The Feathers of Death, page 11
However, two things happened to assist Alastair out of the Sussex rut. In the first place, his father’s persistence on the Stock Exchange was so rewarding that it would hardly have been decent for the family to remain in the pseudo-Tudor house any longer; and just before the war they moved to a large country house in Hertfordshire, which was still within easy commuting distance but indicated a definite social elevation—to the status of substantial gentry. Memories are short in that part of the world; and by the time the war was over, after all the comings and goings and deaths and impoverishments which had resulted in the neighborhood, the Lynches were as firmly established, in a comparative fashion, as if they had been there since the Conquest. All of which enabled Alastair, who had meanwhile been sent to Harrow, to assume the airs and amusements of the young squire—and without any of the concomitant annoyances; for there was no tedious estate to be administered (only a very imposing and amply staffed garden), and so far from being shut away in some deplorable country district, he was within an easy hour of central London. He could therefore put on a red coat and go hunting or a black tie and go to the theater, both with equal ease and in neither case with the prospect of returning to accounting ledgers that told a tale of unpunctual tenants, dishonest agents, and idle, half-witted laborers.
This in itself might not have been much improvement on his Sussex condition, had it not been for the influence of his time at Harrow. Normally, this would just have confirmed the prejudices and assumptions implicit from birth in his mode of existence and carefully underlined by his smart Surrey prep school. But it so happened that Alastair’s house at Harrow had been taken over for the war by one of those brilliant, worldly and rather suspect men who occasionally turn up as schoolmasters in times of shortage and stress, but who would normally steer well clear of education in all its guises. This particular man was an old Harrovian who had spent a cheerful life of travel and dissipation, had been the friend, variously, of Lord Russell, Lord Berners and Ezra Pound, and had been quietly living in “retirement” when the war broke out. Feeling he ought to assist the country which he had been at pains to stay away from most of his life, he offered his services and his degree to his old school, only to have them politely declined; for in those early days adequate stocks of the steady and mediocre young Christians so beloved of headmasters were still available. But when the steady and mediocre young Christians were all marched off to battle, and when even a few of the middle-aged Christians were discovered to have specialist qualifications for discomforting the King’s enemies, the old sinner’s offer was gratefully remembered. And since he was quite a rich old sinner, they gave him a house to look after, in which, when Alastair arrived there in 1942, he was fairly and squarely established with a large library and an excellent cellar.
Libraries and cellars are unpopular during wars. They betoken privilege, detachment, a lack of the team spirit. It is to the everlasting credit of Alastair’s temporary housemaster that it was his library and his cellar above everything that he was anxious to share with his boys. At a time when schoolmasters everywhere were talking endlessly of character and effort and enthusiasm, were devising routines of unparalleled austerity, were making their boys traumatic and hysterical by ferocious recitals of the names of ex-alumni dead on the field of honor, this succulent and kindly man merely saw to it that those in his charge had decent literature to read and an occasional glass of decent wine to drink. An amiable and unusual attitude in a public school at any time, this was of quite disproportionate significance during the dreary and cant-ridden years of the war. As a result Alastair, who but for this happy chance might have emerged from school as one of the joyless little bullies so readily turned out at the time, in fact left Harrow in 1946 a tolerant, skeptical and often witty young man. Mistrustful of all enthusiasms, contemptuous of all causes, he was firmly and forever convinced that in literature, conversation and wine were to be found at once the staples of civilized existence and, if one added travel, the only possible consolations for the bedraggled world in which he had grown up.
