Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 3

by Anthony Powell

  Once Lovell’s way of looking at the world was allowed, he could be subtle about ways and means. With the additional advantages of good looks and plenty of push, these methods were bringing fair success in his chosen career by the time war broke out. In marrying Priscilla, he had not, it is true, consummated a formerly voiced design to ‘find a rich wife’; but then that project had never, in fact, assumed the smallest practical shape. Its verbal expression merely illustrated another facet of Lovell’s romanticism—in this case, romanticism about money. He had, in any case, taken a keen interest in Priscilla even back in the days when he and I had been working on film scripts together (none of which ever appeared on any screen), so there was no surprise when the two of them married. At first he lost jobs and they were hard up. Priscilla, who had some taste for living dangerously, never seemed to mind these lean stretches. Lovell himself used to present an equally unruffled surface to the world where shortage of money was concerned, though underneath he certainly felt guilty regarding lack of it. He looked upon lack of money as a failing in himself; or, for that matter, in anyone else. From time to time, though without any strong force behind it, his romanticism would take moral or intellectual turns too. He would indulge, for instance, in fits of condemning material things and all who pursued them. These moods were sometimes accompanied by reading potted philosophies: the Wisdom of the East in one volume, Marx Without Tears, the Treasury of Great Thought. Like everyone else of his kind he was writing a play, an undertaking that progressed never further than the opening pages of the First Act.

  ‘I never get time to settle down to serious writing,’ he used to say, thereby making what almost amounted to a legal declaration in defining his own inclusion within an easily recognisable category of non-starting literary apprenticeship.

  These were some of the thoughts about Lovell that passed through my head while I sat on a bench in the hall waiting to see Major Finn. The address in Westminster to which I had been told to report turned out to be a large house converted to the use of military headquarters. After a while a Free French corporal, his arm in a sling, joined me on the bench; then two members of the Free French women’s service. Soon the three of them began an argument together in their own language. I re-read Moreland’s postcard—a portrait of Wagner in a kind of tam-o’-shanter—confirming our dinner that night. Enigmatic in tone, its wording indefinably lacked the liveliness of manner usual in this, Moreland’s habitual mode of communication.

  We had not met since the first week of the war, soon after Matilda had left him. Matilda’s subsequent marriage to Sir Magnus Donners had been effected with an avoidance of publicity remarkable even at a time when all sorts of changes, public and private, many of these revolutionary enough, were being quietly brought about. Muting the news of the ceremony was no doubt to some extent attributable to controls Sir Magnus found himself in a position to exercise in certain fields. The wedding of the divorced wife of a musician, well known even if not particularly prosperous, to a member of the Government rated in general more attention, even allowing for the paper shortage, than the few scattered paragraphs that appeared at the time. People said the break-up of Moreland’s marriage had at first so much disturbed him that he seemed likely to go to pieces entirely, giving himself up increasingly to drink, while living as best he could from one day to the next. However, a paradox of that moment in the war was an excess, rather than deficiency, of musical employment; so that, in fact, Moreland found himself immersed in work of one sort or another, which, even if not very inspiring professionally, kept him alive and busy. That, at any rate, was what I had heard. Inevitably we had lost touch with each other since I had been in the army. Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward—in contrast with love—is perhaps no less complicated, requiring equally mysterious nourishment; like love, too, bearing also within its embryo inherent seeds of dissolution, something more fundamentally destructive, perhaps, than the mere passing of time, the all-obliterating march of events which had, for example, come between Stringham and myself.

  These rather sombre speculations were interrupted by a door opening nearby. A Free French officer in a képi appeared. Middle-aged, with spectacles, rather red in the face, he was followed from the room by a youngish, capless captain, wearing Intelligence Corps badges.

  ‘Et maintenant, une dernière chose, mon Capitaine,’ said the Frenchman, ‘maintenant que nous en avons terminé avec l’affaire Szymanski. Le Colonel s’est arrangé avec certains membres du Commandement pour que quelques jeunes officiers soient placés dans le Génie. Il espère que vous n’y verrez pas d’inconvenient.’

  ‘Vous n’avez pas utilisé la procédure habituelle, Lieutenant?’

  ‘Mon Capitaine, le Colonel Michelet a pensé que pour une pareille broutille on pouvait se dispenser des voies hierarchiques.’

  ‘Nous aurons des ennuis.’

  ‘Le Colonel Michelet est convaincu qu’ils seront négligeables.’

  ‘Ça m’étonnerait.’

  ‘Vous croyez vraiment?’

  ‘J’en suis sûr. Il nous faut immédiatement une liste de ces noms.’

  ‘Très bien, mon Capitaine, vous les aurez.’

