The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  ‘Rylands, you mean?’

  ‘No no no. Unfortunately not. But Dally’s going.’

  ‘That’s gen, is it?’

  ‘Not yet, but it will be.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  The Adjutant looked up in Gordon’s direction, then leaned forward across the table to Thurston. ‘It only needs one more thing,’ he said quietly, ‘to turn the scale. The CO’s been watching Dally for some time, on my suggestion. I know the old man pretty well, as you know, after being in his Company for three years at North Midland Command. He’s waiting to make up his mind, do you see? If Dally puts up a black in the near future – a real black – that’ll be enough for the CO. Cleaver’ll get his chance at last.’

  ‘Suppose Dally doesn’t put up a black?’

  ‘He will.’

  ‘He hasn’t yet, you know. The terminal equipment’s all on the top line, and Dally knows it inside out.’

  ‘I’m not talking about that kind of a black. I’m talking about the administrative and disciplinary side. Those vehicles of his are in a shocking condition. I thought of working a snap 406 inspection on one of them, but that wouldn’t look too good. Too much like discrimination. But there’ll be something. Just give me time.’

  Thurston thought of saying that those vehicles, though covered with months-old mud and otherwise offensive to the inspecting eye, were in good running order, thanks to the efficiency of the section’s transport corporal. Instead, he let his mind wander back to one of the many stories of the Colonel’s spell as a company commander in England. Three weeks running he had presented his weekly prize of £ 1 for the smartest vehicle to the driver of an obsolete wireless-truck immobilized for lack of spare parts. The Company Sergeant-Major had won a bet about it.

  ‘We’ll have some fun then, Tom old boy,’ the Adjutant was saying in as festive a tone as his voice allowed. He was unaware that Thurston disliked him. His own feelings towards Thurston were a mixture of respect and patronage: respect for Thurston’s Oxford degree and accent, job at a minor public school, and efficiency as a non-technical officer; patronage for his practice of reading literary magazines and for his vaguely scholarly manner and appearance. The affinity between Thurston’s unmilitary look and the more frankly ragamuffin demeanour of Dalessio could hardly explain, the Adjutant wonderingly felt, the otherwise unaccountable tendency of the one to defend the other. It was true that they’d known each other at the officers’ training unit at Catterick, but what could that have to do with it? The Adjutant was unaccustomed to having his opinions contested and he now voiced the slight bafflement that had been growing on him for the last few minutes. ‘It rather beats me,’ he said, ‘why you’re taking this line about friend Dally. You’re not at all thick with him. In fact he seems to needle you whenever he speaks to you. My impression is, old boy, for what it’s worth, you’ve got no bloody use for him at all. And yet you stick up for him. Why?’

  Thurston amazed him by saying coldly: ‘I don’t see why the fact that a man’s an Italian should be held against him when he does his job as well as anyone in the sodding Army.’

  ‘Just a minute, Tom,’ the Adjutant said, taking a cigarette from his silver case, given him by his mistress in Brussels. ‘That’s being a bit unfair, you know. You ever heard me say a word about Dalessio being an Eyeteye? Never. You were the one who brought it up. It makes no difference to me if a fellow’s father’s been interned, provided –’

  ‘Uncle.’

  ‘All right, uncle, then. As I say, that’s no affair of mine. Presumably he’s okay from that point of view or he’d never have got here. And that’s all there is to it as far as I’m concerned. I’m not holding it against him, not for a moment. I don’t quite know where you picked up that impression, old boy.’

  Thurston shook his head, blushing slightly. ‘Sorry, Bill,’ he said. ‘I must have got it mixed. It used to get on my wick at Catterick, the way some of the blokes took it out of him about his pal Musso and so on. I suppose it must be through that somehow, in a way, I keep feeling people have got it in for him on that score. Sorry.’ He was not sorry. He knew quite certainly that his charge was well-founded, and that the other’s silence about Dalessio’s descent was a matter of circumspection only. If anyone in the Mess admired Mussolini, Thurston suspected, it was the Adjutant, although he kept quiet about that as well. It was tempting to dig at his prejudices on these and other questions, but Thurston did his best never to succumb to that temptation. The Adjutant’s displeasure was always strongly urged and sometimes, rumour said, followed up by retaliatory persecution. Enough, dangerously much, had already been said in Dalessio’s defence.

