by Phillip Rock
“You may or may not,” she said tautly. “That’s something you won’t know for certain until tomorrow. It wouldn’t hurt to have another string to your bow.”
“I have strings—all in basic khaki. I’ll have a job, it’s a question of what kind.”
She lay stiffly on her back, very much on her side of the bed. He sounded cheerful enough. She could hear him humming in his dressing room. Whistling in the dark. He was concerned and worried, but not nearly as concerned as she was. The past months had been a nightmare for her, not knowing from one day to the next when his orders would come through and he would be posted to a permanent command. Commuting twice a week to London to be with him, their house in the country in a state of chaos with most of their belongings packed away in crates since Christmas. Their plans had been so definite in that long-ago time—she and the twins and his mother to go east with him, to stay in a large rented house in Gezirha on the Nile. But she hadn’t been pregnant then. It would be foolish to go to Egypt now. And there was the possibility that he wouldn’t be ordered to that part of the world anyway. They could send him God knows where, to any spot where the Union Jack flew—Hong Kong, Sierra Leone, Malaya. Life could be so simple and pleasant if he resigned his commission. It wouldn’t bother her in the least to see him go off to London every morning on the train. The Fenworth Building Society. Offices throughout Great Britain and Northern Ireland, their advertisements pasted on buses and boardings and the walls of the underground—“Build a Future—Invest in the Fenworth Society.” What was wrong with that?
Fenton switched off the bedside lamp and opened the window drapes. Moonlight filtered into the room in an ivory glow. He stood by the window gazing out at the dark buildings across the square.
“My mind’s racing like a bloody engine,” he said.
“Not as quickly as my own.”
“I could have Peterson send up a bottle of champagne. Nothing like the bubbly to make one drowsy.”
“I associate champagne with celebrations. I hardly feel like celebrating anything at the moment.”
He walked over to the bed and sat beside her. “We have a lot of things we could raise a glass to. Or, anyway, I do.”
“Do you, Fenton?”
“I have you. That’s worth a toast.”
She reached out and touched his hand. “I’ve been lying here feeling sorry for myself. Prenatal collywobbles, I suppose. I’ll get over it.”
He bent down and kissed her. “I love you, Winnie, and I want you to be happy.”
“It would make me happy to see you going off to work every day in the city, but only if it was what you wanted. I couldn’t bear it if you were miserable.”
“I’d get used to it.”
“No you wouldn’t. I was just being selfish.”
“Beneath that wonderful exterior of yours is something even more wonderful.”
He pulled the covers back and got into bed beside her. She sat up and slipped the silk nightgown over her head and then lay back, waiting for him. His lips glided across her breasts and then down over the swell of her belly where a new life pulsed—lingering, caressing, until she clasped him tightly in her arms and drew him to her with a soft cry.
HE DROVE PAST the palace toward the Mall. A platoon of grenadiers was leaving Wellington Barracks and marching up Birdcage Walk to the tapping of a drum. They looked splendid in their red coats and bearskin hats, the morning sun glinting off brass buttons and shiny rifles, but he could not think of them as soldiers. They were actors in a pageant, relics of some dimly remembered play. He could not reconcile their scarlet ranks with his own vision of soldiers—dun-colored creatures in steel helmets, muddy and stained, seen through the smoke and haze of a daybreak in Flanders.
He parked the car near the War Office and checked his image in the window glass. He was wearing mufti and the sight made him smile. With his dark suit, bowler, and furled umbrella, he could have been taken for a director of the Fenworth Building Society—if he weren’t so obviously an officer in the Guards.
“Good morning, sir!” The khaki-clad old sergeant in the foyer snapped to attention.
“Morning, Sergeant. I have a nine o’clock appointment with General Wood-Lacy.” He glanced casually at his wristwatch. “A bit on the early side.”
“Quite all right, sir. The general’s in his office. Do you know the way up?”
“I do indeed.”
