James Delingpole

by Coward on The Beach (epub)

  The tricky part is plucking up the courage to make the initial pass. And this, I'm afraid, is something that I have never been much good at. I can cope with artillery barrages, wading through the surf under fire; charging enemy machine- gun posts, fighting hand to hand and so on. But when I'm confronted with the terrifying challenge of asking a woman even for the time of day, let alone dinner or a quick one, up against the wall, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that we might as well since we could be dead tomorrow, well, almost without fail my courage deserts me.

  This morning, though, I am quite determined will be different. Emboldened by Price's - or should I say my father's — excellent champagne, stung by the thought that this ugly brute is continuing to enjoy the flower of English womanhood while I, his superior in class, rank and ephebic beauty, continue to suffer a life of monkish celibacy, I have decided to steer Paddy back to the place I last saw that scrumptious little Land Girl. We shall strike up a conversation. And then, who knows.

  'Hello again,' I say to her. (Gosh, what an inspired opener!)

  "Ello,' she says. (Cockney, I should guess. But I've never shied from the exotic.)

  'I was wondering -'

  'Yes?'

  'I was wondering whether you might fancy a ride.'

  'A ride?' she says, with a crafty smile. Her teeth are a bit discoloured, I can't help noticing. Still she does have a very nice face.

  'On Paddy,' I say, flushing.

  She stands there a while, surveying Paddy and me, as if weighing up the pros and cons. 'Fanks for offerin'. But I'd better not.'

  'You'll be perfectly safe. He's a very gentle horse.'

  'It's not 'im I'm worried about. It's the geezer wot I 'ave to work for.'

  'Do you mean Price. Mr Price?'

  'New bloke. Ugly sod. Very saucy.'

  'Well, you needn't worry about him. He works for me.'

  'This is never all yours?' she says, gesturing at the field behind her.

  'And that, and that,' I say, pointing towards the obelisk hill and the distant lake.

  'Blimey. You a lord or somefink?'

  'My mother's . . .' I was about to tell her that my mother is the younger daughter of an earl, but this strikes me as being more information than she needs. 'No, just a humble land­owner's son. Very humble. You know 3,000 acres really isn't that much.'

  She laughs. 'Still. Mustn't grumble, eh?'

  'No. I suppose I mustn't.'

  There's an awkward silence. She shifts from foot to foot.

  'So how about it?' I say, patting the saddle just in front of me. 'If I promise to square it with Mr Price?'

  Her eyes flicker down for a moment, then back up at me. 'Yeah. All right.'

  The girl's name is Patsy and she comes from a family of seven in Bethnal Green; her parents are dead, her big brothers are in all arms of the military and the younger ones and her sisters are now dispersed across the country after their home took a direct hit from a Doodlebug. She doesn't want me to feel sorry for her - 'There's other families 'ave 'ad a lot worse' - but there's a sob in her voice as she adds: 'I don't 'alf miss 'Arry, though.'

  'Your father?'

  'My 'orse.'

  'You had a horse?'

  'For the market.'

  'But where did you keep him?'

  'In the 'ouse. Where do you fink? 'Arry had his room, down­stairs. And when I was sad, when fings got too much, I'd sneak down into 'Arry's room and spend the night with 'im. All curled up next to him, in the hay. 'E never minded. Good as gold 'e was. Just like this one,' she says, giving Paddy a pat.

  Ah, I think to myself. So it's not so much me she's inter­ested in as my horse. Still, these things can be worked on, I'm sure. And as we amble forward, squashed together in the saddle, my arms either side of her as I hold the reins, the delicious thought occurs that this might yet prove to be a rather wonderful summer for me, Paddy and our gamine young coquette.

  'Have you been to the old mill?' I hear myself asking.

  'Wot, the water wheel? Loads of times,' she says.

  'Ah but have you been swimming in the millpond?'

  'In this weather?'

  'Well, if you're not game,' I say, a touch huffily, pulling on Paddy's right rein so that he begins to turn back the way we've just come.

  "Ang on. I never said I wasn't game. It's only, well, I ain't got nuffink to wear.'

  I bring Paddy to a halt for a moment.

  'Who said you had to wear anything?' I say.

  'Wot?'

