Anthony Powell - The Military Philosophers

I got out the draft. Finally a tremendous minute was launched on its way that very afternoon. Bureaucratically speaking, grass had not grown under our feet; but this was only a beginning. That weekend was my free one. I told Isobel what I had suggested to Kucherman.

‘If the worst comes to the worst we can invoke Matilda.’

Neither of us had seen Matilda since she had married Sir Magnus Donners.

‘It’s just a long shot.’

On Monday morning a summons came from Finn as soon as he arrived in his room. I went up there.

‘This Belgian affair.’

‘Yes, sir?’

Finn passed his hands over the smooth ivory surfaces of his skull.

‘The most extraordinary thing has happened.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘An order has come down from the Highest Level of All to say it is to be treated as top priority. The chaps are to come over the moment their accommodation is decided upon. Things like financial details can be worked out later. All other minor matters too. Tell Blackhead he can talk to the PM about it, if he isn’t satisfied.’

‘This is splendid, sir.’

Finn put on the face he usually assumed when about to go deaf, but did not do so.

‘Providential,’ he said. ‘Can’t understand it. It just shows how the Old Man’s got his finger on every pulse. I don’t know whether Kucherman did — well, a bit of intriguing. He’s a very able fellow, and in the circumstances it would have been almost justified. You will attend a conference on the subject under the DSD at eleven o’clock this morning, all branches concerned being represented.’

The Director of Staff Duties was the general responsible for planning matters. When I next saw Kucherman, we agreed things had gone through with remarkable smoothness. The name of Sir Magnus Donners was not mentioned when we discussed certain administrative details. Thinking over the incident after, it was easy to see how a taste for intrigue, as Finn called it, could develop in people.

During the period between the Potsdam Conference and the dropping of the first atomic bomb, I read in the paper one morning that Widmerpool was engaged to Pamela Flitton. This piece of news was undramatically announced in the column dedicated to such items. It was not even top of the list. Pamela was described as daughter of Captain Cosmo Flitton and Mrs Flavia Wisebite; an address in Montana (suggesting a ranch) showed her father was still alive and living in America. Her mother, whose style indicated divorce from Harrison Wisebite (sunk, so far as I knew, without a trace), had come to rest in the country round Glimber, possibly a cottage on the estate. Widmerpool — ‘Colonel K. G. Widmerpool, OBE’ — was based on a block of flats in Victoria Street. Apart from stories already vaguely propagated by Farebrother and Duport, there was no clue to how this engagement had come about. Surprising as it was, the immediate implications seemed no more than that a piece of colossal folly on both their parts would soon be readjusted by another announcement saying the marriage was ‘off’. The world was in such a state of flux that such inanities were only to be expected in one quarter or another. Only later, considered in cold blood, did the arrangement appear credible; even then for less than obvious reasons.

‘Drove for the Section, did she?’ said Pennistone. ‘I never remember those girls’ faces. I haven’t heard anything of Widmerpool for some time. I suppose he’s now passed into a world beyond good and evil.’

I had not set eyes on Widmerpool myself since the day Farebrother had recoiled from saluting him in Whitehall.

Although, as an archetypal figure, one of those fabulous monsters that haunt the recesses of the individual imagination, he held an immutable place in my own private mythology, with the passing of Stringham and Templer, I no longer knew anyone to whom he might present quite the same absorbing spectacle, accordingly with whom the present conjunction could be at all adequately discussed. By this time, in any case, changes both inside and outside the Section were so many it was hard to keep pace with them. Allied relationships had become more complex with the defeat of the enemy, especially in the comportment of new political regimes that had emerged in formerly occupied countries — Poland’s, for example- some of which were making difficulties about such matters as the ‘Victory march’; in general the manner in which Peace was to be celebrated in London. In other merely administrative respects the Section’s position was becoming less pivotal than formerly, some of the Allies — France, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia — sending over special military missions. These were naturally less familiar with the routines of liaison than colleagues long worked with, while the new entities, unlike the old ones, were sometimes authorized to deal directly with whatever branch of the Services specially concerned them.

‘Not all the fruits of Victory are appetising to the palate,’ said Pennistone. ‘An issue of gall and wormwood has been laid on.’

By that time he was himself on the point of demobilization. He had dealt with the Poles up to the end. Dempster and others had gone already. The Old Guard, like the soldiers in the song, were fading away, leaving me as final residue, Finn’s second-in-command. In a month or two I should also enter that intermediate state of grace, technically ‘on leave’, through which in due course civilian life was once more attained. Finn, for reasons best known to himself — he could certainly have claimed early release had he so wished — remained on in his old appointment, where there was still plenty of work to do. Other branches round about were, of course, dwindling in the same manner. All sorts of unexpected individuals, barely remembered, or at best remembered only for acrimonious interchanges in the course of doing business with them, would from time to time turn up in our room to say goodbye, hearty or sheepish, according to temperament. Quite often they behaved as if these farewells were addressed to the only friends they had ever known.

‘My Dad’s taking me away from this school,’ said Borrit, when he shook my hand. ‘I’m going into his office. He’s got some jolly pretty typists.’

‘Wish mine would buck up and remove me too.’

‘He says the boys don’t learn anything here, just get up to nasty tricks,’ said Borrit. ‘I’m going to have a room to myself, he says. What do you think of that? Hope my secretary looks like that AT with black hair and a white face who once drove us for a week or two, can’t remember her name.’

‘Going back to the same job?’

‘You bet — the old oranges and lemons/bells of St Clement’s.’

As always, after making a joke, Borrit began to look sad again.

‘We’ll have to meet.’

‘Course we will.’

‘When I want to buy a banana.’

‘Anything up to twenty-thousand bunches, say the word and I’ll fix a discount.’

‘Will Sydney Stebbings be one of your customers now?’

About eighteen months before, Stebbings, suffering another nervous breakdown, had been invalided out of the army. He was presumed to have returned to the retail side of the fruit business. Borrit shook his head.

‘Didn’t you hear about poor old Syd? Gassed himself. Felt as browned off out of the army as in it. I used to think it was those Latin-Americans got him down, but it was just Syd’s moody nature.’

Borrit and I never did manage to meet again. Some years after the war I ran into Slade in Jermyn Street, by the hat shop with the stuffed cat in the window smoking a cigarette. He had a brown paper bag in his hand and said he had been buying cheese. We had a word together. He was teaching languages at a school in the Midlands and by then a headmastership in the offing. I asked if he had any news, among others, of Borrit.