Small Wars (10 page)

Chapter One

There were no more slow mornings stretched out on sheets that were lit up like landscapes. There was no more sudden brightening of the day on seeing one another. It was at odds with everything around them. Hal was successful; he was beginning to live up to the expectations put upon him.

He had written to the families of the two dead soldiers, trying to find, in their deaths, something of which their mothers could be proud. He could not say he was proud. In the quiet times, when he thought of the siege on Pappas’s mountain camp and its conclusion, he felt doubt, like a betrayal, shadowing him. Hal had known these things happened in wars; he had thought the wars would be different.

Lottie and Meg had got over their measles, and were out of quarantine. They had been pale and difficult for a few weeks, but now their legs were brown between their short cotton frocks and white ankle socks. They would be two years old in August, and Clara took them to other children’s birthdays at the officers’ club, where there was cake and ice-cream – much better ice-cream than there was in England, but Clara missed her home. Her mother sent packages to her, wrapped and over-wrapped with brown paper, bound tightly around with tough string in double knots against the foreign post. ‘The assistant assured me they would fit two-year-olds but they seem terribly big to me,’ she wrote, and ‘Your father says eucalyptus puts off mosquitoes, if you don’t want to put Deet on the girls. But how on earth would you apply it?’ Clara opened the packages meticulously, absorbing the faint traces of England.

This party had been for Deirdre and Mark Innes’s boy, Roger. They’d had donkeys brought up to the club and decorated their halters with coloured crêpe paper, and given rides round and round the circular drive outside. Afterwards they had all gone back to the garden, where tea was laid out on long tables and Clara had tried to persuade her girls of the merits of egg and cress sandwiches, but ended up eating most of them herself. Mark and one or two other men had been there for a while, looking a little lost in their uniforms, but mostly it was women, with parents’ frowns and party smiles.

Clara was sitting on a rug in the shade of a tree on the lawn. It was the time of day between tea and drinks: waiters and yard-boys were clearing up fairy-cake cases and paper cups and getting ready for the evening, when the strings of bulbs would be lit and trays of White Ladies would come out. Clara knew she ought to go before then: young children at cocktail hour would not be welcome. People who had no children, or sent them away to school, lived a very different life from Clara’s.

Lottie and Meg were together, walking without looking at one another, around a circular flowerbed, planted with roses. They had bows at the backs of their short dresses. Roger had been taken away by Deirdre some time before and Clara knew the girls would be bored soon.

‘Lottie! Meg! Time to go, darlings. Come along.’

At the front of the building they walked between parked cars towards the road. Clara’s eye was caught by movement in one of them and she looked again.

Through the back window she could see the top of the blond head of a child. There didn’t appear to be anybody else in the car. Clara, still holding the twins’ hands, looked around. There was nobody. The windows were closed tight in the car, but the child’s hand appeared then, flat against the glass, streaking it.

Clara walked towards the car. She let go of Meg and Lottie.

‘Stay there. One minute,’ she said.

Nearer now, she could see that it was Roger. His face was very pink and sweaty from the heat, and he was crying. He looked at her with recognition but no communication. He was shut in a car; he had no plan what to do about it.

Clara, feeling embarrassed to interfere, tried the handle of the car, but it was locked. She went around to the other side. Then she saw – on the asphalt, almost crushed against the front tyre – Deirdre and a man tangled together, kissing. They would have been just out of sight of Roger in the back seat of the car, and partially hidden, at least, by the car next to it. Deirdre’s hands were clinging to the man’s jacket. Her legs were splayed like a traffic accident, and his whole arm was hidden beneath her skirt. His knees were on the ground and they were both breathing hard against the black driveway and the dirty tyre.

Clara, absurdly – trained up by Hal to notice these things – saw from the pip on his shoulder that he was a second lieutenant. She thought she ought to go, but then Deirdre saw her and almost yelped, her eyes flying wide open. The man scrambled to his feet. He was very dusty. His face was covered with Deirdre’s rather violent lipstick. It was Lieutenant Grieves. Clara thought immediately that Hal didn’t think much of him.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said.

‘God!’ said Deirdre, sounding cross more than anything.

‘I’m so sorry – I saw Roger.’

‘He’s fine,’ said Deirdre, and Clara glanced back into the car at Roger who was crying with his eyes shut, saliva stringing his gaping mouth.

She remembered the girls, trying to think how long she’d taken her eyes from them, and saw that they hadn’t moved from the spot but stood there in their party frocks, like little dolls – except that the frocks had chocolate cake on them.

