Soldier No More

by Anthony Price

  Roche rounded the corner of the pitch and turned towards them at last, along the goal-line. But although he knew that they had seen him the moment he had appeared from behind the pavilion, they still took not the least bit of notice of him.

  “… ah, well you may have it your way, Major Willis, sir—“

  God! Another major!

  “—but I say it’s in good heart, and if we leave it alone it’ll be right enough with no more fussing, if we get a drop of rain.”

  “But will we get that, Mr Badger? You want to put your trust in God, and I say that God helps those who help themselves.” Major Willis bent down and examined the grass at his feet. “I don’t know … I don’t think it’s as vigorous as it ought to be for the time of year—“ he straightened up abruptly “—so let’s have a third opinion, eh?”

  “Eh?” The groundsman frowned at him, and then at Roche, since there was no other possible opinion in sight.

  The schoolmaster also turned towards Roche. He was a slightly-built man, with a ferrety look which reminded Roche of Field Marshal Montgomery.

  “Captain Roche, is it?” he inquired peremptorily.

  “Major … Willis?” And also the Field Marshal’s rather nasal voice. But not, judging by the smell of Scotch whisky, the Field Marshal’s celebrated abstinence, thereby confirming Stocker’s intelligence work. “My—ah—my colleague, Major Stocker, phoned you, I believe, sir.”

  “So he did—jolly good! Now then—“ Willis gestured to the great open expanse of playing field “—are you a sportsman? Of course you are, I don’t need to ask, do I!”

  Roche felt that he had been warned, yet insufficiently forewarned nevertheless.

  “So what d’you think of it, then? Am I right—or is Badger here right?”

  It was all just grass to Roche, and rather lush, if anything. “My game was hockey, actually.” It might be a risk, admitting that, but it was less risky than remaining on the subject of grass.

  “Hockey?” Willis frowned at him. “What club d’you play for?”

  None, at the moment. I haven’t played for some years—the last time I played was in Malaya, actually.”

  Willis nodded. “For the Army?”

  “Yes.” That was stretching the truth, but if sporting prowess was the way to Major Willis’s heart then so be it.

  Willis nodded again. “They’re rather good, aren’t they—the Malays?”

  Damn good,” said Roche heartily. “But it was a scratch game—we were on the way to Korea at the time. That was the main fixture just then.”

  Willis stared at him for a second. “Ah … yes, I see what you mean—the main fixture, what!” He nodded once more, and then turned to the groundsman. “Well, Mr Badger, we’ll let it wait until the weekend—right?”

  “If you say so, Major Willis, sir,” the groundsman nodded lugubriously, and stumped away down the goal line.

  “He knows he’s in the wrong—and he just doesn’t want to do the work—he knows damn well that I know it, too!” Willis shook his head at Mr Badger’s departing figure. “The trouble is, it’s no good knowing better than other people these days—I’ve been suffering from that all my life, and I ought to be used to it by now, I suppose …” He swung back to Roche in another of his abrupt Montgomeryesque movements. “Now then, Captain—what’s this ‘matter of national interest’ with which it is alleged I can help you, eh? Let’s have it straight, with no frills—identity card first— right?”

  Roche watched him scrutinise the identity card.

  “Seems okay. ‘David Roche’? Can I call you David?”

  “Yes, Major—“

  “And we’ll put a stop to that, for a start. Badger calls me ‘Major’ because he served in the same battalion with me for most of the war, and he knows it annoys me. He was an idle sergeant and I was an unpopular major, so we made a good pair, both civilians at heart… But you don’t have to ‘major’ me. The boys call me ‘Wimpy’ now, so you can do the same—right?”

  Right…” Or it would be right if he could get a word in edgeways. “Right, then! Suppose you tell me about this national interest of yours? But I should warn you—you’ll have to make a damn good case if you want me to help you. I’m not in a giving frame of mind these days, you know.”

  Roche looked at him questioningly. “I beg your pardon?”

