A ginger man in uniform, capless, arms akimbo but bent painfully forward the better to show his three chevrons of rank, now stood in the doorway and said, surveying the queue compassionately, 'The scum of the earth, the dregs of humanity,' and then, 'Right. In you come. No pushing and shoving. Plenty for everybody if you can call it a body. In, then.' The queue pushed and shoved. Inside, on the left, three men in dirty cooks' white stood with ladles over steaming drums of stew. On the right a private soldier, his tunic far too large, clattered out dull-gleaming pannikins and spoons. The hungrier members of the queue barked at each other, drooling as their doles were ladled out, clapping dirty paws over their portions, protective lids, as they staggered with them over to the rows of tables. Tristram had eaten the day before, but the morning's anger had made him ravenous. The room, whitewashed, coarsely functional, was full of the noise of sucking, the splash and tremulous clatter of spoons. Tristram, maddened by the odorous steam, supped up his stew in seconds. Hunger was now greater than before. The man next to him was licking his empty bowl. Somebody, eating too greedily, had been sick on the floor. 'Waste,' said somebody else, 'sheer bloody waste.' There seemed to be no second helpings. Nor was it possible to sneak out and re-join the queue: the akimbo sergeant was watchful at the door. It did not, as a matter of fact, seem possible to get out at all.
A door diagonally opposite to the entrance now opened and a uniformed man in early middle age marched in. He was capped, polished, brushed, pressed, holstered, and carried the three stars of a captain. His steel-rimmed army-issue spectacles gleamed benevolently. Behind him stood a stocky two-striped man, clipboard under his arm. Tristram, with wonder and hope, saw that the captain carried, in addition to his stars, a grey bag that chinked discreetly as he walked. Money? God bless the army. God very much bless the army. The captain stalked around the tables, surveying, weighing, and the corporal toddled after. At Tristram's table, 'You,' said the captain - his accent was cultured - to an old champing man with wild hair, 'could use, perhaps, a tosheroon or so.' He dug into the bag and, half-contemptuously, tossed a bright coin on to the table. The old man made the ancient gesture of touching his forelock. 'You,' said the captain to a young hungry man who was, ironically, very fat, 'could probably make use of a loan. Government money, no interest charged, repayable within six months. Shall we say two guineas?' The corporal presented his clipboard, saying, 'Sign here.' The young man, with shame, confessed that he could not write. 'A cross, then,' comforted the corporal, 'then out through that door.' He nudged towards it, the door he and the officer had entered by. 'Ah,' said the captain to Tristram, 'tell me all about yourself.' His face was remarkably unlined, as though the army possessed some secret face-iron; he smelled curiously spicy. Tristram told him. 'A schoolmaster, eh? Well, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. How much shall we say? Four guineas? Perhaps you can be persuaded to settle for three.' He rustled the notes out of the bag. The corporal pushed his clipboard forward and seemed ready to stick an inkpencil in Tristram's eye. 'Sign here,' he said. Tristram signed, shaky, the notes clutched in the same hand. 'Now out through that door,' nudged the corporal.
The doorway seemed not to be a way out. It led into a long wide kind of hallway, whitewashed and smelling of size, and a number of ragged people were being indignant with a young and unhappy-looking sergeant. 'It's no good going on at me about it,' he said in a Northern voice pitched tight and high. 'Day after day we get them in here going on at me as if it was my fault, and I have to tell them it's nowt to do with me. Nothing,' he translated, looking at Tristram. 'Nobody made you,' he told everybody reasonably, 'do what you've just done now, did they? Some - that is to say, the old ones - got a little present. You got a loan. That'll be taken out of your pay, so much per week. Now, you needn't have taken the King's money if you didn't want to, and you needn't have signed. It was all quite voluntary.' He pronounced this last word to rhyme with 'hairy'. Tristram's heart lunged down deep then up again into his throat, as if it were on elastic.
'What is all this?' he said. 'What's going on?' To his surprise he saw the dirty-grey lady there, ramrod with grande dame hauteur. 'This creature,' she said, 'has the impertinence to say that we've joined the army. I never heard such nonsense. Me in the army. A woman of my age and position.'
