The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [34]
‘I’m sorry I sent you off like that without any lunch,’ he said.
‘That was the order.’
‘No,’ said Gwatkin. ‘It wasn’t.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘There would have been lots of time for you to have had something to eat,’ he said.
I did not know what to answer.
‘I had to work off on someone that rocket the CO gave me,’ he said. ‘You were the only person I could get at – anyway the first one I saw when I came back from the Colonel. He absolutely took the hide off me. I’d have liked to order the men off, too, right away, without their dinner, but I knew I’d only get another rocket – an even bigger one – if it came out they’d missed a meal unnecessarily through an order of mine.’
I felt this a handsome apology, a confession that did Gwatkin credit. Even so, his words were nothing to the chocolate. There were still a few remains clinging to my mouth. I licked them from the back of my teeth.
‘Of course you’ve got to go,’ said Gwatkin vehemently, ‘lunch or no lunch, if it’s an order. Go and get caught up on a lot of barbed wire and be riddled by machine-gun fire, stabbed to death with bayonets against a wall, walk into a cloud of poison gas without a mask, face a flame-thrower in a narrow street. Anything. I don’t mean that.’
I agreed, at the same time feeling no immediate necessity to dwell at length on such undoubtedly valid aspects of military duty. It seemed best to change the subject. Gwatkin had made amends – one of the rarest things for anyone to attempt in life – now he must be distracted from cataloguing further disagreeable potentialities to be encountered in the course of a soldier’s life.
‘Sergeant Pendry hasn’t been very bright today,’ I said. ‘I think he must be sick.’
‘I wanted to talk to you about Pendry,’ said Gwatkin.
‘You noticed he was in poor shape?’
‘He came to me last night. There wasn’t time to tell you before, with all the preparations going on for the exercise – or at least I forgot to tell you.’
‘What’s wrong with Pendry?’
‘His wife, Nick.’
‘What about her?’
‘Pendry had a letter from a neighbour saying she was carrying on with another man.’
‘I see.’
‘You keep on reading in the newspapers that the women of this country are making a splendid war effort,’ said Gwatkin, speaking with all that passion which would well up in him at certain moments. ‘If you ask me, I think they are making a splendid effort to sleep with as many other men as possible while their husbands are away.’
Even if that were an exaggeration, as expressed by Gwatkin, it had to be admitted letters of this kind were common enough. I remembered my brother-in-law, Chips Lovell, once saying: ‘The popular Press always talk as if only the rich committed adultery. One really can’t imagine a more snobbish assumption.’ Certainly no one who administered the Company’s affairs for a week or two would make any mistake on that score. I asked Gwatkin if details were known about Pendry’s case. None seemed available.
‘It makes you sick,’ Gwatkin said.
‘I suppose the men have some fun too. It isn’t only the women. Not that any of us are given much time for it here – except perhaps Corporal Gwylt.’
‘It’s different for a man,’ said Gwatkin. ‘Unless he gets mixed up with a woman who makes him forget his duty.’
These words recalled a film Moreland and I had seen together in days before the war. A Russian officer – the story had been set in Tsarist times – had reprimanded an unpunctual subordinate with just that phrase: ‘A woman who causes a man to neglect his duty is not worth a moment’s consideration.’ The young lieutenant in the film, so far as I could remember, had arrived late on parade because he had been spending the night with the Colonel’s mistress. Afterwards, Moreland and I had often quoted to each other that stern conclusion.
‘It’s just the way you look at it,