Doctors Wear Scarlet

by Raven, Simon

  So off we went, Major Seymour, sir, and very simple I dare say it sounds. Follow your nose and you can’t miss Akoru. No more you could – provided you could heave the boats through the weed, because the river’s just a marsh, a lot of it; and provided you didn’t get eaten whole or just nicely poisoned by some hell-creature in the mud when you were in the water pushing; and provided the mosquitoes and the dear Lord knows what left a drop of your own blood in your body. And, on top of it all, provided that six men in twenty didn’t get jungle belly eight hours after starting. You see, sir, normally you get natives who know the river and its ways to take you down. But with the trouble in Nianga and all over… Not a nigger could we get. Not a one. And after twelve hours we’d covered just ten miles, all of us dead beat and, as I say, six men with their innards turned to hot Steinhager ripping its way out of them like a saw.

  “Leave ’em here with Corporal Symonds and one canoe, sir,” I said; “and we can make our way on in the morning.”

  So Mr Richard got on his wireless to the Major and asks him to make what shift he can to collect Symonds and the other six. The Major didn’t like this, but he quite saw that six sacks of gut fluid wouldn’t be no help in getting us twenty miles further, and so he agrees. Then we spend a few hours trying to sleep, and off we go again, leaving Symonds doing nursey and looking back down the river, where his help would come from, as though he thought to see Jesus Christ come walking over the water at any minute.

  Well, sir, by the time the sun went down that second day, we’d got a further twelve or fourteen miles and we could reckon to reach Akoru late the next afternoon. Which was lovely as far as it went. Only another five men, including the second corporal, had come down with jungle belly. Which left us with just nine fit men and me and Mr Richard.

  “We can’t leave them here this time, Meredith,” he says. “It’d take two days for the Major to send them help – if he’s got any help to send. And we can’t spare good men to stay here and look after them. They’ll have to come on with us in the morning.”

  Which was fair enough, sir. They’d not be too comfortable in the canoes, but we’d be able to do something for them when we got them to Akoru. Or so we hoped. So then he gets on the wireless to let the Major know how things are, and the Major says to take the sick men on the next morning like he’s decided, and once again we try to get some kip.

  But in the morning, sir, there’s four men more as sick as you please, and one that was sick the night before – Private Buxton – lying there dead. Which means only seven of us is properly on the move. Not to mention that if you carry a dead man you carry more than his weight.

  “All right,” says Mr Richard. “It’s no good thinking us seven can get three canoes and all these sick men through this shit to Akoru. The only hope is for a few of us to get to Akoru quickly, try to organise help there and send it back.”

  Which is all very nice, I thinks to myself, only you don’t know, bonny boy that you are, what sort of games they’re having in Akoru just now.

  But he has the sense not to give me or any other –er much time for thinking.

  “Which of the five fit men is the most reliable, Sergeant Major?” he says.

  “Private Thorpe,” I says.

  “Come here, Thorpe,” he says.

  And Thorpe comes.

  “Private Thorpe,” says Mr Richard, “it is my duty and privilege to promote you, here in the field, to the rank of full corporal. You have my word that this appointment will be confirmed and honoured by my superior officers after we get back. You will now select one of the remaining fit men to stay here with you and assist your sick comrades until such time as I send help back from Akoru. Understood?”

  Well, sir, Thorpe looks a bit green, and he’s just going to open his mouth to say something, when Mr Richard says, “I’m particularly glad to have you to call upon, Thorpe. I was reading the other day in the History of the Regiment how your grandfather won a VC at Ypres.”

  It was a long shot, because there’s a lot of Thorpes in the regiment, being as it’s a Ludlow name, but Mr Richard had come up with the right number. Private Thorpe stands up like double his height, and he salutes Mr Richard as though he were saluting the Prince of Wales, and off he goes like the Lord Harry himself to choose a mucker to help him.

  “You and I and the other three will go on,” says Mr Richard, “–with Private Buxton.”

  “Bury him here, sir,” I says.

  “No, Meredith. Private Buxton may well be the most useful member of the party.”

  Then he gets them to making a sort of bier for poor Buxton. Tent poles, a couple of blankets and some cording. A pillow for his head. Gets some green and a few of these jungle flowers and decks it all up a treat.

