve to turn me down too? Even though I hunted regularly two days a week, and often more. But my father was a small-town baker, and I was expelled from school; so they turned me down. That’s what comes of giving your children airs. My poor Dad was very set on us having the advantages, as he called them, that had been denied him, so he half-ruined himself sending us to a public school. Only as he couldn’t afford a good public school he sent us to a bad one…’
Holl’s voice was getting flatter and flatter. ‘Bloody boring it was; right tedious. So I seduced the housemaster’s daughter, and they sacked me.’
‘My, my. And you eloped to Gretna Green and lived happily ever after.’
‘That’s enough of that,’ said Holl. ‘It wasn’t so funny. Though I don’t know, bits of it were, I suppose, looking back. Flipping little stuck-up snob she was, though tasty. She was crazy about horses like schoolgirls are, and she found out, I mean I told her, that I hunted with one of the snobbiest hunts in England; she wasn’t to know I did it, see, by helping in the kennels for nothing and by teaching in a riding school to get my horses free. So I led her up the garden path with tales of the aristocracy and our place in the country, and she followed all the way into the bedroom or rather the hayloft. But when they found out, and I wanted her to go off with me, by then she’d found out my father was a baker. So she threw me out, and the school threw me out, and my Dad threw me out. I worked in a garage for a bit, and then I won some fights and got a job as boxing instructor in an athletics training college…’
His voice seemed set to meander on through his whole life story. Impatiently Alan interrupted to say that that was all very well, but no reason why Holl should take it out on him.
‘That was when I took to drink,’ said Holl, unheeding. ‘Been on it ever since, on and off, since I was seventeen. Seventeen’s too young to start, really; ruins a man’s wind. Slut,’ he added, and was silent for a moment.
Then he said: ‘I’ve never forgiven that bitch. I was in love with her.’ A flat and final sadness in this statement, like stones falling into wet mud, suddenly convinced Alan that Holl was near the truth, but even more that he was drunk. He rose to go.
A large hand reached out with remarkable swiftness to restrain him.
‘I hadn’t finished,’ said Holl.
He breathed heavily in the dark for some time, his hand still resting round Alan’s like a fetter. Then: ‘Bloody snobs!’ he whispered.
‘You want to keep off the booze,’ said Holl. ‘A youngster like you. Look at me. I’d have my own battalion by now if it wasn’t for the Demon. Simply because, mark you, I happen to be a good soldier, that’s why I’d have a command. I’ve been winning this war since autumn, 1938; just me and old Churchill in there together winning this war. No one else even knew about it. But I saw ’em. That time I was over in Frankfurt-on-Main bashing the guts out of those German cruiser-weights who thought they could fight, I saw ’em: regiments, divisions, whole damn’ armies of ’em rolling along the autobahns in autumn, ‘38, and those tanks weren’t cardboard either…
‘Mark you,’ said Holl, and a forefinger prodded the dark, ‘I’m not moaning about our fellow-officers, our esteemed colleagues. They’re a good lot, as good as you’ll find. They mind. It’s just they don’t know about there being a war on; none of ’em seen the Jerry bombers come drooling in at dusk over Kent, like you and me have. And they don’t know about winning. And I can tell you Jimmie boy…’
Alan said his name wasn’t Jimmie.
‘Heh?’ said Holl. He thought a bit. ‘Nor it is. I thought for the moment you were my baby brother.’ His baffled thought was almost as palpable in the dark as a trapped bat. ‘But you’re not,’ he said at last, apparently relieved. ‘But I was saying about this winning. I can tell you, Mart, it’s not just yourself you got to persuade is winning; you’ve got to make eight hundred cross-eyed yokels, the whole damn’ battalion, know they’re winning. That’s what we’ve got to do; strip the village fat and cow dung of centuries off these brown boys, till they remember the war and the fighting inside of them, and remember that they’re the men who went through the whole of India like a dose of salts whenever it was. If they’ll give us another four or five months here and a couple more in the desert to limber up, as, mark you, they promise…’ He laughed like a supercharged Bentley starting up. ‘They promise. But maybe if we have time, if they’ll lay off puking paper bags of flour over us from flying banana boxes, and give us some tommy guns, and carriers, and artillery, and antitank stuff, and wireless, then maybe we will have time. But it’s going to be close.