'I daresay you'll do all right,' said the sergeant. 'They like them a bit younger as a rule, but you'll as like as not get a nice job looking after the auxiliaries. Women soldiers,' he explained courteously to Tristram, as though Tristram were the most ignorant one there, 'are called auxiliaries, you see.'
'Is this true?' asked Tristram, fighting for calm. The sergeant, who seemed a decent young man, nodded gloomily. He said:
'I always tell people never to sign anything till they've read it. That thing that Corporal Newlands has out there says at the top that you've volunteered to serve with the colours for twelve months. It's in pretty small printing, but you could have read it if you'd wanted.'
'He had his thumb over it,' said Tristram.
'I can't read,' said the young fat man.
'Well, then, that's your funeral, isn't it?' said the sergeant. 'They'll teach you to read, never fear.'
'This,' said the grey lady, 'is preposterous. This is an utter scandal and a disgrace. I shall go back there at once and give them back their filthy money and tell them precisely what I think of them.'
'That's the way,' said the sergeant admiringly. 'I can just see you in the orderly room, giving them what for. You'll do pretty well, you will. You'll be what they call a real old battle-axe.'
'Disgraceful.' And she made, a real old battle-axe, for the door.
'What's done can't be undone,' said the sergeant philosophically. 'What's been signed can't be unsigned. Fair means or foul, they've got you. But twelve months isn't much, now, is it? They talked me into signing on for seven years. A right twit, I was. A mug,' he translated for Tristram. 'Between you and me, though,' he confided to all, 'there's a lot more chance of promotion if you're a volunteer. Eee, she's at it,' he said, cocking an ear. From the dining-hall the raised voice of the grey woman could be clearly heard. 'Do well, she will.' Then, 'They'll be having what they call Con Scrip Shun before long, so Captain Taylor says. A volunteer will be in a different position altogether from one of those. That stands to reason.'
Tristram began to laugh. There was a chair just inside the doorway and he sat on it the better to laugh. 'Private Foxe,' he said and laughed, crying.
'That's the way,' said the sergeant approvingly. 'That's the real army spirit. Keep smiling is what I say, it's better to laugh than do the other thing. Well,' he said, standing at ease, nodding as other pressed vagrants came in, 'you're in the army now. You might as well make the best of it.' Tristram continued to laugh. 'Just like he's doing.'
Part Five
One
'lTSY bitsy booful,' went Derek Foxe, first to one dribbling chuckling twin, then to the other. 'Boo boo boo boop a doop,' he booed to his little namesake and then, scrupulously fair, that identical phatic utterance to tiny Tristram. He was never anything but scrupulously fair, as his subordinates at the Ministry of Fertility could testify; even Loosley, demoted to rather junior executive rank could - though he was now trying to prove Derek a homosexual - hardly prate of injustice. 'Worple worple worple,' chortled Derek in serial duplicate, typing the twins with two fingers. These meanwhile, bubbling like fish, secure in their play-pen, podgily clutched the rails and performed a treadmill action. Tiny Tristram alone said, like Upanishadian thunder, 'Da da da.' 'Ah,' said Derek seriously, 'we ought to have more, lots, lots more.'
'So they can be put in the army and shot at?' said Beatrice-Joanna. 'Not likely.'
'Oh, that -' Derek, hands clasped behind, did a brief quarterdeck-pacing act round the drawing-room. He then drank off his coffee. It was a spacious drawing-room; all the rooms of the seaward-looking flat were spacious. There was space nowadays for men of Derek's rank, for their wives or pseudo-wives, their children. 'Everybody's got
to take his chance,' he said. 'Her chance, too. That's why we ought to have lots more.'
'Nonsense,' said Beatrice-Joanna. She was stretched on a deep-piled chunky couch that was eight feet long and claret-coloured. She was leafing through the latest issue of Sheek, a fashion magazine which was all pictures. Bustles, her eye noted, were decreed by Paris for daywear; daring decolktages were de rigueur for evening; Hongkong cheongsams were lascivious with fourfold slits. Sex. War and sex. Babies and bullets. 'In the old days,' she mused, 'I'd have been told that I've already exceeded my ration. And now your Ministry tells me that I've not fulfilled my quota. Mad.'
'When we're married,' said Derek, 'properly married, that is, you may feel differently about it.' He padded round to the rear of the couch and kissed her nape, its broth of goldish flue delicate in the weak sun. One of the twins, perhaps tiny Tristram, made, as on a satirical sound-track, a synchronic farting lip-noise. 'Then,' said Derek jocularly, 'I can really start talking about wifely duties.'
