Small Wars (2 page)
‘Right then.’
He took two glasses of punch and handed her one. ‘Not sure what’s in it. Something awful probably, if the food in this place is anything to go by.’
‘I’m sure it’s lovely.’
There was a brief silence of excruciating tension.
‘We don’t get to see an awful lot of girls. Sorry if I’m not up to much small-talk.’
She seemed relieved. ‘You’re fine. It was easier at home, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. Much. Now we’re all dressed up. Makes things trickier.’
‘You’ve only seen me in slacks. With dog hairs on them probably.’
‘Not that bad. Frocks anyway.’ He paused. ‘And you looked very nice.’
Clara looked down at her punch. Hal noticed she wasn’t drinking it. The hand holding her glass was gloved. He wanted to take the glove off. He wanted to hold her hand. ‘Would you like to dance with me?’ he said.
‘I’d love to.’
‘I’m not awfully good.’
‘Aren’t you? I’m marvellous,’ she said, and Hal laughed; he knew he’d been right about her.
They danced to ‘Choo Choo Ch’Boogie’, and then ‘Fools Rush In’, and then ‘Mam’selle’. They danced until the supper interval, and wouldn’t be interrupted by anybody.
The cadets, though commissioned into their regiments, kept the pips on their shoulder boards covered all through the evening. At twelve o’clock, it was the girls who pulled the short dark ribbons away, and completed their transformation into soldiers. Some chaps had their sisters do it or, God forbid, their mothers, but Hal – unaware of being watched now, or of anything else – would have Clara for his, and he wasn’t frightened about the promise it seemed to make between them.
After this, and a few months in England on exercises, he was to be sent to Germany with his regiment. He would write to her from there, visit when he could, and when the time came – if she wanted it – he would marry her.
In the dissonant laughing countdown to midnight, Clara reached up to his shoulder to untie the ribbon – had to take off her gloves at last to do it – and smiled at him.
Hal saw nothing but the girl he was with and the service he was promised to, and in the deep silence at the centre of himself he made an absolute commitment to each.
The army had rented them a house in Limassol, quite near to the harbour because married quarters on the base hadn’t been sorted out for them yet.
Hal knew the weather had been bad on the crossing from England – even after Gibraltar – and he pictured Clara and the girls laid up in their cabins all the way from Portsmouth. He hoped they hadn’t been too sick; Clara wasn’t a good sailor. He had enjoyed his own journey from Krefeld, flying in bumpy weather with the countries of Europe and wrinkled blue sea passing below, like a clay model you could stick flags in, and move imaginary armies from place to place.
Hal had been promoted to major, and transferred from his battalion in Germany to this one, alone, not knowing anybody. Everything had been new to him. He had set about the business of leadership and his new rank with steadfast energy, and was rewarded by a smooth transition. Sleeping alone in that house for a month, as he had, he missed the company of barracks, and the isolation was grating.
The Limassol house was narrow, in a cobbled street, with no outlook to speak of and barely a lock on the door. It made Hal uncomfortable to think of it, the unsettling lack of security, and that you couldn’t see anything from the windows other than the crooked windows of other houses. If someone were to approach, or set a booby-trap, there’d be no stopping them. A few months before, in Famagusta, an EOKA terrorist had lobbed a bomb through the open window of a soldier’s house as his wife was putting the children to bed. Hal knew his instinct – his agony of responsibility – must be tempered and that the Housing Officer was doing everything he could to get him married quarters at the garrison. But the other soldier’s wife, in Famagusta, had lost half her arm in the explosion. Hal had spoken to the Housing Officer again that morning, reminding him, but beyond doing that he had no power: he must trust everything was being done that could be done. If he didn’t have faith, he wouldn’t manage, but with it, he could live with the knowledge of the other soldier’s wife and still have his own come to be with him.
He lay in the bed that was too big for him, but would be too small for them both when Clara came, and imagined her leaving England for Cyprus. It had been a vicious winter all over Europe. Hal pictured a cold day at Portsmouth harbour, HMS
Endeavour
vast and cold too, and Clara waving to her mother.
Hal was right. Clara had been sick on the voyage. Meg and Lottie hadn’t seemed affected by the heaving boat at all, perhaps being small and low to the ground their bodies weren’t so disrupted, and she’d had to run after them, bent over, up and down the slippery metal corridors of the
Endeavour
, what felt like all day, every day, for the whole journey. The twins were sixteen months and had discovered exercise, exploration and teasing their mother.