‘Just coming!’ she said, although they hadn’t asked. She tried to look back at Deirdre and Grieves without seeing them, and backed away. Then, suddenly, and with anger, ‘I think he’s a bit hot. You oughtn’t to leave him in a car like that!’ She took the girls’ hands and left, more embarrassed for having said that than for having seen Grieves’s hand up Deirdre’s skirt.

With her back to Deirdre now, she said, ‘It’s his birthday!’ in a rage, to nobody.

She realised she was dragging the girls and slowed down for them, trying to feel calmer, loving them, and loosening her grip on their hands. She felt the plumpness of their small fingers and stroked them with her thumbs, gently, as she walked, nearly crying.

At her house, she took off Lottie and Meg’s dresses and ran them a tepid bath. She was washing them when she heard Deirdre calling from downstairs. ‘You there?’

‘Yes, wait, just coming.’

Clara took the girls out of the bath, dried them and put them to bed, taking her time about it, concentrating on brushing their hair and reading them
The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit
quite slowly.

‘…“He doesn’t say ‘please’, he
takes
it!”’

She forgot about Deirdre downstairs.

Deirdre had helped herself to a gin and tonic – at least one. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ She was standing in the middle of the floor, near the cane chair. She looked at Clara defiantly and put her drink down. She lit a cigarette. ‘I didn’t know how long you’d be or I would have made you one.’

They went outside. There were two white garden chairs, metal, on each terrace of the Lionheart houses, and Clara and Deirdre sat on them, with the white metal table between them.

‘Promise me you won’t tell Hal.’

‘Hal?’

‘He hates Tony anyway.’

Clara couldn’t think who Tony was. Of course: Tony Grieves. ‘No, he doesn’t.’

‘Yes, he does. I’m not even bothering about Mark, because I know you wouldn’t let on to
him
.’

Clara looked at her and thought, This is what an adulteress looks like – I must be very naïve. ‘No, of course –’ she said.

Deirdre looked angry with her, which seemed unfair, and had her usual irritable restlessness, which always made Clara frightened of crossing her. She wouldn’t tell anybody. She wanted Deirdre to go.

‘You’re my first proper friend,’ said Deirdre, looking at her quickly and almost guiltily. ‘I’ve never got on with other girls all that well. They were all bitches at school.’

Clara didn’t want her confidence.

Deirdre leaned towards her, ‘You and Hal…everything is so
nice
for you two,’ she said.

Clara felt too warm in the close evening. She thought of Hal on top of her, smothering her; felt the inside of herself contract, a hard lump in her chest as Deirdre went on, ‘Now you think I’m the original scarlet woman. I wish you hadn’t seen.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘You must think we were mad to be doing it
there
,’ she said. Then, quietly, ‘God, Clara, that’s part of it, can’t you see?’

Clara thought of Mark Innes, who was kind, and a good soldier. She felt pressed in by pleasure and pain. ‘Let’s just forget about it,’ she said briskly. She stood up.

Deirdre was surprised. ‘Shan’t I tell you then?’

‘Tell me?’

‘About Tony. About Mark. Everything.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

Clara, standing over Deirdre, realised she looked as if she was throwing her out. Deirdre stared up at her, scorned.

‘No,’ said Clara. ‘I just think it’s better if we don’t go into it.’

Deirdre’s mouth twisted a smile. ‘I see.’ She got up and stamped out her cigarette on Clara’s terrace.

‘I’d better get back to my little boy,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave him alone, can I?’ And for a second Clara had a feeling Deirdre would spit, or hit her, but she just smiled, then said, ‘Look, why don’t you two come for supper tonight?’

‘Tonight?’

‘No hard feelings and all that?’

Clara pushed open the door to the girls’ room. The beds were at right angles to each other. The room was dim and soft and full of sleep. It was so clean. Clara bent over each of them and kissed them. Then, not able to leave, she sat down on the floor, in the narrow wedge-shaped gap behind the door, and rested.

Her mind ran over the scene with Deirdre and what she had seen. There’s gossip, she thought, trying to smile, but couldn’t make light of it. She thought of Deirdre’s legs, the heels of her shoes scraping the asphalt, of her own bare feet trying to find purchase on the cool floor as Hal pushed her up higher onto the bed to accommodate him, not hearing or seeing her. The girls’ breathing lapped and overlapped in the room.