'How long now?'
'About six months. That will make it a full two years since you last saw him.' He kissed her delicious nape once more. 'The statutory period for desertion.'
'I keep thinking about him,' said Beatrice-Joanna. 'I can't help it. I had a dream a couple of nights ago. I saw Tristram quite clearly, wandering through the streets, crying out for me.'
'Dreams don't mean anything.'
'And I've been thinking about that business of Shonny saying he'd seen him. In Preston.'
'Just before they put the poor man away.'
'Poor, poor Shonny.' Beatrice-Joanna gave the twins a glance of desperate fondness. Shonny's brain turned by the loss of his children, the defection of his God, he now recited long liturgies of his own composition - in a cell in Winwick Hospital, near Warrington, Lancs. - trying to munch consecrated bedclothes. 'I can't help feeling that. That he's been wandering everywhere, all over the country, looking for me.'
'There were ways and means,' said Derek. 'Were you honestly expected to live off air, you and the two children? I've said often, and I say again now, that the most charitable thing is to think of Tristram long dead and long eaten. Tristram is ended, over. Now it's you and me. The future.' He looked, bending over her, masterfully smiling, groomed and smooth, very much like the future. 'Heavens,' he said, without anxiety. 'The time.' A clock on the far wall meekly showed it him - a stylized golden sun of a clock, fiery rays like hair-locks set all round it. 'I must fly,' he said, without hurry. And then, with even less hurry, into her ear, 'You wouldn't really like things to be any different, would you? You're happy with me, aren't you? Say you're happy.'
'Oh, I'm happy.' But her smile was wan. 'It's just that I - that I like things to be right, that's all.'
'Things are right. Very much right.' He kissed her fully on the mouth with a relish that smacked nothing of valediction. But he said, 'Now I really must fly. I've a busy afternoon ahead of me. I'll be home about six.' He did not forget the twins, kissing each on its flossy pate and blowing final phatic vocables at them. Waving, smiling, brief-case under arm, he left: the Ministry car would be waiting below.
After about three minutes Beatrice-Joanna glanced round the room somewhat furtively, then tiptoed over to the switch which operated the Daily Newsdisc, shinyblack as a liquorice pancake on its wall-spindle. She could not altogether explain to herself this sensation of small guilt at wanting to hear the day's news again: after all, the Daily N ewsdisc - now one of a number of free-enterprise organs, auditory, audio-visual, even (the Weekly Feel) tactile - was there for anybody's re-listening. What itched in Beatrice-Joanna's brain-stem was a hint that there was something disingenuous about the news these days, something crafty and implausible which Derek and people like him knew all about (laughing up their sleeves at it) but didn't want people like her to know all about. She wanted to see if she could find a crack in the too-smooth plaster which now -
'- Secession of China from Ruspun and the declaration of China's intention - made by Premier Poh Soo Jin in Peking - to establish an independent association of states to be known in Kuo-Yu as Ta Chung-kuo, anglicized as Chinspun. Indications are already reported of aggressive intentions towards both Ruspun and Enspun, as witness raids on Kultuk and Boryza and massing of infantry in Southern Canton. There is every sign, says our Midway Island observer, of an intended annexation of Japan. With the laying bare of the western flank of Enspun -' Beatrice-Joanna clicked off the manic synthetic voice. Sheer damned nonsense. If the world were really considering starting a real war, surely there should be talk of soaring planes and plunging warships as well as trudging armies with simple portable weapons; there should, surely, be threats of the resurrection of one of those ancient but efficacious province-blasting nuclear devices. But there wasn't. That British Army improvised last year and now superseded - for the maintenance of civil order - by reasonable blueclad bobbies, was pure infantry with minimal support of specialist corps; in the magazines and on the newsreels one saw the soldiers climbing the ramps of troopers - off for training, it was said, on the Annexe Islands or for police work in dissident corridors - up-thumbing at the cameras with a partially dentate leer, the best of British luck and pluck.
