Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(41)
Tom was unsmiling. “If I were you, I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic.”
“But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?”
Tom held up his hands. “I’m sorry, you’re losing me.”
Mary exhaled smoke. “Possibly I am.”
September, 1940
THE PACKED EIGHT O’CLOCK brought Alistair’s regiment to Waterloo from their Hampshire barracks. Into the sky the train disgorged vapors; into the capital, sixty officers and three hundred men. They had twenty-four hours’ leave, orders to rest and recuperate and a tendency to do neither.
In his new uniform of a captain in the Royal Artillery, Alistair stood on the platform to wish his men the best. Wills would be drawn up, he supposed, and mothers reassured of sons’ immortality, and fathers slipped letters to be opened in case of contradictory news. Blushing sisters would be introduced to suitable fellow officers, younger brothers issued with gobstoppers and wooden rifles. The enamored would be betrothed, the betrothed espoused. Entire human lives would be conceived, in unorthodox locations, by hurrying bodies cheerful with wine and still mostly clothed, at two thirty in the afternoon. The Savoy’s best spoons would be pocketed, things that were not cricket cricketed. He didn’t even like to think.
A pair of brother officers invited him to join them for breakfast but he declined. He invented some quick excuse—an aunt or an aneurism—which he forgot as soon as he had uttered it but which the others seemed to find sufficient. In any case they left without taking offense. Alistair was so adept at this now—at keeping to himself—that he did it without conscious effort. He might have bowed out of this leave entirely if Tom hadn’t insisted he come.
He watched his battery disperse. Each group of six or a dozen men ringed itself off from the others with laughter of its own particular key. Alistair knew the men well but he did not know how they formed their clans to go drinking in. He had ministered them all under fire, without making any more distinction than the bullets and the shells had done. By what unobservable law did they now divide themselves into these friendship groups that cut across the lines of their official units?
Of course the men were not cattle, and yet he did not understand how fierce could be the loyalty to this or that faction, while another merited only disdain. And yet that was men for you: there was always this counter-current, this Escheresque sleight that they performed without ever seeming to defy their orders. The Army made them into a flock of birds while the men made themselves into shoals of fishes, swimming in the contrary direction.
His men headed for the pubs on the back streets behind the station, where the licensing hours had been quietly surrendered. The soldiers would drink ale until dusk and then switch to whisky and fists. They would fight the Navy if available, other regiments if not, and the RAF as a last resort since it was not considered form to bother the afflicted. They would fight for the simple joy of doing so without 7.2-inch howitzers. Then they would return at dawn and call him “sir,” with their heels the regulation width apart.
Alistair knocked out his pipe on the heel of his shoe. If there was one thing the war had done, it was to change his mind about the class of people who never came into the Tate. Men and good paintings had a genius for escape from the frame.
He took a cab to Belgravia, where he had an appointment with the regimental physician. The fare was two shillings ha’penny and he handed over a half crown and told the driver to keep the change. The man blessed him, so Alistair tipped him another shilling. He thought: This might be the last bright blue morning, the last London taxi in its livery, the last quiet shilling with its lion and its crown. It occurred to him that no one who hadn’t been in battle could know what things were worth.
At the doctor’s offices they kept him waiting in a pink-carpeted anteroom with six Windsor chairs and a large framed print of the King. Looking up at him, Alistair began to feel that the King was an old chum. The King sat alone and rigorously upright in full ceremonial dress with what looked like ten pounds of medals and braid hanging off it. He rested one gloved hand on the pommel of a ceremonial sword. His expression suggested that he would not hesitate to use the sword on himself or others, should the portraitist require him to maintain the pose for one more damnable minute. Alistair’s knees jiggled up and down as he sat.
This was what he had not understood, until the war: that all men were of one blood, embedded from king to serf in a perfectly rigid formalism and all quietly abstracting themselves from it. The men did it with fighting and cheap women, the officers with theater and costly ones. Alone in his mind each man knew himself free as a king, while the King alone knew himself enslaved. Alistair felt euphoric. This was the great joke, and until the war he hadn’t got it.
These insights were coming to him continuously, and with terrific effervescence, after yesterday’s god-awful low. He laughed at himself. There was no reason to fret about it: why should one expect to feel the same every day, in a world that was rearranging itself by the hour? He was pleased with this formulation, and said so to himself. He was pleased with . . . in fact no, it was gone—his thoughts were coming so quickly—but no matter. He was pleased with . . . well, he was just pleased.
The doctor called him in after ten minutes. He was a portly man with side whiskers, in a white cotton jacket with gold insignia—the effect, to Alistair’s eye, falling somewhere between avuncular surgeon and cruise ship ma?tre d’. The man remained seated behind his desk, not looking up when Alistair came in.