Unconditional surrender (13 page)

They discussed and elaborated the possibilities of plot, counterplot, and betrayal. Captain Fremantle was a simple man. Before the war he had served in a lowly capacity in an insurance company. His post for the last three years had given him an occasional glimpse into arcane matters. Too many strange persons had briefly passed through his narrow field of vision for him to be totally unaware of the existence of an intricate world of deception and peril that lay beyond his experience. Roughly speaking he was ready to believe anything he was told. De Souza confused him only by suggesting so much.

Later, as they drove back, de Souza developed a new plot.

‘Are we being too contemporary?’ he asked. ‘We are thinking in terms of the thirties. Both uncle Crouchback and your Major Dracula came to manhood in the twenties. Perhaps we should look for a love motive. Your commandant is plainly as queer as a coot and Uncle Crouchback’s sex-life has always been something of a mystery. He never made his mark as a
coureur
when I served with him. This may well be a simple old-fashioned case of blackmail or, better still, of amorous jealousy.’

‘Why “better still”?’

Captain Fremantle was far out of his depth.

‘Altogether less sordid.’

‘But how do you know the commandant has any connexion with Crouchback’s disappearance?’

‘It is our working hypothesis.’

‘I simply don’t know whether to take you seriously or not.’

‘No, you don’t, do you? But you must admit you have enjoyed our little outing. It’s given you something to think about.’

‘I suppose it has, in a way.’

It was a baffled and bemused staff-captain who returned in the early afternoon to his headquarters. He had been deputed to make tactful inquiries of the most responsible-seeming of the officers under instruction as to whether he and his fellow officers had noticed any little oddities in the behaviour of his commandant. He had found himself investigating a mystery, perhaps a murder, whose motives lay in the heights of international politics or the depths of unnatural vice. Captain Fremantle was not at his ease in such matters.

The house, when they reached it, seemed empty. It was certainly silent save for the howling of the wind in the chimneys. One RASC private was on duty at the garage. Everyone else, confined to quarters without employment, had gone to bed, except Major Ludovic who, Captain Fremantle was informed, had left by car while they were still in the aerodrome, taking a driver with him and remarking in the phrase universally used by commanding officers to explain their absence from their posts, that he was ‘called to a conference’.

‘I think perhaps I’ll go and lie down too,’ said de Souza. ‘Thank you for the outing.’

The staff captain looked at his tidy office where no new papers had arrived since morning. Then he, too, took his puzzled head to his pillow. The African wine gently asserted its drowsy powers. He slept until the batman came in to put up the blackout screen in his window.

‘Sorry, sir,’ said the man as he discovered the tousled figure; ‘didn’t know you was here.’

Captain Fremantle slowly came to himself.

‘Time I showed a leg,’ he said. Then: ‘Is the commandant back?’

‘Yessir,’ said the man grinning.

‘What’s the joke, Ardingly?’ There was a confidence and cordiality between these two to which Ludovic, who shared Ardingly’s services, was a stranger. ‘The major, sir. He’s going on funny.’

‘Funny?’

Phantasmagoric memories came into Captain Fremantle’s quickening mind. ‘Going on funny?’

‘Yessir. He’s been and got a little dog.’

‘And he is going on funny with it?’

‘Well, not a bit like the major, sir.’

‘Perhaps I’d better go and see.’

‘Perhaps you’d say “acting soft”,’ Ardingly conceded.

Captain Fremantle had lain down to rest with the minimum of preparation. He had removed his boots, anklets, and tunic. Now he arose and put on service dress and followed the corridor into Major Ludovic’s part of the house. Pausing outside the door he heard from inside a clucking noise, as though a countrywoman were feeding poultry. He knocked and entered.

The floor of Ludovic’s room was covered with saucers containing milk, gravy, spam, biscuits, Woolton sausage, and other items of diet, some rationed, some on points, some free to the full purse. Here and there the food had been rudely spilt; none of it seemed to have appealed to the appetite of the Pekinese puppy which crouched under Ludovic’s bed in a nest of shredded paper. It was a pretty animal with eyes as prominent as Ludovic’s own. Ludovic was on all fours making the noises which had been audible outside; he was, at first sight, all khaki trouser-seat, like Jumbo Trotter at the billiard-table; a figure from antiquated farce, ‘caught bending’, inviting the boot. He raised to Fremantle a face that was radiant with simple glee; there was no trace of embarrassment or of resentment at the intrusion. He wished to share with all the overflowing delight of his heart.

