He tried soup for breakfast, turning the day upside down, but knowing he could not chew. Then painfully but eagerly he went to work:
Sergeant Braddis had come smartly to attention and saluted in front of his young superior, Lieutenant Dodds, his great dagger thumbnails in evidence at the front of his loosely closed fists. Dodds, seated, neat in his uniform, looked up at him appraisingly. The man, on the surface, was every inch a soldier—a billboard for the regular army. “At ease, Sergeant,” he said, easily, and proceeded to the point; to beat about the bush with such a man would be to lose the skirmish before you started. “I want to question you about two points of your behavior which are troubling to me, and to hear your answers on them.”
“Certainly, sir. I’m sorry if I’ve dissatisfied you.” Not a sign of discomfort there, Dodds saw; perhaps his best chance of getting anywhere would come from Braddis underestimating him.
“My first point concerns Private Callum.”
“Sir?”
“There is a perception in the platoon that you pick on him.”
“For what, sir?”
“I understand you destroyed a sketch he was making during his stand-down time in the trench.”
“Yes, sir, that was a mistake on my part, and I apologized for it. I was cleaning my bayonet, and he was drawing something, and kept looking at me furtive-like, and it looked to me as though he was doing a cartoon of me, which he could show around when I wasn’t there, and make me a laughingstock. A kind of sneaky insubordination, if you see what I mean, sir. So I swooped down and tore it up. Then he said he wasn’t drawing me, so I apologized.”
“There was another drawing that you confiscated from him, of a nude, a naked woman.”
“Yes, sir. That was different. He had this picture, very lifelike, I have to hand it to him, of a woman standing in a bathtub full frontal showing everything she had. I considered it a lewd picture. Then there are others I have seen he’s drawn of the men, without their permission, naked at the baths. Now I know you’re fond of the lad, sir, and he may well be good at drawing and other things, but it seems to me that he’s not a soldier. Here we are facing a well-armed and well-trained enemy less than three hundred yards away in a very difficult war, and he’s sitting by himself painting naked men and ladies. He’s never part of the platoon, just sits there doodling. So I took away the picture as a signal to him that I wanted him to shape up. Otherwise, he’s just one more thing I have to worry about when we go over the top—and as you should know, sir, Mr. Jerry requires all our attention.”
“Where is the picture now, Braddis?”
“I have it in the sergeants’ mess, sir.”
“I want you to give it back to him. You can say you asked me about it, and I said it was all right for him to draw what he likes, as long as he takes care of his soldierly work.”
“I don’t think I want to do that, sir. That way I lose face in the platoon.”
“All right. Then bring it to me this afternoon, and I’ll give it back to him. I’ll tell him you brought it to me for my decision.”
“All right, sir. That way would be a little better.”
“Good. This afternoon, then. The other point is this: you must stop your solo patrols into no-man’s-land at night.” Dodds was watching the sergeant closely. Perhaps a small clenching of the jaw, but perhaps he was imagining it.
“And why is that, sir? I’m off duty after the regular patrol, so isn’t my time my own?”
“Yes, but not if you’re endangering yourself: we have enough casualties in regular encounters without losing sergeants on personal sprees.”
“They’re not sprees, sir, and I do know how to look after myself.”
“There is the additional reason that you make these patrols for dishonorable purposes.”
“And what would they be? Killing Germans?”
Better, thought Dodds. He’s getting angry.
“Looting, Sergeant.”
“Understand me here, sir,” said Braddis, with heavy emphasis on the sir. “I am a good professional soldier; there are not that many of us—maybe just enough to have kept England in the war, amid a bunch of amateurs sitting on their duffs and waiting for victory to be delivered to them without getting dirty. I don’t believe we would be widely blamed if, after removing one of the king’s enemies, we took away with us some small token of our victory.”
“That might be so, if the tokens came only from the enemy. But the feeling would be very different if it was known that some of them came from our own good men, fallen for the same king—even if the tokens were taken by our professional soldiers.”
“I can assure you, sir, that the few things I have taken have come from fallen enemy.”
