Small Wars (17 page)

‘Yes. After they found that one in the NAAFI at Larnaka – and the beach.’

‘You weren’t on the beach.’

‘No. You were.’

‘Yes. I was.’

‘I saw a picture in the paper of –’

‘We’ve all seen those pictures, Clara.’

‘They can make them out of anything. Olive-oil tins.’

‘Yes. I know.’

‘I feel better when I check.’

‘Why don’t you stop?’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here. Adile has been here. Think of all the security. We’re safe.’

‘Just let me finish.’ She went back to the desk and carefully opened the drawers.

Hal stayed still. If there actually were a bomb in the drawer, he thought, she’d trip the switch and blow her hands off to the elbow, at least.

He shut his eyes once more, but the sound of her checking and touching and fiddling with things was intolerable. She was nearby. He could sense her movement. He half opened one eye. She was kneeling, checking under the small table by the sofa.

With no warning that he was going to do it, no moment’s check on himself to stop, he jumped towards her, big hands grabbing her viciously by the arms. ‘Just stop it! Just fucking stop it!’ He shook her, gripping her soft flesh, both of them on their knees. ‘There’s nothing there!’

He let go of her suddenly – realising. He tried to take her hands, but she pulled away. She was cringing in fear of him.

‘God, Clara,’ he said, as if all the world had stopped at what he’d said to her, at what he had done.

He found he was kneeling by the sofa with his head down on his arms. ‘Clara,’ he said again. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry…’ He shut his eyes, as tightly as he could. He stayed hunched away from her, hiding, until at last he felt her hands on his shoulders. Her fingers on the back of his neck.

‘No, don’t,’ she said.

Her fingers stroked him, small strokes, where his hair met his bare skin, in absolution.

There was silence.

‘It’s all right,’ she said.

‘No. It isn’t.’

‘There. Silly, you haven’t even taken off your jacket. There…’

A little later, it was supper time. They ate together in loving complicity, but Clara’s arms hurt still where Hal’s fingers had gripped the muscle. She felt the gentle ache, knowing she must absorb this, too, and forgive it. ‘Hal,’ she said softly, ‘what’s happened?’

‘What do you mean?’ He looked at her in surprise.

She was patient. She took a small mouthful, chewed it. ‘Will you have to go to Nicosia for the court-martial?’

Hal’s voice was quiet and even. ‘There wasn’t enough evidence.’

Clara was startled. She put down her knife and fork. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We’re not going to take it any further,’ he said.

‘But that’s not fair!’

‘We have to think of the greater good.’

‘The greater good?’

Hal, implacable, continued to eat his supper.

‘But, Hal, Lawrence Davis –’

‘Don’t get worked up about it, Clara, there’s no need.’

All control, he put an end to it effortlessly.

‘All right,’ she said.

‘Eat up.’

She looked down at the table.

‘Clara?’ He spoke gently. ‘I’m sorry about earlier. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know what could have happened.’

‘It’s quite all right.’

When Hal went outside with his brandy, for his after-dinner smoke, Clara stayed sitting at the table.

She thought of Davis placing his trust in Hal, as she had done. He’d had so much feeling.
Disgusting
, he’d said, and that they would be punished. She was sure he would have fought for the principle of the thing. She remembered his silly youthful face thrust towards her, questioning. ‘What’s he like, your husband?’ and she, in confidence, had answered, ‘Try him.’

The cameo, the little Iris, was tucked into the pages of her diary. She pictured it there, making a friendly dent in the paper, close to the spine.

She hadn’t wanted to share Hal’s cigarette, or sip his brandy, and she checked her arms, where the redness was fading. He had hurt her, there would be blue bruises later, but that wasn’t why she had stayed inside. It wasn’t because of the way he could overlook the vicious crimes of his own men, as if they were insignificant; she could bear that, she could try to forgive him. She hadn’t wanted to go outside with him because the smell of the smoke turned her stomach, and she didn’t want to drink, even a little. Clara counted back in her mind to another night for which she must forgive Hal, and knew beyond doubt that she was pregnant. She had known for days. She had lied to herself.

Chapter Ten

Privates Francke and Miller were transferred and attached to separate units; they didn’t see each other again. All three men went through the rest of their lives with no moment at which they were discovered or punished. Their consciences troubled them variously, and without consequence.

Hal was experiencing unpopularity amongst his men for the first time. Many of them had their pay docked because of the night in Limassol, or spent time in the guardroom, and Hal’s responsibility for the banishment of Francke and Miller had made him their enemy, too. He didn’t need love, just respect. He had them out on night patrols, down at the ranges or practising drill for hours in the daytime and discipline improved, if his popularity didn’t. He counted it as a victory in a battle that had become smaller and smaller, with so little room for victory in it.

If Hal was unpopular, Davis was loathed. He had never found a comfortable place at Episkopi because of his connection with the SIB; it separated him, and now, with a reputation as a toad who would report his fellows – and then, worse, not stand by his own story – he was shunned. Davis felt their dislike keenly, and the hatred of the men, too, because he had betrayed them. Davis believed he sensed violence amongst them, directed at him. Unfamiliar with their class, he was fearful of it and, to avoid being left alone, forced into the reluctant company of the other junior officers.