He walked up two flights of stairs and along a dark, narrow corridor, its walls lined with engravings depicting forgotten campaigns. The building was a warren of corridors, but he followed the proper ones, which led him, like the passages in a maze, to the oak-paneled antechamber of the general’s office. An elderly, white-haired lieutenant colonel rose from his desk with a smile.
“Fenton, dear chap. So good to see you again.”
“How are you, Blythe?”
“As well as can be expected, I suppose. It’s rather a sad day for me. I shall miss the old boy.”
“As I’m sure he’ll miss you. Always imagined the two of you retiring together.”
“That had been my hope, but General Strathling talked me into staying on for another year or two and joining his staff in Delhi.” He came out from behind the desk and placed a hand on the brass knob of the door he had guarded, in a sense, for a good many years. “I’m still trying to persuade your uncle to come east. Purchase a house in Simla. He always enjoyed the Kashmir. You might put that bee in his bonnet if you have the chance.”
General Sir Julian Wood-Lacy, V.C., C.V.O., was standing by a window when Fenton entered the room. The large office was barren except for the desk and a couple of wood chairs. The bookcases and files had been emptied, and pictures and maps taken from the walls.
“Looks like you’ve closed shop.”
“Half a bloody century is enough for any man.” The general took a puff on his cigar and looked away from his view of St. James’s Park. “You’re on time for a change.” The old general, whose face had once graced a recruiting poster because of its bulldog pugnacity, eyed his nephew from head to toe and back again. “You look prosperous, like one of those stocks-and-bloody-bonds wallahs.”
Fenton smiled and brushed his sleeve across his bowler before placing it on a hat rack near the door. His umbrella went into a stand fashioned from the leg of an elephant.
“Now that you’re almost in civvy street, General, I’ll recommend a tailor. Purdy and Beame, Burlington Street.”
The old man scowled and scattered cigar ash on the carpet. “Don’t be so damn cheeky. Care for a brandy?”
“At nine in the morning? I have more respect for my liver.”
“I stopped respecting mine years ago.” He glanced about the room helplessly. “If I can only find the bloody bottle.”
Fenton sat down in a chair facing the desk and pointed toward a row of shelves on the far wall. “Forlorn bottle and two lonely glasses in yon bit of shelf. And I change my mind. One drink to your glorious career.”
The general snorted as he stumped across the room. “What’s so bloody glorious about it, I’d like to know? Just one more crock who put in his time.”
“Let’s not be modest. Old Woody, the hero of Mons.”
“Hero of Mons my arse.” He made a guttural sound deep in his throat that sounded like a threat, then poured brandy into the glasses and carried them back toward his desk. He walked stiffly and with great care. “Getting lame. If I were a horse I’d be shot out of pity.”
“You need sun. India, perhaps.”
“He told you to say that, didn’t he?” He handed Fenton a glass and then sat at his desk with a grateful sigh. “Bugger Blythe. I’m not going to spend my last years staring at the Himalayas. I’ve got that bit of rough shoot in Yorkshire and a sturdy little house to go with it.” He drank some of the brandy and then toyed with the glass, rolling it between his thick, strong hands. “I asked for the job of passing on your new orders. I’m sure you know why.”
“I can guess.”
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br /> “Blythe has prepared a letter I dictated. A letter ostensibly from you. I think it is a good letter, one that certain people in this building will be quite relieved to get. The letter states, in simple, soldier prose, your reluctant but necessary decision to retire from the army as of today in order to devote yourself to your family and business interests. The letter will be received with gratitude and your early retirement will be honored with a full colonelship. A nice little gesture on their part. What do you say to that?”
“Ah,” Fenton said.
“And what does that peculiar sound signify?”
“Relief. Rather like hearing the second shoe drop.”
“Then I take it you intend to do the sensible thing and sign the letter?”
“On the contrary. I intend to receive my orders and comply with them.”
“You bloody fool.”
It was uttered with a quiet intensity, not untinged with respect for the tall, hawk-faced man seated across from him. Sir Julian had never married, and at seventy was not likely to do so. His only living nephew was the nearest thing he would ever get to a son. He swallowed the rest of his brandy.
