Again Naidu hesitated. 'If we must go into it now… It's a question without an answer. And there is no question either. It didn't have to happen. It simply happened.'
'Come on, let's get going,' said Ayscue.
Churchill said loudly, 'Yes, let's do that. Why don't we do that? Chaps getting crushed under lorries, it's happening every day. Hardly worth stopping for. A bit uncomfortable for the chap under the lorry, but he was probably going too fast and this little experi-ence'll see to it that he takes more care in future. And think of all those opportunities for spiritual growth on the part of the chap's girl, and his mates, and the chaps who were driving the lorries that knocked him off. All that fortitude and resignation and what-not that they'd have had to do without otherwise. The Lord giveth and by Christ the Lord taketh away. Oh, it isn't only all right really, it's better than all right, eh, Willie?'
'James.' Ayscue faced Churchill across the hood of the jeep, 'Please don't talk in that accusing tone. I can't think of anybody who'd try to justify this thing here. Surely you must know I wouldn't. Can't you see that Moti and I feel just as badly about it as you do?'
'I don't know where Moti fits in,' said Churchill as before, throwing away the cigarette he had been trying to light, 'but as regards you, Willie, no, I can't. I don't think you do feel as badly as I do. If you did, you wouldn't be over here, getting ready to drive off to the Mess and have tea, you're supposed to be a bloody parson, you'd have crawled under that bloody lorry and be doing your best to comfort that poor sod, instead of-'
Ayscue had walked round the front of the jeep and now put his face close to Churchill's.
'How?' he said. 'Comfort him how?'
'Don't ask me, that's your department, I only-'
'Stop trying to set up a monopoly in feeling. The first thing I could make out over there was that the doctor was preparing to give the man an injection that would make him unconscious in seconds. He gave him it. There was nothing I could do after that, because he'll probably never recover consciousness, and if he does it's unlikely he'd be able to take in what I said or even what I was.'
'But he might.'
Naidu got out of the passenger's seat and walked past them up the road away from the accident.
'Exactly,' said Ayscue to Churchill, 'and that above all is why I'm over here instead of over there. What's he going to think if he wakes up and sees me? Use your imagination, James. How would you feel if you came to yourself in a hospital bed with a man in a dog-collar bending over you and telling you to be of good cheer? You'd know where you were due next all right. Agreed?'
Churchill nodded.
'If I had any reason to suppose that that boy believed in God then I wouldn't have come away. But these days the chances are very much against any such thing. And I couldn't ask him. I just couldn't risk it, James. You see that, don't you?'
Churchill nodded again.
'Come on.'
'I'm sorry, Willie,' said Churchill as they drove away.
'That's all right. We'd better both apologize to Moti. I'm afraid we may have shocked him a little.'
'Because of what?'
'Inappropriate behavior.'
They picked up Naidu and a few minutes later turned right towards the camp, first pausing to allow a heavy mobile crane to pass in the opposite direction.
Captain Leonard put on his mess-jacket and stood while Deering, his batman, fastened the buttons, using a thin cloth so as not to spoil the polish on the brass.
The jacket was of an unusual deep ultramarine, the mark of an honor awarded to the 17th Dragoons, Leonard's regiment, as a result of an incident in the Peninsular War when a squadron of them had been able to take an enemy force in the rear by swimming, horses and all, across an arm of the Mediterranean. The regiment was colloquially known as the Sailors in consequence. Nowadays it was a reconnaissance unit equipped with scout cars and light tanks, but had remained, as far as its officers were concerned, an abode of the landowning families. It was for this reason that Leonard's masters in Whitehall had chosen it as his cover, explaining rather offensively that nobody would suspect an officer in the Sailors of being anything but what he seemed. In a different mood, those masters had undone a fair part of this precaution by advising Leonard to divulge strong periodic hints about his real job, on the new-found principle-recently advertised to Hunter-that a security system works best when the opposition know it to be at work and may react significantly to that knowledge. Many of the officers and men in the camp had heard that Leonard was not really a soldier at all but some sort of agent of military counter-intelligence assigned to prevent anyone outside from learning what No. 6 Headquarters Administration Battalion was actually up to.
Although he had never trained or served with the Sailors, had never been near them except to be given dinner and shown round once at their depot, Leonard's attention to his turnout as one of them would have been judged adequate even by the Vice-President of their Mess. He pointed out various imperfections-a protruding thread at the edge of the revers, a fleck of dried metal-polish near a buttonhole-which Deering went some way towards repairing. Then, with the care of a cadet about to go on guard-mounting, Leonard examined himself in the full-length triple-paneled tailor's glass he took wherever his masters sent him.
The man inside the jacket and the close-fitting scarlet trousers with ultramarine stripe was forty years old. He had retreating black hair that was still thick at the sides and back, and a sallow complexion darkened round the mouth by beard showing under the skin. When he spoke, it was with a perpetual air of urgency stemming in part from the guttural sound he regularly substituted for the letter R. He said urgently now,
