The Valley of Bones

by Anthony Powell

  ‘Maureen …’ he called.

  He used that same peculiar cooing note he employed when answering the telephone.

  ‘Hull-ooe … hull-ooe …’ he would say, when he spoke into the instrument. Somehow that manner of answering seemed quite inappropriate to the rest of his character.

  ‘I wonder whether what we call politeness isn’t just weakness,’ he had once remarked.

  This cooing certainly conveyed no impression of ruthless moral strength, neither on the telephone, nor at the counter of this pub. No one appeared. Gwatkin pronounced the name again.

  ‘Maur-een … Maur-een …’

  Still nothing happened. Then a girl came through the door leading to the back of the house. She was short and thick-set, with a pale face and lots of black hair. I thought her good-looking, with that suggestion of an animal, almost a touch of monstrosity, some men find very attractive. Barnby once remarked: ‘The Victorians saw only refinement in women, it’s their coarseness makes them irresistible to me.’ Barnby would certainly have liked this girl.

  ‘Why, it would be yourself again, Captain Gwatkin,’ she said.

  She smiled and put her hands on her hips. Her teeth were very indifferent, her eyes in deep, dark sockets, striking.

  “Yes, Maureen.’

  Gwatkin did not seem to know what to say next. He glanced in my direction, as if to seek encouragement. This speechlessness was unlike him. However, Maureen continued to talk herself.

  ‘And with another military gentleman too,’ she said. ‘What’ll ye be taking this evening now? Will it be porter, or is it a wee drop of whiskey this night, I’ll be wondering, Captain?’

  Gwatkin turned to me.

  ‘Which, Nick?’

  ‘Guinness.’

  ‘That goes for me too,’ he said. ‘Two pints of porter, Maureen. I only drink whiskey when I’m feeling down. Tonight we’re out for a good time, aren’t we, Nick?’

  He spoke in an oddly self-conscious manner. I had never seen him like this before. We seated ourselves at a small table by the wall. Maureen began to draw the stout. Gwatkin watched her fixedly, while she allowed the froth to settle, scraping its foam from the surface of the liquid with a saucer, then returning the glass under the tap to be refilled to the brim. When she brought the drinks across to us, she took a chair, refusing to have anything herself.

  ‘And what would be the name of this officer?’ she asked.

  ‘Second-Lieutenant Jenkins,’ said Gwatkin, ‘he’s one of the officers of my company.’

  ‘Is he now. That would be grand and all.’

  ‘We’re good friends,’ said Gwatkin soberly.

  ‘Then why haven’t ye brought him to see me before, Captain Gwatkin, I’ll be asking ye?’

  ‘Ah, Maureen, you see we work so hard,’ said Gwatkin. ‘We can’t always be coming to see you, do you understand. That’s just a treat for once in a while.’

  ‘Get along with ye,’ she said, smiling provocatively and showing discoloured teeth again, ‘yourself’s down here often enough, Captain Gwatkin.’

  ‘Not as often as I’d like, Maureen.’

  Gwatkin had now recovered from the embarrassment which seemed to have overcome him on first entering the pub. He was no longer tongue-tied. Indeed, his manner suggested he was, in fact, more at ease with women than men, the earlier constraint merely a momentary attack of nerves.

  ‘And what would it be you’re all so busy with now?’ she asked. ‘Is it drilling and all that? I expect so.’

  ‘Drilling is some of it, Maureen,’ said Gwatkin. ‘But we have to practise all kind of other training too. Modern war is a very complicated matter, you must understand.’

  This made her laugh again.

  ‘I’d have ye know my great-uncle was in the Connaught Rangers,’ she said, ‘and a fine figure of a man he was, I can promise ye. Why, they say he was the best-looking young fellow of his day in all County Monaghan. And brave too. Why, they say he killed a dozen Germans with his bayonet when they tried to capture him. The Germans didn’t like to meet the Irish in the last war.’