“How long have you been in the army?”
“Thirteen years.”
“And you have no more idea how the system works than some Oxford Street ribbon clerk!”
“May I beg to differ, sir?”
“You may not, sir!” He was speaking to just another subordinate who needed a good dressing down, and, by God, he was the man to do it. “You believe you’ve served king and country for thirteen years, but that is not true. As a professional army officer you have served only the general staff. It’s they who set the standards, and one either complies with those standards or gets out. The staff has always had a horror of the unorthodox and they have had more than enough of it in the past few years, thank you very much! They’ve had to contend with Colonel Lawrence dashing about like some Drury Lane fairy in a bloody soppy burnoose. They’ve had Trenchard pulling his flying corps out of the army and forming his own service—and they have Elles wanting to do the same with his tanks. They do not like it, sir. They do not like it one bit. And they sense the seeds of heresy in you, by gad. Your peculiar behavior in nineteen seventeen will never be understood or forgiven. Your insistence on having Major Greville court-martialed was bad enough, but the mysterious appearance of the hearing transcripts in the hands of that German fella—”
“Martin Rilke is not a German fella.”
“A Yank then, with a Boche name. A bleeding newspaper wallah. By all rights you should have been booted from the service if not bloody well shot!”
Fenton’s expression was stone. “I followed the King’s Regulations to the letter with Charles. As for my giving the transcript to Rilke, there was no proof of it.”
“No proof of it,” the general sighed. Slumping back in his chair, he struck a match and relit his cigar. “As if proof were needed. The Yank circulated that transcript as an antiwar tract—the prattle of a shell-shocked man, young Greville condemning the war and Field Marshal Haig’s handling of it.”
“He was my friend, sir. I owed him that much.”
The general snorted and puffed smoke like a dragon. “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his career for a friend! Greville’s beliefs were the same as your own, I warrant, or you’d never have bound him over for court-martial so as to give him a public forum. It was a cheap dodge, and the War Office did not appreciate your actions. You talk about proof, by God. The only thing that saved your neck was me, sir!”
“I’m suitably grateful, I assure you.”
“But I can’t save your career. You’re a marked man. If you stay in the army you’ll be handed every dog’s job they can find. Nothing but bitter duty until they succeed in hounding you out.”
He opened a drawer and removed an official War Office envelope. “Your orders, sir. You are to embark on the P&O steamer City of Benares leaving Southampton twelfth July. You will disembark at Aden and proceed to Basra, then by train to Baghdad. From there you will go, by whatever transport is available, to Bani el Abbas on the upper Tigris and assume command of the Twelfth Battalion of the Sixty-fifth Brigade—a mixed bag: one company of West Lanes, an armored-car detachment, and two companies of Punjabis. You will arrive in the hot season, one hundred twenty in the shade—if one can find any shade. Fever off the river. Marauding Arabs and Kurds in the wasteland. Pure hell on earth. I doubt if Winifred will be overjoyed at your assignment.”
It was very quiet in the office, only the soft ticking of a wall clock and the distant hum of London’s traffic. Fenton drained his glass and then leaned forward and placed it on the desk. He smiled wryly at his uncle, whose face seemed carved out of oak.
“You never told me the army would be an easy profession.”
“No, I never told you that.”
“And I never promised Winnie I’d leave it.” He reached out a hand. “May I have my orders, sir?”
The general held the envelope tightly between his fingers. “There’s still time. Blythe has typed the letter.”
Fenton shook his head and took the envelope from his uncle’s hand. He slipped it into his coat pocket and stood up. “Twelfth July. Not much time, and I have at least one important thing to do. Goodbye, sir.”
