The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [43]
‘The show-down has come,’ said Pennistone.
The day this news was released, I went upstairs to see Finn about a rather complicated minute (to be signed by one of the Brigadiers) on the subject of redundant Czech army doctors being made available for seconding to the Royal Army Medical Corps. There had been difficulty about drafting satisfactory guarantees to make sure the Czechs, should they so require, would be able to recover the services of their MOs. Finn was in one of his unapproachable moods. The Russo-Polish situation had thoroughly upset him.
‘It’s a bad business,’ he kept repeating. ‘A bad business. I’ve got Bobrowski coming to see me this afternoon. What the hell am I to say?’
I tried to get the subject round to Czech medical matters and the views of the RAMC brasshats, but he told me to bring the matter up again that afternoon.
‘You’ve got to go over to the Cabinet Offices now,’ he said. ‘They’ve just rung through. Some Belgian papers they want us to see. Something about the King. Nothing of any great importance, I think, but graded “hand of officer”, and to be read by those in direct contact with the Belgians.’
The position of the King of the Belgians was delicate. Formally accepted as monarch of their country by the Belgian Government in exile, the royal portrait hanging in Kucherman’s office, King Leopold, rightly or wrongly, was not, officially speaking, very well looked on by ourselves. His circumstances had been made no easier by a second marriage disapproved by many of his subjects.
‘Have a look at this Belgian file before you bring it up,’ said Finn. ‘Do a note on it. Then we can discuss it after we’ve settled the Czech medicos. God, this Polish business.’
I went across to the Ministry of Defence right away. Finn had given the name of a lieutenant-colonel from whom the papers were to be acquired. After some search in the Secretariat, this officer was eventually traced in Widmerpool’s room. I arrived there a few minutes before one o’clock, and the morning meeting had begun to adjourn. If they were the same committee as that I had once myself attended, the individual members had all changed, though no doubt they represented the same ministries. The only one known to me was a figure remembered from early London days, Tompsitt, a Foreign Office protégé of Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson’s. Sir Gavin himself had died the previous year. Obituaries, inevitably short in wartime, had none of them mentioned the South American misjudgment that had led to his retirement. His hopes in Tompsitt, untidy as ever and no less pleased with himself, seemed to have been realized, this job being presumably a respectable one for his age, if not particularly glamorous. Widmerpool, again in a good humour, made a facetious gesture of surprise on seeing me.
‘Nicholas? Good gracious me. What is it you want, do you say? Belgian papers? Do you know anything about this, Simon? You do? Then we must let him have them.’
Someone was sent to find the papers.
‘We finished early this morning,’ said Widmerpool. ‘An unheard of thing for us to do. I’m going to allow myself the luxury of lunching outside this building for once. So you’re looking after the Belgians now, are you, Nicholas? I thought it was the Poles.’
‘I’ve moved over.’
‘You must be glad.’
‘There were interesting sides.’
‘Just at this moment, I mean. You are well out of the Poles. They are rocking the boat in the most deplorable manner. Our own relations with the USSR are never exactly easy – then for the Poles to behave as they have done.’
The attention of the other civilian, who, with Tompsitt, had been attending the meeting, was caught by Widmerpool’s reproachful tone. He looked a rather younger version of our former housemaster, Le Bas, distinctly clerical, a thin severe overworked curate or schoolmaster.
‘One would really have thought someone at the top of the Polish set-up would have grasped this is not the time to make trouble,’ he said. ‘Your people must be pretty fed up, aren’t they, Tomp?’
Tompsitt shook back his unbrushed hair.
‘Fed to the teeth,’ he said.