‘The weeping grief of it is,’ said Holl, ‘given only time, I could make this unit of poxy sweepers into a masterpiece. And the weeping grief of it is, if they don’t give us time, you and me are going to personally conduct a battalion of innocent brown souls into massacre. And that’s a sin I’m not prepared to die with, not on my lily-white soul.’
‘You’re tight,’ Alan said, trying to disengage the clutch on his wrist.
‘Maybe,’ said Holl, with some pompousness. ‘Or maybe not. But the fact remains even if sheathed in the lily-white fat of your own soul. You’re in this too, officer. You and me, we lead these men in battle. In sim’lar circ’mst’nces it is obligatory to know whether you’re coming or going. I suggest that you have no idea whether you’re coming or going. Now, that’s not right, is it, Mart? Christ, boy, you move like a glutted cow when her bags are full to bursting and the milkmaid’s busy with a lover. You moon, boy, like a sex-starved calf. I can’t think why I waste time with you; but by God, by the time I’ve finished with you you’ll know yourself so well you’ll have to murder the whole world in case they find out too. Which is the object of the exercise. See?’
His grip relaxed on Alan’s wrist, and nimbly Alan dodged sideways out of his chair before it could trap him again.
‘Good night,’ he said, with some hauteur.
Holl did not answer; he had slumped, vastly derelict, in the long wicker chair.
Alan walked back to his room, a little dizzy. Never had he been hit so hard and so often by so many platitudes. He thought that Holl, even if drunk, must be going mad. And where had he got the liquor from?
He saw that the light was on in his room. He stopped, looking in through the window. Sundar Singh was tucking his mosquito net in round his bed; the long strand of hair on his shaven head flipped to and fro as he moved. Alan had by now found out at least one account of the purpose of this strand of hair; it served as a handle, according to tradition, by which God lifted one to Heaven when one died. If so, Alan thought, the boy should either grow the strand thicker, or go slimming, for if lifted by it in his present stoutness, he would certainly break it with his weight. He was moving about the room now, gently, softly, and somehow blindly like a moth, bumping in a cushioned way. He was not doing anything, just touching. His fingers caressed Alan’s books, and traced the outline of an ashtray; then one finger rested tentatively on a key of the open portable typewriter. The type arm stood up, jerkily. Gently, Sundar moved it up and down, his head on one side; then, as he took his finger off, the arm fell back with a sharp click, and the boy jumped back guiltily from the table. He stood quite still for a moment, apparently listening, until delicately he approached the table again, and, after a couple of feints, picked up Alan’s travelling clock in both hands. He peered at it very closely, and then put it to his ear. Rapt, he stayed, with the clock to his ear, and an infinitely foolish, drugged smile slowly swamped his face; his brown eyes almost vanished up under their lids, and the whites gleamed.
Alan’s stomach contracted, and he swallowed sickly; there followed a vertigo, depth opening upon depth, of the worst loneliness that he had ever experienced. He went quickly and fiercely into his room. Pigeon-toed, Sundar Singh stood furtively in front of the table, his hands behind his back.
Alan exploded. ‘Get out! Jao!’
The boy cowered, his lips trembling. ‘Sahib?’
Alan controlled himself. ‘Go,’ he said, with a gesture almost pleading. He forced himself to smile. ‘Ram ram,’ he said.
When the boy had gone, Alan hurried towards the bed, but was trapped in the long looking-glass. He stared at himself, unwillingly.
‘Peace be with you,’ he said, aloud. His image mouthed back.
He turned out the light, and undressed in the dark. In the shrine of the white netting, his fingers moved, but confusedly; he seemed to own eleven of them. He placed his hands together, palm to palm, the fingers straight and still.
‘Christ, let me out of this,’ he said.
In the east, the dawn was green and tender, and the plain flowed towards it from their feet. Above them the stars, weakened and shrunken, hung more recognisably than usual in the great dome of the Indian sky.
