That was why Wimpy had insisted on 'scouting around', with that sly, withdrawn look on his face—Wimpy was much brighter than he was, much quicker on the uptake, so he had needed to have those pictures (which he didn't believe in) proved or disproved by the evidence ot his own eyes, which he knew he would find.
That was really why he had wanted to go north, to Arras —
because there wasn't anything to the south to follow.
And that was why Wimpy had said 'To the French?', and not
'To catch up with the battalion?', of course.
dummy4
'Where's Willis?' repeated Major Audley, almost petulantly.
And . . .
That was how it would have been, with tanks up against soft aluminium anti-tank ammunition, over the ridge against C
Company—
But there was no time for tears for C Company, and poor incompetent acting-acting-company-commander Waterworks, and young Christopher Chichester, whose knowledge of the Boys anti-tank rifles would have availed him nothing with that bloody-fucking-useless practice ammunition up the spout—
'I'll go and get him,' said Harry Bastable.
There was a slight, impossible movement under the blanket, as though Major Audley had found the use of one blackened claw.
'
'My boy, David . . .'
Bastable was pinned down by those eyes.
'Tell Willis . . . My boy, David—he knows my boy, David—'
Audley stopped abruptly.
Suddenly, Bastable knew what Audley was talking about: he had a son named David, and Willis was an acquaintance, if not a friend, and more than that a schoolmaster, if not an acquaintance, who had admitted teaching Audley's 'my boy, dummy4
David'—that was who he was talking about.
'Yes, Nigel—' he leaned forward again. '—your son, David—?'
'Not my son—not my son—but my boy, damn it —' Major Audley took one great rattling breath, and then a second shallower one.
Bastable couldn't make head nor tail of that, for the man was obviously rambling now, but he forced himself to lean over to place his ear closer to catch the words.
'Your son, David?' He found himself staring at the heavy brocaded cushion on the back-rest of the settee. It was old-fashioned, but very high-class material, he noted. And very expensive too—not unlike the curtains he had sold to Mrs Anstruther last spring—was it only last spring?
Major Audley seemed to have had second thoughts about the message he wished to pass on to Wimpy about his son David, or the propriety of giving it to someone else, perhaps.
'Your son, David?' Bastable felt himself belittled by such lack of confidence. 'Tell Wimpy what?'
In the far distance, faint but clear enough in the silence surrounding them, there was the sound of someone kick-starting a motor-cycle. The engine roared for a moment, and then stalled.
That would be Wimpy, thought Bastable. Wimpy's passion for riding motor-cycles was unbridled, and he had even been known to break battalion rules to satisfy it. But if there was no battalion any more, then the rules no longer applied—and dummy4
if the battalion had left a motor-cycle behind then Wimpy was the man to nose it out, like a dog sensing the presence of a bone.
The French lady had touched his shoulder, he realized. And she was speaking to him again.
He turned towards her. 'Ne comprenez pas,' he said.
She stared at him for a moment. Then she reached past him and drew the blanket up over Audley's face.
Bastable looked down at the blanket, then back to the French lady, then down at the blanket again.
'He can't be dead. He was just speaking to me —' He pulled the blanket down.
The motor-cycle started up again in the distance.
IX
But it wasn't Wimpy on the motor-cycle.
It was one of the khaki machines the battalion had acquired at Boulogne—British Army property, and certainly not the property of the spotty-faced French youth who was sitting proudly astride it outside the shop where the old man and the women had been standing.
Bastable felt a sudden vicious anger well up inside him.
