Small Wars (19 page)
Sitting at a battered table were two SIB plainclothes officers, whose names Hal knew – he had seen them for six months, spoken to them, yet knew little of them. On the table there was another emptied sandbag, soaked, a wireless set, cigarettes and matches. Near them was a private, in shirtsleeves, sweating. He had wet clothes and was holding a wooden stick.
There was silence, apart from the strained breathing of the half-stripped prisoner.
‘Who is this?’ said Hal, without thinking.
Nobody spoke. The boy, lying there, stopped moving, alert and quivering. He looked up at Hal, or turned his face towards him anyway, but the blackish blood and bruises made it hard to see if his eyes were open.
‘Who’s this?’ Hal asked again, hearing himself and wondering at the sound of his voice. ‘What’s going on here? What is this?’ He was a man accustomed to answers. ‘Davis? What sort of procedure is this?’
Davis, behind him, didn’t answer.
The nearest of the SIB men stood up and came forward. His voice was nasal; he spoke coolly. ‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake,’ he said.
‘What mistake?’
‘You’ll have to go.’ He came towards Hal, as if to leave with him. ‘I have authority here,’ he said.
Hal heard men coming fast along the corridor behind him. Their feet sounded loud, the noise banging around the walls as they closed in, but he didn’t turn. Then a voice said, ‘Major Treherne. Excuse me, sir?’ and he did turn, slowly, to see the sergeant from the front desk, with another behind him. They saluted him. Davis had stood aside for them, and now was looking down. The sergeant spoke again: ‘Sir. Would you come with me, please? About Nugent?’
Hal looked back at the SIB man, who smiled.
‘Thanks awfully,’ he said.
‘Sir?’ the sergeant said.
Hal went to the door. ‘Davis. Follow me,’ he said, without looking at him.
He went with the sergeants, away from the prisoners, past the first room he had been in. They walked quickly in front of him. Hal could smell the fresh air coming in as they went back towards the desk.
‘We thought we’d lost you,’ said one.
Hal couldn’t hear Davis behind him.
‘This way, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘Through here.’
But Hal ignored them – hardly saw them – and walked past, out of the building, down the wooden steps and onto the hard ground in the glare of the sun outside. He was blinded. He stopped, not deliberately, just his mind stopping and his body winding down. He still couldn’t see in the bright light, taking breaths of clean air as his eyes adjusted.
There was no Davis behind. He wasn’t coming out. Hal looked about him.
‘Sir?’
One of the sergeants’ voices. Hal pulled the keys from his pocket and went towards his car, parked fifty feet away.
‘Sir!’
‘Not now.’
He pulled open the door, nothing in his mind but that he had to think calmly, away from the wood-smelling wet dim rotten corridors of that place, out of sight of it. He felt the blood pounding behind his eyes, his brain rushing to fight, save, act – but not doing that, doing nothing but trying to get away. The thin key went into the ignition, turned, metal pressing his fingers, but no sound, no spark – he switched off, turned it again, and there was an answering hum, but nothing more. The smell of the place hadn’t left him, that the boy in there was bleeding. He turned the key again. The car started up, turning over slower than it should; he revved it, putting it hard into reverse and pulling away from the building with the engine protesting. The gears jolted into first, without stalling, and he got away from the guardroom up the hill.
Nobody came after him.
The track led up the hill to a dividing point. Hal, clear of the guardroom, stopped the car. He was on the brow of a hill. He couldn’t see anybody. The windscreen was covered with fine dust.
Roads, made and unmade, converged here, uneven, marked by tyre tracks and signs sticking out of the dry earth. ‘Officers’ Mess’, ‘Lionheart Estate’, ‘Kensington’. He didn’t need them: he knew the place. He knew it.
Roads meeting, joining, splayed and spreading as they found their destinations. The one to his right led to the Burroughses’ house where surely his servant, or wife, would know where to find him – but the thought died before Hal even had time to dismiss it. He had no ally. His country, his schoolboy land of just hierarchies, was defeated. It had no ambassador to send out any longer.