‘Holl,’ said Alan, ‘you’re weakening. You’re getting soft.’ The horse that confronted him had a saddle on it.
Holl grinned raggedly, and, almost abashed, ran his hand through his downy hair. ‘Giddy-up,’ he said. ‘We’re going to bash the guts out of these poor old mokes.’
They moved off sedately, at a walk, side by side.
Holl coughed. ‘Did I talk a lot of crap last night?’
Alan was wondering when he was going to fall off, but the stirrups were a comfort. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘What about?’
‘You,’ said Alan, more cheerfully; his horse seemed almost malleable. ‘You, and victor-ee. It seems you are going to win the war. You personally.’
Holl groaned. ‘It was that sodding barman. He let me have half a bottle of whisky, for cash. I’ll have to see that the Mess President sacks him. God, I might have done anything. Anything!’
‘You also ran through the seduction of the housemaster’s daughter, your career in the garage and in the ring.’
Holl was making nervous flapping gestures with his free hand, and swearing under his breath. He reined in his horse. ‘Alan!’ he said.
Enchanted, Alan found that his own horse too could be stopped. ‘Yes?’
Holl swallowed, and said with reluctance: ‘Actually, it wasn’t the housemaster’s daughter.’
‘Oh?’
‘Her father ran the local sweet-and-tobacco shop.’ Holl looked miserable. ‘I’m sorry.’
He looked anxiously at Alan, and then saw that he was laughing. His face cleared, and suddenly he began to laugh too, boisterous and forgiven. He kicked his horse into a trot and Alan’s followed.
‘Sit forward!’ shouted Holl.
Alan’s horse was throwing him around in the saddle.
‘Rise! rise in your saddle, lump!’ cried Holl. ‘All right, canter, then.’
The tumult yielded to a smooth, immensely powerful rocking motion. Alan got his balance, and began to enjoy himself.
‘O.K.,’ shouted Holl. ‘Let ’em rip!’
The tempo changed again, and the horse was going much faster than Alan felt to be safe.
‘Go with her! Just go!’ cried Holl over his shoulder, already yards in front.
Alan shut his eyes, and went with her. Presently, finding himself still horse-borne, he opened his eyes. He found himself devouring distance as though he starved for it. The air rushed smooth and cool in his temples; the thunder of his progress was triumphal and the brown earth shuddered at his passing. He opened his mouth and shouted, and felt the sound snatched from his mouth by the speed. Confusedly, he wondered why he had been missing this all these years, and then thought that now he had found it, it could well go on forever.
In fact it stopped rather abruptly at the edge of a small mud village. Alan found himself clutching his horse round its neck. When he had righted himself, he turned, sweating and shining, to Holl. He spoke with solemnity. ‘That’s the most wonderful sensation I’ve ever had. Let’s do it some more.’
But Holl was thirsty. They dismounted by the village shop, a hovel with brilliantly coloured bottles stacked outside on wooden crates, and an array of sweets and cakes covered with flies. They drank saccharine-sweet fizzy lemonade, sitting under a starveling tree and looking at the village, while a small crowd of naked potbellied children looked at them.
‘You’ve good hands,’ Holl said, appraising. He looked at Alan and grinned, warm and open.
‘Lord!’ said Alan. ‘It’s bloody marvellous.’ He smiled back at Holl, and stretched luxuriously. Relaxed, he seemed to float.
‘Only one better feeling in the world,’ Holl said, sucking. ‘And that’s a woman. Why, I remember at college – I used to play rugger for the town – Saturdays, you know, a good game, and then a soak in a piping hot bath, and out to the pub. That’s when a man’s really relaxed, and after a couple of beers it just comes bubbling up. There’s no holding it.’ He shook his bottle meditatively, and the bright yellow liquid fizzed. ‘Women,’ he said, with regret, and drank to them. ‘That’s life. That’s living.’ He belched. ‘That’s bloody poetry.’
