by Alec Waugh
They met first at the British Club.
‘Let’s only have a couple of whiskies,’ Johnson said. ‘I got some wine at the N.A.A.F.I. They’re keeping it on ice for us at the Sinbad.’
It was a warm still night; a dozen or so tables had been set out on the terrace. There were fires burning down the east bank of the river, where the large flat fish—the musgoof—was being grilled. There was no moon yet; the sky seemed very low and the stars very bright. ‘Let’s make this a good dinner,’ Johnson said. ‘If you were in England and you could order anything you liked, what would you start off with?’
‘As there’s not an “R” in the month, I can’t say “oysters”, so I’d say caviare.’
‘I thought you would. And that’s exactly what I’ve got. An F.S. Sergeant brought a jar of it from Tehran.’
The jar was in the bucket, cooling beside the wine. ‘It’s Palestinian wine,’ Johnson said. ‘It’s a toss up, isn’t it? Or so they tell me. I don’t know anything about wine. In fact, I’ve brought my hip flask. I’ll leave you to finish that bottle. I suppose I miss a great deal of pleasure through not appreciating wine. What’s the best dinner you’ve ever had?’
‘One of those gaudy nights at Oxford, I suppose.’
‘Mine wouldn’t be anything as grand as that. I believe that I’d plump for a dinner in Belgium somewhere. ’I’ve forgotten the name of the place; about fifteen miles back from Ypres; we’d had a week in the Salient; lost half our company. You were in the Salient, weren’t you?’
‘I was in the attack on Zonnebeke.’
‘This was a little after that. God, was it raining. God was I glad to get out of that ruddy Salient. We were going back to the Somme to rest. It was our first night out of the line. There was a Canadian captain, halfseas over; he kept on singing the same song. He only knew the refrain:
“Cheerioh, cheeriay, A rolling stone gathers no moss, so they say.”
He was going up the line next day. He was probably gathering moss himself within a week.’
‘What did you have for dinner?’
‘Heavens, but I’ve forgotten. Omelette and chicken, I suppose. But I can see it all so clearly; and the rattle of the rain; and bottle after bottle of champagne; and that Canadian with his rolling stone. Say what you like about that war, there were better times to it than there are to this. More variety and the relief of getting out of the line; going to Amiens for the night. There was leave too, every three or four months. God, the excitement of those fortnight leaves; with a swollen bank balance and everyone thinking you a hero. It’s altogether different now. You are ordered to the Middle East and it’s a five-year sentence but you can’t give yourself a good-bye party because that would be careless talk. Nothing to look forward to this time.’
They relished their caviare. And the mulligatawny soup was hot on the palate with an after-sting. ‘We don’t want any more fish, do we, after that caviare? The steaks are good here.’
The waiter asked them how they would have their steaks. Four, eight or twelve annas, for that was the way you ordered your steak at the Sinbad, as raw, medium rare, or well done. ‘I’m a middle of the road man myself,’ said Johnson. ‘Eight annas for me.’ With the arrival of the steak, Johnson put his flask upon the table.
‘You can manage the rest of that bottle yourself, can’t you?’
‘I’m sure I can; it’s very pleasant.’
‘I’m glad. I thought it was. I wish I liked wine more. I got started on whisky in the East. If you once feel at home with whisky, wine seems tepid.’
Johnson had never talked upon his years in India. ‘Do you look back on that as your best time?’ Reid asked.
He shook his head. ‘There was an unhappy feeling there. We felt that we weren’t wanted. There was a lot of pacifism in the air in England. You remember that trouble at Amritsar. We had the suspicion that if there was trouble, and we took a firm line as we should have to do, we wouldn’t be backed up at home. It made one resentful against one’s own country. That wasn’t pleasant for a soldier. Take it by and large, you know, everything has seemed pretty tame after that First War.’
‘I can’t say I’ve found that.’