Corporal Kirby had found that strong British tea and a roll-up, harsh and quick-burning, were very reviving, even when the mercury was up in the hundreds. Thinking he had the afternoon off, he was in the corporals’ mess when Major Treherne sent for him.
‘Righty-oh, lads, that’s my holidays buggered up,’ he said, draining his mug, and left them.
He found the major at his office. He was waiting inside, and didn’t seem to hear when Kirby knocked on the door, just when he said, ‘Sir?’
Then he jerked his head up, and looked at him. ‘Run me down to Evdimou, would you, Kirby?’
‘Sir.’
Hal crossed the blazing beach, walking towards the café he had guessed Mark would be there, and he was, leaning back almost to the horizontal under the shade of the canopy with his boot heels dug into the sand. There was the tiniest of breezes coming off the dark blue sea.
‘Fancy a trip into town?’ said Hal, hearing, with some surprise, his voice come out as clipped and even as ever.
‘
Avec
or
sans
wives?’ said Mark.
‘Without.’
‘Absolutely.’
They went to Maxim’s Cabaret, in Limassol, and were there as the doors opened.
Upstairs there was a brothel of some repute that neither of them intended to visit. They took a corner table, far back, and started with bottles of Keo beer, laying the foundations. Mark could see it was a determined effort of Hal’s to get drunk, and welcomed it, whatever his reason.
Squares of sour herbed feta and sodden olives were brought along with each round; the table around them and the floor beneath were littered with cigarette ends and olive stones and still they hardly spoke. Hal was looking straight ahead, drinking fast, and Mark left him to it, not asking anything.
After an hour or so, the floor show started – dancing girls from around the world – and they moved on to brandy sours, ordering bread to soak it up, mixing the bland flat bread with dark tobacco and the strong liquor.
The Spanish dancer stayed on for a long time – too long. She had castanets and uttered guttural yelps that had the soldiers around them answering her and laughing. Hal and Mark were drunk now, thick-tongued with it, arguing over whether she was really Spanish and if she was a stripper on other nights, or a whore. They drank more brandies, without the sour, and a swollen clay jug of water was brought and ignored.
A Turkish belly-dancer, then respectable Greeks were followed by a girl of unidentifiable nationality with veils who might have been Persian and was almost definitely a stripper on other nights.
‘You can bet your life old Kirby’s availing himself of the upstairs entertainment,’ said Mark, and they laughed at the idea of knock-kneed Kirby burning through his corporal’s pay, taking his chances with VD and Military Police raids, while they watched the belly-dancing below him.
Their jackets were on the backs of their chairs. There were no women there apart from those dancing, just other soldiers and British civil servants or engineers with dark-tanned faces, making their eyes show up in the shadowed room where cheap, exotic lamps shone onto the red embroidered tablecloths.
They drank some more. Mark was leaning back in his chair watching the ceiling above him as much as the women. Hal felt the raw liquor burning him. The blotting out of pain, anaesthetic, escape – that was what other men found in it. His stomach turned over, rebelling, but he drank more, in need. Not absolution: oblivion, the consummation of nothingness. If he did not have decency then he might at least cut out the desire for it.
The back of his hand was numb against the mouth he tried to wipe.
He knocked over the water jug, which broke on the tiles, and neither of them noticed. A waiter, with his neat white jacket, crouched at their feet to gather up the pieces. Hal half took in the top of his head, bowed, as he cleared up for them, fumbling around the floor near their boots as the show ended. The music was louder. All the girls crowded the stage, surrounded by clapping, their heels drumming on the hollow wood – boots on the wooden floor of the guardroom – stamping, loud stamping on wood, and cheers in sudden darkness.
In the dark Hal closed his eyes. Blind.
‘Fuck Jesus Christ Jesus oh God,’ he said, into the anonymous noise around him. ‘Oh, God. Please. Help me. God,’ and the noise of men clapping, the shouts and whistles, received his words.