‘Maybe I don’t play enough rugger.’ Alan was prepared to concede a point. He hadn’t thought about Lettice in quite those terms. He tried to remember her as she stood in the firelight, wearing only her hair and a soft bloom like that of a ripe peach on the stem, but his eye was caught by a flowering of rich purple and orange at the entrance of a hut twenty-five yards away. The vivid colour swirled, and, rising, settled slender and flowing about the upright figure of a woman. She moved towards them, floating in the sun beneath the earthen pot she carried on her head, and the subtle, consummately poised balance of her movement bewitched him with the flattery of music in the veins, so that for a second his breath caught in his throat.
With unwary joy, he exclaimed to Holl, that that was why he had volunteered for service in India.
Uncomprehending, Holl looked at the woman. She passed them indifferently, without a glance. Holl said it was shocking the way Indians treated their women.
Alan thought of trying to explain. His father was a Civil Servant, who served state and family with equal selfless devotion; only recently had Alan decided that this devotion, while admirable, was grey, and that his father was a victim. When, enhanced by scholarships, yet still costing his father far more than could decently be afforded, he had gone up to Cambridge, his father had said, liberally, that the great thing at the university was to meet people and talk to them; but he added, as rider, that it was also a good thing to get a first, for then, armoured, one could make one’s choice. ‘Because,’ said his father, ‘if you then pass high enough into the Civil Service, you can choose; everything is open to you: Treasury, Education, what you like, even Foreign Service can be managed nowadays without a private income – anything…’ At the time this seemed reasonable enough, but already, by the end of his first term, it had become clear to Alan that ‘anything’ could not be confined within the opportunities offered by the Civil Service; there were other ways of life.
By the end of his first year, he had plumped for professional scholarship; he would be a don. Dons seemed civilised, to own an extraordinary freedom, and to have enough money to get by quite handsomely; scholarship offered endless vistas, exciting yet agreeably secure, to curiosity, and as he was reading languages, travel would be a necessity though all the time he would have a sound home base to work from. But when, at the beginning of his third year, war broke, it was as if he saw Cambridge from a bomber; like a suddenly exposed ants’ nest it lay open to hostile skies, scurrying with minute and flustered academics, impotent and almost frivolous in their irrelevance. He had no choice now; he must be a soldier, but he would not go back to Cambridge when it was all over. He knew, he thought, about war; it was a job to be done. His father had done it before him, but his father had started with illusions and had in consequence to become disillusioned; Alan’s advantage, it seemed to him, was that he started with no illusions and therefore could not be disillusioned. Determined to believe nothing that anyone might say, to commit his soul to no cause, and (intellectually, at least) resigned to death if he should prove unlucky, he set about war; he would be as efficient a soldier as it lay in his power to be, because that was the job in hand, but also he would get anything out of war that war might, in its large way, turn up in his path. A free trip to India, when offered, suited him perfectly, and though he had not expected moments of enlightenment to kindle from, for example, a ride on a horse and a woman in a purple sari, he was open to accepting these moments wherever they might spring from.
But what Alan actually said to Holl was: ‘It’s a very exciting country, if you’ve never been outside Europe before. It’s a very beautiful country, and I might never get another chance to see it if I go back to Cambridge after the war and teach the boys and girls French and German.’
Holl sucked, and said: ‘That woman obviously had trachoma.’ Then with some warmth, he added: ‘Can’t see what you see in it. Nasty dirty unhygienic superstitious lying bribing bunch of bastards.’
Alan asked why, in that case, Holl had come to India.
‘You may well ask. Except that I’d blotted my copybook at home, and it seemed a good idea to try somewhere else when the Army offered it free. In fact, there are two advantages in this benighted country: I might stick on here when it’s all over and wangle into the police or something like that. You get responsibility out here much earlier; I mean there are men of my age, twenty-eight or so, who have hundreds of men under their command and hundreds, thousands of square miles of which they’re little kings. I don’t say I’d mind that. And then you can live like a gentleman – you have to live like a gentleman, what with sweepers and cooks and bearers; no domestic problem. And then horses are cheap or even free if you’re near a Remount place like we are. Only drawback’s the climate and the inhabitants.’ He rose, swatting viciously at flies, and remounted his horse.
They rode back the way they had come, the sun now warm on their backs, and the wind of their speed astringent on their faces. Alan rode in a thoughtless serenity, that was not seriously disturbed when he fell off once, and then again.