She heard the door open downstairs and Hal’s heavy boots on the tiles. ‘Hello!’ he called.

Clara got up slowly. She had better go down to him.

Deirdre had her maid cook something, and brought the covered dishes to the table herself, putting out her cigarette to serve the waxy potatoes.

The mutton, unidentifiable, swam in grease, the thick sheep smell rising up from the coarse meat. They drank thick white wine, tasting of resin, and there was a tomato salad, scattered with oregano.

Clara wasn’t hungry. She watched Hal sitting back in his chair with his legs crossed. He seemed a bigger presence now even than before. Mark, next to him, was slight and tentative.

The day before, there had been a bomb in a café near Larnaka, and a British civilian had been amongst the wounded as well as soldiers. The morning papers – English and Greek – had been full of it. Clara had found herself reluctantly seeking out every detail. The day had been spent with the tiny print read and reread and the thin pages damp under her fingers, trying to look after the girls, sickening in the heat and stuffy closeness of her house.

‘Deirdre’s been getting all the gory details about this Arapiddou business,’ said Mark.

‘Oh, I have too!’ said Clara, grateful to talk and smiling at Deirdre, who didn’t smile back. ‘I don’t want to know, then I find myself looking. It’s silly.’

‘You shouldn’t. It just frightens you,’ said Hal.

‘I’m just so curious,’ said Deirdre. ‘I live for the papers. Whether it’s who’s bombed who, or who’ll be wearing what in London this autumn –’

‘Yes. She’s a heartless person, my wife,’ said Mark, and Deirdre gave him a quick, contemptuous look.

‘Are you shocked by me, Hal?’ she said.

‘We all like to read the papers,’ he answered.

‘Especially those of us all cooped up and not out seeking the action like you, probably,’ said Deirdre, with a look at Mark. Mark, as Hal’s 2i/c, spent most of his time in the office, only out on ops when they were short-handed. It was an often thankless job, and Deirdre resented it, calling him Hal’s secretary to tease.

Mark handed round the plates of mutton, and Deirdre’s spoon dug into the bowl of big thick potatoes, piling Hal’s plate and Mark’s, with just one or two for herself and Clara. Clara looked down at the dark meat, and oil, then up from her plate to Hal’s cool look and felt shamed by the judgement she read there.

Hal tried to smile at her, but she had looked down at her plate again. She wasn’t going to eat; he could see she didn’t want to.

After supper, they stepped onto their own terrace and said goodnight. Hal closed the sliding doors and locked them as Clara turned away.

‘Wait,’ he said.

She stopped, passively. He took her hand to go upstairs.

In the bedroom, she turned away from him to undress. Every part of him wanted to be close to her but her back was eloquent, and he was obedient to it.

‘That wasn’t much fun,’ he said, to make conversation.

‘No.’ She undid her pearls. ‘Deirdre and your lieutenant – Tony Grieves – are having an affair. I saw them today.’

‘Really?’

‘At the club. Kissing by the cars.’

‘Christ. Poor old Mark,’ said Hal.

She didn’t turn towards him. He wasn’t sure what more there was to be said. He felt silly, surplus to requirements. ‘Were you feeling all right?’ he said, thinking of her not eating.

‘Just not very hungry.’

He nodded, although she couldn’t see him do it, and sat down on the bed, beginning to undress, slowly, so that she could use the bathroom first.

Hal dreamed of the high plains and black smoke. In his dream the clear air, made bitter by smoke, was the main thing; the images – blue sky, bright sharp rock – were jumbled and not like any real scene, but the smell, the black cooked smell, was burning his nose; it was filling him up –

He woke with Clara’s hand on his face. It was hot night, not glaring day and –

‘Hal,’ she said, ‘you were making a noise. Bad dream?’ and he, remembering, defended himself.

‘No…Not bad,’ he said.

She could not comfort him, then.

Chapter Two

Hal walked through the dark narrow tunnel towards the lighted beach. He had left the house after breakfast, asking Clara if she wanted to bring the girls down, or leave them with Adile and come alone with him, but she hadn’t wanted to. They might all have walked by the sea before the heat of the day, but he hadn’t imagined doing it alone. He didn’t really understand going for walks: he didn’t know what you were supposed to do on them, but once he’d said he was going, he had to go, and leaving the house, said, ‘Well, perhaps I shall see you down there, then?’

Now he couldn’t help listening for her voice behind him.

His boots echoed on the floor of the tunnel.

