The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [2]
‘Finn’s good nature makes him vulnerable,’ Pennistone said. ‘But he can always fall back on his deafness and his VC.’
Finn was certainly prepared to use either or both these attributes to their fullest advantage when occasion required, but he had other weapons too, and took a lot of bypassing when it came to conflict. Quite why he had changed his mind about accepting promotion, no one knew. If, until that moment, he had preferred to avoid at his age (what that age was remained one of his secrets) too heavy responsibilities, too complex duties, he now found himself assailed by work as various as it was demanding. There was perhaps a parallel with Lance-Corporal Gittins, storeman in my former Battalion, a man of similarly marked character, who, no doubt to the end, preferred a job he liked and knew thoroughly to the uncertainty of rising higher. Possibly a surface picturesqueness about the duties, the people with whom he was now brought in contact, had tempted Finn more than he would have admitted. That would be easy, for Finn admitted to nothing but the deafness and the VC; not even the ‘L’ of his own initial, though he would smile if the latter question arose, as if he looked forward one day to revealing his first name at the most effective possible moment.
‘Finn’s extraordinary French is quite famous in Paris,’ said Pennistone. ‘He has turned it to great advantage.’
Pennistone, capable, even brilliant, at explaining philosophic niceties or the minutiae of official dialectic, was entirely unable to present a clear narrative of his own daily life, past or present, so that it was never discoverable how he and Finn had met in Paris in the first instance. Probably it had been in the days before Pennistone had abandoned commerce for writing a book about Descartes – or possibly Gassendi – and there had been some question of furnishing Finn’s office with Pennistone’s textiles. In peace or war, Finn was obviously shrewd enough, so he might have ferreted out Pennistone as assistant even had he not been already one of the Section’s officers, but, on the contrary, concealed in the innermost recesses of the military machine. He enjoyed a decided prominence in Finn’s councils, not by any means only because he spoke several languages with complete fluency.
‘Why did Finn leave the City for the cosmetics business?’
‘Didn’t he inherit some family interest? I don’t know. His daughter is married to a Frenchman serving with the British army – as a few are on account of political disinclinations regarding de Gaulle – but Finn keeps his wife and family hidden away.’
‘Why is that?’
Pennistone laughed.
‘My theory is because presence of relations, whatever they were like, would prejudice Finn’s own operation as a completely uncommitted individual, a kind of ideal figure – anyway to himself in his own particular genre – one to whom such appendages as wives and children could only be an encumbrance. Narcissism, perhaps the best sort of narcissism. I’m not sure he isn’t right to do so.’
I saw what Pennistone meant, also why he and Finn got on so well together, at first sight surprising, since Finn had probably never heard of Descartes, still less Gassendi. He was not a great reader, he used to say. Such panache as he felt required by his own chosen persona had immense finish of style, to which even the most critical could hardly take offence. Possibly Mrs Finn had proved the exception in that respect, lack of harmony in domestic life resulting. Heroes are notoriously hard to live with. When Finn conversed about matters other than official ones, he tended on the whole to offer anecdotal experiences of the earlier