"I don't know--" said Gwinnie.
"I do know. We shall be lucky if we get a look in when McClane's cars break down."
"That's it. Have you seen their cars? I overhauled them this morning, in the yard. They're nothing but old lorries, converted. And one of 'em's got solid tyres."
"Well?"
"Well--You wait."
They waited. Even the McClane Corps had to wait.
* * * * *
"I don't care," said Charlotte, "how beastly they are to me, provided they leave John alone."
"What can they do?" he said. "They don't matter."
"There's such a lot of them," said Gwinnie. "It's when they're all together they're so poisonous."
"It's when they're separate," Charlotte said. "I think Mrs. Rankin does things. And there's McClane swearing he'll get us out of Belgium. But he won't!"
She didn't care. She had got used to it as she had got used to the messroom and its furnishings, the basket chairs and backless benches, the two long tables covered with white marbled American leather, the photographs of the King and Queen of the Belgians above the chimney piece. The atmosphere of hostility was thick and penetrating, something that you breathed in with the smells of ether and iodine and disinfectant, that hung about the grey, leeking corridors and floated in the blond light of the room. She could feel a secret threat in it, as if at any minute it might work up to some pitch still more malignant, some supreme disaster. There were moments when she wondered whether McClane had prejudiced the authorities against them. At first she had regarded the little man as negligible; it was the women who had fascinated her, as if they had or might come to have for her some profound importance and significance. She didn't like McClane. He straddled too much. But you couldn't go on ignoring him. His dreamy, innocent full face with its arching eyes was a mask, the mask of dangerous, inimical intentions; his profile was rough cut, brutal, energetic, you guessed the upper lip thin and hard under the hanging moustache; the lower one stuck out like a sucker. That was his real face. It showed an adhesive, exhausting will that squeezed and sucked till it had got what it wanted out of people. He could work things. So could Mrs. Rankin. She had dined with the Colonel.
Charlotte didn't care. She liked that beastliness, that hostility of theirs. It was something you could put your back against; it braced her to defiance. It brought her closer to John, to John and Gwinnie, and shut them in together more securely. Sutton she was not quite so sure about. Through all their depression he seemed to stand apart somehow by himself in a profounder discontent. "There are only four of us," he said; "we can't call ourselves a corps." You could see the way his mind was working.