The Hour of The Donkey (16 page)

His eyes became more accustomed to the gloom.

The bomb had also detached every ornament and every picture from the walls to smash among the plaster on the floor —

I doubt it,’ said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear—

The French lady spoke to him again, and indicated a doorway, so that there was no time for bitter tears.

A big room—the lounge, if that was what the French called it.

A gloomy room—gloomy because the tattered curtains were drawn across the windows, admitting the light of what must still be early morning through innumerable rents.

Shattered china and glass. A fallen chandelier in the middle of the floor amongst the plaster —

Soft furnishings, furniture, china and glass—
if England is bombed like this
, thought Bastable,
then Bastable
’
s of Eastbourne will make a fortune in replacements
.

There was someone lying on the huge high-backed settee, covered from chin to boots by a blanket.

The French lady whispered unintelligible words softly in his ear. All he could make out from them was the familiar ‘officier anglais’.

He crunched across the floor towards the settee, skirting the chandelier. In the half-light all he could make out was a dirty white face—grey-white against the brown-white of the enveloping blanket-which he couldn’t recognize. He realized that he had had the feeling, for no rational reason, that the wounded officer would be Tetley-Robinson, he couldn’t think why. But this must be one of the new subalterns, like Chris Chichester, whose names and faces alike were still vague to him. This wasn’t either Tetley-Robinson or Chris Chichester, certainly … yet—yet —

The eyes opened slowly, as though the crunching of his boots had awakened the wounded man from sleep.

The head moved and the eyes fastened on him.

‘Who’s that?’ The voice was weak, but instantly recognizable. And yet the act of recognition only left Bastable more confused: how could he have failed to recognize Major Audley, whose face he knew so well, at that first glance?

He knelt down beside the settee.

‘M— … Nigel?’ he stared at the recognizable-unrecognizable mask. Audley’s face had been stretched and had fallen in on itself, and then covered with sweat and grime and coated with fine dust which adhered to the twenty-four-hour bristles on his chin and cheek. The eyes, which had darker shadows under them, like bruises, had sunk into his head.

‘Who’s that?’ Audley repeated.

‘Harry Bastable,’ said Bastable.

‘Harry … ?’ Audley could make nothing of the Christian name.

‘Bastable.’ Harry Bastable swallowed. ‘C Company —Bastable, Nigel.’

‘Bastable!’ The exclamation was little more than a whisper. The eyes closed, then opened again. ‘Bastable …?’

‘I’m here, Nigel. Captain Willis and I are here.’

The eyes disengaged from Bastable’s. ‘Willis?’

‘We came back, Nigel. What happened?’

Audley moved his head, still peering past Bastable.

‘Willis … Where’s Willis?’

Bastable had the feeling that he had been rejected. ‘He’s not here at the moment. He’ll be here eventually, Nigel.’

‘Willis …’ The voice-trailed off and the eyes closed.

Bastable leaned forward and lifted the blanket, first a little, then more, and finally (when the eyes still didn’t open to accuse him) enough to see what lay beneath it.

The French lady said something, and although Bastable didn’t understand a word of what she said he knew what she was saying.

So this was another new experience, he thought as he lowered the blanket gently. He had seen dead men, so now he was seeing a dying one. It was just another new experience.

The French lady’s presence behind him also had a steadying effect. He must not disgrace himself, or the Prince Regent’s Own. He was going to see a lot of this, and, at a guess, it would more often be worse than this, hard though that was to imagine.

Just another new experience. He had to hold on to that, and not be sick.

In the meantime …

‘Nigel?’ He paused. ‘Can you hear me, Nigel?’

The eyelids fluttered, but remained closed. Bastable turned towards the French lady. ‘Madame … s’il vous plait …’ he searched for the word, and as usual found nothing in his vocabulary except ‘ou est’ and ‘combien’, and now ‘pour le chien’. ‘Damn!’

She looked at him questioningly. ‘M’sieur?’

He turned his hand into a cup and lifted the cup to his lips. ‘Water, Madame. Water?’

‘Oui.’ She nodded, and left the room without another word, crunching regardless over the wreckage of her treasures.

