Unconditional surrender (22 page)

The Adriatic was suggested and considered. Burma had been offered and evaded. It was plain from the reports he saw that it was no place for Ian. It might, on the other hand, be just the place for Trimmer.

‘All Trimmer reports negative, sir,’ Ian reported to General Whale.

‘Yes. Where is he now?’

‘San Francisco. He’s been right across the country. He’s flopped everywhere. It isn’t really his fault. He went too late. The Americans have heroes of their own now. Besides, you know, they haven’t a fully developed consciousness of class. They can’t see Trimmer as the proletarian portent. They see him as a typical British officer.’

‘Haven’t they seen the fellow’s hair? I don’t mean the way it’s cut. The way it grows.
That’s
proletarian enough for them, surely?’

‘They don’t understand that kind of thing. No, sir, he’s been a flop in America and he’d be worse in Canada. As I see it we can only keep him moving west. I don’t think he ought to come back to the UK at the moment. There are reasons. You might call them compassionate grounds.’

‘There’s a bigger problem on our hands – General Ritchie-Hook. He’s had a blood row with Monty and is out of work and keeps bothering the Chief. I don’t quite see why we should be regarded as responsible for him. Ritchie-Hook and Trimmer – why should we be held responsible for them?’

‘Do you think they could go as a pair and impress the loyal Indians?’

‘No.’

‘Nor do I. Not Ritchie-Hook, certainly. They’d soon stop being loyal if he had a go at them.’

‘There’s Australia.’

‘For Trimmer that would be worse than America.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake settle it yourself. I’m sick of the man.’

General Whale, too, knew he had passed the zenith of his powers and from now on could only decline. There had been a delirious episode when he had helped drive numerous Canadians to their death at Dieppe. He had helped plan greater enterprises which had come to nothing. Now he was where he had started in his country’s ‘finest hour’, with negligible powers of mischief. He occupied the same room, he was served by the same immediate staff as in the years of expansion. But his legions were lost to him.

There was stagnation at Ludovic’s station, also. The staff-captain remained. The instructors had been recalled. No new clients appeared for the parachute course. But Ludovic was content.

He employed a typist in Scotland. He had chosen her because she seemed the most remote from enemy action of any of those who offered their services in the
Times Literary Supplement
. Throughout the winter he had sent her a weekly parcel of manuscript and received in return two typed copies in separate envelopes. She acknowledged the receipt of each parcel by postcard but there was a four-day interval during which Ludovic suffered deep qualms of anxiety. Much was pilfered from the railways in those days but not, as things happened, Ludovic’s novel. Now at the beginning of June he had it all complete, two piles of laced and paper-bound sections. He ordered Fido to basket and settled down to read the last chapter, not to correct misprints, for he wrote clearly and the typist was competent, not to polish or revise, for the work seemed to him perfect (as in a sense it was), but for the sheer enjoyment of his own performance.

Admirers of his
pensées
(and they were many) would not have recognized the authorship of this book. It was a very gorgeous, almost gaudy, tale of romance and high drama set, as his experience with Sir Ralph Brompton well qualified him to set it, in the diplomatic society of the previous decade. The characters and their equipment were seen as Ludovic in his own ambiguous position had seen them, more brilliant than reality. The plot was Shakespearean in its elaborate improbability. The dialogue could never have issued from human lips, the scenes of passion were capable of bringing a blush to readers of either sex and every age. But it was not an old-fashioned book. Had he known it, half a dozen other English writers, averting themselves sickly from privations of war and apprehensions of the social consequences of the peace, were even then severally and secretly, unknown to one another, to Everard Spruce, to Coney, and to Frankie, composing or preparing to compose books which would turn from the drab alleys of the thirties into the odorous gardens of a recent past transformed and illuminated by disordered memory and imagination. Ludovic in the solitude of his post was in the movement.

Nor was it for all its glitter a cheerful book. Melancholy suffused its pages and deepened towards the close.

So far as any character could be said to have an origin in the world of reality, the heroine was the author. Lady Marmaduke Transept (that was the name which Ludovic had recklessly bestowed on her) was Lord Marmaduke’s second wife. He was an ambassador. She was extravagantly beautiful, clever, doomed; passionless only towards Lord Marmaduke; ambitious for everything except his professional success. If the epithet could properly be used of anyone so splendidly caparisoned, Lady Marmaduke was a bitch. Ludovic had known from the start that she must die in the last chapter. He had made no plans. Often in the weeks of composition he had wondered, almost idly, what would be the end of her. He waited to see, as he might have sat in a seat at the theatre watching the antics of players over whom he had no control.