Hal’s company might have been the heroes of the hour, but EOKA were unaffected by Pappas’s defeat – if anything, they were stronger. It seemed that however many of the mountain gangs were destroyed the British could not bring peace to the island. In May, the tensions between the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots worsened, too. This was partly because of the British policy of turning the two populations against one another – using the minority Turks to police the majority Greeks – and partly that they hated one another anyway. Hal spent long hours with Burroughs in his dusty sun-filled office, drinking cups of tea and discussing the various machinations of governments and empire. British troops were pouring onto the island not just for Cyprus itself, but from their bases in Egypt, too. President Nasser had banished them and was being armed by the Communists, while America, Israel and Europe looked on and made deals of their own – and then there was Cyprus, immovably British. If Cyprus was lost, they were saying in London, then the whole Middle East was lost. Any British offensive in the area would be launched from sovereign Cyprus, tucked as it was in the far east of the Mediterranean. With the Suez Canal threatened, and oil supplies with it, Cyprus might have been a small island but its sea was the wide world.

The tunnel ended and the bright sun blinded him. His eyes adjusted to the light and the enormous view.

The long crescent of sand stretched whitely away to his right, and to the left ended in giant rocks that were different yellows and rainbow-striped. Far away, some horses trotted towards him through the shallow waves.

He could just make them out. There were four, he thought, straining to see. One was being ridden and one led, and then, behind them, two more, one with a rider. Hal walked towards the edge of the water.

He hadn’t wanted to come alone.

He remembered Clara turned away from him that morning and other mornings – nights too.

The horses were clearer now: he could make out the thin leading ropes between them and their tails, carried high, blew softly to one side.

Perhaps he could persuade Clara to spend a proper evening with him in Limassol. That might cheer her up. Strange, though: when he imagined suggesting it he felt certain she would say no. He felt her presence, ghostly, pushing him away in mysterious rage, although she had never so much as reproached him.

He had reached the water; the tiny waves touched his boots. He took a small step back, wet tidemarks on the shining leather, the thought of Clara filling his mind with obscure shame.

He looked up and to the right again; the horses were much closer but he couldn’t hear them yet over the sea. He could see the sun-glittering water thrown up by their hoofs, and that all four were bays, dark as conkers next to the bright blue sea. They shone; the sun was hitting them brightly.

He tried to work out who was riding them; one horse swung wide and he saw slender legs and hoofs trot out nicely to catch up through the dusty dry sand. Then – from one small moment to the next – the picture broke. The sand blew up in giant spouts around the horses. Hal didn’t understand, but then his mind caught up, the noise of the explosion, coming surreally after the sight of it, was a muffled ripping.

All four horses were hidden by the huge feathery spouts of sand. The sand seemed to float, hover in the air in columns, and then fall, soft as water. Then sound came back to him, with the shrill shrieking of a wounded horse, and he began to run towards them. His boots were deep in the dry sand; he veered towards the edge of the sea where it was harder.

Two of the horses, unhurt, had scrambled up and they bolted towards him at a flat gallop with the reins and lead-ropes flying outwards. They were in a pair, like horses tied to a chariot, in a blind panic. Hal kept running, straight, and thought they would hit him. They reached him, one on each side with the gap between them very narrow. A knotted rope-end hit him full in the face, he thought one of the horses had hit him but they went past – he felt the heat of them – and he was in clear air.

He was yards away now, running towards the fallen men and horses, trying to assimilate what he was seeing. His legs stopped under him. The sand had settled and, with it, pieces of man and horse, huge splashes of blood that were like spilled pots of bright paint and hard to connect with reality.

There was a horse very near him with both front legs blown off. It was trying to get up, not realising, and throwing up its head with the effort. Its chest was flat to the ground, where it shouldn’t have been, and it was screaming; its snorting head was very close to Hal, sweating and big. The man who had come off the horse was on the ground too. His face and head were covered with blood, but he was yelling, so Hal looked past him to the other man, one he recognised, a corporal – Taylor – who worked with the horses.

Taylor was lying on the sand and his leg was missing and it looked like part of his arm too, but it was hard to tell because of his being buried in sand and blood. The horse with no front legs was still trying to get up and still screaming.

Hal ran to Taylor and got down into the sand by him, grabbing him, with his back pressed against the back of another horse, a dead one – its huge insides spilled out behind him – and his knees grinding into the sand.

