Around him were some men of his regiment. Most were in uniform; all were filthy and drawn. A brownish little café. A defeated sort of smell, of wet charcoal and bonfire smoke. No biscuits or buns available. Everyone’s eyes downcast, faces blackened with soot. His watch was in his pocket, inexplicably. Seven in the morning. He put it back on his wrist. His wallet was gone. He thought: They’ve stolen my leave.
He had found his men and stood them drinks in the bars behind Waterloo. Then bombs had fallen near the station and he had organized the men into teams to help the rescue crews. They had used their hands on the piles of brick and timber, digging out civilians and parts of civilians. There had been some competition to see which teams could clear houses the quickest. There had been a grown hand holding an infant hand, with neither attached to anything. There had been an accordion with the Bakelite case blistered and charred. It had helped to be drunk.
Now he made his way to Waterloo Station, where the stationmaster gave him more coffee and let him scrub in the staff washroom. Alistair stripped to the waist and ran a slow trickle of brown water into the basin. The mains pipes were cracked, or the fire pumps were taking all the pressure. He cleaned up as well as he could, combed his hair with his fingers, and accepted a clean shirt that the stationmaster offered. He needed the man’s help to do up the buttons—his fingers were blistered and cut.
He closed his mind to all thoughts of the previous night. This was what he had learned in France: that one could continue to operate quite adequately, so long as one stayed in the hour.
At eight-thirty his men began to arrive back at the station, singly and in lurching groups. Alistair slapped each man on the back and got him roughly corralled at one end of the concourse. It was a relief to be back in charge of something simpler than himself. Though his head was hammering with the hangover, it amused him to discover that the men were worse off. After the rescue work was done it seemed that the majority had simply returned to the public houses, where normal service had continued in the cellars below the bars. It was impressive to see what the regiment had done to itself in twenty-four hours, with only indirect help from the enemy.
“Big night?” he said to a man who was bleeding from a cut above the eye.
“Yes but we’ll give it back to them double, won’t we, sir?”
“The Germans?”
“Well the Navy was fortunate, sir, that the Germans interrupted.”
Alistair docked him two shillings of pay for fighting, wrote him a personal IOU for two shillings, and carried on.
A private was complaining, “If the Luftwaffe had let me have one more hour, I’d have got her in the sack.”
“Look on the bright side,” said Alistair. “If you’d had one more minute after that, you’d have got her in the family way.”
The man turned and saw him. “Sorry, sir, didn’t know it was you.”
“I hardly know myself. Never mix wine and whisky, that’s an order.”
“Not unless you’re buying again, sir.”
Alistair moved from man to man, keeping it light. Under the chatter the men shook with anger. When it was time to face the Germans again, the grudge would be particular.
His fellow officers returned singly or in pairs, looking rather better off than he, and they all set to work to re-form the pacified and compliant men into the sterner geometries of war. On the station concourse the men lined up quite docilely in their ranks while the officers puffed on pipes and took the roll call and made sardonic inquiries concerning the men who were still AWOL. At nine, with the half-past raising steam at the platform and the men lining up to board, Alistair felt the universe returning to a bearable configuration.
He looked up from the company list and saw Mary arriving on the concourse in the dress she had worn the day before, conspicuous amid the uniforms. She carried his duffel bag, which he had left at the Lyceum.
His body’s first instinct was to take cover. She hadn’t seen him yet. He could easily just board the train, and he knew he ought to. Instead he waited and smoked his pipe. He could not stop watching her. He was a little sick at himself for it, but he was too tired now to be a saint.
As the men headed for the platform and their ranks thinned, Mary spotted him, broke into a smile and waved. He caught himself waving back, his chest tightening, immediately guilty now that the choice could not be unmade. She hurried over, and then her face fell and she stopped a yard short.
She said, “I was worried something might have happened to you.”
“It did. I popped into town and collected this hangover.”
“It suits you.”
“It’s a little tight around the temples. The others are all right, I hope?”
“I told them I was going home to check up on Mother and Father.”
“Well, now you can.”
She looked down. “You wish I hadn’t come, don’t you?”
He tapped out his pipe. “It might have been better.”
She looked up with a spark of anger. “I am in love with Tom, you know.”
“That’s good.”
“He is the gentlest man.”
“ ‘Well, you know, I like him myself.”
“I’m sure we shall be married.”