few moments.’
‘By God, you’re a bloody impudent man. I’ve a mind to put you under close arrest. D’you hear me? March you right inside.’
‘Then it’s high time I was leaving. Mr Riddick, I am thanking you for my cup of tea. It has been invigorating.’
But the R.S.M. did not return his smile.
‘Pipe-Major, I observed when marching by today that the windows of the Band Block are in a dirty condition.’
‘Did you, now?’ The Pipe-Major’s eyebrows nearly touched the fringe of his hair. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, Mr Riddick, I’ll go right back there now and see that they are cleaned, just for your sake. That’s what I’ll be doing.’
Shortly after the Pipe-Major left, the R.S.M. spotted a soldier with the lace of his boot undone. He was put on a charge for being improperly dressed, straight away. He was lucky not to be put in gaol.
SEVEN
NOW THE TOWN was small, but the county was smaller. The news of the dancing class soon circulated and seasoned officers blushed like cadets when they were asked if they had learnt their Pas-de-Basques yet. Underneath the layer of sunburn even Sandy Macmillan grew a little warm, but if the officers were teased, the county notwithstanding was thoroughly glad. It was a sign for the better. The officers from Campbell Barracks had not made themselves popular over the preceding year or two, with their drinking and their springy dancing. Even those people in the county who did not consider themselves to be purists were a little sick of them. At the Hunt Ball, not that there is much of a Hunt, people had grown accustomed, in an angry sort of way, to seeing the officers form up in front of the band so that the rest of the dancers were edged down to the bottom of the set. They clapped their hands and joked with the drummer, and they hooched and swung their women.
Everybody knew that Jock Sinclair encouraged them: as acting Colonel he was at the root of the trouble, for this is an old axiom: that a Mess takes on the complexion of its Colonel. It was therefore with warm hearts that the county welcomed a man who was instantly recognisable as a gentleman – Barrow Boy.
At first people were curious to meet him; then they were anxious; then, after a month, they were desperate. The county began to talk of nothing else and everybody wished they could peep over the sixteen-foot wall. Rumours abounded. All sorts of innocent tweed-coated men were recognised as the mysterious Colonel. Jimmy Cairns’s aunt in Crieff set the Victorian terraces alight with her news items straight from the Adjutant’s mother’s mouth. A young farmer who had something to do with one of the Territorial outfits in the neighbourhood swore that Barrow was the White Rabbit himself. Barrow had blown up the heavy water plant in wherever-it-was; he had been one of Winston’s special boys. Barrow had made the officers run round the barracks before breakfast. Barrow had been doing far rougher things to the idle than any young Alexander. Barrow had been in Colditz. Barrow had said that if any officer held his knife like a pen he would be posted to another regiment. Barrow was the talk of both town and county.
‘He’s a small man. You never see him in uniform this side of the wall. My dear, he has a look of Lawrence of Arabia.’
‘Lawrence of where?’
‘Nonsense … his eyes are much larger.’
‘He’s coming to dinner on Thursday,’ proudly: that was said with pride.
‘Really?’ and that said with chagrin.
‘Well probably. You must recall him. Tom knew him before the war. You must remember him.’
‘My dear, I was a child then.’
In the county the talk is well up to standard. And the county often meets, even when the roads are bad. There were cocktail parties in houses which once had known stronger drinks and fuller servants’ quarters, but here as ever gossip, like a leaf, whirled round and round, then with a spiral movement and on the hot breath of a matron, it was lifted upwards to unlikely heights.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Jock said, when he heard or overheard such a conversation, and he clenched his fists and screwed up his face. But he never got further than that: instead he cracked that joke of his about red tabs and tits, which usually went down very well. He did not like to hear much talk of the Colonel; he said all the talk at the parties was childish; people going on as if the boy were Monty himself. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ he said.
‘He’s English, you know.’
‘Nonsense. He’s a connection of the jute Maclarens.’
‘Dundee?’
‘Originally.’
‘Really? He has money?’
‘I don’t know how much now.’
The ladies talked about him most at the cocktail parties, but in the swells’ club in the town and after dinner in some of the houses that still ran to dinner parties (proper style) his name came up again. The men treated it with a little more reserve.
‘Was he with the First Battalion?’
‘Can’t have been. Billy would have met him.’
‘He was S.A.S., wasn’t he?’
Then the older voice. ‘Only thing I know about him is he’s got a pair of Purdeys, and they say he can shoot with them: that’s more than that tyke Sinclair can do, at all events.’
A ‘hear, hear,’ a finishing of the glass, a moment or two spent in clearing away the dishes for the foreign girl, and it is time to join the ladies.
But the Colonel did not go to the dinner on the Thursday or on the Friday or to supper on the Sunday. He had to stack his invitations horizontally on his shelf, but he still replied to them all in his own neat hand. Each time he refused, and he gave as his reason pressure of work.
When at last, a month later, he invited the whole neighbourhood to a regimental cocktail party it was no surprise to anyone that there was hardly a refusal. The county had decided to come to the Colonel. And the drink had better be good.
And the drink was good. Whatever may be said about that Battalion’s fighting record or social performance no one but a Plymouth Sister could deny the quality of the drinks at one of the regimental parties. There were all sorts of drinks, and there were a great many of them. The officers saw that the stewards circulated amongst the guests swiftly and for a long time. It was impossible to hold an empty glass, and, perhaps consequently, it was impossible to believe that the party was not a howling success. Simpson and some of the other better-known young men were like perfect ushers at a wedding. They welcomed people as soon as they arrived in the ante-room, and they offered plates of savouries and silver boxes of cigarettes to two hundred guests. At the beginning – he’d had one for the road – Jock was pink in the eyes with social affability and he was holding guests male or female by the elbow, pretending to be listening to what they had to say. But often he glanced through the door to the hall where Barrow was greeting the guests.
Barrow made a point of shaking everybody’s hand. He had the dazed and silvery look of the bride’s father, and as he shook hands he said a word or two; then, as the guest replied, his eyes wandered to the next guest in the long queue. Everybody looked at him as if he were a waxwork that could talk, and although some of the sharper females dared a personal question, nobody
