A Solitary War (26 page)

“Of c-course I'm an Englishman!” stuttered Teddy, “A-and as I said, I meant nothing personal, but we can still say what we believe in this country. Isn't that what we went to war for, for
freedom
of speech?”

Runnymeade, a sardonic look on his face, filled up the glasses. “This is going to be a party,” he said, with satisfaction.

Phillip made a feeble protest at the sight of more gin slopping into his tumbler.

“Tell us about your pal Schicklgruber the house-painter,” went on Runnymeade, settling into his chair again, the sardonic look increasing as he glanced at Stefania.

Her mouth hardened as she retorted. “You shut up, ‘Boy'!” and turning to Phillip, clasped his hand. “Why didn't you bring Billy over? Is he alone on the farm?”

“No, my boy Roger has taken Billy out to try his hand at cock pheasants,” said Mrs. Carfax.

Phillip thought that she must have told Roger where to get cartridges, for he had come to him that morning to tell him that the granary door was locked. He said that he could not get inside, and wanted some .410 cartridges. The young gentleman had been wearing Lucy's old grey jacket over his own jacket, tied by a leather belt, to which had hung a dirk in its sheath which had belonged to Lucy's Pa. Phillip noticed that the point was chipped, as though having been thrust into frozen ground. Then he had asked for the coat. Later, questioning Billy, he learned that he had not lent Roger the dirk. Now ‘Yipps' had, without telling him, let the boys go shooting. Billy was not properly trained to the use and care of a gun. That mid-Victorian Holland saloon gun of Pa's, rebored for a .410 cartridge, had no safety catch.

“Don't you take any notice of ‘Boy',” said Stefania, seeing his worried look. “He has lost the art of composure.”

“I think most of us have, Stefania. I think all young people should be trained for the ballet, or judo, or games that require poise. Working on the land is good, too. One acquires patience.” Black despair seeped into his mind.

In a low voice she said, “Don't drink that stuff, leave it. ‘Boy' is rotted away with drink. He's incapable of love, that's his trouble. And he's only fifty-five.” She squeezed his hand again.

The sympathy of this great artist,
ballerina
assoluta
,
gave him a glow, a momentary release from tension; and lifting his glass he drank half the gin; to feel a kick into another dimension, wherein the flushed face of his old friend and tormentor Julian Warbeck appeared through nearly twenty years saying arrogantly,
Well,
old
boy,
it's
a
poor
heart
that
never
rejoices!
With Julian he swallowed the rest of the glass. It was almost with a shock that he heard
Runnymeade's
lazy drawl directed towards him, and the question, “You served in the last war, didn't you, Maddison?”

“More or less.”

“What were you?”

“Oh, all sorts of a skrimshanker.”

“I mean, what branch of the Service did you serve in?”

“Infantry—Special Section under the Sappers—Infantry—Machine Gun Corps until kicked out—then Infantry again.”

“Phillip did damned well,” exclaimed Teddy. “Didn't you know?”

“No, I didn't know, Mr. Pinnegar,” replied Runnymeade, looking at him with a flushed and cynical stare which filled Phillip with some uneasiness. “What was your regiment, Maddison?”

“The London Regiment—the Mediators—the Cantuvellaunians—among others——”

“Some people say you weren't in the British Army,” said Runnymeade, deliberately. “Do you know Major
Christianson-Cradock
?”

“Well, I like that,” cried Teddy hotly, “I served with Phillip in the Ancre Valley in the winter of 'sixteen, and all through Third Ypres in 'seventeen until we took Passchendaele!”

“I just wondered,” said Runnymeade, “what lot were you in at Passchendaele, Maddison? The Fifteenth Jaegers?”

“I had some cousins in the German Army, I'm proud to say.”

“But you weren't one of them?”

“If spirit is reality, and body the illusion, then certainly I was often among my brave friends in
feld grau
.”

“Well, it beats me,” said Captain Runnymeade, dropping the role of accuser. “Some say this, some say that, so I thought I would ask you straight out when I saw you, on the principle that an honest man has nothing to hide. But I may tell you that when Christianson-Cradock looked up your name in
Who's
Who
,
he could find no record of service, apparently.”

