“Port! Port! Port!”
“Whose port?”
“The King’s port!”
Alistair grinned. “We are officer material.”
Duggan gave a wire-thin smile and used the hot end of his cigarette to trace the undulations of the plain. “Don’t you luh . . . loathe this vile place?”
Alistair puffed at his pipe. “It was a paradise before the Army took it over. Full of little hamlets bursting with cheerful cottages, every one of them with a roaring hot fire and a unicorn tethered outside.”
“Suh . . . sounds like Peckham.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
Duggan shivered. “In the suh . . . sense in which the human suh . . . soul is eternal, no one is actually from Peckham. Some of us are living there pro tempore, suh . . . so help us.”
“I’m north of the river. Camden.”
“Oh, the guh . . . glamour. And what did you do up there before you began doing whu . . . whatever the Army tells you?”
“I was a very junior conservator at the Tate. I made tea and reminded the night cleaners not to use Vim on the actual canvases.”
“One wonders how the nation will muh . . . manage without you.”
“Oh, and I suppose you were the archbishop of Canterbury?’
“I’m an actor. Oh, the stuh . . . stammer disappears on the stuh . . . stage.”
“And you signed up for this?”
“I was suh . . . sick of being Second muh . . . Murderer. And so here I am. Rehearsing to be the fuh . . . first.”
“And how are you finding it?”
“Costumes are rather drab but there aren’t many luh . . . lines to learn.”
“It’s the one show you hope will never make it to the West End.”
“Amen.”
Alistair tapped out his pipe on the side of his boot. “Miss London?”
Duggan shook his head. “I duh . . . didn’t get through the bathing-suit round.”
Alistair smiled. “I miss being allowed to mind my own business.”
“I muh . . . miss it too.”
“Are you married?”
Duggan held up his cigarette and let the wind whip the ash away. “You ruh . . . really are young, aren’t you?”
In the southwest the horizon was gone now, lost in a flat zinc mist. Above them the base of the cloud was dropping, black cords of rain dragging it down. As the weather closed, the men occupied a shrinking remainder of the plain between the grass and the falling sky. The company exchanged the blackly comic looks of men about to be engulfed by worse of the same.
The sergeant major blew his tin whistle. “MIST COMING IN! TAKE NOTE, YOU HOPELESS BASTARDS! TAKE NOTE!”
Duggan frowned. “Take note of whu . . . what exactly? Will that awful man never tire of being unhelpful?”
Alistair blew on his hands to warm them. “What do you suppose he thinks we should be doing?”
“About the mist? Well we can hardly shh . . . shoot it, can we? And yet they have issued us th . . . these.” Duggan flicked the barrel of his rifle with a fingernail, making the dead note of a stopped bicycle bell.
“Do you suppose he means we should put on more clothes?”
“I’m wuh . . . wearing everything they gave us. Aren’t you?”
“Should we eat something, then? To keep our energy up?”
“Did the suh . . . sergeant major order us to eat anything? I don’t think I could bear being bawled at again.”
“We could use our initiative.”
“Did he spuh . . . specifically order us to use our initiative?”
“I have some jam in my pack.’
Duggan threw him a look. “You’ve been lugging jam around? Isn’t the stuh . . . standard-issue suffering heavy enough for you?”
“I’ve been saving it for when I needed bucking up.”
Alistair opened his pack and fished out the Kilner jar of Tom’s blackberry jam. “There. I don’t suppose you’ve anything we could put it on?”
Duggan looked around. “You won’t luh . . . laugh?”
Alistair shook his head. Somewhere close, the sergeant major was yelling again, the words snatched and broken in the wind.
Duggan said, “I have some biscuits my duh . . . dear mother baked.”
He took them carefully from his pack, wrapped in a blue linen tea towel and tied with parcel string.
Now with a silent rush the mist washed over the company and the plain vanished entirely. Nothing was visible outside the tight globe each man crouched in. They sprawled on their packs, smoking and talking in low tired voices, answering the encircling grayness with the blank orbs of their eyes.
Alistair’s thoughts stalled. After a fortnight of this sour cold and this enervating wind and this incessant sergeant major, his fatigue ran so deep that only the sight of the wide plain had convinced him of his own residual magnitude. Now he felt snuffed and extinguished. He blew on his hands and waited for the whistle to sound and an order to be given that would invest him once more with purpose.