But there was a less happy result of all this. Like all gifted men of his kind, Alastair’s housemaster had more time for graceful and intelligent boys than he did for lumpish and stupid ones. Fair to all, he was nevertheless overgenerous to some, among whom were Alastair and several of his friends. Over these boys their housemaster had a particular influence; he took them on expeditions and had them to stay, during the holidays, at some of the pleasanter resorts which wartime England even then afforded. Seeing the time Alastair spent with this man and the very distinctive influence he was absorbing, Alastair’s parents became jealous—and finally expressed their resentment in the viciously stupid fashion of rejecting the housemaster’s suggestion that Alastair should go up to Oxford. It was doubtful whether his parents had, until then, given much thought to Alastair’s future; but the moment advice came from another and increasingly detested quarter, they sprang into action with spiteful assurance. Alastair, they said, had always been going to follow his father into the City; to send him to Oxford would merely be to prolong an interval already liable to be inconveniently lengthened by impending National Service. At Oxford he would simply develop idle habits and impractical notions for the future conduct of his life—and of these he had seemingly absorbed quite enough already. Let him get to the City and learn his business—as his father had before him. He must start standing on his own feet.
This inexcusable pronouncement was a shock to Alastair, who had hitherto been given anything, within reason, that he had asked for. If ever there was a place for the enjoyment of literature, conversation and wine—not to mention the liberal intervals allowed for travel—Oxford, he thought, must be it. And as for this business of making money, his housemaster’s teaching was that while money was to be treasured as an instrument of pleasure, the getting of it was an affront to any man of taste. Nor could it be said that it was at all necessary for him to get it. His father had made plenty and could easily have afforded to retire the next day and present Alastair with enough to keep him in comfort for life. No doubt a young man must have an occupation of sorts—and indeed at that time an officious Labour Government was busy legislating to that effect; but to sweat away in a distasteful environment in order to add redundant gold to the existing mass of it was against all reason and every civilized canon of behavior. Thus Alastair pondered with himself. But he had the restraint not to make a scene and the wit to see that his parents’ attitude was in essence negative—that it was more a question of stopping him doing what his housemaster suggested than of making him do something they themselves actually favored. But Oxford, it seemed, or, by extension, Cambridge, was definitely out. It remained to find a happy compromise (another frequent recommendation of his housemaster’s).
One evening early in his National Service he came home for the weekend and announced that, if his parents wished, he could go to Sandhurst and eventually be sure of a regular commission in Lord Martock’s Regiment. For Alastair had realized something which many young men of his type would have entirely overlooked—that the Regular Army, while superficially a harsh and overdisciplined institution, can in certain circumstances present a well-endowed young man with a life that includes travel, a great deal of leisure, and the company of pleasant and like-minded people of considerably more intelligence than is generally allowed. The vital thing was to find the right sort of regiment. The Foot Guards, he had heard, were rather stuffy in peacetime; the rifle regiments, though extremely nice, much too concerned with professional efficiency. Most cavalry regiments were tolerant and pleasure-loving, but with a tendency to flashiness; the light infantry regiments were, frankly, middle-class; the fusiliers were even more middle-class. Finally, and again with the assistance of his housemaster, he had settled for Martock’s Foot. “You’ll be happy with them,” the old man had said. “They are unsnobbish, as the Army goes, but unmistakably upper-class; unenthusiastic but with a good military reputation; unconcerned with good-form morality and totally unimpressed by the mystique of team games and beer.” Another advantage, as Alastair well knew, was that Martock’s Foot was quite smart enough to appeal to the vaguely snobbish instincts which had drawn his parents from Sussex to Hertfordshire and had led them to enter him for Harrow. Again, surely the choice of a secure and honorable career would indicate sufficient determination to “stand on his own feet”—even if that career would be intolerable without a very generous allowance from his father? And so, in the event, it proved. Unaware that Martock’s Foot was the suggestion of Alastair’s hated schoolmaster, his parents gave calm but satisfied consent; it was also settled that Alastair should receive five hundred pounds a year from his father while he was at Sandhurst, fifteen hundred a year when he was commissioned, and a large block of capital when he was thirty. A few weeks later, he came happily enough to Camberley and settled down to the rather disagreeable eighteen months’ training that must unfortunately precede his chosen life of idleness with honor.
