Shadows On the Grass

by Simon Raven

  In these tricky circumstances, I applied to my friend Second Lieutenant John Carson Parker (later just Carson).

  ‘I’ve got a date,’ I said, ‘so I’m going to bolt through the copse and round to the Mess that way. If anyone asks where I am, tell him I’ve been urgently called to the telephone.’

  ‘No one’s come to call you.’

  ‘They won’t have been watching. Nobody will think of that – if you put your heart into the job.’

  ‘They’ll expect you back when you’ve finished.’

  ‘Make it seem terribly serious, the sort of thing which would keep me for a long time. You might even hint that somebody was dying.’

  ‘I shall do no such thing,’ said John C-P righteously. ‘It’s bad luck to say that unless some one is dying, and the lie would be found out later on.’

  ‘I only said “hint”. No need to commit either of us to anything. You could say I had a sad look on my face when I went.’

  ‘I’ve never known anyone look less sad. You look positively fatuous with self-satisfaction.’

  This was probably true. The prospect of a good meal and a romp to follow gives all of us a bit of a gloss.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said. ‘It’s what you make them think that counts. You hope to be an actor. God help you if you can’t even pull this off.’

  As I had hoped, he could not resist the challenge and undertook the task. I nipped behind the Pavilion, through the copse, into the Mess, in and out of a bath, and into a taxi by the Guard Room with seconds still to spare. One could do that sort of thing very swiftly when young, because one still thought women worth the effort. Though even then one was beginning to have doubts. When I arrived back at Rolleston that evening, I really could not imagine why I had put up with two hours of inane chatter about parties at Larkhill (my guest was a NAAFI manageress there, an improvement, however slight, on Mond’s galère of the previous summer) simply to be allowed a ten minute fumble with stocking tops and damp bristle before being rather clumsily jerked off into one of my own handkerchieves…and this while standing up behind the NAAFI kitchens, as regulations forbade the admission of males into the NAAFI staffs quarters. But then if I had been allowed into her bed, I now reflected, it would probably have been much worse. If I’d done it ineptly (quite likely) I’d have felt a perfect bloody fool, and if I’d done it well she’d have wanted me to stay for another round. In either case I’d have been expected to listen to more inane chatter afterwards and possibly I’d have been required to say that I loved her. To tristitia post coitum would have been added saeva indignatio, for the difficulties of getting transport back to Rolleston after these delays would have been insuperable; I should have had to walk – a whole mile and a quarter. All in all, I congratulated myself, I had come off light with the loss of a handkerchief.

  In my room John Carson Parker was waiting, along with Tony Hollis, now, like Conrad, a QC, in those days the most articulate and sardonic of all the anti-Pugh set.

  ‘C-P’s really gone and dished up the haggis,’ Tony said.

  ‘Dished up what?’

  ‘It’s your fault,’ said C-P, ‘you would insist that I did it.’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Tell that fib about your being called to the telephone.’

  ‘So I was asked for?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tony. ‘I was introduced to the Brigadier because he’d been a childhood friend of my mother, God help the poor sod. Then it turned out that he’d had a dear little nephew at the OTS in Bangalore, and I was told to find you so that you could discourse on its delights to the jolly old uncle.’

  ‘So Tony asked me where you were,’ C-P took up the tale, ‘and I said you’d been called to the telephone.’

  ‘So I went back to the CO and the Brigger,’ said Tony, ‘and told them just that, whereupon there was a nasty little hush in the air (rather as if Baby had suddenly crapped himself while being shown to Granny for the first time) and then Pugh the Pong started to mizzle.’

  ‘To mizzle?’

  ‘To talk fery fin, like fis, wif his lips almost fhut. The upshot was that I was to get C-P over there p.d.q. to say his piece, about you and the telephone, in person.’

  ‘Well?’ I said to C-P after there had been silence for nearly a minute.

  ‘I hardly know how to tell you this,’ said C-P, and gurgled. ‘You see, when I presented myself I’d made up my mind that I couldn’t even hint at death or dying because such matters are not to be lightly spoken of. But I was determined to do my level best for you in any other way I could, so when the Pong said, “What’s all this about Raven being wanted on the telephone?”, I said, very seriously, “I’m afraid it’s true, sir. Someone fetched him a few minutes ago.” I was scared he might take me up on the “someone” and want to know who, but his mind was working rather differently.