Duggan was working at the knot that tied the biscuits in their blue cloth. His fingers stopped as the light gained a darker inflection. Two boots sank into the mud between Alistair and Duggan. The two men looked up.
“OH, WELL ISN’T THIS DELIGHTFUL! THESE TWO LONDON GENTLEMEN HAVE COME TO THE COUNTRYSIDE FOR A PICNIC!”
Gray forms converged in the mist. They turned into men Alistair recognized, their faces variously animated by apologetic solidarity or leering glee. He stood. Duggan drew himself up more slowly, first placing his parcel carefully on top of his pack.
“SATISFIED, DUGGAN?”
Duggan nodded. “Yes, Suh . . . Sergeant Major.”
“THAT PARCEL POSITIONED ENTIRELY TO YOUR LIKING, IS IT?”
“Qu. . . Quite, thank you, Sergeant Major.”
Without breaking eye contact with Duggan, the sergeant major nudged the package off its perch and smashed it into the ground with his boot. He ground it under his heel until it was half submerged in the mud.
“AND NOW?”
Duggan looked down at the muddy tea towel and the shattered biscuits dissolving in the rain. He raised his eyes to the sergeant major’s.
“Now your wuh . . . wife will have to bake me some muh . . . more buh . . . biscuits, Sergeant Major. I can pick them up next time I’m wuh . . . with her.”
The company sucked in its breath. The sergeant major rocked back on his heels and smiled, slowly, in a leer that exposed the teeth to their roots. The wind whipped at the men’s rain jackets.
“Very good, Duggan,” said the sergeant major finally. It was the first time any of the company had heard him use a normal speaking voice. He retreated and crouched beside his own pack, downwind, to communicate with parties unknown over the field radio.
Now the company clustered around Duggan. Once they were sure the episode was over and the sergeant major’s attention otherwise engaged, a few of them shook his hand. A cigarette was offered, and lit for him when it was clear that his own hands were shaking too badly to do it.
Alistair watched how the men acted with Duggan: chummily, though ready to disperse if the sergeant major should return in wrath. They did not yet know the ways of the Army—whether a besting once acknowledged was forgotten, or whether grudges were held over things like this. There were nervous laughs. No one attempted a reenactment of the incident. They waited nervously in the fog: a chance agglomeration of greengrocers and machinists and accounting clerks, rifles slung.
From a little way off, Alistair watched them with a tired apprehension. His pipe was far beyond relighting now, his fingers stiff and unfeeling. He retrieved Tom’s jam from the mud, wiped the jar off and replaced it in his pack. (He should be at the garret now, eating the damned jam with a spoon.) It was a struggle, with one’s body shivering r
ight down into the deep muscle, to concentrate on staying as dry as one could and not simply bursting into tears.
Dusk came, and with it the rumble of an engine. A canvas-backed truck, its slotted lights throwing a demure downward glance in the mist. It drew up, engine running. An orange glow from the cab, the driver smoking. The sergeant major jumped up on the hood to address them.
“RIGHT, YOU LUCKY LADS! THIS WEATHER ISN’T LOOKING TOO CLEVER AND SINCE I AM A BENEVOLENT GOD, I AM TREATING YOU ALL TO A NICE WARM NIGHT IN BARRACKS! PACKS ON, HOP IN NOW, AND DON’T SAY DADDY ISN’T GOOD TO YOU!”
The men cheered. Alistair wrestled his stiff limbs over the tailgate and collapsed into the laughing crush of men on the benches in the back of the truck. The man to his left slapped him on the back and offered him a dry cigarette. Alistair smoked it wolfishly. With an ache so terrible that it was funny, the feeling returned to his hands and feet.
All around him now the company bent to the task of complaining. Their faces lit erratically in the drawing glow of cigarettes, the men named the plain an evil place and enumerated the bodily modifications and inventive sodomies they would vest upon the person of Adolf Hitler, at war’s end, for causing them to have spent winter weeks on Salisbury, when after all they were handsome young men with important peacetime work to do, such as drinking and philandering and sleeping both of those things off.
