The Valley of Bones (3 page)

‘We shall see.’

‘Yanto says he’s sure he will remain
with two pips all the war. He doesn’t care. Yanto has no ambition.’

I had met Evan Breeze – usually known
by the diminutive ‘Yanto’ – in the Mess the previous night, a tall, shambling,
unmoustached figure, not at all military, who, as an accountant, stood like
myself a little apart from the norm of working in a bank. Gwatkin, so I found
in due course, did not much like Breeze. In fact it would be true to say he
hated him, a sentiment Breeze quietly returned. Mutual antipathy was in general
attributed to Gwatkin’s disapproval of Breeze’s unsmart appearance, and
unwillingness to adapt himself to army methods and phraseology. That attitude
certainly brought him some persecution at the hands of Gwatkin and others in
authority. Besides, Breeze always managed to give the impression that he was
laughing at Gwatkin, while at the same time allowing no word or act of his to
give reasonable cause for offence. However, there was apparently another
matter. When we knew each other better, Kedward revealed that Gwatkin, before
his marriage, had been in love with Breeze’s sister; had been fairly roughly
treated by her.

‘Rowland falls like a ton of bricks
when he does, believe me,’ Kedward said, ‘when he takes a fancy to a girl. He
was so stuck on Gwenllian Breeze, you would have thought he had the measles.’

‘What happened?’

‘She wouldn’t look at him. Married a
college professor. One of those Swansea people.’

‘And Rowland married someone else?’

‘Oh, yes, of course. He married
Blodwen Davies that had lived next door all their lives.’

‘How did that work out?’

Kedward looked at me
uncomprehendingly.

‘Why, what do you mean?’ he said. ‘All
right. Why should it not? They’ve been married a long time now, though they
haven’t any kids. All that about Gwen Breeze was years ago. Yanto must have
forgotten by now that Rowland could ever have been his brother-in-law. What a couple
they would have been in one family. They would have been at each other like a
dog-fight. Rowland always knows best. He likes bossing it. Yanto likes his own
way too, but different. Yanto should clean himself up. He looks like an old hen
in uniform.’

All the same, although Breeze might
not possess Kedward’s liveliness, ambition, capacity for doing everything with
concentrated energy, I found later that he was not, in his own way, a bad
officer, however unkempt his turnout. The men liked him; he was worth consulting
about the men.

‘Keep an eye on Sergeant Pendry, Nick,’
he said, when he heard Pendry was my Platoon Sergeant. ‘He is making a great
show-off now, but I am not sure he is going on that way. He has only just been
promoted and at present is very keen. But he was in my platoon for a time as a
corporal and I am not certain about him, that he can last. He may be one of
those NCOs who put everything into it for two or three weeks, then go to
pieces. You’ll find a lot like that. They have to be stripped. There is nothing
else to do.’

It was Breeze, on the evening of the
day I had been shown round the lines by Kedward, who took me to the bar of the
hotel where the officers of the unit were billeted. After dinner, subalterns
were inclined to leave the ante-room of the Mess to the majors and captains,
retiring to where talk was less restricted and rounds of drinks could be ‘stood’.
This saloon bar was smoky and very crowded. In addition to a large civilian
clientele and a sprinkling of our own Regiment, were several officers from the
Divisional signals unit located in the town, also two or three from the RAF.
Pumphrey, one of our subalterns, was leaning against the bar talking to a
couple of army chaplains, and a lieutenant I had not seen before, wearing the
Regiment’s badges. This officer had a large, round, pasty face and a ragged
moustache, the tangled hairs of which glistened with beer. His thick lips were
closed on the stub of a cigar. In spite of the moustache and the fact that he
was rather bald, he shared some of Kedward’s look of a small boy dressed up in
uniform for fun, though giving that impression for quite different reasons. In
strong contrast with Kedward’s demeanour, this man had an extraordinary air of
guilt which somehow suggested juvenility; a schoolboy wearing a false moustache
(something more than burnt cork this time), who only a few minutes before had
done something perfectly disgusting, and was pretty sure that act was about to
be detected by the headmaster with whom he had often been in trouble before.
Before I could diagnose more, Kedward himself came into the bar. He joined us.

‘I will buy you a bitter, Idwal,’ said
Breeze.

Kedward accepted the offer.

‘Finland is still knocking the Red
Army about on the news,’ he said. ‘We may go there yet.’

Pumphrey, another of our non-banking
officers (he sold second-hand cars), beckoned us to join the group with the
chaplains. Red-haired, noisy, rather aggressive, Pumphrey was always talking of
exchanging from the army into the RAF.