  ‘Well, it’s a risk the Germans won’t have to run in this one,’ said Gwatkin, speaking more gruffly than might have been expected in the circumstances. ‘Even here in the North there’s no conscription, and you see plenty of young men out of uniform.’

  ‘Why, ye wouldn’t be taking all the young fellows away from us, would ye?’ she asked, rolling her eyes. ‘It’s lonely we’d be if they all went to the war.’

  ‘Maybe Hitler will decide the South is where he wants to land his invasion force,’ said Gwatkin. ‘Then where will all your young men be, I’d like to know.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, throwing up her hands. ‘Don’t say it of the old blackguard. Would he do such a thing? You think he truly may, Captain Gwatkin, do ye?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Gwatkin.

  ‘Do you come from the other side of the Border yourself?’ I asked her.

  ‘Why, sure I do,’ she said smiling. ‘And how were you guessing that, Lieutenant Jenkins?’

  ‘I just had the idea.’

  ‘Would it be my speech?’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  She lowered her voice.

  ‘Maybe, too, you thought I was different from these Ulster people,’ she said, ‘them that is so hard and fond of money and all.’

  ‘That’s it, I expect.’

  ‘So you’ve guessed Maureen’s home country, Nick,’ said Gwatkin. ‘I tell her we must treat her as a security risk and not go speaking any secrets in front of her, as she’s a neutral.’

  Maureen began to protest, but at that moment two young men in riding breeches and leggings came into the pub. She rose from the chair to serve them. Gwatkin fell into one of his silences. I thought he was probably reflecting how odd was the fact that Maureen seemed just as happy talking and laughing with a couple of local civilians, as with the dashing officer types he seemed to envisage ourselves. At least he stared at the young men, an unremarkable pair, as if there were something about them that interested him. Then it turned out Gwatkin’s train of thought had returned to dissatisfaction with his own peacetime employment.

  ‘Farmers, I suppose,’ he said. ‘My grandfather was a farmer. He didn’t spend his time in a stuffy office.’

  ‘Where did he farm?’

  ‘Up by the Shropshire border.’

  ‘And your father took to office life?’

  ‘That was it. My dad’s in insurance. His firm sent him to another part of the country.’

  ‘Do you know that Shropshire border yourself?’

  ‘We’ve been up there for a holiday. I expect you’ve heard of the great Lord Aberavon?’

  ‘I have, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘The farm was on his estate.’

  I had never thought of Lord Aberavon (first and last of his peerage) as a figure likely to go down to posterity as ‘great’, though the designation might no doubt reasonably be applied by those living in the neighbourhood. His name was merely memorable to myself as deceased owner of Mr Deacon’s Boyhood of Cyrus, the picture in the Walpole-Wilsons’ hall, which always made me think of Barbara Goring when I had been in love with her in pre-historic times. Lord Aberavon had been Barbara Goring’s grandfather; Eleanor Walpole-Wilson’s grandfather too. I wondered what had happened to Barbara, whether her husband,

  Johnny Pardoe (who also owned a house in the country of which Gwatkin spoke) had been recalled to the army. Eleanor, lifelong friend of my sister-in-law, Norah Tolland, was now, like Norah herself, driving cars for some women’s service. Gwatkin by his words had certainly conjured up the past. He looked at me rather uncomfortably, as if he could read my mind, and knew I felt suddenly carried back into an earlier time sequence. He also had the air of wanting to elaborate what he had said, yet feared he might displease, or, at least, not amuse me. He cleared his throat and took a gulp of stout.

  ‘You remember Lord Aberavon’s family name?’ he
asked.

  ‘Why, now I come to think of it, wasn’t it “Gwatkin”?’

  ‘It was – same as mine. He was called Rowland too.’

  He said that very seriously.

  ‘I’d quite forgotten. Was he a relation?’

  Gwatkin laughed apologetically.

  ‘No, of course he wasn’t,’ he said.

  ‘Well, he might have been.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘You never know with names.’

  ‘If so, it was miles distant,’ said Gwatkin.

