Dear Illusion Read online

  ‘Well, your boy Cleaver doesn’t impress me all that much, Bill,’ Thurston, who hated the Adjutant, said to him. ‘The only time we’ve tried him on duty he flapped.’

  ‘Just inexperience, Tom,’ the Adjutant said. ‘He’d soon snap out of that if we gave him command of the section. Sergeant Beech would carry him until he found his feet.’

  ‘Mm, I’d like to see that, I must say. The line duty-officer getting his sergeant out of bed to hold his hand while he changes a valve.’

  ‘Now look here, old boy.’ The Adjutant levered a piece of meat out from between two teeth and ate it. ‘You know as well as I do that young Cleaver’s got the best technical qualifications of anyone in the whole unit. It’s not his fault he’s been stuck on office work ever since he came to us. There’s a fellow that’d smarten up that bunch of goons and long-haired bloody mathematical wizards they call a line-maintenance section. As it is, the NCOs don’t chase the blokes and Dally isn’t interested in chasing the NCOs. Isn’t interested in anything but his bloody circuit diagrams and test-frames and what-have-you.’

  To cover his irritation, Thurston summoned the Mess corporal, who stood by the wall in a posture that compromised between that of an attendant waiter and the regulation stand-at-ease position. The Adjutant had schooled him in Mess procedure, though not in Mess etiquette. ‘Gin and lime, please, Gordon . . . Just as well in a way he is interested in line apparatus, isn’t it, Bill? We’d have looked pretty silly without him during the move out of Normandy and across France. He worked as hard as any two of the rest of us. And as well.’

  ‘He got his bouquet from the Colonel, didn’t he? I don’t grudge him that, I admit he did good work then. Not as good as some of his chaps, probably, but still, he served his turn. Yes, that’s exactly it, Tom, he’s served his—’

  ‘According to Major Rylands he was the linchpin of the whole issue,’ Thurston said, lighting a cigarette with fingers that were starting to tremble. ‘And I’m prepared to take his word for it. The war isn’t over yet, you know. Christ knows what may happen in the spring. If Dally isn’t around to hold the line-maintenance end up for Rylands, the whole unit might end up in the shit with the Staff jumping on its back. Cleaver might be all right, I agree. We just can’t afford to take the risk.’

  This was an unusually long speech for anyone below the rank of major to make in the Adjutant’s presence. Temporarily gagged by a mouthful of stew, that officer was eating as fast as he could and shaking his forefinger to indicate that he would as soon as possible propose some decisive amendment to what he had just been told. With his other hand he scratched the crown of his glossy black head, looking momentarily like a tick-tack man working through his lunch-break. He said indistinctly: ‘You’re on to the crux of the whole thing, old boy. Rylands is the root of all the trouble. Bad example at the top, do you see?’ Swallowing, he went on: ‘If the second-in-command goes round looking like a shithouse detail and calling the blokes by their Christian names, what can you expect? You can’t get away from it, familiarity breeds contempt. Trouble with him is he thinks he’s still working in the Post Office.’

  A hot foam of anger seemed to fizz up in Thurston’s chest. ‘Major Rylands is the only field officer in this entire unit who knows his job. It is due to him and Dally, plus Sergeant Beech and the lineman-mechs, that our line communications have worked so smoothly during this campaign. To them and to no one else. If they can go on doing that they can walk about with bare arses for all I care.’

  The Adjutant frowned at Thurston. After running his tongue round his upper teeth, he said: ‘You seem to forget, Tom, that I’m responsible for the discipline of officers in this unit.’ He paused to let the other reflect on the personal implications of this, then nodded to where Corporal Gordon was approaching with Thurston’s drink.

  As he signed the chit, Thurston was thinking that Gordon had probably been listening to the conversation from the passage. If so, he would probably discuss it with Hill, the Colonel’s batman, who would probably report it to his master. It was often said, especially by Lieutenant Dalessio, the ‘Dally’ now under discussion, that the Colonel’s chief contact with his unit was through the rumours and allegations Hill and, to a less extent, the Adjutant took to him. A tweak of disquiet made Thurston drink deeply and resolve to say no more for a bit.