‘This is our new reinforcement, Yanto,’
he shouted, ‘Lieutenant Bithel. He’s just reported his arrival at the Orderly
Room and has been shown his quarters. Now he’s wetting his whistle with me and
the padres.’

We pushed through the crowd towards
them.

‘Here is Iltyd Popkiss, the C. of E.,’
said Breeze, ‘and Ambrose Dooley that saves the souls of the RCs, and is a man
to tell you some stories to make you sit up.’

Popkiss was small and pale. It was at
once evident that he had a hard time of it keeping up with his Roman Catholic
colleague in heartiness and avoidance of seeming strait-laced. Dooley, a large
dark man with an oily complexion and appearance of not having shaved too well
that morning, accepted with complaisance this reputation as a retailer of
hair-raising anecdote. The two chaplains seemed on the best of terms. Bithel
himself smiled timidly, revealing under his straggling moustache a double row
of astonishingly badly fitting false teeth. He hesitantly proffered a flabby
hand. His furtiveness was quite disturbing.

‘I’ve just been telling them what an
awful journey I had coming here from where I live,’ he said. ‘The Adjutant was
very decent about the muddle that had been made. It was the fault of the War
Office as usual. Anyway, I’m here now, glad to be back with the Regiment and
having a drink, after all I’ve been through.’

I thought at first he might be a
commercial traveller by profession, as he spoke as if accustomed to making
social contacts by way of a kind of patter, though he seemed scarcely sure
enough of himself for that profession. The way he talked might be caused by
mere embarrassment. The cloth of his tunic was stained on the lapels with what
seemed egg, the trousers ancient and baggy. He looked as if he had consumed
quite a few drinks already. There could be no doubt, I saw with relief, that he
was older than myself. If he had ever played rugby for Wales, he had certainly
allowed himself to run disastrously to seed. There could be no doubt about that
either. He seemed almost painfully aware of his own dilapidation, also of the
impaired state of his uniform, at which he now looked down apologetically,
holding out the flap of one of the pockets from its tarnished button for our
inspection.

‘When I’m allotted a batman, I’ll have
to get this tunic pressed,’ he said. ‘Haven’t worn it since I was in
Territorial camp fifteen or more years ago. Managed to spill a glass of
gin-and-italian over the trousers on the way here, I don’t know how.’

‘You won’t get any bloody marvellous
valeting from your batman here, I’m telling you,’ said Pumphrey. ‘He’ll be more
used to hewing coal than pressing suits, and you’ll be lucky if he even gets a
decent polish on those buttons of yours, which are needing a rub up.’

‘I suppose we mustn’t expect too much
now there’s a war on,’ said Bithel, unhappy that he might have committed a
social blunder by speaking of pressing tunics. ‘But what about another round.
It’s my turn, padre.’

He addressed himself to the Anglican
chaplain, but Father Dooley broke in vigorously.

‘If I go on drinking so much of this
beer, it will have a strong effect on my bowels,’ he said, ‘but all the same I
will oblige you, my friend.’

Bithel smiled doubtfully, evidently
not much at ease with such plain speaking in the mouth of the clergy.

‘I don’t think one more will do us any
harm,’ he said. ‘I drink a fair amount of ale myself in civilian life without
bad results.’

‘You want to keep your bowels open
anyway,’ said

Dooley, pursuing the subject. ‘That’s
what I believe in. Have a good sluicing every day. Nothing like it.’

He held up his glass to the light, as
if assessing the aperient potentialities of the contents.

‘Army food gives me squitters anyway,’
he went on, roaring with delight at the thought. ‘I’ve hardly had a moment’s
peace since we mobilized.’

‘It makes me as constipated as an owl,’
said Pumphrey. ‘I should just about say so.’

Dooley finished his beer at a gulp,
again giving his jolly monk’s laugh at the thought of man’s digestive
vicissitudes.

‘Even if I’m all bound up, I always
carry plenty of toilet paper round with me,’ he said. ‘Never be without it.
That’s my rule. You can’t know when you’re not going to be taken short in the
army.’

‘That’s a good notion,’ said Pumphrey.
‘We must follow His Reverence’s advice, mustn’t we. Take proper precautions in
case we have to spend a penny. Perhaps you do already, Iltyd. The Church seems
to teach these things.’

‘Oh, why, yes, I do indeed,’ said
Popkiss.

‘What do you take Iltyd for?’ said
Dooley. ‘He’s an old campaigner, aren’t you, Iltyd?’