  'House rules, I'm afraid. We've been doing it for genera­tions.'

  By the time we reach the old mill, Patsy has all but surren­dered to the inevitable. Not only has she grown much more relaxed in the saddle - she doesn't even complain when I press myself closer against her and bring my arms tighter round hers - but she has become a lot more flirtatious and giggly.

  'This where you bring all your girlfriends, then?' she says.

  'I'll have you know I'm an officer and a gentleman.'

  'It's the officers, I've 'eard, wot are the worst.'

  'Then I shall endeavour not to disappoint you,' I say, with one of those leers I imagine Price uses all the time, but which I'd never dream of essaying myself if I weren't so tiddly.

  Jolly well works though. Patsy titters responsively. So I give her a cheeky squeeze of the waist and she giggles at that too.

  Things are progressing so swimmingly that when it comes to dismounting I find it exceedingly difficult to slide from the saddle because of a certain awkward lump in my britches. If Patsy were to notice - and I simply don't believe Price's dubious theories on this score — I reckon I would undo all the good work I've done so far. So I quickly flood my brain with the grisliest images I can think of: the cartload of children just after the attack on the refugee convoy; Johnny's head flying towards me, eyes still focusing on me, after being severed clean by a samurai blade.

  It does the trick. More or less.

  'Don't look,' I say, as I begin stripping off my clothes. Patsy, waiting under the willow, has insisted I test the water first.

  'I've got brothers, Dick. Seen it all before.'

  Next thing, I'm mounting the parapet of the bridge and - quick as I can, so as not to allow myself any opportunity to change my mind - leaping straight to the spot where I know the millpond's deepest.

  The water, when I hit it, feels hard as blue ice and damn near as cold. But as the shock begins to subside, and the chill gives way to a delicious tingly warmth, I realise I'm laughing and shouting for joy:

  'Come on in!' I yell, raising my arms in the air. 'It's

  'Lovely' I was probably going to say, but I don't because, as happens when you try waving your arms in the air in deep water, I've sunk like a stone and I'm talking in bubbles and thinking about pike. Big pike. The sort of pike that could rip your tackle off in no time, I'm thinking as I clench my upper thighs together, wishing she'd hurry up and join me, so we can get out again and move on to the next course. Every time a stray bit of weed brushes against my leg, I shudder.

  'Liar,' she says. But she has started to remove her clothes none the less. 'Oi. No looking!' she says, having got down to her underwear.

  'I'll shut my eyes. Promise,' I say.

  'You'll turn your head till I say, or I ain't coming in.'

  So I paddle myself round till I'm facing the opposite direction, which I continue to do until I have judged suffi­cient time has elapsed. I've timed it perfectly, too, because I manage to whip myself round and look up at the very moment she's perched on the parapet, ready to jump in.

  'Oi,' she squeals, jumping in, but by then I've had my eyeful. Under all those heavy, oversized farmworker's clothes, she turns out to have a very thin, delicate body, the tan on her face and hands contrasting quite jarringly with her natural urban pallor. She needs filling out; looking after. But most of all what she needs is a damn good —

  'Urrrbbll'. She's ducking me, and using her whole body- weight to keep me under, which as near-drowning e
xperiences go is by no means the worst I've had, not with that bony but smooth-skinned naked young body pressed against mine. Reluctantly, I pull myself free to get a breath of fresh air.

  'You're a double liar, 'n' all, cos you said it wasn't cold,' she says as I bob up, laughing.

  'And it's bloody freezing!'

  'We'll have to find some way of making ourselves warm, then, won't we?'

  'You, Dick, have got a filfy mind.'

  'Really? I was wondering whether we should make a fire. What was on your mind?'

  Patsy takes this as the cue to give me another ducking. Then, after we've bobbed about a bit, and flirted some more, another one. But though the sun is shining, there's still a slight chill in the air and the water is hardly Mediterranean. Patsy says she needs to get herself warm — 'By putting my clothes on, thank you very much' — and since she can't trust me to behave myself, I'd better stay where I am till she's done.

  While Patsy wades shorewards, I gaze at her retreating buttocks until she disappears from view. Wallowing in the pool, I'm barely touched by the cold or pike fear now, because I'm far too busy thinking filthy thoughts and wondering how best to make my next move. Invite her back to tea with my parents? I snigger aloud at my silly little joke. Offer to marry her? I snigger again. Draw her attention to the convenient seclusion of the mill house -?

