Sandhurst, which, as he progressed up the hierarchy, was proved amply justified. His had been a fine career. But he had not been of his lady wife Mildred’s class, not to start with. That is why the Grants had always invited Other Ranks. Not any longer. Mrs Grant was putting her foot down.
‘I don’t mind that boy, what’s his name, James something, he knows how to behave.’
‘He’s an officer now, my dear.’
‘Well, there you are.’
Ten young officers, James one of them, had spent a long weekend with the Grants and behaved well enough, though they, like the earlier guests, took themselves off into the town’s clubs.
James did not.
Colonel Grant said to James, while they sat companionably on the verandah, a tray of tea between them, ‘James, tell me, what is the talk in camp, about things in general?’
‘You mean, being kept here in India, doing nothing? ‘This was direct, and it was bitter, and not only on bis own account.
‘Yes, what are they saying?’
Now the Colonel must know what ‘they’ were saying, since his friend Colonel Chase heard it all, in the Officers’ Mess. Had he forgotten James was no longer with the ordinary soldiers?
‘When I was in with the men, there was a lot of grumbling. They don’t like it. But you know, the men grumble about everything.’ Yes, the Colonel did know, he hadn’t forgotten. ‘It seems to me, sir, that the men dislike officers as a matter of form … but is that what you were asking?’
What Colonel Grant was asking came from many levels and motives in him. He and Colonel Chase had sat together, talking intemperately - for them - about disaffection, and feeling that they were out of touch.
‘In the Officer’s Mess - is there bad feeling? Dangerous bad feeling?’
Since Colonel Chase heard the kind of thing said, this must be a question of interpretation: and James was startled.
‘I don’t like politics, sir, I never did.’
To say that, straight out, wasn’t something he would have done in the mess.
He had, at the beginning, said, ‘I’m not interested in politics,’ as he might have said, ‘I don’t take sugar in my tea.’
He could have said he was Conservative, or - daringly - that he intended to vote Labour, but not, that he was uninterested, any more than in the time of, let’s say, Luther’s Theses, someone might have said, I’m not interested in religion.
To be not interested in politics: that meant he was callously indifferent to the fate of humanity, at the very least misinformed. On that early evening a dozen young men set themselves to inform him. And so he had evolved some polite ways of indicating interest without committing himself.
But this explosion of interest in his lack of proper feeling had made him think back to the glorious days of I938. Now he knew that the intense political feeling of that time had not been the nation’s usual condition. Mostly left- wing feeling. There had been a boiling up of political thought, because of the Spanish Civil War, because of the Slump and the poverty, because of the threat of the coming war and so there had been all those politics, mostly left-wing. He had gone through it listening, but reading poetry.
In the Officers’ Mess most of the young men were left-wing, in various ways, but the talk was - loudly - about India. The young officers, not the older ones. The whole sub-continent was effervescing with talk of freedom, freedom from Britain, and here, in Camp X, their main task was to suppress it.
What had Colonel Chase said to Colonel Cram? He would have talked of troublemakers, Bolsheviks, even communists. About the Fifth Column, and possibly there might even have been talk of courts-martial.
‘You may not like politics, James, but I don’t imagine you can avoid them.’
James said truthfully, ‘I never think about it.’
Now the Colonel protested, in an old mans aggrieved voice, ‘Does what we’ve done here in India mean nothing to you? We’ve built all these fine railways, we’ve built roads, we’ve kept order …’ He had to stop. Order was not the word for what was happening now: agitators everywhere, the Congress, people in prison. Then, ‘Does the British Empire mean nothing to you, James?’
‘The Captains and Kings are going to have to depart, sir, that’s what I think.’
‘I see, and you don’t care.’
James might have said that if he were in Daphne’s arms the whole bloody British Empire could sink into the sea.
He said, ‘Well, sir, I don’t imagine what we think about it will make much difference to what happens.’
And now his voice was full of trouble. One reason why he didn’t like to think about politics was that if he did he had to think about the war, and that meant being engulfed in horror, an incredulous, unbelieving, protest that this war was happening at all. He knew that he dreamed about it, the enormity, the weight of it.
Colonel Grant looked sharply at the young man, whom he had been ready to convict of unfeeling. Rut no, that was not it, there was real pain there, and those blue eyes, which the Colonel thought of as English, were unhappy.
The Grants asked James and some others, one of them Second Lieutenant Jack Reeves, at the height of the hot season, for a week in the hills. They took the long slow train up into the hills and found themselves in a little cottage, that had English flowers in the garden. The winds blew cool and fresh and there was no dust. The villas and houses were called Elm Place, Wisteria Lodge, Kent Cottage, Hollyhock Close. Mrs Grant, no longer flushed with heat, though the neck of her dress showed a raddled red vee, revealed herself as an unremarkable, non-complaining hostess, but with a tendency to fuss, perhaps because she was feeling guilty. ‘James, you really must take care, I heard you coughing again last night. And you too Jack, here’s some linctus.’ The Colonel, evidently and touchingly
