The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [14]
‘Kielkiewicz has heard of Kafka,’ said Pennistone, as we reached the foot of the stairs.
‘You put them all through their literary paces as a matter of routine?’
‘He laughed yesterday when I used the term Kafka-esque.’
‘Wasn’t that rather esoteric?’
‘It just slipped out.’
Pennistone laughed at the thought. Though absolutely dedicated to his duties with the Poles, he also liked getting as much amusement out of the job as possible.
‘In the course of discussing English sporting prints with Bobrowski,’ he said, ‘a subject he’s rather keen on. It turned out the Empire style in Poland is known as “Duchy of Warsaw”. That’s nice, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t look forward to this tussle with Blackhead about palliasse straw – by the way, what happened in the war about the Air Cooperation Squadron and which command it came under?’
‘One of my notable achievements up there was to settle that. But go and see Q (Ops.). That’s the big stuff now. Then have a talk with Finn. Where’s the driver?’
Borrit gave a shout. An AT came quickly from behind the screen that stood on one side of the untidy cramped little hall, crowded with people showing identity cards as they passed into the building. She glanced at us without interest, then went through the door into the street.
‘Not bad,’ said Borrit. ‘I hadn’t seen her before.’
Very young, she was one of those girls with a dead white complexion and black hair, the only colouring capable of rising above the boundlessly unbecoming hue of khaki. Instead of the usual ATS tunic imposed by some higher authority anxious that the Corps should look, if not as masculine as possible, at least as Sapphic, she had managed to provide herself, as some did, with soldier’s battledress, paradoxically more adapted to the female figure. It had to be admitted that occasional intrusion at ‘official level’ of an attractive woman was something rather different from, more exciting than, the intermittent pretty secretary or waitress of peacetime, perhaps more subtly captivating from a sense that you and she belonged to the same complicated organism, in this case the Army. At the same time, Borrit’s comment was one of routine rather than particular interest, because, according to himself, he lived a rather melancholy emotional life. His wife, a Canadian, had died about ten years before, and, while Borrit marketed fruit in Europe, their children preferred to live with grandparents in Canada. His own relations with the opposite sex took an exclusively commercial form.
‘I’ve never had a free poke in my life,’ he said. ‘Subject doesn’t seem to arise when you’re talking to a respectable woman.’
He had confided this remark to the room in general. In spite of existing in this amatory twilight, he presented a reasonably cheerful exterior to the world, largely sustained by such phrases as ‘What news on the Rialto?’ or ‘Bring on the dancing girls’. He and Pennistone followed the driver to where the Section’s car was parked outside. I turned away from the staff entrance and made for Q (Ops.).
The new flight of stairs led down into the bowels of the earth, the caves and potholes of the basement and sub-basement, an underground kingdom comparable with that inhabited by Widmerpool. It might have been