“Well, let’s see now,” said Dodds. He reached into the drawer of his desk, and took out a hip flask of heavy decorated silver and put it on the desk. He certainly had Braddis’s attention now. “I am told that this is nineteenth-century Bavarian silver, so we can assume it came from a German source. But this”—he reached into the drawer again, came up with a slim silver cigarette case, and placed it on the desk next to the flask—“belonged to my friend Lieutenant Kenneth Thomas of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, who was reported ‘missing in action, presumed dead,’ not half a mile from where I’m sitting, after an unsuccessful sally seven weeks ago. It actually has his monogram KLT engraved on the front, and I happen to know that it was a present to him from his young wife.”
There was no bluster in the man now. He was not rattled, but he was concentrating. Dodds’s eyes never left his face, and he saw a great stillness come into his expression. This was war, and Braddis was not underestimating him now.
“May I ask where you got these things, sir?” he said quietly.
“You may. I got them from the same man you sold them to, Frédéric Cafors, the pawnbroker on the Rue de Beauvais in Amiens.”
“How do you—or he—know I was the one who sold them to him? Twenty people a day take their swag to Cafors.”
“So you do know the establishment. And it’s true—he runs a busy business; and sometimes more than one person is there at once. You had been identified by someone as a sergeant of the Norfolks (he pronounced our regiment as though it was German), and frankly, Sergeant, your finger- and thumbnails are quite distinctive marks of identity.”
There was no doubt about it: the soft-looking little shit was tougher than Braddis thought.
“What do you intend to do with these things, sir?” he asked.
“I intend to send the cigarette case back home, where it belongs, to Mr. Thomas’s widow,” Dodds said. “But right now I want to add something else. You are, as you say, a very good professional soldier, and we need them badly. But there is something in your temperament which seems to tempt you out of bounds; I am aware of the incident at Caterham at the guards’ depot, when you were a strong candidate for the next plum regimental sergeant major’s position that came up.” (For God’s sake, it was in the man’s file: he had been busted to sergeant for purloining stores when he was quartermaster at the depot.) “I think you should stay within bounds and within rules, and you will be all right.”
“Will that be all, sir?”
“Yes. And remember the picture by this afternoon.”
“Sir.” He had saluted smartly and marched away, himself a picture of contained rage; but Callum’s drawing had duly been dropped off at the office in a brown envelope, boldly addressed: ATTENTION: LIEUT. DODDS. The picture was quite unmarked, slightly to his surprise, and Dodds found it beautiful and gentle, a contrast to the drawing of the old man in front of the fire, which was strong and dark, like most of the work; he had come upon it loose, when he was leafing through the sketchbook, and seeing him studying it, Callum had looked up and said briefly, “My dad.” With that picture of the dour, exhausted man still firmly in his mind, and this one of the woman with a towel in one hand, balancing and about to step out of the tin bathtub placed in front of the fire, it all fell into place for him. T
he fireplace and mantel were clearly the same in both drawings, and the woman must be Callum’s mother, who, as he remembered from his file, had died when her son was ten. None of the pictures was dated, but Dodds assumed she must have been drawn from memory after her death.
None of this did he mention when he handed back the drawing with a nod to Callum in the trench. The end of a small episode, but certainly not the end of Sergeant Braddis. And Braddis had what Dodds knew he would never have: killer spirit. He should at least leave a memo.
After supper, which consisted of well-prepared warm water from the tap, and nothing else, MacIver pondered the confrontation between the platoon commander and his sergeant. He had been a little surprised at the sexual innuendo creeping into the dialogue. Perhaps it meant nothing: a manly man, as Braddis projected himself to be, might well, with his buddies and in his soul, think all officers soft, and probably homosexual; and in any competition with such people, it might be a good ploy to inject a little taunt along those lines, to soften up a soft man further, as it were. But was Dodds gay? Perhaps, but probably not, MacIver decided, though almost certainly sexually inexperienced, so who, including himself, could tell? There did not seem to be many passengers in the Windrush, as he plied it up and down the Broads (unfortunate wording in the context). At most there would be a few introductions by his mother of suitable young women (“You really must meet Gwendolyn Meredith, Linda and Archie’s daughter, she’s so pretty and kind; I’ll invite her to tea next Thursday”). Simon Dodds, he thought, knew he wanted more than that, but he certainly had not yet found her. What about Braddis and Callum, and the nude picture?
