Nuns and Soldiers (7 page)

‘Balintoy is skiing in Colorado,’ said Mrs Mount, ‘or shall we say après skiing.’

‘While we toil,’ said Manfred.

‘I bet he’s staying at the Brown Palace Hotel,’ said Stanley.

‘He is.’

‘Where does he get the money?’

‘Balintoy gives ski-ing bursaries to poor boys.’

‘How kind of him.’

‘Sylvia says how kind of him!’

‘We’ll be skiing here soon if this goes on.’

Balintoy was a Lord, a real one, not like the Count. ‘Just a mouldy Irish peerage,’ as Manfred put it. His mother, a relation of Janet Openshaw, still lived in a crumbling castle in County Mayo. Stanley and Guy had taken up young (now not so young) Balintoy. Guy and Gertrude had stayed at the castle once.

‘He wrote to Gerald Pavitt.’

‘I’m jealous.’

‘How is Gerald these days?’

‘Manic.’

The Count, leaning against the mantelpiece, was watching the door for Gertrude. He badly wanted a drink. And he wanted to see her return from Guy’s room with a calm countenance.

‘Tim, dear boy, could you get me another drink?’

‘Certainly, Stanley, what’s your poison?’

Gertrude came in. The Count saw across the room her mask of tired pain, the screwed-up eyes, the terrible
concentration.
Then came the calmness he needed to see. She was smiling at Sylvia and Mrs Mount. Everyone fell silent and moved towards her.

‘Victor has just gone in,’ she said.

Victor Schultz, bald and handsome, was Guy’s doctor, also his cousin, a pleasant unambitious general practitioner with a passion for golf. He had married a famous beauty of preeminent silliness, and was now divorced.

‘How is Guy?’ said Manfred, his big face looking down, solemn and gentle. Someone had to ask this question. Manfred usually took it on.

‘Oh - you know - the same - Count, you haven’t got a drink, do take one.’

The Count hoped that his politeness did not go unnoticed.

Tim Reede, having brought Stanley his drink, said to Gertrude, ‘I wonder if there are any of those cheese biscuits in the kitchen? I was painting all through lunch and I could do with a snack.’

‘Oh, yes, Tim, do go and help yourself to anything.’

‘I suppose Guy doesn’t want to see me, no,’ Manfred said wistfully half to himself.

Mrs Mount began to question Gertrude about the efficiency of the nurses and how much they cost.

Stanley asked Sylvia politely how Paul was getting on at school.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘fine, he’s expected to do well in his exams.’

‘That’s splendid. You know William has just gone up to Balliol? And Ned is turning out to be quite a mathematical genius, he gets it from Janet of course.’

‘And how is Rosalind? Still mad about ponies?’

‘I’m afraid so, but her music is gaining ground. Do you know, I think that little girl is the cleverest of the lot!’

‘Of course you used to play the flute, usen’t you, Stanley?’

‘I gave it up. What would Uncle Rudi say?’

Victor Schultz came in with a bright grave face. He patted Gertrude on the shoulder, using his professional manner. He accepted a drink. He had a cheerful temperament and, once rid of the famous beauty, had resumed his youthful insouciance. He was fond of Guy, but when he became a doctor had made a pact with himself to survive by rejoicing with others but grieving with them moderately. He was soon smiling.

Mrs Mount said, ‘Victor, I’ve just been talking to Gertrude about the nurses. I wonder if you could advise me. A friend of mine has this aged parent -’

Stanley was saying that he really must get to his surgery.

Sylvia had managed to sidle up to Gertrude. ‘Gertrude, I wonder if -’

‘Veronica, do you want a lift?’ said Manfred.

Gertrude said to Stanley, ‘Thank you so much for coming. Give my love to Janet. Tell her how lovely her chrysanthemums are looking.’

Sylvia said, ‘Gertrude, I wonder if I could possibly see Guy.’

There was a moment’s silence then, embarrassed, the guests began to talk again among themselves.

Gertrude flushed. Then a look of strain, almost of anger, wrenched her face, her mouth and eyes. ‘Well, no, he’s very - He can’t see anyone.’

‘I’d only want to see him for a few minutes. I wanted to ask him something.’

‘No, I’m sorry, you can’t see Guy - he’s - ill - he can’t see people - any more -’ She put her hands to her eyes as if to prevent tears.

