Esprit de Corps Read Free Page B

in his speech as ‘pulchritudinous’?”
    â€œNever.”
    â€œHe did.” Antrobus nodded vigorously several times and took a savage swig at his drink. “He absolutely did.”
    â€œI suppose”, I said after a moment, “that now he is retiring he will settle over there and integrate himself.”
    â€œHe was offered a chance to go to Lake Success as a specialist on Global Imponderables, but he turned it down. Said the I.Q. wasn’t high enough—whatever that meant. No, it’s even more tragic. He has taken a villa outside Rome and intends to summer in Italy. I saw him last week when I came back from the Athens Conference.”

    â€œYou saw him?”
    â€œYes.” Antrobus fell into a heavy brooding silence, evidently stirred to the quick. “I don’t really know if I should tell you this,” he said in a voice with a suspicion of choking in it. “It’s such a nightmare.”
    â€œI won’t repeat it.”
    â€œNo. Please don’t.”
    â€œI won’t.”
    He gazed sadly at me as he signed his bar slips, waiting in true Foreign Office style until the servant was out of earshot. Then he leaned forward and said: “I ran into him near the Fontana, sitting in a little trattoria. He was dressed in check plus-fours with a green bush jacket and a cap with a peak. He was addressing a plate of spaghetti—and do you know what?”
    â€œNo. What?”
    â€œThere was a Coca Cola before him with a straw in it.”
    â€œGreat heavens, Antrobus, you are jesting.”
    â€œMy solemn oath, old man.”
    â€œIt’s the end.”
    â€œThe very end. Poor Polk-Mowbray. I tried to cringe my way past him but he saw me and called out.” Here Antrobus shuddered. “He said, quite distinctly, quite unequivocally, without a shadow of doubt—he said: ‘Hiya!’ and made a sort of gesture in the air as of someone running his hand listlessly over the buttocks of a chorus girl. I won’t imitate it in here, someone might see.”
    â€œI know the gesture you mean.”
    â€œWell,” said Antrobus bitterly, “now you know the worst. I suppose it’s a symptom of the age really.” As we sauntered out of his club, acknowledging the porter’s greeting with a nod, he put on his soft black hat and put his umbrella into the crook of his arm. His face had taken on its graven image look—“a repository of the nation’s darkest secrets”. We walked in silence for a while until we reached my bus stop. Then he said: “Poor Polk-Mowbray. In Coca Cola veritas what?”
    â€œIndeed,” I said. There could not be a better epitaph.

3
    Frying the Flag
    â€œOf course, if there had been any justice in the world,” said Antrobus, depressing his cheeks grimly. “If we ourselves had shown any degree of responsibility, the two old ladies would have been minced, would have been incinerated. Their ashes would have been trampled into some Serbian field or scattered in the sea off some Dalmatian island, like Drool or Snot. Or they would have been sold into slavery to the Bogomils. Or just simply crept up on from behind and murdered at their typewriters. I used to dream about it, old man.”
    â€œInstead of which they got a gong each.”
    â€œYes. Polk-Mowbray put them up for an M.B.E. He had a perverted sense of humour. It’s the only explanation.”
    â€œAnd yet time softens so many things. I confess I look back on the old Central Balkan Herald with something like nostalgia.”
    â€œGood heavens,” said Antrobus, and blew out his cheeks. We were enjoying a stirrup-cup at his club before taking a turn in the park. Our conversation, turning as it always did upon our common experiences abroad in the Foreign Service, had led us with a sort of ghastly inevitability to the sisters Grope; Bessie and Enid Grope, joint editor-proprietors of the Central Balkan