The trouble with Sandhurst lies in the moral and disciplinary side of the instruction. Military subjects are taught capably and broadly, academic subjects with sympathy and even liberality; but there is with all this nagging insistence on the Arnoldian virtues and a distinct tendency to employ Arnoldian methods. There is much talk of keenness and responsibility, much earnest endeavor to maintain a suitable “tone” in one’s company; and of course the prefect system, in the form of a cadet hierarchy of underofficers and N.C.O.s, is one of the staples of the whole place. Literature, conversation and wine are thus at a discount. Alastair had been prepared for this, and he had also been prepared, up to a point, for a return to the conditions of existence in a public school; but he had hardly been prepared for the positive barrage of moral influence with which authority bombards its pupils at the R.M.A. To indulge in irony at the expense of the establishment’s moral values was a dangerous and unpopular pastime; to accept them whole- or even halfheartedly was quite out of the question. Alastair was thus in the uneasy position of having to simulate enthusiasm and responsibility and similar virtues for days on end, with almost no one to whom he could turn for the release of a compensating bout of cynicism or satire. For most young men at Sandhurst are only too ready to accept the military-cum-moral values upheld there, since in the center of these is the assumption that only very superior people are capable of absorbing them and that, by extension, each cadet belongs to a morally superior caste. This neofeudal conception has a strong appeal for young men of uncertain intelligence and uncertain social backgrounds, and so there were few cadets willing to listen to Alastair while he analyzed the Sandhurst credo into its absurd components and mocked it for the nasty, incongruous and ugly edifice of the spirit it was. Still, uneasy as he might be, he remained unconverted, though hardly unaffected, by the intensity of the moral atmosphere he had to live in. It might even have been a valuable educational experience for him, had it not turned a lighthearted eighteenth-century skepticism into an almost paranoiac distrust of any kind of moral excellence.
For the rest, he got by well enough. Bad at drill but adaptable to games, with a good memory for military fact, a shrewd administrative intelligence and a distinct gift for languages, he passed his examinations with sufficient credit to disarm comment about the vaguely “unsatisfactory” nature of his character. So his father was able to stand by with pride and his mother in tears as he marched up to the college steps for the last time into a commissioned life and fifteen hundred pounds a year. This he did with relief. He was now a man and could put away the childish things of Sandhurst in the adult and congenial atmosphere of Martock’s Foot.
It was at this stage that I first met him. Myself about two years older than Alastair, I was at that time in charge of the mortar troop; and since there was no troop available for Alastair to command during his first few months with us, he was sent to me to be of general assistance and to pick up what knowledge of the three-inch mortar he could or would acquire. Two of his qualities became immediately apparent. Firstly, he was excellent company for days at a time—never intrusive, always ready for a little conversation, quick to pick up and share private jokes about the situation or activities in which we were involved. The only thing which made him disagreeable was the occasional necessity for making a bad or hurried meal, when he would point out that one’s meals were as surely limited in number as one’s days upon earth and that it was a positive duty to enjoy them. The second thing I noticed about him at once was his interest in, and very quick understanding of, the theoretical side of mortaring, as opposed to a total disinclination to investigate such minor and practical details as the way in which the weapon worked or ought to be cleaned. He was, in short, given to generalization, like most intelligent yet lazy people. Indeed, intelligence and laziness were the two qualities for which he became famous throughout the battalion. When he left me and my mortars, he went to a subaltern’s normal employment as commander of an ordinary saber troop—a task he was still performing two years later, at the time of which I write, and would in the normal course of events continue to perform for a further two years. Successive company commanders recognized his undoubted competence and deplored or condoned, as their natures might dictate, his infinite capacity for doing nothing and his complete refusal to move a foot in any direction unless he was firmly and personally convinced of the necessity. In fact, however, he was never guilty of a major bêtise and his attitude was on the whole approved and appreciated in our regiment. As Sanvoisin used to remark, Alastair’s idleness might equally justly be described as economy of action—a pleasing thing in an army where so many officers rushed around and shouted their heads off merely in order to deceive or impress their seniors. In the end it was arguable that Alastair commanded and administered his troop in an efficient and unobtrusive manner, giving the minimum of trouble or work to either his men or himself. This the men were quick to recognize, as they were to appreciate his undeniable friendliness and fairness and his willingness to take great pains on their behalf, whether as individuals or as a body, if he truly considered it necessary. Thus one could really say that Alastair’s two years with our regiment had made him a popular and respected figure both with the men and with his superiors. Scandal there had been none, save for the gaming debts the previous June, and this affair had really been settled without much trouble. True, two or three of the more severe officers, such as Sinclair or Duthwaite, looked upon Alastair as “dubious” or “equivocal.” But they were in a definite minority. His contemporaries, like Michael Byrt, were at once proud and fond of him. As for myself, I had known him intimately since our time together with the mortars; and I shall only say that no enterprise, whether of business or of pleasure, ever had quite the same pith and joy in it for me as when Alastair was bearing a part.