Grieves had been attached to the REME, as part of a security detail, high in the Troodos. It would be the last posting of his National Service, which was due to finish in the autumn. He was in a tented camp, very uncomfortable and isolated; he wanted to write to Deirdre, a litany of lonely obscenity, but couldn’t have done it without discovery by her husband, so there was no more communication between them.

Deirdre was left with a resentment she longed to express. She found Mark intolerable. Sleeping with Tony Grieves had eased the tension between them, in some ways; now she was focused utterly on him, but not to the good. He wanted a brother or sister for Roger. Deirdre obliged in the effort, grudgingly. Hal heard them through the walls during his long and sleepless nights, rowing and occasionally having sex, and remembered himself and Clara, as quiet as they could be, whispering into each other’s hands and ears and necks.

Hal didn’t know if Mark had any idea about Deirdre and Grieves, still, but he hadn’t seemed to think any the worse of Hal for arresting him – unlike some of the others – and had even remarked, ‘Have to root out the rotten apples, Hal. Just don’t expect to change the world and win a popularity prize while you’re about it,’ which Hal had accepted with good grace, as fair enough.

There were ceasefire talks going on, and relative quiet from EOKA, who were taking the opportunity to re-arm. The British were trying to negotiate with the exiled Archbishop Makarios, and – though it stuck in their throats to do it – to treat him as a man of God and a politician, instead of the duplicitous terrorist they held him to be when a ceasefire was not being discussed.

With tensions between the British and the Greeks eased, the violence between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots expanded, as if to fill a vacuum. The soldiers at Episkopi and all over the island were occupied with quelling disputes between the two populations, separating them from one another with barbed wire, patrolling the streets they shared to keep the peace.

Cyprus shifted through an uneasy summer; Britain kept her slender grasp on empire and the Cypriots and soldiers continued to play out the long game of complicity and enmity, welcome and rebellion, the bloodshed entrenching each position as firmly as the friendship did.

Mark and Hal, accompanying a patrol through a Greek village one Sunday, found themselves the guests of honour at a wedding; honey and figs and rough, cork-stopped bottles of wine were heaped into their car while they were pressed, each in turn, to dance with the bride. The village was decked with flowers and ribbons. It seemed to balance over the vast, glittering view like an exquisite mirage. The next day two British soldiers were badly injured in an ambush two miles from the same village.

Then, towards the end of July, all of Cyprus’s problems were dwarfed by President Nasser’s nationalising of the Suez Canal. He did it dramatically, during a triumphant speech, heard on wirelesses all over the world, and the British, French and Americans were thrown into disarray and conflict, not only with Egypt but with one another. To the British, a gauntlet had been thrown down. At Episkopi and everywhere else the talk was almost exclusively of that. The usual polarity of extraordinary and ordinary, which characterised life in Cyprus, was made more extreme again. Troops flooded the island from Egypt and elsewhere, thrown off Egyptian soil, billeted in tented camps, under pressure to finish new airfields and repair old ones, moving vehicles and weapons in haste, while colonial life went on uninterrupted, staunch and defiant in the face of the coming crisis. The army wives still ran their poetry clubs and drama societies; bands were still booked into the Limassol Club. The women with families, or young children, like Clara, found they were left out of fun that was more stubbornly frivolous than it had been before, a society thumbing its nose at danger.

Clara knew she must tell Hal she was pregnant. She dreaded it. She scarcely owned it to herself. She decided she might as well just come right out and say it.

Hal was in the small garden with the girls. They were filling the paddling pool from the tap in the kitchen; Hal had a watering can and the girls their tiny beach buckets of painted tin. The three of them marched back and forth, the girls spilling most of the water on the tiles and the grass, and the paddling pool seemed to fill very slowly. Clara was cutting tomatoes in the kitchen, stepping aside for the girls, ‘Mummy!’ and Hal, ‘Excuse me.’

The girls were in rompers, Hal had on a shirt, undone at the neck. He looked up from the spangled lapping water into the house and she said, ‘Come in for a moment, Hal.’

‘What is it?’

‘Please?’

‘Carry on, girls,’ he said, and came inside.

She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. Her hands were wet on the knife. ‘Hal,’ she said. She would just say it. Once it was said, he would know. She sawed at the thick tomato skin with the knife.

‘Careful.’ He took the knife from her.

She turned and dried her hands. The water outside threw bright flashes into her eyes.

‘Clara?’

‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ he said.

‘Do you really think so?’ She looked into his clear eyes and he looked into hers.

‘Of course! When will it come?’

‘I don’t know yet. Perhaps in January. I need to go to the doctor.’

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Yes – fine.’

It was as if they had studied their words earlier and knew them quite well.

Hal put his hand on her arm and said, ‘Well, that’s marvellous news.’