“Well, he couldn't have looked properly, that's all I can say!” cried Teddy.

“Were you in the same regiment, Mr. Pinnegar?”

“All through 'seventeen we served together, first on the Somme, then in Flanders, as I told you, and went through Third Ypres, in the same Machine Gun Company. I ought to know, as I commanded Two hundred and eighty six company for four months. Then Phil went home sick, and I lost sight of him. But I saw his D.S.O. in
The
Times
,
in May nineteen eighteen.”

“Very interestin',” said Runnymeade, “I wonder why his decoration isn't recorded in
Who's
Who
?”

“One writes one's own stuff in
Who's
Who
,”
said Phillip. “Oscar Wilde called
Who's
Who
the greatest work of fiction published every year in England.”

“Ah,” said Runnymeade, pouring himself a drink. “Now don't get me wrong over this. I have merely remarked that the
authenticity
of Maddison's origins have been cast in some doubt,
according
to a number of minds. Speaking for myself, I do not know.”

“Well then, ‘Boy', you ought to hold your tongue,” retorted Stefania. “You should know better than to repeat—as you are always telling me—‘the gossip of the servants' hall'.”

“
Touché
,” said Runnymeade. “But don't get me wrong over this. I merely warned Maddison that his political activities have made him subject to some suspicion, and—as I have indicated—some research into his origins has been made. I assure you, ‘Farm Boy'”—looking at Phillip with a face suddenly serious—“that I spoke as I did just now only after some deliberation, and in the spirit of friendship.”

“Thank you, ‘Horse Boy', I understand all you say. To be against a war, even passively, is to be regarded as a potential traitor. A year after the last war had finished, I was as good as called that by my father when I said that the German troops were brave men, who believed in the righteousness of their cause, in the same way as ourselves. The odd thing was—although I understand it—my father's mother was German.”

“Ah, that's what it all comes from,” said Runnymeade.

“Poor ‘Little Ray of Sunshine',” said Mrs. Carfax. “But, my dear man, you've only yourself to blame, if you
will
take up
crackpot
causes. I suppose you'll turn Buddhist next.”

She put her hand over his, an action sharply regarded by Stefania Rozwitz. Phillip shook the hand vigorously, relieved that the conversation had veered away from an exposure that he had long dreaded: his prison sentence after the first war, and the removal of his name as a Companion of the Order.

Tea was brought in by Rippingall in a striped jacket: muffins, buttered toast and Christmas cake, wide fragile Sèvres cups for China tea and thin lemon slices. This was a drink that Phillip enjoyed after the astringencies of gin, which he had never liked since that Christmas party in Grandfather Turney's house when, as a very small boy, he had stolen back to the darkened room where the dish of flaming raisins had burned in pale blue flame, and lifting up the dish, had drunk all the liquid remaining, to go down soon afterwards into a stupor followed by a bilious attack lasting two days.

*

The walk to the cottage of the Baden-Poynders was exhilarating under the flashing stars of winter. On the way was a post of the Observer Corps. They were challenged. Runnymeade having been recognised, they passed on, exchanging compliments of the season with the unseen watchers.

Five minutes later, they came to their destination, to sit around a hearth leaping with flames in the light of candles, while their host brought them tall glasses of whisky and soda.

Colonel Baden-Poynder was the father of four sons, three of them in uniform. Phillip knew the name as one of great wealth from coal; and Baden-Poynder's father had been one of the crack shots of the Edwardian era. He winced therefore when he heard Teddy, amicable and loquacious, say to the host, “Phillip here, you know, Colonel Poynder, has one of the finest small shoots in the country,” and unperturbed by his host's polite silence Teddy went on to say, with expansive bonhomie, “So you ought to keep in with him, you know! Then he'll invite you to one of his shoots.”

