Post of Honour (33 page)

It seemed to him a wonderful thing that he should have been capable of inspiring a letter like that and it crossed his mind, musing on it once again, that he might have Grace Lovell to thank for it. Looking back he realised now how raw and ingenuous he had been as a lover when he and Grace had honeymooned in Paris at the beginning of the Edwardian era, a time when only a street-walker dared admit to a knowledge of the art of love, when complete ignorance of all physical aspects of marriage was a bride’s (and often a groom’s) title to respectability. It had been Grace and no one else who had taught him what little he knew of women. Because of her Claire had been spared the painful, clumsy initiation reserved for the majority of young wives. Yes, she could surely take some credit to herself for the success of their marriage, for all she had needed from the outset was his frank admiration of her body and she had brought to their relationship a prevailing sense of humour that was strange in a daughter of a glum old stick like Edward Derwent.

It was because his thoughts turned to Grace more than once that day that the encounter on the road up to Messines thirty-six hours later made such a profound impression upon him. Pot-bellied old General Plumer, probably the only high-ranking officer in the Salient who enjoyed the respect of his troops, blew his famous mines early that morning and their effect was as devastating as his chief-of-staff, Harington, had promised. The roar that accompanied the detonation of the nineteen undiscovered galleries under Messines sounded like the crack of doom and news filtered back that the attack had been a triumph, the first wave of troops walking over with virtually no opposition, for the German trenches opposite were a shambles. Paul realised this when he saw some of the gibbering survivors that afternoon, and although he pitied them he felt more optimistic about the war than he had felt for years. If it was ever to end, he told himself, then this was surely the way to wage it and the mere trickle of British wounded, compared to the flood that had accompanied every other push, was corroboration.

He went up the line that night with a convoy of corrugated iron for revetting the captured trenches. The outward journey was less eventful than any he had made since his arrival in the sector, and it was a quiet, windless dawn when he started back and became snarled up in a traffic jam two miles short of the dump. An ambulance, heading in the opposite direction, had swerved off the road and become bogged down on the edge of a flooded shell-hole and he sat watching as a party of pioneers attached a cable to the ditched vehicle in an attempt to drag it back on the road. Then, as he half dozed, he seemed to have had a particularly vivid dream for there was something familiar about the slim, uniformed WAAC, obviously the ambulance driver, who stood nonchalantly by the running board of the pioneers’ lorry smoking a cigarette.

She looked, he thought, more like a boy than a woman in her laced-up boots and loose-fitting trench coat. She did not appear much concerned over the fate of her vehicle but rested her weight on the spare tyre of the lorry, inhaling deeply and letting the smoke trickle from her nose. Then he shook himself awake with a shout of amazement; the WAAC was Grace whom he had last seen after her hectic involvement in the House of Commons riot six years ago and although he knew this with complete certainty he was so amazed by her presence there that, for almost a minute, he stood half in half out of his lorry before shaking himself, jumping down and squelching across the slimed pavé to greet her in a voice hoarse and cracked with emotion. ‘
Grace!
It
is
you! It’s you, by God!’, and for some reason that he found difficult to explain to himself, he felt a tremendous surge of exhilaration as he seized both her hands and pumped them up and down so energetically that the cigarette fell from her lips and some of the pioneers, hearing him shout, looked up from their work to stare at them.

She did not seem so surprised as he but her eyes lit up and she smiled, slowly, almost sleepily, so that he noticed she was not only dog tired but also that she must have lost two stone since their last meeting. Her dark hair, crammed under the ungainly cap, had been cut short and there were flecks of grey over the temples. He had always thought of her as rather stocky and well-made, particularly about the shoulders but now she seemed so slim and fragile that, despite the few grey hairs and the circles under her eyes, she looked younger and infinitely more vulnerable than he recalled. He groped for his cigarettes and offered her one, noting that her hand shook a little as she put it to her lips. She said, in the low, controlled voice that was the only thing about her unchanged, ‘I heard you were out, Paul. Uncle Franz wrote and told me about a month ago but it’s a bore that you’ve caught me at such a disadvantage! I’m not usually this inefficient, it was a bloody staff car hogging the centre of the road. It would have been all the same if I’d been loaded with abdominals, blast them! However, what can you expect from red-tabs? Everyone is expected to make way for them, even the poor devils they’ve fed into the Mincing Machine!’