Hal spent the next day rounding up possible terror suspects in one of the hilltop villages. He stood with his back to the church. The pen was set up in the bright glare of a shadeless corner. There were fifteen men inside it, guarded by soldiers. Hal was with Kirby near a very small café. You wouldn’t have known it was a café, except for the row of old men who normally sat outside it on metal chairs. They weren’t there now.

The village was tiny and the café, square and church were tiny too, with narrow streets and the smell of donkey shit ground into the uneven stones.

The three-tonner with the informer in it hadn’t been able to get into the square, being too wide, so it was virtually wedged into a side street about a hundred and fifty yards away, thick canvas hanging down over the back, with a frayed hole cut out of it for the informer to see out.

The men were to be paraded past, and the soldiers were ordering them into a line.

The glare came up off the streets, the whitish stone and plaster of the buildings, with their tattered wooden balconies and broken tiles on the sagging roofs.

Hal squinted into the bright light. His mouth tasted bitter. He watched the men being paraded slowly past the unseen informer. All of them were frightened, an assortment of ages and types made one by their captivity.

Davis was in the truck with the informer and the SIB. He and Hal hadn’t spoken to one another, beyond what was necessary, since the summary hearing.

The church behind Hal was shaped like a small fat cross, with domes on each section. Beside him, Kirby lit a cigarette and the sharp smell of burned sulphur reached him. The sour smell started quick images in his mind – glaring sand, thick blood. He shook his head slightly, made irritable and bored by the intrusion, but his heart, ungovernable, beat huge and violently in his chest. Clara’s weak body, pregnant, the pieces of bloodied men…‘They all know the routine,’ he said to Kirby. ‘If there was anyone worth looking at here, they’d have made a bolt for it when they saw us coming.’

‘Always the way, sir,’ said Kirby, comfortably.

Hal was very aware of the church at his back. He felt the tilt of the hill sloping down under his feet on the uneven cobbles. The angle of his vision slanted towards the line of men shuffling past the truck, like a magic lantern of false perspective, in the hot day.

There was a disturbance in the line – some scuffling. One of the soldiers shoved an old man in the kidneys with the butt of his rifle. He collapsed with weak knees onto the ground, putting out a bony hand to steady himself.

Hal saw him fall, saw the brief pleasure of the nineteen-year-old private who had pushed him, and said nothing.

He turned, sensing something, but there was nobody there, just the church. A moment later he looked again, forgetting he had checked already, feeling a presence and uncomfortable.

He turned back to the church and found he had started to walk towards it. He glanced back once, then pushed the door open and went in. The building was oddly bigger inside than it had appeared. There was dimness and cool air, some thin candles dug into sand burning near to him. He felt their warmth. His eyes moved from dome to shadowed arching dome in the peaceful height of the church.

Churches in England had worn grey stone, dampness, dryness, dripping English trees outside, and he had looked at those leaded panes and stone arches a million times. He had always liked church, for its order and recitation, for the singing and the peaceful gap between one part of the day and the next. He felt at home there, in the boredom of school chapel and the joy of his wedding; it was home as England was home. This place was nothing like the churches he knew and yet it was familiar to him – uncomfortably so: the familiarity seemed to find him out, unpeel the layers of him, a feeling that was too sharp for comfort.

He walked down the aisle, between the pews, towards the altar, which, set deeply in another arch, he could hardly see.

Hal had spent more hours than he could count in the chapel at Sandhurst. Attendance was obligatory, enforcing the long contemplation of altar, ceiling, the white stone engraved with the rolls of honour, other men’s heads, and, above their heads, the officers’ collect, in stone too. ‘Almighty God, whose son Jesus Christ, the Lord of all life, came not to be served but to serve.’

Approaching this altar, he had an idea he might pray.

There was no light except that coming through the windows above and the limited glow of the candles. The paint on the wooden altarpieces behind the gold candelabra was dark with age and poverty. There were two wooden panels, and the third missing – broken or stolen. The central picture, directly facing, was a Madonna and Child, with short perspective so that it looked as if the baby was held against her, with no legs or lap to support it. Both faces stared outwards, crudely. Hal saw that beside it – more strange because it lacked an opposite – was a painting of Christ, as a man, walking towards him, with a diagonal pattern of crosses on white over a robe Hal could not make out. Behind Him, in gold, were ranks of angels.

The rest of the small church was bare. There were no other panels, no curtains or carvings, just the stone, and this.

The face of Christ was Byzantine, a blank oval, arched lines for brow and nose, stiff white hand lifted in blessing as He marched outwards, leading the angels in their lines behind.

Hal stared at the painted face, and was filled with fear, a rush of sorrow he didn’t understand. He turned quickly and went back down the church, feet loud in the silence. Pulling the flaking, heavy door towards him, he got out onto the cobbles, half stumbling as one foot tipped into a shallow channel.

The brightness blinded him. He felt very shaken; his hands were trembling.

Kirby was exactly where he had left him and didn’t look round when Hal returned. It was as if going into the church had taken no time at all, or he had imagined it. He wanted to ask – had to stop himself asking – if he had gone inside the church, or been with Kirby all the time, seeing the line of frightened men pass the cut-out hole to be identified, and other men, uniformed, watching them.