Dear Illusion: Collected Stories Read online

  It was dark and cold outside and Dalessio shivered on his way over to the Signal Office. He tripped up on the cable which ran shin-high between a line of blue-and-white posts outside the entrance, and applied an unclean expression to the Adjutant, who had had this amenity provided in an attempt to dignify the working area. Inside the crowded, brilliantly lighted Office, he was half-asphyxiated by the smoke from the stove and half-deafened by the thumping of date-stamps, the ringing of telephones, the enraged bark of one sergeant and the loud, tremulous singing of the other. A red-headed man was rushing about bawling ‘Emergency Ops for 17 Corps’ in the accents of County Cork. Nobody took any notice of him: they had all dealt with far too many Emergency Ops messages in the last eight months.

  Thurston was in his office, a small room partitioned off from the main one. The unit was occupying what had once been a Belgian military school and later an SS training establishment. This building had obviously formed part of the original barrack area, and Thurston often wondered what whim of the Adjutant’s had located the offices and stores down here and the men’s living-quarters in former offices and stores. The cubicle where Thurston spent so much of his time had no doubt been the abode of the cadet, and then Unteroffizier, in charge of the barrack-room. He was fond of imagining the heavily built Walloons and high-cheeked Prussians who had slept in here, and had insisted on preserving as a historical document the chalked Wir kommen zurück on the plank wall. Like his predecessors, he fancied, he felt cut off from all the life going on just outside the partition, somehow isolated. ‘Alone, withouten any company,’ he used to quote to himself. He would laugh then, sometimes, and go on to think of the unique lavatory at the far end of the building, where the defecator was required to plant his feet on two metal plates, grasp two handles, and curve his body into the shape of a bow over a kind of trough.

  He was not laughing now. His phone conversation with Dalessio had convinced him, even more thoroughly than phone conversations with Dalessio commonly did, that the other despised him for his lack of technical knowledge and took advantage of it to irritate and humiliate him. He tried to reread a letter from one of the two married women in England with whom, besides his wife, he was corresponding, but the thought of seeing Dalessio still troubled him.

  Actually seeing Dalessio troubled him even more. Not for the first time it occurred to him that Dalessio’s long, matted hair, grease-spotted, cylindrical trouser-legs and ill-fitting battledress blouse were designed as an offensive burlesque of his own neat but irremediably civilian appearance. He was smoking, too, and Thurston himself was punctilious in observing inside his office the rule that prohibited smoking on duty until ten at night, but it was no use telling him to put it out. Dalessio, he felt, never obeyed orders unless it suited him. ‘Hallo, Thurston,’ he said amiably. ‘Not still having a baby about the Poles, I hope?’

  ‘I don’t think I ever was, was I? I just wanted to make sure what the position was.’

  ‘Oh, you wanted to make sure of that, did you? All right, then. It’s quite simple. Physically, the circuit remains unchanged, of course. But, as you know, we have ways of providing extra circuits by means of electrical apparatus, notably by utilizing the electron-radiating properties of the thermionic valve, or vacuum-tube. If a signal is applied to the grid . . .’

  Thurston’s phone rang and he picked it up gratefully. ‘Signalmaster?’ said the voice of Brigadier the Lord Fawcett, the largest and sharpest thorn in the side of the entire Signals unit. ‘I want a special dispatch-rider to go to Brussels for me. Will you send him round to my Office for briefing in ten minutes?’

  Thurston considered. Apart from its being over a hundred miles to Brussels, he suspected that the story told by previous special DRs who had been given this job was probably quite true: the purpose of the trip was to take in the Brigadier’s soiled laundry and bring back the clean stuff, plus any wines, spirits and cigars that the Brigadier’s Brussels agent, an RASC colonel at the headquarters of the reserve Army Corps, might have got together for him. But he could hardly ask the Lord Fawcett to confirm this. Why was it that his army career seemed littered with such problems? ‘The regular DR run goes out at oh-five-hundred, sir,’ he said in a conciliatory tone. ‘Would that do instead, perhaps?’