  And so you should. Since Suez, my lad—when I was of a mind to go to the Canadian Embassy, or whatever they call it, and ask them if I could emigrate, except they would probably have told me they didn’t want old buffers like me…And then we came a cropper—et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos, as Virgil put it. So where was ‘the national interest’ when we invaded Egypt, then—eh?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with Suez—“

  “Naturally. Like when Field Marshal Haig said to the poor squaddie ‘Where did you start the war, my man?’ and the poor fellow replied ‘Christ, sir—I didn’t start it!’ But is that a sufficient answer, I ask you? So where is the national interest now, Captain Roche?”

  The plain white envelope in Roche’s breast-pocket began to make its weight felt.

  “Only in the last resort,” Stocker had advised him. “Use it if he positively won’t talk. Fred Clinton doesn’t want it used, but you’ll have to exercise your best judgement there.”

  “Well—spit it out, man! Don’t just stand there,” Willis exhorted him.

  “Yes, sir—“ Roche floundered.

  “ ‘Wimpy’. You call a man ‘sir’—or ‘Major Willis’, for that matter—and you’re halfway to making an issue of it. But if you call him ‘Jack’, or ‘Harry’, or ‘Wimpy’, then you can get away with insulting him to his face,” said Willis, of a sudden half-conciliatory, almost friendly. “Don’t be put off by my bark—it’s only a concealment for a total lack of bite, dear boy. I talk too much, that’s my trouble. It’s part natural—the way I’m put together—and part guilt-complex that there are still young fellows like you, having to look to the ‘national interest’ a dozen years after we won the war, which we’d never have had to fight in the first place if we’d stood up for what was right and in the national interest—audiet pugnas vitio parentum, rara iuventus … but I don’t suppose you’ve had time to study the Classics—‘how they fought shall be passed on to a younger generation smaller because of their parents’ crimes’—the context was different, but the sense is there, I’m sorry to have to admit…”

  Stocker had described him as being ‘mildly eccentric’, especially on the subjects of sport and the classics, and therefore unpredictable; but reputedly benevolent after his lunch time sessions—out of term, naturally—with his cronies in the local pub; and a formidably good teacher, and a ladies’ man, but a bachelor—and, for God’s sake, what did all that add up to?

  “Well, David?” said Willis. “The national interest, then?”

  It added up at the moment to the reduction of David Roche almost to a tongue-tied Sixth Former with doubtful prospects in Higher Cert.

  “Yes … Well, I’m told you were one of the executors of the will of Major Nigel Alexander George Audley, Mr Willis—“

  Note i. Father, ed. Eton and Balliol College, Oxford; major, Prince Regent’s Own South Downs Fusiliers (T.A.), killed in action, France, May 1940.

  “—and Legal Guardian of David Longsdon Audley—“

  Audley, David Longsdon—

  Willis looked at him blankly for a moment. “What?”

  “You’re David Audley’s legal guardian?” repeated Roche.

  “I was, yes.” The schoolmaster emphasised the past tense.

  “You were a friend of his father’s?”

  Willis nodded. “Yes.”

  “And you taught the son—at his prep school?”

  Another nod. “Yes.”

  “And here at Immingham?”

  “Yes.”

  Roche waited in vain for something more than that third successive ‘yes’, until it became obvious that in spite of being self-confe
ssedly talkative Willis was now determined to be monosyllabic.

  “So you knew him quite well?”

  Willis bent down to examine the grass, probing it with his fingers as though he was looking for something. And so he was, of course, thought Roche. But it wasn’t in the grass.

  “Who?” Willis didn’t look up, though.

  “The son.”

  Willis straightened up slowly. “Why do you want to know?”

  “The national interest, Major.”

  Willis faced him. “I told you, I don’t like being called ‘Major’—and particularly at this precise moment, I think.”

  “Why not—at this precise moment particularly?”

  “Because I suspect it’s to remind me that I once held the King’s Commission—‘Right trusty and well-beloved’, and all the rest, Captain.”

  The envelope would be required. Stocker had known that all along.