Dim lights came up slowly as the clapping stopped. The girls had gone. He put his head down into his hand, half resting on the table, but then straightened, not looking at anything.
Mark signalled for another drink.
‘My wife’s having another baby,’ said Hal, surprising himself, because he hadn’t been thinking about that. Mark didn’t say anything stupid like ‘congratulations’ he stayed quiet.
Hal started his next drink, losing the appetite for it. The room was slipping around him. He found he couldn’t grasp the things that were tearing at him as sharply as before, and felt grateful. But then, in that defenceless relaxing, as he let himself fall inside his head, deep down, the old familiar horrors showed themselves. They had been waiting for him to let down his guard.
He could refuse the temptation to describe the sad innards of his brain; he could refuse to say, ‘I saw a boy…I probably brought him in myself – there’s nowhere for me to go for help and I can’t help anybody.’ He could deny the arguments with himself, knowing he was impotent, and had failed, but the images came back, fresh minted, mocking, all his various agonies, and he was helpless in the face of them and shamed.
‘Come on,’ said Mark. ‘Let’s get you home.’
They left the nightclub at midnight, stepping into a stiff wind coming in from the sea, and Kirby, moderately sober and sexually sated, drove them out of Limassol.
‘How was your evening, Kirby?’ asked Mark.
‘Not too bad, sir, thank you,’ said Kirby, turning the car onto the road.
‘Glad to hear it. Glad to hear it,’ said Mark, dropping his chin onto his chest.
Hal, beside him, who had longed for unconsciousness, knowing now there was no release in it, fought for control. He kept his eyes open, and watched the bright moon as it rode fast and high above them.
The moonlight striped the bed where Clara lay. She watched the shadows on the wall and tried to remember hymns, but couldn’t. She remembered the words or the tunes but not together, and they were always in fragments. A strong wind blew the short curtains outwards into the room so that they looked stiff, like something hard but still moving.
She sat up in bed and tucked her hair behind her ears. The wind was pushing the catch of the window back and forth in uneven squeaks. Immortal. Invisible. Immortal. Invisible. She reached for her diary in the darkness and opened it, feeling through the pages blindly. Taking the cameo in her fingertips, she held it in the bar of silver light across her legs.
It was just a talisman; it couldn’t help her. She was alone. Clara felt the slow, deep beginning of anger inside herself, so great it terrified her. It made her feel ashamed that she hid the cameo from Hal, that she had been flattered by the attention of a man in whom, really, she had no interest. She clenched her fist around the cameo, then put it down and away from her.
She felt a small tap, like a tiny finger, inside her, a tiny movement, as if she were being reminded of something. Her baby was moving. For a moment she felt pure wonder, but it sickened.
She remembered this feeling, this first movement, from when she was pregnant with the twins. Then the realisation of life within her had been lit up and circled by joy, which now was telescopically distant in her memory. She imagined the small thing strengthening inside her with the blind assumption of her protection. Only inches of soft flesh formed the barrier between it and the dreadful air. She wasn’t the strong cradle it needed. If it had a brain it would read her thoughts. If it even had a brain the size of a mouse’s brain it would know it was unwelcome, had been unwelcome from its conception. She had tried to lie to it, and to herself, but she knew she had failed. The small tap came again, like a question.
Clara heard the car draw up, and Hal saying goodnight to Kirby and to Mark. After a time the door opened.
She sat up in bed again as he came up the stairs and stopped in the doorway.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hello.’
He didn’t move, or start to undress, or come nearer, he just stood there, a soldier silhouette.
‘I felt the baby move,’ she said, her habit, in spite of everything, still being to tell him things.
He didn’t answer her. She couldn’t see his face.
‘It was the first time,’ she said. ‘I wish you had been here.’
He didn’t speak.
He could see that she needed him to. He came and sat on the bed, not looking at her. He felt her hand on his arm. ‘Did you hear me?’ she said. ‘About the baby? Are you drunk?’
