In the Wolf's Mouth (9 page)

Sergeant Major Henderson wasn’t interested in these women either. He was a practical man and preferred the prostitutes. The other night he had received the men in his room, stripped from the waist down, sitting
open-legged in front of the fire, a razor rasping through his pubic hair as he shaved it off. ‘For the avoidance of crabs,’ he informed them. ‘I suggest you strip your area as well. Don’t give ’em anything to hold onto.’ His legs were large and white as wax. Between his feet dropped dry curls of coppery hair. He had similarly forthright advice about dealing with civilians and fellow soldiers. ‘You’ll want to get off on a good footing. I find it helps give the idea if you refer to them as “You fuckers”.’

Will nodded. That was what a sergeant major was for: to inculcate the coarseness and expeditious brutality of military manners. Not that Sergeant Major Henderson would have thought in those terms. He simply was brutal and coarse. His shaving left him with scalded pink genitals, nude and obscene. He tried to look away while Henderson stood up swinging to pull on his underpants. At this point Captain Draycott entered and froze, blinking, trying to work out what he had walked into. Henderson calmly buckled his trousers. ‘Lessons in hygiene, sir,’ he said.

Captain Draycott was a very different man, a DPhil in Icelandic Literature from a military family but a man who wouldn’t have entered the army if it hadn’t been for the war. He was gifted with a natural physical prowess that was apparently accidental. He rowed and played handball. With his eyes of clear, rinsed blue, he was obvious leadership material. His eyes weren’t piercing, however, but sensitive, vulnerable. Confronted with the gross, obtuse, often perverse demands of the army, he would halt, blink, and look around as though
to catch the attention of someone reasonable who could never be found. Will would certainly have made a better captain than Draycott. Perhaps one day, war being what it is, he would get his chance.

The wind had strengthened, cuffing the water into little waves that raced endlessly into the harbour wall. The gull had been joined by two others. They circled in the air and settled, bowing and calling.

‘Afternoon, squire.’ Travis, come to relieve him. ‘Anything of note? U-boats among the mackerel fleet?’

‘No activity of any kind. Shit all, as Henderson would say.’

‘Smoke?’

‘Abso-bloody-lutely.’

Travis tapped a couple of cigarettes from his pack and flipped open his lighter. Will lit his from the ragged, blustery flame. Travis snapped the lighter shut. He smiled, tilting upwards the cigarette between his lips.

‘Least we’re not in any bother,’ he said.

‘True enough. I detect no immediate peril.’

‘That’s right. And you get to keep all your limbs that way. No sliding about outside Woolworth’s on a wooden tray begging with a tin cup.’

‘Can’t argue with that. You can just stand here and enjoy the view.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And we’ll all die as old men in our beds with nothing on our minds.’

‘Sounds ideal.’

Back in the hut, Will found Samuels reading a magazine, head bent, a cigarette held at his temple,
exhaling smoke onto the opened pages. ‘Afternoon,’ he said without looking up. ‘Enjoy the ozone?’

‘Bored. Bored. Bored. Bored. Bored. Couldn’t find a book to read?’

‘My apologies, professor.’ Samuels imitated Travis’s voice: ‘But we’re all safe and sound, ain’t we?’

‘I know. Awfully cheering, isn’t it.’

Samuels turned a page cleanly, slowly, with his skilled fingers. A Jew, Samuels’ father was the proprietor of a wireless shop in London and the young Raphael – who liked to be called ‘Rafe’ in the English manner; Will called him Samuels – had grown up fiddling with valves and wires. He loved the machines and the broadcasts and could be quite poetic on the subject, talking of the invisible radio waves that surrounded them all, beamed through the air and separated into electrical impulses by these beautiful machines. Will suspected that all Samuels knew, admittedly quite a lot, he had gleaned from his listening rather than reading or a real education. An automatic, fastidious recoil from Samuels sometimes occurred in Will. He wanted to distinguish between them. They were not the same thing, not to be confused, even if they shared a stature, an eye colour and a rank in this unsatisfactory unit.

Will sat down and looked at the bustling clouds. The bright window pane shook.

‘I want to do something,’ he said.

‘I know you do. But this won’t last for ever,’ Samuels said. ‘It can’t, can it? Nothing does.’

Will lit one of his own cigarettes, dragging the match aflame with a slow, vindictive scrape. The hut hummed in the wind.

