Scruffy - A Diversion (29 page)

“It isn’t true,” he said, “I never have been wounded. It’s all—it’s a mistake. I’m as healthy as you are.”

This confession elicited neither shock nor surprise from Miss Boddy who merely gave him a sunny and dimpled smile saying, “Oh, how glad I am for your sake. It must be dreadful to be wounded. It must be even more dreadful, I suppose, to have to kill someone. Have you ever killed anyone?”

Amelia leaped on to the sandy beach and came over to the Gunner, stood up on her hind legs, took his band and tugged at it and looked up at him beseechingly. With a gesture that was almost automatic the Gunner reached into his pockets for the odd bit of sugar, carrot or peanuts, but found nothing. “Sorry, luv,” he said, “the next time,” and then he replied to Miss Boddy’s question. “No, Ma’am, I don’t think so, leastways not that I know of. I have spent the last twenty years of me life on Gibraltar looking after a lot of bleedin’—I mean taking care of the apes there for the Government. That’s my job.”

With a sinking feeling at the pit of his stomach the Gunner realized that he had given himself away first crack out of the box. Since Miss Boddy had already been approached on behalf of the Crown to donate or lend her pet ape to the Rock and had refused, the presence of the self-confessed keeper of those animals must surely add up to two and two. But he had reckoned without the trust and innocence of the chubby and cheerful little person who appeared prepared to accept him for what he was, or said he was, without any thought to ulterior motives for his presence.

“How very wonderful for you,” she said, “to be able to live with them. Are they not the dearest creatures in the world? How you must miss them. What brings you to this part of the world?”

And then a most astonishing and even more horrifying tiling happened to Gunner John Lovejoy, for while with one part of his cerebral system he realized that his error had gone unnoticed and he had been granted a reprieve which would enable him to answer with an adequate lie, the emotional hemisphere of his brain, hitherto a total stranger to him, rejected this subterfuge.

“I’ve been sent ’ere to bring your ape back to Gibraltar with me,” the Gunner found himself blurting. “We’ve got to have a mate for old Scruff—’Arold that is. That’s his Christian name. ’E’s the last ape left on the Rock and the ’Uns caught on to it and ’as bought up all the apes around Africa and the P.M. sent a message we’ve got to start breeding the hapes on the Rock again or we’ll be druved off like it says in the history books, and there goes your flippin’ war—at least that’s what Major Clyde says. There,” concluded the Gunner, “now you know.”

The Gunner then stood like a small boy feeling aghast at what he had done, knowing that his idiot declaration had knocked the props out from under the carefully-built structure of his superior officers and, in all probability, hastened the collapse of the British Empire. The anguish in his soul communicated itself to Amelia who climbed gently up his leg, then up his waist, thence to his shoulder where she clung, putting her cheek against his and making small noises in her throat.

Miss Boddy rose from the rock on which she had been sitting and contemplated the soldier and her pet, looking with her clear eyes, now troubled, upon the lines and leathery countenance of the Gunner close to the little animal she had loved so long. And suddenly she was powerfully reminded of her father. But this was not all. With this memory somehow the Gunner had evoked a kind of nostalgia which swept through her of old times and places and people and ways of life. Had she closed her eyes she would have heard the mournful hooting of river craft on a foggy night, or the rumble of drays through the streets, or the cries and bustles of the barrow-boys and street vendors. And then it was gone.

She took a second look at the Gunner. The new clean uniform, the shave, plus the anguish of soul had eradicated a good deal of the dissoluteness and cynicism from his general appearance. His cap sat at a rakish angle giving him rather a youthful aspect and not disagreeable. Nevertheless, she was shocked and somewhat hurt at this continued invasion of her privacy when she had already told the young man who had come upon a similar mission that she would have nothing whatever to do with the scheme of surrendering her innocent and virginal pet to the embraces of an unknown monster, in order that a lot of ridiculous and wicked-minded humans should be able to go on fighting and killing one another.

Yet even though she found the revelation distasteful she was able to experience commiseration with the one who had confessed. She said with some severity, “Well, at least you are honest,” and then more gently, “and a good person at heart, I am sure, for Amelia loves you. Come, Amelia, we must be going.”

It was to the credit of the ape that new love or no she didn’t hesitate a moment upon the command of her mistress but leaped to the shoulders of Miss Boddy, who marched off with her.