  “Now. Buxton in one canoe with two men to paddle and keep the flies off. You and I and the other man in a second canoe. The third stays here.”

  And off we go once more. There’s a rough patch soon after we start, where it’s every live bugger in the water pushing, but it’s not too thick at that, sir, and later on the going’s good enough. So that by about three in the afternoon Mr Richard says he reckons we’re nearly there.

  Then he stops us to make some preparations. First of all, he has the canoe with Buxton lying in it attached to ours with a rope, so that we can tow it behind us. Then he routs about in his bedding roll, and damn my heart if he doesn’t come up with his Sam Browne belt and sword case. He fits his Sam Browne and gets me to buckle on his sword.

  “You two,” he says to the boys in the second canoe, “one at Buxton’s head, one at his feet. Arms reversed.”

  And on we go, Mr Richard standing at the bow end of the leading canoe with his sword drawn, and me and the other chap paddling him and towing the one behind, where Buxton’s having his last ride, all decked out with jungle green and two good men to guard and mourn, as is fitting for a soldier of Her Majesty’s forces. Round a bend in the river we come, and there it is – a few miserable huts on the bank and a couple of native boys going screaming in among them to give the word. A flag post but no flag. A sentry point but no sentry. And then half a hundred ugly bloody wogs, some of them with rifles and some with those cutlasses they carry, coming out of the jungle and out of the huts, crowding down to the water’s edge with a sort of mutter hovering in the air above them, and all of them waiting for us.

  “Akoru,” says Mr Richard. “Just keep a steady pace into the bank, Jim Meredith,” he says, “or you’ll never make RSM.”

  So very slowly we move in towards the bank. And as we get nearer, the wogs start fiddling with their rifles and fingering their cutlasses, and I start wondering what it feels like to have two feet of rusty iron up your crutch, and Mr Richard stands there as stiff as though he’s outside Buckingham Palace and whispers out of the corner of his mouth: “Easy does it. That’s my good boys. Easy… Easy…”

  And then, when we’re only about thirty yards from the reception committee, and the mutter they’re making is like a cloud of angry bees in summer time, Mr Richard lifts his sword hilt to his lips and brings the point down in a salute as lovely as ever you saw. Then he raises the point again and sweeps it round, very very slowly, till he’s pointing straight at poor Buxton lying there in the second canoe, with the two lads making shift to lean on their arms-at-the-reverse and their heads bowed like a pair of weeping angels. And at that moment the crowd stops its muttering and takes a good look, and then starts jabbering again twice as loud but in a softer tone, if you see what I mean, sir; and then damn my soul to hell if they don’t start sort of shrinking away from each other, till lo and behold there’s a clear passage made through the middle of ’em, wide enough for three good men to march abreast.

  Well, we don’t need to be told what to do now. When we reach the bank, Mr Richard walks about ten feet up from the water and then stands still. Me and the other lads unloads Buxton and lays him down. Then I and another picks him up again, the remaining two form up behind us, and at the word from Mr Rich
ard we slow-march up through the crowd and forty yards or so into the village, till he halts us just by this flag pole which hasn’t got a flag. We put Buxton down at the foot of the flag pole, and Mr Richard steps forward and calls out, “Who speaks English here?”

  Then a funny little chap, all wizened and shrinking and bowing, comes scratching out of the crowd.

  “Where is your leader?” Mr Richard says.

  The little chap calls out, and a big man with a rifle, and a cartridge belt slung across his chest, comes slowly out of the ruck of them, looking at Mr Richard as if he wants to chop him apart for fire wood – and no doubt would have done if poor Buxton hadn’t been lying there with the flies starting to settle on him now and a faint stink coming up, which gets me to wondering how long we shall have to keep him above ground for our protection.

  Any road Mr Richard points to Buxton and then to the flagpole, and says to the interpreter, “Tell your leader that my dead friend would wish the flag of his fathers to fly above him.”

