Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [90]
‘Yes, but you see my point. If I’m eligible, no reason why I shouldn’t come to the dinner, is there?’
Cheesman was insistent. He was not in the least put out by Lintot’s emphasis on the unmilitary impression he gave. What he was keen on, pedantically keen, consisted in establishing his, so to speak, legal right to be at the party. He spoke in a precise, measured tone, as if attendance at the dinner were a matter of logic, as much as free choice.
‘Of course, of course. Glad to see you here. You’re about the only man in the room I’ve met before.’
Lintot was quite uninterested in Cheesman’s bona fides as ‘I’ personnel. Cheesman accepted that his point had been understood, even if unenthusiastically. Now, I remembered that manner, at once mild and aggressive. It brought back early days in the army – Bithel, Stringham, Widmerpool.
‘Didn’t you command the Mobile Laundry?’
I appended the number of General Liddament’s Division to that question.
‘You were there just for a short time, the Laundry only attached. Then it was posted to the Far East.’
Cheesman drew himself up slightly.
‘Certainly I commanded that sub-unit. May I ask your name?’
I told him. It conveyed nothing. That was immaterial. Cheesman’s own identity was the important factor.
‘Surely you fetched up in Singapore?’
Cheesman nodded.
‘In fact, you were a Jap POW?’
‘Yes.’
Cheesman gave that answer perfectly composedly, but for a brief second, something much shorter than that, something scarcely measurable in time, there shot, like forked lightning, across his serious unornamental features that awful look, common to those who speak of that experience. I had seen it before. Cheesman’s face reverted – the word suggests too extended a duration of instantaneous, petrifying exposure of hidden feeling – to an habitual sedateness. I remembered his arrival at Div. HQ; showing him the Mobile Laundry quarters; making this new officer known to Sergeant-Major Ablett Bithel had just been slung out. I had left Cheesman talking to the Sergeant-Major (who had the sub-unit well in hand), while I myself went off for a word with Stringham. One of Cheesman’s peculiarities had been to wear a waistcoat under his service-dress tunic. He had been surprised at that garment provoking amused comment in mess.
‘A waistcoat’s always been part of any suit I wore. Why change just because I’m in the army? I’ve got to keep warm in the army, like anywhere else, haven’t I?’
He did not give an inch, either, in adapting himself to military manners and speech, behaving to superiors as he would in a civilian firm, where he was paid to give the best advice he could in connexion with his own employment. He dressed nothing up in the forms and terms traditional to the military subordinate. Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson had been particularly irked by that side of Cheesman. He used to call him ‘our Mr Cheesman’, a phrase in which Cheesman himself would have found nothing derogatory. Thirty-nine when he joined the army at the beginning of the war, he wanted to ‘command men’. He must be nearly sixty now. Except when that frightful look shot across his face, the features were scarcely more altered than Sunny Farebrother’s.
‘How the hell did you survive your Jap POW camp?’ asked Lintot cheerfully.
Cheesman brushed the question aside.
‘A bit of luck. The Nips were moving some of their prisoners in ’44. Don’t know where they were taking us. When we were at sea, the Nip transport was sunk by an American warship. No arrangements made for POWs, of course, when ship’s company took to the boats, but the Americans rescued most of us – and a lot of the Nips too.’
‘Don’t expect you were feeling too good by that time?’
‘Naturally I wasn’t fit for normal duties for a month or two. When I was on my feet again, I got a change of