Scruffy - A Diversion Read online

  He therefore set the remains of the wig upon his head where it gave him the aspect of an infernal golliwog, and with his free hand he now seized the flag from about his shoulders and waved it, though actually he was shaking it at the crowd in the square from whom roars of delighted laughter were now ascending. The two slogans, “Viva Espana and “Arriba Franco” glittered in the afternoon sunlight.

  Down in the reviewers’ stand the Governor turned icily to his aide and said loudly enough for all to hear, “I don’t consider that that is funny.”

  The atmosphere in the office of Brigadier Gaskell was at one and the same time white-heated fury and cold, glaring icy anger, and Tim knew that he was for it. Whereas before when the Brigadier had chewed him out over the apes it had been part routine bluster and part the Brigadier enjoying himself letting off steam, this time he was genuinely outraged and angry and therefore spoke in curt, controlled tones that were all the more biting for their restraint.

  “Captain Bailey.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You realize that full responsibility for this disgraceful affair rests upon your shoulders as O.I.C. Apes?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you any explanation?”

  “No, sir. Someone must have been playing a practical joke.”

  “Brilliant, Captain Bailey. I was able to deduce that myself. Have you any idea who?”

  “No, sir.”

  “There will be an investigation. In the meantime you are no longer Officer in Charge of Apes and if I had my way you would not be officer in charge of anything. You would no longer be an officer at all. I intend to confer with the Judge Advocate to see what charges, if any, can be preferred against you for this humiliating incident. In the meantime you will return to your duties. That is all, Captain Bailey. Dismissed.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Tim numbly and almost by now from habit.

  1 0

  Felicity’s Return

  It didn’t take Tim long to find out in Army terms what it meant to displease the boss, though in fact the Brigadier was not a vindictive man and had no time to spend hounding a Captain of Artillery. There actually had been no charge which could be brought against Captain Bailey which would stand up in a Court Martial, nor had anyone really wanted to investigate what had seemed like a very bad practical joke, for fear of who it might turn up. Likewise, since Scruffy had made off with the container of the firework and it was never seen again, there wasn’t even an adequate clue upon which to base a probe.

  But the fact that the General was furious communicated itself down the ranks and his subordinates took it upon themselves to make things as uncomfortable as possible for young Bailey.

  To begin with Tim found himself ousted from his comfortable quarters and banished to Outer Siberia, which were the stark unfinished bungalows out near Point Europa where the unmarried Second Lieutenants were housed. Every unpleasant chore and duty that could be visited upon one who was still an officer was handed to him, in addition to his guns, so that he was kept working from seven in the morning until eleven o’clock at night in order to keep up.

  Worst of all, it had been made plain to him that he was not welcome anywhere on the Upper Rock near the apes’ village. A new O.I.C. Apes had been appointed, a young subaltern by the name of Barton who had come to the Army from civilian life and arrived on the Rock with a recent draft, a pink-cheeked, rabbity young man whom Tim was not even allowed to meet or contact to act as the link in the chain of handing on an office, instructions and bumph connected therewith.

  Apparently the General himself had supplied these instructions and from what Lovejoy had been able to tell Tim in a brief encounter on the Library steps, they had been short and to the point.

  “ ’E seemed very put out, the young subaltern did,” Lovejoy confided to Tim, “and said I was to carry on and look after them as before and not to worry if I didn’t see much of him. Ha, ha,” Lovejoy laughed, “See much of him! That’s a good one. Not ’ide nor ’air nor so much as a shadow you might say, sir. I gather the Brigadier told him if he ever ’eard of him going near the apes he’d ’ave his scalp off. He wasn’t even to be seen talking to me beyond getting a monthly report, and as for talking to you, sir—” Lovejoy suddenly looked around to see if anyone was near by.

  “I know, I know,” Tim had said hastily. “Unclean! I’m contagious.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Lovejoy said, “but you know how it is. They’ll miss you terribly. I’ll do me best for ’em, but it’s best to lay low while the ’eat is on, don’t you think so?”

