Scruffy - A Diversion (16 page)

And now that Tim stared and stared he saw what had always been most surely there, buried beneath the chubbiness, and it terrified him. It set his heart to beating and filled him with a thousand fears and sadnesses and the certainty that this glorious creature was no longer for him. Already she belonged to the tall Commander at her side with whom she was in laughing unison. Something within Tim told him that such a beauty occurred only once or twice in a generation, and by its very uniqueness made the wearer a child of destiny.

He held her in the round field of his glasses and for a moment found himself looking directly into her eyes, those same frank, sweet eyes, but now seemingly enhanced a thousand times, and for an instant he was panic-stricken that she might see and recognize him, not realizing that the glasses were hiding his face. Yes, Felicity had returned, but no longer his Felicity. She was lost to him for ever. He turned and fled into the shadows of the shed and thence out into the street where he climbed into his car and raced off blindly to nowhere as though the furies were after him.

Felicity’s immediate disappointment at Tim’s failure to meet her was mitigated by her thought that in the first place she had not been able to let him know the date and time of her arrival, and in the second, he had probably drawn duty at that hour and had no way of letting her know.

Too, she realized that she had steeled herself to expect it. It was the simplest way for a man to say, “I hope you didn’t take our little instant of several years ago seriously.”

Immediately upon her arrival she found herself overwhelmed with details and problems connected with the department in her charge. Nothing, of course, was as it should be. The quarters provided were inhospitable and unsanitary, kitchen arrangements inadequate, orders confused and there was plenty to do to occupy the time and patience of Wren Second Officer Commanding, Felicity French. It was a week before her head was above water sufficiently to realize that that amount of time had passed and she had neither seen nor heard from Tim. She herself had received permission to quarter at the Mount, even though it had mostly been turned into sets of offices, and she had her old room.

What saddened Felicity almost as much as the loss of the man she had thought she loved was his neglect of his manners. For surely by that time Tim would have heard of her arrival. There wasn’t a man in Gibraltar who didn’t know by then that twenty females, to be permanently stationed among them, had arrived on the Rock. It would have been more kind and less cowardly and rude if he had sent around a note or telephoned an amicable
coup-de-grace
to say, “Heard you were back. Frightfully busy. We must have lunch some time.”

Once Felicity had queried her father as to whether he had ever seen or heard from Captain Bailey—she had thought perhaps a message or a letter from him had gone astray—causing the Admiral to go back so far in his memory for a reply that he was forced to query, “Eh? Who?” and then as he remembered finally, “Haven’t laid eyes on the fellow.” Then he asked his daughter anxiously, “That’s not still on, is it? I thought your mother wrote me—”

“It was a long time ago, wasn’t it?” was all that Felicity had replied, to which the Admiral had given vent to a great and audible exhalation of relief while mumbling audibly: “Whew, I’m glad that’s over and done with,” then adding, “you’ll have enough to keep you busy here.”

Once in a moment of weakness, loneliness and longing she had picked up the receiver of the telephone and dialled the number of Tim’s quarters one evening. A strange voice had replied, “Captain Ducrow speaking,” and Felicity had hung up. He was no longer in his old quarters. Perhaps he was not even on the Rock any more. She laid hold of the service telephone directory with a gesture that was almost savage and thumbed through it. Well he
was
on the Rock still. There it was, “Captain Timothy Bailey, R.A. office. First Battalion H.Q., Tel.: 134, Home Catchment Road, Point Europa Barracks, Tel.: 84-972.” But she didn’t pick up the telephone again; she only sat looking at the name and thinking. What she knew she had dreaded was that she might have found him in the married barracks. But what was strange was that he should have been moved out to Catchment Road. This was the Sahara as far as quarters were concerned, where young Lieutenants were parked until they had gained some seniority, experience and rank.

She thought she was over it; she put Tim out of her mind; she no longer raised her head and listened when the telephone in the Mount rang. The arrival of the Wrens had resparked a fraction of social life on the Rock, at least among the Navy. Yet quite unaccountably one afternoon Felicity found herself in her car headed out of town and up the road past the ruins of the Moorish Castle, then sharply around the bend, climbing along the face of the cliff on the familiar road that led to St. Michael’s hut and the place known as the village of the apes.

