The military philosophers (8 page)

‘You’re Captain Jenkins, aren’t you?’

‘I am.’

‘I think you know my mother.’

‘What’s your mother’s name?’

‘Flavia Wisebite – but I’m Pamela Flitton. My father was her first husband.’

This was Stringham’s niece. I remembered her holding the bride’s train at his wedding. She must have been five or six years old then. At one stage of the service there had been a disturbance at the back of the church and someone afterwards said she had been sick in the font. Whoever had remarked that found nothing surprising in unsatisfactory behaviour from her. Someone else had commented: ‘That child’s a fiend.’ I knew little of her father, Cosmo Flitton – not even whether he were still alive – except for the fact that he had lost an arm in the earlier war, drank heavily, and was said to be a professional gambler. Alleged to be not too scrupulous in business dealings, Flitton had been involved in Baby Wentworth’s divorce, later rejecting marriage with her. He had left Pamela’s mother when this girl was not much more than a baby. Establishing the sequence of inevitable sameness that pursues individual progression through life, Flavia had married another drunk, Harrison F. Wisebite, son of a Minneapolis hardware millionaire, whose jocularity he had inherited with only a minute fragment of a post-depression fortune. I wondered idly whether Flavia owed her name to
The Prisoner of Zenda
. Mrs Foxe would have been quite capable of that. Mrs Foxe was said to have given her daughter a baddish time. Pamela, an only child, must be at least twenty by now. She looked younger.

‘Where is your mother at the moment?’

‘She’s helping with Red Cross libraries. She gets sent all over the place.’

‘I suppose you’ve no news of your Uncle Charles?’

‘Charles Stringham?’

‘The last I saw of him, he’d been posted overseas. I don’t even know where.’

She began driving the little car very fast and we nearly ran into an army truck coming across the Park from the opposite direction. She did not answer. I repeated the question.

‘You’ve heard nothing?’

‘He was at Singapore.’

‘Oh,
God…’

With that strange instinct that exists in the ranks for guessing a destination correctly, Stringham had supposed himself on the way to the Far East.

‘Nothing’s known, I suppose?’

‘No.’

‘Just reported missing?’

‘Yes.’

‘He used to be a great friend of mine.’

‘We were close when I was quite a child.’

She said that in an odd way, as if almost intending to imply something not to be investigated too far. When I thought the remark over later, it seemed to me unlikely she had seen much of Stringham when she was a child, and he was being cured of drink in the iron grip of Miss Weedon. Later, I understood that the ambiguity might have been deliberate. Girls of Pamela’s sort take pleasure in making remarks like that, true or not.

‘Will you tell your mother – how dreadfully sorry …’

Again she made no answer. Iciness of manner remained complete. She was perhaps not altogether normal, what Borrit called ‘a bit off the beam’. There was no denying she was a striking girl to look at. Many men would find this cosmic rage with life, as it seemed to be, an added attraction. Perhaps all these suppositions were wide of the mark, and she was just in poor form because she considered herself crossed in love or something obvious of that sort. All the same, the impression was of an uneasy personality, one to cause a lot of trouble. The news about Stringham made relations even more difficult. Her demeanour suggested only gross indifference on my own part had kept me in ignorance of what had happened, that she did not wish to speak more about a matter specially painful to herself.

‘How did you discover I was in the Section?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Your name cropped up somewhere the other night. I was saying what a bloody awful series of jobs I always get, and the next one was to drive for this outfit. Somebody said you were in it.’

‘You don’t like the ATS?’

‘Who wants to be a bloody AT?’

By this time we had entered the confines of Bayswater. Some of the big houses here had been bombed and abandoned, others were still occupied. Several blocks that had formerly housed Victorian judges and merchants now accommodated refugees from Gibraltar, whose tawny skins and brightly coloured shirts and scarves made this once bleak and humdrum quarter of London, with its uncleaned or broken windows and peeling plaster, look like the back streets of a Mediterranean port. Even so, the area was not yet so squalid as it was in due course to become in the period immediately following the end of the war, when squares and crescents over which an aroma of oppressive respectability had gloomily hung, became infested at all hours of day and night by prostitutes of the lowest category.