  The Adjutant was brushing crumbs off his battledress, which was of the greenish hue current in the Canadian Army. This little affectation, like the gamboge gloves and the bamboo walkingstick, perhaps suited a man who had helped to advertise men’s clothes in civilian life. He went on to say in his rapid quacking monotone: ‘I’d advise you, Tom, not to stick your neck out too far in supporting a man who’s going to be out of this unit on his ear before very long.’

  ‘Rylands, you mean?’

  ‘No no no. Unfortunately not. But Dally’s going.’

  ‘That’s gen, is it?’

  ‘Not yet, but it will be.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  The Adjutant looked up in Gordon’s direction, then leaned forward across the table to Thurston. ‘It only needs one more thing,’ he said quietly, ‘to turn the scale. The CO’s been watching Dally for some time, on my suggestion. I know the old man pretty well, as you know, after being in his Company for three years at North Midland Command. He’s waiting to make up his mind, do you see? If Dally puts up a black in the near future – a real black – that’ll be enough for the CO. Cleaver’ll get his chance at last.’

  ‘Suppose Dally doesn’t put up a black?’

  ‘He will.’

  ‘He hasn’t yet, you know. The terminal equipment’s all on the top line, and Dally knows it inside out.’

  ‘I’m not talking about that kind of a black. I’m talking about the administrative and disciplinary side. Those vehicles of his are in a shocking condition. I thought of working a snap 406 inspection on one of them, but that wouldn’t look too good. Too much like discrimination. But there’ll be something. Just give me time.’

  Thurston thought of saying that those vehicles, though covered with months-old mud and otherwise offensive to the inspecting eye, were in good running order, thanks to the efficiency of the section’s transport corporal. Instead, he let his mind wander back to one of the many stories of the Colonel’s spell as a company commander in England. Three weeks running he had presented his weekly prize of £1 for the smartest vehicle to the driver of an obsolete wireless-truck immobilized for lack of spare parts. The Company Sergeant-Major had won a bet about it.

  ‘We’ll have some fun then, Tom old boy,’ the Adjutant was saying in as festive a tone as his voice allowed. He was unaware that Thurston disliked him. His own feelings towards Thurston were a mixture of respect and patronage: respect for Thurston’s Oxford degree and accent, job at a minor public school, and efficiency as a non-technical officer; patronage for his practice of reading literary magazines and for his vaguely scholarly manner and appearance. The affinity between Thurston’s unmilitary look and the more frankly ragamuffin demeanour of Dalessio could hardly explain, the Adjutant wonderingly felt, the otherwise unaccountable tendency of the one to defend the other. It was true that they’d known each other at the officers’ training unit at Catterick, but what could that have to do with it? The Adjutant was unaccustomed to having his opinions contested and he now voiced the slight bafflement that had been growing on him for the last few minutes. ‘It rather beats me,’ he said, ‘why you’re taking this line about friend Dally. You’re not at all thick with him. In fact he seems to needle you whenever he speaks to you. My impression is, old boy, for what it’s worth, you’ve got no bloody use for him at all. And yet you stick up for him. Why?’

  Thurston amazed him by saying coldly: ‘I don’t see why the fact that a man’s an Italian should be held against him when he does his job as well as anyone in the sodding Army.’

  ‘Just a minute, Tom,’ the Adjutant said, taking a cigarette from his silver case, given him by his mistress in
Brussels. ‘That’s being a bit unfair, you know. You ever heard me say a word about Dalessio being an Eyeteye? Never. You were the one who brought it up. It makes no difference to me if a fellow’s father’s been interned, provided—’

  ‘Uncle.’

  ‘All right, uncle, then. As I say, that’s no affair of mine. Presumably he’s okay from that point of view or he’d never have got here. And that’s all there is to it as far as I’m concerned. I’m not holding it against him, not for a moment. I don’t quite know where you picked up that impression, old boy.’

  Thurston shook his head, blushing slightly. ‘Sorry, Bill,’ he said. ‘I must have got it mixed. It used to get on my wick at Catterick, the way some of the blokes took it out of him about his pal Musso and so on. I suppose it must be through that somehow, in a way, I keep feeling people have got it in for him on that score. Sorry.’ He was not sorry. He knew quite certainly that his charge was well-founded, and that the other’s silence about Dalessio’s descent was a matter of circumspection only. If anyone in the Mess admired Mussolini, Thurston suspected, it was the Adjutant, although he kept quiet about that as well. It was tempting to dig at his prejudices on these and other questions, but Thurston did his best never to succumb to that temptation. The Adjutant’s displeasure was always strongly urged and sometimes, rumour said, followed up by retaliatory persecution. Enough, dangerously much, had already been said in Dalessio’s defence.