  “That’s it, Lovejoy,” Tim had said. “If they take you off as well I don’t know what will happen to the poor creatures. We’d best not be seen speaking together any more. Good luck and look after them, Gunner.” The Gunner watched the Captain hurrying off and felt curiously choked, even though life was to be happily unsupervised from then on. It had been a pleasure to work with a man like Bailey.

  If one lives for a long time in a dog-house one becomes eventually dog-house-minded. One tends to see all life as through the small, low-down archway of the kennel, and by the time he had news of Felicity’s imminent arrival Tim had all but managed to convince himself that he had lost out on this front as well.

  The wall of the grey transport helped by the tugs pushing against her port side loomed massively over the dock, closing the gap of open water. Her rails were lined with troops of every kind, and top side in their dark-blue uniform and circular or tricorn hats was a group of some twenty Wrens. Standing on the pier below in the crowd Tim Bailey gazed upwards looking for Felicity amongst them and failed to find her.

  He felt a momentary stab of panic. Had he then so completely forgotten what she looked like? He brought into the focus of his mind the framed photograph of her he had on his desk, the rather plain-looking, stoutish girl with the round chubby face, merry quizzical eyes and gentle, kind expression. It had never been her looks, so to speak, but the entity, the wholeness of her, the girl within, who blended with her exterior that had penetrated and reached to his heart.

  Without realizing it Tim had fallen victim to that mischief inevitably worked by a long separation where affection and desire has not yet changed into the love and familiarity of mind and body that comes with intimacy.

  Felicity was a framed picture, a mop of unruly hair surmounting the black and white contrast by which a photograph defines a face. She was a particular kind of bubbling laugh, a manner of walking, ways and tricks of speaking and the memory of a soft, yielding mouth and kisses in the shadow of the wistaria-covered trellis of the Mount. And all this had begun increasingly to fade, had become more and more difficult to recall, until sometimes Tim would spend a morning trying to recapture a sound, an image, a look, and pinion once more who and what it was he loved.

  Thus it was with all kinds of doubts, anxieties and trepidations that Tim found himself on the dock that morning, fearful of not seeing Felicity, equally fearful of seeing her.

  What would she be like? Would she still remember him? Would she want to see him? Or would her brief romance with an unknown and penniless Artillery officer be a burden and an embarrassment to her? She was almost two years older now and in that time must have encountered dozens of men more attractive, important and eligible than he.

  True she had written him that she had succeeded in being posted to Gibraltar in command of the detachment of Wrens being sent out to lighten some of the load in the Navy Yard, but under the restrictions of censorship she had not been able to write exactly when she would be arriving on the Rock, or by what means, but only that it would be soon. It had been rather an impersonal and diffident letter, Tim felt, and never guessed that she was suffering from the same doubts and qualms resulting from the erosions of time.

  She didn’t wish to tie him to the memory of an instant. She was aware that he was a bachelor officer in wartime and that although the women had been evacuated from the Rock there was no dearth of them crossing the line each day and retur
ning at night. Tim well could have found someone far more attractive than she.

  The grape-vine had it that when next the Transport Dart docked she would have a contingent of W.R.N.S. aboard. Hence Tim’s presence to meet it. Yet he didn’t make himself conspicuous upon the pier, but hung back on the fringe at the far side.

  No Felicity it seemed. Tim raised his field-glasses again and swept the row of girls lining the rail at the centre of the boat deck. Faces under tricorn hats, faces under little funny round sailor caps. There were two stunners amongst them, a small girl with dark, glossy hair and sombre, smouldering kind of looks, and a slender blonde with beautifully chiselled features and exquisite complexion. Her hair was lemon-gold in colour, burnished and gleaming from beneath her hat. They were both rare types and Tim thought with a half-smile of the chaos they would create on the Rock. Each had a naval officer on one side and an army officer on the other. The naval officer attending the blonde had the gold-leaf of a commander on his cap and was being solicitous and attentive. Tim half smiled to himself; the chap looked like a man in love. That kind of beauty frightened Tim. He had never pursued it. It made him feel inadequate. Once more he swept the ranks of the twenty or so Wrens looking for Felicity.