For the next three days nothing happened except the theft from a vessel of a couple of crates of prosthetic limbs. There were jokes about that – checking the town for men with three legs, and so on – but Will didn’t find them amusing. Standing in the hold inspecting an open crate full of arms had given Will a very unpleasant feeling. It was one sudden thought, that those unnatural smooth forms, parodies of human flesh, actually embodied real pain in real men, men with their limbs blown off, or – even more powerful to realise – men whose limbs hadn’t yet been blown off but would be, any moment, possibly that very moment. It was the way the boat rocked as he stood in it. It was all mixed up with Lucretius and the swerving atoms that make up the world and its events and it all came home to him. He was enclosed in the thought as in a dream. The war was very large and complicated and, in some important ways, wrong. The scale of it was disclosed by this one tiny detail, this one negligible fragment of the chaos. The prosthetic limbs lay in the open crate in front of him like bits of outsized dolls, marionettes, things for the theatre. Thoughts thronged in his mind with such force they almost unbalanced him. He said nothing. He told the man he could close the case again. Outside, in the sea air, he breathed and felt better.

That night Captain Draycott gave them the news. They were off. Finally, a proper posting – to liberated North Africa.

10

Two nauseous weeks on board ship, more digression and delay. But beneath the leaden hours, Will could feel, flashing, impatient, the bright incipience of adventure, of the action he was sailing towards.

The first view of the town showed a delicate white human construction set above the sea, very intricate and appealing after the monotonous, elemental voyage. The soldiers disembarked, were processed and billeted and walked through a pretty Islamic place of domes and minarets and blue shadows across whitewashed walls. There were shell holes and craters, pockmarks of bullets in plaster. A late-flowering plant grew everywhere, in gardens and high places, hung with spidery red blossoms. Frenchmen in white suits and straw hats observed the troops with an effortful nonchalance. Will smiled at one, was scowled at. They seemed without gratitude or energy. A strange atmosphere. Lassitude and recent death. The Arab children were more alive, smiling, running up, running away. Will tried an Arabic phrase on one little girl. She caught her sudden laugh in a cupped hand, stopped still and stared as he walked on with the others.

The Field Security unit were given a fine seaside mansion to inhabit. They weren’t told who had been there before. It was simply now theirs, capacious and
comfortable with a steep stony garden, grand vistas of the sea and an ideal policeman’s view of the town below to the right. The first sensation was of trespass. The tiled floors gave a clipped response, the high ceilings seemed to know something. It took the men’s loud appropriation, curses, thrown kitbags and slammed doors, to take possession of the place. They discovered a dining room with a long walnut table and mirrors, several bathrooms with baths on clawed feet, canopied beds and simple servants’ beds.

Will and a few others were sent back to the waterfront to collect motorbikes. They returned roaring up the coast after a couple of hours to learn that Draycott had found them a cook. That evening they sat around the long table and ate a meal that would have seemed a hallucination back home: fresh meat, wine from small tulip-shaped glasses, fruits – nectarines and peaches – and soft cheese. The fruit was so colourful, like a platter of tiny Chinese lanterns glowing golden and rose, and so full of juice and flavour. They sucked and gasped.

‘We’re being seduced,’ Will said. ‘They’re trying to soften us up.’

‘That comes later,’ Travis said. ‘With the dusky maidens.’

‘Not tonight it doesn’t, I’m afraid, chaps,’ Draycott said. ‘Meeting in the town hall. Everyone’s got to be there. Laying down the law sort of affair. Apparently I’ve got to make a speech.’

The town hall was filled with voices and different uniforms. With sidelong glances the defeated French assessed the free French, the town’s police, the military
police, the Senegalese soldiers, the Arabs, the stiff Englishmen, New Zealanders and Indians. It soon settled into a dullness, however, as speech after tedious speech was made. Captain Draycott had the pleasure of informing the assembly that Field Security now represented the highest civil authority in the city. Whether this was understood was hard to determine although it seemed unlikely. To overcome the language barrier, Captain Draycott had decided to address the audience in carefully correct schoolboy Latin. Will looked around at the various bored, attentive or murmuring faces. He thought that they weren’t really there to find out how the town would be run. They were there to show themselves, to see the others and draw their own conclusions. Later, outside, they would find out the rest.