‘Cor,’ he said, ‘just take a dekko at the little perisher. Wouldn’t fancy anything I give him. Had me worried. Thought he was sick. Thought I ought to call in the MO. Then I turned me back for a jiffy and blessed if he hasn’t polished off the last number of
Survival
. How d’you call that for an appetite?’ Then falling into a fruity and, to Captain Fremantle, bloodcurdling tone of infatuation, he addressed himself to the puppy: ‘What’ll kind staff-captain-man say if you won’t eat his nice grub, eh? What’ll kind editor-man say if you eat his clever paper?’

Guy meanwhile lay in bed less than a mile from Ludovic and his pet. There were, as de Souza had remarked, oubliettes which from time to time opened and engulfed members of His Majesty’s forces. Thus it had happened to Guy. He was clothed in flannel pyjamas not his own; his leg was encased in plaster and it seemed to him that he had lost all rights of property over that limb. He was left alone in a hut so full of music that the wind swept over it unheard. It was the Emergency Ward of the aerodrome. Here he had been delivered in an ambulance from the RAF hospital, where a young medical officer had informed him that he required no treatment. ‘Just lie up, old boy. We’ll have another look at you in a few weeks and then take the plaster off. You’ll be quite comfortable.’

Guy was not at all comfortable. There were no fellow patients in the ward. Its sole attendant was a youth who, sitting on Guy’s bed, announced, as soon as the stretcher-party had left: ‘I’m a CO.’

‘Commanding Officer?’ Guy asked without surprise.

Anything seemed possible among these inhabitants.

‘Conscientious Objector.’

He explained his objections at length above the turmoil of jazz. They were neither political nor ethical but occult, being in some way based on the dimensions of the Great Pyramid.

‘I could have lent you a book about it, but it got pinched.’

There was no malice in this youth nor was there the power to please. Guy asked for something to read. There was a welfare bloke came with some books once. I reckon someone must have flogged them. They weren’t the sort of books anyone could read anyway. They don’t take in any papers in the RAF. Any news they want they hear on the blower.’

‘Can’t you stop this infernal noise?’

‘What noise was that?’

‘The wireless.’

‘Oh no. I couldn’t do that. It’s laid on special. Piped all through the camp. It isn’t wireless anyway. Some of it’s records. You’ll soon find you get so you don’t notice it.’

‘Where are my clothes?’

The conscientious objector looked vaguely round the hut. ‘Don’t seem to be here, do they? Perhaps they got left behind. You’ll have to see Admin about that.’

‘Who’s Admin?’

‘He’s a bloke comes round once a week.’

‘Listen,’ said Guy, ‘I’ve got to get out of here. Will you telephone to the parachute school and ask Captain Fremantle to come here?’

‘Can’t hardly do that.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Only Admin’s allowed to telephone. What’s the number of this school?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, there you are.’

‘Can I see Admin?’

‘You’ll see him when he comes round.’

For an excruciating day Guy lay staring at the corrugated iron roof while the sounds of jazz wailed and throbbed around him. Very frequently the attendant brought him cups of tea and plates of inedible matter. During the watches of the second night he formed the resolution to escape.

The wind had dropped in the night. His fellows, he reflected, would now be starting for their fifth jump. With pain and enormous effort he hobbled across the ward supporting himself by the ends of the empty beds. In a corner stood the almost hairless broom with which the attendant was supposed to dust the floor. Using this as a crutch, Guy stumbled into the open. He recognized the buildings; the distance across the asphalt yard to the officers’ mess would have been negligible to a whole man. For the first time since his unhappy landing Guy felt the full pain of his injury. Sweating in the chill November morning he accomplished the fifty difficult paces. It was not an excursion which would have passed without notice at the Halberdier barracks. Here it was no one’s business either to stop him or to help him.

At length he subsided in an armchair.

One or two pilots gaped but they accepted the arrival of this pyjama’d cripple with the same indifference as they had shown him when he had arrived in uniform with his batch of parachutists. He shouted to one of them above the noise of the music: ‘I want to write a letter.’

‘Go ahead. It won’t disturb me.’

‘Is there such a thing as a piece of paper and a pen?’

‘Don’t see any, do you?’

‘What do you fellows do when you want to write a letter?’