  The Adjutant’s manner had grown genial again and, with a muttered apology, he now offered Thurston a cigarette. ‘What about another of those?’ he asked, pointing his head at Thurston’s glass.

  ‘Thank you, I will, but I must be off in a minute. We’re opening the teleprinter to the Poles at twenty-hundred and I want to see it’s working.’

  Two more officers now entered the Mess dining-room. They were Captain Bentham, a forty-year-old Regular soldier who had been a company sergeant-major in India at the outbreak of war, and Captain Rowney, who besides being in charge of the unit’s administration was also the Mess’s catering officer. Rowney nodded to Thurston and grinned at the Adjutant, whose Canadian battledress he had been responsible for securing. He himself was wearing a sheepskin jacket, made on the Belgian black market. ‘Hallo, William,’ he said. ‘Won the war yet?’ Although he was a great chum of the Adjutant’s, some of his remarks to him, Thurston had noticed, carried a curious vein of satire. Bentham sat stolidly down a couple of places along the table, running his hands over his thin grey hair.

  ‘Tom and I have been doing a little plotting,’ the Adjutant said. ‘We’ve decided a certain officer’s career with this unit needs terminating.’

  Bentham glanced up casually and caught Thurston’s eye. This, coming on top of the Adjutant’s misrepresentation of the recent discussion, made Thurston feel slightly uncomfortable. That was ludicrous, because he had long ago written Bentham off as of no particular account, as the most uninteresting type of Regular Army ex-ranker, good only at cable-laying, supervising cable-laying and looking after the men who did the actual cable-laying. Despite this, Thurston found himself saying: ‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ but at that moment Rowney asked the Adjutant a question and the protest, mild as it was, went unheard.

  ‘Your friend Dally, of course,’ the Adjutant answered Rowney.

  ‘Why, what’s he been up to?’ Bentham asked in his slow Yorkshire voice. ‘Having his hair cut?’

  There was a general laugh, then a token silence while Gordon laid plates of stew in front of the new arrivals. His inquiry whether the Adjutant wanted any rice pudding was met with a facetious and impracticable instruction for the disposal of that foodstuff by an often-quoted route. ‘Can’t you do better than that, Jack?’ the Adjutant asked Rowney. ‘Third night we’ve had Chinese wedding-cake this week.’

  ‘Sorry, William. My Belgian friend’s had a little misunderstanding with the civvy police. I’m still looking round for another pal with the right views on how the officers of a liberating army should be fed. Just possess your soul in patience.’

  ‘What’s this about Dally?’ Bentham persisted. ‘If there’s a move to give him a wash and a change of clothes, count me in.’

  Thurston got up before the topic could be reopened. ‘By the way, Jack,’ he said to Rowney, ‘young Malone asked me to remind you that he still hasn’t had those cigarettes for the blokes he’s lent to Special Wireless.’

  Rowney sighed. ‘Tell him it’s not my pigeon, will you, Thomas? I’ve been into it all with him. They’re under Special Wireless for everything now.’

  ‘Not NAAFI rations. He told me you’d agreed to supply them.’

  ‘Up until last week. They’re off my hands now.’

  ‘Oh no they’re not,’ Thurston said nastily. ‘Accordin
g to Malone they still haven’t had last week’s.’

  ‘Well, tell him…’

  ‘Look, Jack, you tell him. It’s nothing to do with me, is it?’

  Rowney stared at him. ‘All right, Thomas,’ he said, abruptly diving his fork into his stew. ‘I’ll tell him.’

  Dodging the hanging lamp-shade, which at its lowest point was no more than five feet from the floor, Thurston hurried out, his greatcoat over his arm.

  ‘What’s eating our intellectual friend?’ Rowney asked.

  The Adjutant rubbed his blue chin. ‘Don’t know quite. He was behaving rather oddly before you blokes came in. He’s getting too sort of wrapped up in himself. Needs shaking up.’ He was just deciding, having previously decided against it, to inflict some small but salutary injustice on Thurston through the medium of unit orders. He might compel the various sections to start handing in their various stores records for check, beginning with Thurston’s section and stopping after it. Nice, but perhaps a bit too drastic. What about pinching his jeep for some tiresome extra duty? That might be just the thing.

