The sight of his wife stopped him dead.
‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘What is it?’
‘Probably some bug. Don’t worry. She’ll be all right tomorrow I expect.’
‘Good Lord,’ he said again. She took pills from the bottle by the bed, gave them to him, and he downed them with a gulp from Daphne’s glass.
He sank down to sit on the bed. ‘Betty,’ he said, ‘five hundred men. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ He stood up, pulled off his boots, first one, thump, then the other, thump; walked around to the other side of Daphne, lay down and was asleep.
Betty went to tell the maids that no supper would be needed. ‘Go off home. That’s right.’
‘Thank you, medem.’
Betty returned to stand near the bed. Daphne had not moved.
Joe lay there, beside his wife, Good-fellow Joe, everybody’s friend, rubicund and jovial, but there he lay, and Hetty would not have known him. He kept grimacing in his sleep, and grinding his teeth, and then, when he was still, his mouth was dragged down with exhaustion.
Betty switched off the light. She returned to her house over dark lawns and sat for a long time, in the dark. Four days. There had been so much noise; soldiers with their English voices, telephones, cars coming and going, dance music, the same tunes played over and over again on die gramophone, while feet in army boots scraped and slid, but now the noise was subsiding, another voice that had been speaking all the time was becoming audible, in an eloquence of loss, and endurance. Four days the troopship had been in. A long way off, on the other side of a chasm, of an abyss, smiled life, dear kind ordinary life.
Down the gangways they came, between the guns that had been ready to defend them all the way from Cape Town, Hues of men, hundreds, to form up in their platoons and companies on the quays, where James was already standing at ease, though at ease he was not, for his feet hurt like, it is safe to say, the feet of most of those young men, some of whom had been there for over an hour, under an unwelcoming sun. These soldiers were not in as bad a way as getting on for a month ago, in Cape Town. Beneficent Cape of Good Hope had loaded the ship with food, and above all fruit. Foot boys who had scarcely tasted a grape in their lives had consumed luscious bunches until the bounty ran out. Three weeks this time, not a month, and the Indian Ocean had been kind except for a four-day storm halfway across, when conditions had been similar to
those in the Atlantic. James stood narrowing his eyes against the glare, holding himself so as not to faint; and he watched the great ship and, if hatred could kill, then it would have sunk there and then and be gone forever.
It was very hot. The air was stale and clammy. Thin dark men in loincloths hurried about being told what to do by dark men in uniform, who were being supervised by white men in uniform. No smell of sea now, though it was so near, only oil and traffic fumes. At last the endless lines did end, while men were still forming into their companies. Some had already moved off, to the accompaniment of the barking sounds of the sergeants, which James now found soothing, being reminders of order and regularity. James’s company were marched to a barracks, where they were fed, and showered off the seawater which on some skins still festered. Hundreds of naked young men, but while they were in nothing like as bad shape as in Cape Town they were still the walking wounded, patched with red rough skin and fading bruises. They would be sent to the train tomorrow, which would take them to their destination: unnamed. The name, its harsh alien syllables was whispered about through the hundreds of soldiers who were already thinking of it as a haven where they would at last keep still, lose the sway of the ship. Camp X was what they had to call it. The smell in the barracks was enough to make them sick, despite the showers.
Authority on this second stage of the voyage, remembering the twenty-five madmen they had left behind in Cape Town, the dozens that had gone into hospital to be patched up, and the shocking physical state of the disembarking men, had chosen not to notice that more and more slept on the decks, and, disregarding regulations, simply did not turn up for the ritual of the seawater douches. All that voyage had been very hot. The sickroom was full of cases of diarrhoea, and again officers had to double up so as to provide accommodation for another sickbay. There were always queues for the ship’s doctors. That fruit in unaccustomed stomachs, the feasting and drunkenness at Cape Town, added to the queues for the latrines. If an epidemic broke out - and why not? - what was to be done? Five thousand men, most already run down, many coughing: it was a poor show, and no ship’s officers had ever been more relieved to see a port appear at last.
In the barracks that night the soldiers lay on top of their bedding and cursed, and sweated. The attendant corporals and sergeants, as sick as their men, dismayed and homesick, advised patience, in raucous voices. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll fucking well be patient,’ shouts Sergeant Perkins.
As for James, he did not divide the voyage into two stages, England-Cape Town, Cape Town-Bombay. It had been one long suffering, consuming him, body and soul, interrupted by four days of heaven.
Through the three weeks of die Indian Ocean James, sick and sore, sat with his back against a cabin wall and dreamed … It was a dream, that place, with its mountain spilling cloud like a blessing over its lucky inhabitants. A dream of big cool houses in gardens. He held in his mind that scene of two young women, one dark, one fair, in their flowery wraps under a big tree, that scene; and the nights with Daphne, and one memory in particular, Daphne seeming to shine in the lamplight, her yellow hair spreading on white shoulders, holding out her arms to him. And dancing cheek to cheek. And how the sea had thundered over them, deep in love, crashed and banged and sucked, but then retreated, harmless.
A dream of happiness. He would hold it in his mind and not think of anything at all, only that, until this bloody war ended.
Meanwhile he was in a barracks with fifty men, cursing and scratching and calling out in their sleep, if you could call that sleep, and in the morning he marched with the others to the trains that would take them to Camp X, which it turned out was two days’ travelling away. The conditions on the train matched those on the ship for discomfort but at least a train goes straight, more or less, it doesn’t sway and lurch about. James watched the landscape of middle India go past and hated it. The Cape wasn’t alien, with its oaks and its vineyards and its fruit, he had felt at home in a landscape where nothing said: You don’t belong.
When they at last reached Camp X, somewhere in the middle of India, and marched in their companies on to the parade ground - the maidan - half the camp was of new shiny huts, or sheds. In other words, Nissen huts, and white tents covered the rest of the ground. There was a race, everyone knew, though no one had told them, to get the huts up before the monsoon started. Under their feet as they marched or stood at ease was a powdery dark dust, that puffed up and fell in drifts. The smell, what was the smell, wood smoke and pungency and much else, and the soldiers sniffed and tasted the air, this dusty foreign air, while a sun like a brass band blared down on them.