Clara, whom Hal had taken to calling ‘Pudding’ during her pregnancy in Krefeld, had lost all of her baby weight, and with being seasick all the time and no German – or even English – stodge to sustain her, now barely filled out her clothes at all. She hoped she wouldn’t be too skinny for Hal. He loved her curves.
When she wasn’t chasing the girls up and down the
Endeavour
, or leaning over the metal bowl of the lavatory, she read to them. She read the new books she had bought for them in London, and she read the old books her mother had allowed her to take from the shelves of the nursery. She held the loose-spined books gently, reading to Meg and Lottie about fairies and trains and England, until all three fell asleep.
The
Endeavour
made its slow floating entry into the deep east of the Mediterranean. They passed Greece, and the long reaches of Crete. The ancient seas slid away beneath them, the boat throbbed and heaved, the islands and the skies surrounded them. Now she stood in the drizzle, watching Cyprus coming towards her out of the mist.
She had travelled out with an odd assortment of people: an Italian nightclub singer, a young teacher for the English school, who was a shy man barely out of school himself, and a Welsh businessman, with ‘interests’ in Nicosia, who was very boastful; he liked to frighten them with stories of EOKA’s terrorist atrocities, and make them feel as if they were entering a proper war zone, not just a long-held part of the Empire having a little trouble with a few insurgents. ‘It’s hardly the Blitz, is it?’ Clara said to the young teacher one night. It made her feel braver.
Despite the recent war, she had never felt herself a foreigner in Germany: it had the northern European restraint and ragged bombed greyness of home, and she had felt unthreatened there, even as she missed her family. She thought her sense of belonging might actually spring from the war between them, that England and Germany were like two siblings, badly bruised, but forced to carry on in the same house and learn to get on. Cyprus, though, was another thing altogether. Part of the Empire it may have been, but the island was a virtual chip off the Middle East too, Byzantium, Turkey, Greece, all of these parts in crisis, under the British flag, and her husband charged with part of its protection; Clara couldn’t help but feel nostalgia for the dull concrete barracks and modern flats of Krefeld, and Brunswick, that she had called home for the six years of her marriage.
The group of civilians clustered together on the metal deck while all around them troops prepared to disembark and the
Endeavour
’s crew brought her into dock. Clara knew they were in the way; she was trying to get mittens onto the girls, but kept dropping them, dangling on their elastic. The soldiers were National Service ones, noisy, desperate to be on land. Clara and the other civilians had kept apart from them on the voyage and it was disconcerting to be surrounded now. The Italian singer, who had put on a sort of safari suit with a cinched waist for their arrival, held one of Meg’s hands, and Clara, with Lottie on her hip, held the other. Rain stung her eyes.
The arms of the small harbour were around them now as they drew closer. Clara could see the houses of the town all along the straight front and the waves hitting the sea wall and splashing up. She could see the fishing boats and navy craft bobbing and bumping together on their moorings. She saw black cars and Land Rovers and soldiers, and behind them the jumble of plaster and stone buildings, warehouses, storehouses and the big metal mooring posts, which were mushroom-shaped with giant thick ropes tightly wound around them. She saw soldiers and Cypriots milling about, knotted in groups, waiting. She held onto her children’s small hands tightly.
She saw Hal.
He had seen her first and was smiling, with his eyes squinting against the wind. He raised his hand. Now there was just the waiting for the big slow ship to close the distance between them.
The front door stuck.
‘We’ve had a lot of thunderstorms,’ said Hal.
The girls peered past their mother’s legs into the darkness of the house.
‘Well gosh, it’s not awfully Mediterranean, is it?’ said Clara.
‘Not today.’
Corporal Kirby, Hal’s batman, began to bring the cases in from the Land Rover. Clara was forced into the kitchen; she and the girls pressed themselves against the wall as Hal and Kirby lifted the biggest trunk and took it upstairs.
Clara took off her hat. There was a stove, a small table, a sink and a food safe with a front that opened downwards to make a shelf. The brown louvred shutters were closed on the window at the front, and at the back of the house there was a door with a curtain over it. The little girls silently watched Clara go to it and push the curtain aside. It slid awkwardly on the plastic-covered wire.
The neighbouring houses backed onto a small courtyard where there was a washing bowl for clothes on the tiles, and a tree in a pot that was dead. She turned back to the room. The girls were pale and top-heavy in their buttoned-up coats.