He pinned Taylor’s chest down but his head was straining up, the mouth wide and soundless. Hal was shaking with the effort of keeping him down. He tried to look at the rest of him. His arm was there – Hal pushed the sand off it – but there was something wrong with it so he didn’t touch it again. The two of them were writhing in a grotesque struggle, Taylor fighting him with impossible strength, his good leg thrashing around in the sand, which spat up into Hal’s face and eyes, and the stump moving wildly too.

Hal was aware that two people were running towards them – it was Grieves and Scott – and he began to give orders without hearing himself. He sent Scott to the other wounded man and Grieves came over to him but didn’t help him immediately. Hal was holding Taylor, struggling and convulsing, shouting for help with him; he would die very soon from bleeding, and his speechless scream was so close to Hal’s face he could smell the fresh blood, like a butcher’s shop, and more of it congealing on the warm sand. There wasn’t time. Hal kept shouting orders, and Grieves finally got down with them in the filthy sand and was yelling for the doctor. There wasn’t a doctor – he was such a fool and good for nothing – Hal grabbed Grieves’s arm, and forced it onto Taylor’s chest to hold him, gripping his hands to put on him, but he still kept pulling back and panicking while Hal yanked the stirrup leather from the saddle of the dead horse. It was clamped tight and hard to get free. Grieves was gibbering about something just by his ear while he pulled at it. He thought he was saying, ‘Help help help’ – but he didn’t listen. The horse was still screaming so loudly that there almost wasn’t any other sound, even with Grieves so close to him.

He got the leather free, and it didn’t take long to tie it around Taylor’s upper leg, but he had gone quiet and Hal wasn’t sure that he was alive.

When Taylor went still, Grieves was still, too, and seemed to be in shock.

The horse was screaming with a constant shrill broken sound. At the side of Hal’s vision he could see that the other man, Scott, was with the other casualty – the one he had passed by – and that he’d pulled off his shirt to press it against his head.

‘Stay here. Hold here,’ said Hal to Grieves, showing him, and stood up.

He took his pistol and went over to the screaming horse. It took too long because it was throwing its head around and he couldn’t keep the gun against it. He gripped the bridle tightly with slippery bloody fingers and fought hard to keep it still enough. When he shot it, the horse’s head fell straight down in a dead weight, its neck sideways on the sand, and it felt like silence afterwards because the screaming had been so loud.

In the deaf frozen quiet, Hal saw Grieves kneeling by Taylor, who seemed lifeless. The shining pale pink insides of the dead horse were curled and cleanly wet – they looked alive; the other horse, with no front legs, lay at his feet. Scott was kneeling in the sand holding the other wounded man, holding him tightly, cheek pressed against bleeding cheek. Just nearby lay a horse’s hoof, blown clean off. It looked like a miniature version of an elephant-foot ashtray that a friend of Hal’s father had, on a stand. Then the distant sound of an engine broke the silent shock.

He heard the quiet murmuring of Scott as he soothed the man he held, their faces close, and Grieves’s rasping breath. A Land Rover came out of the black tunnel, the engine noise suddenly much wider, and roared towards them very fast.

He looked at the Land Rover, as it swerved to a sandy halt, all the doors opening at once. Dr Godwin and other men with stretchers got out. Help hadn’t been long in coming – it was perhaps only seven or eight minutes since the explosion.

Taylor was lifted onto a stretcher. Hal saw him move, but his face was white and sunk deep onto the bones, as if he were very old. They carried the other man, and Scott with him, to the Land Rover, and inside it, then it reversed, gears changing as it headed back into the tunnel.

Immediately the Land Rover had gone, running feet could be heard in the tunnel, then men came onto the beach and towards them. Grieves had sat back now. He had his head on his knees, with his arms covering it, as if he were under fire.

Hal moved his head to look. All around him the beach was pale and untouched, with just the limited carnage where he stood, just this small grouped wreckage.

There was blood and sand all round the dug-out space where Taylor had been lying in front of them. The horse Hal had shot had sand on its breathless muzzle. He could see Taylor’s leg, with the brown leather riding boot still on it, nearby. There was no reason why the riding boot would have come off; it just looked odd. His eye went past this to the craters in the sand, about four feet deep, with the little waves coming in and running over the edges of them, foamy, and then running away again to the sea.

He thought that normally when you saw holes in a beach, there was a heap of sand next to them with a wooden spade stuck into it.

The soldiers had nearly reached him.

‘Fall back,’ he said. ‘Mines.’