‘You took the summary of communications across to Command Group, didn’t you?’
‘The what, Mr Archer?’
‘That thing I gave you to take over to the major’s Office, you took it, didn’t you?’
‘Oh yes. Captain Cleaver was there and I gave it to him.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Oh absolutely, Mr Archer.’
‘You’d swear to that?’ Archer smiled conspiratorially. ‘They’re trying to make out over there that I never sent it. You’d stand by me if it came to a court-martial, wouldn’t you?’
Hargreaves looked worried. ‘I don’t quite understand, Mr Archer, but if there’s any trouble you can count on me to—’
‘Never mind, Hargreaves, I was only pulling your leg… Good show you put up last night at the parliament, by the way — I was meaning to tell you.’
‘Oh, thank you very much, Mr Archer, how kind of you… You don’t think perhaps it was a bit… extreme? You know, at the end.’
‘Not a bit, you were quite justified. These people need to be talked to straight once in a while. You keep at it. Oh, and I thought that bit about Auden came in very well. I didn’t know you were a fan of his.’
‘I’ve just read a few of his things, sir.’
‘I see.’ Archer became conscious that he had been smiling rather a lot. ‘Right, that’s all, Hargreaves, thank you.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
On Archer’s table lay a letter he had been writing to a friend of his in Oxford, one who, like most of his contemporaries, was medically unfit for military service — a doubly fortunate shortcoming in the present case, for one of this friend’s several neuroses forbade him to be ordered about. The letter was full of undetailed assertions of hatred and misery, unsolicited news about what Archer’s two girl-friends in England had been writing to him, and inquiries about issues of jazz records. He put on top of it the Signalmaster’s Diary — its sole entry for the morning read 0840 On duty F. N. Archer Lt — and told Sergeant Parnell, the superintendent, where he was going. Then he donned his ridiculous khaki beret and left.
Outside, the sunlight was intense. Hargreaves was standing in the shade, leaning against the corner timber of the barn and talking to a switchboard-operator called Hammond, who among other things was Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Home Office. He gave Archer an inquisitive brown-eyed glance.
Archer went down the yard, at one side of which a dispatch-rider was dozing on a heap of straw, and crossed the cobbled street to the school building. He was thinking that the oddest thing about the major, or about himself, was that Raleigh’s behaviour was getting funnier all the time without arousing any laughter in him, Archer. Take Raleigh’s unconcealed delight whenever a new formation moved into the area and thus gave him another place to have a line run to and a telephone installed at, an amenity much resented by its beneficiaries, who would usually have spent most of the war too near a telephone and asked for nothing better than to remain incommunicable. The major had almost got drunk — he never did quite — on the strength of having foisted a special dispatch run and a wireless link upon a Displaced Persons Area Authority on the verge of closure. He seemed very near believing that stuff like this represented a serious and adequate role for a group that had provided half the communications of an Army Corps Group headquarters at war; he no longer excused the farce of having a Signal Office here at all by saying (untruly) that it kept the lads busy.
The same shift of attitude had taken place over his road. This boulevard through the camp area, too short to matter except in terms of the energy its construction absorbed and totally unnecessary anyway because of the dry summer, was about to be extended to other parts of the major’s tribal domain. Archer foresaw himself doing further stints of uninformed supervision, watching the hard-core and rubble go down, scouring the village for more wheelbarrows, driving out to the Engineers detachment to borrow yet more. Hitler had been funny too, but you had had to live in Valparaiso or somewhere to be able to laugh at him with conviction.
A flight of green-painted wooden steps led up the side of the school. Sergeant Doll was sitting on them, evidently improving his tan. With the affability of a pub landlord at the entry of a notable big spender, he called from a distance: ‘Good-morning to you, Mr Archer, and how are you this fine morning, sir?’
‘Oh, fed up,’ Archer said unguardedly.
‘Well, I’m not, sir, I don’t mind telling you.’ Doll made no move to get up and let Archer pass. ‘I’ve got plenty to eat and a decent bed and no work and nothing to spend my pay on and nobody to bother me. I’m winning, sir.’
‘Yes, you are, aren’t you?’ Archer, whose head was on a lower level than Doll’s, noticed that the other seemed to have no hairs whatsoever in his nose. This had the effect of making his moustache appear, if not actually false, at any rate an isolated phenomenon.
‘That was a nice little spot of bother at the old House of Commons last night, sir, wasn’t it? Of course that fellow Hargreaves, he’s unbalanced, isn’t he? A lot of these Reds are, you know. There must be something in that particular philosophy that sort of attracts such people. He must be a perfect little darling to have in the section, Master Hargreaves. I don’t know how you put up with him, sir, honestly I don’t. I’d have got rid of him many moons ago.’
‘Oh, he’s not as bad as all that. He is an educated man, after all.’
‘That makes it twenty times worse, sir, in my view. The corruption of the best is worst, I remember reading that somewhere. You’d be the one who’d know where it comes from, I expect, sir, wouldn’t you?’
Archer looked up sharply, but Doll’s eye was as bland as ever. ‘It’s Latin,’ Archer said. ‘I think.’
‘No doubt, sir. It’s really a pity Hargreaves made an exhibition of himself like that. Damaged his own case, I thought. Don’t you agree, sir?’
There was a pause while Archer recalled what was perhaps his sole intelligently self-interested action since joining the Company: putting a half-bottle of whisky on Doll’s desk last Christmas Eve. Ever since then the major, who tended to make a confidant of Doll, had found that his little surprises for Archer, in the shape of unheralded inspections of the Signal Office and the like, had an odd way of turning out not to be surprises after all. Rather late in the day, Archer was discovering a related principle, that the Army afforded unique scope for vindictiveness and that disagreement on apparently neutral matters often provoked such a reaction. He knew now that the Adjutant of the unit, who had of course gone to Potsdam with the others, had been that sort of person, selecting junior officers for troublesome duties less by caprice than by remembering who had most recently contested his opinion in the Mess, even if the subject had been literature or the weather. Sometimes a tendency to confuse names (surprising in so incessant an advocate of attention to detail) gave his selections an involuntary impartiality. After thinking about it for two years, Archer was nearly sure that a historic mission to collect a new type of line-transmission apparatus, entailing a journey three-quarters of the way across England and back in January and two successive nights in an unheated railway carriage, had fallen to his share because a second-lieutenant called Belcher, whom Archer hoped he did not in the least resemble, had a day or two earlier contradicted the Adjutant about Alice in Wonderland. But as the Adjutant got to know his subalterns better, such miscarriages of injustice had become rarer, not that this change had been to Archer’s advantage.