MacIver believed that Braddis would have the same attitude to women as to other possible possessions: he took pretty much what he pleased, though sex might not rank at the top of his acquisitiveness. MacIver had assumed that Braddis took the picture to contemplate it for his pleasure, even though he left no mark on it; his use of the word lewd indicated that he could find it arousing, admittedly while acting the puritan. MacIver rated the chance that Braddis might have been disarmed by the beauty of the picture at close to zero. And Callum? Callum knew the picture was beautiful, and he knew it was not lewd, but that didn’t mean that he saw nothing sexual in it. MacIver did not need Freud to tell him a boy can easily draw both the direction and the shape of his appetite from his mother: why else did he personally go for high-breasted, slim women who kept their secrets? But right now, with all his passions somehow turning like the tide towards yearnings of loss rather than hungers for gain, he saw a certain poignancy in these three men, each contemplating this naked woman in the middle of war, and figuring their separate, private desires around her form; the poignancy, of course, came from the fact that soon they would all be gone themselves, and all their desires unfulfilled.
And what about Margaret? She taught him that sex did not have to be always intense and fraught. It could be playful.
Soon after they got together, Sally Gordon, flirting busily at a party at her gallery, told MacIver that when she asked Margaret what it was like going to bed with him, she had answered, “It’s sort of like going to bed with a polar bear. You know that when he settles down, he’s going to keep you nice and snug, but you don’t know what sort of friskinesses he’s going to get up to first.”
“My God, Sally, what did you say?”
“I said I thought I would hate that uncertainty, and she said that she had thought she would hate it too, but it turned out she loved it.”
He had leered at Sally horribly; Margaret said that whenever he spoke to her, his Scots burr thickened threefold. “Of course,” he said, “Sally is a Gordon,” burring fourfold on the r’s.
Margaret was ten years younger than he was, but in fact sexually more experienced. He enjoyed teasing her, and tormenting himself, by asking pointed questions about her previous affairs. She was skillful at giving indirect answers to his questions, but at odd times would drop small, precise details of information about this or that encounter, which stirred him into a lather of titillation and jealousy.
“What can you expect?” she said innocently, when not for the first time he had been rendered speechless. “I’m an artist.”
“So what?” he retorted. “I’m a rugby player.”
“Ooh la-la, a rugby player!” she said, feigning terror and laughing delightedly.
In fact, Margaret had liked having a rugby player. Once when they had been visiting Chelsea, his very English mother had given Margaret a folder she had kept of newspaper cuttings of his games (the fact that she had assembled such a collection astonished him; she had not attended a single one of them at the school, university, club, or international level, until she appeared by good luck with her latest handsome and well-dressed beau at Twickenham on his epic day there; after which, looking radiant, she had hugged him and exclaimed, “O my bonny Scottish boy, what a warrior man you grew to be!”). Margaret took the folder home with her and studied it carefully, and was delighted to find that two different reports of two different games in two different newspapers had referred to him as a “punishing runner.” And some time later surprised them both at an intense moment of lovemaking by shouting, “Punish me, my strong runner.”
She was, in fact, experienced or not, innocent, childlike, and mostly wise. Lying in bed, sometimes after making love, sometimes just playing out their day to each other, he would hold her, half-lying across him, his leg between her thighs, her breast against his chest, her hand up on his shoulder, silk against shag. “Tell me,” she would say.
The prick of desire was both distraction and inspiration to him. He told her the story of Angela Trelawney, famous reclusive Cornish painter, and her Bootlegger Cove series: almost a hundred paintings, same cove, but every season and every mood, light, water, rock, maelstrom to brimming calm. One day, within an hour, brisk winds changed to black storm banging in from the horizon, vast seas thundering onto the rocks, spray salting the grasses on the top of the cliffs. While she watched, twenty-four feet of unmasted, blue-hulled sloop suddenly smashed into the point of the northern promontory on the far side of the cove. Instant and total disintegration of boat, and while it was washing away she saw on the next wave a limp figure in a yellow slicker heaved upwards and hurled into the rocks. Margaret always wanted his details; “Paint it,” she said, her voice muffled somewhere in his neck.