He was struck by the bitterness of her voice and also by the terrible exhaustion it expressed, as though the effort of greeting him made substantial demands on her vitality.

‘Franz never told me you were out here!’ Paul said, indignantly, ‘I thought you were nursing in London.’

‘I was,’ she told him, ‘but when I discovered women handle authority even more despotically than men I got a transfer! It was either that or braining the matron with a bed-pan! How long have you been out?’

Only three months, he told her, so apologetically that she laughed and said, ‘Well, don’t sound so bloody humble about it! After all, you’re rising forty now and I daresay you could have dodged the column easily enough!’ Then she looked at him rather pensively, adding, ‘You wouldn’t tho’, would you? You were always a glutton for punishment!’

‘Damn it, so were you!’ he laughed. ‘At least I enjoyed creature comforts when they were available! Look here, let me get some of my chaps to work on that crate of yours, those bloody pioneers will be fiddling about until Jerry drops something heavy on us!’ and he shouted to his sergeant and walked over to supervise the salvage operations while she continued to watch, standing with her legs squarely apart, still dribbling smoke through her nose.

The ambulance was hauled clear at last, not before time for a range-finder crumped down in a field about three hundred yards to the west. Drivers in both halted columns began to hoot and shout ribald advice, and in the resultant flurry he almost lost her, for she scrambled into the driving seat and addressed herself to the controls while Paul’s sergeant swung the starting handle, beaming with relief when the engine coughed and ticked over. Paul ran round to the offside just as the column began to move.

‘Where can I get in touch with you? Let’s have dinner somewhere?’

She called over her shoulder, ‘Base hospital, I’m free tonight, six until midnight! Ask for Driver Lovell!’

She reversed expertly across the road and then edged away leaving him to scramble back into his lorry and move off in the opposite direction. He was heady with excitement, reflecting, as they nosed down the road to the dump, ‘By God, but she’s a remarkable woman! I don’t think I ever realised how remarkable!’ And then he pondered the startling changes in her looks and manner, neither of which, he felt, could be wholly explained by her occupation and drab uniform, for notwithstanding her almost insane embroilment in The Cause, he had always thought of her as all woman and now she was four-fifth male and as tough and embittered as the hardiest trench veteran. She was also, he thought soberly, near the end of her tether, used up, physically and spiritually but sticking it out in the way most of the men were sticking it, fortified to some extent by the mystic comradeship of the Western Front.

V

S
he succeeded in surprising him again that night after he had picked her up at the hospital transport depot and driven her into Béthune in the Douglas motor-cycle combination he had scrounged. She had changed her uniform and used a little lipstick and powder and the grey hair above her ears must have been camouflaged in some way for the tendrils that strayed below the rim of her cap were now as dark and curling as he remembered. She seemed also to have performed the miracle of developing a small bust during the day and was at least half a woman again but she did not seem to mind when he referred jokingly to this startling recapture, saying, carelessly, ‘Well, it isn’t every night one is taken out to dinner by an ex-husband! Other men will be there and I wouldn’t like them to think you were that hard up for a girl!’

He found her surprisingly relaxed and easy to talk with, as though they were not an estranged husband and wife, who had been parted for twelve years, but a couple of old friends who occasionally spent an evening together. While they were waiting to give their order she said, looking round at tables occupied exclusively by officers and nurses from Advanced Base Hospital, ‘It’s almost a club, isn’t it? Entrance fee a hole in you somewhere, or the permanent shakes!’

‘You used to be just as hard on politicians,’ he reminded her, laughing. ‘Have you shifted your sights to the General Staff?’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I’m not murderous about anyone any more; I was, when I first came out and drove wounded back after the Loos fiasco but not now. It’s got ’way beyond anyone’s control! The politicians lost their grip years ago and even at HQ the old ex-cavalry Has-beens are the prisoners of their own inadequacies. You might say I’ve succeeded in reversing the Bourbon outlook—I’ve forgotten everything and am learning all the time.’

