The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [95]
‘You did. I’m sorry. Did you get on very well with him?’
‘Pretty well,’ said Gwatkin, ‘but this will mean Blodwen’s mother will have to move in with us. I like her all right, but I’d rather that didn’t have to happen. Look, Nick, you won’t speak to anyone about last night.’
‘Of course not.’
‘It was bloody awful,’ he said.
‘Of course.’
‘But a lesson to me.’
‘One never takes lessons to heart. It’s just a thing people talk about – learning by experience and all that.’
‘Oh, but I do take lessons to heart,’ he said. ‘What do you think then?’
‘That one just gets these knocks from time to time.’
‘You believe that?’
‘Yes.’
‘You really believe that everyone has that sort of thing happen to them?’
‘In different ways.’
Gwatkin considered the matter for a moment.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I can’t help thinking it was just because I was such a bloody fool, what with Maureen and making a balls of the Company too. I thought at least I was being some good as a soldier, but I was bloody wrong.’
I thought of Pennistone and his quotations from Vigny.
‘A French writer who’d been a regular officer said the whole point of soldiering was its bloody boring side. The glamour, such as it was, was just a bit of exceptional luck if it came your way.’
‘Did he?’ said Gwatkin.
He spoke without a vestige of interest. I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already. Before I could decide whether it was worth making a final effort to ram home Vigny’s point, or whether further energy thus expended was as wasteful of Gwatkin’s time as my own, Kedward crossed the yard.
‘Rowland,’ he said, ‘come to the cookhouse at once, will you. It’s serious.’
‘What’s happened?’ said Gwatkin, not pleased by this interruption.
‘The Company butter’s been flogged. So far as I can see, storage arrangements have been quite irregular. I’d like you to be present while I check facts with the CQMS and the Messing Corporal. Another thing, the galantine that’s just arrived is bad. Its disposal must be authorized by an officer. I’ve got to straighten out this butter business before I do anything else. Nick, will you go along and sign for the galantine. Just a formality. It’s round at the back by the ablutions.’
‘Nick’s just off to Div HQ,’ said Gwatkin.
‘Oh, are you, Nick?’ said Kedward. ‘Well best of luck, but you will sign for the galantine first, won’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Goodbye, then.’
‘Goodbye, Idwal, and good luck.’
Kedward hastily shook my hand, then rushed off to the scene of the butter robbery, saying: ‘Don’t be long, Rowland.’
Gwatkin shook my hand too. He smiled in an odd sort of way, as if he dimly perceived it was no good battling against Fate, which, seen in right perspective, almost always provides a certain beauty of design, sometimes even an occasional good laugh.
‘I leave you to your galantine, Nick,’ he said. ‘Best of luck.’
I gave him a salute for the last time, feeling he deserved it. Gwatkin marched away, looking a trifle absurd with his little moustache, but somehow rising above that. I went off in the other direction, where the burial certificate of the galantine awaited signature. A blazing sun was beating down. For this, my final duty at Castlemallock, Corporal Gwylt, who was representing the Messing Corporal, elsewhere engaged in the butter investigation, had arranged the galantine, an immense slab of it, in its wrappings on a kind of bier, looking like a corpse in a mortuary. Beside the galantine, he had placed a pen and the appropriate Army Form.
‘Oh, that galantine do smell something awful, sir,’ he said. ‘Sign the paper without smelling it, I should, sir.’
‘I’d better make sure.’
I inclined my head with caution, then quickly withdrew it. Corporal Gwylt was absolutely right. The smell was appalling, indescribable. Shades of the Potemkin, I thought, wondering if I were going to vomit. After several deep