Anthony Powell - The Military Philosophers

‘Good morning.’

It was a terrific volume of sound, an absolute bellow, at the same time quite effortless. A moment later, he was on the landing halfway up the stairs, where Theodoric had paused. Then he disappeared from sight. Vavassor grinned and nodded. He was without comment for once. I left him to his reflections about the Far East, hurrying myself now, again in the hope of catching Finn, quickly passing Kitchener’s cold and angry eyes, haunting and haunted, surveying with the deepest disapproval all who came that way. Finn was free. He made no reference to Farebrother.

‘You’ll have to be quick, Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Asbjornsen’s due at any moment, but he’s sometimes a second or two late. Now what about Q (Ops.)?’

He had quite set aside his deafness. I ran over the points at speed. Finn made some notes, collating the information with whatever material had emerged from his session with our own General. He was now quite recovered from the phase, reported by Pennistone, of feeling the only hope of getting the thing properly done would be to fly to Persia and himself arrange it singlehanded.

‘The civilian elements are now definitely coming out, sir?’

‘Anders insisted — no doubt rightly — but the women and children will not make the operation any easier.’

There had been controversy about these camp-followers who had managed to exist in the wake of the army, largely on its shared rations. At first it had seemed they might have to stay behind.

‘Some of the boys are old enough to be trained as cadets. The CIGS himself noted that point on the paper with approval.’

Finn’s telephone bell rang.

‘Ask him to come up,’ he said. ‘It’s Asbjornsen. We’ll return to the evacuation later, Nicholas. I shall have to keep Asbjornsen from talking too much, as Colonel Chu is due in less than twenty minutes. Did I tell you Chu’s latest after his six months’ course at Sandhurst?’

The Chinese military attaché, well known for the demanding nature of his requests, had just completed an attachment as cadet to the Royal Military College.

‘Chu enjoyed the RMC so much he wants to go to Eton.’

‘He could see Windsor Castle at the same time, though the state apartments are probably not open.’

‘Good God,’ said Finn. ‘He doesn’t just want to visit the place — he hopes to attend the school as a pupil.’

‘He’s a shade old, sir.’

‘I told him thirty-eight is regarded as too mature in this country to be still at school. It was no good. All he said was “I can make myself young.”

Finn sighed.

‘I wish I could,’ he said.

Sometimes the military attachés dispirited him. Chu’s unreasonableness seemed to have achieved that. General Asbjornsen arrived in the room. Tall, like General Lebedev, not much given to laughter, he always reminded me of Monsieur Ørn, the long craggy Norwegian, who had been at La Grenadière when, as a boy, I had stayed with the Leroys in Touraine. He shook hands with Finn and myself gravely. I withdrew to our room. Corporal Curtis had again increased the pile of stuff on the desk. I was still going through this when Pennistone returned from the Titian.

‘What on earth were you about, David, minuting Blackhead please amplify ?’

‘Has it upset him?’

‘Beyond description.’

‘Good.’

‘What were your reasons?’

‘Renan says complication is anterior to simplicity. I thought Blackhead would make an interesting experiment for trying out that theory.’

‘We can only pray Renan was right.’

‘Renan would find prayer charming, but ineffectual. Did you see Q (Ops.)?’

Pennistone went through the points I had cleared with Finn.

‘Look, Nick,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be able to collect the Klnisaszewski Report tomorrow afternoon, as there’s another meeting about the evacuation. Will you get it? Nothing whatever required, except to receive it from the Polish officer on duty.’

The Klnisaszewski Report was one of those items of Intelligence that fell, as such items sometimes do, in a no-man’s-land between normal official channels and those secret services so cautiously handled by Finn. Even Finn saw no harm in our trafficking in this particular exchange of information, which the Operational and ‘Country’ sections liked to see. For some internal reason, the Polish branch concerned preferred to hand over the report direct, rather than present it, in the normal manner, through the Second Bureau of their GHQ. Pennistone, as it happened, always collected the Klnisaszewski Report, though merely, in the division of our duties, because he had fallen into the habit of doing so.

‘Here’s the address,’ he said. ‘It’s the north side of the Park. We might discuss some of these evacuation points further at lunch.’

The following day I arranged to collect the report in the afternoon. When I went down to the staff entrance and shouted for our driver, the white-faced girl commended by Borrit again appeared from behind the screen. She was as sulky as ever. The Section’s car was just large enough to hold four persons in great discomfort. If you were the only passenger, you could travel at the back or beside the driver, according to whim. I told her the street number and sat in front.

‘Can you find your way there?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know London pretty well?’

She hardly answered. After a few minutes beside her, it was clear this AT possessed in a high degree that power which all women — some men — command to a greater or lesser extent when in the mood, of projecting round them a sense of vast resentment. The girl driving, I noticed, was able to do this with quite superlative effect. Her rankling animosity against the world in general was discharged with adamantine force, comparable with Audrey Maclintick’s ill humours when her husband was alive, or Anne Stepney’s intimations of rebellion before she had shaken off the trammels of family life. However, those two, although not without their admirers, were hardly in the same class as this girl when it came to looks. Borrit had been right in marking her down. She was very striking. All the same, after another remark received with little or no response, I gave up further talk. Perhaps she had a grievance or the curse. These drivers usually only did duty for a week or two and at the moment inducement was lacking to coax her out of that mood. It occurred to me — one never feels older than in the middle thirties — that she was bored with all but young men or had taken an instantaneous dislike to me. Conversation lapsed. Then, while driving through Hyde Park, she suddenly spoke of her own accord, though even then in a way to suggest that speech was a painful effort to her, every word so far as possible to be conserved.

‘You’re Captain Jenkins, aren’t you?’

‘I am.’

‘I think you know my mother.’

‘What’s your mother’s name?’

‘Flavia Wisebite — but I’m Pamela Flitton. My father was her first husband.’

This was Stringham’s niece. I remembered her holding the bride’s train at his wedding. She must have been five or six years old then. At one stage of the service there had been a disturbance at the back of the church and someone afterwards said she had been sick in the font. Whoever had remarked that found nothing surprising in unsatisfactory behaviour from her. Someone else had commented: ‘That child’s a fiend.’ I knew little of her father, Cosmo Flitton — not even whether he were still alive — except for the fact that he had lost an arm in the earlier war, drank heavily, and was said to be a professional gambler. Alleged to be not too scrupulous in business dealings, Flitton had been involved in Baby Wentworth’s divorce, later rejecting marriage with her. He had left Pamela’s mother when this girl was not much more than a baby. Establishing the sequence of inevitable sameness that pursues individual progression through life, Flavia had married another drunk, Harrison F. Wisebite, son of a Minneapolis hardware millionaire, whose jocularity he had inherited with only a minute fragment of a post-depression fortune. I wondered idly whether Flavia owed her name to The Prisoner of Zenda . Mrs Foxe would have been quite capable of that. Mrs Foxe was said to have given her daughter a baddish time. Pamela, an only child, must be at least twenty by now. She looked younger.