  So the interpreter tells the big bloke, who mutters and curses and shakes his head, but the crowd have heard too and come edging forward, chattering and mumbling; and somehow it’s plain that they agree with Mr Richard, for some of your natives can have a powerful respect for the dead, so that the big bloke, after he’s looked at them once or twice as cruel as a barrack square on a February morning, lumbers off to one of the huts and comes back with the flag and hands it to Mr Richard. And Mr Richard and me, we start fiddling with the hoist ropes, and all I can think of is “Now which way up is the –ing thing meant to go?” But up it goes in any case, Major Seymour, sir, right to the top of the pole. The lads present arms without having to be told, bless their hearts, and then we lower away again till the flag’s at half mast above Private Buxton, who deserves the compliment if ever any bugger did, for stink as he might he’d saved the lives of his five comrades.

  And many more too, I wouldn’t wonder. For once that flag went up, and the natives saw it where they were used to seeing it, there was an end to trouble in Akoru – and all the length of the river, as we afterwards heard. The crowd melted away like the beer in a quartermaster’s pot, until there was only the big bloke and the interpreter left for Mr Richard to question. Well, the District Officer was dead and so were most of his police, bar those that had joined the rebels. But with the flag up and the crowd gone, and the big bloke seeing that the best he could do to save his skin was to help us all he knew, we soon settled to get everything to rights. Disarmed everyone in the village. Got on the wireless to Major Longbow, who said he’d tell the District Commissioner and send fresh men as soon as possible. Fixed up a team of natives who really knew the river to go back with me and collect Corporal Thorpe and the rest. And there it was, Major Seymour, sir, everything sweet and cosy again, and all done with a silly toy of a sword and a dead man who was already fit meat for the flies…

  “And so he came home a hero,” said Tyrrel. “And his proud Penelope was waiting to go to the Palace with him and see him get his medal.”

  “She went to the Palace all right,” I said; “but after that things didn’t go quite as she might have hoped.”

  “Oh?”

  “You see, Inspector, when Richard got back to Cambridge in the autumn of 1955 he was a bit restless at first and rather difficult. But Walter and everyone put this down to two years away in the Army; and so when, after a time, he seemed to settle more or less, they thought everything was all right. He was getting on quite well with a new line of research Walter had suggested, and taking the part expected of a young don in college life, and you might have thought all was well.”

  “And wasn’t it?”

  “From Walter Goodrich’s point of view, there was still one thing very much amiss. The ‘understanding’ which Richard was supposed to have with Penelope…nothing whatever seemed to come of it. Oh, he was polite and nice enough when he saw her. But he didn’t go one step out of his way in order to do so.”

  “Perhaps he’d met someone else…while he was in the Army?”

  “If so, there was no sign of her. So both Walter and Penelope began to get a bit restive about this. And matters were not improved when he began to avoid them – not merely to make no effort to see them, but actively to keep out of their way. Nor was this all: at about the same time he began to see a very great deal of a young first year undergraduate called Piers Clarence.”

  “I thought you said–”

  “–I did say. There was nothing about Richard’s friendship for Clarence,” I said firmly, “which could even remotely suggest a homosexual entanglement. I saw them together several times and I’m sure of this. It was just awkward that he should suddenly make of Clarence an almost constant companion at the same time as he started to see as little as possible of Penelope – not to mention Walter.”

  “And what did you deduce from that?” said Tyrrel.

  “Much the same as Marc Honeydew did,” I said. I went to my desk and routed for a few moments until I found what I was after.

  “This letter,” I said, giving it to Tyrrel, “sums up the whole matter very shrewdly. Marc wrote it to me just when Richard first started to see a lot of Piers Clarence – before I myself had met the boy. You will notice that Honeydew on the whole supports me in saying that this was not a homosexual affair – though one or two of his innuendos indicate that he might like to have believed it was. Ignore those, and you have a very tolerable account.”

  Dear Anthony Seymour, (Honeydew had begun,)

  It was lovely seeing you in London last month, though I don’t think much of that stuffy old club of yours. Any way, it’s high time you came to pay us a visit again, my dear; and I have a little news which may tempt you from the gay metropolis quicker than our other poor attractions.

  The fact is that Dickie Fountain has started a kind of affair with a new undergraduate called Piers Clarence. Of course you know what a hysterical old thing I am, so when I say “affair” I’m exaggerating a bit, because I don’t think there’s anything wicked going on, my dear, like holding hands under the table in the Arts’ Restaurant or taking luxurious double bedrooms in five star hotels. The plain truth remains that Dickie and this boy are together a very great deal – lunches, walks, theatres, the lot.