They called the Army an arse hat and its brass hats brass arseholes. They denounced the ice wind blowing through the canvas canopy, and they cursed the hardness of the truck’s metal benches. They articulated the opinion that the optimal stowage location for those benches would be up the arse of the truck driver, to whom it was pointed out that the small effort of bringing seat cushions with him from barracks might have been a nice touch.
Next they insulted the boot-makers who had made the boots they all wore, which were constructed entirely of hate and which kept the freezing water in but not out. These boots were to be shoved up the boot-makers’ arses.
Now the men expressed the hope that the designers of the Lee-Enfield MkIII rifle might experience, when urinating, defecating, or ejaculating, a blockage of the same unshiftable cussedness that the men had experienced when prone in the frozen mud of the firing range and trying with numb fingers to persuade the magazine to surrender a bullet to the breech. It was decided that all of the boot-makers (with the boots already in situ up their arses) should be put up Lee and Enfield’s arses: the left-boot-makers up Mr. Lee’s and the right-boot-makers up Mr. Enfield’s. Finally Lee and Enfield should be inserted headfirst up each other’s arses, since they were so very keen on breech loading.
There was nothing the military had that the men did not believe would be more properly stowed within the concavities of other personages, animals or objects. There in the budding warmth in the back of the truck, while their wet clothes steamed and a canteen of spirits was passed from hand to hand, the men squared away the whole Army, calibrating every one of its tyrannies and stowing it like a Russian doll up the arse of the next-smallest tyranny, until the whole great apparatus of war seemed certain to find its inevitable resting place, deep within the German Führer’s fundament.
In short, the men were happy. From the litany of their grievances only the sergeant major was absent, since it was his intervention that had gifted this sudden warmth and this freeing of tongues. Alistair had to hand it to the magnificent bastard: he was not without genius. Over two frightful weeks he had driven the company to the brink and then, sensing desertion or mutiny, he had sidestepped like a matador. Now, as the wind outside rose to gale force, the sergeant major sat aloof in the cab with the driver, letting the company vent, his power over them doubled by his act of magnanimity.
Alistair made himself comfortable on the bench and drank from the canteen when it was passed to him. The men were all right. They had been pushed to their limit, and if there had been nothing particularly exalting about how they had reacted, then his own behavior had been unexceptional too. They passed him the drink with no distinction. Maybe this was more than he had a right to expect.
As the warmth spread through him and they all waited for the truck to drive off, Alistair let himself relax. Now that the need for alertness was gone, he was drowsy. He hadn’t realized, until now, quite how exhausted he had become. His eyes closed. The cheerful complaining voices lost their distinctness. They merged with the idling note of the engine and the roar of the wind without.
He snapped awake when the tailgate of the truck banged open. From the startled expletives of the company, he understood that some of them had drifted off too. A cold blast blew in as a flap of canvas was drawn back. The sergeant major shone a torch. The men winced and screwed up their eyes as the beam danced over them and came to rest on Duggan.
“Out you hop, Duggan, there’s a good chap,” said the sergeant major.
“Excuh . . . cuse me?” said Duggan.
The only sound was the soft chugging of the truck’s engine.
“HARD OF HEARING? I SAY AGAIN, MR. DUGGAN: PAUSING ONLY TO GATHER UP THE KIT WITH WHICH HIS MAJESTY THE KING IN HIS GENEROSITY HAS SEEN FIT TO ISSUE YOU, MAKE LIKE A BUNNY RABBIT AND HOP HOP HOP OUT OF THIS LOVELY TRUCK!”
“Wuh . . . what?”
“YOU WILL MAKE YOUR WAY TO BARRACKS ON FOOT DUGGAN! NIGHT NAVIGATION EXERCISE, YOU LUCKY MAN! PULLED YOUR NAME OUT OF THE HAT AT RANDOM SO HELP ME GOD!”
Duggan did not move.
“WELL COME ON, DUGGAN! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? EVERY MINUTE YOU SIT THERE ON YOUR ARSE IS A MINUTE YOU ARE KEEPING THESE SOLDIERS FROM THEIR STEAK-AND-ALE PIES AND THEIR HOT BATHS AND THEIR BEDS!”
“Buh . . . but I don’t know how to get to buh . . . barracks.”
“BARRACKS IS IN WARMINSTER, DUGGAN, EXACTLY WHERE WE LEFT IT!”