  There then occurred one of those strange and dramatic silences which are so often encountered during a docking, when for no known reason all sound and cries suddenly die away. One can hear the rushing of water from one of the bilge holes in the side, the chuffing of the pushing tugs and the ring of the engine-room telegraph from the bridge. This silence was shattered by Felicity’s laugh.

  Unmistakably the bubbling, pealing laughter came from Felicity, and it at once evoked her living, vibrant, desirable, as she always had been in Tim’s mind.

  Once more with eagerness he turned his glasses top-side. He heard the laugh again; he was focused upon the slender, petite, exquisite blonde next to the tall, handsome Commander. Felicity’s laugh was coming from her throat. And then Tim saw that it was Felicity.

  Felicity! But how changed! And not his Felicity, this ravishing beauty. It was a Felicity thinned down by hard work and discipline, her hair groomed and shining. But the greatest change had taken place in her features, which had been marred, or rather disguised by the baby fat about which she had never bothered. It had melted away to leave a classic loveliness, finely sculptured nose and lips and a movingly enchanting line of jaw sweeping from ear to chin.

  And now that Tim stared and stared he saw what had always been most surely there, buried beneath the chubbiness, and it terrified him. It set his heart to beating and filled him with a thousand fears and sadnesses and the certainty that this glorious creature was no longer for him. Already she belonged to the tall Commander at her side with whom she was in laughing unison. Something within Tim told him that such a beauty occurred only once or twice in a generation, and by its very uniqueness made the wearer a child of destiny.

  He held her in the round field of his glasses and for a moment found himself looking directly into her eyes, those same frank, sweet eyes, but now seemingly enhanced a thousand times, and for an instant he was panic-stricken that she might see and recognize him, not realizing that the glasses were hiding his face. Yes, Felicity had returned, but no longer his Felicity. She was lost to him for ever. He turned and fled into the shadows of the shed and thence out into the street where he climbed into his car and raced off blindly to nowhere as though the furies were after him.

  Felicity’s immediate disappointment at Tim’s failure to meet her was mitigated by her thought that in the first place she had not been able to let him know the date and time of her arrival, and in the second, he had probably drawn duty at that hour and had no way of letting her know.

  Too, she realized that she had steeled herself to expect it. It was the simplest way for a man to say, “I hope you didn’t take our little instant of several years ago seriously.”

  Immediately upon her arrival she found herself overwhelmed with details and problems connected with the department in her charge. Nothing, of course, was as it should be. The quarters provided were inhospitable and unsanitary, kitchen arrangements inadequate, orders confused and there was plenty to do to occupy the time and patience of Wren Second Officer Commanding, Felicity French. It was a week before her head was above water sufficiently to realize that that amount of time had passed and she had neither seen nor heard from Tim. She herself had received permission to quarter at the Mount, even though it had mostly been turned into sets of offices, and she had her old room.

  What saddened Felicity almost as much as the loss of the man she had thought she loved was his neglect of his manners. For surely by that time Tim would have heard of her arrival. There wasn’t a man in Gibraltar who didn’t know by then that twenty females, to be permanently stationed among them, had arrived on the Rock. It would have been more kind and less cowardly and rude if he had sent around a note or telephoned an amicable coup-de-grace to say, “Heard you were back. Frightfully busy. We must have lunch some time.”

  Once Felicity had queried her father as to whether he had ever seen or heard from Captain Bailey—she had thought perhaps a message or a letter from him had gone astray—causing the Admiral to go back so far in his memory for a reply that he was forced to query, “Eh? Who?” and then as he remembered finally, “Haven’t laid eyes on the fellow.” Then he asked his daughter anxiously, “That’s not still on, is it? I thought your mother wrote me—”

  “It was a long time ago, wasn’t it?” was all that Felicity had replied, to which the Admiral had given vent to a great and audible exhalation of relief while mumbling audibly: “Whew, I’m glad that’s over and done with,” then adding, “you’ll have enough to keep you busy here.”

