Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [87]
‘A waistcoat’s always been part of any suit I wore. Why change just because I’m in the army? I’ve got to keep warm in the army, like anywhere else, haven’t I?’
He did not give an inch, either, in adapting himself to military manners and speech, behaving to superiors as he would in a civilian firm, where he was paid to give the best advice he could in connexion with his own employment. He dressed nothing up in the forms and terms traditional to the military subordinate. Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson had been particularly irked by that side of Cheesman. He used to call him ‘our Mr Cheesman’, a phrase in which Cheesman himself would have found nothing derogatory. Thirty-nine when he joined the army at the beginning of the war, he wanted to ‘command men’. He must be nearly sixty now. Except when that frightful look shot across his face, the features were scarcely more altered than Sunny Farebrother’s.
‘How the hell did you survive your Jap POW camp?’ asked Lintot cheerfully.
Cheesman brushed the question aside.
‘A bit of luck. The Nips were moving some of their prisoners in ’44. Don’t know where they were taking us. When we were at sea, the Nip transport was sunk by an American warship. No arrangements made for POWs, of course, when ship’s company took to the boats, but the Americans rescued most of us – and a lot of the Nips too.’
‘Don’t expect you were feeling too good by that time?’
‘Naturally I wasn’t fit for normal duties for a month or two. When I was on my feet again, I got a change of job. They were short of Intelligence wallahs where I was. I’d picked up a few words of Japanese. It was thought better to make use of me in ‘I’, rather than go back to Mobile Laundry duty, though I’d have liked to return to the job for which I’d been trained. That’s why I’m allowed here, without being strictly speaking applicable. Funny meeting you, Mr Jenkins. I don’t remember your face at all at that Div HQ. The officer I recall is the DAAG, Major Widmerpool. He made quite an impression on me. Very efficient, I should say. A really good officer. You can always tell the type. I expect he’s done well in civilian life too.’
‘Do you remember a man in your sub-unit called Stringham?’
Cheesman looked surprised at the question.
‘Of course I do. How did you know Stringham?’
‘We were friends in civilian life.’
‘You were?’
Cheesman found that statement hard to credit. He thought about it for a second or two. Stringham and I – that was the impression – seemed miles apart. He wrestled with the question inwardly. When at last he answered, it was as if prepared to accept my word, even then the claim scarcely believable.
‘I see. I do recall now Stringham wasn’t just the ordinary bloke you find in the ranks. I was taken aback at first when you said you’d known him. Of course, you get all sorts in a war. He was a superior type, an educated man. You could see that. All the same I never thought about it much. He never made any difficulties. I’d forgotten altogether. Just remember him in the jobs he used to do. I could never place him myself. What was his work in civilian life?’
That was a hard question to answer. What did Stringham do? Cheesman must be told something. What about the time when (with Bill Truscott as dominant colleague) he had been a sort of personal secretary to Sir Magnus Donners? I fell back on that. To be a secretary implied at least a measure of professional identity. That would serve the purposes of the moment.
‘Stringham was private secretary to a business tycoon.’
‘Oh, was he?’
Cheesman seemed at first more surprised than ever. He did not pursue the matter. His own job could well have brought him face to face with eccentric business tycoons. Either that struck him, or he decided to leave the question vague in solution.
‘He was very fond of making jokes, but I always found him an excellent worker in my sub-unit.’
Cheesman said that without the least disapproval. He spoke as one merely registering an unusual characteristic. So far as jokes were concerned, his own features proclaimed a state of intact virginity as to any experience or sense of them, immaculately so. Cheesman had never made a joke, never seen a joke, could live