She didn’t know why she was going, she didn’t care. She simply drove. Perhaps Gunner Lovejoy would be there. She had not seen him either since her return. This, however, was not surprising, for even in such a minute area as Gibraltar, intermingling of the Services occurred only at top levels when the brass met to see how they could do one another down. The lower echelons of the Navy, the Army and the Air Force circulated in their own orbits without ever making contact.

What Felicity found where the apes’ village had been just before the ruins of the emplacement of Prince Ferdinand’s Battery surprised and shocked her. Lovejoy was not there. Nor was anyone else. And furthermore the place was filthy with scraps of foul and rotting carrots and lettuce, ordure, dirty bits of dried-up orange skins, pieces of sodden and mouldy bread and remnants of other food that had become unrecognizable to the sight and offensive to the nostrils. Heretofore the place where the apes fed was kept scrupulously clean by Lovejoy, nor had Tim been above taking a hand. All left-overs remaining after the apes had had their fill were swept up and disposed of in a dustbin and carted away.

Felicity heard a sound between a cough, a squeak and a wheeze. It came from a dog ape, a young male Macaque curled up in a tree. She parked her car, got out and went to the thorn tree and looked to see if it was someone she knew. The ape regarded her with apathy, pulling back its lips to bare its canines. It wheezed and coughed again. Felicity knew enough about apes to know a sick one when she saw it. Someone ought to be looking after it. No one was.

A loose pebble rolled and she heard a scuffling sound and turned in time to see a full-grown female gliding along at the side of the road. She was carrying an apelet in her arms, but it was dead. When she had got past Felicity the girl saw the dark stain of clotted blood behind the left ear of the female, or rather where the left ear should have been. She felt suddenly as though she wanted to weep.

Uncertain of herself, thoroughly put out, miserable, Felicity walked somewhat farther up the road to the place where she had first come upon Captain Timothy Bailey of His Majesty’s Royal Artillery and Officer in Charge of Apes. This was the small, curved and railed-in concreted enclosure which jutted out slightly over the cliff, looking out over the port and the sea, and there she saw a familiar figure which made her heart leap.

“Scruffy,” cried Felicity. “Oh dear, dear, Scruffy.”

The old boy had been sitting there scratching himself and reflecting. He was bored; he was hungry, and he was out of sorts. He was permanently out of sorts these days and resenting the changed world in which there were no longer tourists who brought him goodies to eat and cameras and field-glasses to throw over the cliff; where cars no longer parked enabling one to remove the windscreen-wipers and chew the rubber off them; where visits to town no longer paid off in either entertainment or illicit nourishment, and where his ear-drums were in permanent pain from bangs and explosions of one kind or another.

Scruffy recognized Felicity at once, whether from voice or smell or because he was a bit sharper than Captain Bailey was beside the point. His amber eyes lit up, his black lips were drawn back from his yellow teeth and he leaped up and down and coughed and barked and scolded her.

The tears were now so close to Felicity’s eyes that the big Macaque looked almost beautiful.

“Oh, Scruffy dear,” she cried, “how good it is to see
someone.
” And from force of habit she put her hand into her pocket to see what was there, and found a chocolate bon-bon wrapped in silver paper.

She unwrapped it slowly, and as she did so Scruffy came forward. The memory tubes and transistors of his own computer system had this situation taped and Felicity labelled as The Girl Who Always Had Something.

“Come, my darling,” crooned Felicity and held out the bonbon.

Scruffy sidled over mostly on his behind and reached with his firm black leathery hands. With one he clutched Felicity’s wrist and the other took the praline. He smelled the sweet and, for a second, a look of blissful anticipation crossed his otherwise grumpy features. This was more like it. On the other hand there was no reason to exclude the amenities. He therefore pulled Felicity’s wrist towards him and bit her severely in the thumb, then skipped away eight paces clutching his comfit and leaping up and down coughing and railing at her. Felicity let out a scream of pain followed by four orthodox Naval curses and one that she made up herself on the spur of the moment.