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  ‘I mean so distant, he wasn’t a relation at all,’ Gwatkin said. ‘As a matter of fact my grandfather, the old farmer I was talking about, used to swear we were the same lot, if you went back far enough – right back, I mean.’

  ‘Why not, indeed?’

  I remembered reading one of Lord Aberavon’s obituaries, which had spoken of the incalculable antiquity of his line, notwithstanding his own modest start in a Liverpool shipping firm. The details had appealed to me.

  ‘Wasn’t it a very old family?’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘Going back to Vortigern – by one of his own daughters? I’m sure I read that.’

  Gwatkin looked uncertain again, as if he felt the discussion had suddenly got out of hand, that there was something inadmissible about my turning out to know so much about Gwatkin origins. Perhaps he was justified in thinking that.

  ‘Who was Vortigern?’ he asked uneasily.

  ‘A fifth-century British prince. You remember – he invited Hengist and Horsa. All that. They came to help him. Then he couldn’t get rid of them.’

  It was no good. Gwatkin looked utterly blank. Hengist and Horsa meant nothing to him; less, if anything, than Vortigern. He was unimpressed by the sinister splendour of the derivations indicated as potentially his own; indeed, totally uninterested in them. Thought of Lord Aberavon’s business acumen kindled him more than any steep ascent in the genealogies of ancient Celtic Britain. His romanticism, though innate, was essentially limited – as often happens – by sheer lack of imagination. Vortigern, I saw, was better forgotten. I had deflected Gwatkin’s flow of thought by ill-timed pedantry.

  ‘I expect my grandfather made up most of the stuff,’ he said. ‘Just wanted to be thought related to a man of the same name who left three-quarters of a million.’

  He now appeared to regret ever having let fall this confidence regarding his own family background, refusing to be drawn into further discussion about his relations, their history or the part of the country they came from. I thought how odd, how typical of our island – unlike the Continent or America in that respect – that Gwatkin should put forward this claim, possibly in its essentials reasonable enough, be at once attracted and repelled by its implications, yet show no wish to carry the discussion further. Was it surprising that, in such respects, foreigners should find us hard to understand? Odd, too, I felt obstinately, that the incestuous Vortigern should link Gwatkin with Barbara Goring and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. Perhaps it all stemmed from that ill-judged negotiation with Hengist and Horsa. Anyway, it linked me, too, with Gwatkin in a strange way. We had some more stout. Maureen was now too deeply involved in local gossip with the young farmers, if farmers they were, to pay further attention to us. Their party had been increased by the addition of an older man of similar type, with reddish hair and the demeanour of a professional humorist. There was a good deal of laughter. We had to fetch our drinks from the counter ourselves. This seemed to depress Gwatkin still further. We talked rather drearily of the affairs of the Company. More customers came in, all apparently on the closest terms with Maureen. Gwatkin and I drank a fair amount of stout. Finally, it was time to return.

  ‘Shall we go back to barracks?’

  This designation of Castlemallock on Gwatkin’s part added nothing to its charms. He turned towards the bar as we were leaving.

  ‘Good night, Maureen.’

  She was having too good a joke with the red-haired humorist to hear him.

  ‘Good night, Maureen,’ Gwatkin said again, rather louder.

  She looked up, then came round to the front of the bar.

  ‘Good night to you, Captain Gwatkin, and to you, Lieutenant Jenkins,’ she said, ‘and don’t be so long in coming to see me again, the pair of ye, or it’s vexed with you both I’d be.’

  We waved farewell. Gwatkin did not open his mouth until we reached the outskirts of the town. Suddenly he took a deep breath. He seemed about to speak; then, as if he could not give sufficient weight to the words while we walked, he stopped and faced me.

  ‘Isn’t she marvellous?’ he said.

  ‘Who, Maureen?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘She seemed a nice girl.’

  ‘Is that all you thought, Nick?’

  He spoke with real reproach.