‘Drat the girl,’ said Stanley to Manfred at the doorway, ‘has she no tact, no sense? Poor Gertrude -’

‘I’d only need a few minutes with him,’ said Sylvia, near to tears herself.

‘No -’

‘I must go,’ said Stanley.

‘I think we should all go,’ said Mrs Mount. ‘Manfred?’

‘Who’s got cars?’ said Gertrude. ‘It’s such an awful night.’

‘I have, and Stanley,’ said Manfred.

‘And me,’ said Victor.

‘Who goes which way? You’re going with Manfred, Veronica?’

‘I can take Sylvia,’ said Stanley. ‘Come along, Sylvia. I’ll drop you at the tube.’

‘I’m sorry - but please understand -’ said Gertrude to Sylvia.

‘I’ll take the Count,’ said Victor, ‘he’s on my way.’

‘Thank you all for coming - you know it means a lot - to both of us -’

‘And Tim, - where’s Tim? You can go with Stanley too, that’s right, isn’t it?’

Shushed to silence by Stanley they went into the hall and tiptoed to find their coats. There was a smell of wet wool, and the melted snow had made a dark mark upon the carpet. Mrs Mount sat down to pull on her boots. They filed out of the front door one by one. Stanley and Mrs Mount kissed Gertrude.

The drawing-room was empty. Gertrude came in and closed the door. She went and pulled back the curtains a little at one of the windows. It was still snowing. She heard the cheerful voices below as her guests packed into the three cars.

 

 

The Count would have liked to stay on after the others and talk to Gertrude alone, but he feared to displease her or to draw attention to himself. The Count had been in love with Gertrude for years. Of course no one knew this.

He allowed himself to be hustled out and into Victor’s car, but he soon made an excuse and asked to be set down. He wanted to walk home by himself through the snow. He bought some chestnuts from a man with a brazier. The stand with the glowing coals looked like a little god in a shrine. The snow was still falling but more slowly. The pavements were white, the roads were moraines of dark tossed snow and slush where the cars hissed cautiously past. Guy had been right to say that the world sounded different. There was no wind, and the large flakes fell solemnly, purposively, as if just released from a huge hand held close above the light of the street lamps. Railings and the bowed-down branches of shrubs in gardens were piled high with glistening crystalline structures. The Count was wearing a woollen cap which Gertrude used to laugh at. He adjusted his scarf and turned up the collar of his overcoat, and as he strode along with his long legs he felt warm.

The Count lived in a featureless block of flats in the no-man’s-land between the King’s Road and the Fulham Road, and he had not very far to walk. He had eaten some of his chestnuts and carefully put the charred shells away in his pocket. He went up in the lift and along a corridor, past many silent doors, to reach his own flat. He knew his neighbours amicably but very slightly. He let himself in and turned on the light, his face glowing with the change of temperature. His flat had two small bedrooms and a living-room which could have been pleasant only the Count had no sense of the visual world, and no social obligation to exhibit ‘good taste’. He very rarely invited any guest. Dark green metal bookshelves covered four walls. On the third wall there was, above a shiny modern sideboard, a print of Warsaw. The Count had very few mementos from his childhood home, and none of them on view. He had a misty brown photo of his parents when they were first married, two staring youthful almost childish faces. He also had a Polish flag, perhaps the one which had formed his first perception. He kept the flag rolled up at the bottom of a drawer. His hand, questing for something else, touched it sometimes. There had been other Polish things which his mother, in her last illness, had given away to an old Polish lady who used to visit her. His mother did not think that her son would want ‘that old stuff’. The Count remembered this with shame.

