"That's good, that's well put. Here, read this. It is a translation I have done from the holy Roman." And he drew the tailed sonnet from his bosom and handed it to Elton. Elton read it with gloom as though it were a move-order back to St Helena.
"Coarse. I know all of these words for the member save that one – dumpendebat. That you made up."
"It's a holy word from a holy hymn."
"Major Kettering with his holy dumpendebat, thrusting it in. There were some of us after supper, pissing in the garden of the mess at Rochester, with the orchestra coming through very clear and the swish of the dancers, for it was our summer ball. Pissing under the stars and on the bole of the great elm that's there. One said, Captain Freebody I believe it was, there's an unholy great red rod you have on you, Harry. And Kettering says: made great with use. It all comes back to me now. God, God, surely that's where they met. And Augusta so demure in her spotted muslin ballgown, and her arms so tender and plump." Elton began to cry.
"Stop that," John said sharply. "We all have cause for it. It's not a man's way."
"Man's way." Elton stiffened. "Damn you, I'm a soldier," he cried, then drank off his wine, shuddered, poured himself all that was left in the fiasco and, before drinking again, called: "Hey grandma, more of this piss." The Romans heard that – thispis – with the respect due to an older and more authoritative tongue than their own, perhaps Greek, and tried it out (dispis) while the old woman, with a gummy garlic cackle, went to refill. "How did you get yours?" Elton asked.
"My what?"
"The thing we both have."
"I was nursing my brother," John said. "Tom. A mere boy. I caught it from him."
"And how did he catch it?"
"I don't know. But it can be a very catching thing, God help us."
"But not everybody catches it. The doctors don't seem to catch it. You know what I was told? I was told that all depends on the state of health of the mind of him who is exposed to it. And that if you are in love – if you are thwarted -"
"Please. Try not to think of it." The wine came. "Grazie."
"I put this as a general proposition, you understand, a general proposition." He took comfort from the words and quaffed like a soldier. "What was I saying then?"
"You were, sir, enunciating a general proposition."
"Good. The thwarting of desire, I said. His desire was thwarted. Yours also. And of course mine." He lowered his forehead almost as far as his wine-gripping hand and growled: "Desire."
"You speak better than you know," John said. "There was a fool, his name was Wells, not that it matters. No, it does. Wells of stupidity, of malice, wells of the rank stinking water of inhumanity. He convinced poor Tom that a foreign lady was madly in love with him. She did not, I may say, exist. But Tom in his fever cried out for her. I should have thrashed Wells before I left England."
"I had a corporal named Wells. He was a corrupt man and a drinker. No, his name was Willis. But it is near enough. I'll thrash this Wells for you when I reach home." Erect again, he nodded at John casually, as though he had offered to deliver a parcel. Then: "I have a confession to make."
"Make no confession to me. There's that chewing nodding priest at Trinity Church we see on the Steps. He hears confessions."
"Now you joke again and laugh at me. No, no, this is a confession that concerns only you. I lied to you, you see. I was never at St Helena. It was my cousin Jenkins that was there."
"You were very convincing."
"A lie, yes. But you lie, do you not? Is it not all lying with you? Is not your poetry a kind of lying?"
"A very Platonic way of looking at it. Fictions, yes, the making up of things, but with no intent to deceive. Coleridge says something about the willing suspension of disbelief. Your lie was charming and harmed no one. It was a kind of poetry. That was good, I thought, old Bony shouting Voltaire at you from his cabbage patch."
"Yes, I thought so too. It could have happened, could it not? I could have been posted to St Helena. In the army you are liable to be posted anywhere."
"Where were you in fact posted? When, according to your fiction, you were posted to St Helena."
"Oh, I was in Chatham. And now, naturally, you are fully within your rights not to believe that either."
"I believe. Credo. I believe any man who tells me he was at Chatham."
"Well, we must drink to it, we must sink a bumper."
"With all my heart."
Elton looked at John with a cunning kind of frowning. "You do not take me in, you know. You pretend things, but you are laughing at me all the while."
"I assure you I am not."
"To what is it that I just now proposed we drink then?"
"To Chatham, to St Helena, to the mendacious arts, to your recovery. We have forgotten your good news. You're no longer a sick man."
"Oh, I am very sick." Elton bitterly bit off the word several times to the interest of the Romans. "Seck," one of them ventured. "Aye, sick," cried Elton. "What do you common labouring louts know of the soul's sickness? I have given her everything and now she raises her petticoat for the pleasure of Major Kettering. He will pleasure her, aye." A gnarled wall-eyed huge-shouldered Roman nodded with Elton, also saying ai. "I will not have your mockery," Elton cried, "I have been mocked enough." He started to rise. John tried to hold him down, saying:
"No, man, sit. This wine is stronger than you think. Do not let the wine talk for you."
"My sword shall talk for me, damn you."
"You're wearing no sword."
"Am I not?" Elton, in surprise that seemed to contain no displeasure, tapped his swordside and looked down on it, then sat. "I must have forgotten to put it on," he said, smiling.
"But you're not in uniform, are you? You are dressed as I am."
"I am better dressed than you are, sir." Elton sped to becoming haughty and truculent drunk.
"You are a gentleman, sir, an officer, sir, and I am but a poor poet, sir."
"And a liar, sir, remember that, sir."
"It is you who are the liar, sir, and on your own admission, sir."
Elton drunk-thundered: "No man calls me a liar, sir." And then he sillily smiled. "Let us have all that again, about foul fustilugs and she is like a cow in the waist and her feet stink and so on." And then, in fine truculence, "It is a foul libel on the sex, sir."
"All of it?"
Elton simpered. "Some of it. What was all that about gubber-somethinged and a sharp fox-nose?"
"I am too weary to do it all again."
"It is true, though," pouted Elton, his eyes stern. "The nose, I mean. I had always wondered what her nose reminded me of, and it was of a fox's. Vixen's, rather. A very small vixen, though, and her nose was always very cold. A sign of health, they say." He felt his own nose. "A sign of good health, so they have always said." He started to laugh. "Blow thy nose in her bosom," he laughed. "The old rogue, whoever he was."