The Gunner collapsed on to the rock vacated by the spinster and let his shamed head sink between his hands. He felt like an utter fool. The first time he had ever been entrusted with a mission more important than clearing out the barracks, scrounging groundnuts for his charges or polishing an anti-aircraft piece, he had let everyone down. Also for the first time during his rather rough and lonely life as a soldier during which his prime concern had been the welfare of John C. Lovejoy, the Gunner felt he had hurt someone he didn’t wish to hurt.

He sat there a shrunken little figure of a man who seemed to have sunk inside his uniform. The hair emerging from his military cap was salted with grey and the hands that hid his unhappy countenance were knotted and veined. He silently cursed himself, Tim Bailey, Major Clyde, the Brigadier and even, somewhat more timidly, the Prime Minister, but mostly and with the greatest fervour the Army, which could uproot a man and order him into situations and actions which he would otherwise never even contemplate. Lovejoy’s shoulder heaved in a prodigious sigh, for he was feeling very sorry for himself.

“There, there,” said a gentle voice which came from somewhere above him, “don’t take on so. Of course I should not dream of letting you have Amelia for such a horrid purpose, but if you like, some time later, you can tell me about Harold and his friends.”

It was indeed Miss Boddy who had returned. Grief-stricken at the misery of her new-found love, Amelia had tugged at her mistress until she too had turned around and observed the woebegone scene and her kindly heart had sped her back.

The Gunner felt his heart give a strange and unaccustomed leap within its cage. Again it seemed he had suffered a reprieve at the hands of this extraordinary woman.

He stood up, “Yes, Ma’am,” he said. “Thank you, Ma’am. Tell you about ’Arold? That’d take time. ’E’s the best, ’e is. None other like ’im.”

Amelia clapped her hands with pleasure. She could not, of course, understand what they had said, but she was sensitive to the fact that her mistress as well as her new-found friend were no longer unhappy.

Gunner Lovejoy was no hagiographer, it’s even doubtful whether in his elementary education he had encountered the life of a single saint or was familiar with the method employed by both professionals and amateurs of this form of literature in building up a narrative, history, tradition, saga and personal characteristics of their holy men. But it would seem that every man, not completely insensitive, has within himself the ability to weave legends about his fellow man and elevate him to a superior position.

Major Clyde had also found evidence of a vein of poetry imbedded in the Gunner. This now came to light as over the period of the next few days the Gunner proceeded to canonize old Scruff into St. Harold the Blessed, Patron Saint of Gibraltar.

“Right from the beginning I could tell ’e was different from the others,” the Gunner was saying in the cool of the evening after supper. They were occupying a corner of the porch where Miss Boddy was enjoying a post-prandial cigarette, her feud with the various manifestations of wickedness on earth oddly enough not extending to nicotine, while Lovejoy, with Amelia entwined about his neck, tried to stomach a lime and water. Heaven could have testified his need to have Guinness replace the water, but mindful of Major Clyde’s awful threats the Gunner was still playing it straight and getting on with it as best he could unsupported and unfortified.

“Y-a-a-s,” the Gunner went on, “like I was saying, ’e wasn’t like the rest, even when he was a little tiny baby. Why, I remember the day I gave him ’is first groundnut. As you know, Ma’am, they’d rather have groundnuts than anything.”

“Oh yes,” sighed Miss Boddy, luxuriating in the pleasure of being told stories, “Amelia loves them, I always try to have some on me. But of course the war you know—”

“Oh, we’ve lashings of them on the Rock, Ma’am,” said the Gunner, getting in a quick bit of propaganda, and then continued, “Well as you can imagine there was a scramble for them, half a dozen little hapelets squealing and jumping about, fighting to get their peanuts. Well, when it come to Harold’s turn—and I can see him now like it was yesterday, he was only a year old—he comes up nice and quiet and stands there waiting. If ’e’d have ’ad a hat on ’e’d have taken it off he was that polite. I gave him ’is handful of nuts and what do you think he did, Ma’am?”

Miss Boddy’s friendly blue eyes were shining with delight and somewhat breathlessly she guessed, “Shared them with his fellows?”

