Soldier No More

'Because of you?'

'She'd decided I ought to be a teacher. But I was in the Army then . . . she got it all mixed up—she thought, if they found out about her, and then about Harry . . . with the way Senator dummy5

McCarthy was hunting down people with the wrong connections. . . she had this crazy idea that they'd throw me out of the Army, and then they wouldn't let me teach after that. She said I'd be tagged as a 'subversive'—it's funny, really.'

'Funny?'

'Harry wouldn't have made that mistake. He would have known that it wouldn't have made any difference to my becoming a teacher. They don't work that way in England, he would have known. They couldn't have cared less—

particularly in the sort of school I wanted to teach in ... not even if I'd been Stalin's stepson-in-law—or Krushchev's . . .

and McCarthy never carried any weight in England—Harry would have known all that. But Julie didn't, that's all.'

She stared at him. 'And that is ... funny?' She was questioning the word, not the fact.

'Ironic, is what I mean, Madame.'

'Ah!' she nodded. ' 'A funny sort of cobber' means 'a strange one', not a humorist. And 'funny business' is not comedy, but the exact opposite—I remember.' Her wrinkled eyelids closed momentarily.

'Cobber' was purest Australian; and, more than that, she pronounced the word with an authentic Aussie twang. And yet there was no Aussie in her 'funny business', it was drawled in what might almost have been American.

She was staring at him again. 'And the army too? They would dummy5

not have cared?'

Roche shrugged. 'I was only a National Service officer at the time—a conscript. I was due to be demobbed— demobilised—

pretty soon, anyway. It might have worried them a bit, in some ways. But it wouldn't have worried me, anyway.' She frowned suddenly. 'That surprises you, Madame?'

'You did not teach ... in this school of yours?' She nodded, still frowning. 'You remained in the army . . . Yes, that surprises me.'

Roche relaxed. They had prepared him for this one long ago, if his connection with Julie had ever surfaced. It was another in the long succession of ironies that he had never needed their carefully rehearsed explanation until now, for a purpose and an interrogation very different from the one they had envisaged.

'In what way, Madame?' But it would do, just the same, their explanation.

'After such a tragedy . . . such a mockery. . . you must have been a very young man—' the hint of a sad smile crossed her mouth '—you are not an old man even now ... I would have expected bitterness, if not anger, Captain.'

Roche constructed his own frown carefully, as Raymond Galles had advised him to do. 'Against whom Madame?'

'Against those in power. Against the . . . the brass-hats? The hats of brass, is it?'

Again the strange—funny-strange—pronunciation: it might dummy5

almost be broad Yorkshire this time.

'The Establishment?'

'The Establishment? That is new to me ... But—the Establishment— yes, that has the right sound and the right meaning,' she nodded, mimicking him. 'The . . .

Establishment—yes!'

She echoed him again exactly. And that, of course, was what she was doing, thought Roche, the mists clearing from his mind. Once upon a time many Allied escapers had passed through this house, and some of them must have stayed for days, until the coast was clear, since it was an emergency hide-out for the times when the normal route was compromised. Australians, Americans, Yorkshiremen—they had all come and gone, leaving nothing behind them but memories and the echoes of their dialects in the vocabulary of this elderly French lady, who had an ear for the music of language!

'Oh . . . the I see—' He felt himself warming to her, with her so beautifully and carefully enunciated mongrel English and all the courageous stories behind it which would never be told, of bomber crews from Lancasters and Flying Fortresses, from Bradford and Brisbane and Boise, Idaho. But there was a cold layer beneath the warm one: if she could hear and remember so much, could she hear and distinguish the untruth also— Raymond Galles had warned him that her ear was razor sharp? 'Yes—angry, certainly Madame.'

That was the very truth, he was safe there: first the dummy5

paralysing shock of grief and despair . . . then— then anger and bitterness both, which he had been too cowardly to turn into outright rebellion, which had been in a fair way to turn into the lethargic boredom of serving out his time as a messenger-boy in Japan, hauling brief-cases of decoded intercepts from American to British headquarters in a humiliating one-way traffic—

How he had hated the Americans then . . . hated the Americans, and hated the British by simple extension, the servile allies of the hated Americans, who had killed his Julie

— his American— and now received the scraps from their master's table, carried in the brief-case chained to his wrist, the very ball- and-chain of servitude!