They turned in at the gates of the camp, and Holl wove his horse between the dose-planted saplings along the camp road, in and out. He stopped in a little crowd of grinning troops, and dismounted amongst them, swearing gaily at them until their teeth threatened to fly out in the ecstasy of their mirth. Following sedately behind at a walk, Alan recognised the warm feeling in him as happiness; he surveyed the camp with affection and surprise; he felt at ease.
A hand caught at his stirrup. It was Sundar Singh. Alan understood that the adjutant wanted him, urgently. ‘Jilo, sahib,’ said Sundar Singh, making flapping, chicken-like darts in the direction of the adjutant’s office. ‘There is a telegram. Priori-tee.’
Alan dismounted, and found his knees wobbling under him. He had to stand still for a moment before he could walk. That would of course be due to the strain on muscles unaccustomed to riding; but as he went across to the office he was preparing nervously for the announcement of disaster. A bomb on Lettice? On his parents?
The adjutant was out of temper; he had been aroused from his lie-in. ‘Where the bloody hell have you been? I sent for you half an hour ago. There’s a high-powered cable about you here from General Staff, Simla. They want to know: are you capable of instructing certain officers and N.C.O.s in German?’
‘What?’
‘Whether you are capable of instructing in German. That’ll be for the new highly hush-hush parachute bodies, I take it. I think it’s somewhere near Simla, and very nice too. Cool and sweet; thousands of dispossessed wives thrown in for good measure. I didn’t know you knew German. Do you?’
‘Yes,’ said Alan, somewhat distrait. His imagination had caught. He saw himself, a B.A. gown fluttering black over khaki shorts, instructing on a dais before a submissive audience of strong brave men who watched his chalk respectfully as it wrote on the blackboard: Ich bin ein Freund; bitte konnen-Sie mich ans nachste Power-station dirigieren; Ich muss es sofort aufblasen. When they had learned that, off they would go in aeroplanes, while he started on the next batch. He must look up the German for ‘power station.’
‘Yes, I think I could manage that. I read German at Cambridge, and lived in Heidelberg for nine months.’ He stared unseeing at the adjutant, who was brooding over the telegram and smoothing his moustache.
‘Cushiest assignment I ever heard of,’ said the adjutant. He looked up at Alan almost enviously. ‘I wish I was hot on German. But Scrapings will hit the ceiling pronto when he hears; subalterns come and go here as though it were an R.T.O.’s office. Either they’re N.B.G. and we have to work like hell to wish them on to Brigade or some other safe coop, or else one of these weird mystic bodies stoops from Simla, and just pinches them without as much as a by-your-leave.’ Alan’s mind rolled, luxurious as a water buffalo in mud. He could stop pretending to be an infantry officer; he could relax. In Simla, or wherever it was, there would be people interested in things that interested him; people with whom he could talk on subjects other than military. He would perhaps have time to read, time to explore, time to think. He would be safe, and honourably so.
He stood beside the adjutant, looking out of the window of the hut. The adjutant was talking but Alan did not hear what he said. He felt like singing. Then his eyes focused; he was looking at Holl who was still out there grinning like a tiger in a bunch of sepoys. He saw Holl fling his arms wide in a great, rich, prodigal gesture, his gold tooth sparkling like a shower of sovereigns. He heard distantly a roar resembling whoosh! And saw the sepoys scattering with distinctly informal salutes. Then Holl turned, and came striding towards the office in which they stood.
Alan was surprised to hear himself saying: ‘Better just think it over, I suppose. I mean I don’t have to go, do I? If my German wasn’t good enough?’
The adjutant stared at him. ‘Well. No. It’s entirely your decision. It’s up to you, you’re the only person who knows.’
There was a silence. Alan saw Holl had stopped for a word with the subadar-major.
The adjutant said: ‘Well, think it over. But let me know before tiffin. They’ll be wanting the answer at the other end.’
