This last, at any rate, was a flagrant lie. Had it not been, Archer would not have been where he was now. And surely he must know he had lied.
The major turned his head away. ‘Any questions, Jack?’
‘No thank you, Major.’
‘You, Jock?’
‘No, sir.’
The major nodded. With his head still averted, he said: ‘All right, thank you, Frank. Hang on a moment outside, will you? You can tell Parnell to get back to the section.’
Archer saluted and was gone.
‘Well, thanks a million for inviting me along to your little show, Major,’ Rowney said, stretching. ‘Plenty of the old drama, what? Strong supporting cast. And very ably produced, if I may say so.’
Ignoring him, Raleigh turned to me. ‘Well, Jock, what do you think?’
‘About what exactly, sir?’
‘Come on, man, we want to get this thing wrapped up. What finding? You’re the junior member and you give your views first.’
I gave the more militarily relevant of my views and Rowney did the same. Within the next twenty seconds the Court had found that engine, charging, 1,260-watt, one, on charge to Lieutenant F. N. Archer, Royal Signals, had been lost by that Officer in circumstances indicating negligence. Lieutenant F. N. Archer, Royal Signals, was hereby reprimanded. So that was that.
After an expressionless Archer had been acquainted with the findings and had left, I stopped at the door to chat to Rowney. I had never much cared for him but I was grateful to him this afternoon for having, in his own way, given his opinion of the major’s little show. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Raleigh crumple up the Court of Inquiry documents and stuff them into his trouser-pocket.
Outside in the thin sunshine the three of us halted for a moment before dispersing. Raleigh’s face took on a summarizing expression, with raised eyebrows and lifted lower lip. ‘If only he’d pull himself together,’ he said. ‘But…’
IV
In Archer’s section office and store, surrounded by piles of camouflage nets and anti-gas clothing, I apologized to him for having been a member of the Court. He sat inattentively on a crate containing a spare teleprinter, finally rousing himself to take a cigarette off me and to say: ‘Funny thing about that charging-engine, you know. One of the things about it was that it wouldn’t go. It never had gone in living memory. And then the tool-kit was missing. And no spare parts. And it was obsolete anyway, so it was no use indenting for spares. So it never would have gone.’
‘Did you tell Raleigh that?’
‘Yes. He said it was irrelevant.’
‘I see.’
‘Another funny thing was that the Quartermaster’s got one nobody wants in his store. Surplus. In running order. With tools. And a complete set of spares. The QM offered it me.’
‘Did Raleigh say that was irrelevant, too?’
‘Yes. It wasn’t the one I’d lost, you see. Oh, thanks very much, Corporal Martin, that’s extremely kind of you.’
This was said to a member of Archer’s section who had carried in a mug of tea for him, though not, I noticed aggrievedly, one for me.
Somewhere overhead aircraft could be heard flying eastward. Archer sipped his tea for some time. Then he said: ‘Not a bad act I put on, I thought, in front of that rag-time bloody Court of Inquiry. Sorry, I know you couldn’t help being on it.’
‘An act, then, was it?’
‘Of course, you owl. You didn’t need to tell me the thing had no standing. But I had to pretend that I thought it had, don’t you see? — and behave like a hysterical schoolgirl.’
Archer was a good mimic, I reflected, but it was perhaps questionable whether any amount of ordinary acting talent could have produced the blushes I had seen. On the other hand, I had no way of knowing how deeply he had thrown himself into the part.
‘That was what Raleigh wanted,’ he went on. ‘If I’d stood up for my rights or anything, he’d just have decided to step up his little war of nerves in other ways. As it was I think I even made him feel he’d gone too far. That crack about him always backing me up was rich, I thought. Well, we live and learn.’
Archer no longer looked lost. Nor did he look particularly young. It was true, I thought, that the Army would lick anyone into shape. You could even say that it made a man of you.
I SPY STRANGERS
I
‘Doing what’s right, that’s going to be the keynote of our policy. Honouring our obligations. Loyalty before self-interest. None of this letting our friends down when we think it’s going to serve our turn. Not that it ever does in the end, of course, that type of thing. We can all see that from what happened pre-war. It was greed and selfishness got us into that mess. Anyway, coming down to details a bit now. First, Europe.’
The Foreign Secretary, a tall young man whose schoolmasterly and rather slovenly air did not rob him of a certain impressiveness, glanced over at the tanned, neatly moustached face of the Opposition’s spokesman on Defence questions. It was from this quarter that real difficulty was to be expected, not from the Foreign Affairs spokesman, let alone from the Leader of the Opposition. For a moment the Foreign Secretary quailed. More than one member of the Government, he knew, found his policies absurd or extravagant rather than extremist and would gladly see him humiliated. He knew too that other, less overtly political reasons for this attitude were widespread on both sides of the House (and in the Visitors’ Gallery). The temptation to play safe was strong. But he must resist it. He could not have it said that he had covered up his real programme with comfortable platitude. That was what They had always done.
‘In Europe,’ he went steadily on, ‘we’re going to go all out for co-operation and friendship with the Soviet Union. France too, naturally, but the state France is in these days, it’ll be a long time before she’s ready to play her full part in world affairs. It’s obvious the lead’s got to come from ourselves and the Russians. So first of all we have a system of guarantees of small countries, done between us. That is, Britain and the Soviet Union get together and say they’ll clobber anyone who tries to walk into Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland and Greece and Albania and all those places. And really clobber him, not just notes and protests and sanctions. We’re not going to have it like it was last time.
‘Then there’s self-determination. That means everybody’s got to have their own country and their own government. Nobody under foreign domination. Now I’ll just take one example and show the type of thing I have in mind.’
He took his one example. It was Poland, not because he thought it was an example, good or bad, of anything in particular, but because he had not long ago read a short book on recent Polish history and, as was his habit, made notes on it. These supplied him now with many an unfamiliar name and obscure fact, made him sound like a bit of an expert on Poland, and by implication, he hoped, on politics in general. After an account of post-1918 events in Eastern Europe, he leant heavily on Poland’s outmoded system of land tenure, the anti-democratic utterances of its government in exile and the Warsaw workers’ resistance in 1939 and since.
He had got a lot of this off by heart and was able to look round the debating chamber. Two Opposition back-benchers were ostentatiously playing cards, conversations were muttering away here and there, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was apparently asleep, but on the whole there seemed to be the right kind of semi-attentiveness. At least two people were taking everything in. They were the Speaker, whom the Foreign Secretary instinctively distrusted but of whose basic progressivism there could be little real doubt, and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Home Office, whose brilliant brown eyes stared disconcertingly into his.