by David Lodge
‘A very good way to feel,’ said Mike.
‘Oh you just don’t care,’ pouted Pauline.
As far as I was concerned, there was only one fly in the soothing ointment of that evening: the nagging suspicion that Mike and Pauline would naturally prefer to be alone together. I selfishly suppressed this thought until about ten o’clock, when Pauline was in the tiny kitchenette making some coffee.
‘Look, Mike,’ I said, ‘I hope I haven’t spoilt your last evening by staying on. I mean, two’s company and all that.…’
‘It’s all right, Jon. I invited you on purpose. It’s stopped her getting all upset before I go back. But perhaps if you could manage to nip off a few minutes before me.…’
So at about ten past ten I explained to Pauline that I had to phone my mother before leaving London, and that I would meet Mike at the tube station. She smiled gratefully; and when I saw the phone in the hall I realized that she had seen through the manœuvre. I was curiously pleased that she had done so. As I clumped down the empty Sunday-night street, the metal studs of my boots grating on the pavement, I cast a covetous glance back at the window of Pauline’s room. The main light went off, leaving just the faint red glow of the gas-fire.
The tube station was quite busy, and among the travellers I noticed many of my own kind,—dispirited youths in ill-fitting uniforms, and soldiers of longer service who were permitted to wear civilian clothes on leave. The latter were chiefly distinguished by the small, cheap canvas grips which they carried, probably containing shaving kit, sandwiches against the journey, and a pair of socks which Mum had washed and darned over the week-end. Mike was a long time coming, and I was beginning to look anxiously at the clock and to contemplate leaving him behind, when he appeared, dressed in his uniform. This meant that he had kept it at Pauline’s, and I wondered in a vaguely troubled way whether he had spent the last three nights there. But his religion, and Pauline’s undemonstrative air of virginity, allowed me to dismiss the idea. Mike’s mouth was set in a grim line, and he only grunted when I rallied him for being late. I had to urge him to run for a train, and we only just made it. Everything indicated that his parting from Pauline had been painful, and I maintained a tactful silence.
With each successive stop, the proportion of soldiers among the passengers on the tube train became greater. King’s Cross, that Sunday night, seemed to be swarming with them. They stood or sat about the platforms, waiting for their trains, clad in creased uniforms or rumpled suits, smoking, or playing the automatic vendors, or just shuffling their feet amongst the litter, staring out of numbed, hopeless eyes: disconsolate shades on the banks of the Styx waiting to be ferried across to Hades. Many were being seen off by their girl-friends, and for once I was glad that I was unattached, so wretched did the couples seem: joking unhappily, or holding hands in dumb misery, or striving to lose consciousness in a joyless kiss of parting. I watched one couple writhing in a passionate embrace up against the wall of the Gentlemen’s lavatory; they separated abruptly, and the girl walked away without a word or a flicker of expression. With a slight shock I saw that they were both chewing gum. All over the station people were demonstrating their inability to say good-bye.
I had time to observe all this because we discovered that the train left at 11.30 instead of 11.15. Our miscalculation was advantageous; we secured an empty compartment at the front of the train, and pulled down the blinds on the corridor side. Our hearts sank as someone ruthlessly pulled back the door, but a shout from one of his mates drew him away. So we had the unusual good fortune of a compartment to ourselves. We were able to extinguish all the lights, except for the blue bulb which glowed dimly in the ceiling, imparting a weird purplish tinge to Mike’s hair. As soon as the train was in motion we stretched out on the seats, munching a couple of apples from the food-bag my mother had thoughtfully slipped into my small pack.
The dim light, the metallic syncopation of the train wheels, and a mutual melancholy at being carried back to Catterick, encouraged me to risk an intimate question.
‘Are you and Pauline engaged?’
He shook his head. ‘Too many problems. Family, religion’—he bit deeply into his apple, munched, and swallowed,—‘Me …’
‘Pauline isn’t a Catholic,’ I said, poising my intonation half-way between a question and a statement.
‘No. I wanted her to receive instruction, but she’s scared of it for some reason.’
