The Valley of Bones (15 page)

We sat next to
each other at dinner that night. Stevens asked
me what I did for a living.

‘You’re lucky
to have a writing job,’ he said, ‘I’ve tried writing myself. Sometimes think I
might take it up, even though
peddling costume jewellery is a good trade for putting yourself over with the
girls.’

‘What sort of
writing?’

‘Spot of
journalism in the local paper – “Spring comes to the Black Country” – “Sunset
on Armistice Day” – that sort of thing. I knock it off easily, just as I can
pick up languages.’

I saw Stevens
would go far, if he did not get killed. He was aware of his own taste for
self-applause and prepared to laugh at it. The journalistic streak was perhaps
what recalled Chips Lovell, whom he did not resemble physically.

‘Did you
volunteer for the Independent Companies?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t
think I’d be much good at them.’

The
Independent Companies – later called Commandos – were small guerilla units,
copiously officered. They had been employed with some success in Norway.
Raising them had skimmed off the best young officers from many battalions, so
that they were not popular with some Commanding Officers for that reason.

‘I was in
trouble with my CO the time they were recruiting them,’ said Stevens. ‘He
bitched up my application. It was really because he thought me useful to him
where I was. All the same, I’ll get away into something. My unit are a lot of
louts. They’re not going to prevent me from having what fun the army has to
offer.’

Here were
dreams of military glory very different from Gwatkin’s. After all this talk, it
was time to go to bed. The following morning there was drill on the square. We
were squadded by a stagey cluster of glengarry-capped staff-sergeants left over
from the Matabele campaign, with Harry Lauder accents and eyes like poached
eggs. Amongst a couple of hundred students on the course, there was hope of an
acquaintance, but no familiar face showed in the
Mess the previous night. However,
slow-marching across the asphalt I recognised Jimmy Brent in another squad
moving at right-angles to our own, a tallish,
fat, bespectacled figure forgotten since Peter Templer had brought him to see
Stringham and myself when we were undergraduates. Brent looked much the same. I
had not greatly liked him at
the time. Nothing heard about him since caused me, in a general way, to want to
see more of him. Here, however, any face from the past was welcome, especially
so veteran a relic as Brent. After the parade was dismissed, I tackled him.

‘We met years
ago, when you came over in Peter Templer’s second-hand Vauxhall, and he drove
us all into the ditch.’

I told him my
name. Brent clearly did not recognise me. There was little or no reason why he
should. However, he remembered the circumstances of Templer’s car accident, and
seemed pleased to find someone on the course who had known him in the outside
world.

‘There were
some girls in the car, weren’t there,’ he said, his face lighting up at that
happy memory, ‘and Bob Duport too. I knew Peter took us to see a couple of friends
he’d been at school with, but I wouldn’t be able to place them at this distance
of time. So you were one of them? What a memory you’ve got. Well, it’s nice to
find a pal in this god-forsaken spot.’

‘Do you ever
see Peter now? I’d like to hear what’s happened to him.’

‘Peter’s all
right,’ said Brent, speaking rather cautiously, ‘wise enough not to have mixed
himself up with the army like you and me. Got some Government advisory job.
Financial side. I think Sir Magnus Donners had a hand – Donners hasn’t got
office yet, I’m surprised to see – Peter always did a spot of prudent
sucking-up in that direction. Peter knows which side his bread is buttered. He’s
been quite
useful to Donners on more than one occasion.’

‘I met Peter
once there – at Stourwater, I mean.’

‘You know
Donners too, do you. I’ve done a little business with
him myself. I’m an oil man, you know. I was in the South
American office before the war. Did you ever meet Peter’s sister, Jean? I used
to see quite a bit of her there.’

‘I knew her
ages ago.’

‘She married
Bob Duport,’ said Brent, ‘who was with us on the famous occasion when the
Vauxhall heeled over.’

There was a
perverse inner pleasure in knowing that Brent had had a love affair with Jean
Duport, which he could scarcely guess had been described to me by her own
husband. Even though I had once loved her myself – to that extent the thought
was painful, however long past – there was an odd sense of power in possessing
this secret information.