Beatrice-Joanna had almost convinced herself that she had been convinced, one evening before the stereotelly in this very flat, that she had seen in penumbral background to the close-up of an up-thumbing cheerful Tommy a face she knew. 'Nonsense,' of course, from Derek, stretched in his purple dressing-gown. 'If Tristram were in the army Army Records would have his name. You sometimes forget I'm his brother and I have a certain duty. I consulted Army Records and they know nothing. I've said before, and I say again now, the most charitable thing is to think of Tristram long dead and long eaten.' Still -
She pressed an electric buzzer on a wall-panel of switches and buzzers; almost at once a cheerful (cheerful as a Tommy) brown girl glided in, bowing in spasms, dressed in servant's black silk-substitute. She was a pretty little orchestra of races and her name was Jane. 'Jane,' said Beatrice-Joanna, 'please get the twins ready for their afternoon outing.' 'Yes, yes, madam,' said Jane, and she wheeled the castered play-pen across the seagreen fitted carpet, clucking and creasing her face at the two treadmilling infants.
Beatrice-Joanna went to her bedroom to make herself ready for the afternoon's walk. Her dressing-table carried, in neat order, a whole pharmacy of creams and unguents; her wall-fitted wardrobes were full of gowns and costumes. She had servants, children, a handsome and successful pseudo-husband (co-ordinating subminister at the Ministry of Fertility, soon, it was said, to be Minister), all that love could give and money could buy. But she did not think she was really happy. A dim film in some basement projection-room of her mind occasionally flickered a sequence of things as they had been. Often called a flower by Derek (and, previously, by Tristram), had she really been a flower she would have belonged to the class Diandria. She needed two men in her life, her day to be salted by infidelity.
She now unlocked a carved camphorwood box and took from it a letter she had written the day before; it smelled deliciously of mingled camphor and sandalwood. She read through it for the seventh or eighth time before definitely making up her mind to send it. It said:
'Dearest dearest Tristram, there have been such changes in this mad world, so many strange things have been happening since we parted so unhappily, that there is nothing I can say here that will make much sense to either of us except that I miss you and love you and long for you. I'm living with Derek now, but don't think badly of me for that: I have to keep a home going for your two sons (yes, I do honestly believe they are really yours). Perhaps you have already tried to write to me, perhaps - and I firmly believe this - you have tried to get in touch with me, but I know how difficult life has been. Your brother has been most kind to me and I think he genuinely loves me, but I don't think any letter you write c / o him would ever reach me. He has his precious career to think of, a man with children standing a better chance of promotion to
Minister of Fertility than a man with none, or so he says. You will remember how every day when we were together I used to take my walk by the sea, not far from Government Building. Every afternoon I still do that, wheeling my two sons in their pram, from three to four. Looking out to sea I now pray daily that the sea will send you back to me. This is my hope. I love you and if I ever hurt you I am sorry. Come back to your always loving Beattie.'
She refolded this and placed it in a fine-quality subtle-smelling envelope. Then she took her dainty inkpencil and addressed the envelope in her bold mannish hand to Tristram Foxe, Esq., B.A., British Army. There was just a chance; it was the only way, anyway. As for Army Records - Derek must either be most influential or a great liar; she herself, one furtive afternoon after seeing that television newsreel, had telephoned the War Office (the house telephone was an extension of the Ministry switchboard) and, after endless shuttling from department to department, had finally contacted a little Scots voice which admitted to being Army Records but said coldly that private individuals could not be informed of troop locations. Something to do with security. But she was not, said Beatrice-Joanna, concerned primarily with anything so sophisticated as location; her enquiry was more fundamental, more ontological. The voice had clicked itself sternly off.
Derek had come home smiling at six and wanted to know, smiling, why she had been telephoning Army Records. Didn't she believe him, her pseudo-husband, didn't she trust him? That was the whole point: she didn't. One could forgive mendacity and untrustworthiness in a lover but hardly in a husband, even pseudo. She didn't tell him this, however. Still, his love seemed to be an unscrupulous sort of love, and that was flattering, but she preferred that sort of love in a lover.
So she went out with the twins in a pram in the winter marine sunshine, the little black-clad nurse clucking and moon-smiling at the two bubbling little men in their warm woollies, and she posted the letter in a pillarbox whose top had been whitened by seagull-droppings. It was like launching a letter in a bottle on the sea, that great unpunctual deliverer.
The Wanting Seed Page 17