The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [10]
‘I’ve given up girls,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be interested to know.’
‘Charles Stringham said the same when I ran across him in the ranks. Is this for the war?’
Templer laughed.
‘I used to think I was rather a success with the ladies,’ he said. ‘Now one wife’s run away and the other is where I indicated, I’m not so sure. At least I can’t be regarded as a great hand at marriage. It’s lately been made clear to me I’m not so hot extra-matrimonially either. That’s why I was beefing about age.’
He made a dismissive gesture.
‘I’ll ring your friend Jeavons,’ he said.
He strolled away. There was always the slight impression of which Stringham used to complain – persisting even into the universal shabbiness of wartime – that Templer was too well dressed. I had never before known him so dejected.
While eating breakfast after Night Duty, I reflected that it would be as well to warn Jeavons that Templer might be getting in touch with him. Without some such notification, knowing them both, nothing was more likely than that they would get at cross purposes with each other. Then I put personal matters from my mind and began to think about the day’s work that lay ahead.
‘You’ll be surprised at the decisions one has to take on one’s own here,’ Pennistone had said when I first joined the Section. ‘You might think that applied to the Operational people more than ourselves, but in fact captains and majors in “I” have to get used to giving snap answers about all sorts of relatively important policy matters.’
When I returned to the building, this time to our own room, Dempster, who looked after the Norwegians and had a passion for fresh air, was trying vainly to open one of the windows, laughing a lot while he did so. He was in the timber business and knew Scandinavia well, spending skiing holidays in Norway when a boy with an aunt who was a remote kinswoman of Ibsen’s. Dempster was always full of Ibsen stories. He had won a couple of MCs in ’14-’18, the second up at Murmansk during the War of Intervention, an interlude the less inhibited of the Russians would, once in a way, enjoy laughing about, if the subject came up after a lot of drinks at one of their own parties. That did not apply to the Soviet military attaché himself, General Lebedev, who was at all times a stranger to laughter. Dempster was a rather notably accomplished pianist, who had been known to play a duet with Colonel Hlava, the Czech, also a competent performer, though not quite in Dempster’s class.
‘No good,’ said Dempster.
Holding a long pole with a hook on the end with which he had been trying to open the windows, he looked like an immensely genial troll come south from the fjords to have a good time. Still laughing, he replaced the pole in its corner. This endlessly repeated game of trying to force open the window was always unsuccessful. The sun’s rays, when there was any sun, penetrated through small rectangles in otherwise bricked up glass. The room itself, irregular of shape, was on the first floor, situated in an angle of the building, under one of the domed cupolas that ornamented the four corners of the roof. In winter – it was now early spring – life here was not unlike that lived at the earth’s extremities, morning and evening only an hour or two apart, the sparse feeble light of day tailing away in early afternoon, until finally swallowed up into impenetrable outer blackness. Within, lamplight glowed dimly through the shadows and nimbus of cigarette smoke, the drone of dictating voices measuring a kind of plain-song against more brief emphatic exchanges made from time to time on one or more of the seven or eight telephones. This telephonic talk was, as often as not, in some language other than English; just as the badges and insignia of visitors tended, as often as not, to diverge from the common run of uniform.
Pennistone, still wearing a blue side-cap, was sitting in his chair, preparing for action by opening the small gold hunter that always lay on