  ‘No, it certainly would not do instead. You have a man available, I take it?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir.’ This was true. It was also true that the departure of this man with the dirty washing would necessitate another, who might have been driving all day, being got out of the section billet and condemned at best to a night on the Signal Office floor, more likely to a run half across Belgium in the small hours with a genuine message of some kind. ‘Yes, we have a man.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid in that case I don’t see your difficulty. Get him round to me right away, will you?’

  ‘Very good, sir.’ There was never anything one could do.

  ‘Who was that?’ Dalessio asked when Thurston had rung off.

  ‘Brigadier Fawcett,’ Thurston said unguardedly. But Dally probably didn’t know about the laundry rumour. He had little to do with the dispatch-rider sections.

  ‘Oh, the washerwoman’s friend. I heard a bit about that from Beech. Not on the old game again, is he? Sounded as if he wanted a special DR to me.’

  ‘Yes, he did.’ Thurston raised his voice: ‘Prosser!’

  ‘Sir!’ came from outside the partition.

  ‘Ask Sergeant Baker to come and see me, will you?’

  ‘Sir.’

  Dalessio’s large pale face became serious. He pulled at his moustache. Eventually he said: ‘You’re letting him have one, are you?’ If asked his opinion of Thurston, he would have described him as a plausible bastard. His acquiescence in such matters as this, Dalessio would have added, was bloody typical.

  ‘I can’t do anything else.’

  ‘I would. There’s nothing to it. Get God’s Adjutant on the blower and complain. He’s an ignorant bugger, we know, but I bet he’d take this up.’

  Thurston had tried this, only to be informed at length that the job of Signals was to give service to the Staff. Before he could tell Dalessio about it, Baker, the DR sergeant, arrived to be acquainted with the Lord Fawcett’s desires. Thurston thought he detected a glance of protest and commiseration pass between the other two men. When Baker had gone, he turned on Dalessio almost savagely and said: ‘Now look, Dally, leaving aside the properties of the thermionic bleeding valve, would you kindly put me in the picture about this teleprinter to the Poles? Is it working or isn’t it? Quite a bit of stuff has piled up for them and I’ve been holding it in the hope the line’ll be through on time.’

  ‘No harm in hoping,’ Dalessio said. ‘I hope it’ll be working all right, too.’ He dropped his fag-end on the swept floor and trod on it.

  ‘Is it working or is it not?’ Thurston asked very loudly. His eyes wandered up and down the other’s fat body, remembering how it had looked in a pair of shorts, doing physical training at the Officers’ training unit. It had proved incapable of the simplest tasks laid upon it, crumpling feebly in the forward-roll exercise, hanging like a crucified sack from the wall-bars, climbing by slow and ugly degrees over the vaulting-horse. Perhaps its owner had simply not felt like exerting it. That would have been bloody typical.

  While Dalessio smiled at him, a knock came at the plywood door Thurston had had made for his cubicle. In response to the latter’s bellow, the red-headed man came in. ‘Sergeant Fleming sent to tell you, sir,’ he said, ‘we’re just after getting them Polish fellows on the printer. You’ll be wanting me to start sending off the messages we have for them, will you, sir?’

  Both Thurston and Dalessio looked up at the travelling-clock that stood on a high shelf in the corner. It said eight o’clock.

  III

  ‘That’s just about all, gentlemen,’ the Colonel said. ‘Except for one last point. Now that our difficulties from the point of view of communication have been removed, and the whole show’s going
quite smoothly, there are other aspects of our work which need attention. This unit has certain traditions I want kept up. One of them, of course, is an absolutely hundred-per-cent degree of efficiency in all matters affecting the disposal of Signals traffic, from the time the In-Clerk signs for a message from the Staff to the time we get . . .’

