‘They’re still on here,’ Reg, the lineman-mechanic, said, gesturing towards the test teleprinter. ‘Want to see ’em?’
‘Yes, please. It’s nearly time to switch ’em through to the teleprinter room. We’ll get that done before I go.’
Reg bent to the keyboard of the machine and typed:
HOW U GETTING ON THERE READING ME OK KKKK
There was a humming pause while Reg scratched his armpit and said: ‘Gone for a piss, I expect… Ah, here he is.’ In typical but inextinguishably eerie fashion the teleprinter took on a life of its own, performed a carriage-return, moved the glossy white paper up a couple of lines, and typed:
4 CHRISTS SAKE QUIT BOTHERING ME NOT 2000 HRS YET KKK
Dalessio, grinning to himself, shoved Reg out of the way and typed:
CHIEF SIGNAL OFFICER BRITISH LIBERATION ARMY ERE WATCH YR LANGUAGE MY MAN KKKK
The distant operator typed:
U GO AND SCREW YRSELF JACK SORRY I MEAN SIR
At this Dalessio went into roars of laughter, digging his knuckle into one deep eye-socket and throwing back his large dark head. It was exactly the kind of joke he liked best. He rotated a little in the narrow aisle between the banks of apparatus and test-panels, still laughing, while Reg watched him with a slight smile. At last Dalessio recovered and shouldered his way down to the phone at the other end of the vehicle.
‘Give me the teleprinter room, please. What? Who? All right, I’ll speak to him… Terminal Equipment, Dalessio here. Yes. Oh, really? It hasn’t?’ His voice changed completely, became that of a slightly unbalanced uncle commiserating with a disappointed child: ‘Now isn’t that just too bad? Well, I do think that’s hard lines. Just when you were all excited about it, too, eh?’ Over his shoulder he squealed to Reg, in soprano parody of Thurston’s educated tones: ‘Captain Thurston is tewwibly gwieved that he hasn’t got his pwinter to the Poles yet. He’s afwaid we’ve got some howwid scheme on over heah to depwive him of it… All right, Thurston, I’ll come over. Yes, now.’
Reg smiled again and put a cigarette in his mouth, striking the match, from long habit, on the metal ‘No Smoking’ notice tacked up over the ventilator.
‘Give me one of those, Reg, I want to cool my nerves before I go into the beauty-parlour across the way. Thanks. Now listen: switch the Poles through to the teleprinter room at one minute to eight exactly, so that there’s working communication at eight but not before. Do Thurston good to bite his nails for a few minutes. Put it through on number…’ — his glance and forefinger went momentarily to a test-frame across the aisle — ‘number six. That’s just been rewired. Ring up Teleprinters and tell ’em, will you? See you before I go off.’
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?’