  Once in a moment of weakness, loneliness and longing she had picked up the receiver of the telephone and dialled the number of Tim’s quarters one evening. A strange voice had replied, “Captain Ducrow speaking,” and Felicity had hung up. He was no longer in his old quarters. Perhaps he was not even on the Rock any more. She laid hold of the service telephone directory with a gesture that was almost savage and thumbed through it. Well he was on the Rock still. There it was, “Captain Timothy Bailey, R.A. office. First Battalion H.Q., Tel.: 134, Home Catchment Road, Point Europa Barracks, Tel.: 84-972.” But she didn’t pick up the telephone again; she only sat looking at the name and thinking. What she knew she had dreaded was that she might have found him in the married barracks. But what was strange was that he should have been moved out to Catchment Road. This was the Sahara as far as quarters were concerned, where young Lieutenants were parked until they had gained some seniority, experience and rank.

  She thought she was over it; she put Tim out of her mind; she no longer raised her head and listened when the telephone in the Mount rang. The arrival of the Wrens had resparked a fraction of social life on the Rock, at least among the Navy. Yet quite unaccountably one afternoon Felicity found herself in her car headed out of town and up the road past the ruins of the Moorish Castle, then sharply around the bend, climbing along the face of the cliff on the familiar road that led to St. Michael’s hut and the place known as the village of the apes.

  She didn’t know why she was going, she didn’t care. She simply drove. Perhaps Gunner Lovejoy would be there. She had not seen him either since her return. This, however, was not surprising, for even in such a minute area as Gibraltar, intermingling of the Services occurred only at top levels when the brass met to see how they could do one another down. The lower echelons of the Navy, the Army and the Air Force circulated in their own orbits without ever making contact.

  What Felicity found where the apes’ village had been just before the ruins of the emplacement of Prince Ferdinand’s Battery surprised and shocked her. Lovejoy was not there. Nor was anyone else. And furthermore the place was filthy with scraps of foul and rotting carrots and lettuce, ordure, dirty bits of dried-up orange skins, pieces of sodden and mouldy bread and remnants of other food that had become unrecog
nizable to the sight and offensive to the nostrils. Heretofore the place where the apes fed was kept scrupulously clean by Lovejoy, nor had Tim been above taking a hand. All left-overs remaining after the apes had had their fill were swept up and disposed of in a dustbin and carted away.

  Felicity heard a sound between a cough, a squeak and a wheeze. It came from a dog ape, a young male Macaque curled up in a tree. She parked her car, got out and went to the thorn tree and looked to see if it was someone she knew. The ape regarded her with apathy, pulling back its lips to bare its canines. It wheezed and coughed again. Felicity knew enough about apes to know a sick one when she saw it. Someone ought to be looking after it. No one was.

  A loose pebble rolled and she heard a scuffling sound and turned in time to see a full-grown female gliding along at the side of the road. She was carrying an apelet in her arms, but it was dead. When she had got past Felicity the girl saw the dark stain of clotted blood behind the left ear of the female, or rather where the left ear should have been. She felt suddenly as though she wanted to weep.

  Uncertain of herself, thoroughly put out, miserable, Felicity walked somewhat farther up the road to the place where she had first come upon Captain Timothy Bailey of His Majesty’s Royal Artillery and Officer in Charge of Apes. This was the small, curved and railed-in concreted enclosure which jutted out slightly over the cliff, looking out over the port and the sea, and there she saw a familiar figure which made her heart leap.

  “Scruffy,” cried Felicity. “Oh dear, dear, Scruffy.”

  The old boy had been sitting there scratching himself and reflecting. He was bored; he was hungry, and he was out of sorts. He was permanently out of sorts these days and resenting the changed world in which there were no longer tourists who brought him goodies to eat and cameras and field-glasses to throw over the cliff; where cars no longer parked enabling one to remove the windscreen-wipers and chew the rubber off them; where visits to town no longer paid off in either entertainment or illicit nourishment, and where his ear-drums were in permanent pain from bangs and explosions of one kind or another.