A brave lady, thought Bastable. Audley hadn’t been hit here, or there would have been blood everywhere, so she must somehow have found him and brought him in—perhaps with someone’s help, but into her house, to her settee, under her blanket… and a very good quality blanket too, as good as the best Witney blankets stocked by Bastable’s of Eastbourne, by the feel of it. Would Mother have behaved so well, in the ruin of her house, with a dying French officer on her hands?

Well … well, perhaps she would at that, he thought suddenly with a stab of guilt at his disloyalty. Mother had sold her jewels, everything down to her wedding ring, in the bad times in the early thirties, when it had been touch-and-go in the firm, so maybe she would at that, by God!

He stared down at Major Audley’s face. There was nothing he could do for Audley—and nor could Doc Saunders have done anything either, for what lay under the blanket.

But there was still something Audley could do for Harry Bastable and for England, perhaps And if there was, then he must do it.

He heard the familiar crunching sound of feet on broken plaster and china and glass behind him.

‘M’sieur.’

Damn and damn and damn! He had wanted water, to moisten Audley’s lips and wipe his brow—and she had brought him brandy in a mug, half a mug of it—he could smell it even before he could see it. Damn, damn,
damn!

She smiled at him. It was for him, of course!

He took a gulp of the stuff, and coughed on it, and choked on it, as always, as it burned his empty stomach.

He couldn’t give it to Audley, therefore. Audley had no stomach.

It was a bloody miracle Audley was still alive. With what was under the blanket Audley should have been dead long ago.

He took another, more controlled gulp, and felt it burn all the way down, and turned back to the dying
officier anglais
.

The eyes were open, and they were suddenly brighter, and they were looking at him.

‘What happened?’ asked Audley, pre-empting his own question with unbearable clarity. ‘The battalion?’

Bastable stared at him in an agony of indecision. That was his question, and he no longer knew what to ask, if Audley didn’t know the answer himself.

‘Where’s Willis?’ asked Audley. ‘I want to talk to him.’

‘What happened?’ The question sounded empty now, but it was still the only one he could think ot.

‘Where’s Willis?’ The dirt-encrusted lips compressed themselves obstinately.

‘Nigel—what happened?’ Bastable bent over the dying man, pushing aside the question with his own. ‘Tell-me-what-happened?’

‘Willis—?’

‘Captain-Willis-is-coming. The-Germans-attacked … ?’ Under desperation Bastable could feel anger rising.

The lips trembled. ‘Amateurs… Came across the fields… and down the road … open order—like, they didn’t care —like, we weren’t there … But we were…’ The lips quivered again.

‘Yes?’ Bastable willed the lips to open again. ‘Yes?’

‘After that… bombers… Stukas—smashed up everything …’

‘Yes?’

‘Tanks … infantry …
professionals
…
’ The eyes lost Bastable’s face, and the voice trailed off again.

He had to get both back again. ‘
Sir—
Nigel?’

He couldn’t shake a dying man. ‘Sir?’

‘Bloody shambles, naturally.’ The eyes transfixed him. ‘Where’s Willis?’ The voice seemed stronger.

A horrible certainty loomed out of the mist in Harry Bastable’s mind—and advanced into the clear light of inevitability as he stared at it.

He recognized it, because it had been there all the time, waiting to show itself to him—he had known about it and had expected it, but had refused to look at it. Instead, he had made pictures in his imagination and shared them with Wimpy, and they had both believed in those pictures because they had both been unwilling to accept the reality, even when it stared them in the face.

That was why Wimpy had insisted on ‘scouting around’, with that sly, withdrawn look on his face—Wimpy was much brighter than he was, much quicker on the uptake, so he had needed to have those pictures (which he didn’t believe in) proved or disproved by the evidence ot his own eyes, which he knew he would find.

The battalion had never left Colembert-les-Deux-Ponts.

That was really why he had wanted to go north, to Arras —because there wasn’t anything to the south to follow.

And that was why Wimpy had said ‘To the French?’, and not ‘To catch up with the battalion?’, of course.

‘Where’s Willis?’ repeated Major Audley, almost petulantly.

And …
a bloody shambles, naturally
… naturally.