As Ludovic read the last pages he realized that the whole book had been the preparation for Lady Marmaduke’s death – a protracted, ceremonious killing like that of a bull in the ring. Except that there was no violence. He had feared sometimes that his heroine might be immured in a cave or left to drift in an open boat. These were chimeras. Lady Marmaduke, in the manner of an earlier and happier age, fell into a decline. Her disease was painless and unspecified. Under Ludovic’s heavy arm she languished, grew thinner, transparent, the rings slipped from her fingers among the rich covering of her chaise-longue as the light faded on the distant, delectable mountains. He had hesitated in his choice of title, toying with many recondite allusions from his recent reading. Now with decision he wrote in large letters at the head of the first page:
THE DEATH WISH
.

Fido in his basket discerned his master’s emotion, broke orders to share it, leaped to Ludovic’s stout thighs, and remained there unrebuked, gazing up with eyes of adoration that were paler and more prominent than Ludovic’s own.

‘What I long to know,’ said Kerstie, ‘is what went on between Guy and Virginia after she settled in Carlisle Place. After all there was a good month before her figure began to go.’

‘It’s not a thing I should care to ask her,’ said Ian.

‘I don’t think I can now. We made it up all right after our tiff – it’s no good
keeping things up
ever, is it? – but there’s been a coldness.’

‘Why are you so keen to know?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘There’s been a coldness between me and Virginia for years.’

‘Who was there this evening?’

‘Quite a salon. Perdita had brought Everard Spruce. There was someone I didn’t know called Lady Plessington and a priest. It was all quite gay except for the midwife who kept trying to show us the baby. Virginia can’t bear the sight of it. In a novel or a film the baby ought to make Virginia a changed character. It hasn’t. Have you noticed that she always calls it “it”, never “he”. She calls the midwife “Jenny”. It was always “Sister Jenkins” in the days before the birth. They get on all right. Old Peregrine speaks of the child as “Gervase”. They’ve had it christened already, as Catholics do for some reason. When he asks how Gervase is, Virginia doesn’t seem to cotton on. “Oh, you mean the baby. Ask Jenny.”’

When Virginia’s baby was ten days old and the news was all of the Normandy landings, the dingy tranquillity which enveloped London was disturbed. Flying bombs appeared in the sky, unseemly little caricatures of aeroplanes, which droned smokily over the chimney tops, suddenly fell silent, dropped out of sight and exploded dully. Day and night they came at frequent irregular intervals, striking at haphazard far and near.

It was something quite other than the battle scene of the blitz with its drama of attack and defence; its earth-shaking concentrations of destruction and roaring furnaces; its respites when the sirens sounded the All Clear. No enemy was risking his own life up there. It was as impersonal as a plague, as though the city were infested with enormous, venomous insects. Spirits in Bellamy’s, as elsewhere, had soared in the old days when Turtle’s had gone up in flames and Air Marshal Beech had taken cover under the billiard table. Now there were glum faces. The machines could not be heard in the bar but the tall windows of the coffee-room (cross-laced with sticking plaster) fronted St James’s Street. All heads were turned towards them and a silence would fall when a motor bicycle passed. Job stood fast at his post in the porter’s lodge, but his sang-froid required more frequent stimulation. Members who had no particular duties in London began to disperse. Elderberry and Box-Bender decided it was time they attended to local business in their constituencies.

General Whale made an unprecedented move to the air-raid shelter. It had been constructed at great expense, wired, air-conditioned, and never once used. It had been a convention of HOO HQ that no attention was paid to raid warnings. Now General Whale had a bed made there and spent his nights as well as his days underground.

‘If I may say so, sir,’ Ian Kilbannock ventured, ‘you’re not looking at all well.’

‘To tell you the truth I don’t feel it, Ian. I haven’t had a day’s leave for two years.’

The man’s nerve had gone, Ian decided. He could now safely desert him.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘with your approval I was thinking of applying for a posting abroad.’

‘You, too, Ian? Where? How?’

‘Sir Ralph Brompton thinks he could get me sent as war correspondent to the Adriatic.’

‘What’s it got to do with
him
?’ asked General Whale in an access of feeble exasperation. ‘How are military postings
his
business?’

‘He does seem to have some pull there, sir.’

General Whale gazed at Ian despondingly, uncomprehendingly. Three years, two years, even six months ago there would have been a detonation of rage. Now he sighed deeply. He gazed round the rough concrete walls of his shelter, at the silent ‘scrambler’ telephone on his table. He felt (and had he known the passage might so have expressed it) like a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.