‘I ran into
Duport just before war broke out. I never knew him well. I gather they are
divorced now.’

‘Quite right,’
said Brent.

He did not
allow the smallest suggestion of personal interest to colour the tone of his
voice.

‘I heard Bob
was in some business mess,’ he said. ‘Chromite, was it? He got across that
fellow Widmerpool, another of Donners’s henchmen. Widmerpool is an able fellow,
not a man to offend. Bob managed to rub him up the wrong way. Somebody said Bob
was connected with the Board of Trade now. Don’t know whether that is true. The
Board of Trade wanted me to stay in Latin America, as a matter of fact.’

‘You’d have
had a safe billet there.’

‘Glad to leave
the place as it happened, though I was doing pretty well.’

‘How do you
find yourself here?’

‘Managed to get into this mob through
the good offices of our Military Attaché
where I was. His own regiment.
Never heard of them before.’

I supposed
that Brent had been relieved to find this opportunity of moving to another
continent after Jean had abandoned him. That disappointment, too, might explain
his decision to join the army as a change of occupation. He was several years
older than myself, in fact entering an age group to be reasonably considered
beyond the range of unfriendly criticism for remaining out of uniform;
especially if, as he suggested, his work in South America was officially
regarded as of some national importance. I remembered Duport’s story clearly
now. After reconciliation with Jean, they had sailed for South America. Brent
had sailed with them. At that time Jean’s affair with Brent had apparently been
in full swing. Indeed, from what Duport said, there was every reason to suppose
that affair had begun before she told me of her own decision to return to her
husband. So far as that went, Jean had deceived me as much as she had deceived
Duport. Fortunately Brent was unaware of that.

‘How do you
like the army?’

‘Bloody awful,’
he said, ‘but I’d rather be in than out.’

‘Me, too.’

The remaining
students of the course were an unexceptional crowd, most of the usual army
types represented. We drilled on the square, listened to lectures about the
German army, erected barbed wire entanglements, drove 3-ton lorries, map read.
One evening, preceding a night exercise in which one half of the course was
arrayed in battle against the other half, Stevens showed a different side of
himself. The force in which we were both included lay on the
ground in a large semi-circle, waiting for
the operation to begin. The place was a clearing among the pine woods of
heathery, Stonehurst-like country. Stevens and I were on the extreme right
flank of the semi-circle. On the extreme left, exactly opposite
us, whoever was disposed there continually threw handfuls
of gravel across the area between, which landed
chiefly on Stevens and myself.

‘It must be
Croxton,’ Stevens said.

Croxton
was a muscular neurotic of a kind, fairly common,
who cannot stop talking or creating a noise. He sang
or ragged joylessly all the time, without
possessing any of those inner
qualities – like Corporal Gwylt’s, for example – required
for making such behaviour acceptable to others. He was always starting a row,
playing tricks, causing trouble.
There could be little doubt that Croxton was responsible
for the hail of small stones that continued to spatter
over us. The moon
had disappeared behind clouds, rain
threatening. There seemed no prospect of the exercise beginning.

‘I think I’ll
deal with this,’ Stevens said.

He crawled
back into the cover of the trees behind us, disappearing in darkness. Some
minutes elapsed. Then I heard a sudden exclamation from the direction of the
gravel thrower. It was a cry of pain. More time went by. Then Stevens returned.

‘It was
Croxton,’ he said.

‘What did you
do?’

‘Gave him a
couple in the ribs with my rifle butt.’

‘What did he
think about that?’

‘He didn’t
seem to like it.’

‘Did he put up
any fight?’

‘Not much. He’s
gasping a bit now.’