‘What number did you say?’

‘It must be the one on the corner.’

She drew up the car in front of a large grey house in the midst of a complex of streets that had on the whole escaped bomb damage. Several steps led up to a sub-palladian porch, the fanlight over the open door daubed with dark paint to comply with black-out regulations. The place had that slightly sinister air common to most of the innumerable buildings hurriedly converted to official use, whether or not they were enclaves of a more or less secret nature.

‘Will you wait with the car? I shan’t be long.’

After the usual vetting at the door, my arrival being expected, quick admission took place. A guide in civilian clothes led the way to a particular office where the report was to be obtained. We went up some stairs, through a large hall or ante-chamber where several men and women were sitting in front of typewriters, surrounded by walls covered with a faded design of blue and green flowers, enclosed above and below by broad parchment-like embossed surfaces. This was no doubt the double-drawing-room of some old-fashioned family, who had not redecorated their home for decades. I was shown into the office of a Polish lieutenant-colonel in uniform, from whom the report was to be received. We shook hands.

‘Good afternoon … Please sit down …
prosze Pana, prosze Pana
… I usually see Major Pennistone, yes.’

He unlocked a drawer and handed over the report. We spoke about its contents for a minute or two, and shook hands again. Then he accompanied me back to where I could find my way out, and, after shaking hands for the third time, we parted. Halfway down the stairs, I grasped that I was in the Ufford, ancient haunt of Uncle Giles. The place of typewriters, so far from being the drawing-room of some banker or tea-broker (perhaps that once), was the combined ‘lounge’ and ‘writing-room’, in the former of which my Uncle used to entertain me with fishpaste sandwiches and seed cake. There, Mrs Erdleigh had ‘set out the cards’, foretold the rows about St John Clarke’s book on Isbister, my love affair with Jean Duport. The squat Moorish tables of those days had been replaced by trestles: the engraving of
Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time
, by a poster of characteristically Slavonic design announcing an exhibition of Polish Arts and Crafts. On the ledge of the mantelpiece, on which under a glass dome had stood the clock with hands eternally pointing to twenty minutes past five, were photographs of General Sikorski and Mr Churchill. It struck me the Ufford was in reality the Temple of Janus, the doors between the lounge and the writing-room closed in peace, open in war.

Reaching the entrance, I saw the hotel’s name had been obliterated over the front door, as had also that of the De Tabley opposite, to which Uncle Giles had once, at least, briefly defected; only to return in penitence – had he been capable of that inner state – to the Ufford. The De Tabley as now the local branch of the Food Office. The name always recalled an incident at school. Le Bas used to make a habit of reading from time to time the works of the lesser-known Victorian poets to his pupils. He had been doing this on some occasion, declaiming with his accustomed guttural enunciation and difficulty with the letter ‘R’:

‘Sweet are the ways of death to weary feet,
Calm are the shades of men.
The phantom fears no tyrant in his seat,
The slave is master then.’

He asked where the lines came from. Of course no one knew.

‘Lord de Tabley’s chorus from
Medea
.’’

‘Never heard of him, sir.’

‘A melancholy fellow, but not without merit.’

Stringham, who had previously appeared all but asleep, had asked if he might see the book. Le Bas handed it over. He always rather liked Stringham, although never much at ease with him. Stringham turned the pages for a moment or two, then returned to the poem. Le Bas had read aloud. Stringham himself spoke the second verse:

‘Love is abolished; well that that is so;
We know him best as Pain.
The gods are all cast out, and let them go!
Who ever found them gain?’

Le Bas was prepared, in moderation, to have Death commended, but he never liked references to Love; probably, for that matter, was unwilling to have the gods so peremptorily dismissed. He had, I suppose, been betrayed into quoting the earlier lines on account of some appositeness they bore to whatever he had been talking about. He must have seen that to allow Stringham to handle the volume itself had been a false step on his own part.

‘Love, of course, had a rather different meaning – indeed, two quite separate meanings in Ancient Greece – from what the modern world understands by the term,’ he said. ‘While railing against the gods was by no means unknown in their mythological stories.’

