Kingsley Amis - Dear Illusion - Selected Stories

‘Very good, sir.’ There was never anything one could do.

‘Who was that?’ Dalessio asked when Thurston had rung off.

‘Brigadier Fawcett,’ Thurston said unguardedly. But Dally probably didn’t know about the laundry rumour. He had little to do with the dispatch-rider sections.

‘Oh, the washerwoman’s friend. I heard a bit about that from Beech. Not on the old game again, is he? Sounded as if he wanted a special DR to me.’

‘Yes, he did.’ Thurston raised his voice: ‘Prosser!’

‘Sir!’ came from outside the partition.

‘Ask Sergeant Baker to come and see me, will you?’

‘Sir.’

Dalessio’s large pale face became serious. He pulled at his moustache. Eventually he said: ‘You’re letting him have one, are you?’ If asked his opinion of Thurston, he would have described him as a plausible bastard. His acquiescence in such matters as this, Dalessio would have added, was bloody typical.

‘I can’t do anything else.’

‘I would. There’s nothing to it. Get God’s Adjutant on the blower and complain. He’s an ignorant bugger, we know, but I bet he’d take this up.’

Thurston had tried this, only to be informed at length that the job of Signals was to give service to the Staff. Before he could tell Dalessio about it, Baker, the DR sergeant, arrived to be acquainted with the Lord Fawcett’s desires. Thurston thought he detected a glance of protest and commiseration pass between the other two men. When Baker had gone, he turned on Dalessio almost savagely and said: ‘Now look, Dally, leaving aside the properties of the thermionic bleeding valve, would you kindly put me in the picture about this teleprinter to the Poles? Is it working or isn’t it? Quite a bit of stuff has piled up for them and I’ve been holding it in the hope the line’ll be through on time.’

‘No harm in hoping,’ Dalessio said. ‘I hope it’ll be working all right, too.’ He dropped his fag-end on the swept floor and trod on it.

‘Is it working or is it not?’ Thurston asked very loudly. His eyes wandered up and down the other’s fat body, remembering how it had looked in a pair of shorts, doing physical training at the Officers’ training unit. It had proved incapable of the simplest tasks laid upon it, crumpling feebly in the forward-roll exercise, hanging like a crucified sack from the wall-bars, climbing by slow and ugly degrees over the vaulting-horse. Perhaps its owner had simply not felt like exerting it. That would have been bloody typical.

While Dalessio smiled at him, a knock came at the plywood door Thurston had had made for his cubicle. In response to the latter’s bellow, the red-headed man came in. ‘Sergeant Fleming sent to tell you, sir,’ he said, ‘we’re just after getting them Polish fellows on the printer. You’ll be wanting me to start sending off the messages we have for them, will you, sir?’

Both Thurston and Dalessio looked up at the travelling-clock that stood on a high shelf in the corner. It said eight o’clock.

III

‘That’s just about all, gentlemen,’ the Colonel said. ‘Except for one last point. Now that our difficulties from the point of view of communication have been removed, and the whole show’s going quite smoothly, there are other aspects of our work which need attention. This unit has certain traditions I want kept up. One of them, of course, is an absolutely hundred-per-cent degree of efficiency in all matters affecting the disposal of Signals traffic, from the time the In-Clerk signs for a message from the Staff to the time we get…’

He means the Out-Clerk, Thurston thought to himself. The little room where the officers, warrant-officers and senior NCOs of the unit held their conferences was unheated, and the Colonel was wearing his knee-length sheepskin coat, another piece of merchandise supplied through the good offices of Jack Rowney in exchange, perhaps, for a few gallons of petrol or a couple of hundred cigarettes; Malone’s men’s cigarettes, probably. The coat, added to the CO’s platinum-blond hair and moustache, increased his resemblance to a polar bear. Thurston was in a good mood, having just received the letter which finally buttoned up arrangements for his forthcoming leave: four days with Denise in Oxford, and then a nice little run up to Town for five days with Margot. Just the job. He began composing a nature note on the polar bear: ‘This animal, although of poor intelligence, possesses considerable cunning of a low order. It displays the utmost ferocity when menaced in any way. It shows fantastic patience in pursuit of its prey, and a vindictiveness which…’

The Colonel was talking now about another tradition of his unit, its almost unparalleled soldier-like quality, its demonstration of the verity that a Signals formation of any kind was not a collection of down-at-heel scientists and long-haired mathematical wizards. Thurston reflected it was not for nothing that the Adjutant so frequently described himself as the Colonel’s staff officer. Yes, there he was, Arctic fox or, if they had them, Arctic jackal, smiling in proprietary fashion at his chief’s oratory. What a bunch they all were. Most of the higher-ranking ones had been lower-ranking officers in the Territorial Army during the thirties, the Colonel, for instance, a captain, the Adjutant a second-lieutenant. The war had given them responsibility and quick promotion, and their continued enjoyment of such privileges rested not on their own abilities, but on those of people who had arrived in the unit by a different route: Post Office engineers whipped in with a commission, older Regular soldiers promoted from the ranks, officers who had been the conscripts of 1940 and 1941. Yes, what a bunch. Thurston remembered the parting words of a former sergeant of his who had been posted home a few months previously: ‘Now I’m going I suppose I can say what I shouldn’t. You never had a dog’s bloody chance in this lot unless you’d been at North Midland Command with the Adj. and the CO. And we all know it’s the same in that Mess of yours. If you’d been in the TA like them you were a blue-eyed boy, otherwise you were done for from the start. It’s all right, sir, everybody knows it. No need to deny it.’

The exception to the rule, presumably, was Cleaver, now making what was no doubt a shorthand transcript of the Colonel’s harangue. Thurston hated him as the Adjutant’s blue-eyed boy and also for his silky fair hair, his Hitler Youth appearance and his thunderous laugh. His glance moved to Bentham, also busily writing. Bentham, too, fitted into the picture, as much as the Adjutant would let him, which was odd when compared with the attitude of other Regulars in the Mess. But Bentham had less individuality than they.

‘So what I propose,’ the Colonel said, ‘is this. Beginning next week the Adjutant and I will be making a series of snap inspections of section barrack-rooms. Now I don’t expect anything in the nature of spit-and-polish, of course. Just ordinary soldierly cleanliness and tidiness is all I want.’

In other words, just ordinary spit-and-polish, Thurston thought, making a note for his sergeant on his pad just below the polar-bear vignette . He glanced up and saw Dalessio licking the flap of an envelope; it was his invariable practice to write letters during the Colonel’s addresses, when once the serious business of line-communications had been got through. Had he heard what had just been said? It was unlikely.

The conference broke up soon afterwards and in the Mess ante-room, where a few officers had gathered for a drink before the evening meal, Thurston was confronted by an exuberant Adjutant who at once bought him a drink. ‘Well, Tom,’ he said, ‘I reckon that fixes things up nice and neat.’

‘I don’t follow you, Bill.’