Small Wars (6 page)
In March and April the hillside behind the garrison and even the cliffs below were bright with wild flowers. It hadn’t been a bad winter, compared to English winters, but it was good that the thunderstorms were over and the roads were better.
The houses on Lionheart Estate were small and semi-detached; Clara thought living there must be what being working class might be like, except for the outside lavatories. She didn’t know how anybody lived with those. Deirdre and Mark Innes were on one side and another officer and his family on the other; she felt a stronger sense of community than she had ever felt, even during the war. In Germany they had moved around a lot, and married quarters for a captain and his wife were very different from those for a major with a family.
Sometimes Clara could hear Deirdre and Mark arguing next door and she hoped they couldn’t hear her and Hal making love. The twins were unwakeable, but she pictured Deirdre and Mark, sleepless in their beds, overhearing them. She tried to be as quiet as she could but it was difficult. Hal was virtually silent when he made love to her, perhaps a legacy of the etiquette of the boys in their lonely beds in the dormitories at school. He would please her, sweetly, and hold off and wait; the more intensely he felt, the quieter he would become, and Clara felt closer to him than if he had demonstrated noisy masculinity. He would hide his face in her neck, forced closer to her, made vulnerable by his silence.
And laughing afterwards, too, was noisy. She would cover his mouth and her own with her hands and feel his breath on her palm.
In Cyprus there were strawberries in the early spring.
A grocery van owned by a Greek Cypriot named Tomas visited the houses on Lionheart, Marlborough and Oxford Estates almost every day. Tomas was something of a favourite with the officers’ wives. He was flirtatious and unattractive – but pleasantly so – the father of four children. Sometimes one or two of his children came with him, and sat on big bags of Cyprus potatoes in the back, getting streaks of red earth on their legs. The van was small and dark green, with corrugated sides that rolled up and a diesel engine you could hear stopping and starting along the curved roads of the estates. The wives would go out with baskets or string bags to buy lettuces, vegetables and fruit.
Clara’s first strawberries of the year were bought from Tomas. It was nine o’clock, and Hal had just left. They had made love that morning – even more quietly because it was daytime – and she had stayed in bed with her legs stretched out, listening to him downstairs, getting ready to go. He had brought the girls in for tickling and Clara felt very happy with the early sun coming in onto the creases of the white sheet and the girls’ hair, tangled from sleep. It was a slow ecstatic morning. After breakfast she heard Tomas and they went out to catch him.
Clara stood in the road, which was quiet and empty. Tomas handed her the strawberry box last and she walked back with it in her hand, not putting it into the shopping bag. The corners of the cardboard were stained pink. The string of the heavy bag was digging into the fingers of one hand and the strawberry box was light in the other. The girls walked behind, slowly, not in straight lines.
In front of their house Clara put down the string bag and sat on the grass. She took the first strawberry. It was warm from being in the passenger seat with the sun coming through the windscreen. ‘You can’t get these until the summer in England,’ she said.
‘’Tis-it?’ asked Lottie, and then Meg:
‘’Tis-it?’
Deirdre Innes’s front door banged behind them as she came out with her little boy, and they all turned. She had on her sunglasses and a bright green dress with a white belt. Deirdre was irritable even in pleasure, and her light mouse hair always fought to fall out of the curl she tried to keep in it. ‘Picnic?’ she said, dropping her keys into her big straw basket and trying to take her little boy’s hand. He was called Roger, and would soon be three.
‘Here.’ Clara held a strawberry out to her.
‘How marvellous.’
Roger, who wore pale blue cotton rompers and had fat legs, stared at Lottie and Meg, who stared back. Deirdre threw the strawberry stalk away from her. ‘We’re going down to Dodge. Coming?’
Dodge City was the nickname for the row of shops on the base. It had a wooden walkway along it and the buildings had been hastily thrown up, giving it the appearance of a frontier town in the Wild West – hence its nickname. There was a hairdresser and a small general store. Greek-run and friendly.
Deirdre and Clara walked to Dodge and the children went so slowly it took a long time. They chatted and finished the strawberries, looking up occasionally at the dark blue horizon of the sea.
‘Cyprus – the Sunshine Posting,’ said Deirdre, with bitterness, and Clara didn’t draw her out, preferring to relish her own happiness as precious.
