He found he could get through a day’s paperwork by about eleven in the morning. He found that his clerk-corporal could get through it by ten, and since it was received wisdom in Her Majesty’s Forces that the devil made work for idle hands, he inquired politely of Corporal Ollerenshaw, “What do you do with the rest of the day?”
Ollerenshaw, not having bothered either to stand or salute on the arrival of an officer, was still behind his desk. He held up the book he had been reading-Teach Yourself Italian.
“Come sta?”
“Sorry, corporal, I don’t quite…”
“It means, ‘How are you, sir?’ In Italian. I’m studying for my O level exam in Italian.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir. I do a couple of exams a year. Helps to pass the time. I’ve got Maths, English, History, Physics, Biology, French, German, and Russian-this year I’ll take Italian and Art History.”
“Good Lord, how long have you been here?”
“Four years, sir. I think it was a curse from the bad fairy at my christening. I would either sleep for a century until kissed by a prince or get four years in fuckin’ Libya. ‘Scuse my French, sir.”
Ollerenshaw rooted around in his desk drawer and took out two books-Teach Yourself Russian and a Russian-English, English-Russian dictionary.
“Why don’t you give it a whirl, sir? It’s better than goin’ bonkers or shaggin’ camels.”
George took the books, and for a week or more they sat unopened on his desk.
It was hearing Ollerenshaw through the partition-”Una bottiglia di vino rosso, per favore”-”Mia moglie vorrebbe gli spaghetti alle vongole”-that finally prompted him to open them. The alphabet was a surprise, so odd it might as well have been Greek, and as he read on he realized it was Greek, and he learned the story of how two Orthodox priests from Greece had created the world’s first artificial alphabet for a previously illiterate culture by adapting their own to the needs of the Russian language. And from that moment George was hooked.
Two years later, and the end of George’s tour of duty in sight, he had passed his O level and A level Russian and was passing fluent-passing only in that he had just Ollerenshaw to converse with in Russian and might, should he meet a real Russki for a bit of a chat, be found to be unequivocally fluent.
Most afternoons the two of them would sit in George’s office in sanctioned idleness speaking Russian, addressing each other as “comrade,” and drinking strong black tea to get into the spirit of things Russian.
“Tell me, tovarich,” Ollerenshaw said, “why have you just stuck with Russian? While you’ve been teaching yourself Russian I’ve passed Italian, Art History, Swedish, and Technical Drawing.”
George had a ready answer for this.
“Libya suits you. You’re happy doing nothing at the bumhole of nowhere. Nobody to pester you but me-a weekly wage and all found petrol you can flog to the wogs-you’re in lazy bugger’s heaven. You’ve got skiving down to a fine art. And I wish you well of it. But I want more. I don’t want to be a lieutenant all my life, and I certainly don’t want to be pushing around dockets for pith helmets, army boots, and jerry cans for much longer. Russian is what will get me out of it.”
“How d’you reckon that?”
“I’ve applied for a transfer to Military Intelligence.”
“Fuck me! You mean MI5 and all them spooks an’ that?”
“They need Russian speakers. Russian is my ticket.”
MI5 did not want George. His next home posting, still a lowly first lieutenant at the age of twenty-nine, was to Command Ordnance Depot Upton Bassett on the coast of Lincolnshire-flat, sandy, cold, and miserable. The only possible connection with things Russian was that the wind, which blew bitterly off the North Sea all year round, probably started off somewhere in the Urals.
He hated it.
The saving grace was that a decent-but-dull old bloke- Major Denis Cockburn, a veteran of World War II, with a good track record in bomb disposal-took him up.
“We can always use a fourth at bridge.”
George came from a family that thought three-card brag was the height of sophistication but readily turned his hand to the pseudo-intellectual pastime of the upper classes.
He partnered the major’s wife, Sylvia-the major usually partnered Sylvia’s unmarried sister, Grace.
George, far from being the most perceptive of men, at least deduced that a slow process of matchmaking had been begun. He didn’t want this. Grace was at least ten years older than him and far and away the less attractive of the two sisters. The major had got the pick of the bunch, but that wasn’t saying much.
George pretended to be blind to hints and deaf to suggestions. Evenings with the Cockburns were just about the only damn thing that stopped him from leaving all his clothes on a beach and disappearing into the North Sea forever. He’d hang on to them. He’d ignore anything that changed the status quo.
Alas, he could not ignore death.
When the major died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack in September 1959, seemingly devoid of any family but Sylvia and Grace, it fell to George to have the grieving widow on his arm at the funeral.
“You were his best friend,” Sylvia told him.
No, thought George, I was his only friend, and that’s not the same thing at all.
A string of unwilling subalterns was dragooned into replacing Denis at the bridge table. George continued to do his bit. After all, it was scarcely any hardship, he was fond of Sylvia in his way, and it could not be long before red tape broke up bridge nights forever when the army asked for the house back and shuffled her off somewhere with a pension.
But the breakup came in the most unanticipated way. He’d seen off Grace with a practiced display of indifference, but it had not occurred to him that he might need to see off Sylvia, too.
On February 29th, 1960, she sat him down on the flowery sofa in the boxy sitting room of her standard army house, told him how grateful she had been for his care and company since the death of her husband, and George, not seeing where this was leading, said that he had grown fond of her and was happy to do anything for her.
It was then that she proposed to him.
She was, he thought, about forty-five or -six, although she looked older, and whilst a bit broad in the beam was not unattractive.
This had little to do with his acceptance. It was not her body that tipped the balance, it was her character. Sylvia could be a bit of a dragon when she wanted, and George was simply too scared to say no. He could have said something about haste or mourning or with real wit have quoted Hamlet, saying that the “funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.” But he didn’t.
“I’m not a young thing anymore,” she said. “It need not be a marriage of passion. There’s much to be said for companionship.”
George was not well acquainted with passion. There’d been the odd dusky prostitute out in Libya, a one-night fling with an NAAFI woman in Aldershot… but little else. He had not given up on passion, because he did not consider that he had yet begun with it.
They were married as soon as the banns had been read, and he walked out of church under a tunnel of swords in his blue dress uniform, the Madame Bovary of Upton Bassett, down a path that led to twin beds, Ovaltine, and hairnets worn overnight. He had not given up on passion, but it was beginning to look as though passion had given up on him.