Temporary Kings (27 page)

Usually
there was less on offer, fewer, still fewer, even known by sight. That was
especially true when the thinned ranks of branches, originally designed to be
reunited on this particular occasion, were augmented by other elements. These,
if remotely related in duties, had once been regarded with a certain
professional suspicion, but their attendance too dwindled through death and
inanition, requiring, as we did, bolstered numbers to make the party worth
while. In short, feeling increasingly isolated, I lost the habit of attending
these dinners. Then, a son likely to become liable for military service, it
seemed wise to re-establish bearings in a current army world, find out what was
happening, pick up anything to be known. I put down my name again, without much
hope of seeing anyone with whom closer bonds were likely to be evoked than
shared memory of whether or not some weapon, piece of equipment, had ‘come off
the security list’ for release to the Allies, or by swopping stories about the
shortcomings, as an officer and a man, of the unpopular brigadier.

That
year the dinner was held on the premises of a club or association of vaguely
patriotic intent, unfamiliar to myself both in membership and situation. The
dining-room was decorated in a manner sober to the point of becoming
sepulchral, drinks obtainable from a bar at one end. No one standing about
there was an acquaintance. At the table assigned to my former Section, faces
were equally unknown. Mutual introductions took place. My righthand neighbour,
Lintot, fair, bald, running to fat, had looked after some of the Neutrals – a ‘dismal
crowd’, he said – before Finn commanded, later posted to Censorship in the
Middle East. He worked in a travel agency. We talked of the best places to take
an autumn holiday abroad.

Macgivering,
on the other side, also belonged to a War Office epoch earlier than my own. His
duties had been in the Section handling in-coming telegrams, where he
remembered the stunted middle-aged lieutenant, for ever polishing his Sam
Browne belt. We had both forgotten his name. Macgivering himself, tall, spare,
haggard, with a slight stutter, had been invalided out of the army, consequent
on injury from enemy action, while in bed at his flat one early night of the
blitz. We split a bottle of indifferent Médoc, and discussed car insurance, as
he had some sort of public relations connexion with the motor business.

Only
towards the end of dinner did I notice Sunny Farebrother sitting at the end of
a table on the far side of the room. During the war he had operated in several
areas of army life, including at least one of those branches now joined to the
increasingly disparate elements of this dinner. He had found himself a place at
right angles to the ‘high table’, where more important members or guests sat.
He was talking hard. His neighbour looked like a relatively senior officer,
whom Farebrother appeared to be indoctrinating with some ideas of his own.
Farebrother looked in the best of form. He must be close on seventy, I thought.
At the end of these dinners movement away from table places was customary, so
that people could circulate. I decided to have a word with Farebrother at this
interspersion. He was still in earnest conversation with the supposed general,
when the time came. He could be pushing a share in which he was interested. I
had not seen him at or near the bar on arrival. Probably he had deliberately
turned up at the last moment to avoid threatened liability for buying a drink.

While
I waited for a suitable moment to move across to Farebrother’s table, a man
with woolly grey hair and wire spectacles (the latter not yet a fashionable
adjunct) came to speak with Lintot. Macgivering had already left, to make
contact elsewhere in the room. I changed into his former seat, to allow the
wire-spectacled man to talk in more comfort sitting next to Lintot. They
appeared to know each other through civilian rather than army connexions.
Lintot was astonished at the wire-spectacled man’s presence at this dinner. His
wonderment greatly pleased the other.

‘Didn’t
expect to find your accountant here, did you, Mr Lintot? We can both of us
forget the Inland Revenue for once, can’t we? To tell the truth, I’m attending
this dinner under rather false pretences. The fact is a friend of mine told me
he was coming to London for this reunion. We wanted to talk together about
certain matters, one thing and another, so as I’d gained a technical right to
be deemed Intelligence personnel, I applied to the organizers of this ‘I’
dinner. They said I could come. I always enjoy these get-togethers. My old mob
have one. There’s a POW one too. Why not roll up, I said to myself.’

‘Never
knew you were in the army. Of course we’ve always had a lot of other things to
talk about, so that wasn’t surprising.’