Sir Julian watched him leave the office and swore softly under his breath: “Damn fool.” There was no malice in the words. No bite to them. It was what he would have done, of course. A matter of pride. His own career had been under a cloud once, long, long ago. He had openly criticized a doddering fool of a brigadier for gross incompetence during an expedition in the Sudan. He had saved his own small force from disaster and had marched them back to the Nile, fighting every step of the way. His quick tongue had earned him a court-martial, at which, with the peculiar logic of the army, he was recommended for the Victoria Cross and then severely reprimanded and ordered off to India for hard duty along the northwest frontier. He had served his penance with fortitude and then had thrust his way back up the ladder of command. He offered a silent prayer that Fenton might one day do the same.
A DISPATCH FROM Spanish Morocco was on his desk when he got to the office at 8:30—three thousand words, like a chapter from War and Peace. Martin eyed it dubiously and then checked his daily calendar. A full schedule. Miss Shaw brought in a cup of coffee and a handful of Huntley & Palmer biscuits on a plate. He lit a cigar and settled down to work, tackling the Moroccan report. It was all good, readable stuff, but there was no market for it. Filler material at best. His blue pencil zipped and slashed like a surgeon’s blade.
Next on his calendar was a correspondent from the Telegraph who had condescended to offer his services to INA in return for a salary that could only be described as princely. Martin remembered him from the war. The man had never gone up to the line, preferring to write his battle reports from his room at the Hotel Ritz in Paris using secondhand information. So much for him.
The interview was cordial but brief and the man left feeling slightly bewildered that he hadn’t been hired on the spot.
“There’s a man to see you, Mr. Rilke.” Miss Shaw’s head around the door. “He has no appointment, but he claims to be a friend of yours.”
“His name?”
“A Colonel Wood-Lacy.”
He hadn’t seen Fenton in over a year, but they kept in touch. He was not only an old friend but a source of matters military. Fenton had gone to France with the BEF in August 1914, a captain in the Coldstream Guards. He had survived Mons and the first battle of Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and the Somme offensives. The deaths of so many regular army officers, plus his own competence, brought rapid promotion. By 1917 he was brevetted a brigadier general, a young thruster obviously destined for further honors, but then he had fallen from grace.
“Gosh it’s good to see you, Fenton. How’d you know I was back in London?”
“I had dinner with Jacob before he left. He told me the happy news.” He glanced around the off
ice. “I hope I’m not intruding. Never seen such a busy place. Something momentous happen that I haven’t heard about?”
“No. Just a normal day in the world. Poles fighting Russians, Russians fighting starvation, Riffs slaughtering Spaniards, Greeks murdering Turks and vice versa. I’ll be blue-penciling most of it as being of no consequence. A serene day, in fact. Drop by when there’s a war on.” He motioned toward a chair. “Get a load off your feet.”
“Are you quite sure? I hate popping in on people.”
Martin stole a glance at his watch. “I’m sending a feature writer off to Poland and I have a few things to talk over. Take about half an hour. Then I can leave and we can have a leisurely lunch. How does that sound?”
“Jolly good. Just find me a quiet corner and I’ll stay out of the way.”
Martin headed for the door. “There’s only one quiet corner in the joint and you’re seated in it.”
During the thirty-five minutes that Fenton waited, a copyboy dashed in four times to deposit sheaves of Teletype messages. Having nothing else to do, he stood by the desk and read them. The events of the day, hot off the wire. It made depressing reading. He could envision a morning in which a report would end up on the desk telling of the ambush and massacre of British soldiers near Bani el Abbas on the Tigris. The Gatling jammed and the colonel dead … as the Victorian poem put it. Martin would probably scrawl a blue line across it as being of no consequence.
THE PUB IN Magpie Alley was suitably dim and ancient, with black-oak tables and timbered walls. Its customers were divided equally between Fleet Street journalists and lawyers from the Temple, each group keeping strictly to its own side of the room. Martin ordered for them, whiskeys and the mixed grill.
“Now then,” he said to Fenton, “bring me up to date. Are you still waiting around for orders?”
“I got them this morning, read to me in person by Uncle Julian. I’ve been posted to some ragtag battalion in Mesopotamia—or, rather, Iraq, as they now call it. Prefer Mespot myself as being more indicative of the bloody country.”