The following
day, during a lecture on the German Division, I saw Croxton, who was sitting a
few rows in front, rub his back more than once. Stevens had evidently struck
fairly hard. This incident showed he could be disagreeable, if so disposed. He
also possessed the gift of isolating himself from his surroundings. These
lectures on the German army admittedly lacked light relief-after listening to
many of them, I have preserved only the ornamental detail that the German
Reconnaissance Corps carried a sabre squadron on its establishment – and one
easily dozed through
the lecturer’s dronings. On the other hand, to remain, as Stevens could,
slumbering like a child, upright on a hard wooden chair, while everyone else
was clattering from the lecture room, suggested considerable powers of self-seclusion.
Another source of preservation to Stevens – unlike Gwatkin – was an
imperviousness to harsh words. He and I had been digging a weapon pit together
one afternoon without much success. An instructor came up to grumble at our
efforts.

‘That’s not a
damned bit of use,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t give protection to a cat.’

‘We’ve just
reached a surface of rock, sir,’ said Stevens, ‘but I think I can say we’ve
demonstrated the dignity of labour.’

The instructor
sniggered and moved on, without examining the soil. Not everyone liked this
self-confident manner of Stevens. Among those who disapproved was Brent.

‘That young
fellow will get sent back to his unit,’ Brent said. ‘Mark my words. He’s too
big for his boots.’

When the whole
course was divided into syndicates of three for the purposes of a ‘tactical
exercise without troops’, Brent and I managed to be included in the same trio.
To act with
an acquaintance on such occasions is an advantage, but it was at the price of
having Macfaddean as the third partner. However, although Macfaddean,
a schoolmaster in civilian life, was feverishly
anxious to make a
good impression on the Directing Staff, this also meant that he was prepared to
do most of the work. In his middle to late thirties, Macfaddean would always
volunteer for a ‘demonstration’, no matter how uncomfortable the
prospect of crawling for miles through mud, for
instance, or exemplifying the difficulty of penetrating dannert wire. When the
task was written work, Macfaddean would pile up mountains of paper, or
laboriously summarize, whichever method he judged best set him apart from the
other students. He was so tireless in his energies that towards the end of the
day, when we had all agreed on the situation report to be presented
and there was some time to spare, Macfaddean could not bear these minutes to be
wasted.

‘Look here,
laddies,’ he said, ‘why don’t we go back into the woods and produce an
alternative version? I’m not happy, for instance, about concentration areas. It
would look good if we handed in two plans for the commander to choose from,
both first-rate.’

There could be
no doubt that the anonymity of the syndicate system irked Macfaddean. He felt
that if another report were made, the second one might be fairly attributed to
his own unaided efforts, a matter that could be made clear when the time came.
That was plain enough to both Brent and myself. We told Macfaddean that, for
our part, we were going to adhere to the plan already agreed upon; if he wished
to make another one, that was up to him.

‘Off you go,
Mac, if you want to,’ said Brent. ‘We’ll wait for you here. I’ve done enough
for today.’

When
Macfaddean was gone, we found a place to lie under some withered trees,
blasted, no doubt, to their crumbling state by frequent military experiment. We
were operating over the dismal tundra of Laffan’s Plain, battlefield of a
million mock engagements. The sky above was filled with low-flying aircraft, of
outlandish colour and design, camouflaged perhaps by Barnby in a playful mood.
Lumbering army reconnaissance planes buzzed placidly backwards and forwards
through grey puffs of cloud, ancient machines garnered in from goodness knows
what forgotten repository of written-off Governmental stores now sent aloft
again to meet a desperate situation. The heavens looked like one of those
pictures of an imagined Future to be found in old-fashioned magazines for boys
Brent rolled over on his back and watched this rococo aerial pageant.

‘You know Bob
Duport is not a chap like you and me,’ he said suddenly.

He spoke as if
he had given much thought to Duport’s character; as if, too, my own presence
allowed him at last to reach certain serious conclusions on that subject.
Regarded by Templer, and Duport himself, as something of a butt – certainly
a butt where women were concerned – Brent possessed a curious resilience in
everyday life, which his exterior did not reveal. This was noticeable on the
course, where, unlike Macfaddean, he was adept at avoiding work that might
carry with it the risk of blame.

‘What about
Duport?’

‘Bob’s
really
intelligent,’ said Brent earnestly. ‘No
intention of minimising your qualifications in that line, or even my own, but
Bob’s a real wonder-boy.’