The Complete McAuslan (52 page)

‘Hadn’t you better report to H.Q.?’ I called after him, but he was through the gate by then, leaving me nonplussed but not a little relieved; giving lip to captains wasn’t my usual line, but he hadn’t turned regimental, fortunately.

‘Whit the hell was yon?’ demanded Sergeant Telfer, who had been an entranced spectator.

‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘Ballater Bertie, by the look of him.’ For he had, indeed, the air of those who command the guard at Ballater Station, conducting Royalty with drawn broadsword and white spats. And yet he’d been wearing an M.M. ribbon, which signified service in the ranks. I remarked on this to Telfer, who sniffed as only a Glaswegian can, and observed that whoever the newcomer might be, he was a heid-case – which means an eccentric.

That was the battalion’s opinion, formed before Captain Errol had been with us twenty-four hours. He had driven straight to the mess, which was empty of customers at that time of day, smooth-talked the mess sergeant into paying the ghari out of bar receipts, made free with the Tallisker unofficially reserved for the Medical Officer, parked himself unerringly in the second-in-command’s favourite chair, and whiled away the golden afternoon with the
Scottish Field
. Discovered and gently rebuked by the Adjutant for not reporting his arrival in the proper form, he had laughed apologetically and asked what time dinner was, and before the Adjutant, an earnest young Englishman, could wax properly indignant he had found himself, by some inexplicable process, buying Errol a gin and tonic.

‘I can’t fathom it,’ he told me, with the pained expression he usually reserved for descriptions of his putting. ‘One minute I was tearing small strips off the chap, and the next you know I was saying ‘What’s yours?’ and filling him in on the social scene. Extraordinary.’

Having found myself within an ace of bell-hopping for Captain Errol by the same mysterious magic, I sympathised. Who was he, anyway, I asked, and the Adjutant frowned.

‘Dunno, exactly. Nor why we’ve got him. He’s been up in Palestine lately, and just from something the Colonel said I have the impression he’s been in some sort of turmoil – Errol, I mean. That type always is,’ said the Adjutant, like a dowager discussing a fallen woman. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if he was an I-man.’

‘I’ is Intelligence, and the general feeling in line regiments is that you can keep it; I-men are disturbing influences best confined to the higher echelons, where they can pursue their clandestine careers and leave honest soldiers in peace. Attached to a battalion, they can be unsettling.

And Captain Errol was all of that. As he had begun, with the Adjutant and me, so he went on, causing ripples on our placid regimental surface which eventually turned into larger waves. One of the former, for example, occurred on his first night in the mess when, within half an hour of their first acquaintance, he addressed the Colonel as ‘skipper’. It caused a brief silence which Errol himself didn’t seem to notice; officially, you see, there are no ranks in the mess, but junior officers (of whom captains are only the most senior) normally call the head man ‘sir’, especially when he is such a redoubtable bald eagle as our Colonel was. ‘Skipper’ was close to the edge of impertinence – but it was said so easily and naturally that he got away with it. In fact, I think the Colonel rather liked it.

That, it soon became plain, was Errol’s secret. Like his notorious namesake, he had great charm and immense style; partly it was his appearance, which was commanding, and his war record – the family of Highland regiments is a tight little news network, and many of the older men had heard of him as a fighting soldier – but most of it was just personality. He was casual, cocky, even insolent, but with a gift of disarmament, and even those who found his conceit and familiarity irritating (as the older men did) seemed almost flattered when he gave them his attention – I’ve seen the Senior Major, a grizzled veteran with the disposition of a liverish rhino, grinning sourly as Errol teased him. When he was snubbed, he didn’t seem to notice; the eyebrow would give an amused flicker, no more.

The youngest subalterns thought him a hell of a fellow, of course, not least because he had no side with them; rank meant nothing to Errol, up or down. The Jocks, being canny judges, were rather wary of him, while taking advantage of his informality so far as they thought it safe; their word for him was ‘gallus’, that curious Scots adjective which means a mixture of reckless, extrovert, and indifferent. On balance, he was not over-popular with Jocks or officers, especially among the elders, but even they held him in a certain grudging respect. None of which seemed to matter to Errol in the least.

I heard various verdicts on him in the first couple of weeks.

‘I think he’s a Bad News Type,’ said the Adjutant judicially, ‘but there’s no doubt he’s a character.’

‘Insufferable young pup,’ was the Senior Major’s verdict. ‘Why the devil must he use that blasted cigarette holder, like a damned actor?′ When it was pointed out that most of us used them, to keep the sweat off our cigarettes, the Major remarked unreasonably: ‘Not the way he does. Damned affectation.’