At Dodge, she waited outside the shop for Deirdre, leaning against the wooden post of the walkway with the sun on her face and Lieutenant Davis came out of the barber’s, rubbing the back of his newly shaved neck. He noticed her and looked oddly surprised. ‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Good morning. Nice haircut?’
‘Well, I won’t need another for a while at least,’ he said, smiling.
‘I’m just waiting for Deirdre Innes.’
‘No shopping to do?’
‘Not today.’
Davis looked at the girls, who were hunched low and close to one another nearby, examining some ants and squashing them occasionally with their short fingers.
‘Savages,’ he said.
‘Shocking, isn’t it? First instinct – destruction.’
He looked at her. ‘Are you on Marlborough?’ he asked.
She had thought he was going to say something quite different, she didn’t know what.
‘Lionheart,’ she said. ‘We were in town before, which was horrid, so I’m glad we’re up here now.’
‘Yes, much better off. Did you feel in any danger?’
‘Everyone was very friendly, actually. The Greeks seem so hospitable. Hal says it’s a shame a perfectly amicable situation can be spoilt by a few troublemakers.’
‘Does he? I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, how would we like it if a lot of Greeks moved into the Houses of Parliament and told us what to do?’
‘It’s not the same thing at all. And they didn’t complain about it when we were defending them from the Germans, did they?’
Lottie got up and went over to Clara, leaning on her, pressing her dusty hands against her skirt and twisting her neck to smile up at Davis with self-adoring charm.
‘Hello – you’re a sweet little thing,’ said Davis.
‘This is Lottie. That’s Meg.’
Meg was absorbed in the ants still and didn’t hear.
‘Twins?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was a twin, but my sister died when we were two.’
‘Oh.’
Clara was at a loss for a moment. Her girls were nearly two; it didn’t bear thinking about. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Well. You know.’
This remark seemed to finish the topic and Clara searched for another. She wished Deirdre would come out. Lottie wriggled and kept smiling up at Davis, then went over and smiled at him even more, hoping to be picked up, and Clara felt embarrassed, as if Lottie’s behaviour were her own.
‘Lottie, what’s Meg doing?’ she said.
Davis, unused to children, just smiled down at her. ‘I say,’ he said suddenly, ‘I’ve got my batman down here. Shall I give you a lift up to Lionheart? I’m meeting your husband to – Well, we have to go up to one of the villages, but I’ve time, if you don’t mind coming along now.’
‘You’re with Hal today?’
Davis looked at her for a second, then said, as if he hadn’t heard, ‘Should you like a lift up?’
‘Yes. Thank you. Right now?’
‘Right now would be best. I don’t want to keep the major waiting.’
Clara picked up Lottie, put her on her hip and went to the door of the shop, leaning into the grocery-smelling dark. ‘Deirdre? Lieutenant Davis says he’ll give us a lift up – will you be long?’
‘Oh, jolly good, Roger’s fading. Right now?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll just finish up.’
Clara was relieved Deirdre would be with them.
Deirdre sat in the front of Davis’s Land Rover, leaning her arm restlessly on the open window and holding Roger around the middle, and Davis sat practically on the gearstick between her and his driver. Clara and the girls were in the back. Deirdre was quiet, the engine noise made it hard for Clara to speak and she had to keep the girls pinned down over the bumps.
The Land Rover stopped at the first street of Lionheart, by the Devonshire Road sign. ‘Will this do?’
‘Lovely,’ said Clara.
‘Will you be seeing Tony Grieves later?’ said Deirdre, suddenly, and Davis said,
‘Yes, I should think so.’
‘Well be sure and tell him hello, won’t you? From Mrs Innes.’ She said it challengingly, meeting his eye.
‘Certainly. Goodbye.’
She opened the door and put Roger down first, then climbed down after him and hauled her basket out. Davis jumped out and opened Clara’s door for her. He nodded to her obligingly and smiled. He was a little smaller than Hal, possibly, and narrow. His narrowness was boyish.
‘Abyssinia,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she laughed, ‘I expect so.’
He turned to Deirdre. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Innes.’
‘Yes – don’t forget what I told you.’ Deirdre was impatient, and cross with Roger about something, walking away from them, so Clara and the twins waved off the Land Rover as it turned and drove away.