  ‘“Doesn’t Raven realise he’s on parade?” he said.

  ‘“Oh, not quite on parade,” said the Brigadier, who seemed rather on your side.

  ‘“Well, in the position of a host,” said the Pong. “What do you know about all this, C-P?”

  ‘“All I know, sir,” I said, “is that he seemed very agitated. He muttered something like, ‘Oh God, that again,’ and took off very fast indeed.”

  ‘“Depend upon it, Pugh,” said the Brigadier in a merry way, “it’s either a dun or a woman. That’s the trouble with being a subaltern: one is pestered morning, noon and night by Jews or women.”

  ‘“I wasn’t,” said the Pong.

  ‘“I was once dunned on the Mess Lawn at Simla,” said the Brigadier. “Fun to look back on but not so amusing at the time. God, it’s marvellous being middle-aged,” he said, and took a great suck at his glass, “no bloody Jews or women hanging about like vampire bats. Except the wife, of course, but she’s just part of the bedroom furniture by now.”’

  ‘I’m beginning to like this Brigadier,’ I said. ‘Sporting type.’

  ‘You won’t be much in love with what’s coming next,’ said Tony with naked glee.

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ said C-P, ‘it just slipped out.’

  ‘What slipped out?’

  ‘Well, the Pong wasn’t very pleased with the Brigger’s line of conversation, I suppose he thought it was setting a bad example; and at the same time he felt that though the Brigger wasn’t at all put out by your absence, he couldn’t just let it go at that; so what he tried to do was change the subject and close the whole matter, both in one go. “Just double over to the Mess, C-P,” he said, firm but quite good-humoured, “and tell Raven not to take all night.” And then to the Brigadier in a quick follow-on, “What about another drink, sir?” And the Brigger said, in a teasing way, “You are old enough, Lewis, to know that one never asks anyone to have ‘another drink’, even if he’s had forty-nine already, but simply ‘to have a drink’. Thank you very much, I don’t mind if I do.” It was then that it slipped out.’

  ‘What slipped out?’

  ‘Well, I was trying to kill time, you see –’

  ‘– WHAT slipped out?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to find out,’ said Tony Hollis, ‘not if I was you.’

  ‘As I was saying,’ said C-P, ‘I was trying to kill time. I knew I shouldn’t find you in the Mess, or that if I did you wouldn’t thank me, so I was just trying to hang about, hoping that if it got late enough the Pong would think you weren’t worth bothering about and not insist on my going to fetch you. And in order to have an excuse to hang about I busied myself with the matter of the Brigger’s next drink. I beckoned to the waiter and said in my most smarmy way, “What will it be, sir?” “Pink gin and water.” And I said, “Would you like to try a slight variation, sir? Peach bitters instead of angostura?” You know, I wanted to show the old place off a bit, show the Brigger that the 77th knew a thing or two, tirra lirra. But it was the most ghastly flop. Either his drink had suddenly turned sour on him – you know how it can on an empty stomach – or he was g
enuinely put out by the mention of peach bitters, but whichever it was he turned quite violent. “No I certainly would not,” he said. “What’s all this effeminate rubbish, peach bitters indeed, what’s muck like that doing in your Mess?” So the Pong, remembering that I was Wines Member of the Mess Committee, said, “Well, C-P? What is this stuff doing here? This isn’t the Ritz Bar, you know.” He obviously thought it was rude of the Brigger to carry on like that when he was offered something special, and to judge from his tone he was trying to jolly the whole thing quietly off. But the Brigger wasn’t on for being jollied off. “Answer up, boy,” he yapped, “what do you want with that filth in your Mess? You’ll be telling me next you sell scent.” So I said, “Raven asked me to get it.” “What did he want with it?” “He said he always liked a quiet glass of gin and peach bitters in the middle of the morning, sir. Sometimes he liked half a bottle of Champagne, he said, but since this Regiment was too dowdy to stock Champagne, Raven said –”

  ‘– What in God’s name were you thinking of?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ wailed C-P. ‘Once I’d started I just couldn’t stop. I was kind of mesmerised by the awful look on the Brigger’s face, and I heard myself going on and on and on.’