It was the kind of whisky Phillip had not tasted since the days in Conduit Street in the back room of his tailor: ‘Dew of
Bene-veneh
' soft as milk to drink, and as kind to the stomach, that conditioner of thought. His glass was filled, and he entered a world of pictured memories and faces, one day to be given life in words upon the printed page; he accepted a third glass ‘with aclarity'.
Aclarity
was the word: until he was twenty-one, he recalled, he had pronounced alacrity as
aclarity
,
having read it as that in his first wonderful green-covered number of the Gem Library.
Tom
Merry
disappeared
from
the
scene
with
aclarity
,
having discovered that the German master was a spy, with a rope-ladder down the cliff to a secret cave behind ivy and other creepers, wherein was a heliograph for signalling out to sea. And from the cliff-tops one night Tom Merry had seen an immense black shadow upon the moonlit waters of the Channel, with gun turrets and four funnels—the mighty
Von
Der
Tann.
So Tom Merry swarmed up the rope with aclarity, to foil the machinations of the Germans to capture England in 1906 …

And now it was nearly 1940, and all the life between the years had gone in a series of instantaneous invisible flashes disconnected and yet connected, all the pulses of blood in the arteries and the movements all meaningless when they had been made, all in frightening appearance but to disappear without any purpose Perhaps it was the flames that made the swirling of the tilting room; he must get out, he was going to be sick.

Trained by experience, habituated by many occasions in the past when the warning swirl came, to be followed by the dreaded loosening waters of the mouth, he pulled himself upright,
murmured
something about overwork, and hastening to the door before he could be shown the lavatory (fearful of the noises of vomiting) opened it and walked into sharp cold darkness, to stop as though electrically by the unseen gate, open it noiselessly, close it noiselessly, and turning to the right, to proceed rapidly towards the known main road. On the way there the
constellations
fell in a swarm past his face, and to his surprise he was walking backwards on his heels and curiously not falling over, a most deplorable sensation. He felt rimed grass on his hands, the naked black hemisphere stared down, Bear and Plough and Bull and Eagle swarming like glittering bees above the horizon.

After some time he recovered, and raising himself with his elbows was able to check Polaris by six lengths from the coulter of The Plough. Polaris remained small and mistily grey, a star of the most quiet good form, devoid of flamboyance, never doing a flashy thing or falling the wrong way up the sky. Thank God he wasn't going to shoot his bundle after all.

He could not bear the heat of those flames vomiting into the black throat of the chimney. They were coal flames, incensed with what Baden-Poynder, coal magnate, would call logs. How
strange the ways of magnates! Penelope's father would not allow her to buy, for
£
200, fifty acres of land with woodlands to build a house of her own, away from the marshes now defiled by an
anti-aircraft
range. “Daddy wouldn't consider it. He says money invested in land, or a new house is at best a wasting asset.” On principle: the laws of money must religiously be observed on all occasions: capital must be conserved, come death, war, and damnation.

Money was like a log-jam in a Canadian river: you had to leap from a log before it rolled, before you lost foothold, before it rolled you under and then you were submerged, lost to the world of the nimble jacks. Penelope might spend
£
200 on a party, as
entertainment
, should she desire to entertain her friends at Claridge's. That was a fiscal certainty, deliberate outlay for a recognised social purpose. But
£
200 for fifty acres of land in the summer of 1939—‘Daddy wouldn't consider it'. The mind was closed to something that was a poor investment in the known conditions of the market place. And so said all of them; and he, the oddment, the crank, had bought land as a vague and incoherent challenge to the System upheld by the steady and the wise—Christ also had broken the laws, and so got the chop. And they thought him a German spy—‘these tedious old fools' of Hamlet. Why waste time and spirit, as he had, in literally cleaning out the Copleston lavatories? Mammalian man was the same from age to age: but now Money had met its Challenger, muttering to himself in rehearsal of clarifying speeches, far away across the North Sea or German Ocean. ‘The world is too far gone for saints.'

Having, as he thought, recovered from the fumes of gin and whisky, Phillip nevertheless knew by experience the value of walking beyond water-in-the-teeth danger.

Proceeding with care into the main coastal road he saw the dark outline of the Frigate Inn before him, and thought to have a ginger beer to chase away with its prickles the last tentacles of the pallid octopus which reached from belly to brain on such foolish occasions.