‘Ah, but you are different, Prof. You didn’t stay on in the army and besides you’ve been a success as a civilian. You found your metier. But for the rest of us . . . it wasn’t so much that we were having a great time in the war. We weren’t. But the good times were so super. And it was easy to believe that peace would be a succession of those super times. Without the grim intervals between them. “Après la guerre” how we used to talk about it. “Après la guerre fini; Anglais soldat parti” And when it came, it amounted to so very little. Though, of course, that wouldn’t be true in your case. I suppose you’ve had a pretty good life really.’
‘I have had my difficult times.’
‘Who hasn’t? But if you had to live it over again, I guess you would.’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘I wouldn’t; no, I wouldn’t. It’s been such an anti-climax. If I’d had kids, it might have all been different; it was bad luck I didn’t; we both wanted them. But as it’s turned out, you can’t think how much time I spend brooding over those war years. And there are a lot of others who feel the same. Were you in London for the Silver Jubilee?’
‘I was.’
‘Did it strike you how much it was a recrudescence of a wartime nostalgia? All that milling round the streets, that crowd in front of Buck House, shouting for the King. The King was the symbol of that time, the survival: the singing of the wartime songs: “Tipperary” and “Pack up your troubles” and “Keep the home fires burning”. It was a living again in the First War. The last time of living again in it. Within a year, the King was dead: another year and the Prince of Wales had abdicated and there was a whole new dispensation. The Silver Jubilee was a kind of requiem for the war.’ The eight-anna steaks were thick and tender; black on the outside, reddish pink in the centre; and the heavy sweetish Palestinian wine had mercifully failed to become sickly after the second glass. Reid let himself relax. He had talked very little. Johnson had said that he wanted to fête the Prof.’s red flashes, but it was very clear that what he had really wanted was to indulge in last war reminiscences. A host was entitled to set the tone for his own party.
‘You weren’t ever wounded, were you, Prof.?’ he asked.
‘No, I was taken prisoner, but I wasn’t wounded.’
‘I wasn’t wounded either. I was lucky. Did you ever think that you might get killed?’
‘Oddly enough I never did. Though the betting, I suppose, was even.’
‘Nor did I. They used to say that men always had a premonition. They knew if they were for it.’
‘I’d heard that said too.’
‘It must have been a curious feeling for those who had that premonition; sitting in the mess the evening before you’re going up the line, listening to the talk of what you’d be doing when you came down again, joining in the talk, yet knowing that though some of them might be still here to carry out those plans, you wouldn’t. Isn’t that what they call dramatic irony?’
‘That’s what they call dramatic irony.’
‘I never had that feeling; yet so often I was so very close: a whacking great shell landing in a trench two seconds after I’d got round the traverse. I remember looking once at a trench that had been blown to pieces and saying to myself: “I wonder how often I shall find myself, twenty years from now, wishing I’d not moved round that traverse.” Did you ever think that, Prof.?’
‘I always thought: “I’m bearing a charmed life.” ’
‘Perhaps that’s because you had a different kind of premonition. You knew that you were going to make something of your life. You had a premonition of success.’
‘Success is a big word.’
‘You can apply it in your case.’
Reid did not answer. He remembered what Mallet had said. ‘You’ve sized yourself up. You know what you amount
to.’ And he supposed that that was true. He had been born with a certain talent: and he believed that he had made the most of it. He had made the mistake neither of minimizing nor magnifying its dimensions. He saw himself in focus. He had thought quite a lot afterwards over Mallet’s talk. He had been surprised by Mallet’s powers of intuition. He had told him things that he had not realized about himself, and about Farrar too. Perhaps that was the feminine streak in Mallet. He had once heard a Don at Oxford arguing that you knew the other sex much better than you knew your own. ‘Men put on a mask with each other. They are on the defensive; there’s rivalry between them; so they don’t give themselves away. What man has ever seen another man in tears? Most women have.’ Perhaps Mallet who had, so everyone said, this strong feminine streak was able to enter a man’s mentality in the way that a woman could. He had brooded a long time over Mallet’s warning. What devilment were Farrar and Sedgwick cooking up?