‘Your things are wet, aren’t they?’ said Clara, and took off their woollen hats. ‘Shall we go and see what Daddy’s up to?’
In the front bedroom, Hal and Corporal Kirby were trying to find space for the trunks and smaller cases. Hal turned to Clara as she came in. He looked serious and embarrassed.
‘What a lovely house!’ she said, and he smiled at her.
‘That’s fine, Kirby. Leave it, will you.’
‘Right, sir.’
They heard his boots down the stairs, and the door, and then the Land Rover starting up. Meg and Lottie stared at their parents.
‘How’s it been?’ said Clara.
‘Not bad at all.’
‘Better than Krefeld?’
‘Well, not half so luxurious, as you can see.’
‘We don’t mind.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Of course not. We’ll make the best of it.’
Clara went to him slowly. She put her face against his shoulder and the girls came over too, and rested their hands on their parents’ legs. Hal put his head down and felt Clara’s smooth hair against his cheek. ‘A month was too long,’ he said. He put his arms round them all as the sound of motorbikes and Cypriot voices and the banging shutters of other houses came up from the street.
The Episkopi Garrison was west of Limassol. The narrow road left the town and crossed the big headland, with the Akrotiri RAF base fence on the left, then went back towards the sea through orange groves, flat fertile land and a long avenue of cypresses.
After the orange groves, the road went up steeply and climbed the cliffs, first with a cutting through them, then with big views of the sea and the long coast behind. After that part, the land was empty and more remote for a stretch and then there was Episkopi.
After you drove through the gate and along the small road into the garrison, there was a mixture of freshly made concrete buildings and Nissen huts, signs to different areas and rows of Land Rovers, three-tonners and large tented sections too, with rutted tracks between them, where permanent buildings hadn’t been sorted out yet. There were too many troops coming into Cyprus to accommodate them all properly, a feeling of movement all the time, and a shifting of plans.
Happy Valley was at the far side of the garrison, with the mountains behind it, and had been tented, but now white houses for officers were being put up, with front lawns, and the track to the stables and polo field was half laid with tarmac.
Below the garrison was the beach, an arc, which for most of the year was good for swimming and exercising horses on the sand. You could walk through a long straight tunnel in the high cliff to get to it, or you could negotiate a very steep track down the front of the lower cliffs where they were sandy and had grass in patches.
The officers’ mess was a new, concrete building, painted white, with shallow steps up to the narrow porch, and on the evenings that women were invited it was sometimes strung with dim bulbs. Hal thought the bulbs rather pathetic looking, and that they highlighted the general shabbiness, but women always said, ‘How lovely,’ so he supposed he was wrong. There was a big garden at the back of the mess which you could get straight out to from the bar.
Clara was trying not to get mud on her evening shoes and didn’t notice the bulbs. She had hated leaving the twins with the Greek girl on their first night. On the drive over Hal had felt foolish pointing out donkeys and goats and the oranges on the trees, trying to cheer her up.
The mess bar was low-ceilinged and modern, filled with soldiers and their wives, and the floor was carpeted like a golf club.
‘Colonel and Mrs Burroughs,’ said Hal.
‘How do you do.’
‘Mark Innes.’
‘How do you do.’
Mark Innes, an even-featured, open-faced man of about Hal’s age, smiled and shook her hand. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ he said.
‘Another of mine, Tony Grieves. Grieves, my wife, Clara.’
Grieves – a crumpled-looking man of twenty-three, quite drunk – made a sort of lurching bow. ‘Mrs Treherne, how do you do.’
‘How do you do.’
A Turkish Cypriot waiter in a white jacket brought over a tray of cocktails.
‘White Ladies,’ said Mrs Burroughs. ‘Would you care for one? We’ve all sorts of other things if you’d rather not. But White Ladies are
it
at the moment.’
‘That’s lovely. Thank you.’
The waiter held the tray in both hands, Clara noticed, as she took the drink.
There was a bar, hard sofas and armchairs, and a fire at one end of the room. A glass case held silver cups, and yet the whole place had a hasty, brand-new feeling, like a stage set, she thought. She sipped the cocktail, and the sharp lemon juice stung her lips.
‘Have they managed to sort out a house for you yet, Hal?’ said Colonel Burroughs, and put a hand on his shoulder, turning him away from Clara as Mrs Burroughs closed in.
