David Oldman: Dusk at Dawn

Whitehall Court, he now saw, dominated the skyline. Several storeys high it boasted three asymmetrically placed turrets that loomed like the topping on one of mad Ludwig’s Rhinish castles. He craned his neck at them as he walked the building’s considerable length until he stood beneath the east turret. He was about to go inside when he caught sight of the man in the cap again, loitering across the road. Paul stopped and stared defiantly at him but the man appeared unconcerned. He simply turned on his heel and walked away.

Paul watched him, experiencing an illogical sense of dissatisfaction. Then, dismissing the man from his thoughts, Paul passed through the entrance. Finding number forty-six listed on the top floor, he took the lift.

His knock upon the door was answered by a rather severe-looking girl with a long equine face and brown hair wound into a bun on her neck. She regarded Paul suspiciously from a pair of horsy eyes. They matched the colour of her hair, a few strands of which had escaped the bun and hung beside her left ear in a rather dishevelled way.

‘Yes?’ she asked, blinking the horsy eyes at him.

Paul removed his cap and despite the number being inches from his shoulder asked if this was number forty-six. Over her shoulder he could see the room was empty except for a desk, a chair and a typewriter. From beyond the room, though, came the noise of voices and machines.

‘Do you have business here?’

‘I think so,’ he said.

‘You think so.’

‘Yes. Well, actually I’m not sure.’

‘You’re not sure.’

Frustrated at having everything he said repeated, Paul explained how he had been given the note with the address on it. ‘If this is number forty six,’ he finished.

‘Show me this note.’

A little unsettled by her peremptory manner he pulled the crumpled note from his pocket. The girl took it, giving him a brief interrogative glance that might have been a comment upon its condition.

‘Where did you find this?’

‘I didn’t find it,’ he said. ‘I was given it. It was addressed to me. Well, it wasn’t actually addressed, if you see what I mean, but it was meant for me.’

She gave him another penetrating stare then, with what seemed reluctance, stood aside and allowed him to enter.

Despite catching a faint trace of eau de cologne as he edged past her, he was aware of a formidability about the girl he wasn’t used to in women. Most members of the opposite sex he met generally displayed an attitude of admiration, if not deference, towards him; an esteem, he accepted, given more to the uniform rather than to him as an individual, even if by now he regarded these to be virtually interchangeable. He couldn’t help but be aware that this submissiveness was absent in this girl. With her errant strands of hair and disconcerting manner, he suspected she might be just the kind one might find chained to the railings outside Parliament demanding votes for women.

She sat down at the desk and picked up a sheet of paper, clipping his note to it. Behind her a curtain obscured a door and, to his right through another, he could see an adjoining room where several girls sat at desks while a man carrying sheets of paper passed between them. The man glanced up at that moment and seeing Paul stepped to the door and abruptly shut it.

‘Wait here,’ the girl with the bun said and disappeared through the door behind the curtain.

Paul waited, stared patiently at the curtain then at the rest of the featureless room. When, after several minutes, she had still not returned, he edged towards the desk and peered at the papers standing beside the typewriter. They had been squared into a neat pile and on the top sheet he saw two short typed paragraphs followed by an illegible squiggle in the same green ink as his note. Not being able to read the typing upside down he was just reaching out to turn the paper around when the curtain twitched aside and the girl reappeared. He snatched his hand back.

‘Name?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Ross. Captain Paul Ross.’

‘You’re early.’

‘I’m sorry.’

The girl held the curtain aside. ‘Through here. Keep straight ahead.’

Perplexed, Paul stepped past her, catching the scent of eau de cologne once more. He ducked around the curtain and passed through the doorway which led to a dimly lit passage.

‘Where exactly do I go?’ he asked over his shoulder after a few paces.

Receiving no reply, he turned around only to find that he was alone.

At the far end of the passage he came to a short flight of stairs and a door that led, to his surprise, onto the roof. Bewildered, he stepped out.

For a moment he had the odd sensation of still standing by the embankment, but now seeing the same scene through the wrong end of a telescope. London glittered beneath him. From this height the Thames flowed even more sluggishly, almost stilled as if caught in a photograph. To the south and the east he could see chimney smoke hanging static in the heavy summer air and the crowded tumbledown streets of Lambeth. Traffic trundled along below. Almost all was now motorised, the few torpid horse-drawn vehicles that were left pulled by the pitiful broken-down nags the war had passed over. Along the pavements he could see the odd sandbagged doorway and boarded window, even though the expected bombing raids had never quite amounted to the airborne Armageddon everyone had at first feared. In fact he couldn’t now remember the last time he’d heard of a Zeppelin raid.

He was still looking dreamily out across the skyline when he heard a voice call his name. Across the roof, beyond a narrow iron bridge connecting it to another part of the building, an officer wearing the uniform of a colonel and looking in Paul’s direction stood in front of some ramshackle sheds.

‘Ross?’ the colonel called again.

Paul raised a hand.

‘Well, step to it, man,’ the colonel shouted. ‘Step to it.’ Behind him men and women were walking in an out of the sheds, chatting to each other.

Paul crossed the bridge, his boots clanking against the metal rails.

‘You’re early,’ the colonel said as Paul saluted him.

Paul took him to be around forty and so smartly turned out that he suspected the colonel had taken the trouble to have his uniform cut by an expensive tailor. He was good-looking, in a slightly raffish way, and exactly the kind of man Paul thought of when the term, ‘man-about-town’ was used. Judging by the colonel’s expression, though, he was none too pleased to see Paul.

‘I’m Browning,’ he said. ‘You weren’t seeing C until two.’

‘Seeing sea?’ Paul repeated.

‘ C ,’ Browning reiterated impatiently, ‘C!’ He bundled Paul through a door in one of the sheds. Paul looked around him.

‘Canteens,’ said Browning curtly and gave Paul a push through yet another door and down a flight of stairs. ‘He’ll see you anyway, time being short as it is.’

Paul wondered if Browning had been speaking Spanish. Or was si Italian? Italian, surely. After all, why would he speak Spanish? Spain wasn’t in the war as far as Paul was aware.

He found himself in another corridor, propelled forward by the occasional prompt of Browning’s impatient hand in his back.

If they were labouring under the delusion that Paul spoke Italian, someone had got their wires crossed. He wondered again if the note hadn’t been meant for the other Paul Ross. He had been with the First Battalion of the East Surreys when they had been sent to the Italian front in the autumn of the previous year. Paul had envied him the posting at the time, while he himself had been floundering in the mud of Passchendaele. Until, that is, he had heard that the other Ross had been killed. It was possible, he supposed, that they were sending him out to Italy as a replacement, since they already had the paperwork in place for a Paul Ross. That was just the sort of bureaucratic over-complication the War Office in their wisdom would see as a simplification. Upon reflection, he didn’t care much for the thought of it. He had heard that it had all got a bit gruesome after Caporetto. And a winter in the Alps was the last thing he wanted. He wouldn’t have minded trying his hand at skiing, but he didn’t suppose there was any more time for sports on the Italian front than there had been in Flanders. Anyway, Italy or not, he couldn’t see how it was going to help him with his ‘present difficulty’. Not unless they were going to give him some sort of foreign posting allowance. Then the note hadn’t actually given any indication that the matter had anything to do with the war at all; Browning might be a colonel but that it was an army matter was an assumption he had made because of Whitehall Court’s proximity to the War Office.