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.