Anthony Powell - The Valley of Bones

‘I took your advice, Nick,’ he said.

We were alone together in the Company Office.

‘About the storage of those live Mills bombs?’

Gwatkin shook his head, at the same time swallowing uncomfortably, as if the very thought of live grenades and where they were to be stored, brought an immediate sense of guilt.

‘No, not about the Mills bombs,’ he said, ‘I’m still thinking over the best place to keep them — I don’t want any interference from the Ordnance people. I mean about Maureen.’

For a moment the name conveyed nothing. Then I remembered the evening in the pub: Maureen, the girl who had so greatly taken Gwatkin’s fancy. Thinking things over the next day, I had attributed his remarks to the amount of stout we had drunk. Maureen had been dismissed from my mind.

‘What about Maureen?’

‘I asked her to come out with me.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She agreed.’

‘I said she would.’

‘It was bloody marvellous.’

‘Splendid.’

‘Nick,’ he said, ‘I’m serious. Don’t laugh. I really want to thank you, Nick, for making me take action — not hang about like a fool. That’s my weakness. Like the day we were in support and I made such a balls of it.’

‘And Maureen’s all right?’

‘She’s wonderful.’

That was all Gwatkin said. He gave no account of the outing. I should have liked to hear a little about it, but clearly he regarded the latest development in their relationship as too sacred to describe in detail. I saw that Kedward, in some matters no great psychologist, had been right in saying that when Gwatkin took a fancy to a girl it was ‘like having the measles’. This business of Maureen could be regarded only as a judgment on Gwatkin for supposing Sergeant Pendry’s difficulties easy of solution. Now, he had himself been struck down by Aphrodite for his pride in refusing incense at her altars. The goddess was going to chastise him. In any case, there was nothing very surprising in this sort of thing happening, when, even after an exhausting day’s training, the camp-bed was nightly a rack of desire, where no depravity of the imagination was unbegotten. No doubt much mutual irritation was caused by this constraint, particularly, for example, something like Gwatkin’s detestation of Bithel.

‘God,’ he said, when he set eyes on him at Castlemallock, ‘that bloody man has followed us here.’

Bithel himself was quite unaware of the ferment of rage he aroused in Gwatkin. At least he showed no sign of recognising Gwatkin’s hatred, even at times positively thrusting himself on Gwatkin’s society. Some persons feel drawn towards those who dislike them, or are at least determined to overcome opposition of that sort. Bithel may have regarded Gwatkin’s unfriendliness as a challenge. Whatever the reason, he always made a point of talking to Gwatkin whenever opportunity arose, showing himself equally undeterred by verbal rebuff or crushing moroseness. However, Gwatkin’s attitude in repelling Bithel’s conversational advances was not entirely based on a simple brutality. Their relationship was more complicated than that. The code of behaviour in the army which Gwatkin had set himself did not allow his own comportment with any brother officer to reach a pitch of unfriendliness he would certainly have shown to a civilian acquaintance disliked as much as he disliked Bithel. This code — Gwatkin’s picture of it, that is — allowed, indeed positively kindled, a blaze of snubs directed towards Bithel, at the same time preventing, so to speak, any final dismissal of him as a person too contemptible to waste time upon. Bithel was a brother officer; for that reason always, in the last resort, handed a small dole by Gwatkin, usually in the form of an incitement to do better, to pull himself together. Besides, Gwatkin, with many others, could never finally be reconciled to abandoning the legend of Bithel’s VC brother. Mythical prestige still hung faintly about Bithel on that account. Such legends, once taken shape, endlessly proliferate. Certainly I never heard Bithel himself make any public effort to extirpate the story. He may have feared that even the exacerbated toleration of himself Gwatkin was at times prepared to show would fade away, if the figure of the VC brother in the background were exorcised entirely.

‘Coming to sit with the Regiment tonight, Captain Gwatkin,’ Bithel would say when he joined us; then add in his muttered, confidential tone: ‘Between you and me, there’re not much of a crowd on this course. Pretty second-rate.’

Bithel always found difficulty in addressing Gwatkin as ‘Rowland’. In early days, Gwatkin had protested once or twice at this formality, but I think he secretly rather enjoyed the respect implied by its use. Bithel, like everyone else, possessed one or more initial, but no one ever knew, or at least seemed to have forgotten, the name or names for which they stood. He was always called ‘Bith’ or ‘Bithy’, in some ways a more intimate form of address, which Gwatkin, on his side, could never bring himself to employ. The relaxation Bithel styled ‘sitting with the Regiment’ took place in an alcove, unofficially reserved by Gwatkin, Kedward and myself for our use as part of the permanent establishment of Castlemallock, as opposed to its shifting population of Anti-Gas students. The window seat where I used to read Esmond was in this alcove, and we would occasionally have a drink there. Since the night when he had first joined the Battalion, Bithel’s drinking, though steady when drink was available, had not been excessive, except on such occasions as Christmas or the New Year, when no great exception could be taken. He would get rather fuddled, but no more. Bithel himself sometimes referred to his own moderation in this respect.

‘Got to keep an eye on the old Mess bill,’ he would say. ‘The odd gin-and-orange adds up. I have had the CO after me once already about my wine bill. Got to mind my p’s and q’s in that direction.’

As things turned out at Castlemallock, encouragement to overstep the mark came, unexpectedly, from the army authorities themselves. At least that was the way Bithel himself afterwards explained matters.

‘It was all the fault of that silly old instruction,’ he said. ‘I was tired out and got absolutely misled by it.’

Part of the training on the particular Castlemallock course Bithel was attending consisted in passing without a mask through the gas-chamber. Sooner or later, every rank in the army had to comply with this routine, but students of an Anti-Gas course naturally experienced a somewhat more elaborate ritual in that respect than others who merely took their turn with a unit. A subsequent aspect of the test was first-aid treatment, which recommended, among other restoratives, for one poisonous gas sampled, ‘alcohol in moderate quantities’. On the day of Bithel’s misadventure, the gas-chamber was the last item on the day’s programme for those on the course. When Bithel’s class was dismissed after this test, some took the advice of the text-book and had a drink; others, because they did not like alcohol, or from motives of economy, confined themselves to hot sweet tea. Among those who took alcohol, no one but Bithel neglected the manual’s admonition to be moderate in this remedial treatment.

‘Old Bith’s having a drink or two this evening, isn’t he,’ Kedward remarked, even before dinner.

Bithel always talked thickly, and, like most people who habitually put an unusually large amount of drink away, there was in general no great difference between him drunk or sober. The stage of intoxication he had reached made itself known only on such rare occasions as his dance round the dummy. At Castlemallock that night, he merely pottered about the ante-room, talking first to one group of anti-gas students, then to another, when, bored with him, people moved away. He did not join us in the alcove until the end of the evening. Everyone used to retire early, so that Gwatkin, Kedward and myself were alone in the room by the time Bithel arrived there. We were discussing the German advance. Gwatkin’s analysis of the tactical situation had continued for some time, and I was making preparations to move off to bed, when Bithel came towards us. He sat down heavily, without making his usual rather apologetic request to Gwatkin that he might be included in the party. For a time he listened to the conversation without speaking. Then he caught the word ‘Paris’.