‘My old man taught me: “Never put anything in writing,” he used to say.’

The pilots gaped. One went out; another came in.

Guy sat and waited; not in vain. After an hour the party of parachutists arrived, led on this occasion by Captain Fremantle.

The staff captain had slept (twice) on the problem of Guy’s disappearance. He now gave no notional assent to any of de Souza’s ‘hypotheses’, but an aura of mystery remained, and he was quite unprepared for the apparition of Guy in flannel pyjamas waving a broom. He came cautiously towards him.

‘Thank God you’ve come,’ said Guy with a warmth to which Captain Fremantle was little accustomed.

‘Yes. I have to see the AO about a few things.’

‘You’ve got to get me out of here.’

Captain Fremantle had more than three years’ experience of the army and, as the facts of Guy’s predicament were frantically explained, the staff-solution came pat: ‘Not my Pigeon. The SMO will have to discharge you.’

‘There’s no medical officer here. Only some kind of orderly.’

‘He won’t do. Must be signed for by the SMO.’

The eleven ‘clients’ were morose. Their former exhilaration bad subsided with their fears. This last jump was merely a disagreeable duty. De Souza saw Guy and approached him.

‘So you are safe and well, uncle,’ he said.

Guy had served as the source of invention to beguile a wet day. That joke was over. De Souza now wished to finish his course early and get back to London and a waiting girl.

‘I’m being driven insane, Frank.’

‘Yes,’ said de Souza, ‘yes, I suppose you are.’

‘The staff-captain says he can’t do anything about me.’

‘No. No. I don’t suppose he can. Well, I’m glad to have seen you all right. It looks as if they wanted us to take off.’

‘Frank, do you remember Jumbo Trotter in barracks?’

‘No. Can’t say I do.’

‘He might be able to help me. Will you telephone to him as soon as you get back? Just tell him what’s happened to me and where I am. I can give you his number.’

‘But
shall
I get back? That is the question uppermost in my mind at the moment. We put our lives in jeopardy every time we go up in that aeroplane – or rather every time we leave it. Perhaps you’ll find me in the next bed to you insensible. Perhaps I shall be dead. I am told you dig your own grave – those are the very words of the junior instructor – if the parachute doesn’t open – burrow into the earth five feet deep and all they have to do is shovel the sides down on one. I keep reminding Gilpin of that possibility. In that rich earth a richer dust concealed. In my case a corner that shall be for ever Anglo-Sephardi.’

‘Frank, will you telephone to Jumbo for me?’

‘If I survive, uncle, I will.’

Guy stumbled back to his bed.

‘Wasn’t it a bit cold out there?’ asked the conscientious objector.

‘Bitterly.’

‘I was wondering who’d got my brush.’

Guy lay on the bed, exhausted by his efforts. His plastered leg ached more than it had done at any time since his injury. Presently the conscientious objector came in with tea.

‘Got some books out of the Squadron Leader’s office,’ he said, giving him two tattered pictorial journals which, from their remote origin in juvenile humour, were still dubbed ‘comics’; but for their price they would have been more appropriately named ‘penny-dreadfuls’ for the incidents portrayed were uniformly horrific.

An aeroplane came in to land.

‘Was that the parachute flight?’ Guy asked.

‘Couldn’t say, I’m sure.’

‘Be a good fellow. Go and find out. Ask if anyone was hurt.’

‘They wouldn’t tell me a thing like that. Don’t suppose they’d know, anyway. They just drop them out and come back. Ground staff collect the bodies.’

Guy studied the Squadron Leader’s ‘comic’.

Wherever he went de Souza left his spoor of unreasonable anxiety.

Few things were better calculated to arouse Jumbo’s sympathies than the news that a Halberdier had fallen into the hands of the Air Force. Those who knew him only slightly would not have recognized him as a man of swift action. In Guy’s case his normal gentle pace became a stampede. Not Jumbo alone with his car, driver, and batman, but the Transit Camp Medical Officer in his car with his orderly, and an ambulance and its crew all sped out of London into Essex. The right credentials were produced, the right manumissions completed; Guy’s clothes were collected from the hospital, his remaining baggage from the Training Centre, Guy himself from the emergency ward, and he was back in London in his quiet room before de Souza, Gilpin, and their fellows had been marshalled into the bus for their return to the ‘dispersal centre’.