The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [20]
That last conviction was unanswerable by this time. No one who had seen Bithel proceeding at the double could possibly suppose his abilities in the football field had ever been more than moderate.
‘Do you know when Idwal was Orderly Officer last week,’ said Gwatkin, ‘he found Bithel in his dressing-gown listening to the gramophone with the Mess waiters. Bithel said he was looking for Daniels, that servant of his I don’t much like either. And then we are expected to keep discipline in the unit.’
‘That bloody gramophone makes a frightful row at all hours.’
‘So it does, too, and I’m not going to stay in those billets any longer. I have had enough. My camp-bed was taken down to the Company Office this morning. That is the place for a company commander to be. Half the day is lost in this place walking backwards and forwards from billets to barracks. We are lucky enough to have an office next door to the Company Store. The bed can be folded up and go into the store for the day.’
We had reached a fork in the road. One way led to barracks, the other to billets. Gwatkin seemed suddenly to come to a decision.
‘Why don’t you come down to the Company Office too?’ he asked.
He spoke roughly, almost as if he were demanding why I had disobeyed an order.
‘Would there be room?’
‘Plenty.’
‘We’re pretty thick on the ground where I am at present, even though Idwal is on the Anti-gas course at the moment.’
‘It won’t be so lively sleeping in the office.’
‘I can stand that.’
‘The great thing is you’re on the spot. Near the men. Where every officer should be.’
I was flattered by the suggestion. Kedward was at the Corps School of Chemical Warfare at Castlemallock – usually known as the Anti-gas School – so that Breeze and I were Gwatkin’s only subalterns at that moment, and there was a lot of work to do. As I have said, accommodation at the billets had little to recommend it. The Company Office was at least no worse a prospect. To be in barracks would be convenient, not least in its reduction of continual trudging backwards and forwards to the billets.
‘I’ll have my kit taken down this evening.’
That was the beginning of my comparative intimacy with Gwatkin. Sharing with him the Company Office at night altered not only our mutual relationship, but also the whole tempo of night and morning. Instead of the turmoil of Kedward, Breeze, Pumphrey and Craddock getting dressed, talking, scuffling, singing, there was only the occasional harsh, serious, professional comment of Gwatkin; his tense silences. He slept heavily, often dropping off before the electric light was out and the blackout down; never, like myself, lying awake listening to the talk in the Company Store next door. The partition between the store and the office did not reach all the way to the ceiling, so that conversation held in the store after Lights Out, although usually carried out in comparatively low tones – in contrast with the normal speech of the unit – was often audible. Only the storeman, Lance-Corporal Gittins, was supposed to sleep in the store at night, but, in practice, the room usually housed several others; semi-official assistants of Gittins, friends, relations, Company personalities, like Corporal Gwylt. These would gather in the evening, if not on guard dudes, and listen to the wireless; several of those assembled later staying the night among the crates and piles of blankets, to slumber in the peculiar, musty smell of the store, an odour somewhere between the Natural History Museum and an oil-and-colour shop. Lance-Corporal Gittins was CSM Cadwallader’s brother-in-law. He was a man not always willing to recognise the artificial and temporary hierarchy imposed by military rank.
‘Now, see it you must, Gareth,’ I heard the Sergeant-Major’s voice once insisting on the other side of the partition. ‘In time of peace – in the mine – you are above me, Gareth, and above Sergeant Pendry. Here, that is not. No longer is it the mine. In the Company we are above