As Alan went out, he brushed past Holl, and grinned rather feebly in answer to Holl’s grin. He went on towards his room with his head singing in tingling falsetto: Hee-ar my prayer! The good Lord had heard; Alan’s hands joined together as he walked, his fingers counting themselves all present and correct. Yet his body somehow dragged, almost stumbling, under his galloping mind; he tried to urge it on, to skip, to jump, even, but it would not respond, and he arrived at his room in such disorganisation that he tripped over the step and all but fell on to his bed.
He found Sundar Singh standing by him. He was as bashful as a virgin offering herself, simpering, his hands behind his back; then with an awkward flourish, he almost hit Alan in the face with a pair of brown boots, one in each hand. They shone like chestnuts fresh from the shell. Sundar Singh studied Alan’s face anxiously.
‘Thik hai, sahib?’
Alan gathered that his orderly was inquiring not only whether the boots were properly cleaned to his taste, but also whether the outcome of the telegram was satisfactory. He suppressed a groan, and inspected the boots. He said they were splendid; everything was splendid.
The orderly’s face melted with pleasure, and the round body salaamed with happy reverence. He laid the boots like an offering at the foot of the bed, and went out.
‘Now,’ said Alan, aloud, ‘think it over.’ He turned on his back, and looked carefully at the fan revolving above him; it seemed to be having no effect whatever on the thickening heat of the day. Then it seemed as though it were revolving inside his head, in a perfect vacuum there established. There was anyway nothing to think over:
Entschieden ist die scharfe Schlacht,
Der Tag blickt siegend durch die Nacht.
It was decided. He would teach paratroopers or commandos German. Who said that? Schiller? or Goethe? Schiller, he thought.
He found he was wondering if the Mess would be empty. He decided there was a fair chance it would be, and went over, cautiously, unwilling to meet anyone. The dining-room proved in fact to be empty, and with a large relief he sat down and ate a healthy breakfast. Then, equally cautiously, he slipped out, and back to his room. Stretched on his bed once more, he looked at his watch. It was ten-fifteen. At eleven, he would step over to the adjutant and confirm his decision to go. No, he would go at ten-thirty; in a quarter of an hour’s time.
In need of something to press against, he reached for the footboard of his bed, but there wasn’t one. After turning about for some time, he looked at his watch again. It was ten-eighteen. He shook the watch, but it was going all right. A curious immobility invaded his limbs. It was very hot. The room seemed to be shrinking on him; outside all was quiet except for the distant creak of a bullock cart’s wheel. Then someone hawked explosively under his window and spat. He found his shirt was wet through with sweat and realised that the fan had stopped.
‘I must get up,’ he said loudly to himself as if on a desert island, ‘and take this shirt off. And tart up for the adjutant. And get the orderly to go find someone to fix the fan.’
He stayed where he was, stretched rigid as on a rack, the sweat running down into his eyes. He could hear his watch running along by his pillow, and beyond it, the slower pulse of his travelling clock, and beyond that a slow booming thud that was his heart. He wondered why he bothered to keep a watch and a clock going. It occurred to him, appalling, that no one had wound his heart up.
Some time, some ages later, when the door burst open and Holl came stamping in, Alan realised that this was what he had been waiting for.
Holl lumbered round the room, and back again, flicking glances at Alan out of the corners of the pale eyes. Then he sat on the edge of the table. He looked at Alan’s books, and drummed his fingers on the table top. With some deliberation he lit a cigarette, and at last bent the eyes full on Alan. Alan did not know what he was expecting, except that it would be something loud. Still Holl did not speak, but Alan was surprised to feel that the eyes looked more wounded than anything else.
‘So,’ said Holl at last, very mild, ‘you’re to be a schoolmarm in Simla.’
He had changed from the corduroy slacks in which he rode into uniform khaki shirt and shorts. The winding of his ankle-puttees was mathematically correct, and from them his legs went up like trunks.
‘Ah,’ said Alan. His throat seemed dry. He cleared it, and said: ‘I’ll be rather good at it.’
‘And I thought you were a soldier,’ said Holl. His eyes now were puzzled, and his voice frankly grieving.