  So what’s he like, this Piers Clarence, I hear you asking in that serious way of yours, and is he a good thing for Richard? Well, Anthony Seymour, Master Clarence is a very gay nineteen, with manly cherub looks (the contradiction is purposeful) and reputed to be highly intelligent. He is also known to be very lazy, prone to spend money he has not got, and given to much wine and merriment; the ushers at his school reported him as being “unsatisfactory”; so all in all you can see he is an attractive character, and it’s a bit of a puzzle to my addled old brains how he ever came to get into Lancaster. Because you know, my dear, what long and austere faces we all have here.

  Anyway, here he is, the friend of Dickie Fountain’s bosom, and I don’t think it’s what Dr Goodrich ordered at all. It isn’t that Dickie is being distracted from his work – that goes quite well from what I hear, and of course those Army poems of his have been doing him a deal of good in a generally cultural way. Nor is it that there is any particular likelihood of overt scandal, because after all Master Clarence is reading the Classics and so can be assumed to have that most respectable asset in common with Richard as well as his (less respectable) youth; when all is said, dons aren’t positively forbidden to go about with their pupils. No. Walter’s trouble is that a lot of people are already beginning to enquire what has happened about the famous “understanding” Richard was supposed to have with Penelope, and this means that the Clarence business has come at the most unhelpful time possible – just when it is absolutely vital for Walter to have the strongest grip on Richard he can contrive. Which is exactly what he hasn’t got. Because you see, my dear, the real point is this: Dickie is using Piers Clarence in much the same way as he once used you – as an embodied contrast to, and a means o
f escape from, the burdensome influence of possessive Walter. So frustrating for Walter.

  Not, I hasten to add, that Richard isn’t fond of both Piers and yourself for your own delicious sakes; but you’ve both come in handy, at one time or another, as Walter-antidotes, and this does make you even more desirable than Dickie might otherwise have found you… But there is, Anthony Seymour, one important difference, which I now beg you to note, between Richard’s friendship for yourself and his affection for this Clarence child. In your case, he’d known you before, and even though you were conceived by him as an “anti-Walter” you were a pretty sober and serious companion. So much so that even Walter had to recognise and respect you as such. This Piers Clarence, on the other hand, might have been deliberately chosen as a Walter bait. He is a positive banner of rebellion. Pagan and dissolute in habit, mocking in demeanour, racy in speech and casual in conduct – anti-church, anti-establishment, even anti-education – I tell you, my dear, he’s a joy to have around. And it very much looks to me as if Richard, after years of plaudits from the schoolmasters and Walters of this world (if we forget his occasional naughtinesses), is at last beginning to think he’s been in the wrong gallery all along and is bent on letting everybody know it by the simple expedient of flaunting Piers Clarence in front of them. Not that he actually joins in Piers’ frolics; but he never rebukes him, and even, I think encourages him, if only indirectly, by lending him little bits of money – and on one occasion by letting him use his rooms for a party while he himself was away for the weekend. Rather naughty, I thought – and so did all the Porters.

  Of course, one can’t help feeling sorry for poor Penelope with all this going on. I’m so afraid we shall wake up one morning to find she’s become a nun. But then you know her, bags of guts and officer-like quality, so I expect she’ll face it out somehow… Anyway, my dear, I do beg you to come up and have a look at this ménage, and possibly to counsel Dickie against becoming too outrageous. (He hasn’t yet, but he’s in an odd mood, and he won’t take any notice of silly old me.) And don’t delay too long. For a little bird tells me that Richard is keen to get away, at the end of the academic year, and prosecute his researches in Greece. Which is the last thing Walter would have allowed normally, since he’s only just got back from the wars; but what with this Clarence affair bubbling away so gaily, I wouldn’t wonder if Walter doesn’t lend hearty support to the idea, in the hope that a year away from Piers may bring Dickie back to his senses – and to Penelope – again. But then just think of what he might get up to in Greece! Poor Walter. Poor Penelope. Poor Marc Honeydew, for that matter, who has nothing better to do than send you these pages of provincial gossip and tons and tons of love.