The Iron Stallions (6 page)

His mother, Josh’s Aunt Elvira, was quieter. She wore a beaten look these days, which came, so Josh had heard, because his Uncle Robert was having another affair, this time with an actress whom he’d set up in a house near Bradford.

‘I expect you’re hungry,’ she said. ‘Young people always are. But I’ve got muffins and a cake, and I expect you’ve developed a tremendous appetite since you were in the army.’

While they were eating, her husband arrived with Claude, his younger son. They seemed to be two of a kind. Claude had missed the open friendliness of Aubrey and seemed even to show the signs of deviousness and cunning which had made Robert such a good businessman.

Josh eyed them warily. He didn’t like his uncle and he didn’t trust him much. When the high endeavour of the war had been swept away in the flood of self-interest that had engulfed the ex-soldiers, men like his uncle had been left in possession of immense fortunes that were an insult to the dead and to the intelligence of those who survived.

Robert studied him without interest. ‘They’ve put inches on you,’ he said. ‘How did you find it? A crashing bore? I always did.’

‘No, sir,’ Josh said. ‘I enjoyed it.’

‘Infantile! All that damned nonsense about tradition! “We wear green because the French Lancers did at Waterloo.” It always seemed a bit futile to me.’

‘Not to me, sir.’

‘Well, you belong to the other side of the family and they were always obsessed with the army to the point of lunacy. Perhaps that’s why they’re so poverty-stricken and always demanding help from me.’

Josh frowned. ‘We’ve never demanded help from you, sir,’ he said. He was certain of the fact because he’d more than once heard his mother say she’d die before she asked Robert for assistance.

Robert frowned and gestured. ‘Well, no,’ he agreed. ‘Not yet. But you will. You see. Times are hard and they’re getting harder. Nobody’ll be able to live much longer on assets.’ He glanced at Josh. ‘One of these days your grandmother will find that house too big for her and won’t be able to afford to run it. I’ve offered to take it off her hands more than once but she remains stubborn.’

The following week Josh set off for Germany.

The country he remembered from visits before the war as plump, prosperous and well-ordered was in a sorry state. After a century of fighting, France and Germany were still doing each other irreparable harm. Because they couldn’t obtain the ruinous war reparations they had insisted on, the French had marched into the Ruhr to take over its industries and the Germans had refused to co-operate so that the whole industrial system had come to a halt. The value of the deutschmark had disappeared, prices had soared even as customers waited to be served, and thousands of people had lost their savings. The Hartmann family were better off than most because the old Graf had sunk his money in Switzerland before the war and it had wisely been left there.

Josh’s aunt greeted him with wet eyes. Despite the bitterness that had existed during the war, she was glad to see him, glad to know her family hadn’t forgotten her. His Cousin Konstantin, who’d inherited the title of Graf after his father’s death, received him more warily, finding it hard to forget that his father, Josh’s uncle, had been killed by a British shell.

‘Germany wasn’t really beaten, you know,’ he insisted. ‘She was stabbed in the back by the people at home.’

‘Do you really believe that, Konni?’ Josh asked.

‘It’s what they say. Especially this new party, the National Socialists. They say it was the Jews and the Communists.’

‘Konni,’ Josh said earnestly, ‘Germany was beaten because she lost the fighting. The blockade beat her. You must know that.
You
went hungry enough.’

‘You’ve read your history,’ Konstantin admitted bitterly. ‘But it’s
British
history.’

‘Perhaps it is,’ Josh agreed. ‘But I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll send you a British history of the war if you’ll send me a German one. Then you can read the English and I can read the German so we can make up our own minds instead of having them made up for us by politicians and newspapermen. Anyway, who runs these National Socialists?’

Konstantin shrugged. ‘Chap called Hitler. I think he’d like to feel he’s as clever as Mussolini but he’s really only an Austrian agitator who ended up in jail. They’ve just released him under an amnesty, but he’s finished now. Nobody will ever take any notice of him or his party again.’