‘Do you remember that château at Potije, on the road from Ypres?’ Johnson was continuing. ‘Well, I was in charge once there, of an ammunition dump...’
So the flood of memories flowed on, as the Tigris below them swirled south to Babylon; the moon would be rising soon, already a grey brown shimmer flickered on the water and Reid in his turn found himself recalled to distant battles. ‘Where were you in 1918, on March the twenty first?’ he asked.
A sense of euphoria engulfed him. Across the water came the sound of a clear voice singing from an open-air cinema. That must be Deanna Durbin in the film that he had planned to see on Saturday. He could almost hear the words. A waning moon threequarters full was rising above the low skyline of the city. Its reflection flickered on the rippling water, lighting the islands that rose above its surface. From the date groves round the Centre rose a murmuring of voices and the persistent jangled rhythms of oriental music. It was Ramadan, when no one slept. What peace. What utter peace.
‘Believe it or not, I was on leave. I’d only had five days of it. Did they recall me in a hurry.’
‘Then you don’t remember how it was around Arras in those days; an unreal sense of peace; mild bland sunlight after morning mists.’
How those mists lingered on the 21st, on the day of the great German breakthrough. Anecdote followed anecdote. The bottle emptied in the bucket and theirs was the last table on the terrace.
‘We must be going. It’s been a great, great evening.’
‘It’s certainly been that for me,’ said Johnson.
A staff car was waiting for them in Rashid Street. The pavements were empty now. Within ten minutes, they were outside the mess. ‘I think I’ll go into my office for a moment,’ Johnson said.
‘Me, I’m for bed,’ said Reid.
Reid’s room was on the first floor, facing East. His bed had been set out on the balcony. The nights were very hot, but round about four in the morning, a cool breeze would rise, and he would pull a sheet over his shoulders. That was one of the best moments of the day, that waking to a sense of a chill.
He was tired, but he was not sleepy yet. He changed into his pyjamas and stood leaning on the balustrade, looking down on the eternal river. It had been a strange, strange evening, evocative of so much that he had half-forgotten. Would he, twenty years from now, on the brink of age, looking back on the Second War, hear himself saying: ‘Everything has been an anti-climax since?’ He did not think he would.
Two days earlier he had learnt that the machinery of his divorce suit was revolving smoothly. He could expect his decree nisi early in the new year. Because of this divorce he would on the surface be returning to an entirely different life. Yet he would be still a professor of history and philosophy. He was limited by his very assets. He looked ahead five years; the war would be over. He would be fifty; his sons would be at a university. They would have picked up, he and they, the threads that had been dropped during the war. They would probably be as close to him as they would have been if he had shared their teens with them and he would have been spared that saddening period when a father feels his children growing away from him, needing to assert their independence, a mental equivalent for the weaning of a child. The bond would never have been so close that there would have been the necessity for that wrenching free.
Some psychologists argued that divorce gave children a sense of insecurity. That might happen when a home was suddenly broken up, when the basis of their existence fell apart. But he felt that that was a more valid argument in the United States, a country of overwhelming territorial vastness, whose citizens, whose very way of life was perpetually on the move, and where the young needed to be assured that they had roots. He did not feel that that argument held good in England, with its inherited culture, with its assurance of survival in every church spire, in every village, in the cities through which for nine hundred years no foreign feet had marched. He did not believe his sons would feel they had been cheated. They might even enjoy having a second home. They might call it ‘rather fun’ or whatever the slang phrase of the moment was.
What would that second home be like? Would he be a bachelor? Would he have remarried? Remarried whom? Diana? Why not, after all, why not? She would want to make an end sometime of her present vagabondage, which was well enough in wartime, but would not be in step with a world that was bent not upon destruction but upon reconstruction. Not that Diana wanted to be in step. But she was a part of the spirit of her day; in her revolt against her father, she was in tune with the moment’s mood, reacting against complacence. That battle was now fought out. A new battle would be starting; the rebuilding of a broken world. Why should not he and Diana find themselves in step?