Lintot
appeared rather at a loss what to say next. He drew me into the conversation,
mentioning we had been in the same Section, though not in the War Office at the
same period.

‘This
is – well, I’ve got to be formal, and call you Mr Cheesman, because I only know
your initials – this is Mr Cheesman, whose accountancy firm acts for mine. For
me personally too. We do our best against the taxman between us, don’t we? I
didn’t expect to find him here. Never thought of Mr Cheesman as a military man
somehow, though I never think of myself as one either, if it comes to that.’

‘Yes,
but you see my point. If I’m eligible, no reason why I shouldn’t come to the
dinner, is there?’

Cheesman
was insistent. He was not in the least put out by Lintot’s emphasis on the
unmilitary impression he gave. What he was keen on, pedantically keen,
consisted in establishing his, so to speak, legal right to be at the party. He
spoke in a precise, measured tone, as if attendance at the dinner were a matter
of logic, as much as free choice.

‘Of
course, of course. Glad to see you here. You’re about the only man in the room
I’ve met before.’

Lintot
was quite uninterested in Cheesman’s bona fides as ‘I’ personnel. Cheesman
accepted that his point had been understood, even if unenthusiastically. Now, I
remembered that manner, at once mild and aggressive. It brought back early days
in the army – Bithel, Stringham, Widmerpool.

‘Didn’t
you command the Mobile Laundry?’

I
appended the number of General Liddament’s Division to that question.

‘You
were there just for a short time, the Laundry only attached. Then it was posted
to the Far East.’

Cheesman
drew himself up slightly.

‘Certainly
I commanded that sub-unit. May I ask your name?’

I
told him. It conveyed nothing. That was immaterial. Cheesman’s own identity was
the important factor.

‘Surely
you fetched up in Singapore?’

Cheesman
nodded.

‘In
fact, you were a Jap POW?’

‘Yes.’

Cheesman
gave that answer perfectly composedly, but for a brief second, something much
shorter than that, something scarcely measurable in time, there shot, like
forked lightning, across his serious unornamental features that awful look,
common to those who speak of that experience. I had seen it before. Cheesman’s
face reverted – the word suggests too extended a duration of instantaneous,
petrifying exposure of hidden feeling – to an habitual sedateness. I remembered
his arrival at Div. HQ; showing him the Mobile Laundry quarters; making this
new officer known to Sergeant-Major Ablett Bithel had just been slung out. I
had left Cheesman talking to the Sergeant-Major (who had the sub-unit well in
hand), while I myself went off for a word with Stringham. One of Cheesman’s
peculiarities had been to wear a waistcoat under his service-dress tunic. He
had been surprised at that garment provoking amused comment in mess.

‘A
waistcoat’s always been part of any suit I wore. Why change just because I’m in
the army? I’ve got to keep warm in the army, like anywhere else, haven’t I?’

He
did not give an inch, either, in adapting himself to military manners and
speech, behaving to superiors as he would in a civilian firm, where he was paid
to give the best advice he could in connexion with his own employment. He
dressed nothing up in the forms and terms traditional to the military
subordinate. Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson had been particularly irked by that side
of Cheesman. He used to call him ‘our Mr Cheesman’, a phrase in which Cheesman
himself would have found nothing derogatory. Thirty-nine when he joined the
army at the beginning of the war, he wanted to ‘command men’. He must be nearly
sixty now. Except when that frightful look shot across his face, the features
were scarcely more altered than Sunny Farebrother’s.

‘How
the hell did you survive your Jap POW camp?’ asked Lintot cheerfully.

Cheesman
brushed the question aside.

‘A
bit of luck. The Nips were moving some of their prisoners in ’44. Don’t know
where they were taking us. When we were at sea, the Nip transport was sunk by
an American warship. No arrangements made for POWs, of course, when ship’s
company took to the boats, but the Americans rescued most of us – and a lot of
the Nips too.’

‘Don’t
expect you were feeling too good by that time?’

