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By Root 2373 0

by the wardens; otherwise there was nothing to indicate the place had been subjected to an attack from the air, which had killed several persons. This lack of outward display was comparable with the Madrid’s fate earlier that evening, when a lot of talking in a restaurant had been sufficient to drown the sound of the Warning, the noise of the guns. This must be what Dr. Trelawney called “the slayer of Osiris and his grievous tribute of blood.” I wondered if Dr. Trelawney himself had survived: when Odo Stevens would receive the news: whether the Lovells’ daughter, Caroline, would be brought up by her grandparents. Reflecting on these things, it did not seem all that long time ago that Lovell, driving back from the film studios in that extraordinary car of his, had suggested we should look in on the Jeavonses’, because “the chief reason I want to visit Aunt Molly is to take another look at Priscilla Tolland, who is quite often there.”

THREE

The first meal eaten in Mess after return from leave is always dispiriting. Room, smell, food, company, at first seemed unchanged; as ever, unenchanting. On taking a seat at table I remembered with suddenly renewed sense of internal discomfort that Stringham would be on duty. In the pressure of other things that had been happening, I had forgotten about him. However, when the beef appeared, it was handed round by a red-haired gangling young soldier with a hare-lip and stutter. There was no sign of Stringham. The new waiter could be permanent, or just a replacement imported to F Mess while Stringham himself was sick, firing a musketry course, temporarily absent for some other routine reason. Opportunity to enquire why he was gone, at the same time to betray no exceptional interest in him personally, arose when Soper complained of the red-haired boy’s inability to remember which side of the plate, as a matter of common practice, were laid knife, fork and spoon.

“Like animals, some of them,” Soper said. “As for getting a message delivered, you’re covered with spit before he’s half-way through.”

“What happened to the other one?”

If asked a direct question of that sort, Soper always looked suspicious. Finding, after a second or two, no grounds for imputing more than idle curiosity to this one, he returned a factual, though reluctant, reply.

“Went to the Mobile Laundrv.”

“For the second time of asking, Soper,” said Macfie, “will you pass the water jug?”

“Here you are, Doc. Those tablets come in yet?”

Macfie was gruff about the tablets, Soper persuasive. The Cipher Officer remarked on the amount of flu about. There was general agreement, followed by some discussion of prevalent symptoms. The subject of Stringham had to be started up again from scratch.

“Did you sack him?”

“Sack who?”

“The other Mess waiter.”

“What’s he got to do with you?”

“Just wondered.”

“He was transferred to the Laundry from one day to the next. Bloody inconvenient for this Mess. He’d have done the job all right if Biggy hadn’t been on at him all the time. I complained to the D.A.A.G. about losing a waiter like that, but he said it had got to go through.”

Biggs, present at table, but in one of his morose moods that day, neither denied nor confirmed his own part in the process of Stringham’s dislodgement. He chewed away at a particularly tough piece of meat, looking straight in front of him. Soper, as if Biggs himself were not sitting there, continued to muse on the aversion felt by Biggs for Stringham.

“That chap drove Biggy crackers for some reason,” he said. “Something about him. Wasn’t only the way he talked. Certainly was a dopey type. Don’t know how he got where he was. Had some education. I could see that. You’d think he’d have found better employment than a Mess waiter. Got a bad record, I expect. Trouble back in Civvy Street.”

That Stringham had himself engineered an exchange from F Mess to avoid relative persecution at the hands of Biggs was, I thought unlikely. In his relationship with Biggs, even a grim sort of satisfaction to Stringham might be suspected, one of those perverse involutions