  'I say, you look freezing,' calls a voice from the parapet of the bridge. A female voice. The very last voice in the world I want to hear right at this moment.

  'No, really, it's lovely once you're in,' I say, automatically, as my heart sinks and my body falls limp with the burden of inextricable doom.

  'Do you know, I'm so fearfully hot I'm almost tempted to join you,' says Gina, flapping at the lapels of a grey flannel jacket so as to waft some air down her blouse. Her outfit - shapely, exquisitely cut and very expensive: pre-war couture, no doubt - sets off her figure quite gorgeously. 'Go on! How much do you dare me?'

  I look up helplessly as Gina looks down at me from the parapet, smiling, inviting, eager and as lovely as I have ever seen her. And in that brief moment, I know what paradise looks like. Paradise, that is, viewed from the perspective of a poor, miserable wretch wallowing in the third circle of hell.

  Then Patsy appears on the bank, looking like a drowned rat, and all I can think now is what terrible teeth she has and what a slovenly posture and dreadful shabby clothes. And I know it's bloody awful of me to think that way, the behav­iour of a cad, but there's no reason to lie about it now, that's what we're like, we boys, on those rare occasions where we're thinking with our brains rather than our pricks, and that's how it was, I'm afraid.

  Gina's expression darkens just long enough to let me know how deep inside the doghouse I am before expertly recovering her poise.

  'Oh, I'm so sorry,' she says sweetly, 'I've interrupted your fun.' The way she says 'fun' suggests anything but.

  'No, really, it's quite all right,' I say. 'Patsy's one of our Land Girls and she needed to cool off. But I expect you're ready to get back to work now, aren't you, Patsy?'

  'Oh yes, Mr Dick,' says Patsy, bowing and tugging her fore­lock in mock subservience. 'To please the master is my only wish.' Her eyes are dark fury.

  Under different circumstances I might find her jealous rage quite flattering. As it is, I just feel a total heel.

  'If you wait just a moment, I can give you a ride back.'

  'Fanks,' she says, with a sneery glance at Gina. 'But I reckon any girl who'd want a ride with you would need their bloomin' 'ed examined.'

  'Um, perhaps I should catch up with you later,' says Gina, making to leave.

  'No, wait, I shan't be long,' I say, wading towards where I've left my clothes on the bank.

  But too late - they've already been scooped up by Patsy.

  "Ere. Allow me to 'elp,' she says. And with a dramatic swing of her arms, she hurls first my britches, then my shirt, and my hacking jacket, and finally my riding boots, into the millpond.

  And that isn't the worst of it either. When finally I've got myself out of my dripping wet kit and gone downstairs to find out from Griffiths where Lady Gina has got to, I learn that she has gone out for a walk with Mr James and isn't expected back much before dinner.

  'But how dare he! It was me she came to see. Wasn't it?'

  'Strictly speaking, Mr Richard, she came at your father's bidding to make up the numbers for dinner.'

  'Well, you'll make sure I get to sit next to her, won't you, Griffiths?'

  'I'm afraid the placement has already been decided, Mr Richard. Your father has some military gentlemen he should like you to meet.'

  Father is forever inviting senior military types round for dinner. Some are old comrades from the trenches, others are lured by the fact that our home makes a convenient stopping- off point after training exercises in the Black Mountains, by the excellent shooting on the estate, and, most especially, by my father's superb wine cellar — which he never touches himself because, since the last war, ever perverse, he has only drunk whisky. No doubt if I had been as proficient in the art of brown-nosing as my twin brother, I might have used these connections to progress much further up the ranks than I have. The problem is, I have this old-fashioned view that the prin­cipal purpose of a dinner party is to see how far you can get inside your pretty young neighbour's knickers, not how far you can bury your tongue up a colonel's arse.