‘Not bad for a peer of the realm, do you think, sir?’ said Stringham.

That was rather cheek, but Le Bas had let it pass, probably finding a laugh the easiest channel for moving on to less tricky matters.

As I went down the steps, I saw a uniformed Pole had strolled out of the Ufford – as I now thought of the place – and was chatting with Pamela Flitton. He seemed to be making a better job of it than myself, because, although continuing to look sullen, she was listening with comparative acceptance to what seemed the commonplace of conversation. At first I thought the Pole was an officer, then saw he was an ‘other rank’, who wore his battledress, as most of them did, with a tough air and some swagger. He was dark, almost Oriental in feature, showing a lot of gold teeth when he smiled and saluted, before withdrawing up the steps. We set off on the return journey. In the far distance sounded the gentle lowing of an Air Raid Warning. They were to be heard intermittently in the daytime. As the car passed once more through the park, the All Clear sounded, equally faint and far.

‘Sounds as if they let off the first one by mistake.’

She did not answer. Perhaps she only liked foreigners. In any case, the thought of Stringham put things on an unhappy, uncomfortable basis. I was not sure, in truth, whether she wanted to avoid discussing the subject because she herself felt so deeply, or because she was really scarcely at all interested in anything but her own personality. We reached the staff entrance. I made some further remark about a message to her mother. She nodded, disappearing once more behind the screen. Pennistone had returned from the meeting.

‘How did it go?’

‘Finn brought off one of his inimitable French phrases –  Kielkiewicz is, as you know, more at ease in French. During a moment’s silence, Finn suddenly murmured very audibly: “Le Commandant-Chef aime bien les garçons.”‘

‘What provoked this startling revelation?’

‘The Polish cadets – a message came down from the top approving of them as potential training material. Thank God, Bobrowski wasn’t there. He’d have had a stroke. Even Kielkiewicz went rather red in the face and pretended to blow his nose.’

‘You didn’t ask Finn to amplify?’

‘One was reminded of the French judge comforting the little boy cross-examined in court. “Ne t’inquiètes-pas, mon enfant, les juges aiment les petits garçons” – then remembering himself and adding: “Pourtant les juges aiment les petites filles.”‘

A day or two later Pamela Flitton drove me again when I was going to Bobrowski’s office. This was in the Harley Street neighbourhood (ten years later I used to sit in a dentist’s chair where once I had talked with Horaczko), from where I should proceed to the Titian. Horaczko’s business was likely to be completed in a few minutes, so she was told to wait with the car. As it happened, Horaczko himself wanted to visit Polish GHQ and asked for a lift. When we came out together from the military attaché’s office, Pamela Flitton was standing by the car, surveying the street with her usual look of hatred and despair. Horaczko, seeing her, lightly touched the peak of his cap. For a moment I thought this just another example of well- applied technique in what was generally agreed to be the eminently successful relationship established by the Polish forces with the opposite sex in the country of their exile, but, although her acknowledgment was of the slightest, it was plain they had met before. As there were two of us, Horaczko and I sat at the back of the car. We talked about official matters all the way to the Titian.

Passing through its glass doors, guarded by Military Police wearing red covers, like our own, on their angular ethnic Polish lancer caps, Eastern Europe was instantaneously attained. A similar atmosphere imposed, though in a less powerful form, on the Ufford, no doubt accounted to some extent for the brief exorcism there, on first arrival, of the ghost of Uncle Giles. At the Titian, this Slav ethos was overwhelming. Some Poles, including Horaczko, who prided himself on assimilation with things British, found his own nation’s characteristics, so he said, here rather depressingly caricatured. To me, on the other hand, the Titian offered an exotic change from the deadly drabness of the wartime London backcloth. The effect was to some extent odorously created, an aroma that discreetly blended elements of eau-de-cologne and onions, sweat and leather, the hotel’s Edwardian past no doubt contributing its own special Art Nouveau pungency to more alien essences.

‘I see you know our driver. She’s the daughter of a friend of mine, as it happens.’

Horaczko at once became tremendously diplomatic in manner, as if large issues were raised by this remark, which was certainly the product of curiosity.