From behind him, seemingly from the office wing, came a metallic bark like the sound of a rifle shot. Which probably was what it was. One of the chowkidars trying to scare off an imagined thief. Two weeks ago, the tyres had been stolen off one of the Centre’s cars, under the sentries’ eyes. The sentries had been told to shoot. He listened, craning his neck. From his balcony he could see the front of the offices. A light went on in one of the top windows. The door of the office opened. A man stood in the doorway. A white man; in a dressing-gown. The duty officer. Damn him; he had no right to undress. He had a bed there, surely that should do. He broke into a run. He was making for the mess. There was something up. Reid hurried down to meet him. There was a lamp over the entrance to the mess; it shone down on the duty officer’s face so that the cheek bone shadowed it, giving it the look of a distorted mask. ‘Yes, yes, what is it?’
‘It’s Major Johnson, sir. He’s shot.’
‘He’s wounded?’
‘No, sir. Yes, sir. I mean he’s dead.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Oh yes, sir, quite. His whole head, sir, blown right off.’
‘Who by? What by? That damn fool chowkidar?’
‘Oh no, sir, by himself; his own revolver. It was in his hand. He was in his office. He’s been over there half an hour; in his office, working. Then suddenly the gun went off.’
‘I see. We’ll go across.’
Funerals had to be carried out quickly in Baghdad in the summer. Johnson’s was fixed for the following afternoon. A perfunctory inquest decided that he had died by his own hand through misadventure. Subsequently there would be a military court of inquiry. A verdict of suicide would establish that the crime of a self-inflicted wound had been committed, an unfavourable decision that would affect the pension to Johnson’s widow. Reid had no doubt, however, that the court would take a lenient view of the situation. So many juries had ruled that a man had had an accident cleaning his gun. There would be only two witnesses, himself and the duty officer. The duty officer would testify that Johnson had come into the office late, had gone to his own room and worked over his files. Johnson had spoken to him on his way to his office and said that he expected to be there for about an hour. Half an hour later there had been the report of a shot being fired. He would describe the condition in which he had found Johnson. He would add that there were a number of rou
tine files on the desk. Johnson had clearly spent the last half hour of his life working on those files. At any rate until he had begun to clean his revolver. The cleaning materials were on the desk.
Reid in his turn would describe the dinner at the Sinbad. He would say that Johnson was in the best of humours; that they had had two whiskies at the British Club; that Johnson had had two glasses of white wine and then had drunk whisky from his flask. He could not remember how many whiskies Johnson had nor how strong they were. Johnson had a good head for whisky, but he had certainly drunk enough to be a little careless. ‘I was glad that I had not got to drive a car myself.’ Reid proposed to say. He would add that he had known Johnson well. They had been contemporaries at Sandhurst, though they had not met there. On their journey out to the Middle East, they had found that the fact of their being contemporaries had constituted a genuine bond between them. He had received a number of confidences from Johnson. He had the highest respect for Johnson as a man and as an officer. He did not believe that Johnson had any personal worries. A year ago, Johnson had been worried by his inability to find a suitable posting in the Middle East. He had been worried by the report that officers over the age of forty-five were to be relegated to unemployment if they were not needed upon any staff. It was at his own suggestion that Johnson had been offered an appointment with the Centre. It was work that he was admirably fitted to undertake. He enjoyed the work. He was popular with the officers and with the other ranks. There was no reason why he should not stay on in the Centre till the end of the war. He could see no reason why Johnson should have wanted to take his life.
Neither he nor the duty officer would be precise about the condition of Johnson’s body. The significant question would therefore not be asked. ‘Why should a man in the process of cleaning a revolver put its muzzle in his mouth?’