The Young Lions

"Yes, Sir."

"Call me up in a couple of weeks," said Pavone. "It may turn out to be interesting."

"Thank you, Sir," said Michael.

"Do you smoke cigars?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Here." Pavone held out three cigars and Michael took them.

"I don't know why I think so, but I think you have an intelligent look in your eye."

"Thanks."

Pavone looked over at General Rockland. "You'd better get back there," Pavone said, "before the General goes off with your girl."

Michael stuffed the cigars into his pocket. He had considerable trouble with the pocket button because his fingers were shaking as though he were plugged into an electric circuit.

"I am still sweating," Ahearn was saying as Michael left the table, "but everything is extraordinarily clear."

Michael stood respectfully but firmly next to General Rockland. He coughed discreetly. "I'm afraid, Sir," he said, "I have to take the lady home. I promised her mother I'd bring her back by midnight."

"Your mother in London?" the General demanded of Louise.

"No," said Louise. "But PFC Whitacre knew her back in St Louis."

The General laughed hoarsely and good-naturedly. "I know when I'm being given the business," he said. "Her mother. That's a new one." He clapped Michael heavily on the back.

"Good luck, Son," he said, "glad to have met you." He peered around the room. "Where's Ottilie?" he demanded. "Is she giving out those damned cards here, too?" He strode off, the Captain with the moustache in his wake, looking for Mrs Kearney, who was locked by now in the bathroom, with one of the sergeant pilots.

Louise smiled at Michael.

"Having a good time?" Michael asked.

"Charming," Louise said. "The General fell right on top of me when the bomb hit. I thought he was going to spend the summer there. Ready to go?"

"Ready," said Michael.

He took her hand and they went out.

Outside there was a sullen smell of smoke in the air, foul and threatening. For a moment, Michael stopped, feeling his jaws and his nerves panicking again, and he nearly turned round and ran back inside. Then he controlled himself, and started down the dark, smoky street with Louise.

From St James's Street came the thin tinkle of glass, and the heavy orange flicker of fire, spitting up through the smoke, and a new sound, thick and gurgling, that he had not heard before. They turned the corner and looked down towards the Palace. The street reflected the quivering orange fire in a million angles of broken glass. Down in front of the Palace, the fire shone back off a small lake of water. The gurgling was being made by ambulances and fire engines pushing through the water in bottom gear. Without saying anything to each other, Michael and Louise walked swiftly, their shoes crackling on the glass, making a sound like people walking through a frozen meadow, towards the spot where the bomb had fallen.

A small car had been hit right in front of the Palace. It was lying against a wall, crushed and compressed, as though it had been put through a giant baling machine. There was no sign of the driver or any of the passengers, unless what an old man on the right-hand side of the street was carefully sweeping into a small pile might be they. A woman's beret, dark blue and gay, rested, almost untouched by the catastrophe, a little to one side of the car.

The houses facing the Palace still stood, although their fronts had slipped down into rubble. There was the familiar and sorrowful picture of rooms, ready for living, with tablecloths laid, and counterpanes turned back, and clocks still ticking the time, laid open to the eye of the night by the knifelike effect of the blast. It is what they are always striving to achieve in the theatre, Michael thought, the removal of the fourth wall and a peep at the life inside.

No sounds came from the broken houses, and somehow Michael felt that very few people had been caught by the bomb. There were many deep air-raid shelters in the neighbourhood, he comforted himself, and probably the inhabitants of the houses had been cautious.

Nobody seemed to be making any effort to rescue anybody who might still be in the blasted buildings. Firemen sloshed methodically through the pond of water, from the gushing, ruptured main. Air Raid Rescue people pushed desultorily and quietly at the more obvious bits of the wreckage. That was all.

Against the wall of the Palace, where the sentry boxes had stood, and the sentries had marched and saluted in their absurd wooden-toy ma

It was the most banal idea about a war, Michael knew, that if of fatality, but it was impossible not to think of it, impossible not to think of the casual threads of accident on which we survive to face the next if that comes tomorrow.

"Come on, darling," Louise said. He could feel that she was shivering, and he was surprised, because she had always been so cool, so contained. "We're not doing any good here. Let's go home."

Silently, they turned and walked away. Behind them, the firemen had managed to reach some valve and the gushing from the broken main diminished, then stopped completely. The water in front of the Palace was calm and black.

Four days after the opening of Hamlet, Michael was called into the orderly room of the Special Services Company to which he was attached for rations and quarters and told that he was ordered to report to the Infantry Replacement Depot at Lichfield. He was given two hours to pack his bags.