  “Don’t think that I’ve forgotten that allegiance,” said Willis. “It’s simply that there are other allegiances—like that of a legal guardian, for example. And a teacher’s too … ‘in loco parentis’ covers both—‘in the place of a parent’, if you have no Latin, Captain.” Willis paused. “How would you say ‘in the national interest’ relates to ‘in loco parentis’, morally speaking?”

  Roche waited. The briefly monosyllabic Willis had been a little unnerving, but now that the man had started to talk again he could afford to wait. “I concede the classical precedents. It would have presented no problem to a Roman father, and certainly not to a Spartan one … But nowadays they encourage children to inform on their parents behind the Iron Curtain, and we regard that as an attribute of barbarism. And I don’t see why the boot shouldn’t be on the other foot as well, in all honesty.”

  The whole drift of Willis’s soliloquy was fascinating, in that he’d taken it for granted Audley was the subject of a security investigation of some kind. But what was surprising was that Willis himself didn’t seem in the least surprised.

  “What makes you think I want you to ‘inform’ on him, as you put it?” he inquired innocently.

  Now Willis did seem a touch surprised. “My dear fellow, I can’t imagine you want me to ‘inform’ on his father! Apart from the fact that Nigel’s been dead these sixteen—seventeen—years, I hardly think his … gentlemanly activities, such as they were—his gathering of rosebuds—were ever likely to be of the slightest national interest, or of any other sort of interest, except perhaps sociological, as a footnote to the 1930s. So that only leaves young David, and you clearly wish me to ‘inform’ on him—even so unworldly a person as myself can see that!”

  But—“

  Willis raised a hand. “And I must tell you that on mature consideration I don’t think I will, and for two reasons … Of which the first is that I doubt that I have anything of the slightest importance to impart, since I haven’t clapped eyes on him for several years, and we correspond but rarely with each other … And the second, and to my mind much stronger reason, is that… as his former guardian and teacher, not to mention the friend and brother-officer of his father … I’m not prepared to sneak on him— certainly not without a very much better reason than anything so vague as ‘the national interest’. Indeed—whose ‘national interest’? Not that of those who conceived the Suez landings of last year as also being ‘in the national interest’, I can tell you!”

  Roche nodded deprecatingly. “I do take your point, sir—“ he could no more bring himself to call the man ‘Wimpy’ than he could have called the terrifying Johnnie ‘Genghis Khan’ to his face “—but I don’t think you quite understand why I’m here … why we need your help, that is …”

  “Indeed?” Willis regarded him with an expression of polite but absolute Misbelief.

  “We want David Audley to help us,” said Roche.

  “ ‘With your inquiries’?” murmured Willis. “Isn’t that the phrase: ‘A man is helping the police with their inquiries’? But I do understand that, my dear fellow. I understand it perfectly. And nothing you say is going to stop me understanding it.”

  Roche took the envelope out of his inside breast-pocket and handed it to Willis.

  “What’s this, then?” Willis looked at the blank envelope suspiciously.

  “It’s for you, sir.”

  “It’s not addressed to me. It’s not addressed to anyone!”

  “It’s for you, sir, nevertheless,” insisted Roche, aware that he was quite as curious about the contents as Willis must be.

  He watched the schoolmaster take a spectacle-case from his pocket and perch a pair of gold-rimmed half-glasses on his nose, and then make a nervous hash of splitting the stiff white paper, which was definitely not Government-issue.

  The single sheet of paper inside matched the thickness of the envelope: it was slightly curved from its carriage inside Roche’s breast-pocket, but not crumpled, and it gave a dry parchment-like crackle as Willis opened it.

  Handwriting, that was all Roche could make out.

  “Good God!” exclaimed Willis. “Good God!”

  It was going to work, whatever it was, thought Roche. Everyone had a key to them somewhere, and Clinton had obtained Willis’s somehow.

  “Well I never!” murmured Willis. “Good God!”

  It was a pity that Audley’s key wasn’t so readily available. But, for a guess, Audley didn’t have a simple key, but more likely a combination of numbers; and one or more of those numbers was apparently locked up in Willis’s head—and some more numbers might be locked up in some numbered account in Zurich or Beirut as well. But this was a start, and he ought to be grateful for that. Because only in opening up Audley could he gain access to sufficient funds with which to bargain for his own freedom, and be shot of the lot of them.