Alan leant sideways and took a cigarette. He lit a match. ‘I am a devout coward,’ he said, playing for dead-pan bravado. He looked not at Holl but at the match, and indeed the match was shaking in his fingers. Who said that? he thought. Certainly not Schiller. Perhaps Bob Hope. He could feel Holl looking at him, and could feel him standing off from him, bristling like a dog. He realised that his remark, however true, was, in this company, in poor taste; but his throat stuck, and he could think of no way of modifying it.
Holl stood there, bristling, and said nothing.
In desperation, Alan repeated: ‘I’ll be good at it, you see. Be some use.’
Holl made a noise something like a spit; then he rolled his shoulders as if loosening up, and heaved one arm half up in the familiar gesture that he used for getting his troops on the move; then the arm collapsed to his side. ‘I dare say you will,’ he said. ‘I dare say.’ He looked vacantly around; then he poked up at Alan’s fan with his stick. ‘Your fan needs fixing,’ he said. Without looking at Alan again, he left the room.
As the door shut, Alan sat up convulsively, and hurled his cigarette against the wall. Then he had to get up, and stamp on it to put it out. He looked at his watch; it was almost eleven. He took off his shirt, and rubbed down with a towel. He put on a clean shirt, shorts, boots and puttees. He had seven shots at the puttees before they would fall more or less into place, and his temper rose as he fought them. He stood in front of the glass, hitched his shorts straight, and combed his hair; the face looked sweaty but otherwise unravaged – indeed it seemed rather smug. We must have the courage of our cowardice, it said.
‘You boozing, brainless, fornicating, sentimental oaf!’ cried Alan in despair to the absent Holl. Seizing cap and stick, he proceeded at a brisk mechanical march towards the adjutant’s office. That afternoon he would write letters: to Lettice: Darling, I have been chosen out as a schoolmarm… to his parents: You may be relieved to hear that… and so they would, what with one son dead in the Middle East already.
The adjutant was talking to one of the company commanders about latrines. Alan saluted smartly, and waited, his mind as blank as the burning parade ground out on to which he looked.
There was, it seemed, to be an inspection shortly of latrines. ‘For some reason,’ the adjutant was saying, ‘all officers who have served on the Northwest Frontier have got very fly-conscious.’ He raised his eyebrows at Alan, and a brief hiatus in the conversation stood open. The two officers stood with their heads inclined slightly towards Alan, as though half pausing to allow a waiter to put something on a plate in front of them. In the top of Alan’s head, a delicate counterpoised machinery began to work; a key seemed to turn, levers lifted gently, wheels turned over, and tumblers fell into place in a succession of muted, accurate clicks.
Already the adjutant was talking again, about fly-traps, but Alan’s mouth had flown open, and it pronounced loudly but calmly:
‘I have come to the conclusion, sir, that my German really isn’t good enough.’
‘One maggot and all hell’s let loose,’ said the adjutant. ‘What was that, Alan?’
Alan swallowed and repeated his statement.
‘Oh.’ The adjutant scuffled among the papers on his desk, and found the telegram. With pencil poised, he talked some more about latrines to the company commander. Then he broke off in midsentence, looking faintly puzzled.
‘Did you say you did not want to go to Simla?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s what I thought you said.’ He looked at Alan, a question hovering unformulated under his eyebrows. Then, with a large blue pencil, he wrote NO on the telegram. The question faded, and he said, abstractedly: ‘Ah well, it’s your pigeon,’ and went on talking to the company commander. ‘Scrapings is bad enough without all this huroosh when it comes to what he calls the Disposal of Waste Matter, ha ha…’
Alan was walking back across the scorching dust to his room. He was dazed. For some reason, he was for the moment obsessed with a vision of the munshi who had taught him Urdu in the Cadet College and, who, towards the end of Alan’s course, had been sacked after a row with the authorities. He had paid a mourning state visit to Alan to say goodbye; holding his bicycle, he had wept a good deal, maintaining with a genuine if rather watery dignity that there had been a conspiracy against him, because he was known to disbelieve in the efficacy of war, let alone its morality; nevertheless, he had said as he left, snuffling: ‘Right will prevail; God will turn the blind men’s eyes to the truth.’