  Price is right. Whatever I do this evening, I mustn't play Father's game. Which is why, at dinner, I make a point of dressing in black tie rather than the mess kit I'm still enti­tled to wear pending my discharge. Yes, I suppose it does make me feel a little out of place amid the sea of scarlet-and-black uniforms — besides Father and James, there's a Royal Marines brigadier, a colonel of paratroops, and a major from the Army Film Unit. But just like Price — he's in black tie, too, an old set of mine, fits him perfectly - I intend to signal to the world that from now on I'm to be treated as a civilian. And I'm going to talk like one, too. No mention of all the things I've done and all the places I've been. That's James's domain, and by the sounds of it, he's going to be given more than enough cues by his man-eating neighbour, Lavinia Crumblebeech, the horse-faced vice-admiral's daughter.

  'So, come on, James, do tell all, we're dying to know,' she says in a voice more piercing than a battle cruiser's klaxon. 'How exactly did you win the bar to your MC?'

  The table falls silent — though less, on the whole, out of all-ears eagerness than from sheer bloody embarrassment. My little sister Lucy captures the mood rather well when she leans across and says to me in what she thinks is a whisper: 'I wonder how much he paid her to ask that?' Unfortunately it seems to have come out rather louder than she intended.

  Lavinia Crumblebeech is looking appalled; mother anxious; my elder sister Isobel — as ever — confused; the tousle-haired director chap from the Army Film Unit evidently tickled in some sort of abstruse intellectual way; Gina mischievous; Caro Ashenden, the rather attractive young war widow stationed next to Price, is simpering prettily; the marine brigadier and his jolly wife both quite purple with mirth; the airborne colonel tremble-jawed with determination to keep a straight face; Price coughing violently into his napkin; and James, who has never taken well to little Lucy's sharp tongue it must be said, on the verge of exploding.

  Only shell-deafened Father, presiding from his throne at the head of the table, has failed to register. He's turning his head from side to side in little jerky movements, desperate for someone to fill him in on the joke, which of course no one will because everyone's pretending not to have heard it.

  'Mummy,' says James in a voice quavering with barely suppressed hysteria. He knows there's no point pleading with Father: his little girl is the one person in the world he allows to do whatever the hell she likes. 'Why isn't Lucy tucked up in bed at school?'

  'Darling, as you know very well —' Mother begins.

  'Excuse me, Mummy, I'm sixteen years old and I'm quite capable of speaking for myself. And
do you know, I'll bet James doesn't know because the only person he has ever been interested in is Major James Coward I've-got-an-MC-and-bar- don't-you-know-aren't-I-quite-the-thing?'

  'Mother,' threatens James half-rising from his chair. I'm sure if there weren't senior officers present he would have got up and strangled her by now.

  'James, you must be patient. Lucy's upset because her school house was hit by a Doodlebug and three of her friends are still missing.'

  'Dead, Mummy. Patricia and Sarah and Victoria are dead.'

  After a flurry of muttered 'good Lord, how awfuls' and 'terribly, terribly sorrys', the dining-room falls even more silent than before, as everyone suddenly decides to find their first course the most tremendously involving thing on earth.

  'Jolly good egg,' says the Brigadier, chewing a morsel of his half-an-egg thoughtfully.

  'Very good indeed. Hen, is it?' agrees the Colonel, a tall, lean para named Myles Todhunter.

  'Hen,' my father confirms.

  'How easily one forgets,' says Todhunter.

  'Julius hasn't, the jammy sausage,' says Isobel, poking her latest acquisition in the ribs. 'Julius, tell them how many eggs you ate in America.'

  Julius flicks his floppy hair from his eyes and removes his glasses, which he begins polishing distractedly.

  'One or two,' he says.

  'Darling, you're being too modest,' says Isobel. She turns to the rest of the table and announces: 'Julius has been in America, making a film about the build-up for the second front. Very hush-hush so I probably shouldn't be telling you. And every day he had two whole eggs for breakfast, fried, boiled, poached, any way he wanted. If he'd wanted, I dare say, he could probably have had even more than two. Couldn't you, honeybun?'

  Julius squirms and I'm not sure I feel too sorry for him. I sense that he's far too sophisticated to be wasting his time among bumpkins like us Cowards; whom, of course, he will be lining up first against the wall, come the revolution.

  'You can't beat an egg,' declares my father.

  'Only when you're making mayonnaise,' quips the Brigadier, prodding with his knife the noisome, yellowish emulsion cook has served with our half of hard-boiled egg.