At Episkopi Garrison, after lunch, the officers often headed home or to Evdimou beach, which was in the next bay along to the west. The café at Evdimou was run by a Greek named Gregoris; they could drink and relax without the formality of the mess. Hal often went there with Mark Innes, and whiled away the afternoon hours when Mark didn’t want to go home to Deirdre. He never said so, of course, but it was understood. Hal would keep him company, staring at the horizon, drinking bottles of Keo beer and resting his mind in peace, between the business of soldiering and the business of Clara and the girls.
That afternoon, though, as Davis had said, there was a job to be done. Kirby was driving Hal and Davis to find Loulla Kollias’s wife, Madalyn. After the raid on the farmhouse and the arrest of her husband, she and her children had gone to stay at her sister’s farm on the plains in the middle of the island.
Davis had a book with him on the journey, which he tried to read, whenever the road was smooth enough. Hal found himself irritated by what he took to be an affectation. There was something about Davis that got his back up, a slouching, sixth-form sensibility; he seemed unable to put himself aside for the job in hand, and at one point had said, ‘Rich, isn’t it, sir? Public relations exercise for the widows and orphans.’
Hal responded coolly: ‘It’s procedure, Davis. A man died in our custody. D’you expect us to put him out with the rubbish?’
It took three hours to get there from Episkopi; a long drive, not improved by Davis’s company. They made a detour to the local police station where there was a muddle about who was going where, and arrangements for collecting the body from Episkopi. Then Kirby had got lost and driven around the dirt roads, swearing, for a while. Now he was waiting out by the Land Rover as Hal, Davis and the two local Greek policemen approached the house. Hal knocked on the door.
Around them were olive groves, the silver leaves touched by a low sun.
They stood, Hal, Davis and the policemen, surrounded by silence that felt deeper after their loud knock than before. Nobody came to the door. Hal glanced around the yard and into the beginnings of the quiet lines of trees, trying to see if there was anybody there. Some chickens pecked about in the dust and perched on the low wall that crookedly circled the house, but apart from that, no life that they could see. Hal thought it was a very peaceful scene that he had come to with the news of death.
Madalyn Kollias stood in stony earth between the lines of vegetables she had been working on, and heard about the death of her husband.
Hal looked up from her hands which were twined together; with soil under the nails and in the cracks in her skin. He looked into her face – carefully not into her eyes – as he explained to her levelly that her husband’s body was in the hospital at Limassol. He relied on Davis to translate for him, pausing between his sentences. The police stood at a respectful distance, with their caps in their hands, looking down at their feet.
Hal told Madalyn Kollias that she was not under suspicion, he didn’t want to cause her any unnecessary suffering. He was distracted by Davis, who was emotionally agitated. Hal could sense his untrained feelings, near him. He kept looking back and forth between Hal, Madalyn Kollias and the Greeks, stumbling over his words. When Madalyn Kollias pressed them for details of Loulla’s death – which Hal was unable to give – Davis’s voice faltered, and when her children came close, he lost concentration.
Madalyn Kollias didn’t get hysterical or violent, which Hal had been warned might happen. She was as brave about it as an Englishwoman might have been. She seemed dazed by the news more than anything.
The Greek police stepped forward and began to talk to her about her husband’s body, the transporting of it back to the village, and offering to take her with them. She refused, stepping back, the shock seeming to slow her as her eyes looked confusedly at them. There wasn’t anything more to be said.
Hal didn’t want to start playing nursemaid to the woman but it seemed equally uncivilised to leave her standing by a patch of melons in her sudden grief. He debated whether he ought to suggest she go into the house, or find her sister, so that she would have somebody to be with.
‘Tell her she should come back to the house – if she wants to,’ he said to Davis.
She nodded. She even took Hal’s arm. They walked slowly across the ridges of soil onto the golden grass and back towards the farmhouse.
He wished she might behave with wog hysteria and make herself foreign to him, but she didn’t seem to hate him. Her sister would be back soon, she said. Hal nodded to the policemen, whose funereal faces showed relief, and turned to leave, but Davis said something else to her, quietly. He went close to her, bent down to speak into her ear and touched her arm. Jolted and upset, she pulled back from him.