  The English officer shook his head to express horror at what had been contemplated. They both laughed a lot.

  ‘Au revoir, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Au revoir, mon Capitaine.’

  The Frenchman retired. The captain turned to me.

  ‘Jenkins?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Finn told me about you. Come in here, will you.’

  I followed into his room, and sat opposite while he turned the pages of a file.

  ‘What have you been doing since you joined the army?’

  Reduced to narrative form, my military career up to date did not sound particularly impressive. However, the captain seemed satisfied. He nodded from time to time. His manner was friendly, more like the good-humoured approach of my old Battalion than the unforthcoming demeanour of most of the officers at Div HQ. The story came to an end.

  ‘I see—how old are you?’

  I revealed my age. He looked surprised that anyone could be so old.

  ‘And what do you do in civilian life?’

  I indicated literary activities.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I believe I read one.’

  However, he showed none of General Liddament’s keen interest in the art of the novel, made no effort to explore further this aspect of my life.

  ‘What about French?’

  It seemed simplest to furnish the same descriptive phrases offered to the General.

  ‘I can read a book as a rule, but get held up with slang or something like the technical descriptions of Balzac.’

  The captain laughed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘suppose we come back to that later. Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Prepared to go abroad?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He seemed almost surprised at this rather minimal acceptance of military obligation.

  ‘We’re looking for liaison officers with the Free French,’ he said. ‘At battalion level. They’re not entirely easy to find. Speaking another language tolerably well seems so often to go with unsatisfactory habits.’

  The captain smiled sadly, a little archly, across the desk at me.

  ‘Whilst our Allies expect nothing less than one hundred per cent service,’ he said, ‘and quite right too.’

  He fixed me with his eye.

  ‘Care to take the job on?’

  ‘Yes—but, as I explained, I’m no great master of the language.’

  He did not reply. Instead, he opened a drawer of the desk from which he took a document. He handed this to me. Then he rose and went to a door on the other side of the room. It gave on to a smaller room, almost a cupboard, surrounded by dark green metal safes. In
one corner was a little table on which stood a typewriter in its rubber cover. A chair was beside it.

  ‘Make a French translation of these instructions,’ he said. ‘Subsistence Allowance is frais d’alimentation. Here is paper—and a typewriter, should you use one. Alternatively, here too is la plume de ma tante.’

  Smiling not unkindly, he shut me in. I settled down to examine the printed sheet handed to me. It turned out to be an Army Form, one specifying current regulations governing issue, or non-issue, of rations to troops in the field. At first sight the prose did not seem to make much sense in English; I saw at once there was little hope of my own French improving it. Balzac on provincial typesetting was going to be nothing to this. However, I sat down and worked away, because I wanted the job badly.

  Outside, on cornices and parapets of government buildings, starlings in thousands chattered and quarrelled. I was aware of that dazed feeling that is part of the impact of coming on leave. I read through the document again, trying to compose my mind to its meaning. This was like being ‘kept in’ at school. ‘. . . the items under (i) are obtainable on indent (A.B.55) which is the ordinary requisition of supplies . . . the items under (iii) and other items required to supplement the ration so as to provide variety and admit of the purchase of seasonable produce, and which are paid for with money provided by the Commuted Ration Allowance and Cash Allowance (iii above) . . . the officer i/c Supplies renders a return (A. F. B. 179), which shows the quantities and prices of rations actually issued in kind to the unit during the month, from which their total value is calculated . . .’

  The instruction covered a couple of foolscap pages. I remembered being told never to write ‘and which’, but the mere grammar used by the author was by no means his most formidable side. It was not the words that were difficult. The words, on the whole, were fairly familiar. Giving them some sort of conviction in translation was the problem; conveying that particular tone sounded in official manifestos. Through the backwoods of this bureaucratic jungle, or the like, Widmerpool was hunting down Mr Diplock, in relentless safari. Such distracting thoughts had to be put from the mind. I chose la plume de ma tante in preference to the typewriter, typescript imparting an awful bareness to language of any kind, even one’s own. For a time I sweated away. Some sort of a version at last appeared. I read it through several times, making corrections. It did not sound ideally idiomatic French; but then the original did not sound exactly idiomatic English. After embodying a few final improvements, I opened the door a crack.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said the captain. ‘Have you finished? I thought you might have succumbed. It’s dreadfully stuffy in there.’

  He was sitting with another officer, also a captain, tall, fair, rather elegant. A blue fore-and-aft cap lay beside him with the lion-and-unicorn General Service badge. I passed my translation across the desk to the I. Corps captain. He took it, and, rising from his chair, turned to the other man.

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment, David,’ he said—and to me: ‘Take a seat while I show this to Finn.’

