The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [22]
‘Maybe that’s the way they say it there.’
‘If Hider wins the war, I tell you, lad, we’ll go down the mine for sixpence a day.’
No one in the store attempted to deny this conclusion. There was another pause and some coughing. It was not easy to tell how many persons were collected there. Gittins himself appeared to have gone to sleep, only Gwylt and Williams, W. H., unable to bring the day to a close. I thought they too must have nodded off, when suddenly Williams’s voice sounded again.
‘How would you like to go up in an aircraft, Ivor?’
‘I would not mind that so much.’
‘I hope I do not have to do that.’
‘We are not in the RAF, lad, what are you thinking?’
‘I would not like it up there I am sure too.’
‘They will not put you up there, no worry.’
‘You do not know what they will do, look at those parachutists, indeed.’
‘You make me think of Dai and Shoni when they went up in a balloon.’
‘And what was that, I wonder.’
‘They took two women with them.’
‘Did they, then?’
‘When the balloon was in the sky, the air began to leak something terrible out of it, it did, and Dai was frightened, so frightened Dai was, and Dai said to Shoni, Look you, Shoni, this balloon is not safe at all, and the air is leaking out of it terrible, we shall have to jump for it, and Shoni said to Dai, But, Dai, what about the women? and Dai said, Oh, fook the women, and Shoni said, But have we time?’
‘We shall not have any time to sleep till morning break, I am telling you, if you will jaw all through the night,’ spoke another voice, certainly Lance-Corporal Gittins, the storeman, this time. ‘How many hundred and hundred of those Dai and Shoni stories have I in all my days had to hear, I should like to know, and most of them said by you, Ivor. Is tarts never out of your thought.’
‘Why, Gareth, you talk about tarts too,’ said Williams, W. H. ‘What was that you was telling my butty of Cath Pendry yesterday?’
‘What about her?’
Gittins sounded more truculent this time.
‘Her and Evans the checkweighman.’
‘You was not meant to hear that, I tell you, Williams, W. H.’
‘Come on, Gareth,’ said Gwylt.
‘Never mind you, Ivor.’
‘Oh, that do sound something I would like to hear.’
No one answered Gwylt. There was a lot more coughing, some throat clearing, then silence. They must all have gone to sleep. I was on the point of doing the same, had even reached a state of only semi-consciousness, when there was a sudden exclamation from the direction of Gwatkin’s bed. He had woken with a start and was feeling for his electric torch. He found the torch at last and, clambering out of bed, began to put up the blackout boards on the window frame.
‘What is it, Rowland?’
‘Turn the light on,’ he said, ‘I’ve got this board fixed now.’
I switched on the light, which was nearer my bed than his.
‘I’ve just thought of something,’ Gwatkin said agitatedly. ‘Do you remember I said units had been issued with a new codeword for intercommunication within the Brigade?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did I do with it?’
He seemed almost to be talking in his sleep.
‘You put it in the box, didn’t you?’
Gwatkin’s usual treatment of the flow of paper that entered the Company Office daily was to mark each item with the date in the inked letters of the Company’s rubber-stamp, himself initialling the centre of its circular mauve impression. He would treat the most trivial printed matter in this way, often wryly smiling as he remarked: ‘This becomes a habit.’ The click of the instrument on an official document, together with his own endorsement ‘R. G.’ – written with a flourish – seemed to give him a feeling of having settled that matter once and for all, a faint but distinct sense of absolute power. If classified as ‘Secret’ or ‘Confidential’, the stuff was put in a large cashbox, of which Gwatkin himself kept the key. The Company’s ‘Imprest Account’ was locked away in this box, together with all sorts of other papers which had taken Gwatkin’s fancy as important. The box itself