Paul realised that he was enjoying her society for the first time since their relationship had fallen foul of Roddy Rudd’s motor-car, just before she ran away. ‘I can understand what you’ve forgotten,’ he said, recalling the free-for-all in Westminster Yard in Coronation week, ‘but what exactly have you learned?’

‘Compassion,’ she said simply, ‘and enormous admiration for the guts and patience of the underprivileged. Many other things of course but those in particular.’ She spoke now, he thought, more as a Socialist than as a suffragette, and he asked her what she thought about the revolution in Russia. Did it mean there was a possibility of world revolution before all the licensed killing was done?

‘That’s difficult to prophesy,’ she said, ‘it depends on the breaking strain of us, the French, and even poor old Fritz over there. Big changes are already occurring in the European social structures but if we can adapt ourselves to this we can probably evolve some kind of compromise when it’s over—providing the peace is reasonably merciful whichever side imposes it!’

She talked easily of all kind of things arising out of political, social, industrial and even strategic problems and he was impressed not only by her width of vision and lucidity, but also by her tolerance that seemed to enfold men who had flung her into gaol and forcibly fed her not once but many times. He was shocked by his own political ignorance and by the relative fatuity of the theorists, professionals like poor old Grenfell struggling with his conscience at home.

‘You’ve changed tremendously, Grace,’ he told her, ‘I don’t think I’d ever have the impudence to quarrel with you again,’ and she laughed, her old, musical laugh and replied, ‘You aren’t obliged to, you’ve got a new wife to dominate!’

‘I never came anywhere near dominating you,’ he protested, ‘and I can’t ever recall trying!’

‘No,’ she said, seriously, ‘I only meant that as a joke. The one real regret I’ve had about it is that I hurt you so badly at the time but even that regret is qualified.’

‘How do you mean, “qualified”?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I imagine you got a much better wife out of it all and certainly more lasting happiness. One only has to look at you to discover that! You are very happy with Claire, aren’t you? All my informants tell me so.’

When she moved from politics and world affairs to human relationships her certainty abandoned her, exposing a slightly naive facet of her compact personality, and through this chink in her assurance he realised that she had deliberately understated her feelings of guilt about him and was trying to convince herself that subsequent events exonerated her. It moved him a little that she should find this necessary after so many years and after witnessing so much real suffering at uncomfortably close range. He said, quickly, ‘What happened was best for both of us, Grace, I don’t bear any malice and never have, at least, not since I remarried. Yes, I am happy with Claire, happier than I deserve in the circumstances but if it’s any comfort to you I can remind you of two things. One—it was you who virtually threw her at me and two—well, I don’t imagine I could have succeeded anything like so well in a second marriage if you hadn’t taught me how to treat a woman in and out of bed!’

‘Did I do that?’ she said, genuinely flattered all the same.

‘You certainly did!’ and acting on a sudden impulse he did a strange thing, tugging out his wallet, extracting the most thumbed of Claire’s letters and pushing it across the table. ‘You’ll probably think I’m only being amiable by admitting that,’ he went on, hurriedly, ‘so there’s proof of it! Go ahead, read that last page!’

‘But it’s a letter from her?’

‘Yes but read it, or skim it if you like. I want you to!’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure. I owe you that!’

She took the folded sheets from the envelope and smoothed them out on the table, turning over the first three pages and glancing at the final page with unconcealed curiosity. The girl came with coffee and cognac but she did not look up although she was careful to shade the letter with her hand. Watching her he saw colour flood her cheeks and only then realised how parchment pale they were, not with the attractively smooth waxiness of the old days but a dry tautness that puckered the skin under the eyes and somehow deprived the face of width. Seeing her flush like that he felt a sudden tenderness for her. She seemed so small, lonely and desperate, so hopelessly inadequate to the fearful demands made upon her strength. She said, returning the letter, ‘Don’t ever be such an idiot as to tell Claire you showed me this, Paul! Ordinarily it would have been unforgivable but I can understand what made you do it and it was very generous on your part! She’s lucky and you’re lucky! I do remember telling you that what she quotes here is the basis of every successful marriage and it was obviously one of the less fanciful theories I had and still have! You’ve found something rare and precious, so hang on to it all your life! But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?’