‘No. Yes – I heard you. That’s good, then.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. I’m pleased.’
‘For God’s sake, Hal!’
His hand was on something small and rounded that pressed into his palm. He picked it up. ‘Is this yours?’ he said, and handed her the cameo. She took it, and he got up and went into the bathroom.
When he woke up, his head hurt all over and his mouth was dry. He sat up and watched his sleeping wife. Her face was turned towards him, unseeing, her arm flung out trustingly with soft, curled fingers. He thought that if he placed his finger in her palm they would close, like a baby’s, and hold him. He lifted his hand to do it. She opened her eyes.
‘Morning,’ he said.
Slowly she looked back at him.
‘Good morning,’ he said again, waiting for her to warm to him. She didn’t.
The twins cried out for her, so Hal went into their room and got them, and brought them in. Clara kissed them, she smiled and spoke to them. She had put on a character – the cheerful mother – as she might have put on a dress. What a marvellous effort that was, he thought, but he had seen her move from flat nothingness, to girding herself, to this brave artifice, and was chilled.
They all went down to breakfast.
Hal watched his household through the fog of his headache. The sun came in at the window. Clara was on her knees, doing up Lottie’s dress at the back. Adile came in. Clara said brightly, ‘Good morning, Adile!’
She looked at Hal, and smiled. An exuberant bird sang outside.
He was reminded of a film he had seen in Germany, one ‘Thursday Night at the Pictures’, in the gymnasium at the base. The giant room had been thick with smoke and laughter from the rows of men on folding chairs, and the white screen seeming to jump in bright light as the reels were changed. It had been a silly story, and Hal couldn’t remember the name of it; he hadn’t thought of it again till now. It had been about the population of a town. The townspeople were corn-fed American types, and foreign to him anyway. They were being taken over by creatures from another world, which inhabited their bodies so that even those closest to them didn’t realise they had changed. They would walk and talk and do all the normal things, but they were unfeeling. Their very wholesomeness was an unnerving deceit because they hid monsters within themselves and didn’t know it.
Kirby’s quick double knock came at eight, as it always did, and Hal said, ‘Yup!’ as he always did, and stood up.
He picked up his cap and put things into his pockets – keys, cigarettes – from the counter by the door where he had left them the night before.
‘Have a lovely day, darling,’ said Clara.
He left the house. Kirby had turned off the engine and was smoking, half sitting on the bonnet of the car. When he saw Hal he stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Morning, sir.’
‘Morning, Kirby. Office.’
In his office, Hal closed the door to Mark’s room, and the one to the corridor.
He sat, and picked up his pen. The shutters and window were open behind him. The sun hadn’t come into the room yet, and he was in relative cool. His desk was thickly varnished chestnut-coloured wood and it shone glassily. He took a sheet of fresh paper from the drawer and, in doing so, noticed that the varnish of the desk was smeared; the cleaner must have used a wet cloth to wipe it, and the water had dried in spots.
Hal rubbed the small spots with his sleeve. Some disappeared, but others were left, dragged out of shape. He took out his handkerchief and polished a small area, realising, as he did it, that the rest of the desk was still smeared.
He cleared the blotter, pens, hole-punch, rubber stamps and ink bottles from the top and put them onto the round table by the door.
In the service room, he washed out a cloth. It was grey, with a thin red stripe; the grey was dirt, not its real colour, but it didn’t go away, even after he had wrung it out under the tap several times.
He wiped the top of the desk and dried it, with his handkerchief, the white one, with the red chain-stitched initials, until there were no more smears on the varnish. The handkerchief would need washing. He had thought he was quite ordered, but he was not. The drawers were filled and spilling over with paperclips, papers, receipts, letters from London, Nicosia, and internal correspondence too.
