The Safest Place in London (17 page)

The rest of the division had landed in Italy and they had been left behind. Gerald hadn't questioned it, one didn't, though the assumption among one's fellow officers was that one was chomping at the bit to follow the action, to get across to Italy. In truth, it had been a relief to be left to trundle around the desert in a light tank. But now the division was back in England, and he and Enderby and Crouch were stuck in the desert unable to
find the only settlement for hundreds of miles. It was no longer a relief. Gerald stuffed the chart and the compass back in his pocket and looked over at his men.

Enderby and Crouch. They sounded like a small but long-established firm of solicitors whose business was made up entirely of wills, entails and probate. Gerald rather liked the firm of Enderby and Crouch. He sometimes imagined their offices, housed in a Georgian building on one side of a square in a small market town in Suffolk perhaps, or Lincolnshire.

The reality of Enderby and Crouch was somewhat different. Enderby, a short, taciturn dairy farmer from Northallerton, had reddish-blond hair, ears that protruded like jug handles and a fair complexion well suited to the low skies, short days and endless winters of North Yorkshire and utterly unsuited to the crippling heat and relentless sun of the Western Desert, so that his skin was permanently burnt, blistered and peeling.

Crouch, who was equally diminutive, heralded from Walthamstow in north-east London and had worked at Smithfield meat market before the war. He had something of the disreputable bookie about him, and where Enderby had a thin, almost malnourished frame, Crouch was lean and wiry, packed with all the pugnacious energy of a bantamweight boxer. He viewed the world through suspicious eyes and sharp features and a mass of very dark, brylcreemed hair, and there was Jewish blood, Gerald presumed, a generation or so back.

The fact that both men were below average height perhaps went some way to explaining their presence in the tank regiment. It certainly wasn't their skill as soldiers. You didn't want a six-foot chap in a tiny, cramped vehicle with no windows save for a flap
through which the driver could see out and a turret to climb in through. Gerald knew this because he was a shade under six foot himself and could attest to how extremely inconvenient it was.

Enderby and Crouch did not like each other. They tolerated each other when the confines of the tank dictated it, but once the turret hatch was open and they were both outside smoking their foul cigarettes or striking up a brew they squabbled like a married couple, and Gerald, for the most part, let them—so long as it didn't come to blows, which occasionally it did. He had been presented with the pair of them in November and the three of them had been making short, and sometimes longer, incursions into the Blue ever since.

In the new year their field of operations had expanded south and west, and they had encountered only unresponsive smoking Arab men on camels, the occasional opportunistic civilian Europeans driving big old thirties cars who had resurfaced now that the war in the desert was ended, and one or two other straggling Allied units like themselves. They had found no sign of the enemy, other than corpses and burnt-out equipment and vehicles. Anyone who had made it this far had either died or turned back. It had been five days since they had left GHQ and they were running low on provisions as well as fuel. Their means of transport on this seemingly unending and purposeless mission was a Light Mk VI, a tank that had once been the mainstay of Britain's overseas territories but was now largely redundant. Vickers had ended production four years ago when the division had switched to the heavier Matilda and Cruiser tanks and later the American Grants and Shermans. The Mk VI had an off-road top speed of twenty-five miles per hour, which meant it could be outstripped
by all but the most sluggish Panzer. It had space for just three crew: the gunner, a driver and the commander, who doubled as radio operator. The radio, their only link back to GHQ and the outside world, did not operate at this range, though every so often Gerald placed the headphones over his ears and listened to the unvarying and eerie storm of static that seemed, to him, to be the sound of the desert. As well as a short-range radio the Mk VI was fitted with one .303-inch gun, which had jammed the only time they had tried to use it, and one .50-inch Vickers machine gun. The Mk VI's half-inch of armour stopped rifle fire and machine-gun bullets sure enough, but against the German 88mm anti-tank guns it afforded as much protection as, say, a tennis net might.

‘What's the score, then, guv'nor?' said Crouch, coming down from his position on the ridge, scratching his backside furiously and shaking his head disgustedly as he spat out a fly. The muscles in his sinewy arms rippled beneath the leathery-brown skin and it was an easy stretch to see him right back at Smithfield after the war, a carcass slung over his shoulder, in bloodied white overalls caked in sawdust. He would survive, Crouch would, when others who had shone more brightly, who had made a difference, had died.

Gerald thought of Ashby, just briefly, and then he stopped.

‘Your guess is as good as mine, Crouch,' he replied mildly, fishing for a cigarette. Crouch's guess was not as good as his, they both knew that, and it didn't need to be, Crouch being the trooper and Gerald being his commanding officer, but it served them both to relax the formalities a bit. It made being stuck in a small tank with two other men just bearable. For they all slept
together under the same tarpaulin at night and they all shared the same rations. They all knew when Crouch's dysentery had returned and that Enderby had not been able to shit in five days. And they all knew why they were really here. If they had been a crack team they would have been on that troopship heading towards the Italian coast, they would be with the Americans fighting their way towards Rome. As it was they were lumbering about the desert in a clapped-out Mk VI mopping up. None of them had any illusions about this nor any complaints, and as such Gerald could see no reason why they needed to be forever saluting and jumping to attention and all that nonsense, not in the desert.