  ‘Tell him the rest,’ said Tony. ‘You’ve got as far as “since this Regiment was too dowdy –”

  ‘“– Since this Regiment was too dowdy to stock Champagne, Raven said,” I said, “he would have to make do with what he could get, which was gin, and would I mind getting in a bottle of peach bitters, as angostura was such wretched stuff, strictly for clownish Majors, and if any snooping middle-class Artillery Officer complained about it, we could always annoy him by telling him they had a bottle in the Horse Gunners’ Mess in Larkhill.” “It strikes me,” said the Brigger, clutching his glass so tight I thought it was going to shatter in his hand, “that I’ve heard this name Raven once too often for one evening. He sounds just the conceited sort of bloody young rotter who calls one ‘Brigadier’ instead of ‘sir’. From the smell of him,” said the Brigger (the drink had really hit his tripes by now), “that interminable telephone call is almost certainly from a bookie he’s welshed on or a tart he’s given a dose of clap. I want you to investigate Raven and his money, Pugh, and let me know, personally, what you find out.” He swallowed his new drink in one and shook all over as if there’d been an earthquake in his belly. “And now, good night,” he said, and stumped off followed by the Pong, who started to mizzle but then thought better of it, and shut his mouth up like a rat trap.’

  In this subsequent event, Lewis Pugh was a brick. I think he thought that the Brigadier had carried on in a thoroughly disreputable fashion, and that all his boasting about his yeasty youth disqualified him from complaining about any extravagance of mine. What was in any case beyond question was that the Brigger had been a rotten guest, drinking too much and talking too big, then turning nasty and leaving in pretty poor style. All these considerations inclined Pugh to let me down as light as he could, though the Brigger’s instruction to investigate me would have to be attended to in some sort. The course Colonel Lewis adopted was the mild one of writing to my parents and telling them he was slightly worried because I appeared to spend more money than most young Officers of my standing; but since he had yet to receive any complaints of me from tradesmen or others (he wrote) he was perfectly prepared to assume that I was in fact living within my means if they (my parents) would confirm that these (my means) included a certain amount of private money.

  On receiving this letter, my parents for once behaved rather well. Up to a point, that is. My father wrote at once to the Pong and saved my face by informing him that I did indeed have some private money (technically true, since Granny Raven had left me £100 in the Post Office Savings Bank, to be mine when I was twenty-one), but that I was apt, like many young men, to be – well – rather too generous with it. If Pugh would gently caution me, my father would be most grateful. Gently cautioned by Pugh I then was – by Pugh at his best, who said that if ever I should be in trouble about money I should come immediately to him, and that provided I told the whole truth and told it promptly, he would see me through somehow. It was one of a Commanding Officer’s duties, he told me – like preventing his young Officers from making rash or discreditable marriages.

  So far so good – until I was written to by my mother. I was a bloody little fool, my mother said, showing myself off like this, but since the Colonel said there had been no complaints, she assumed that I had really got hold of some money. Where from, she wanted to know. I wrote that I had had a couple of very lucky bets at Salisbury Races. My mother wrote again to say that if I went on gambling like this I should certainly ruin myself, and she knew whom to blame for it all: my Grandfather in Cambridge (who had been a cavalryman and remained a keen race-goer ever since, never missing meetings at Newmarket or Huntingdon). He had encouraged me, hadn’t he? Although I wrote at once to exonerate the old gentleman, my mother’s perfectly sound instinct, that my grandfather was somehow at the bottom of my affluence, was not to be gainsaid. Once again, as I heard much later, she leapt to the telephone and bawled the poor old fellow out for his senile and interfering propensity to encourage me in my ‘silly, independent habits’.