Hal got down on his knees. The corners of the drawers were slightly crumbly where the varnish had crunched against the wooden runners. There was dust and tiny sawdust streaks, fluff in the drawers, amongst the contents, which seemed to stick to his hands, presenting smaller and smaller asymmetries for him to address: pencils that were different lengths, papers with corners that were soft and creased, the grain of the cheap wood itself, raw inside the drawers, holding the dust and damp from the cloth in shifting, textured grooves that could not be perfectly flat, ever.
In the service room he rinsed the cloth, and wrung it out, counting the twists and the trickles of water running into the dirty sink.
Hal had lunch in the mess. There, all the talk was of an abandoned car that had been discovered on the road between Limassol and Larnaka the night before. It had contained the mutilated bodies of four Greeks. Their hands had been severed from their wrists, they were stripped naked, and their penises, cut off, had been forced into their dead mouths. The topic was lodged between menus and politics, the movements of troops and the latest news from Egypt. The mutilation – or so went the theory – was a religious act: the Muslim Turks believed that an enemy whose body was cut up in such a way may not enter Paradise. The killers had chopped off the genitals of their victims for theological reasons, then.
Naked corpses with their hands cut off, vichyssoise for lunch, rumours of a new governor, the illegal torture of a teenage boy – if you reflected upon it, thought Hal, one topic was pretty much like any other. It was comfortable to be surrounded by men: the eating, banging cutlery, cigarette smoke and noise, much more subdued than in the evening, were nevertheless consoling. He wished his hands didn’t smell of the filthy cloth he’d used to clean his desk. After lunch he went back to his office to finish cleaning and to write letters.
The typewriter on the clerk’s desk made a rhythmic, metallic sound as he hit the keys with jabbing, staccato fingers, punctuated by a small bell when the carriage returned with an oiled slip and halt; then the smooth revolving rasp of the paper being removed, and in the quiet that followed Hal, lifting his head a moment, thought,
Clara needs to be sent away
.
He put his pen down. The thought came again, like a bubble rising cleanly from a dark pool:
Clara and the children must get away from here.
Clara was sitting on the sofa, trying to read a book. She had the doors closed to the hot night. Moths fluttered around the big orange shades of the lamps. The bobbled fabric glowed. There was the sound of tiny taps as their bodies hit the shades and thin metal struts supporting the bulbs. Sometimes the moths released themselves, feathery wings against Clara’s hair, knocking against her, and she waved them away, glancing up at the door for her husband, waiting.
When he came in, she said, ‘Hello,’ and then pretended to read again.
He hadn’t answered. She looked up. He hadn’t taken off his belt, or his holster, but stood, as if completely disconnected from the room, staring at her.
‘What?’
He moved then, as if unaware of having stopped. ‘Girls asleep?’ he said.
‘Yes. What is it?’
He shook his head slightly, emptied his pockets, began to do all the things he did on returning home but Clara, alerted to some change, put her book down.
‘It’s very stuffy in here,’ he said. ‘Shall I open the door?’
‘If you like.’
He crossed the room. The doors opened and blessed fresh air came in.
Clara stood up. ‘Hal, I want to talk to you.’
He seemed surprised. ‘Do you?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
They were facing one another, a few feet apart.
‘Well, what is it?’
‘I’m worried about you,’ she said.
The clarity of the phrase surprised them both. He looked at her for a moment. He smiled a tight smile, narrowing his eyes in a sort of irony. She didn’t think he knew he did it. ‘I’m absolutely fine,’ he said.
She searched for words. ‘You don’t seem yourself,’ she said at last, in a small voice.
The commonplace little phrase lay between them in all its magnitude. He looked down at the floor, discovered. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Hal…’ Clara moved towards him. She put her hands on his arms.
He narrowed his eyes again, almost smiling but somehow not, and then he said, ‘Clara,’ as if he would turn away from her, but she kept holding his arms.
Without going anywhere, he was all movement, fidgeting beneath his skin, behind his eyes.
‘Wait,’ she said. She could feel the hard tension rising through him like a vibration, but he didn’t move.