On his return from Germany, Josh found himself on the
Mauretania
heading for Virginia and the home of his American cousins. His grandmother had insisted on the visit, arguing that it would do him good, and he landed in New York where he was able to make enquiries and find Louise Peabody’s address. Three days later, after wandering round the chasm-like streets, he took the train to Washington, which was as different from New York as chalk was from cheese.

Louise’s family lived in Arlington and he took a taxi to the door. She greeted him warmly, both of them startled at the change they saw. To Louise Josh seemed enormous and tremendously masculine. To Josh Louise seemed no longer a child but a lively young American girl, not particularly beautiful with her too-large mouth and a nose that wasn’t quite right but with perfect teeth and jetty hair. She was shapely and full of life, her eyes seemed to have grown larger, and she had developed an endearing twisted smile that tugged unexpectedly at his heart.

The family had a country house in northern Virginia, and on his way to his cousins in the southern half of the state, he was invited to stay as long as he wished. The house was on the high slopes of the mountains, overlooking the valley of the Shenandoah, and Josh was offered the use of a spare car. He had just learned to drive and they drove to Williamsburg and Richmond and to the beach or into the mountains. In the heat of a Virginia summer they swam in a nearby lake and went to a country theatre and dances together. Louise was vital, noisy and bursting with energy, yet she said nothing unnecessary and was intelligent enough for what she said to be worth hearing. It was as though Josh had known her and been close to her for years.

Nothing in the world could have stopped them falling a little in love. Louise was warm, happy and satisfying and eager to be with Josh, so that he was delighted with himself and with her and even began to think of putting off his visit to his relations for the sake of staying with her. Being with her was like looking at life through a telescope so that everything that had previously been vague became sharp and clear and emotionally satisfying. For the first time in his life Josh felt alive.

Even their holding hands became a caress and he was aware of the reality of her sex in a way that no other girl had ever affected him before. He was aware of the danger but he still told her he loved her. She laughed quickly but her laughter died almost at once and she became serious and large-eyed and thoughtful. From then on things changed. They were able to walk together without bothering to talk, wrapped in a companionable silence, content merely to be together, each aware of the other and trying hard not to be, their minds full of things that had never occurred to them before, each of them electrified when their hands or their bodies touched.

On the last day he drove her back to Charlottesville. She took him to Jefferson’s home at Monticello and, feeling terribly adult, they ate a meal in the town because her parents had to go to a dinner at the university. As they drove home, the evening was stiflingly hot and as they arrived outside the house a storm started with an unexpected clap of thunder and the rain fell as if the skies had opened. They were drenched before they could reach shelter.

Inside, saturated to the skin, they leaned on each other and laughed. Then Louise started to pull off her wet dress so that she stood in her slip, her slim young body outlined by the clinging satin. His shirt in his hands, his wet hair in his eyes, Josh was aware, with a sudden hot feeling of being a voyeur, of the shape of her body, how her hips filled out the slip and the shape of her breasts. She was looking at him, large-eyed and anxious, then, as their hands touched, their fingers grasped and for a moment they clung to each other, kissing, before Josh hurriedly pushed her away.

‘How come, Josh?’ She was staring at him, hurt and bewildered. ‘There was no harm. A little kissing doesn’t matter.’

‘You
might have been kissing,’ Josh said sharply in a thick voice, unable to explain to her that had they continued he would have been after more than merely kissing.

She stared at him, worried and concerned. ‘But, Josh–!’

‘Lou, you’re not old enough.’

‘I’m sixteen.’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Okay, fifteen. But your grandmother was only fifteen when she fell in love with your grandfather. She told me.’

‘She didn’t
marry
him at fifteen. And
we’re
not in love.’

He was lying, trying to keep her at a distance for his own and her own sake, and she stared at him with tragic eyes. ‘I am,’ she said.

‘Lou, you can’t be. You’re not old enough.’

‘How damned old do you have to be?’

Leaving him speechless, she disappeared to her room. When he ventured downstairs again she had changed into dry clothes and was listening to the radio. Without a word, Josh sat at the opposite end of the settee. They hardly spoke a word all evening.