  But Willis had read his letter, and was now looking at him with a new expression in his eyes. “You work for him—that foxy beggar?”

  Clinton’s features broke through the mists in Roche’s mind—the high colour, which had nothing to do with blood pressure but only with blood, and the sharp features, sharper even than Willis’s ferrety-Montgomery look—foxy would do very well for them, even though the hairline had receded back and down to reveal the freckled skin stretched tight over the skull, leaving only a tide-mark of that once-red hair above the ears. No beauty now, Clinton … and the foxy look was inside now, radiated rather than apparent.

  But Clinton, for sure—

  “I’m very much inclined to agree with you, Oliver. Audley is a tricky blighter. And, what is more germane to our present problem, there was an attempt made to recruit him again shortly after he came down from Cambridge. And it failed abysmally—it was bungled, wouldn’t you say, Fred?”

  “It was none of my doing.” Clinton pointed his muzzle at Roche. “This time we must know what we are about, Roche—“

  “The hair’s all gone now,” said Roche carefully.

  “It has?” Willis flicked a glance at him, and then returned to the far distance. “That’ll be the effect of the sweat, I shouldn’t wonder … I’ve seen the same thing with some of our old boys, coming back for Reunion Night—crowning glories smooth as billiard balls—yes! And what is he now—a full general? He was just Major Clinton then—‘Freddie’ to his betters … or his elders, anyway, if not his betters …”

  Another major. The whole world was full of majors today: majors gone up, like Clinton; majors in the balance, like Stocker; majors long dead, like Nigel Audley, cheated of his destiny; and majors ossified in wartime memories, like this little schoolmaster before him. And even one other potential major too!

  And yet … once upon a time this garrulous schoolmaster had crossed Clinton’s path, which neither he nor Clinton had forgotten; though there was nothing remarkable in that, any of it, for Clinton must have made a lot of men sweat over the years, and he hadn’t finished yet.

  “He’s not a general…”He left the end of the statement open, as though there was more to come.

  “Do
esn’t matter. I’ll bet he tells the generals what to do! He wasn’t above telling ‘em a thing or two when—“ Willis stopped suddenly, cocking his head knowingly at Roche “—but that’s another story … It’s a small world, though—a small world … All those years ago, and now this— out of the blue—a damn small world!”

  He lifted the paper, but didn’t offer it to Roche. Instead he fumbled in his pocket, producing first a pipe, which he stuck between his teeth, and then a gunmetal lighter.

  “And he’s still foxy, too,” he muttered, snapping the lighter and applying the flame to the edge of the letter. When it was well alight he looked up at Roche, the twist of a smile lifting the opposite corner of his mouth to that which held the pipe. “Instructions!”

  Roche watched the flames consume the paper right down to the last finger-hold, which the schoolmaster abandoned just in time. The charred remains floated to the ground, where they lay for a moment still in two complete and almost recognisable pieces; then the breeze shivered them, and lifted them, and finally broke them up, drifting them away across the field.

  Willis put his pipe back in his pocket. “Maybe I should be a little bit frightened, instead of merely obedient—and very grateful he didn’t order me to chew it up and swallow it instead. It would have been most uncommonly indigestible.”

  Whatever there had been between them, it was wind-blown ashes now, and all that could be recovered from it was whether or not it had served its purpose, decided Roche philosophically. It would have been nice to know more, but it didn’t really matter apart from that.

  Willis looked at him again. “Very well, then—I think your last meaningful question was ‘Did I know David Audley quite well?’ And the answer to that is ‘Yes, as well as anyone did, and probably better than most’—and certainly a lot better than Nigel Audley ever did, although that’s not saying much, in all conscience—so, yes is the answer to that one, David Roche.”

  So the paper had been the right key, and doubly the right key, if they were right about Audley—

  “This time we must know what we are about, Roche,” said Clinton. “Because some fool, whoever it was, went at it bald-headed last time, in ‘49—you’re right…” He nodded at Sir Eustace.