And at that instant she found herself possessed of a savage and unreasoning rage against Captain Timothy A. Bailey. It was as though Tim had bitten her. The blood spurted from two deep gashes, one on top, the other on the bottom of the fleshy part of her thumb, but no more freely than the hot tears of anger that came welling from her eyes. Everything that had happened, or had not happened, since her return combined to fuse into one petrol-soaked knot of fury. Scruffy’s bite had now set it alight and flaming.

Unmindful of the gore dripping from her wound on to her uniform she ran to her car, climbed in, crashed the gears into place and went rocketing down the mountain, half-crying, half-muttering phrases to herself in which things and allusions uncomplimentary were coupled with the name of Timothy Bailey.

She careered through the town taking corners on two wheels, frightening dogs and civilians, zoomed down Main Street, charged through the Southport Gates and up past the Rock Hotel, breaking all speed laws in her haste to reach her destination before the heat of the fire which had been kindled should diminish by so much as a single calorie. She wrenched the car off Engineer Road into Europa Road towards the point so that the tires squealed, hurtled onwards into the bare, tatty area of the barracks, and caught the sign indicating Catchment Road. Her glance peeled off the names over the doors outside the barracks until she glimpsed that of Captain Bailey. She stopped the car, which gave vent to an agonized cry of tortured brakes and metal, coupled with the growl and crunch of displaced gravel.

The screen door was closed but the inner door to Captain Bailey’s quarters was open. There was a small lamp burning and the Captain was seated at his desk in his shirt-sleeves. Before he had time to do more than look up from the papers on which he had been working there were two loud, practically simultaneous bangs as Felicity slammed first her car door and then the screen door behind her.

She roared up to the desk and the astonished Captain, thrust her thumb, still leaking her life’s blood, in front of his nose and cried, “Your damn bloody monkey bit me.”

Tim arose, knocking over his chair, “Oh, my God,” he said, “Felicity!” Then he said, “But he’s not mine any more,” and with a note of despair and pathos that reached right to Felicity’s heart, “Felicity, I’m no longer O.I.C. Apes. I’m nothing at all.”

“Tim, oh my dear, darling Tim,” Felicity wailed. “What have they done to you?” For she recognized something of a broken man. Also she was no longer angry with him, for over his shoulder, on his desk, was the framed photograph of herself, or at least of the person she seemed once to have been.

A large bright-red drop of blood fell with an audible splash on to the company report on which Tim had been working and spread out blot-shaped.

“Felicity!”

“Tim, dear Tim!”

They were so close now in one another’s arms that they no longer needed to shout, or even to speak, but could whisper their names and terms of endearment into one another’s ears.

“Tim, why didn’t you meet me?”

“I did.”

“What happened?”

“I was frightened, I ran away.”

“Why?”

“You were too beautiful! I couldn’t bear it. I was afraid! I’m afraid now.”

They separated for a moment and looked at one another.

“Don’t you know what has happened to you?” Tim asked. “Look.” He pointed to a mirror. “Can’t you see, it’s almost blinding?”

It was enough to make any woman exult, but strangely Felicity felt more like crying at the moment. “Do you mean to say,” she said, indicating the photograph, “that you like her more than me? I did it all for you.”

Young Captain Bailey looked from the fat girl in the picture to the goddess by his side and at that moment had no answer for her, so storm-tossed were his emotions.

“I’ll cross my eyes,” Felicity wailed and proceeded to do so, “I’ll cut my hair and stuff pillows in my bosom until I can fatten up for you again. I’ll do anything you ask, Tim, if it will make you happier.”

Afterwards Tim said that it was as though a light shining down from heaven had pierced him with the joyous and everlasting revelation that his adored and chubby girl was still there. She had changed her outer appearance and he supposed eventually he would get used to it and be able to regard her without the aid of dark glasses, but within she was still Felicity, funny, droll, dear, kindly, tender Felicity.

He went to pieces then again over his love for her, the hurt she had suffered which he had inflicted, the wound that was bleeding and the resolving of the pain that he himself had experienced.

They were both covered with her blood by this time and when he had bandaged her and they had tidied themselves and she had announced that having compromised him by practically assaulting him in his quarters they would have to be married at once, he told her of what had happened to him since she had left and of the events leading to his disgrace and sacking.