  He means the Out-Clerk, Thurston thought to himself. The little room where the officers, warrant-officers and senior NCOs of the unit held their conferences was unheated, and the Colonel was wearing his knee-length sheepskin coat, another piece of merchandise supplied through the good offices of Jack Rowney in exchange, perhaps, for a few gallons of petrol or a couple of hundred cigarettes; Malone’s men’s cigarettes, probably. The coat, added to the CO’s platinum-blond hair and moustache, increased his resemblance to a polar bear. Thurston was in a good mood, having just received the letter which finally buttoned up arrangements for his forthcoming leave: four days with Denise in Oxford, and then a nice little run up to Town for five days with Margot. Just the job. He began composing a nature note on the polar bear: ‘This animal, although of poor intelligence, possesses considerable cunning of a low order. It displays the utmost ferocity when menaced in any way. It shows fantastic patience in pursuit of its prey, and a vindictiveness which . . .’

  The Colonel was talking now about another tradition of his unit, its almost unparalleled soldier-like quality, its demonstration of the verity that a Signals formation of any kind was not a collection of down-at-heel scientists and long-haired mathematical wizards. Thurston reflected it was not for nothing that the Adjutant so frequently described himself as the Colonel’s staff officer. Yes, there he was, Arctic fox or, if they had them, Arctic jackal, smiling in proprietary fashion at his chief’s oratory. What a bunch they all were. Most of the higher-ranking ones had been lower-ranking officers in the Territorial Army during the thirties, the Colonel, for instance, a captain, the Adjutant a second-lieutenant. The war had given them responsibility and quick promotion, and their continued enjoyment of such privileges rested not on their own abilities, but on those of people who had arrived in the unit by a different route: Post Office engineers whipped in with a commission, older Regular soldiers promoted from the ranks, officers who had been the conscripts of 1940 and 1941. Yes, what a bunch. Thurston remembered the parting words of a former sergeant of his who had been posted home a few months previously: ‘Now I’m going I suppose I can say what I shouldn’t. You never had a dog’s bloody chance in this lot unless you’d been at North Midland Command with the Adj. and the CO. And we all know it’s the same in that Mess of yours. If you’d been in the TA like them you were a blue-eyed boy, otherwise you were done for from the start. It’s all right, sir, everybody knows it. No need to deny it.’

  The exception to the rule, presumably, was Cleaver, now making what was no doubt a shorthand transcript of the Colonel’s harangue. Thurston hated him as the Adjutant’s blue-eyed boy and also for his silky fair hair, his Hitler Youth appearance and his thunderous laugh. His glance moved to Bentham, also busily writing. Bentham, too, fitted into the picture, as much as the Adjutant would let him, which was odd when compared with the attitude of other Regulars in the Mess. But Bentham had less individuality than they.

  ‘So what I propose,’ the Colonel said, ‘is this. Beginning next week the Adjutant and I will be making a series of snap inspections of section barrack-rooms. Now I don’t expect anything in the nature of spit-and-polish, of course. Just ordinary soldierly cleanliness and tidiness is all I want.’

  In other words, just ordinary spit-and-polish, Thurston thought, making a note for his sergeant on his pad just below the polar-bear vignette. He glanced up and saw Dalessio licking the flap of an envelope; it was his invariable practice to write letters during the Colonel’s addresses, when once the serious business of line-communications had been got through. Had he heard what had just been said? It was unlikely.

  The conference broke up soon afterwards and in the Mess ante-room, where a few officers had gathered for a drink before the evening meal, Thurston was confronted by an exuberant Adjutant who at once bought him a drink. ‘Well, Tom,’ he said, ‘I reckon that fixes things up nice and neat.’

  ‘I don’t follow you, Bill.’

  ‘Step number one in cooking your friend Dally’s goose. Step number two will be on Monday, oh-nine-thirty hours, when I take the Colonel round the line-maintenance billet. You know what we’ll find there, don’t you?’

  Thurston stared blankly at the Adjutant, whose eyes were sparkling like those of a child who has been promised a treat. ‘I still don’t get you, Bill.’

  ‘Use your loaf, Tommy. Dally’s blokes’ boudoir, can’t you imagine what it’ll be like? There’ll be dirt enough in there to raise a crop of potatoes, fag-ends and pee-buckets all over the shop and the rest of it. The Colonel will eat Dally for his lunch when he sees it.’

  ‘Dally’s got three days to get it cleaned up, though.’