11

Despite Draycott’s Latin, enough of what he’d said had been understood for the Field Security office to be immediately busy with visitors. The first to arrive was a small man with short, dense, dark hair, as smooth as velvet, rippling twice over rolls of flesh at the top of his nape. He held a leather portfolio with both hands and spoke rapid French from a puckering mouth. With none of the French speakers in the office, it fell to Will to try to determine the reason for his presence. Possibly Will would have understood the man if he’d been able to slow the tempo of his speech but each time Will tried to staunch the flow of words with outspread hands the man fell silent, watched, and then started again with the same incomprehensible gabble. He ended by pointing at himself with his thumb and nodding with great sincerity, drawing up his shoulders, the pantomime of a dignified man denying some affront.

‘I didn’t understand a word of that,’ Will said loudly. ‘You’ll have to wait.’

The man raised questioning eyebrows.

‘Sit,’ Will said and pointed to a chair. The man understood. He sat down, arranging his portfolio square across his lap.

Will returned to unloading into cabinets the prefabricated filing system.

The next visitor was a Monsieur Girardot, tall, with a kindly, vicarish stoop to his shoulders and fingers dappled yellow with nicotine stains. He spoke excellent English and explained that he was a landowner in a small way.

‘I hope that what I say to you now,’ he went on, ‘will be treated as a matter of confidence.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Because you see, I want to tell you what it is here. There are not many people for you to trust in this town. The truth is that everybody, ev-er-y-bo-dy, in this town is pro-Vichy. Of course they don’t say this to you now because you are here and you have the guns. Fine. So, I can give you details of the people to watch, for reasons of security. I can give you evidence of every person of substance, including, I am ashamed to say, my own brother Guillaume Girardot, being in league with the enemy.’

‘Can you?’

‘I am afraid so.’

‘I think perhaps I ought to introduce you to my superior, Captain Draycott. I’m sure he’d be very interested in what you have to say. Follow me.’

Will led M. Girardot – who was expressing his pleasure at the moral superiority of the English – down the corridor to Draycott’s room. He knocked, heard ‘come’, and entered.

‘Captain, this is M. Girardot. He is sympathetic to our cause and has some very interesting information about the local inhabitants.’

An hour later, Will heard Draycott ushering Girardot out of the building. Will went out to see Draycott,
his face hanging heavily with relief, returning up the stairs. He caught sight of Will and tutted. ‘Why on earth did you send that awful man in to see me? He sat down without asking and betrayed pretty much everyone he knew, immediately, incontinently, including close family.’

I’m sorry, sir. I thought he might have some useful information. Sir, I’ve just had a thought. Will you excuse me a moment? He can be of use.’ Will dashed out past Draycott and called out after M. Girardot, still just within sight, about to turn a corner between crumbling white buildings. Will beckoned him back.

‘Thank you. I wonder, could you possibly translate for us what this chap’s trying to say.’

‘Of course I will help you.’

Shown the small man with the portfolio, M. Girardot said, ‘But I know him.’ The two men chatted in French for a moment. Girardot turned and said, ‘This is Monsieur Dusapin. He has been trying to explain to you that he is an executioner. He built his own guillotine so it is his property. He can work for you, it’s not a problem. He has photographs with him of his work he can show to you.’

‘He has photographs?’

‘Yes, he has.’

Hearing the word ‘photographs’, M. Dusapin began fiddling at the strings of his portfolio. ‘Tell him to stop,’ Will said. ‘Tell him I don’t want to see his disgusting photographs. Tell him we won’t be needing his services. There are thousands of our soldiers in the vicinity. A firing squad won’t be hard to find. There’s no need for us to recreate the terror of the French Revolution.’

Girardot, with a pained expression, translated. Dusapin began objecting. Head tilted to one side, looking at Will, Girardot listened and conveyed the executioner’s meaning to Will.

Will stopped him. ‘I’ve said we don’t want him. It’s time for him to leave.’

When they’d gone, Will plucked at his uniform, pulling it straight. Nausea surged with the anger that rose in him. Obscene, that executioner – soft, ingratiating, ambitious, argumentative, delicate. The rich hair on his head was somehow particularly sickening. Deeply, sinisterly French. He was precisely why the French should not have an empire. They weren’t clean and decent. Their order was that of a petty, sordid regime.