‘Come upstairs and help me with my valise.’
The gruffness of General Asbj0rnsen’s tone was fully justified. I followed him to the disputed room, and was relieved to see the valise on the floor still unpacked. The bathroom door was open. It seemed an apartment designed for the ablutions of a very thin dwarf, one of Mime’s kind. However, spatial content was neither here nor there. The point was, Prasad must have it. I took one end of the valise, Asbj0rnsen the other. Prasad was peeping through the crack of his door. When informed of the way the battle had gone, he came out into the passage. Asbjornsen was not ungracious about his renunciation. Prasad expressed a lot of thanks, but was unaware, I think, that the victory, like Waterloo, had been ‘a damned close run thing’. General Asbjornsen and I carried his valise into Prasad’s former room. I helped Prasad with his valise too, on his taking over of the bathroom. As soon as Prasad and I were out in the passage, General Asbjornsen shut his bedroom door rather loudly. He could not be blamed. My own relations with him, even when we returned to England, never fully recovered from that night. For the rest of the tour I speculated on what arcane rites Prasad conducted in that minute bathroom.
Next morning I rose early to check transport for the day’s journey. The cars were to assemble at the entrance of the Grand Hotel, then pick up baggage of the party at La Petite Auberge on the route out of town. The Grand’s main entrance was on the far side from the sea-front. It faced a fairly large, more or less oval open space, ornamented with plots of grass and flower beds long untended. From here the ground sloped away towards a little redbrick seaside town, flanked by green downs along which villas were spreading. The cars, on parade early, were all ‘correct’. Finn was not due to appear for some minutes. Wondering what the place was like in peacetime at the height of the season, I strolled to the side of the hotel facing the ‘front’. On this façade, a section of the building — evidently the hotel’s dining-room, with half-a-dozen or more high arched windows — had been constructed so that it jutted out on to the esplanade. This promenade, running some feet above the beach, was no doubt closed to wheeled traffic in normal times. Now, it was completely deserted. The hotel, in café-au-lait stucco, with turrets and balconies, was about fifty or sixty years old, built at a time when the seaside was coming seriously into fashion. This small resort had a pleasantly out-of-date air. One pictured the visitors as well-to-do, though not at all smart, only insistent on good food and bourgeois comforts; the whole effect rather smug, though at the same time possessing for some reason or other an indefinable, even haunting attraction. Perhaps that was just because one was abroad again; and, for once, away from people. In the early morning light, the paint on the side walls of the hotel had taken on a pinkish tone, very subtle and delicate, blending gently with that marine aporousness of atmosphere so enthusiastically endorsed by the Impressionists when they painted this luminous northern shore. It was time to find Finn. I returned to the steps of the main entrance. The large hall within was in semi-darkness, because all the windows had been boarded up. Some of the military attachés were already about, polishing their boots in a kind of cloakroom, where the greatcoats had been left the night before. They seemed to be doing no harm, so I went back to the hall. Finn, carrying his valise on his shoulder, was descending the stairs.
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘Good morning, Nicholas. Couldn’t use the lift over there. No lift boys in wartime. Didn’t sleep too well. Kept awake by the noise of the sea. Not used to it’
I reported the matter of the bath. Finn looked grave. ‘Awkward situation, damned awkward. I’ve always tried to keep out of religious controversy. You handled it well, Nicholas. I’ll have a word with Asbjornsen and thank him. Any of them down yet?’
‘Some are cleaning their boots in the lobby through there.’
‘Cleaning their boots? My God, I believe they must have found my polish. Which way? I must stop this at once. It will be all used up.’
He rushed off. The fleet of cars got under way soon after this. That day I found myself with Cobb, Lebedev and Marinko, the Jugoslav. The seating was altered as a matter of principle from time to time. I was beside the driver. Lebedev — the name always reminded one of the character in The Idiot who was good at explaining the Apocalypse, though otherwise unreliable — rarely spoke; nor did he usually attend more than very briefly — so our Mission working with the Russians reported — the occasional parties given by their Soviet opposite numbers, where drinking bouts attained classical proportions, it was alleged. He was, indeed, commonly held to derive his appointment from civil, rather than military, eminence at home, his bearing and methods — despite the top boots and spurs — lacking, the last resort, the essential stigmata of the officier de carrière.
‘I tried to talk to Lebedev the other day about Dostoievski’s Grand Inquisitor,’ Pennistone said. ‘He changed the subject at once to Nekrassov, of whom I’ve never read a line.’
Cobb was making notes in a little book. Marinko gazed out of the window, overcome with Slav melancholy, or, more specifically — being of the party that supported the Resistance groups of Mihailovich — dejection at the course British policy appeared to be taking in that connexion.
‘Just spell out the name of that place we stopped over last night, Major Jenkins,’ said Cobb.
‘C-A-B-O-U-R-G, sir.’
As I uttered the last letter, scales fell from my eyes. Everything was transformed. It all came back — like the tea-soaked madeleine itself — in a torrent of memory … Cabourg … We had just driven out of Cabourg … out of Proust’s Balbec. Only a few minutes before, I had been standing on the esplanade along which, wearing her polo cap and accompanied by the little band of girls he had supposed the mistresses of professional bicyclists, Albertine had strolled into Marcel’s life. Through the high windows of the Grand Hotel’s dining-room — conveying to those without the sensation of staring into an aquarium — was to be seen Saint-Loup, at the same table Bloch, mendaciously claiming acquaintance with the Swanns. A little farther along the promenade was the Casino, its walls still displaying tattered playbills, just like the one Charlus, wearing his black straw hat, had pretended to examine, after an attempt at long range to assess the Narrator’s physical attractions and possibilities. Here Elstir had painted; Prince Odoacer played golf. Where was the little railway line that bad carried them all to the Verdurins’ villa? Perhaps it ran in another direction to that we were taking; more probably it was no more.
‘And the name of the brigadier at the Battle Clearance Group?’ asked Cobb. ‘The tall one who took us round those captured guns?’
He wrote down the name and closed the notebook.
‘You told me, Major Jenkins, that at the beginning of the war you yourself saw a Royal Engineer colonel wearing a double-breasted service-dress tunic. You can assure me of that?’
‘I can, sir — and, on making enquiries, was told that cut was permitted by regulations, provided no objection was taken by regimental or higher authority.’
Proustian musings still hung in the air when we came down to the edge of the water. It had been a notable adventure. True, an actual night passed in one of the bedrooms of the Grand Hotel itself — especially, like Finn’s, an appropriately sleepless one — might have crowned the magic of the happening. At the same time, a faint sense of disappointment superimposed on an otherwise absorbing inner experience was in its way suitably Proustian too: a reminder of the eternal failure of human life to respond a hundred per cent; to rise to the greatest heights without allowing at the same time some suggestion, however slight, to take shape in indication that things could have been even better.