‘I like him,’ said plump and genial Major Bakie. ‘He can be dashed funny when he wants. Breath of fresh air. My wife likes him, too.’

‘Captain Errol,’ observed the Padre, who was the most charitable of men, ‘is a very interesting chentleman. What d’ye say, Lachlan?’

‘Like enough,’ said the M.O. ‘I wouldnae let him near my malt, my money, or my maidservant.’

‘See him, he’s sand-happy. No’ a’ there,’ I heard Private McAuslan informing his comrades. ‘See when he wis Captain o’ the Week, an’ had tae inspect ma rifle on guard? He looks doon the barrel, and says: ‘I seem to see through a glass darkly.’ Whit kind o’ patter’s that, Fletcher? Mind you, he didnae pit me on a charge, an’ me wi’ a live round up the spout. Darkie woulda nailed me tae the wall.’ (So I would, McAuslan.)

‘Errol? A chanty-wrastler,’ said Fletcher – which, from that crafty young soldier, was interesting. A chanty-wrastler is a poseur, and unreliable.

‘Too dam’ sure of himself by half,’ was the judgment of the second-in-command. ‘We can do without his sort.’

The Colonel rubbed tobacco between his palms in his thoughtful way, and said nothing.

Personally, I’d met plenty I liked better, but it seemed to me there was a deeper prejudice against Errol than he deserved, bouncy tigger though he was. Some of it might be explained by his service record which, it emerged, was sensational, and not all on the credit side. According to the Adjutant’s researches, he had been commissioned in the Territorials in ‘39, and had escaped mysteriously from St Valéry, where the rest of his unit had gone into the P.O.W. bag (‘there were a few heads wagged about that, apparently’). Later he had fought with distinction in the Far East, acquiring a Military Cross (‘a real one, not one of your up-with-the-rations jobs’) with the Chindits.

‘And then,’ said the Adjutant impressively, ‘he got himself cashiered. Yes, busted – all the way down. It seems he was in charge of a train-load of wounded, somewhere in Bengal, and there was some foul-up and they were shunted into a siding. Some of the chaps were in a bad way, and Errol raised hell with the local R.T.O., who got stroppy with him, and Errol hauled out his revolver and shot the inkpot off the R.T.O.’s desk, and threatened to put the next one between his eyes. Well, you can’t do that, can you? So it was a court-martial, and march out Private Errol.’

‘But he’s a captain now,’ I said. ‘How on earth —

‘Chubbarao,
and listen to this,’ said the Adjutant. ‘He finished up late in the war with those special service johnnies who were turned loose in the Balkans – you know, helping the partisans, blowing up bridges and things and slaughtering Huns with cheese-wire by night. Big cloak-and-dagger stuff, and he did hell of a well at it, and Tito kissed him on both cheeks and said he’d never seen the like – ’

‘So that’s where he got the M.M.’

‘And the Balkan gongs, and the upshot of it was that he was re-commissioned. It happens, now and then. And of late he’s been undercover in Palestine.’ The Adjutant scratched his fair head. ‘Something odd there – rumours about terrorist suspects being knocked about pretty badly, and one hanging himself in his cell. Nasty business. Anyway, friend Errol was shipped out, p.d.q., and now we’re landed with him. Oh, and another thing – he’s to be Intelligence Officer, as if we needed one. Didn’t I say he was the type?’ The Adjutant sniffed. ‘Well, at least it should keep him out of everyone’s hair.’

The disclosures of Errol’s irregular past were not altogether surprising, and they helped to explain his
alakeefik
attitude and brass neck. Plainly he was capable of anything, and having hit both the heights and the depths was not to be judged as ordinary mortals are.

His duties as I-man were vague, and kept him out of the main stream of battalion life, which may have been as well, for as a soldier he was a contradictory mixture. In some things he was expert: a splendid shot, superb athlete, and organised to the hilt in the field. On parade, saving his immaculate turn-out, he was a disaster: when he was Captain of the Week and had to mount the guard, I suffered agonies at his elbow in my capacity as orderly officer, whispering commands and telling him what to do next while he turned the ceremony into a shambles. Admittedly, since McAuslan was in the guard, we were handicapped from the start, but I believe Errol could have reduced the Household Cavalry to chaos – and been utterly indifferent about it. Doing well or doing badly, it was all one to him; he walked off that guard-mounting humming and swinging his walking-stick, debonair as be-damned, and advising the outraged Regimental Sergeant-Major that the drill needed tightening up a bit. (He actually addressed him as ‘Major’, which is one of the things that are never done. An R.S.M. is ‘Mr So-and-so’.)