  ‘Why, yes. What about you? You’ve really taken a fancy to her, have you?’

  ‘I think she’s absolutely wonderful,’ he said.

  We had had, as I have said, a fair amount to drink – the first time since joining the unit I had drunk more than two or three half-pints of beer – but no more than to loosen the tongue, not sufficient to cause amorous hallucination. Gwatkin was obviously expressing what he really felt, not speaking in an exaggerated manner to indicate light desire. The reason of those afternoon trances, that daydreaming while he nursed the Company’s rubber-stamp, were now all at once apparent, affection for Castlemallock also explained. Gwatkin was in love. All love affairs are different cases, yet, at the same time, each is the same case. Moreland used to say love was like sea-sickness. For a time everything round you heaved about and you felt you were going to die – then you staggered down the gangway to dry land, and a minute or two later could hardly remember what you had suffered, why you had been feeling so ghastly. Gwatkin was at the earlier stage.

  ‘Have you done anything about it?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Maureen.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, taken her out, something like that.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What would be the good?’

  ‘I don’t know. I should have thought it might be enjoyable, if you feel like that about her.’

  ‘But I’d have to tell her I’m married.’

  ‘Tell her by all means. Put your cards on the table.’

  ‘But do you think she’d come?’

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘You mean – try and seduce her?’

  ‘I suppose that was roughly the line indicated – in due course.’

  He looked at me astonished. I felt a shade uncomfortable, rather like Mephistopheles unexpectedly receiving a hopelessly negative reaction from Faust. Such an incident in opera, I thought, might suggest a good basis for an aria.

  ‘Some of the chaps you meet in the army never seem to have heard of women,’ Odo Stevens had said. ‘You never know in the Mess whether you’re sitting next to a sex-maniac of nineteen or a middle-aged man who doesn’t know the facts of life.’

  In Gwatkin’s case, I was surprised by such scruples, even though I now recalled his attitude towards the case of Sergeant Pendry. In general, the younger officers of the Battalion were, like Kedward, engaged, or, like Breeze, recently married. They might, like Pumphrey, talk in a free and easy manner, but it was their girl or their wife who clearly preoccupied them. In any case, there had been no time for girls for anyone, married or single, before we reached Castlemallock. Gwatkin was certainly used to the idea of Pumphrey trying to have a romp with any barmaid who might be available. He had never seemed to disapprove of that. I knew nothing of his married life, except what Kedward had told me, that Gwatkin had known his wife all their lives, had previously wanted to marry Breeze’s sister.

  ‘But I’m married,’ Gwatkin said again.

  He spoke rather desperately.

&
nbsp; ‘I’m not insisting you should take Maureen out. I only asked if you had.’

  ‘And Maureen isn’t that sort of girl.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He spoke angrily this time. Then he laughed, seeing, I suppose, that was a silly thing to say.

  ‘You’ve only met Maureen for the first time, Nick. You don’t realize at all what she’s like. You think all that talk of hers means she’s a bad girl. She isn’t. I’ve often been alone with her in that bar. You’d be surprised. She’s like a child.’

  ‘Some children know a thing or two.’

  Gwatkin did not even bother to consider that point of view.

  ‘I don’t know why I think her quite so wonderful,’ he admitted, ‘but I just do. It worries me that I think about her all the time. I’ve found myself forgetting things, matters of duty, I mean.’

  ‘Do you go down there every night?’

  ‘Whenever I can. I haven’t been able to get away lately owing to one thing and another. All this security check, for instance.’

  ‘Does she know this?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Does Maureen know you’re mad about her?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  He spoke the words very humbly, quite unlike his usual tone. Then he assumed a rough, official voice again.

  ‘I thought it would be better if I told you about it all, Nick,’ he said. ‘I hoped the thing wouldn’t go on inside me all the time so much, if I let it out to someone. Unless it stops a bit, I’m frightened I’ll make a fool of myself in some way to do with commanding the Company. A girl like Maureen makes everything go out of your head.’