“Oh, better than that, Ma’am,” said Lovejoy. “Off in one corner there was an apelet that had ’urt himself a bit and was afraid to get into the scuffle. He was just sitting over there, mournful, wishing he had some groundnuts when Harold went over to ’im and handed ’im
all
of ’is.”

“Oh, how beautiful,” said Miss Boddy. “How happy you must have been.”

For an instant Lovejoy experienced the ineffable joy of the appreciated author. He, of course, had no idea that he was already, and by sheer instinct, abiding by the first rule adhered to by biographers of saints down through the ages which was to endow the youth of the subject with suitable miracles and Sunday-school deeds.

Success led the Gunner on to further flights.

“There was never any mischief or ’arm in ’im. The cars of the tourists used to park up by the apes, you know, and the little beggars would jump up on the bonnets and steal the windscreen wipers off. They used to like to eat the rubber and then throw what was left over the cliff. Harold, ’e never took part in such doings, not ’im. Instead he would sit off by ’imself on a rock, keeping an eye open for when people would come back to their cars, then he’d shout monkey for
Cave!
and warn ’is mates!”

Miss Boddy was silent for a moment at the conclusion of this anecdote and then said gently, “Would not it have been better for Harold to have reproved his little friends and taught them that it was wrong to steal, instead of aiding and abetting their mischief by acting as—ah—look-out?”

“Oh yes, Ma’am, he did, he did!” the Gunner said hastily, realizing quickly that he and Miss Boddy apparently didn’t see eye to eye on questions of morality and that like so many authors who adorn their fiction with their own philosophy he had trodden upon dangerous ground.

“Oh, he did that, Ma’am, after he found out. He was so very young you see, but after I had told him it was wrong and he had seen me scold the other apes he’d wait until he’d see one of his pals pinch one and then go and take it from ’im gently and put it back. ’E got so good at hanging them windscreen wipers back on the ’ooks we thought for a while of training him for a garage-’elper.”

“Adorable,” said Miss Boddy, her scruples satisfied, and fascinated with the tale, “and did you?”

“Oh no,” said the Gunner, “ ’e was destined for better things, he became me assistant, me own right-’and man in charge, me first leftenant, so to speak. There would not be a hape left on the Rock today but for ’im.” The Gunner concluded, finding to his surprise that fiction could sometimes be laced with truth.

The trouble was, or developed, that Miss Boddy was insatiable for Harold stories, and she came to look forward more and more to those evenings on the veranda when their two cigarette ends glowed like fireflies and there was no sound but the lapping of the waves upon the beach, the soft contented chittering of Amelia and the voice of the soldier picturesquely embroidering the saga of Harold.

Her childlike eagerness and delight in his stories pleased Lovejoy, at the same time taxing his imagination to the utmost. In fact the Gunner found that he was plumbing depths in himself hitherto totally unsuspected, leaving him often staggered with surprise at his own inventiveness which seemed to flower even without the dew of strong waters. He was also more keenly aware of the hazards and pitfalls of inspirational narrative, realizing that no man who composes for an audience can ever wholly ignore or forget the presence of same.

“Why one day,” narrated the Gunner, “I was down town walking parst Trafalgar Cemetery with Harold on me shoulder when one of those German bast—tourists I mean, drives by a mile a minute in one of them blarsted Mercedes cars, ’onking like he owned the ruddy road, when to me ’orrer, right in the path of the oncoming vehicle I sees—” Lovejoy here found himself faced with deciding in the twinkling of an eye what it was in the path of the speeding motor car—a kitten, a child, a dog. Maybe Miss Boddy didn’t like children. Would she prefer cats or dogs? All this had to be debated and solved in the lightning-like flash of an instant passing. “An ’elpless little kitten.” Distress showing on Miss Boddy’s chubby countenance told the Gunner that he had chosen correctly.

“Oh,” gasped Miss Boddy, “the poor thing!”

“I was turned to stone,” continued Lovejoy, “but not Harold. Quicker than you could say, ‘I’ll ’ave a beer’, he was off my shoulder and on to the bonnet of the car. He reaches down and scoops up the kitten, does a back-flip and lands twenty yards away with the little thing safe and sound as though it was with its own mother.”

“How wonderfully thrilling,” Miss Boddy breathed, “what a splendid thing to do. What happened to the kitten afterwards?”

“Harold and me brung ’im up. ’E’s ’ad ’is home with me ever since. Finest cat you ever seed.”