“I know where buh . . . barracks is. I don’t know whu . . . where we are.”
The sergeant major leered. The loose flap of canvas set up a volley of sudden claps as a gust caught the truck, rocking it on its springs.
“DO YOU OR DO YOU NOT MR. DUGGAN HAVE IN YOUR POSSESSION ONE BRACKETS ONE COPY OF THE MAP WITH WHICH YOU WERE ALL ISSUED MR. DUGGAN HIS MAJESTY’S ORDNANCE SURVEY SIX INCH TO ONE MILE ENGLAND DASH WILTSHIRE COLON ZERO FIVE TWO?”
“Yes buh . . . but I don’t know whu . . . where we are on it.”
“DID YOU OR DID YOU NOT MR. DUGGAN WHEN I WARNED YOU THAT THE MIST WAS CLOSING IN USE THE LAST VISIBILITY TO TAKE BEARINGS WITH YOUR MARK TWO HAND-BEARING COMPASS AND LANYARD THEN TRANSFER THOSE BEARINGS ONTO THE AFOREMENTIONED MAP AS PER YOUR TRAINING MR. DUGGAN IN ORDER TO TRIANGULATE YOUR POSITION?”
“Nuh . . . no, Sergeant Major.”
“Oh,” said the sergeant major reflectively. “Could be a long night for you, then. Never mind, lesson learned. Come along now, out you hop.”
Duggan’s face blanched in the hard disc of torchlight the sergeant major kept him pinned in. His eyes were red. “You can’t duh . . . do this.”
The sergeant major said nothing and kept the torch trained. Duggan, dazzled by the light, appealed blindly to the company.
“He can’t duh . . . do this. He can’t suh . . . single me out!”
Alistair could not watch Duggan’s face, urgent with expectation, falling when nothing came back from the other men. There was only a soft scraping of boots on the wooden floor of the truck as positions were adjusted.
“Duggan,” said the sergeant major, “I can understand that you may not wish to do this alone, so let me give you a choice. If you are not out of this vehicle in thirty seconds, then everyone will get out and the whole company will march back to barracks with you. Is that what you want, Mr. Duggan?”
Duggan was brittle in the torchlight. “I . . . I . . .”
There was silence for five seconds, then ten. Then, somewhere outside the cold disc of torchlight, a man coughed, and stretched it into a muttering. The hard guttural of the c
ough disguised the initial consonant: “*et out!”
A pause, then more coughing from the men in their darkness. “*et out! *et the hell out of here! *et the bloody hell out Duggan you useless *astard!” The men coughed their judgment into the dark, each damnation blent with a paroxysm of the diaphragm so that the men spoke not only with their tongues but also with their tired bodies that were scourged and sleepy and did not want to go back out into the storm.
Alistair did not join in, but though he wished they would stop he did nothing. Duggan turned to him—or almost to him. Blinded in his small circle of light, he addressed a place slightly to Alistair’s right. In a small voice on the edge of cracking he said, “Huh . . . Heath?” And then, when no answer came, “Alistair?”
Alistair clutched his arms tight around himself. He heard the roaring of the gale and felt the fragile warmth within him. He would be so quickly struck back to numbness if he went out into it all again.
He made himself look at Duggan. The man had a strangely flat face in the torchlight, almost concave. It was a weak face—Alistair saw this now, and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before. It would not be a difficult one to take aversion to. If I had a face like that, Alistair thought, I should probably have learned by his age to be more careful whom I was rude to.
Alistair looked at the weak, beseeching face and felt a surge of anger. This was a man he had spoken with for only a few minutes, and who therefore had no claim to fraternity. They had exchanged a few witticisms, that was all. They had sat out of the wind for a moment, enjoying a solidarity that, now he came to think of it, had been rather smug and based on the understanding that they were cut from finer cloth than the other men. And now here he was, warmed by those other men’s whisky.
“Alistair?”
The wind whipped at the canvas. The men waited on his word. But Alistair did not want to go back out into the storm, and so in the darkness he said nothing.
In the spotlight of the torch, Duggan’s pleading look softened into misery and then dissolved entirely. Finally, as he took his pack and rifle and clambered toward the tailgate, Duggan, the actor, was expressionless.