On with the oilskins. Angela knew every rock in this cove, every roughness and slipperiness. She knew that in a gale like this, if she was to get anywhere near the point, she would have to do it on her knees, and hold on for dear life while every successive wave crashed over her. Not more than eighty yards to the end of the point, but it took her more than ten minutes to get there. Several times she was sure that the water, tearing at her there on the rocks, would prise loose her grip, carry her out into the main surge, and then pound her at leisure like a rag doll on some other chosen rock in the cove.
But finally she got to a raised rock about ten feet above the waterline, the last outcrop before the cove tapered, after millennia of battering, down into the sea itself. Straddling the rock, and clinging to it with arms and knees like a rider dislodged from the saddle onto the neck of a runaway horse, she peered down below her. At once she saw, wedged into a gap in the rocks, the V of the bow and no more than four feet of planking. At first, nothing else. But then, with a shock, she saw the man. He was sprawled face downwards, totally limp, and even as she watched, she saw with horror his left arm float lifelessly upwards on the remnants of a wave as it drained away from the rock.
Was he still alive? She had to get to him to find out. She started counting the number of seconds between the bigger waves, and watched the pattern of their cascade across the rocks where he was lying. She calculated that she would have about six seconds of slack water before she got blasted again; she was lighter than he was: if she missed her moment, she would be swept away like a cork. She waited for two more waves to check her timing. Then on the leeward side, she made her move round
the rock, as soon as the water started to slacken.
Six seconds and counting. On hands and knees she crawled to the man, flattened out next to him, her arm across his back, face next to his. “Give me a sign if you hear,” she yelled at the top of her voice. “We don’t have much time.”
An endless wait, without word or movement. Then just as she was about to scuttle back to her rock, a low voice said clearly, “I can hear you.” Immediately the next wave crashed over them, and though she was already soaked through, she was not ready for the paralyzing cold and weight of the water crushing her breathless. It seemed longer this time than the six seconds before the water eased. “No more of those if we can help it,” she yelled. “Can you move?”
“I don’t know,” the man said, quicker this time. “We may have to wait out one more wave,” she said, “and then we move. Crank every muscle, up around that rock—I’ll help.” Out of time. The next wave was on them, exacting its punishment.
They weathered that. She gasped for air, grabbed his arm in a vise, and yelled, “NOW!!” He was well built, and she did not know what she would do if he just lay there, but to her relief he was on his feet as quickly as she was, one arm bracing against the rocks. With her pulling on, rather than supporting, the other arm, they lurched up against the tall rock, then slithered round it, quick enough for only their legs to be washed by the next sweeping wave. Propping themselves on the leeward side, they paused for breath. Now she could examine her catch: deadly pale, with a huge, livid contusion, his forehead badly grazed but not bleeding much. Dark eyes, strong mustache, blacker for the pallor around it. “What now?” he said dully.
Once started, MacIver took some stopping. Inch by inch, he told her of their crawl over the slippery higher rocks, their lurching, stumbling run across the top of the cliffs to the cottage (“Don’t you dare pass out on me!”), his collapse on passing through the door, her heaping up the fire and undressing herself, her making tea with whisky and honey for both of them, though he had not yet come round, her undressing him and rubbing him hard with towels, to get his circulation going, while admiring his physique, her covering them both with the duvet on the floor in front of the fire for the first round of sleep, her growing concern that he might have a concussion, his revival and reassurance after vomiting and aspirin for his huge headache, his simple inquiry and then gratitude for her having saved his life at risk of her own, and then the second round of sleep, this time with him on the sofa in a large terry-cloth robe under a blanket, and then her second awakening and arousal. MacIver had not missed a beat, and was now in the home stretch, turning the knobs up a little more erotically:
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 9
