The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [48]
‘Did you volunteer for the Independent Companies?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t think I’d be much good at them.’
The Independent Companies – later called Commandos – were small guerilla units, copiously officered. They had been employed with some success in Norway. Raising them had skimmed off the best young officers from many battalions, so that they were not popular with some Commanding Officers for that reason.
‘I was in trouble with my CO the time they were recruiting them,’ said Stevens. ‘He bitched up my application. It was really because he thought me useful to him where I was. All the same, I’ll get away into something. My unit are a lot of louts. They’re not going to prevent me from having what fun the army has to offer.’
Here were dreams of military glory very different from Gwatkin’s. After all this talk, it was time to go to bed. The following morning there was drill on the square. We were squadded by a stagey cluster of glengarry-capped staff-sergeants left over from the Matabele campaign, with Harry Lauder accents and eyes like poached eggs. Amongst a couple of hundred students on the course, there was hope of an acquaintance, but no familiar face showed in the Mess the previous night. However, slow-marching across the asphalt I recognised Jimmy Brent in another squad moving at right-angles to our own, a tallish, fat, bespectacled figure forgotten since Peter Templer had brought him to see Stringham and myself when we were undergraduates. Brent looked much the same. I had not greatly liked him at the time. Nothing heard about him since caused me, in a general way, to want to see more of him. Here, however, any face from the past was welcome, especially so veteran a relic as Brent. After the parade was dismissed, I tackled him.
‘We met years ago, when you came over in Peter Templer’s second-hand Vauxhall, and he drove us all into the ditch.’
I told him my name. Brent clearly did not recognise me. There was little or no reason why he should. However, he remembered the circumstances of Templer’s car accident, and seemed pleased to find someone on the course who had known him in the outside world.
‘There were some girls in the car, weren’t there,’ he said, his face lighting up at that happy memory, ‘and Bob Duport too. I knew Peter took us to see a couple of friends he’d been at school with, but I wouldn’t be able to place them at this distance of time. So you were one of them? What a memory you’ve got. Well, it’s nice to find a pal in this god-forsaken spot.’
‘Do you ever see Peter now? I’d like to hear what’s happened to him.’
‘Peter’s all right,’ said Brent, speaking rather cautiously, ‘wise enough not to have mixed himself up with the army like you and me. Got some Government advisory job. Financial side. I think Sir Magnus Donners had a hand – Donners hasn’t got office yet, I’m surprised to see – Peter always did a spot of prudent sucking-up in that direction. Peter knows which side his bread is buttered. He’s been quite useful to Donners on more than one occasion.’
‘I met Peter once there – at Stourwater, I mean.’
‘You know Donners too, do you. I’ve done a little business with him myself. I’m an oil man, you know. I was in the South American office before the war. Did you ever meet Peter’s sister, Jean? I used to see quite a bit of her there.’
‘I knew her ages ago.’
‘She married Bob Duport,’ said Brent, ‘who was with us on the famous occasion when the Vauxhall heeled over.’
There was a perverse inner pleasure in knowing that Brent had had a love affair with Jean Duport, which he could scarcely guess had been described to me by her own husband. Even though I had once loved her myself – to that extent the thought was painful, however long past – there was an odd sense of power in possessing this secret information.
‘I ran into Duport just before war broke out. I never knew him well. I gather they are divorced now.’
‘Quite right,’ said Brent.
He did not allow the smallest suggestion of personal interest to colour the tone of his voice.
‘I heard Bob was in