‘Is that all he does to him? Talk?’
‘I don’t know what you’re driving at, sir.’
‘Oh yes you do, Frank, don’t you try and bullshit me. There’s something pretty unsavoury about that friendship, as you call it, if half I hear is true.’
‘I’ll go and fetch Hargreaves and Hammond now, sir, if you like, and you can fetch whoever’s been telling you this and get him to repeat it in front of them. And me too, of course, as their Section Officer.’
‘There’s no need to take that tone, old boy. I’m simply telling you as a friend to be on your guard. You don’t want a scandal in the section, do you? Hammond’s a good lad and I shouldn’t like him to get into any sort of trouble. If things turn out the way they might I’d consider him favourably for lance-corporal. Well, I suppose you’d better be getting back to the Signal Office. Sorry to have kept you, but this Hargreaves business has been on my mind rather.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Oh, before you go, Frank, any news of Journey’s End?’
‘The librarian chap in Hildesfeld says he’ll do his best, but it’s been out of print for years. The British Drama League in England are on the job now, apparently.’
‘Good. I hope it comes through. It would be fun to have a shot at putting it on. Do you know it at all?’
‘I’m afraid not, sir.’
‘It’s good stuff, you know, Frank. You’d like it. The best thing on the first war by far. Really gets the spirit of the trenches, the feel of what it was like.’
III
Major Raleigh stood on the steps of the farmhouse where the Officers’ Mess was, trying to smell the lilac bushes. He was having a hard time of it. Competing smells included the one from the cookhouse bonfire, a mixture of rum and hot cardboard; the one from the henhouse where the Mess’s looted chickens lived; the one from the piggery; the one from nowhere and everywhere that was apparently endemic to continental farmyards, about midway between that of a brewery and that of burning cheese-rind. As one of his own wireless operators might have tried to tune out interference, the major stooped and laid his soft nose alongside one of the pale clusters. It tickled, but he got something.
The voice of Cleaver spoke behind him. ‘Are you all right, Major?’
‘Of course I’m all right,’ Raleigh said, wheeling round as he came upright.
‘I’m sorry, I thought you were ill.’
‘Well I’m not. Are you ready?’
‘Yes, Major. Nobody else seems to want to come.’
‘Did you ask them?’
‘Yes, Major.’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes, Major.’
‘It’s a pity some of them couldn’t have taken the trouble to come along,’ Raleigh said, voicing a desire for his brother-officers’ company that was to cool sharply within the hour. ‘All right, Wilf, let’s get moving. We’re late already.’
The two got into the major’s car, a saloon with faded checkerboard painting on the radiator and a cracked mica windscreen. Its only superiority over the major’s jeep lay in the latter vehicle’s having reached the stage of needing to carry a can of petrol, a can of oil and a large can of water whenever it went anywhere. And this thing was a piece of loot, too. While he pulled at the starter and the motor lurched over, Raleigh imagined his friends at Potsdam, each in a Mercedes with the back full of cameras, watches, automatic pistols, pairs of binoculars, crates of champagne and vodka and American whiskey, haunches of venison… Girls did not appear on the major’s list; he considered that side of life much overrated. Before the car came shudderingly to life he had time for a surge of feeling, equally compounded of envy and righteous indignation, at the memory of a current rumour about a large RAF Signals unit which, ordered to return to England with all its stores and transport, and thus secure against Customs inspection, had stuffed every cranny with cameras, watches, automatic pistols — perhaps girls.
They moved out of the yard, with a grinding bump when one of the rear mudguards, worse adjusted than its fellow, met the edge of the road surface. The sun was setting over the fields of rye or oats or barley or perhaps just wheat and there was arguably a fair amount of tranquillity and such about, but the major was beyond its reach. As he frequently said, it was people that interested him. The people interesting him at the moment were still the ones he knew at Potsdam. ‘Funny to think of them all up there,’ he said. ‘Bill and the CO and Jack Rowney and Tom Thurston and all that crowd. And Rylands and Ben and Dalessio and Jock Watson. Wonder what they’re all up to. Parties with the Russians and the Yanks and God knows what. All the big brass-hats around. The Jerries too. And…’ — the major tried briefly to visualize what more might be on view there than other soldiers — ‘everything. Of course I realize we couldn’t all have gone, but I do wish—’
‘The CO and the Adjutant tended to pick the crowd who’d been with them at North Midland Command.’
‘Yes, I know they did.’ A military Calvinist who had had demonstrated to him his own non-membership of the elect, Raleigh spoke in a neutral tone. ‘Not altogether, though. They took Dalessio with them.’
‘I wonder why.’
‘Rylands seemed to think Dalessio was indispensable,’ the major said. Then, quite as if he realized that this was not the most tactful thing to say to a man whom all sorts of pressure had failed to get into Dalessio’s job, he added: ‘I wouldn’t go all the way with him there.’
‘I hear Bill and Jack and Tom are all majors now.’
‘Yes. I’m particularly pleased Tom got his crown. He didn’t fit in quite at first, I thought — bit of an awkward cuss. But some time last winter he pulled himself together and started doing a first-class job. Co-operated for all he was worth.’
The car laboured up an incline past the burnt-out wreck of a civilian lorry, relic of the celebrations on VE night. The cuff of a Wehrmacht jacket, charred and faded, hung out of the remains of the cab. Raleigh was about to comment adversely on this memorial of indiscipline, or of high spirits, but changed his mind and said abruptly: ‘I’d give anything to be at Potsdam.’
‘I’d have thought we were better off here, Major, with the Staff off our backs at last after two years.’
‘They’re doing a job there, that’s the difference. I suppose… I suppose I might still get the chance of taking the Company to the Far East. Depends how the war goes, partly.’ The major was thinking as usual in terms of a Headquarters Signals unit, not of a mere company, and of a lieutenant-colonelcy, but he was too shy to tell Cleaver this.
‘I didn’t realize you were as keen on the Army as all that, sir,’ Cleaver said carefully.
‘Well, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these last few weeks, Wilf. Serious thinking. First real chance I’ve had since 1939. I worked it out that I’ve spent half my adult life in the Army. Pretty shaking thought, that. I’ve got used to being in uniform. Hardly remember what it was like in Civvy Street. And from the way things are going it looks as if I might not care for it when I arrive there. If these Socialists get in—’
‘I shouldn’t worry too much, Major. However badly it turns out there’s sure to be scope for, well, initiative and quick thinking and all the rest of it.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
The major parked the car in the Signal Office yard between an iron canister full of broken glass and a disused boiler stuffed with torn sheets. The two officers crossed the road to the school building and entered the hall.
Parliament was in session. As Raleigh led the way to the Visitors’ Gallery, his shoes thudding on the greasy bare boards, an instrument-mechanic on the Government side was saying: ‘We’re going to build a decent Britain. Fair shares for all and free schools and doctoring and hospitals and no class distinction. The old school tie and the old-boy network aren’t going to work any more. To make sure of that we’re going to abolish the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge, or at any rate change them so that anybody who’s got the brains can go to them, and we’re going to either abolish the House of Lords or make it a thing you vote on, just like the House of Commons. It’s undemocratic any other way. Some of us want to abolish the Royal Family for the same reason, but we’re not decided about that. Personally I think that if you scrap titles and the Honours List and all that carry-on, then you can leave the King and Queen to stew in their own juice.’