William Boyd - The New Confessions

It was Sonia’s father, Vincent, who pointed out the advertisement to me. Every Sunday we had dinner chez Shorrold. They lived in a small, brown, terraced house with a good view of Fulham Palace football ground. The meal never changed — gravy soup, leg of mutton, fruit tart with custard; neither did the atmosphere of stifling boredom. After the meal, Sonia and her mother, Noreen — a decent, dull, long-suffering woman — washed up, giving the men the opportunity for a smoke. Vincent Shorrold was a small spry chap with the impressive but ultimately fragile self-assurance of a traveling salesman. He would initiate conversations with remarks of what seemed at first adamantine authority.

“No. No question. No, definitely. The Allies should take over all of Germany’s mines and forests. Every last tree.” He was reading about the reparation conference in his newspaper. “It’s the only way. The only justice.”

“But Vincent,” I said reasonably, “what we need is cash. Seizing mines and forests won’t provide any cash.”

He looked trapped, dismayed. “Oh.… Oh yes. Perhaps. I see what you mean.” He turned back to his newspaper.

Most of our discussions ran in this manner. Aggressive assertion, polite rebuttal on my part, wordless collapse. He smoked a pipe with a little perforated lid on the bowl. This attachment made me illogically irritated. I heard the clatter of cutlery on crockery from the kitchen and the indistinct noises of Sonia and her mother talking. I felt a profound inertia penetrate me; the air of the room seemed to brew with apathy. I gazed emptily ahead, a thin rope of smoke from my cigarette swaying and shimmying in front of me.

“This was your mob, wasn’t it?” He read: “Thirteenth (Public School) Service Battalion, South Oxfordshire Light Infantry.…” He folded the paper open and handed it over. It was an advertisement for a reunion parade and dinner a month hence. Former members of the battalion were invited to foregather on Wandsworth Common at 4:30 P.M. for a brief parade and address by a Brigadier General Pughe, followed by dinner in the function rooms of the Cape of Good Hope public house in Wandsworth High Street (price, five shillings and sixpence). Applications were to be sent to R.J.M. Tuck (major, ret.).

I was a little late arriving at the common, and I could see a group of several dozen suited men already lined up in front of a small dais equipped with loudspeakers and draped in Union Jack bunting. I walked across the grass towards them, feeling a little nervous. I had been uncertain what to wear and in the end had dressed soberly, as if going to a funeral: a charcoal-gray three-piece suit and black bowler hat. I even carried a mackintosh. It was a mild September day; the chestnut trees on the common were beginning to turn. As I approached I saw that a lot of the men were carrying rolled umbrellas — surrogate rifles, I thought, and wished I had brought mine.

Someone I did not know crossed my name off a list and took my raincoat (“Can’t march with one of those over your arm!”) and I joined a column of men. I greeted a few people whom I recognized and asked myself why I had bothered to come.

We were marched off a hundred yards or so and stood easy. Then we saw three motorcars bump across the grass towards the dais. Some men got out, one of them in uniform. One man strode over to us. I recognized Major Tuck. He went to the head of the column, called us to attention, shouted, “By the left, quick march!” We marched over to the dais, were halted, saluted and were inspected by the brigadier general. Then we listened to him give a halfhearted speech about how we should not allow the iron bonds of comradeship forged in the bitter tempest of war to wither and decay in the soothing balm of peace. We were assembled, I discovered, to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the founding of the battalion. The parade ended with the surviving member of the pipe band (the others were killed, you will remember, carrying stew to the front-line trenches in 1917) playing “The Bonnets of Bonny Dundee.” We repaired to the function suite of the Cape of Good Hope.

Here the atmosphere was a little more convivial. At high table sat the general, Tuck, Colonel O’Dell and Noel Kite’s father, Findlay, and beside him Noel, with a crude wooden hand. We milled around looking for friends to sit beside. I heard my name called and looked round. It was Leo Druce in a chocolate-brown pinstriped suit. He had four medals on his chest. We greeted each other with restrained but real enthusiasm.

“What’s that lot?” I asked, pointing at his decorations.

“Campaign medals. Why aren’t you wearing yours?”

“I didn’t know I was entitled.”

“You were there, weren’t you? Let’s grab a pew.”

We ate rather well: clear mock-turtle soup, boiled sole with a caper sauce, veal collops, roast ham, Coburg pudding and deviled herring roes. (I thought we had done excellently for our five shillings and sixpence. During the speeches I learned that Findlay Kite was responsible for the purvey.) Druce looked prosperous. His thick toffee-colored hair was brushed straight back from his forehead. His shirt looked to me like silk. He wore, I noticed, a large gold signet ring, which I did not recall having seen before. We ate and talked and filled in the intervening years. I had more to relate than he. Druce’s injury had kept him away from the front for months. Then he had been transferred to the Army Service Corps and had been commissioned a lieutenant in 1918. After the war he had tried various jobs and was thinking of going overseas before a modest legacy allowed him to buy a small business in his hometown, Coventry, hiring out motorcars and buses.

As the evening progressed and we drank more, we became predictably maudlin and sentimental. We sought out Noel Kite, by now very drunk, and with the inevitable nostalgia began to reminisce about the “good old days” at Coxyde-Bains and Nieuport. We drank toasts to “absent friends”: Louise, Maitland Bookbinder, Tim Somerville-Start, Julian Teague—

“But Teague’s here,” Noel Kite said.

“Where?”

Kite waved his wooden hand towards the end of the room. “With the cripples.”

A trestle table with a generous overhang had been set up for men in wheelchairs; We made our way down towards it.

Teague’s eyebrows had never grown back and his blunt burned face had a stretched, sore, permanently surprised look to it. His terraced hair grew thick and curly as ever. His trouser legs were neatly pinned up — folded, I thought, like napkins. He was tackling his Coburg pudding with his one good hand. The damaged flesh on the other seemed to have fused the remaining fingers together into a strange arthritic point, like a carved beak. I heard Kite and Druce exchange sotto voce “Good Gods” when they saw him. I sat down.

“Teague,” I said. “It’s me, Todd.”

He looked at me with his one good eye.

“My God,” he said. “You made it.”

I ushered in Kite and Druce and the reminiscing continued. I told them about Teague’s last day as a complete human being. Teague drank a toast to me: “The man who saved my life.” I got rather drunk. I remember Teague whispering to me, “I never told you, but I got MacKanness. Fixed him. Just before you and I met up.” Then Kite said, “Here we are, all that’s left of the bombers.” He looked at me with, I thought, real hostility. “And only Todd came through without a scratch.”

I walked unsteadily back with Druce over Wandsworth Bridge, the coolish breeze off the Thames and memories of Kite’s remark having sobered me up somewhat. Druce said he would pick up a taxi at Parson’s Green. We had exchanged addresses, sworn to meet again at next year’s reunion and in general run the gamut of bibulous avowals. We stood under the electric light at Parson’s Green and made our farewells. I felt a hard obstruction in my throat when I shook his hand and said good-bye. Of all the companions the war had forced on me, Leo Druce was the one I liked the best. I thought back to my miserable weeks with the bantams and felt sure that if I had been with Druce rather than Teague I would have borne up better.