I lapsed into meditation as Mike fell effortlessly asleep. I thought about the evening I had just spent. It had been both soothing and disturbing. Soothing because it had assuaged a hunger which had been a dull pain in my bowels for so long that I had come to live with it, almost ignoring it: woman starvation. It was not just sex,—though that too of course,—it was femininity that had wanted in my life.
I had gone up to college, young, pimply, diffident, but with my mind full of erotic poetry and my desires aimed at beautiful, shameless young women. There were plenty of those, both in college and on the streets around, but I was too callow to make any impression on the former, and too scared to approach the latter. This had such a humiliating effect on my ego that, rather than console myself with the normal, friendly, unsensational type of girl who could always be found with patience, I retired into an eremitical existence and devoted my energies to study. Although I lived at home, I found no compensation in my mother: the Oedipus complex seems to have missed me out somehow. My relationship with my mother since the 11-plus has been rather like that between a bachelor of fastidious tastes and the woman who ‘does for’ him.
So what soothed me that evening was not Pauline herself, but her femininity, which she exuded like an essence in which her whole environment had become steeped. The mingled perfumes from her dressing-table, the teddy-bear in which she kept her night-clothes (Mike had unzipped its belly to demonstrate), the prints of Degas’s ballet dancers on the wall, the stockings and petticoats hung out to dry on the line in the kitchen,—all this was indescribably novel and delightful to me.
It was Pauline herself who was the disturbing element in the evening. I coveted her. I had not yet arrived at the stage of consciously desiring her; but I wanted very much to own her, I wanted to have her on my arm, to have her write me letters, to enjoy that easy familiarity and almost wifely solicitude which I had seen Mike enjoy. I am not an envious person in the ordinary sense. I am, I think, as conscious of my limitations as I am of my merits, and I do not waste time and energy coveting what is manifestly beyond my reach, whether it be an expensive car or an expensive woman. My envy is really an impatient sense of unfitness in the world around me, of some dislocation of the natural order of things. Thus, for instance, it seemed to me that it was not merely unfortunate, but unjust that Meakin should have the comfortable berth in the English Department, and not me. Mike’s relationship with Pauline afflicted me with no emotions of erotic jealousy or envy. I simply recognized in it another example of inefficiency in the cosmic administrative machinery which had allowed them to become intimate before I had had a chance to intervene. For they were manifestly unsuited to each other, the neat, sensible Pauline and the wild, unconventional Mike; whereas she fitted me like a long-lost glove. I whiled away some of the long hours of that journey back to Catterick trying her on in my imagination. She fitted beautifully.
I woke from a troubled sleep at 6 a.m. The train had stopped. I lifted the corner of the blind and peered out. We were at York. I went out to the w.c., where a notice reminded me not to use the lavatory while the train was standing in a station. Waiting for it to move I leaned against the door, surveying the dismal furniture of the cramped room. Another notice said: ‘Gentlemen lift the seat’. Statement or imperative? I wondered. With a pencil I scrawled ‘Officers &’ before the word ‘Gentlemen’.
When I returned to our compartment there was another soldier in it. Mike and I did not speak to the newcomer, nor to each other until we reached Darlington. The second train was full, and dawdled slowly through the damp
countryside, stopping at every small station to deliver milk and mail. At the terminus lorries waited to cart us off to our respective units. We paid a penny for the transport. Although this was preferable to paying for a taxi or walking, the Army’s thoughtfulness in providing the transport seemed slightly sinister, as if we were being rounded up into captivity as efficiently as possible. Standing in the back of the truck, swaying and stumbling as it swung round corners, the high-pitched whine of the four-wheel drive seemed the most melancholy sound in the world.
The personnel undergoing training in the Clerks’ Training Wing at Amiens Camp were a curious collection. We were a concentration of misfits; all of us, for some reason, were unfitted for the normal pursuits of the R.A.C., and had either chosen to become clerks, or had been press-ganged into doing so, for there was always an alleged shortage of clerks in the R.A.C. The average IQ was startlingly high, because we included several ex-P.O.s who had failed Uzbee or Wozbee, some of whom were graduates. Of course the majority were only just literate, but there were better brains to be found among us than anywhere else in the unit, including the Officers’ Mess. It was as if the authorities had determined to seed out from the intakes of new recruits anyone with a spark of intelligence or individuality, together with the odd moron or psychopath, and to subject us all to most farcical and futile form of training they could devise, just to teach us our place.