  IX

  LIGHT BLUE

  But of that I only learned some nine months later, while dining with my Grandfather after I had come up to Cambridge as a freshman. I arrived in King’s at the beginning of July, 1948; for the manner was, at that time, to encourage ex-soldiers to keep the Long Vacation Term which preceded the start of their first year proper at Michaelmas. In this way, it was thought, they would learn at leisure to exchange a military habit of thought for an academic one. In fact all they did was loaf around and drink too much…and occasionally play cricket in Long Vacation Matches got up by the College or the Crusaders.

  In these days, I am told, most Colleges have trouble in raising a proper XI to play any game, even during Full Term. It is certainly known, by all club secretaries in the kingdom, that to make a fixture with a College team is to risk being grievously let down, very often without the smallest warning or the faintest offer of apology, since the young, in their widely proclaimed wisdom, consider that to keep appointments is servile and to apologise for breaking them is hypocritical. In 1948, however, King’s had no difficulty in fielding a goodish XI in July and August, and a series of agreeable fixtures was arranged which included a game against one of the junior XIs at ‘our sister College’ at Eton. This would occur in late July, just before Eton broke up for the summer. We would hire a bus (which had recently become possible again despite continued rationing of petrol), arrive in time for an early luncheon, play till 7 p.m. and drift home by easy stages, at one of which we would dine by prior arrangement.

  Since the day was intended to celebrate the Concordia Amicabilis between King’s and Eton, we would normally be accompanied by a pair of senior dons, one of whom, in 1948, was Professor Frank (later Sir Frank) Adcock, the Ancient Historian. Aside from being a distinguished and eloquent scholar, ‘Adders’ was noted for his acumen as a code-breaker (1914, I fancy, rather than 1939), for academic intrigue of Machiavellian subtlety and nugatory import, for the rarity and sparseness of his entertainments, and for cheating at golf. He also patted a succulent undergraduate bottom from time to time, but never went further than that. Since he was an old acquaintance of my father, whose bottom he had pinched and whose golf ball he had trodden on twenty-five years before, during reading parties on the Norfolk coast, he summoned me to sit next to him in the bus.

  ‘Your faver tells me you are extwavagant, dear boy,’ was his opening service.

  ‘I like to do things properly, sir, if I do them at all.’

  ‘Very well: we must decide what things you can afford to do pwoperly on your allowance. I shall not be so impertinent as to ask you what this is: I shall merely hazard a guess that you have at your command, what wiv gwants, scholarships, et cetewa, et cetewa, some Four Hundred Pounds a y
ear.’

  Nosy old brute, he was dead right.

  ‘On four hundred a year,’ the Professor continued, ‘you can afford Cwicket, Golf, Woyal Tennis and Fives wever Wugby or Eton. You cannot afford to hunt –’

  ‘– I have no intention of hunting, sir –’

  ‘– Don’t interwupt. And you cannot afford to dine out more than fwee times a term. You can afford ale in Hall but not claret or burgundy, except on alternate Sundays and your birfday, and you can never drink Champagne unless it is somebody else’s. Do I make myself plain?’

  ‘Admirably plain, sir.’

  ‘Nor can you smoke cigars,’ said the Professor, ‘indulge in Fine Editions, or Spode China, purchase Oil Paintings to decorate your wall, or keep a mistwess.’ He nudged me roguishly. ‘Ha, ha,’ he ejaculated.

  So the bit about a mistress was a joke. He then told me a story about an undergraduate who had kept a mistress, many years before. She had been, in sound tradition, a tobacconist’s daughter, and the undergraduate had set her up in an apartment near the station. Being zealous for his good name, she insisted that he attended all his lectures and made a conscientious effort at all his exercises, and would never grant him her favours until she had seen his proses or whatever written out in a fair round hand, all ready to be punctually presented the next day. As a result of this and against all the betting, the undergraduate obtained First Class Honours in both parts of the Classical Tripos and was awarded a Fellowship of his College. Out of admiration and gratitude he now married the tobacconist’s daughter; but since in those days a don who married, unless he was Head of a College, forfeited his Fellowship, they kept the marriage a secret. The young woman continued in her apartment near the station, while the new Fellow kept up the same routine which he had observed as an undergraduate, spending much of the day with his wife, as she now was, but dining and sleeping in College. She made him take the same pains with his work as she had demanded before his elevation, was so exigent in fact that eventually he became Master of his College.