A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement by Anthony Powell

Author:Anthony Powell [Powell, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Literary, Omnibus, Classics, Family & Relationships, Fiction
ISBN: 9781446427750
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

3

THE FIRST MEAL eaten in Mess after return from leave is always dispiriting. Room, smell, food, company, at first seemed unchanged; as ever, unenchanting. On taking a seat at table I remembered with suddenly renewed sense of internal discomfort that Stringham would be on duty. In the pressure of other things that had been happening, I had forgotten about him. However, when the beef appeared, it was handed round by a red-haired gangling young soldier with a hare-lip and stutter. There was no sign of Stringham. The new waiter could be permanent, or just a replacement imported to F Mess while Stringham himself was sick, firing a musketry course, temporarily absent for some other routine reason. Opportunity to enquire why he was gone, at the same time to betray no exceptional interest in him personally, arose when Soper complained of the red-haired boy’s inability to remember which side of the plate, as a matter of common practice, were laid knife, fork and spoon.

‘Like animals, some of them,’ Soper said. ‘As for getting a message delivered, you’re covered with spit before he’s halfway through.’

‘What happened to the other one?’

If asked a direct question of that sort, Soper always looked suspicious. Finding, after a second or two, no grounds for imputing more than idle curiosity to this one, he returned a factual, though reluctant, reply.

‘Went to the Mobile Laundry.’

‘For the second time of asking, Soper,’ said Macfie, ‘will you pass the water jug?’

‘Here you are, Doc. Those tablets come in yet?’

Macfie was gruff about the tablets, Soper persuasive. The Cipher Officer remarked on the amount of flu about. There was general agreement, followed by some discussion of prevalent symptoms. The subject of Stringham had to be started up again from scratch.

‘Did you sack him?’

‘Sack who?’

‘The other Mess waiter.’

‘What’s he got to do with you?’

‘Just wondered.’

‘He was transferred to the Laundry from one day to the next. Bloody inconvenient for this Mess. He’d have done the job all right if Biggy hadn’t been on at him all the time. I complained to the DAAG about losing a waiter like that, but he said it had got to go through.’

Biggs, present at table, but in one of his morose moods that day, neither denied nor confirmed his own part in the process of Stringham’s dislodgement. He chewed away at a particularly tough piece of meat, looking straight in front of him. Soper, as if Biggs himself were not sitting there, continued to muse on the aversion felt by Biggs for Stringham.

‘That chap drove Biggy crackers for some reason,’ he said. ‘Something about him. Wasn’t only the way he talked. Certainly was a dopey type. Don’t know how he got where he was. Had some education. I could see that. You’d think he’d have found better employment than a Mess waiter. Got a bad record, I expect. Trouble back in Civvy Street.’

That Stringham had himself engineered an exchange from F Mess to avoid relative persecution at the hands of Biggs was, I thought, unlikely. In

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