A raucous shout shattered this vision. ‘Are you deaf?’ the adjutant was bellowing from his doorway. ‘Come back a moment. I almost forgot to tell you. Your place in the Signals Course at Poona has come through; you’ll be taking that up now you’re not going to Simla.’
Alan saluted, and started on his way again. The news was of no significance.
‘For heaven’s sake, stand still for one second! The course starts tomorrow, so you’ll have to get weaving. You can get on a train and clock in at Poona tonight; you take your orderly with you. I’ll get the railway warrants fixed and you pick ’em up at the office this afternoon.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Alan, and started off again.
In his room, he stood. His eyes wavered stupidly over his worldly possessions; he would have to pack them, he would have to resolve the problem of which to take and which to leave. Overcome by the necessity of organisation, he sat down feebly at the table. Beside his portable typewriter stood a dummy Morse buzzer; he began to tap on it.
‘Bz bz,’ he said; and then, faster: ‘Bz bz bz. Berz berz berz. Bz…’
After a little the message became coherent; he was sending out SOS signals. Dropping the key, he rose, and faced his baggage. Presently Sundar Singh appeared; the boy seemed half-appalled and half-overjoyed at the prospect of going to Poona. After they had packed and unpacked and repacked a few times, Alan thought he would not go into the Mess for tiffin. Instead, he sent Sundar Singh down to the lines to fetch him some troops’ curry and chapattis. He ate walking up and down his room, and as he walked it seemed to him that he was beginning to disintegrate like a ship broken down in a heavy sea. It became imperative to drop anchor, or at least to make some pretence at dropping anchor, even if only to trail overboard an empty cable. He sat down, and took pen and ink and paper; to begin with his hand rested impotently on the paper, and when he lifted it, the paper stuck to it and rose with it. He took a fresh piece of paper, focused upon it, and quickly, briefly – indeed, almost tersely – dictated to his hand a proposal of marriage to Lettice. And so having set his course, he took an aspirin, lay down and went to sleep.
At four o’clock Sundar Singh woke him, and they set off in a truck to the station. As they stood waiting for the train to leave, there was some shouting from the entrance to the platform, and a moment later Holl came heaving down towards them.
Holl was radiant, and stertorous. ‘Thought I’d miss you. Only got back to camp twenty minutes ago from town.’ His right arm came up and over. Wincing, Alan took the hearty clap on his shoulders.
‘That’s a boy!’ shouted Holl. ‘Uh knew you didn’t really mean it. You’ll be with us in Ceylon.’
Alan jumped. ‘Ceylon?’
Holl roared. ‘Met old Stuffins from Brigade at the Club. He swears we’re going to Ceylon. Bloody garrison duties for the duration. Mark you, Stuffins is imbecile, but then so is G.H.Q., so what d’you know?’ Alan felt winded, and wished to grapple with this announcement which seemed unworthy, but Holl had already passed to the subject of Poona, where, he said, the girls were good; might get over one Sunday himself. Then he stopped and peered at Alan.
‘You know you shouldn’t –’ he said, and stopped. He looked embarrassed, and his high cheekbones shone in the late sun. In a low voice he started again: ‘That stuff about –’
‘Devout cowardice,’ said Alan.
It was Holl who winced. ‘You don’t want to say things like that,’ he said earnestly and visibly distressed. ‘It gets around. Loose talk, and all that. I mean, it’s not as if you meant it?’ The query hung in the air, and the train’s whistle snatched it up and pierced the sky with it.
Sundar Singh was plucking at Alan; the train was about to leave. Alan climbed up and in, and slammed the door; through the open window he leaned out over Holl. With his mouth open, Holl looked back up at him; foreshortened, his face appeared to register agony.
‘All right,’ said Alan snappishly. ‘No. Of course not. It was just a crack.’ He bared his teeth. ‘Ha ha.’
‘Ha ha!’ echoed Holl enormously. Agony passed over and he became a bumpkin split with laughter.
‘Blast you,’ said Alan.
He stayed looking out of the window as Holl dwindled. Small cinders rushed against the side of his face. The train gathered speed; Holl was small now on the platform, dwindling rapidly, but he seemed to be waving a big khaki handkerchief. Disgusted, Alan withdrew his head and shut the window.