  ‘If you ask me,’ Bentham was saying, ‘he’s too bloody stuck-up by half. Wants a lesson of some kind, he does.’

  ‘You’re going too far there, Ben,’ the Adjutant said decisively. He disliked having Bentham in the Officers’ Mess, declaring its tone to be thereby lowered, and often said he thought the old boy would be much happier back in the Sergeants’ Mess with people of his own type. ‘Tom Thurston’s about the only chap round here you can carry on a reasonably intelligent discussion with.’

  Bentham, unabashed, broke off a piece of bread and ran it round his plate in a way that Thurston and the Adjutant were, unknown to each other, united in finding unpleasant. ‘What’s all this about a plot about Dally?’ he asked.

  II

  ‘You got that, Reg?’ Dalessio asked. ‘If you get any more interference on this circuit, put it back on plain speech straight away. Then they can see how they like that. I don’t believe for a bloody moment the line’s been relaid for a single bastard yard. Still, it’s being ceased in a week or two, and it never was of the slightest importance, so there’s no real worry. Now, what about the gallant Poles?’ He spoke with a strong Glamorganshire accent diversified by an occasional Italian vowel.

  ‘They’re still on here,’ Reg, the lineman-mechanic, said, gesturing towards the test teleprinter. ‘Want to see ’em?’

  ‘Yes, please. It’s nearly time to switch ’em through to the teleprinter room. We’ll get that done before I go.’

  Reg bent to the keyboard of the machine and typed:

  HOW U GETTING ON THERE READING ME OK KKKK

  There was a humming pause while Reg scratched his armpit and said: ‘Gone for a piss, I expect… Ah, here he is.’ In typical but inextinguishably eerie fashion the teleprinter took on a life of its own, performed a carriage-return, moved the glossy white paper up a couple of lines, and typed:

  4 CHRISTS SAKE QUIT BOTHERING ME NOT 2000 HRS YET KKK

  Dalessio, grinning to himself, shoved Reg out of the way and typed:

  CHIEF SIGNAL OFFICER BRITISH LIBERATION ARMY ERE WATCH YR LANGUAGE MY MAN KKKK

  The distant operator typed:

  U GO AND SCREW YRSELF JACK SORRY I MEAN SIR

  At this Dalessio went into roars of laughter, digging his knuckle into one deep eye-socket and throwing back his large dark head. It was exactly the kind of joke he liked best. He rotated a little in the narrow aisle between the banks of apparatus and test-panels, still laughing, while Reg watched him with a slight smile. At last Dalessio recovered and shouldered his way down to the phone at the other end of the vehicle.

  ‘Give me the teleprinter room, please. What? Who? All right, I’ll speak to him… Terminal Equipment, Dalessio here. Yes. Oh, really? It hasn’t?’ His voice changed completely, became that of a slightly unbalanced uncle commiserating with a disappointed child: ‘Now isn’t that just too bad? Well, I do think that’s hard lines. Just when you were all excited about it, too, eh?’ Over his shoulder he squealed to Reg, in soprano parody of Thurston’s educated tones: ‘Captain Thurston is tewwibly gwieved that he hasn’t got his pwinter to the Poles yet. He’s afwaid we’ve got some howwid scheme on over heah to depwive him of it… All right, Thurston, I’ll come over. Yes, now.’

  Reg smiled again and put a cigarette in his mouth, striking the match, from long habit, on the metal ‘No Smoking’ notice tacked up over the ventilator.

  ‘Give me one of those, Reg, I want to cool my nerves before I go into the beauty-parlour across the way. Thanks. Now listen: switch the Poles through to the teleprinter room at one minute to eight exactly, so that there’s working communication at eight but not before. Do Thurston good to bite his nails for a few minutes. Put it through one number…’ – his glance and forefinger went momentarily to a test-frame across the aisle – ‘number six. That’s just been rewired. Ring up Teleprinters and tell ’em, will you? See you before I go off.’