She placed her hand flat over his heart. She moved a little closer to him. She was breathing lightly, and he not at all. He was frozen as she approached him, carefully, and touched his neck with her fingertips. She could feel his heart beating very fast against her hand.
He did not take his eyes from hers. He blinked. She began to smile at him.
‘I want you to go away from here,’ he said.
There was silence. Then, ‘What?’ she said.
‘I think the best plan is that you and the girls go to Nicosia.’
Clara took her hands from him. Her eyes were wide.
Hal put his hands into his pockets. ‘I’m sure it can easily be arranged, I’ll have a word with the housing officer about it, if you like.’
‘You want me to go away from you?’ She took a step back from him.
‘Don’t you think it would be the best thing?’
When she spoke, her voice was low and shaking: ‘For who?’
‘For you, of course. And the girls. There are doctors there, much better than Godwin, lots of English. You’re not happy here, you’ll be much better off, and then, when things have calmed down, we’ll think again.’
While he was talking she turned away from him, and he spoke to her back. Her head was bowed. Above the top of her dress, between the covered buttons and the curl of her hair, there was bare skin, and he looked at it as he went on, ‘Things have been pretty rough round here recently.’
‘Have they?’ she said, very quietly, without turning. Her hands were gripping the skirt of her dress, twisting the material.
‘If you’re in Nicosia, you’ll be much better off. Things happen here that I don’t like to have you – have anything to do with. The baby –’
She turned suddenly and her face was furious; anger he had never seen in her – that he hadn’t known she had but, as she spoke, he realised he had felt for a long time – now surfacing, stripped bare. ‘The baby?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t you think I know what’s best for me? Don’t you think I know what’s best for me and the girls and this
baby
?’ She said the word as if she hated it.
‘Yes, but –’
‘Well, why, then? Why?’
‘I told you. In Nicosia you’ll be better off.’ Hal tried hard to articulate. ‘I’m not sure, I don’t think I’m much good for you at the moment,’ he said.
‘Aren’t you?’ She laughed harshly.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
‘And if I’m gone you’ll be able to get on with your work?’ she said, not laughing now, bitter.
‘It might be easier.’
‘And you won’t have to look at me?’
‘I –’
‘You hardly do. The only time you’re with me, you
hurt
me, Hal. This
baby
,’ she gestured, ‘which you don’t even
want
– and don’t pretend you do, or that you’ve given it a moment’s thought – and
yesterday
, when I
needed
you –’
What did she mean? Yesterday – the vision of the boy on the wet boards, the blood and water on his chest. Hal’s mouth seemed to fill with hot mineral-tasting blood.
‘When you were
drunk
–’
‘I’d –’
‘Our baby is
here
, Hal. It’s in me, and do you know how I feel about it? I’ll tell you. I don’t bloody want it either,’ she said. ‘That
night
– that
celebration night
of yours,
hurrah
, jolly good, go home and have your wife. Don’t you remember?’
‘Clara –’
Her voice was raw: ‘No! You say you want me safe, but you hurt me.’
‘Clara –’
‘No.’
She backed off, and sat down, suddenly, in the chair opposite him. She began to cry, hiding her face. It was desperate. He felt desperate. The vast realisation of her feelings, and of his failure, engulfed him. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said.
‘Didn’t know what?’
He was her enemy. He hadn’t known it. He went to the chair by the sofa, and sat down, rubbed his face with his hands, trying to order his thoughts. ‘If I have made you unhappy, I apologise.’ He sounded ridiculous, even to himself. Ridiculous and polite, unable to find any way to speak to her. She didn’t say anything. He tried to salvage something. Perhaps he could take it back. She might stay, if he asked her. ‘I don’t know if you want – what you want,’ he said, fumbling through the words, ‘but perhaps you could –’
‘Yes, Hal.’ She stopped him. ‘We’ll go. Don’t worry. We’ll go – gladly.
Leave you to it
, as they say. You win. I surrender.’ She gave him no quarter. ‘I do. I surrender.’