He turned on the radio. He hated television. He lived in a radio world. He listened to everything, news, talks, plays (especially thrillers), political discussions, philosophical discussions, nature programmes, proms, symphony concerts, opera, the Archers, Woman’s Hour, A Hundred Best Tunes, Desert Island Discs, On Your Farm, Any Questions, Any Answers. At some times of year the steadily changing weekly copies of the
Radio Times
seemed the most evident movement of his life’s clock. Manfred had teased him by saying that he hated music, it was not true. He would never have gone near a concert hall. (They had stopped offering him tickets.) But he loved music although he had little conception of what it was. (He had had to have it pointed out to him by Gerald that church bells rang changes, not a continuous simple scale.) Ignorant though he was, he listened and was, like Caliban, enchanted. The terrible slow tenderness of some classical music seemed to him like the flowing of his own consciousness. He had his favourite composers too, he liked Mozart and Beethoven and Bruckner. He also got it into his head that he liked Delius because his music sounded English. (He was unwise enough to say this once to Guy, who asked him sarcastically what on earth he meant. The Count could not say, but he went on thinking so all the same.) He liked songs too, rousing memorable ones like
The Road to Mandalay
, or else sentimental ones which brought tears to his eyes like
Oh That We Two Were Maying.
Often of course he read while the radio rambled on, read his beloved Proust and Thucydides and Condorcet and Gibbon and Saint-Simon and Rousseau’s
Confessions.
He did not read much poetry but cherished a narrow affection for Horace, salvaged from the days of
miles puellam amat.
(This was a taste which he shared with Guy.) He liked a few novelists (he scarcely counted Proust as a novelist, that was more like reading memoirs): Balzac, Turgenev, Stendhal. He had a secret weakness for Trollope and also liked
War and Peace.
At intervals he obsessively read Conrad, looking for some Polish clue which always eluded him. (His father had hated Conrad whom he regarded as a frivolous renegade.) So, mostly, he spent his evenings until he was sent to bed by the final gale warnings. He thought then of the island on which he lived. He thought of the dark vast sea. He thought of lonely men elsewhere who were listening to these warnings, solitary wireless operators on tossing ships, farmers and their dogs sitting in kitchens in the stormy fens. Attention all shipping. Here is a gale warning. Clyde, Humber, Thames, South east gale force nine, increasing force ten, imminent. Imminent, imminent. Biscay, Trafalgar, Finisterre. Cromarty, Faroes, Fair Isle. Solway, Tyne, Dogger. Imminent.

 

 

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the great divisions of the human race. Sleep was a problem to the Count. He was well capable of being cheerful, but the possibility of great unhappiness travelled always with him. He never (as Gerald Pavitt did) actually feared madness, but he knew that if he did not tend himself he could fall into a pit of crippling misery. Sleeplessness and night terrors were then greatly to be feared. He wanted the darkness of death-like sleep, even the hurly-burly of bad dreams, anything rather than an active idle consciousness. He would not use pills for fear of addiction. Balintoy had suggested to him a somniferent method which he adopted sometimes, although it could prove a mixed blessing. The Count imagined himself upon a road, or in a garden, or inside a large house, and then began to move (it was not quite like walking) along the road, round the corner, through the garden to a gate where another garden opened, along a grass path to some trees, through the trees, across a field, from room to room, across a hall, up the stairs, along a gallery ... and so to sleep. But what was happening? The rooms had grown dark, they were full of frightened people, the walls were shuddering with shell-fire, there were no doors, only holes in the walls torn by dynamite, through which the fugitives escaped from house to house, from street to street, until now there is the night lit by bursting shells, a jump in the dark onto bricks and rubble, a wide avenue to be crossed raked with bullets, nowhere to go, no food, no water, the enemy ever nearer, nearer ... Sometimes he dreamed of calmer scenes, Warsaw empty, very beautiful, rebuilt or never harmed, a magic city, a city of palaces, sinister. He saw as a place of destiny, perhaps of doom, the pillared war memorial, the grave where the fire ever burns, the sentries at attention day and night, the echoing goose-step of the relieving guard. The Count stands in the dark, glances shyly at the expressionless faces of the soldiers, glimpses upon the pillars the list of Polish battle honours, Madrid, Guadalajara, Ebro. Westerplatte, Kutno, Tomaszov. Narvik, Tobruk, Monte Cassino, Arnhem. Bitwa o Anglie. Lenino, Warszawa, Gdansk. Rothenburg, Drezno, Berlin. Or is he back in London, beside the eagle-crowned column at Northolt, remembering the Polish airmen who died for Poland, who died for England? His father’s squadron 303 Kosciusko, best of all in the Polish air force. City of Lwow, city of Krakow, city of Warszawa. Battle of Britain, Battle of the Atlantic, Dieppe, Western Desert, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany. His father and his brother are putting on their helmets and their parachutes and climbing into their Spitfires. And the Count wants to go with them, only there are pillars and more pillars, broken pillars, shattered columns in a ruined city, and on each there is a list of battles, gallant battles, gallant defeats, and now he is seeing, stretching away into the distance, not the past but the future ...