When Josh left the following day Louise saw him off from the front steps. As the taxi disappeared down the drive, she stared after it, her eyes moist.

‘Did something happen between you two?’ her mother asked.

‘Nope.’

‘You seemed to be getting on so well, and Josh’s a nice boy.’

‘Yep. Sure is.’

‘Well, what?’

Louise blinked back the tears. ‘Well, nothing,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Nothing. After all, Momma, he’s only eighteen.’

Sandhurst was a new experience for Josh. He had been there before, in 1917 as a privileged spectator with his grandfather, but to be greeted on arrival in 1925 by an elongated figure made of teak wearing a Guards cap and with a high-pitched falsetto scream that made his hair stand on end was a very different matter.

As they were formed up, scared stiff by the precision marching going on about them, the figure with the Guards cap addressed them. ‘Now gentlemen,’ he said. ‘While you’re ’ere, I’m “sir” to you, sir, and you’re “sir” to me, sir. Do you understand, all of you? Even if I address you as “sir”, you will also address me as “sir.” Got it?’

His bark was worse than his bite while his parade-ground patter, learned from generations of instructors, was worth putting in a book. ‘Idle’ covered everything from an untidy appearance to an improperly laced boot. ‘Idle on parade’. ‘Idle boot laces’. Even the bugler, suffering from a sore on his lip, had his name taken for blowing an ‘idle horn’.

In some ways it was a bit like joining a penal battalion. The cadets wore pink and white striped blazers with pill-box hats, a form of headgear that hadn’t been in use in the army since the turn of the century, and on parade the senior under-officers wore as much braid on their sleeves as Hungarian hussars. Though the instructors never missed a thing, they were also full of an underlying sense of humour and mutual loyalty that sprang from years in the army. Training was hard because the cadets had to learn everything that was likely to be needed by an army officer. ‘You’ve got to do it proper,’ they were told by the instructor. ‘And, since you ain’t been away from your mothers for long, you got to rely on me.’

There were a lot of familiar names on the doors of the long blank corridors of the old building – Maxse, de Salis, Lowe, Vandeleur, Luard, Paget – some even that Josh had heard his grandfather mention from as far back as the Crimea. Tradition and duty had brought them there. Josh had already read parts of Clausewitz and followed the campaigns of Stonewall Jackson, Lee, Napoleon, Wellington and Marlborough, poring over maps with his grandfather as he did so. Noticeably, few leaders from the recent war were mentioned, save his father’s old commander, Allenby, though there was a lot of talk about a man called Fuller – a serving soldier, no less – who was preaching blasphemy in the
Royal United
Services Institute Journal
where he was claiming that, although cavalry was still needed, it was only of any use in tanks.

Once more, the drill came easily and he was eyed askance by the sergeant instructor. They spent weeks on general infantry training before moving on to more sophisticated instruction under a major of the 17th Lancers who’d been severely wounded in France. He had one eye, one hand and walked with a limp. Caught by a shell as a subaltern in 1914, when told he was unlikely ever to be fit enough to fight again, he had found a civilian surgeon who had patched him up and, despite his disability, had gone back to France in time to take part in the holocaust on the first day of the Somme. By the end of the war he was commanding a battalion of infantry but, after the Armistice, had dropped back to the rank of major and been given an instructor’s job at Sandhurst. Nobody seemed in the least surprised and, as the sergeant instructor said, ‘’Course he didn’t get no medals, sir. It was what he was trained for.’

Somehow, at Sandhurst, it made sense.

Josh was sorry when the course finished. It taught him a lot and for the first time in his life he began to see what soldiering was all about and that there might be some sense in all the relentless drilling. After passing out, he was kitted out by the regimental tailor, who remembered his father and his grandfather, but his return to the Regiment was very different from his enlistment. Instead of being cleverer than everybody else, now he was considered the lowest form of animal life in the mess.

A few of the older officers eyed him sideways, wondering what they’d picked up – an officer who preferred to start in the ranks against all precedents and need – and a few were inclined to bear down heavily on him, in case he thought he might be one up on them. A few, however, were forthrightly welcoming.