The training course lasted for a month. The first fortnight was devoted to learning a few simple facts about Army procedure which a bright schoolboy could have mastered in ten minutes. The second fortnight was occupied mainly by learning to type at the hair-raising speed of fifteen words a minute.
There were only three instructors: Sergeant Hamilton, Corporal Wilkinson, and Corporal Mason. Hamilton was a rather pathetic little man, with the ugliest countenance I had ever seen. His mouth was obscenely crowded with teeth,—when he drew back his melon-slice mouth to smile you could count hundreds of them,—and their luxuriant growth had given him a deformed jaw which projected into space like some craggy promontory. His words tended to lose themselves in this dental jungle, and to emerge in a strangely primitive guttural splutter, raining saliva on anyone within ten feet. Few people could resist grinning when he spoke, and that I managed to avoid doing so was the only explanation I could produce for his strangely benevolent attitude to me.
Hamilton, wisely, left most of the instructing to the two Corporals. Wilkinson was a spoilt, baby-faced sibling of the petit-bourgeois, who owed his two stripes to his ability as an opening batsman in the Brigade XI. Far more interesting was Corporal Mason, a Regular. I later had the opportunity to check on his age, and was astonished to find that he was only nineteen. He looked at least twenty-nine. He had a white, depraved face, with pale, bloodless lips, and cold, almost colourless eyes. I think he enjoyed his job. He liked the sense of power, and was of a speculative turn of mind. His first action when we clattered into the nissen hut which served as our classroom, was to order someone to stoke up the stove. (The room was always kept at a stifling temperature, with the windows tightly shut and streaming with condensation.) Then he would write something on the blackboard, which we copied into our exercise books. We spent the rest of the day ‘learning’ this, while Mason conducted a kind of Socratic dialogue with various members of the class. He would ask us personal questions with a calm presumption that his right to do so was unquestionable. The first thing he ever said to us, on our first morning in the classroom, was:
‘How many of you are virgins? Come on, put your ’ands up.’ He counted the hands, and observed to Wilkinson ‘Three more than last time.’ I think he was conducting a kind of amateur Kinsey report. He proceeded to interrogate everyone more closely concerning their sexual experience. I had noticed that Mike had not raised his hand, a fact of no small interest to me; but when Mason commented on this Mike replied angrily that he had refused to answer the question. I then wished I had not put my own hand up.
On another occasion Mason asked everyone what they had been doing before their call-up. Several of us said that we had been at a university. It was just the time of year when graduates were being drafted. Mason looked at Wilkinson.
‘Fugg me, we’ve got a right lot ’ere. Shower of bleeding long-’airs.’
‘What did you study?’ he asked me.
‘English, Corporal.’
‘English? What you wanner study that for? It’s your native fuggin language i’n it? What about you?’
The man now interrogated confessed to having read psychology at Manchester.
‘Psychologist eh? I’ve always wanted to meet one of those queers. Reckon you know what everyone’s thinking, don’t you?’ He brushed aside the psychologist’s disclaimer. ‘Know what I’m thinking now?’
‘No, Corporal.’
‘I’m thinking you’re a fuggin lot of use if you don’t know what I’m thinking.’ He guffawed.
‘I’m a psychologist, not a thought-reader,’ said the other testily. But Mason was unperturbed.
‘’Ere, I bet when you’re lying on a woman, you’re working out why she’s lying there. You never wonder why the fugg you’re lying there.’
The kind of one-sided debate which Mason conducted could be irritating, and occasionally embarrassing, but we all cooperated out of sheer boredom with the paltry ‘work’ we were given. All, that is, except Mike, who remained sullen and resentful. I knew he loathed the whole set-up of the Clerks’ Course, and observed him with some anxiety. I was afraid that he might do something desperate to escape, like changing his trade or volunteering for the paratroops. For myself, I counted the tedium and the humiliation a small price for the relief from the rigours of Basic Training.