And they had done their bit, had taken part in the skirmishes around Mersa Matruh and Sidi Barrani in late '40 and early '41, arriving in Tobruk to see the Italians surrendering in their thousands. They had retreated with the rest of the division to Cairo in '42 after Rommel and the Afrika Korps had landed, they had played their part in both the El Alamein battles. They had followed the division into Tripoli a year ago and six months later had finally linked up with the Americans and swept triumphantly into Tunis. They had seen the King himself thanking the troops. In three years they had come under fire, they had experienced mechanical failures in the middle of minefields, their guns had jammed, they had had their tank shot from under them and had leaped for their lives under enemy fire, they had become bogged and stranded and lost, they had rounded up prisoners, they had shot at their own troops in the madness and the confusion and been shot at from above by the RAF. They had seen men die and had seen other men scream with pain and cry out for their mothers. They had each of
them played his part and the war, this part of the war at least, had been won.

If it had been left to him, Gerald accepted, they would probably have lost. But they had not lost. The war in the desert was over and better men than he had won it. And perhaps that was how it was—a handful of really good men made the decisions and performed heroically and everyone else just did what they were told.

He thought of Ashby, whose Sherman had been hit by a shell on the first day of the advance at El Alamein. He had watched it happen and there had been no question of survivors. The earlier Shermans ran on high-powered and highly inflammable aircraft fuel. Ashby's tank had exploded into a firebomb that had lit up the pre-dawn desert. That was how wars were won. And El Alamein had been a spectacular victory.

It was best not to think. War was something one took part in but did not understand. He suspected it was so for most of the men, in this war and in previous ones.

Gerald had grown up in the shadow of war. An uncle, his father's only brother, had died in the second South African War in the first days of the new century, a few weeks before his own birth. He was fourteen at the outbreak of the Great War and spent his years at a minor public school in Dorset watching as the senior boys left in a blaze of glory, went off to France and were cut down a few weeks later, and he fully expected to join them. But the armistice came in his final year of school and he was spared.

He was not spared for long. A telegram arrived at the school just a week later announcing the death of his parents in a road accident.

They were out in Ceylon, his father a railway engineer who had accepted a position in the colonies in the first year of the war and took his wife with him, leaving Gerald at the minor public school. The war came and he and they were separated, and he felt it keenly, but most people were separated in war. His father, Percy Meadows, a kindly man with an anxious nature and a tendency towards melancholia, wrote him letters full of technical details and fascinating statistics about the railway. His mother, Abigail, a stout, hearty clergyman's daughter who laughed a lot at life but whose laughter turned to tears sometimes when she thought no one was looking, wrote him endearing letters that described in colourful detail colonial life and the other wives and the endless tennis and polo parties and the trouble with the servants and, once, how an elephant had come crashing through a wall and into the house.

None of it seemed entirely real. His parents' sudden death, caused when the car they were travelling in had gone off the road and over a precipice in some mountainous region, did not seem real either. His form master took him aside and that was real. The headmaster called Gerald to his office and offered awkward condolences, he attended a memorial service in the village of his father's family. And his parents' letters ceased, all but one letter from his mother, sent the week before her death and arriving, disconcertingly, four weeks after it.

They were gone. In an instant everything had been swept aside. He experienced something akin to vertigo, as though he,
too, were plunging over a precipice, but after so much death it seemed churlish to make too much of it. The world had seen an orgy of death, it was tired of death, tired of mourning. Gerald kept his mourning to himself. He stayed on to the end of the school year, for the fees were paid in advance and his only relative now was an elderly great-aunt in Inverness. After his final exams he had little idea of what he might do, so his form master found him a position in a brokerage firm in the City. It felt an arbitrary decision, going directly into a position rather than trying for Oxford or Cambridge, going into a business about which he knew nothing, but his parents had not left him well provided for so in the end the decision was one of necessity as much as choice.

He joined Goldberg Staedtler. This distinguished firm, located at Ludgate Hill, had established its offices in the dying years of the eighteenth century when the war against America was raging on the other side of the Atlantic and, unimpeded by the blockades and restrictions of that time, had made fortunes on the back of the tobacco, cotton and sugar trade. For a young man of limited funds and no family, and therefore no distractions, it provided a place and a reason to work hard. By the age of twenty-eight, Gerald made senior broker.

Then he met Rosamund and it all came crashing down.

She was the sister of Maurice Lambton, a fellow broker, and had recently returned from New York from where she had, enticingly, retained a trace of an American accent. For some reason never adequately explained, Rosamund was known to everyone, even her own parents, as Bunny. It was a name she somehow lived up to while not appearing to, affording Gerald fleeting glimpses of herself then vanishing with a flick of her hair out
of a room and seemingly into thin air. They met at a dance in Mayfair a week into the new year. She wore a knee-length chiffon dress of bottle green hemmed with silken tassels that shimmered when she moved, a mink stole, a string of pearls at her throat and long black gloves, and she smoked her cigarette through an ivory holder. Her hair was bobbed and gleamed with a silky jet shine over a shapely nose and a pointed aristocratic chin and brooding green eyes that made one think of a Siamese kitten lapping a saucer of cream. She danced with everyone that night and appeared to adore everyone equally.

It was bewildering and Gerald was smitten.

He spent a wretched time in the days and weeks that followed, eventually engineering an invitation to a weekend party at a house in Berkshire. Bunny would be there. Bunny
was
there. He was smitten afresh. His every thought was of her, his only desire to see her, she filled his head and his heart, she coursed through his veins. She opened a door and showed him a part of himself he had been unaware existed and he galloped through that door like a horse over a fence. Certainly there were other young men at that weekend party, but Gerald bided his time. He picked his moment. He got up before dawn and presented her with a crocus at breakfast. She laughed, but afterwards she looked at him differently.