‘What am I doing here?’ he asked. ‘Why am I taking cover when all I want to do is die?’

‘Angela,’ Virginia said, ‘you’d better go too. I can get on all right now by myself. I don’t need Sister Jenny any more really. Couldn’t you take that baby down with you? Old Nanny would look after it, surely?’

‘She’d probably love to,’ said Angela Box-Bender, doubtful but ready to hear reason. ‘The trouble is we simply haven’t any room for a single other adult.’

‘Oh, I don’t want to move at all. Peregrine will be quite happy with me and Mrs Corner once the nursery is cleared. Mrs Corner will be over the moon to see the last of it.’ (There had been the normal, ineradicable hostility between nursing sister and domestic servant.)

‘It’s wonderfully unselfish of you, Virginia. If you really think it’s the best thing for Gervase …?’

‘I really think it’s the best thing for – for Gervase.’

So it was arranged and Virginia comfortably recuperated as the bombs chugged overhead and she wondered, as each engine cut out: ‘Is that the one that’s coming here?’

IN
the world of high politics the English abandonment of their Serbian allies – those who had once been commended by the Prime Minister for having ‘found their souls’ – was determined and gradually contrived. The king in exile was persuaded to dismiss his advisers and appoint more pliable successors. A British ship brought this new minister to Vis to confer with Tito in his cave. The Russians instructed Tito to make a show of welcome. Full recognition for the partisans and more substantial help were the inducements offered by the British and Americans. Meetings ‘at the highest level’ were suggested for the near future. And as an undesigned by-product of this intrigue there resulted one infinitesimal positive good.

Guy had not dismissed the Jews from his mind. The reprimand rankled but more than this he felt compassion; something less than he had felt for Virginia and her child but a similar sense that here again, in a world of hate and waste, he was being offered the chance of doing a single small act to redeem the times. It was, therefore, with joy that he received the signal:
Central Government approves in principle evacuation Jews stop Dispatch two repeat two next plane discuss problem with Unrra.

He went with it to the Minister of the Interior who was lying on his bed drinking weak tea.

Bakic explained, ‘He’s sick and don’t know nothing. You better talk to de Commissar.’

The Commissar confirmed that he too had received similar instructions.

‘I suggest we send the Kanyis,’ said Guy.

‘He say, why de Kanyis?’

‘Because they make most sense.’

‘Pardon me.’

‘Because they seem the most responsible pair.’

‘De Commissar says, responsible for what?’

‘They are the best able to put their case sensibly.’

A long discussion followed between the Commissar and Bakic.

‘He won’t send de Kanyis.’

‘Why not?’

‘Kanyi got plenty of work with de dynamo.’

So another pair was chosen and sent to Bari, the grocer and the lawyer who had first called on him. Guy saw them off. They seemed stupified and sat huddled among the bundles and blankets on the airfield during the long wait. Only when the aeroplane was actually there, illumined by the long line of bonfires lit to guide it, did they both suddenly break into tears.

But this little kindling of human hope was the least impressive incident on the airfield that evening and it passed quite unnoticed in the solemnity with which the arriving passengers were received.

Guy had not been warned to expect anyone of importance. He realized that something unusual was afoot when in the darkness which preceded the firing of the flare-path, he was aware of a reception party assembling, among whom loomed the figures of the General and the Commissar. When the lights went up, Guy recognized with surprise those rarely glimpsed recluses, the Russian Mission. When the machine came to ground and the doors were open, six figures emerged all in British battle-dress who were at once surrounded by partisans, embraced, and led aside.

The Squadron Leader began supervising the disembarkation of stores. There was no great quantity of them and those mostly for the British Mission – rations, mail, and tin after tin of petrol.

‘What am I supposed to do with these?’ Guy asked the pilot.

‘Wait and see. There’s a jeep to come out.’

‘For me?’

‘Well, for your major.’

‘Have I a major?’

‘Haven’t they told you? They signalled that one was coming. They never tell me anyone’s name. He’s over there with the gang.’

Strong willing partisans contrived a ramp and carefully lowered the car to earth. Guy stood beside his two Jews watching. Presently an English voice called: ‘Guy Crouchback anywhere about?’

Guy knew the voice. ‘Frank de Souza.’

‘Am I unwelcome? I expect you’ll get the warning order on tomorrow’s transmission. It was a last-minute decision sending us.’

‘Who else?’

