Anthony Powell - The Military Philosophers

‘This raid seems to be going on a long time.’

‘Of course it is, my friend. We are getting the famous Secret Weapon we have heard so much about.’

‘You think so?’

‘Not a doubt of it. We knew it was coming in Eaton Square. Had you not been informed in Whitehall? The interesting thing will be to see how this fine Secret Weapon really turns out.’

It looked as if Clanwaert were right. He began to talk of the Congo army and the difficulties they had encountered in the Sudanese desert. After a while the subject exhausted itself.

‘Is there any point in not going back to bed?’

‘Hard to say. It may quiet down. I am in any case a bad sleeper. One becomes accustomed to doing without sleep, if one lives a long time in the tropics.’

He put out his cigarette and went to the front door to see how things were looking in the street. A girl with a helmet set sideways on her head, this headdress assumed for decorative effect rather than as a safety measure, came past. She wore an overcoat over trousers in the manner of Gypsy Jones and Audrey Maclintick. It was Pamela Flitton.

‘Hullo.’

She looked angry, as if suspecting an attempted pickup, then recognized me.

‘Hullo.’

She did not smile.

‘What a row.’

‘Isn’t it.’

‘Seen anything of Norah?’

‘Norah and I haven’t been speaking for ages. She’s too touchy. That’s one of the things wrong with Norah.’

‘Still doing your secret job?’

‘I’ve just come back from Cairo.’

‘By boat?’

‘I got flown back.’

‘You were lucky to get an air passage.*

‘I travelled on a general’s luggage.’

A youngish officer, in uniform but with unbuttoned tunic, came into the hall from the passage leading to the ground floor flats. He was small, powerfully built, with hair growing in regular waves of curls, like Jeavons’s, though fair in colour.

‘We seem to be out of fags,’ he said to Pamela.

‘Oh, Christ.’

He turned to me. I registered a crown on his shoulder, MC and bar above the pocket.

‘Haven’t got a cigarette by any chance, pal?’ he said. ‘We’ve smoked our last — why, Nicholas? I’ll be buggered. Caught you trying to pick up Pam. What cheek. How are you, old boy. Marvellous to meet again.’

‘Pamela and I know each other already. She used to drive me in her ATS days, not to mention my practically attending her christening.'

'So you live in this dump, too, and suffer from old Wartstone? If I wasn't leaving the place at any moment, I'd carve up that woman with a Commando knife in a way that would make Jack the Ripper look like the vicar cutting sandwiches for a school treat.'

I was not specially pleased to see Odo Stevens, whose conduct, personal and official, could not be approved for a variety of reasons, whatever distinction he might have earned in the field. At the same time, there was small point in attempting to take a high moral line, either about his affair with Priscilla or the part he had played over Szymanski. Priscilla and Chips Lovell were dead: Szymanski too, for all one knew by this time. Besides, to be pompous about such matters was even in a sense to play into the hands of Stevens, to give opportunity for him to justify himself in one of those emotional displays that are always part of the stock-in-trade of persons of his particular sort. With characteristic perspicuity, he guessed at once what was going through my mind. His look changed. It was immediately clear he was going to bring up the subject of Priscilla.

'It was simply awful,' he said. 'What happened after we last met. That bomb on the Madrid killing her husband- then the other where she was staying. I even thought of writing to you. Then I got mixed up with a lot of special duties.'

He had quite changed his tone of voice from the moment before, at the same time assuming an expression reminiscent of Farebrother's 'religious face', the same serious pained contraction of the features. I was determined to endure for as short a time as possible only what was absolutely unavoidable in the exhibition of self-confessed remorse Stevens was obviously proposing to mount for my benefit. He had been, I recalled, unnecessarily public in his carryings-on with Priscilla, had corroded what turned out to be Chips’ last year alive. That might be no very particular business of mine, but I had liked Chips, therefore preferred the circumstances should remain unresurrected. That was the long and the short of it.

‘Don’t let’s talk about it. What’s the good?’

Stevens was not to be silenced so easily.

‘She meant so much to me,’ he said.

‘Who did?’ asked Pamela.

‘Someone who was killed in an air-raid.’

He put considerable emotion into his voice when he said that. Perhaps Priscilla had, indeed, ‘meant a lot’ to him. I did not care. I saw no reason to be dragged in as a kind of prop to his self-esteem, or masochistic pleasure in lacking it. Besides, I wanted to get on to the Szymanski story.

‘You’re always telling me I mean more to you than any other girl has,’ said Pamela. ‘At least you do after a couple of drinks. You’ve the weakest head of any man I’ve ever met.’

She spoke in that low almost inaudible mutter employed by her most of the time. There was certainly a touch of Audrey Maclintick about her, at least enough to explain why Stevens and Mrs Maclintick had got on so comparatively well together that night in the Café Royal. On the other hand, this girl was not only much better looking, but also much tougher even than Mrs Maclintick. Pamela Flitton gave the impression of being thoroughly vicious, using the word not so much in the moral sense, but as one might speak of a horse — more specifically, a mare.

‘I don’t claim the capacity for liquor of some of your Slav friends,’ said Stevens laughing.

He sounded fairly well able to stand up to her. This seemed a suitable moment to change the subject.

‘You were in the news locally not so long ago — where I work, I mean — about one Szymanski.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re with the Poles, Nicholas?’

‘I’d left them by the time you got up to your tricks.’

Pamela showed interest at the name Szymanski.

‘I sent you a message,’ she said. ‘Did you get it?’

When she smiled and spoke directly like that, it was possible to guess at some of her powers should she decide to make a victim of a man.

‘I got it.’

‘Then you were in on the party?’ asked Stevens.

‘I saw some of the repercussions.’

‘God,’ he said. ‘That was a lark.’

‘Not for those engaged in normal liaison duties.’

One’s loyalties vary. At that moment I felt wholly on the side of law and order, if only to get some of my own back for his line of talk about the Lovells.

‘Oh, bugger normal liaison duties. Even you must admit the operation was beautifully executed. Look here …’

He took my arm, and, leaving Pamela sitting sullenly by herself on a bench, walked me away to a deserted corner of the hall. When we reached there, he lowered his voice.

‘I’m due for a job in the near future not entirely unconnected with Szymanski himself.’

‘Housebreaking?’

Stevens yelled with laughter.

‘That’ll be the least of our crimes, I’d imagine,’ he said. ‘That is, the least of his — which might easily not stop at manslaughter, I should guess. Actually, we’re doing quite different jobs, but more or less in the same place.’

‘Presumably it’s a secret where you’re conducting these activities.’

‘My present situation is being on twenty-four call to Cairo. I’ll release something to you, as an old pal, in addition to that. The plot’s not unconnected with one of Pam’s conquests. Rather a grand one.’