When the lecture was finished the company fell out for twenty minutes; they smoked and ate chocolate and exchanged gossip; qualifying every noun, verb or adjective with the single, unvarying obscenity which punctuated all their speech like a hiccup; they stamped their feet and chafed their hands.
“What did the––company commander want?”
“He wanted to send me to a––O.C.T.U.,” said Alastair.
“Well some––are––lucky. When are you off?”
“I’m staying here.”
“Don’t you want to be a––officer?”
“Not––likely,” said Alastair.
When people asked Alastair, as they quite often did, why he did not put in for a commission, he sometimes said, “Snobbery. I don’t want to meet the officers on social terms”; sometimes he said, “Laziness. They work too hard in wartime”; sometimes he said, “The whole thing’s so crazy one might as well go the whole hog.” To Sonia he said, “We’ve had a pretty easy life up to now. It’s probably quite good for one to have a change sometimes.” That was the nearest he ever came to expressing the nebulous satisfaction which lay at the back of his mind. Sonia understood it, but left it undefined. Once, much later, she said to Basil, “I believe I know what Alastair felt all that first winter of the war. It sounds awfully unlike him, but he was a much odder character than anyone knew. You remember that man who used to dress as an Arab and then went into the Air Force as a private because the thought the British Government had let the Arabs down? I forget his name but there were lots of books about him…. Well, I believe Alastair felt like that. You see he’d never done anything for the country and though we were always broke we had lots of money really and lots of fun. I believe he thought that perhaps if we hadn’t had so much fun perhaps there wouldn’t have been any war. Though how he could blame himself for Hitler I never quite saw…At least I do now in a way,” she added. “He went into the ranks as a kind of penance or whatever it’s called, that religious people are always supposed to do.”
It was a penance whose austerities, such as they were, admitted of relaxation.
After the stand-easy they fell in for platoon training. Alastair’s platoon commander was away that morning. He was sitting on a Court of Enquiry. For three hours he and two other officers heard evidence, and recorded it at length, on the loss of a swill tub from H.Q. lines. At length it was clear that there was a conspiracy of perjury on the part of all the witnesses, or that the tub had disappeared by some supernatural means independent of human agency; the Court therefore entered a verdict that no negligence was attributable to anyone in the matter and recommended that the loss be made good out of public funds. The President said, “I don’t expect the C.O. will approve that verdict. He’ll send the papers back for fresh evidence to be taken.”
Meanwhile the platoon, left in charge of the Sergeant, split up into sections and practised immediate action on the Bren gun.
“Gun fires two rounds and stops again. What do you look at now, Trumpington?”
“Gas regulator.”…Off with the magazine. Press, pull back, press… “Number Two gun clear.”
“What’s he forgotten?”
A chorus, “Butt strap.”
One man said, “Barrel-locking nut.” He had said it once, one splendid day, when asked a question, and he had been right when everyone else was stumped, and he had been commended. So now he always said it, like a gambler obstinately backing the same colour against a long run of bad luck; it was bound to turn up again one day.
The Corporal ignored him. “Quite right, he’s forgotten the butt strap. Down again, Trumpington.”
It was Saturday. Work ended at twelve o’clock; as the platoon commander was away, they knocked off ten minutes earlier and got all the gear stowed so that as soon as the call was sounded off on the bugle they could run straight for their quarters. Alastair had his leave pass for reveille on Monday. He had no need to fetch luggage. He kept everything he needed at home. Sonia was waiting in the car outside the guardroom; they did not go away for weekends but spent them, mostly in bed, in the furnished house which they had taken near by.
“I was pretty good with the Bren this morning,” said Alastair. “Only one mistake.”
“Darling, you are clever.”
“And I managed to shirk P.T.”
They had packed up ten minutes early too; altogether it had been a very satisfactory morning. And now he could look forward to a day and a half of privacy and leisure.
“I’ve been shopping in Woking,” said Sonia, “and I’ve got all kinds of delicious food and all the weekly papers. There’s a film there we might go and see.”
“We might,” said Alastair doubtfully. “It will probably be full of a lot of––soldiers.”
“Darling, I’ve never before heard words like that spoken. I thought they only came in print, in novels.”
Alastair had a bath and changed into tweeds. (It was chiefly in order that he might wear civilian clothes that he stayed indoors during weekends; for that and the cold outside and the ubiquitous military.) Then he took a whisky- and-soda and watched Sonia cooking; they had fried eggs, sausages, bacon, and cold plum pudding; after luncheon he lit a large cigar; it was snowing again, piling up round the steel-framed windows, shutting out the view of the golf course; there was a huge fire and at tea-time they toasted crumpets.
“There’s all this evening, and all tomorrow,” said Sonia. “Isn’t it lovely? You know, Alastair, you and I always seem to manage to have fun, don’t we, wherever we are?”
This was February 1940, in that strangely cozy interlude between peace and war, when there was leave every weekend and plenty to eat and drink and plenty to smoke, when France stood firm on the Maginot Line and the Finns stood firm in Finland, and everyone said what a cruel winter they must be having in Germany. During one of these weekends Sonia conceived a child.
As Mr. Bentley had foretold, it was not long before Ambrose found himself enrolled on the staff of the Ministry of Information. He was in fact one of the reforms introduced at the first of the many purges. Questions had been asked about the Ministry in the House of Commons; the Press, hampered in so much else, was free to exploit its own grievances. Redress was promised and after a week of intrigue the new appointments were made. Sir Philip Hesketh-Smithers went to the Folk-dancing Department; Mr. Pauling went to Woodcuts and Weaving; Mr. Digby-Smith was given the Arctic Circle; Mr. Bentley himself, after a dizzy period in which, for a day, he directed a film about postmen, for another day filed press-