‘Naturally
I wasn’t fit for normal duties for a month or two. When I was on my feet again,
I got a change of job. They were short of Intelligence wallahs where I was. I’d
picked up a few words of Japanese. It was thought better to make use of me in ‘I’,
rather than go back to Mobile Laundry duty, though I’d have liked to return to
the job for which I’d been trained. That’s why I’m allowed here, without being strictly
speaking applicable. Funny meeting you, Mr Jenkins. I don’t remember your face
at all at that Div HQ. The officer I recall is the DAAG, Major Widmerpool. He
made quite an impression on me. Very efficient, I should say. A really good
officer. You can always tell the type. I expect he’s done well in civilian life
too.’

‘Do
you remember a man in your sub-unit called Stringham?’

Cheesman
looked surprised at the question.

‘Of
course I do. How did you know Stringham?’

‘We
were friends in civilian life.’

‘You
were?’

Cheesman
found that statement hard to credit. He thought about it for a second or two.
Stringham and I – that was the impression – seemed miles apart. He wrestled
with the question inwardly. When at last he answered, it was as if prepared to
accept my word, even then the claim scarcely believable.

‘I
see. I do recall now Stringham wasn’t just the ordinary bloke you find in the
ranks. I was taken aback at first when you said you’d known him. Of course, you
get all sorts in a war. He was a superior type, an educated man. You could see
that. All the same I never thought about it much. He never made any
difficulties. I’d forgotten altogether. Just remember him in the jobs he used
to do. I could never place him myself. What was his work in civilian life?’

That
was a hard question to answer. What did Stringham do? Cheesman must be told
something. What about the time when (with Bill Truscott as dominant colleague)
he had been a sort of personal secretary to Sir Magnus Donners? I fell back on
that. To be a secretary implied at least a measure of professional identity.
That would serve the purposes of the moment.

‘Stringham
was private secretary to a business tycoon.’

‘Oh,
was he?’

Cheesman
seemed at first more surprised than ever. He did not pursue the matter. His own
job could well have brought him face to face with eccentric business tycoons.
Either that struck him, or he decided to leave the question vague in solution.

‘He
was very fond of making jokes, but I always found him an excellent worker in my
sub-unit.’

Cheesman
said that without the least disapproval. He spoke as one merely registering an
unusual characteristic. So far as jokes were concerned, his own features
proclaimed a state of intact virginity as to any experience or sense of them,
immaculately so. Cheesman had never made a joke, never seen a joke, could live
– and die – without jokes, even if he knew they existed. It did him credit to
have so far rationalized Stringham’s behaviour as to be capable of thus
defining it Stringham might have been worse typified.

‘Stringham
made jokes in the camp,’ he added.

‘He
wasn’t taken from Singapore too?’

‘No.’

Again
the ghastly forked lightning flashed, a flicker of Death’s vision, reflected
for a dreadful instant behind the wire spectacles’ plates of glass. The flesh
of Cheesman’s face, softly wrinkled, made one think of those old servants of
the past, who had worked unquestioningly for a lifetime in a single household.
In Cheesman’s case this unchanging interior had been, no doubt, his own
austere, limited – one might reasonably say heroic – personality. There was the
same self-assurance as Dan Tokenhouse, the same impression of having dispensed
with sex. There was something else too.

‘Stringham
died in the camp. He behaved very well there.’

Cheesman
thought for a moment after saying that.

‘Very
well. Yes. A good man. He wasn’t too strong, you know. Fancy your having met
him. They’re odd these things. Sergeant-Major Ablett, you may remember him. He
was rescued. He’s quite prosperous now.’

The
matter was better pressed no further. More information could easily become too
much, too much anyway for one’s peace of mind. Cheesman gave no sign that might
be so. He also made no attempt to enlarge. Lintot, understandably, had not been
much interested in these reminiscences. If Cheesman were his personal
accountant, as well as his firm’s, he may have felt he had a better right than
myself to Cheesman’s attention, even if he had brought us together again.

‘Don’t
mind my talking shop for a moment, Mr Cheesman. It will save a letter. Now
about Tax Reserve Certificates …’