POST 20

 
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In the garden, Camilla joined Tom and Philip, hanging on to her brother's arm, whispering.  Tom was pleased when Philip pushed her gently off and she went away.  Radiantly beautiful women embarrassed Tom, and demonstrations that were not girlish but assuredly womanly embarrassed him fearfully.  Besides, that sort of thing with his sister...  Tom caught Constance's eye.  She was doing overmuch beaming and grimacing in Philip's vicinity perhaps.

         Philip looked affectionately at Tom and Tom could not help feeling flattered and pleased as well he might.  "What are you going to do?  Have you decided?"

         Tom looked back at his graceful cousin in his old civvies and laughed excitedly.  "I know exactly, exactly."

         "Not much exactness ever comes out in your letters;  it's mostly waffle."

         The present-stated degree of exactness of Tom's knowing had much to do with his eagerness to engage Philip's whole attention again.  Tom had felt a distance between them over the last year.  "Brought up on Molly Absecond's Thursday Meetings," here Tom thrust back his head housewards, "you'd expect me to know wouldn't you?  You can't mix up poetry and philanthropy and conversation and kindness and Fabianism and communism and uninformed abuse and letters to the newspapers as she does and call that politics."

         "Don't be too sure about it," Philip said mildly after a moment.  "In any case, everything's not as sure as it was.  Anyway, I'm not really talking about your politics.  I'm talking about your imminent call-up."

         "Oh that!  I'll stay out of it as long as I can, completely if I can.  Anyway, come what may, I finish my degree and go dead seriously into politics.  Labour Party centre.  I've told you.  History of the working-class movement in this country to be properly interpreted.  Get a proper language.  Much overdue."  But he was at a loss to fill up the silence.  "Don't you agree?"  Even that remark about language failed to rouse.  As Philip said nothing, Tom took the opportunity to kick the very old football up the garden, watching it soar and land dead.  "You know, make the Labour Party real for us, work like hell...  "

         Constance sighed with a frustrated desire to shine in some way;  explode perhaps.  Bleak House.

         "No, I'm talking about your imminent personal fate.  You're going to be called up.  You never talk about that in your letters."

         "You seem to have...  I don't know, changed your attitude about a lot of things," said Tom, running out of ready talk.  "I wish you wouldn't keep on saying imminent.  Used to be a pleasure to talk to you!"

         "Are you going to be as much of a man as your father?" Philip teased.  Like Frances, Tom sometimes did not notice teasing.

         "My father?  Holy cows!  How does he come into it?"  Philip seemed to allow a lot of time for Tom to answer the question for himself - which Tom failed to do.  "What do you mean?" he asked piteously.

         "How are you going to find out anything about yourself?  Or your father?  By graduating and marrying Frances at twenty-one and going into politics?  Or what?"

         Constance flushed.  Now that was interesting.  Philip had noticed Tom had he?

         "I shan't be marrying anyone at the age of twenty-one I promise you.  And my warrior instincts are well in hand.  We don't all have to arrive at maturity through primitive heroism and killing.  Buzz off, Con.  Fran's too good for either of us."

         "That's something else you're quite sure about is it?  What war is?  What maturity is?"

         "What?"

         "You don't have to learn?  Luckily some of us are born mature with mature opinions on who should be fighting whom in Korea and everywhere else no doubt, as long as it's not you apparently, as you were telling your father the other night."  Oh good!  He remembered something from the other night.  "Some of us are born to be leaders of opinion?  Fine."

         You had to hand it to Tom that he remained cool and was able at this point to display genuine political subject-turning talent.    "You've got an old idea of war from the British Army," he said largely.   "Take Korea.  All you need these days is plenty of modern equipment and more firepower than they've got.  When the Americans really get started in there, they'll reduce the whole thing to law and order in no time.  Nothing to it.  As a matter of fact, I don't think I can possibly go into the Army.  Nothing to do with bravery.  I'd die of the tedium."

         "You've got a funny idea of war...  And who mentioned bravery?" Philip laughed.  "And who are you, not to die of tedium?  Better men than you have had much worse stretches of wilderness opened to them for their exploration, beyond anything you could imagine.  They learn to possess their own souls.  You have to be tough, of course."

         Tom was astonished.  "Well, bloody hell.  You have changed your mind about a lot of things.  And your vocabulary!  You're like the rest.  The Army will do me good, make a man of me, widen my outlook.  I know!  Those who can read are allowed to talk to those who can't.  Teach them the rule book.  Two solid years of time-wasting boredom and barbarism...  ."

         "Extraordinary ...   about barbarians," Philip said.  "There might not be any barbarians except for your snotty way of looking at things.  Your closed door.  I should have thought a couple of years in the democratic army would have fitted in well with your socialist principles.  Or don't other people, and variety, interest you?"

         "You don't fool me, Phil.  You've got the weight of the old traditional family skeletons.  Indian Civil Service.  Army.  Brigadier Barny Harisonn, VC.  Oh, I admire it," Tom said, fairly circumspectly, having in common with Philip another soldier grandparent on the Kellory side, "but it's over.  Honour, patriotism, colonial tradition.  Springs of glorious action they were, not springs of thought.  India's only a start Phil.  The Empire's going to come down round your ears.  And with it, the Army as we know it.  You must try to keep up with the new times as best you can."

         But it was Tom who seemed old-fashioned, so tremendously full of certainty, and closed-up;  and Philip who seemed, despite his desire to stay in the Army, modern, curious, tentative and uncertain.  Constance seemed to recognise Philip's uncertainty as not unlike her own.  It was that particular kind of uncertainty, she reassured herself, which came from recognising more about life, not less, than Tom did.

         The birds sang in the trees and in the silence there was no other sound and it was at this point that Tom first realised the obvious disconnection between his view that a war had to be fought in Korea for democracy and his own disinclination even to go into the Army.  (So far as Constance had taken pains to gather it seemed that despite their comfortable agreement on so much else, on Korea, Frances was with Aunt Molly for the North, communists;  while Tom, on balance was with his father for the South, democrats.  She kept trying to remember that.)

         "Look here," Tom said belligerently, "my believing in force in Korea and being bored by the Army is no contradiction.  There's the importance of political thought and political thinkers you don't pay attention to...  "

         "Ah!  I hoped you might get round to it.  Well then, the freedom of a country's thinkers depends on its armed services, on its being able to defend itself and its thinkers, that's you I suppose, when attacked.  I don't think that will change much in the near future.  You evidently consider your ideas are being attacked, at least?"

         Constance wondered how she would ever again be able to interest him.

         "You have to serve your time, so what are you going in for?  That's all I'm asking.  I'm trying to help."

         "It's all one to me.  You'll be back at Oxford.  Nothing for you to worry about."

         "I?  But you know I'm not going back."

         "Ah, but you're not serious.  What about your thesis?  Not going back at all?"

         "Probably not, unless they take me, or somebody will, as an old man!"

         "National Service rotted your brain, or something?  I don't believe it.  I thought you were supposed to be ambitious."

         "Oh, I'm ambitious!  My ambitions have changed.  I've started the first part of my new education where I hope to go on with it."

         "You must be out of your mind."

         "No.  I'm somewhere near speaking the truth."

         "Education!  Army!  You've just got a taste for bloody paradoxes, that's all.  Oh, it's well-known.  Frances always says that.  Have you actually signed on?"

         "It's in hand."

         "Are you bent on getting to this er..?"

         "Korea?  Not so easy.  Meanwhile I've been offered a job as Instructor at a battle school."

         "Oh fine, fine!  Marvellous news I must say.  Go on then.  Go!  And more fool you."