Being casual in all things, he was naturally accident-prone, but even that did nothing to deflate him, since the victim was invariably someone else. He wrecked the Hudson Terraplane belonging to Lieutenant Grant, and walked away without a scratch; Grant escaped with a broken wrist, but there was no restoring the car which had been its owner’s pride.

He was equally lethal on blue water. Our garrison town boasted a magnificent Mediterranean bay, strewn with wrecks from the war, and sailing small boats was a popular pastime among the local smart set; Errol took to it in a big way, and from all accounts it was like having a demented Blackbeard loose about the waterfront. I gather there is a sailing etiquette about giving way and not getting athwart other people’s hawses, of which he was entirely oblivious; the result was a series of bumps, scrapes, collisions, and furious protests from outraged voyagers, culminating in a regatta event in which he dismasted one competitor, caused another to capsize, and added insult to injury by winning handsomely. That he was promptly disqualified did not lower the angle of his jaunty cigarette-holder by a degree when he turned up at the prize-giving, bronzed and dashing, to applaud the garrison beauty, Ellen Ramsey, when she received the Ladies’ Cup. She it was who christened him the Sea Hog – and was his dinner companion for many nights thereafter, to the chagrin of Lieutenant MacKenzie who, until Errol’s arrival, had been the fair Ellen’s favoured beau.

None of which did much for Errol’s popularity. Nor, strangely enough, did an odd episode which I thought was rather to his credit. The command boxing tournament took place, and as sports officer I had to organise our regimental gladiators – which meant calling for volunteers, telling them to knock off booze and smoking, letting them attend to their own sparring and training in the M.T. shed, and seeing that they were sober and (initially) upright on opening night. If that seems perfunctory, I was not a boxer myself, and had no illusions about being Yussel Jacobs when it came to management. Let them get into the ring and lay about them, while I crouched behind their corner, crying encouragement and restraining the seconds from joining in.

The tournament lasted three nights, and in winning his semi-final our heavyweight star, Private McGuigan, the Gorbals Goliath, broke a finger. Personally I think he did it on purpose to avoid meeting the other finalist, one Captain Stock, a terrible creature of blood and iron who had flattened all his opponents with unimagined ferocity; he was a relic of the Stone Age who had found his way into the Army Physical Training Corps, this Stock, and I wouldn’t have gone near him with a whip, a gun, and a chair. Primitive wasn’t the word; he made McAuslan and Wee Wullie look like Romantic poets.

Left to find a substitute willing to offer himself for sacrifice at the hands of this Behemoth, I got no takers at all, and then someone said he had heard that Errol used to box a bit, and must be about the right weight. There was enthusiastic support for this suggestion, especially from the older officers, so I sought the man out in his room, where he was reclining with a cool drink at his elbow, shooting moths with an air pistol – and hitting them, too.

‘What makes you think I could take Stock, if you’ll pardon the expression?’ he wondered, when I put it to him. ‘Or doesn’t that matter, as long as we’re represented?’

‘Someone in the mess said you used to be pretty useful . . .’

‘Did they now? That’s handsome of them.’ He grinned at me sardonically. ‘Who proposed me – Cattenach?’ This was the second-in-command, Errol’s principal critic. ‘Never mind. It’s not on, Dand, thanks all the same. I haven’t boxed for ages. Too much like work.’

‘There’s no one else in the battalion,’ I said subtly.

‘Stop waving the regimental colours at me.’ He picked off a large moth on the wing, bringing down a shower of plaster. ‘Anyway, I’m an interloper. Let Cattenach take him on if he’s so damned keen; God knows he’s big enough. No, you’ll just have to tell ‘em I’ve retired.’

So I reported failure, and there was disappointment, although no one was daft enough to suggest that Errol was scared. The Adjutant, who was a romantic, speculated that he had probably killed a man in the ring – his fiancée’s brother, for choice – and vowed never to box again; he would have joined the Foreign Legion, insisted the Adjutant, if it hadn’t been for the war. Others joined in these fine flights, and no one noticed the Colonel sauntering out of the mess, but later that evening he told me casually that I could pencil in Errol for the final; he had been persuaded, said the Colonel, filling his pipe in a contented way. Knowing his fanaticism where the battalion’s credit was concerned, I wondered what pressure he had applied, and concluded that he probably hadn’t needed any, just his gentle, fatherly insistence which I knew of old. He could have talked a salmon out of its pool, the same Colonel – and of course the possibility that his man might get half-killed wouldn’t even cross his mind.