‘Don’t be overwhelmed,’ she said. She was long-faced and kind, speaking quickly in a powerful voice. ‘You’ll get used to us all. There’s always a crowd at the end of the week, but you won’t find wives here all that often. There’s more fun to be had in town, at the club. My husband is terribly impressed with yours. He’s young to have been made up to major, isn’t he? His father must be awfully pleased – are Arthur and Jean well?’
‘Yes, I –’
‘I should think you’ll both find it quite different from Germany. But you didn’t come directly from there, did you?’
‘No. I took the girls to my family in Buckinghamshire for a few weeks.’
‘Lovely. What price Buckinghamshire now, eh? It is
freezing
this evening, isn’t it? Very often we have beautiful warm weather in January, but this winter has been very harsh. You’ll find the spring pleasant, I should think, although the summer’s absolutely draining. We have most things here, and once you’re on the base you’ll be more or less comfortable, I’m sure. It is a shame you’re stuck in the town, typical army muddle, but really there’s very little trouble. I don’t know what you’ve heard.’
‘Hal says it’s been a bit quieter recently.’
‘Well, there was an incident in Limassol last week, but mostly we’re managing to stop these ghastly things before they happen, that’s the plan at any rate, but these Cyps are so damned sneaky and the law of averages says they get away with one or two things, however careful one is.’
‘I met a man on the boat who said they make bombs out of car exhausts and food tins.’
‘My dear, they’ll make them out of absolutely anything. They have them on timers and tripwires and goodness knows what. They’ve no scruples whatsoever. We’ve had to put poles on the fronts of the vehicles to catch the piano wire they stretch across the road before it can take off our poor lads’ heads – now what sort of a terrible mind thinks up a thing like that?’
‘I noticed something of the sort as we drove in,’ said Clara, remembering she had been worrying about the girls and hadn’t asked Hal what they were for. She’d rather not know, she decided.
‘Another drink?’ said Mrs Burroughs, and led Clara away from the bar towards a group of women at a card table, playing whist.
‘You must join our reading group at the club. It’s terribly good fun, and we often read plays aloud – do you enjoy the theatre at all? We were thinking of starting a dramatic society…’
Later they were driven home by Kirby through a very black night, stopping for the gates to be opened by soldiers, who peered in at them, saluted and waved them through. The headlights picked out the barbed wire that was looped on the tops of fences or stretched tight between posts.
Away from the base the road felt lonely; Clara was glad to see buildings ahead of them as they came into Limassol. There was almost no street lighting, and nobody about, just the dark houses and alleyways between them.
‘I’m sorry I was so grumpy earlier,’ she said.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Hal. He put his arm around her. ‘You’ll see the girls in a moment.’
‘I’m sure they’re fine.’
‘I’m going to be kept pretty busy,’ he said. ‘Do you remember the blokes in Krefeld, shooting up wrecked old cars just for something to do?’
‘This will be better.’
‘Yes,’ he said firmly.
He was happy.
In Germany Hal had distinguished himself, been promoted to captain and served six years after that without having seen a shot fired in anger and it had been hard to take the inactivity. Even with his joy in having Clara at last, after their long engagement, he had been frustrated. His main challenge was keeping his men up to the mark and occupied, and Clara had come to understand that it was not blood-lust that was being thwarted in Hal, but something cleaner than that, and natural. He’d been trained to do a job; he should have liked to do it.
The car stopped. Kirby got out, opened the door for them and looked up and down the street, short-fingered hands resting loosely on his Sten gun, as they let themselves into the house.
The Greek girl was sitting on a chair in the kitchen. She stood up and smiled. Hal took out his wallet and Clara went straight upstairs to the back bedroom and pushed open the door.
A candle was burning on the tilting chest of drawers.
Lottie was asleep on the bed and the cot was empty. After a very short moment of terror Clara saw that Meg was in the single bed, too, in the shadow behind the heaped-up blankets. She went to the bed and sat down. The twins were jumbled together in sleep. She felt their faces, as she had when they were smaller. She always told herself there was no need to do it, but still, whenever they slept, she checked to make sure they were breathing.
She picked up the candle and went to the top of the stairs. ‘Where’s the girl?’ she said.
‘She’s gone.’
‘She left a candle in the room.’ Clara heard her voice shaking. ‘It’s very dangerous. They’re not babies now, they might have pushed it over. Will you tell her next time?’
‘We won’t use her next time.’
After a moment, she said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get used to everything.’
Hal came up the stairs. He blew out the candle and, in the sudden blackness, kissed her. ‘I’m not worried,’ he said.