‘I’ll explain later. I’m afraid in the whirligig of war I’ve now become your commanding officer, uncle. Be a good chap and see to the stores, will you? I’ve got a night’s talking ahead with the general staff and the Praesidium.’

‘The what?’

‘I thought that might surprise you. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow. Begoy, for your information, is about to become a highly popular resort. We shall make history here, uncle. I must find a present I’ve got for the general in my valise. It may help cement anti-fascist solidarity.’

He stooped over the small heap of baggage, loosened some straps and stood up with a bottle in each hand. ‘Tell someone to do it up, will you? and have it put wherever I’m going to sleep.’

He rejoined the group who were now tramping off the field.

‘Right,’ said the pilot. ‘I’m ready to take on passengers.’

Two wounded partisans were hoisted in; then an American bomber crew who had baled out the week before and been led to the Squadron Leader’s headquarters. They were far from being gratified by this speedy return to duty. There was a regulation that if they remained at large in enemy territory for some weeks longer, they could be repatriated to the United States. It was for this that they had made a hazardous parachute jump and destroyed an expensive, very slightly damaged aeroplane.

Last came the Jews. When Guy held out his hand to them, they kissed it.

As always on these night incursions Guy had his sergeant and orderly with him. They were plainly exhilarated by the spectacle of the jeep. He left it and the stores to them and walked back to his quarters. The night of high summer was brilliant with stars and luminous throughout its full firmament. When he reached the farm he told the widows of de Souza’s coming. There was an empty room next to his which they immediately began to put in order. It was just midnight but they worked without complaint, eagerly, excited at the prospect of a new arrival.

Soon the jeep drove into the yard. The widows ran to admire it. The soldiers unloaded, putting the rations and tins of petroleum in the store room, de Souza’s baggage in the room prepared for him. The Praesidium, whatever that might be, was of no interest to Guy; he was glad de Souza had come; very glad that his two Jews had gone.

“The mail, sir,’ reported the orderly.

‘Better leave that for Major de Souza in the morning. You know he’s taking command here now?’

‘Yes, we got the buzz from the air force. Two personal for you, sir.’

Guy took the flimsy air-mail forms that were then the sole means of communication. One, he noted, was from Virginia, the other from Angela.

Virginia’s letter was undated but had clearly been written some six weeks ago.

Clever Peregrine tells me he managed to persuade them to accept a telegram for you announcing the Birth. I hope it arrived. You can’t trust telegrams any more. Anyway it is born and I am feeling fine and everyone especially Angela is being heavenly. Sister Jennings – Jenny to me – says it is a fine baby. We have rather an embarrassing joke about Jenny and gin and my saying she is like Mrs Gamp – at least it embarrasses other people. I think it quite funny as jokes with nurses go. It’s been baptized already. Eloise Plessington who believe it or not is now my great new friend was godmother. I’ve made a lot of new friends since you went away in fact I’m having a very social time. An intellectual who says he knows you called Everard something brought me a smoked salmon from Ruben’s. And a lemon! Where does Ruben get them? Magic. I hope you are enjoying your foreign tour wherever you are and forgetting all the beastliness of London. Ian talks of visiting you. How? Longing for you to be back. V.

Angela’s letter was written a month later:

I have dreadful news for you. Perhaps I should have tried to telegraph but Arthur said there was no point as there was nothing you could do. Well, be prepared. Now. Virginia has been killed. Peregrine too and Mrs Corner. One of the new doodle bombs landed on Carlisle Place at ten in the morning yesterday. Gervase is safe with me. They were all killed instantly. All Peregrine’s ‘collection’ destroyed. It was Virginia’s idea that I should have Gervase and keep him safe. We think we shall be able to get Virginia and Peregrine taken down to Broome and buried there but it is not easy. I had Mass said for them here this morning. There will be another in London soon for friends. I won’t attempt to say what I feel about this except that now more than ever you are in my prayers. You have had a difficult life, Guy, and it seemed things were at last going to come right for you. Anyway you have Gervase. I wish papa had lived to know about him. I wish you had seen Virginia these last weeks. She was
still her old sweet gay self of course but there was a difference. I was getting to understand why you loved her and to love her myself. In the old days I did not understand.
As Arthur says there is really nothing for you to do here. I suppose you could get special leave home but I expect you will prefer to go on with whatever you are doing.