Thus it was my strong affection for Alastair, combined with what I had always considered, since our mortar days, to be a certain responsibility for him, that made me wonder whether it was not my duty to find out what was afoot between him and Harley and, if necessary, actively to interfere. I knew that I should not be thanked. But better anything, I thought, than the kind of trouble Michael Byrt had hinted at. “Very difficult,” Michael had said, “even in a regiment like this.” Whatever the “civilized” judgment might be, Michael was from an immediate and practical point of view entirely right. And so, early in the day after C.S.M. Mole’s party, determined at any rate to find out where the truth of the matter lay, I sought out Alastair in his tent.
“No trips to the wilderness today?” Alastair said.
“Not today,” I said. “Where did you get to last night? The C.S.M. was very put out.”
“Moley? I’ve seen him and squared all that. I told him I wasn’t feeling well and just slipped away so as not to spoil his party.”
“He may believe that, but Royd doesn’t. He spent a good half hour dropping clangorous hints about your probable destination.”
“Lord, Lord . . . Who heard these clangorous hints?”
“Only me.”
“And were they scurrilous as well as clangorous?”
“No. Royd affected to believe that whatever you were up to was, as they say, platonic.”
“How tactful of him.”
“Was he right?” I asked.
“He was.”
“Was?”
“You have an inquisitive look, Andrew. Must I tell you about this? You can’t really want to know.”
“I want to know very much.”
“Then you’ll have to promise not to interfere.”
“How can I? Do you think we all relish the idea of you making a fool of yourself? Do you really think you can get away with something like this?”
“You don’t know yet what I’m getting away with.”
“Tell me, then. And I’ll not interfere if you convince me you’ve got some sort of control over what’s happening.”
“Good of you, Andrew. But then I don’t know what degree of control will satisfy you.”
“I shall want to be convinced that no one is going to get hysterical. That there are going to be no tearful confessions leading to inquiries and courts-martial.”
“Myself,” said Alastair, “as you well know, I am not given to hysteria and tearful confessions. I don’t think Malcolm is either.”
“Malcolm?”
“Malcolm Harley. A nice name, don’t you think? That’s one of the things I first thought, when I started looking up his record while all that fuss was going on. Someone once told me that all the nicest names are trochaic. Andrew. Michael. Malcolm. The stress on the first syllable, he said, suited the English language. And if both names were trochaic, he said, then that was really a dream. Malcolm Harley. Trochee, trochee . . . Besides, Malcolm is such a suggestive name—the ls and ms make it soft and langorous, but the c redeems it from complete effeminacy—gives it a healthy, outdoor, English ring. And that has always been my weakness, Andrew. If there’s one thing I can’t resist, it’s a combination of softness and masculinity. Like those boys at school who are all fair hair and enormous blue eyes but nevertheless lead the scrum or score dramatic centuries. I could never resist them at Harrow and I don’t seem able to now.”