‘Why, yes, indeed,’ said Popkiss,
evidently pleased to be given this opening, ‘and what do you think? In my last
unit, when I took off my tunic to play billiards one night, they did such a
trick on me. You’d never guess. They wrapped a french letter, do you know,
between those sheets of toilet paper in my pocket.’

There was a good deal of laughter at
this, in which the RC chaplain amicably joined, although it was clear from his
expression that he recognised Popkiss to have played a card he himself might
find hard to trump.

‘And did it fall out in the middle of
Church Parade?’ asked Pumphrey, after he had finished guffawing.

‘No, indeed, thank to goodness. I just
found it next day on my dressing table by my dog-collar. I threw it down the
lavatory and pulled the chain. Very thankful I was when it went away, which was
not for a long time. I pulled the chain half a dozen times, I do believe.’

‘Now listen to what happened to me
when I was with the 2nd/14th—’ began
Father Dooley.

I never heard the climax of this
anecdote, no doubt calculated totally to eclipse in rough simplicity of
language and narrative force anything further Popkiss might attempt to offer,
in short to blow the Anglican totally out of the water. I was sorry to miss
this consummation, because Dooley obviously felt his own reputation as a
raconteur at stake, a position he was determined to retrieve. However, before
the story was properly begun, Bithel drew me to one side.

‘I’m not sure I like all this sort of
talk,’ he muttered in an undertone. ‘Not used to it yet, I suppose. You must
feel the same. You’re not the rough type. You were at the University, weren’t
you?’

I admitted to that.

‘Which one?’

I told him. Bithel had certainly had
plenty to drink that day. He smelt strongly of alcohol even in the thick
atmosphere of the saloon bar. Now, he sighed deeply.

‘I was going to the ’varsity myself,’
he said. ‘Then my father decided he couldn’t afford it. Business was a bit
rocky at that moment. He was an auctioneer, you know, and had run into a spot
of trouble as it happened. Nothing serious, though people in the neighbourhood
said a lot of untrue and nasty things at the time. Nothing people won’t say. He
passed away soon after that. I suppose I could have sent myself up to college,
so to speak. The money would just about have run to it in those days. Somehow,
it seemed too late by then. I’ve always regretted it. Makes a difference to a
man, you know. You’ve only got to look round this bar.’

He swayed a little, adjusting his
balance by clinging to the counter.

‘Had a tiring day,’ he said. ‘Think I’ll
smoke just one more cigar and go to bed. Soothing to the nerves, a cigar. Will
you have one? They’re cheap, but not bad.’

‘No, thanks very much.’

‘Come on. I’ve got a whole box with
me.’

‘Don’t really like them, thanks all
the same.’

‘A ’varsity man and don’t smoke
cigars,’ said Bithel, speaking with disappointment. ‘I shouldn’t have expected
that. What about sleeping pills? I’ve got some splendid ones, if you’d like to
try them. Must use them if you’ve had just the wrong amount to drink. Fatal to
wake up in the night when that’s happened.’

By this time I had begun to feel
pretty tired myself, in no need of sleeping pills. The bar was closing. There
was a general move towards bed. Bithel, after gulping down a final drink by
himself, went off unsteadily to search for a greatcoat he had mislaid. The rest
of us, including the chaplains, made our way upstairs. I was sleeping in the
same bedroom as Kedward, Breeze and Pumphrey.

‘Old Bithel’s been allotted that attic
on the top floor to himself,’ said Pumphrey. ‘He’ll feel pretty lonely up
there. We ought to make a surprise for him when he comes to bed. Let’s give him
a good laugh.’

‘Oh, he’ll just want to go quietly to
bed,’ said Breeze, ‘not wish for any tomfoolery tonight.’

Kedward took the opposite view.

‘Why, yes,’ he said, ‘Bithel seems a
good chap. He would like some sort of a rag. Make him feel at home. Show him
that we like him.’

I was glad no such welcome had been
thought necessary for myself the previous night, when there had been no sign of
horseplay, merely a glass or two of beer before bed. There was perhaps
something about Bithel that brought into being such schemes. What shape the
joke should best take was further discussed. The end of it was we all climbed
the stairs to the top floor of the hotel, where Bithel was housed
in
one of the attics. The chaplains came too, Dooley particularly entering into
the idea of a rag. At first I had envied Bithel the
luxury of a room to himself, but, when we arrived there, it
became clear that such privacy, whatever its advantages, was paid for
by a severe absence of other comfort. The room was fairly big, with a low
ceiling under the eaves. Deep shelves had been built along one side, so that in normal
times the attic was probably used as a large linen cupboard. The walls were
unpapered. There was a strong smell of mice.