That was how it would have been, with tanks up against soft aluminium anti-tank ammunition, over the ridge against C Company—
a bloody shambles, naturally—

But there was no time for tears for C Company, and poor incompetent acting-acting-company-commander Waterworks, and young Christopher Chichester, whose knowledge of the Boys anti-tank rifles would have availed him nothing with that bloody-fucking-useless practice ammunition up the spout—
Oh God
!

‘I’ll go and get him,’ said Harry Bastable.

‘
No —
‘

There was a slight, impossible movement under the blanket, as though Major Audley had found the use of one blackened claw.

‘
No
. No time …’ The feverish eyes truly transfixed him now. ‘My boy, David …’

Bastable was pinned down by those eyes.

‘Tell Willis … My boy, David—he knows my boy, David—‘ Audley stopped abruptly.

Suddenly, Bastable knew what Audley was talking about: he had a son named David, and Willis was an acquaintance, if not a friend, and more than that a schoolmaster, if not an acquaintance, who had admitted teaching Audley’s ‘my boy, David’—that was who he was talking about.

‘Yes, Nigel—‘ he leaned forward again. ‘—your son, David—?’

‘Not my son—not my son—but my boy, damn it —‘ Major Audley took one great rattling breath, and then a second shallower one.

Bastable couldn’t make head nor tail of that, for the man was obviously rambling now, but he forced himself to lean over to place his ear closer to catch the words.

‘Your son, David?’ He found himself staring at the heavy brocaded cushion on the back-rest of the settee. It was old-fashioned, but very high-class material, he noted. And very expensive too—not unlike the curtains he had sold to Mrs Anstruther last spring—was it only last spring?

Major Audley seemed to have had second thoughts about the message he wished to pass on to Wimpy about his son David, or the propriety of giving it to someone else, perhaps.

‘Your son, David?’ Bastable felt himself belittled by such lack of confidence. ‘Tell Wimpy what?’

In the far distance, faint but clear enough in the silence surrounding them, there was the sound of someone kick-starting a motor-cycle. The engine roared for a moment, and then stalled.

That would be Wimpy, thought Bastable. Wimpy’s passion for riding motor-cycles was unbridled, and he had even been known to break battalion rules to satisfy it. But if there was no battalion any more, then the rules no longer applied—and if the battalion had left a motor-cycle behind then Wimpy was the man to nose it out, like a dog sensing the presence of a bone.

The French lady had touched his shoulder, he realized. And she was speaking to him again.

He turned towards her. ‘Ne comprenez pas,’ he said.

She stared at him for a moment. Then she reached past him and drew the blanket up over Audley’s face.

Bastable looked down at the blanket, then back to the French lady, then down at the blanket again.

‘He can’t be dead. He was just speaking to me —‘ He pulled the blanket down.

The motor-cycle started up again in the distance.

BUT IT WASN’T
Wimpy on the motor-cycle.

It was one of the khaki machines the battalion had acquired at Boulogne—British Army property, and certainly not the property of the spotty-faced French youth who was sitting proudly astride it outside the shop where the old man and the women had been standing.

Bastable felt a sudden vicious anger well up inside him. There were dead British soldiers lying in the street—he had only this moment left another one of them, newly-dead —killed in France and not yet buried. And the dirty bastards were already picking up the spoils—the dirty thieving swine!

He launched himself down the street in a red haze of rage, kicking obstructions out of the way, and fetched up within striking distance of the youth before another coherent thought could cross his mind.

‘Get off that machine!’ he barked. ‘Get off— d’you hear me —
this instant
!’

And that might not be an order delivered in French, but—by God! it’s meaning out to be plain enough, he told himself hotly.

The youth tossed his head insolently and rotated his hands on the handlebars.

‘Get off!’ shouted Bastable. ‘At once!’

The youth smirked at him—he was hardly older than the errand boys Bastable’s retained for their parcel deliveries —and pronounced a single word. And although it was a French word its vulgar meaning was also immediately clear to Bastable.

His anger passed the point of incandescence, consumed itself and suddenly became deadly cold. He knew now, as he fumbled with his webbing holster—he knew now with a horrible icy certainty that he would shoot this youth dead in five seconds if he refused to get off the motor-cycle.