‘All what?’
‘The army. The life we’re leading.’
‘Don’t you like the Bank?’
As Kedward had explained at the outset, most of the Battalion’s officers worked in banks. This was one of the aspects of the unit which gave a peculiar sense of uniformity, of existing almost within a family. Even though one was personally outside this sept, its homogeneous character in itself offered a certain cordiality, rather than the reverse, to an intruder. Until now, no one had given the impression he specially disliked that employment, over and above the manner in which most people grumble about their own job, whatever it is. Indeed, all seemed to belong to a caste, clearly defined, powerful on its home ground, almost a secret society, with perfect understanding between its members where outward things were concerned. The initiates might complain about specific drawbacks, but never in a way to imply hankering for another occupation. To hear absolute revolt expressed was new to me. Gwatkin seemed to relent a little when he spoke again.
‘Oh, the bloody Bank’s not that bad,’ he said laughing, ‘but it’s a bit different being here. Something better to do than open jammed Home Safes and enter the contents in the Savings Bank Ledger.’
‘What’s a Home Safe, and why does it jam?’
‘Kids’ money-boxes.’
‘Do the children jam them?’
‘Parents, usually. Want a bit of ready. Try to break into the safe with a tin-opener. The bloody things arrive back at the office with the mechanism smashed to pieces. When the cashier gets in at last, he finds three pennies, a halfpenny and a tiddlywink.’
‘Still, brens get jammed too. It’s traditional for machine-guns – you know, the Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel’s dead. Somebody wrote a poem about it. One might do the same about a Home Safe and the manager.’
Gwatkin ignored such disenchantment.
‘The bren’s a soldier’s job,’ he said.
‘What about Pay Parades and Kit Inspection? They’re soldiers’ jobs. It doesn’t make them any more enjoyable.’
‘Better than taking the Relief Till to Treorchy on a market day, doling out the money from a bag in old Mrs Jones-the-Milk’s front parlour. What sort of life is that for a man?’
‘You find the army more glamorous, Rowland?’
‘Yes,’ he said eagerly, ‘glamorous. That’s the word. Don’t you feel you want to do more in life than sit in front of a row of ledgers all day long? I know I do.’
‘Sitting at Castlemallock listening to the wireless announcing the German army is pushing towards the Channel ports isn’t particularly inspiring either – especially after an hour with the CQMS trying to sort out the Company’s sock situation, or searching for a pair of battle-dress trousers to fit Evans, J., who is such an abnormal shape.’
‘No, Nick, but we’ll be in it soon. We can’t stay at Castlemallock for ever.’
‘Why not?’
‘Anyway, Castlemallock’s not so bad.’
He seemed desperately anxious to prevent me from speaking hardly of Castlemallock.
‘I agree the park is pretty. That is about the best you can say for it.’
‘It’s come to mean a lot to me,’ Gwatkin said.
His voice was full of excitement. I had been quite wrong in supposing him disillusioned with the army. On the contrary, he was keener than ever. I could not understand why his enthusiasm had suddenly risen to such new heights. I did not for a moment, as we walked along, guess what the answer was going to be. By that time we had reached the pub judged by Gwatkin to be superior to M’Coy’s. The facade, it had to be admitted, was remarkably similar to M’Coy’s, though in a back alley, rather than the main street of the town. Otherwise, the place was the usual large cottage, the ground floor of which had been converted to the purposes of a tavern. I followed Gwatkin through the low door. The interior was dark, the smell uninviting. No one was about when we entered, but voices came from a room beyond the bar. Gwatkin tapped the counter with a coin.
‘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 w
hen 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?’
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 3 Page 18