  ‘He would have if he paid attention to what his Commanding Officer says. But I know bloody well he was writing a letter when that warning was given. Serves the bastard right, do you see? He’ll be off to the mysterious East before you can turn round.’

  ‘How much does the Colonel know about this?’

  ‘What I’ve told him.’

  ‘You don’t really think it’ll work, do you?’

  ‘I know the old man. You don’t, if you’ll excuse my saying so.’

  ‘It’s a lousy trick and you know it, Bill,’ Thurston said violently. ‘I think it’s completely bloody.’

  ‘Not at all. An officer who’s bolshie enough to ignore a CO’s order deserves all he gets,’ the Adjutant said, looking sententious. ‘Coming in?’

  Still fuming, Thurston allowed himself to be led into the dining-room. The massive green-tiled stove was working well and the room was warm and cheerful. The house had belonged to the commandant of the Belgian military school. Its solid furniture and tenebrous landscape pictures had survived German occupation, though there was a large burn in the carpet that had been imputed, perhaps rightly, to the festivities of the Schutz Staffel. Jack Rowney, by importing photographs of popular entertainers, half-naked young women and the Commander-in-Chief, had done his best to document the Colonel’s thesis that the Officers’ Mess was also their home. The Adjutant, in excellent spirits, his hand on Thurston’s shoulder, sent Corporal Gordon running for a bottle of burgundy. Then, before they sat down, he looked very closely at Thurston.

  ‘Oh, and by the way, old boy,’ he said, a note of menace intensifying the quack in his voice, ‘you wouldn’t think of tipping your friend Dally the wink about this little treat we’ve got lined up for him, would you? If you do, I’ll have your guts for garters.’ Laughing heartily, he dug Thurston in the ribs and added: ‘Your leave’s due at the end of the month, isn’t it? Better watch out you don’t make yourself indispensable here. We might not be able to let you go, do you see?’

  IV

  Early on Monday Thurston was walking up from the Signal Office towards the area where the men’s barrack-rooms were. He was going to find his batman and arrange to be driven some twenty miles to the department of the Advocate-General’s branch which handled divorce. The divorce in question was not his own, which would have to wait until after the war, but that of his section cook, whose wife had developed an immoderate fondness for RAF and USAAF personnel.

  Thurston was thinking less about the cook’s wife than about the fateful inspection, scheduled to take place any minute now. He realized he had timed things badly, but his trip had only just become possible and he hoped to be out of the area before the Colonel and the Adjutant finished their task. He was keen to do this because the sight of a triumphant Adjutant would be more than he could stand, especially since his conscience was very uneasy about the whole affair. There were all sorts of reasons why he should have tipped Dalessio off about the inspection. The worst of it was, as he had realized in bed last night, when it was too late to d
o anything about it, that his irritation with Dalessio over the matter of the Polish teleprinter had been a prime cause of his keeping his mouth shut. He remembered actually thinking more than once that a thorough shaking-up would do Dalessio no harm, and that perhaps the son of an Italian café-proprietor in Cascade, Glamorganshire, had certain disqualifications for the role of British regimental officer. He twisted up his face when he thought of this and started wondering just why it was that the Adjutant was persecuting Dalessio. Perhaps the latter’s original offence had been his habit of doing bird-warbles while the Adjutant and Rowney listened to broadcast performances of The Warsaw Concerto, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, and other sub-classics dear to their hearts. Cheeping, trilling and twittering, occasionally gargling like a seagull, Dalessio had been told to shut up or get out and had done neither.

  Thurston’s way took him past the door of the notorious line-maintenance billet. There seemed to be nobody about. Then he was startled by the sudden manifestation of two soldiers carrying brooms and a bucket. One of them had once been in his section and had been transferred early that year to one of the cable sections, he had forgotten which one. ‘Good-morning, Maclean,’ he said.

  The man addressed came sketchily to attention. ‘Morning, sir.’

  ‘Getting on all right in No. I Company?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir, I like it fine.’

  ‘Good. What are you fellows up to so early in the morning?’

  They looked at each other and the other man said: ‘Cleaning up, sir. Fatigue party, sir.’