Anthony Powell - The Kindly Ones

For that reason, I always suspected that Billson would — to use her favourite phrase — ‘get her own back’ on Albert for calling her ‘Silly Suffolk’, even though I was at the same time unaware, of course, that her aggressiveness had its roots in love. Indeed, so far was I from guessing the true situation that, with some idea of arranging the world, as then known to me, in a neat pattern, I once suggested to Billson that she should marry Bracey. She laughed so heartily (like the maid damping the Insurance stamp on Mr Lloyd George’s tongue) at this certainly very presumptuous suggestion, while assuring me with such absolute candour of her own determination to remain for ever single, that — not for the last time within similar terms of reference — I was completely taken in.

‘Anyway,’ said Billson, ‘I wouldn’t have a soldier. None of my family would ever look at a soldier . Why, they’d disown me.’

This absolute disallowance of the profession of arms as the calling of a potential husband could not have been more explicitly expressed. Indeed, Billson’s words on that occasion gave substantial grounds for the defiant shape taken by Bracey’s bouts of gloom. There was good reason to feel depression if this was what women felt about his situation. A parallel prejudice against even military companionship, much less marriage, was shared by Edith.

‘Nice girls don’t walk out with soldiers,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘They don’t.’

‘Who says not?’

‘Everybody says not.’

‘But why not?’

‘Ask anybody.’

‘Not even the Life Guards?’

‘No.’

‘Nor the Blues?’

‘Tommies are all the same.’

That seemed to settle matters finally so far as Bracey was concerned. There appeared to be no hope. There was Mercy, the housemaid, but even my own reckless projects for adjusting everyone else’s personal affairs according to my whim did not include such a fate for Bracey. I could see that was not a rational proposition. In fact, it was out of the question. There were several reasons. In the first place, Mercy herself played little or no part in the complex of personalities who inhabited the Stonehurst kitchen — no emotional part, at least. Certainly Mercy herself had no desire to do so. She was a quite young girl from one of the villages in the neighbourhood, found for my mother by Mrs Gullick. Together with her parents, Mercy belonged to a local religious sect, so small that it embraced only about twenty individuals, all related to one another.

‘They don’t believe anyone else is going to Heaven,’ Edith said of this communion.

‘No one at all?’

‘Not a single soul.’

‘Why not?’

‘They say they’re the only ones saved.’

‘Why?’

‘Call themselves the Elect.’

‘They aren’t the only people going to Heaven.’

‘I should just about think not.’

‘They are silly to say that.’

‘Silly, no error.’

Billson went still further than Edith on the same theological issue.

‘That girl won’t be saved herself,’ she said. ‘Not if she goes about repeating such things of her neighbours. God won’t want her.’

The positivist character of Mercy’s religious beliefs, more especially in relation to the categorical damnation of the rest of mankind, was expressed outwardly in a taciturn demeanour, defined by Edith as ‘downright disobliging’, her creed no doubt discouraging frivolous graces of manner. In personal appearance, she was equally severe, almost deliberately unprepossessing.

‘ Her face will never be her fortune,’ Albert once remarked, when Mercy had left the kitchen in a huff after some difference about washing up.

Even Bracey, with all his unvoiced disapproval of Albert, was forced to laugh at the wit, the aptness of this observation. Bracey was, in any case, cheerful enough between his ‘funny days’. If his spirits, at the lowest, were very low indeed, they also rose, at other moments, to heights never attained by Albert’s. On such occasions, when he felt all comparatively well with the world, Bracey would softly hum under his breath:

‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,

May be merry and bright.

But I’m going to be married on Sunday;

Oh, I wish it was Sunday night.’

Earlier in the year, during one of these bursts of cheerfulness, Bracey had offered to take me to see a football match. This was an unexpected, a highly acceptable invitation. It always seemed to me a matter of complaint that, although my father was a soldier, we saw at Stonehurst, in practice, little or nothing of the army, that is to say, the army as such. We lived on this distant hilltop, miles away from the daily activities of troops, who were to be sighted only very occasionally on some local exercise to which summer manoeuvres had fortunately brought them. Even so much as the solitary outline of a Military Policeman was rare, jogging his horse across the heather, a heavy brushstroke of dark blue, surmounted by a tiny blob of crimson, moving in the sun through a Vuillard landscape of pinkish greys streaked with yellow and silver. I had mentioned to Bracey the sight of one of these lonely riders. He showed no warmth.

‘Them Redcaps ain’t loved all that.’

‘Aren’t they?’

‘Not likely.’

‘What do they do?’

‘Run a bloke in soon as look at him.’

‘What for?’

‘They’ll find somethink.’

‘What happens to him?’

‘Does a spell of clink.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Put behind bars.’

‘But they let him out sometime?’

‘Twenty-eight days, might be, if he’s lucky.’

‘In prison?’

‘Some blokes want to get even when they comes out.’

‘How?’

‘Waits behind a hedge on a dark night.’

‘And then ‘

‘Takes the Redcap unawares like. Makes an ambush like. Give him a hiding.’

I accepted this picture of relaxed discipline in the spirit offered by Bracey, that is to say, without expression of praise or blame. Clearly he had described one of those aspects of army life kept, generally speaking, in the background, a world of violent action from which Stonehurst seemed for ever excluded.

Nor was our separation from the army only geographical. Military contacts were further lessened by my mother’s distaste — her morbid horror, almost — of officers’ wives who were ‘regimental’ — ladies who speculated on the Battalion’s chances of winning the Cup, or discussed with too exact knowledge the domestic crises in the life of Mrs Colour-Sergeant Jones. My mother did not, in fact, enjoy any form of ‘going out’, military or civilian. Before marriage, she had been keen enough on parties and balls, but, my father having little or no taste for such amusements, she forgot about them herself, then developed greater dislike than his own. Even in those distant days my parents had begun to live a life entirely enclosed by their own domestic interests. There was a certain amount of routine ‘calling’, of course; subalterns came to tennis-parties; children to nursery-tea.

Bracey’s invitation to the football match was therefore welcome, not so much because I was greatly interested in football but more on account of the closer contact the jaunt offered with army life. Permission was asked for the projected excursion. It was accorded by authority. Bracey and I set off together in a dog-cart, Bracey wearing blue walking-out dress, with slight screws of wax at each end of his moustache, a small vanity affected by him on important occasions. I had hoped he would be armed with a bayonet, but was disappointed. It seemed just worthwhile asking if he had merely forgotten it.

‘Only sergeants carries sidearms, walking out.’