  It was dark and cold outside and Dalessio shivered on his way over to the Signal Office. He tripped up on the cable which ran shin-high between a line of blue-and-white posts outside the entrance, and applied an unclean expression to the Adjutant, who had had this amenity provided in an attempt to dignify the working area. Inside the crowded, brilliantly lighted office, he was half-asphyxiated by the smoke from the stove and half-deafened by the thumping of date-stamps, the ringing of telephones, the enraged bark of one sergeant and the loud, tremulous singing of the other. A red-headed man was rushing about bawling ‘Emergency Ops for 17 Corps’ in the accents of County Cork. Nobody took any notice of him: they had all dealt with far too many Emergency Ops messages in the last eight months.

  Thurston was in his office, a small room partitioned off from the main one. The unit was occupying what had once been a Belgian military school and later an SS training establishment. This building had obviously formed part of the original barrack area, and Thurston often wondered what whim of the Adjutant’s had located the offices and stores down here and the men’s living-quarters in former offices and stores. The cubicle where Thurston spent so much of his time had no doubt been the abode of the cadet, and then Unteroffizier, in charge of barrack-room. He was fond of imagining the heavily built Walloons and high-cheeked Prussians who had slept in here, and had insisted on preserving as a historical document the chalked Wir kommen zurück on the plank wall. Like his predecessors, he fancied, he felt cut off from all the life going on just outside the partition, somehow isolated. ‘Alone, withouten any company’, he used to quote to himself. He would laugh then, sometimes, and go on to think of the unique lavatory at the far end of the building, where the defecator was required to plant his feet on two metal plates, grasp two handles, and curve his body into the shape of a bow over a kind of trough.

  He was not laughing now. His phone conversation with Dalessio had convinced him, even more thoroughly than phone conversations with Dalessio commonly did, that the other despised him for his lack of technical knowledge and took advantage of it to irritate and humiliate him. He tried to reread a letter from one of the two married women in England with whom, besides his wife, he was corresponding, but the thought of seeing Dalessio still troubled him.

  Actually seeing Dalessio troubled him even more. Not for the first time it occurred to him that Dalessio’s long, matted hair, grease-spotted, cylindrical trouser-legs and ill-fitting battledress blouse were designed as an offensive burlesque of his own neat but irremediably civilian appearance. He was smoking, too, and Thurston himself was punctilious in observing inside his office the rule that prohibited smoking on duty until ten at night, but it was no use telling him to put it out. Dalessio, he felt, never obeyed orders unless it suited him. ‘Hallo, Thurston,’ he said amiably. ‘Not still having a baby about the Poles, I hope?’

  ‘I don’t think I ever was, was I? I just wanted to make sure what the position was.’

  ‘Oh, you wanted to make sure of that, did you? All right, t
hen. It’s quite simple. Physically, the circuit remains unchanged, of course. But, as you know, we have ways of providing extra circuits by means of electrical apparatus, notably by utilizing the electron-radiating properties of the thermionic valve, or vacuum-tube. If a signal is applied to the grid…’

  Thurston’s phone rang and he picked it up gratefully. ‘Signal-master?’ said the voice of Brigadier the Lord Fawcett, the largest and sharpest thorn in the side of the entire Signals unit. ‘I want a special dispatch-rider to go to Brussels for me. Will you send him round to my office for briefing in ten minutes?’

  Thurston considered. Apart from its being over a hundred miles to Brussels, he suspected that the story told by previous special DRs who had been given this job was probably quite true: the purpose of the trip was to take in the Brigadier’s soiled laundry and bring back the clean stuff, plus any wines, spirits and cigars that the Brigadier’s Brussels agent, an RASC colonel at the headquarters of the reserve Army Corps, might have got together for him. But he could hardly ask the Lord Fawcett to confirm this. Why was it that his army career seemed littered with such problems? ‘The regular D R run goes out at oh-five-hundred, sir,’ he said in a conciliatory tone. ‘Would that do instead, perhaps?’

  ‘No, it certainly would not do instead. You have a man available, I take it?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir.’ This was true. It was also true that the departure of this man with the dirty washing would necessitate another, who might have been driving all day, being got out of the section billet and condemned at best to a night on the Signal Office floor, more likely to a run half across Belgium in the small hours with a genuine message of some kind. ‘Yes, we have a man.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid in that case I don’t see your difficulty. Get him round to me right away, will you?’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ There was never anything one could do.