  The Adjutant’s manner had grown genial again and, with a muttered apology, he now offered Thurston a cigarette. ‘What about another of those?’ he asked, pointing his head at Thurston’s glass.

  ‘Thank you, I will, but I must be off in a minute. We’re opening that teleprinter to the Poles at twenty-hundred and I want to see it’s working.’

  Two more officers now entered the Mess dining-room. They were Captain Bentham, a forty-year-old Regular soldier who had been a company sergeant-major in India at the outbreak of war, and Captain Rowney, who besides being in charge of the unit’s administration was also the Mess’s catering officer. Rowney nodded to Thurston and grinned at the Adjutant, whose Canadian battle-dress he had been responsible for securing. He himself was wearing a sheepskin jacket, made on the Belgian black market. ‘Hallo, William,’ he said. ‘Won the war yet?’ Although he was a great chum of the Adjutant’s, some of his remarks to him, Thurston had noticed, carried a curious vein of satire. Bentham sat stolidly down a couple of places along the table, running his hands over his thin grey hair.

  ‘Tom and I have been doing a little plotting,’ the Adjutant said. ‘We’ve decided a certain officer’s career with this unit needs terminating.’

  Bentham glanced up casually and caught Thurston’s eye. This, coming on top of the Adjutant’s misrepresentation of the recent discussion, made Thurston feel slightly uncomfortable. That was ludicrous, because he had long ago written Bentham off as of no particular account, as the most uninteresting type of Regular Army ex-ranker, good only at cable-laying, supervising cable-laying and looking after the men who did the actual cable-laying. Despite this, Thurston found himself saying: ‘It wasn’t quite like that’, but at that moment Rowney asked the Adjutant a question and the protest, mild as it was, went unheard.

  ‘Your friend Dally, of course,’ the Adjutant answered Rowney.

  ‘Why, what’s he been up to?’ Bentham asked in his slow York-shire voice. ‘Having his hair cut?’

  There was a general laugh, then a token silence while Gordon laid plates of stew in front of the new arrivals. His inquiry whether the Adjutant wanted any rice pudding was met with a facetious and impracticable instruction for the disposal of that foodstuff by an often-quoted route. ‘Can’t you do better than that, Jack?’ the Adjutant asked Rowney. ‘Third night we’ve had Chinese wedding-cake this week.’

  ‘Sorry, William. My Belgian friend’s had a little misunderstanding with the civvy police. I’m still looking round for another pal with the right views on how the officers of a liberating army should be fed. Just possess your soul in patience.’

  ‘What’s this about Dally?’ Bentham persisted. ‘If there’s a move to give him a wash and a change of clothes, count me in.’

  Thurston got up before the topic could be reopened. ‘By the way, Jack,’ he said to Rowney, ‘young Malone asked me to remind you that he still hasn’t had those cigarettes for the blokes he’s lent to Special Wireless.’

  Rowney sighed. ‘Tell him it’s not my pigeon, will you, Thomas? I’ve been into it all with him. They’re under Special Wireless for everything now.’

  ‘Not NAAFI rations. He told me you’d agreed to supply them.’

  ‘Up until last week. They’re off my hands now.’

  ‘Oh no they’re not,’ Thurston said nastily. ‘According to Malone they still haven’t had last week’s.’

  ‘Well, tell him . . .’

  ‘Look, Jack, you tell him. It’s nothing to do with me, is it?’

  Rowney stared at him. ‘All right, Thomas,’ he said, abruptly diving his fork into his stew. ‘I’ll tell him.’

  Dodging the hanging lamp-shade, which at its lowest point was no more than five feet from the floor, Thurston hurried out, his greatcoat over his arm.

  ‘What’s eating our intellectual friend?’ Rowney asked.