The news did not affect Guy greatly; less, indeed, than the arrival of Frank de Souza and the jeep and the ‘Praesidium’; far less than the departure of his two Jewish protégés. The answer to the question that had agitated Kerstie Kilbannock (and others of his acquaintance) – what had been his relations with Virginia during their brief cohabitation in Uncle Peregrine’s flat? – was simple enough. Guy had hobbled into the lift after their return as man and wife from the registrar’s office and had gone back to bed. There Virginia had joined him and with gentle, almost tender, agility adapted her endearments to his crippled condition. She was, as always, lavish with what lay in her gift. Without passion or sentiment but in a friendly, cosy way they had resumed the pleasures of marriage and in the weeks while his knee mended the deep old wound in Guy’s heart and pride healed also, as perhaps Virginia had intuitively known that it might do. January had been a month of content; a time of completion, not of initiation. When Guy was passed fit for active service and his move-order was issued, he had felt as though he were leaving a hospital where he had been skilfully treated, a place of grateful memory to which he had no particular wish to return. He did not mention Virginia’s death to Frank then or later.

Frank came to the farmhouse at dawn, accompanied by two partisans and talking to them cheerfully in Serbo-Croat. Guy had waited up for him, but dozed. Now he greeted him and showed him his quarters. The widows appeared with offers of food, but Frank said: ‘I’ve had no sleep for thirty-six hours. When I wake up I’ve a lot to tell you, uncle,’ raised a clenched fist to the partisans and shut his door.

The sun was up, the farm was alive. The partisan sentries changed guard. Presently the men of the British Mission stood in the bright yard shaving. Bakic breakfasted apart on the steps of the kitchen. The bell in the church tower rang three times, paused and rang three times again. Guy went there on Sundays, never during the week. Sunday Mass was full of peasants. There was always a half-hour sermon that was unintelligible to Guy whose study of Serbo-Croat had made little progress. When the old priest climbed into the pulpit, Guy wandered outside and the partisan police pressed forward so as not to miss a word. When the liturgy was resumed Guy returned; they retired to the back shunning the mystery.

Now the sacring bell recalled Guy to the duty he owed his wife.

‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘what rations have we got to spare?’

‘Plenty since last night.’

‘I thought of taking a small present to someone in the village.’

‘Shouldn’t we wait and ask the major, sir? There’s an order not to give anything to the natives.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

He crossed the yard to the Air Force quarters. Things were freer and more easy there. Indeed the Squadron Leader did a modest and ill-concealed barter trade with the peasants and had assembled a little collection of Croatian arts and crafts to take home to his wife.

‘Help yourself, old boy.’

Guy put a tin of bully beef and some bars of chocolate into his haversack and walked to the church.

The old priest was back in his presbytery, alone and brushing the bare stone floor with a besom. He knew Guy by sight though they had never attempted to converse. Men in uniform boded no good to the parish.

Guy saluted as he entered, laid his offering on the table. The priest looked at the present with surprise; then broke into thanks in Serbo-Croat. Guy said: ‘Facilius loqui latine. Hoc est pro Missa. Uxor mea mortua est.’

The priest nodded. ‘Nomen?’

Guy wrote Virginia’s name in capitals in his pocket book and tore out the page. The priest put on his spectacles and studied the letters. ‘Non es
partisan
?’

‘Miles Anglicus sum.’

‘Catholicus?’

‘Catholicus.’

‘Et uxor tua?’

‘Catholica.’

It did not sound a likely story. The priest looked again at the food, at the name on the sheet of paper, at Guy’s battle-dress which he knew only as the uniform of the partisans. Then: ‘Cras. Hora septem.’ He held up seven fingers.

‘Gratias.’

‘Gratias tibi. Dominus tecum.’

When Guy left the presbytery he turned into the adjoining church. It was a building with the air of antiquity which no one but a specialist could hope to date. No doubt there had been a church here from early times. No doubt parts of that structure survived. Meanwhile it had been renovated and repainted and adorned and despoiled, neglected and cosseted through the centuries. Once when Begoy was a watering place it had enjoyed seasons of moderately rich patronage. Now it had reverted to its former use. There was at that moment a peasant woman in the local antiquated costume, kneeling upright on the stones before the side altar, her arms extended, making no doubt her thanksgiving for communion. There were a few benches, no chairs. Guy genuflected and then stood to pray asking mercy for Virginia and for himself. Although brought up to it from the nursery, he had never been at ease with the habit of reciting the prayers of the Church for particular intentions. He committed Virginia’s soul – ‘repose’ indeed, seemed the apt petition – to God in the colloquial monologue he always employed when praying; like an old woman, he sometimes ruefully thought, talking to her cat.