Mason and Wilkinson occasionally enlivened proceedings by deliberately provoking one of the class to insolence, and then punishing him. Their favourite punishment consisted in making the victim stand at the end of the room, against the door, and throwing a tennis ball at him. Wilkinson, who was a good thrower, took a sadistic delight in this sport.
We had occasional ‘evening classes’. These were imposed upon us with the object of bringing the Clerks’ Course more into line with the Wireless and Driving Courses, which entailed night exercises. Our evening classes were of course absurdly unnecessary: no more teaching or learning was done than in the day classes. But Mason and Wilkinson rarely kept us for the full hour, and on Thursdays, pay day, there was no evening class at all if enough volunteers could be found to risk the Queen’s pound in a poker-session with the two instructors.
A few days after we had commenced the course, we were astonished to find Norman in our midst. He had been thrown out of the Driving Course after having rammed a telephone kiosk with a Centurion tank, and the authorities, with inspired lunacy, had thought to make a clerk of him. At least he provided a diversion: to watch him entering notes in his exercise book, tightly grasping the pen-holder in his great fist as if it were a chisel, ink seeping slowly over his hands, wrists, uniform and face, was a memorable experience. He quickly adapted himself to the whimsical despotism of Mason and Wilkinson, and justified Mike’s original description of him by playing Caliban to their Prospero and Ariel, by turns slave, clown and victim. It was Norman who laid and stoked the fire in the classroom, Norman who offered Mason and Wilkinson the most outrageous cheek, and Norman who usually ended the morning crucified against the door, roaring and bellowing with simulated pain as the tennis balls thudded into his thick torso.
If Basic Training invited traditional images of hell, the Clerks’ course suggested more sophisticated versions, such as Sartre’s in Huis Clos, its pains compounded of ennui, futility and a sense of time passing with unbearable slowness. This, multiplied by two years! I could never bring myself to do the sum.
It was perhaps because of the low state of my morale that Pauline took such a hold of my imagination. Loyalty to Mike should have made me put her out of my mind, and common sense too, for I could not persuade myself that I was likely to win her fro
m him, even if I were prepared to forfeit his friendship in the attempt. But I could not force the memory of her vague prettiness, her insidious femininity, from my mind. Sleep, as I say, is the opium of the soldier, but I looked forward to bed for a special reason. Between the blankets, warm and comfortable at last, eyes shut against the squalid realities of my existence, I could indulge in weaving fantasies about myself and Pauline, fantasies which are embarrassing to recall. I can understand why the pure of heart are generally religious people. If you believed that there was a fanlight in your mind, through which an old man with a beard was perpetually peering, taking down notes, you would think twice about throwing orgies in there.
I had to discipline severely my constant desire to talk about Pauline with Mike, forcing myself always to let him introduce the subject. But he rarely did, even when he received one of those tantalizing, long mauve envelopes.
‘Letter from Pauline?’ I would say, as we walked away from the office where the post was distributed.
‘Mm,’ he would grunt, thrusting the letter into his breast pocket.
‘Read it if you want to. Don’t mind me.’
‘It’ll keep.’
I rejected the cheap comfort of supposing that their relationship wasn’t proceeding smoothly (though such a hypothesis was useful when the curtain went up on my nightly fantasies); I thought it was more likely that Mike was still brooding on Percy.
During the first week of the Clerks’ Course we were both called to give evidence at the regimental inquiry into Percy’s death. Mike suggested that we should try now to shift attention to Baker’s responsibility, but, although I vaguely agreed, I stuck to the same story I had given the Coroner’s Court. It seemed to me that it would be dangerous to do otherwise. Mike emerged baffled and irritable from his session with the inquiry; I gathered that all his attempts to steer the discussion away from the particular circumstances of Percy’s death, and on to Baker’s general behaviour towards Percy, had been sharply checked as irrelevant. He regarded the whole inquiry as a put-up job aimed at saving the Army’s face. No doubt this was true, but only, I think, on a subconscious level. No doubt the officers concerned were pre-disposed in Baker’s favour, but only because of sheer ignorance of the possible effects of Basic Training on a sensibility like Percy’s. At any rate, Baker was charged as a result of the inquiry.