  The Adjutant rubbed his blue chin. ‘Don’t know quite. He was behaving rather oddly before you blokes came in. He’s getting too sort of wrapped up in himself. Needs shaking up.’ He was just deciding, having previously decided against it, to inflict some small but salutary injustice on Thurston through the medium of unit orders. He might compel the various sections to start handing in their various stores records for check, beginning with Thurston’s section and stopping after it. Nice, but perhaps a bit too drastic. What about pinching his jeep for some tiresome extra duty? That might be just the thing.

  ‘If you ask me,’ Bentham was saying, ‘he’s too bloody stuck-up by half. Wants a lesson of some kind, he does.’

  ‘You’re going too far there, Ben,’ the Adjutant said decisively. He disliked having Bentham in the Officers’ Mess, declaring its tone to be thereby lowered, and often said he thought the old boy would be much happier back in the Sergeants’ Mess with people of his own type. ‘Tom Thurston’s about the only chap round here you can carry on a reasonably intelligent discussion with.’

  Bentham, unabashed, broke off a piece of bread and ran it round his plate in a way that Thurston and the Adjutant were, unknown to each other, united in finding unpleasant. ‘What’s all this about a plot about Dally?’ he asked.

  II

  ‘You got that, Reg?’ Dalessio asked. ‘If you get any more interference on this circuit, put it back on plain speech straight away. Then they can see how they like that. I don’t believe for a bloody moment the line’s been relaid for a single bastard yard. Still, it’s being ceased in a week or two, and it never was of the slightest importance, so there’s no real worry. Now, what about the gallant Poles?’ He spoke with a strong Glamorganshire accent diversified by an occasional Italian vowel.

  ‘They’re still on here,’ Reg, the lineman-mechanic, said, gesturing towards the test teleprinter. ‘Want to see ’em?’

  ‘Yes, please. It’s nearly time to switch ’em through to the teleprinter room. We’ll get that done before I go.’

  Reg bent to the keyboard of the machine and typed:

  HOW U GETTING ON THERE READING ME OK KKKK

  There was a humming pause while Reg scratched his armpit and said: ‘Gone for a piss, I expect . . . Ah, here he is.’ In typical but inextinguishably eerie fashion the teleprinter took on a life of its own, performed a carriage-return, moved the glossy white paper up a couple of lines, and typed:

  4 CHRISTS SAKE QUIT BOTHERING ME NOT 2000 HRS YET KKK

  Dalessio, grinning to himself, shoved Reg out of the way and typed:

  CHIEF SIGNAL OFFICER BRITISH LIBERATION ARMY ERE WATCH YR LANGUAGE MY MAN KKKK

  The distant operator typed:

&nb
sp; U GO AND SCREW YRSELF JACK SORRY I MEAN SIR

  At this Dalessio went into roars of laughter, digging his knuckle into one deep eye-socket and throwing back his large dark head. It was exactly the kind of joke he liked best. He rotated a little in the narrow aisle between the banks of apparatus and test-panels, still laughing, while Reg watched him with a slight smile. At last Dalessio recovered and shouldered his way down to the phone at the other end of the vehicle.

  ‘Give me the teleprinter room, please. What? Who? All right, I’ll speak to him . . . Terminal Equipment, Dalessio here. Yes. Oh, really? It hasn’t?’ His voice changed completely, became that of a slightly unbalanced uncle commiserating with a disappointed child: ‘Now isn’t that just too bad? Well, I do think that’s hard lines. Just when you were all excited about it, too, eh?’ Over his shoulder he squealed to Reg, in soprano parody of Thurston’s educated tones: ‘Captain Thurston is tewwibly gwieved that he hasn’t got his pwinter to the Poles yet. He’s afwaid we’ve got some howwid scheme on over heah to depwive him of it . . . All right, Thurston, I’ll come over. Yes, now.’

  Reg smiled again and put a cigarette in his mouth, striking the match, from long habit, on the metal ‘No Smoking’ notice tacked up over the ventilator.

  ‘Give me one of those, Reg, I want to cool my nerves before I go into the beauty-parlour across the way. Thanks. Now listen: switch the Poles through to the teleprinter room at one minute to eight exactly, so that there’s working communication at eight but not before. Do Thurston good to bite his nails for a few minutes. Put it through on number . . .’ – his glance and forefinger went momentarily to a test-frame across the aisle – ‘number six. That’s just been rewired. Ring up Teleprinters and tell ’em, will you? See you before I go off.’