And Basil, still standing, searched his memory. Mary Nichols? Copenhagen? No, it registered nothing. It was very consoling, he thought, the way in which an act of kindness, in the fullness of time, returns to bless the benefactor. One gives a jolly-up to a girl in a ship. She goes her way, he goes his. He forgets; he has so many benefactions of the kind to his credit. But she remembers and then one day, when it is least expected, Fate drops into his lap the ripe fruit of his reward, this luscious creature waiting for him, all unaware, in the Malt House, Grantley Green.
“Aren’t you going to offer me a drink on the strength of Mary Nichols?”
“I don’t think there’s anything in the house. Bill’s away you see. He’s got some wine downstairs in the cellar, but the door’s locked.”
“I expect we could open it.”
“Oh! I wouldn’t do that. Bill would be furious.”
“Well, I don’t suppose he’ll be best pleased to come home on leave and find the Connolly family hacking up his home. By the way, you haven’t seen them yet; they’re outside in the car; I’ll bring them in.”
“Please don’t!” There was genuine distress and appeal in those blue cow-eyes.
“Well, take a look at them through the window.”
She went and looked. “Good God,” said the girl. “Mrs. Harkness wasn’t far wrong. I thought she was laying it on thick.”
“It cost her thirty pounds to get rid of them.”
“Oh, but I haven’t got anything like that” again the distress and appeal in her wide blue eyes. “Bill makes me an allowance out of his pay. It comes in monthly. It’s practically all I’ve got.”
“I’ll take payment in kind,” said Basil.
“You mean the sherry?”
“I’d like a glass of sherry very much,” said Basil.
When they got to work with the crowbar on the cellar door, it was clear that this high-spirited girl thoroughly enjoyed herself: It was a pathetic little cellar: a poor man’s treasury. Half a dozen bottles of hock, a bin of port, a dozen or two of claret. “Mostly wedding presents,” explained the girl. Basil found some sherry and they took it up to the light.
“I’ve no maid now,” she explained. “A woman comes in once a week.”
They found glasses in the pantry and a corkscrew in the dining-room.
“Is it any good?” she asked anxiously, while Basil tasted the wine.
“Delicious.”
“I’m so glad. Bill knows about wine. I don’t.”
So they began to talk about Bill, who was married in July to this lovely creature, who had a good job in an architect’s office in the near-by town, had settled at Grantley Green in August, and in September had gone to join the yeomanry as a trooper…
Two hours later Basil left the Malt House and returned to his car. It was evidence of the compelling property of love that the Connolly children were still in their seats.
“Gawd, mister, you haven’t half been a time,” said Doris. “We’re fair froze. Do we get out here?”
“No.”
“We aren’t going to muck up this house?”
“No, Doris, not this time. You’re coming back with me.”
Doris sighed blissfully. “I don’t care how froze we are if we can come back with you,” she said.
When they returned to Malfrey, and Barbara once more found the children back in the bachelors’ wing, her face fell. “Oh, Basil,” she said. “You’ve failed me.”
“Well, not exactly. The Prettyman-Partridges are dead.”
“I knew there was something about them. But you’ve been a long time.”
“I met a friend. At least the friend of a friend. A very nice girl. I think you ought to do something about her.”
“What’s her name?”
“D’you know, I never discovered. But her husband’s called Bill. He joined Freddy’s regiment as a trooper.”
“Who’s she a friend of?”
“Mary Nichols.”
“I’ve never heard of her.”
“Old friend of mine. Honestly, Babs, you’ll like this girl.”
“Well, ask her to dinner.” Barbara was not enthusiastic; she had known too many of Basil’s girls.
“I have. The trouble is she hasn’t got a car. D’you mind if I go and fetch her?”
“Darling, we simply haven’t the petrol.”
“We can use the special allowance.”
“Darling, I can’t. This has nothing to do with billeting.”
“Believe it or not Babs, it has.”
The frost broke; the snow melted away; Colony Bog, Bagshot Heath, Chobham Common and all the little polygons of gorse and bush which lay between the high roads of Surrey patches of rank land marked on the signposts W.D., marked on the maps as numbered training areas reappeared from their brief period of comeliness.
“We can get on with the tactical training,” said the C.O.
For three weeks there were platoon schemes and company schemes. Captain Mayfield consumed his leisure devising ways of transforming into battlefields the few acres of close, soggy territory at his disposal. For the troops these schemes only varied according to the distance of the training area from camp, and the distance that had to be traversed before the Cease Fire. Then for three days in succession the C.O. was seen to go out with the Adjutant in the Humber Snipe, each carrying a map case. “We’re putting on a battalion exercise,” said Captain Mayfield. It was all one to his troops. “It’s our first battalion exercise. It’s absolutely essential that every man in the company shall be in the picture all the time.”
Alastair was gradually learning the new languages. There was the simple tongue, the unchanging reiteration of obscenity, spoken by his fellow soldiers. That took little learning. There was also the language spoken by his officers, which from time to time was addressed to him. The first time that Captain Mayfield had asked him, “Are you in the picture, Trumpington?” he supposed him to mean, was he personally conspicuous? He crouched at the time, waterlogged to the knees, in a ditch; he had, at the suggestion of Mr. Smallwood the platoon commander ornamented his steel helmet with bracken. “No, sir,” he had said, stoutly.
Captain Mayfield had seemed rather gratified than not by the confession. “Put these men in the picture, Smallwood,” he said, and there had followed a tedious and barely credible narrative about the unprovoked aggression of Southland against Northland (who was not party to the Geneva gas protocol), about How support batteries, A.F.V.’s and F.D.L.’s.
Alastair learned, too, that all schemes ended in a “shambles,” which did not mean, as he had feared, a slaughter, but a brief restoration of individual freedom of movement, when everyone wandered where he would, while Mr. Smallwood blew his whistle and Captain Mayfield shouted, “Mr. Smallwood, will you kindly get your platoon to hell out of here and fall them in on the road.”
On the day of the battalion scheme they marched out of camp as a battalion. Alastair had been made mortar-man in Mr. Smallwood’s platoon. It was a gamble, the chances of which were hotly debated. At the moment there were no mortars and he was given instead a light and easily manageable counterfeit of wood which was slung on the back of his haversack, relieving him of a rifle. At present it was money for old rope, but a day would come, spoken of as “When we get over 1098”; in that dire event he would be worse off than the riflemen. Two other men in the platoon had rashly put in to be antitank men; contrary to all expectations antitank rifles had suddenly arrived. One of these men had prudently gone sick on the eve of the exercise; the other went sick after it.