  He went out of the room. The other officer nodded to me and laughed. It was Pennistone. We had met on a train during an earlier leave of mine and had talked of Vigny. We had talked of all sorts of other things, too, that seemed to have passed out of my life for a long time. I remembered now Pennistone had insisted his own military employments were unusual. No doubt the Headquarters in which I now found myself represented the sort of world in which he habitually functioned.

  ‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Of course we agreed to meet as an exercise of the will. I’m ashamed to say I’d forgotten until now. Your own moral determination does you credit. I congratulate you. Or is it just one of those eternal recurrences of Nietzsche, which one gets so used to? Have you come to work here?’

  I explained the reason for my presence in the building.

  ‘So you may be joining the Free Frogs.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I look after the Poles.’

  ‘Do they have a place like this too?’

  ‘Oh, no. The Poles are dealt with as a Power. They have an ambassador, a military attaché, all that. The point about France is that we still recognise the Vichy Government. The other Allied Governments are those in exile over here in London. That is why the Free French have their own special mission.’

  ‘You’ve just come to see them?’

  ‘To discuss some odds and ends of Polish affairs that overlap with Free French matters.’

  We talked for a while. The other captain returned.

  ‘Finn wants to see you,’ he said.

  I followed him along the passage into a room where an officer was sitting behind a desk covered with papers. The I. Corps captain announced my name and withdrew. I had left my cap in the other office, so, on entering, could not salute, but, with the formality that prevailed in the area where I was serving, came to attention. The major behind the desk seemed surprised at this. He rose very slowly from his desk, and, keeping his eye on me all the time, came round to the front and shook hands. He was small, cleanshaved, almost square in shape, with immensely broad shoulders, large head, ivory-coloured face, huge nose. His grey eyes were set deep back in their sockets. He looked like an enormous bird, an ornithological specimen very different from Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson, kindly but at the same time immensely more powerful. I judged him in his middle fifties. He wore an old leather-buttoned service-dress tunic, with a VC, Légion d’Honneur, Croix de Guerre avec palmes, and a couple of other foreign decorations I could not identify.

  ‘Sit down, Jenkins,’ he said.

  He spoke quietly, almost whispered. I sat down. He began to fumble among his papers.

  ‘I had a note from your Divisional Commander,’ he said. ‘Where is it? Draw that chair a bit nearer. I’m rather deaf in this ear. How is General Liddament?’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘Knocking the Division into shape?’

  ‘That’s it, sir.’

  ‘Territorial Division, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘He’ll get a Corps soon.’

  ‘You think so, sir?’

  Major Finn nodded. He seemed a little embarrassed about something. Although he gave out an extraordinary sense of his own physical strength and endurance, there was also something mild, gentle, almost undecided, about his manner.

  ‘You know why you’ve been sent here?’ he asked.

  ‘It was explained, sir.’

  He lowered his eyes to what I now saw was my translation. He began to read it to himself, his lips moving faintly. After a line or two of doing this, it became clear to me what the answer was going to be. The only question that remained was how long the agony would be drawn out. Major Finn read the whole of my version through to himself; then, rather nobly, read it through again. This was either to give dramatic effect, or to rouse himself to the required state of tension for making an unwelcome announcement. Those, at least, were the reasons that occurred to me at the time, because he must almost certainly have gone through the piece when the captain had first brought it to him. I appreciated the gesture, which indicated he was doing the best he could for me, including not sparing himself. When he came to the end for the second time, he looked across the desk, and, shaking his head, sighed and smiled.

  ‘Well . . .’ he said.

  I was silent.

  ‘Won’t do, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No, sir?’

  ‘Not as your written French stands.’

  He took up a pencil and tapped it on the desk.

  ‘We’d have liked to have you . . .’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Masham agrees.’

  ‘Masham’ I took to be the I. Corps captain.

  ‘But this translation . . .’

  He spoke for a second as if I might have intended a deliberate insult to himself and his uniform by the botch I had made of it, but that he was prepared magnanimously to overlook that. Then, as if regretting what might hav
e appeared momentary unkindness, in spite of my behaviour, he rose and shook hands again, gazing into the middle distance of the room. The vision to be seen there was certainly one of total failure.

  ‘. . . not sufficiently accurate.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘In fact, doesn’t begin to be.’

  ‘I see, sir.’

  ‘You understand me?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘A pity.’

  We stared at each other.

  ‘Otherwise I think you would have done us well.’

  Major Finn paused. He appeared to consider this hypothesis for a long time. There did not seem much more to be said. I hoped the interview would end as quickly as possible.

  ‘Perfectly suitable . . .’ he repeated.

  His voice was far away now. There was another long pause. Then a thought struck him. His face lighted up.