Peacetime (16 page)

‘Which Army?'

‘I doubt it mattered to him.'

‘Were you able to retrieve nothing?'

‘We gave and sent what we could to relatives and to our true friends, but we did not know then that the same thing was shortly to happen to them and that they too were to be driven from their own homes and businesses. Jews live with other Jews, Mr Mercer. Our whole society was Jewish. It was what, in the end, made everything so easy, so complete, so
containable
.'

Mercer did not fully understand this last remark, but he said nothing.

The swan drifted further from them, swivelling its head to watch them as it went. There had been rain earlier in the day, and the drain was dark and heavy with silt.

‘How is your own work progressing?' Jacob asked.

‘Days, weeks pass when nothing seems to be accomplished, and then one morning I look out and the job's done. I doubt if there's a single man working there who cares enough even to wonder what it is they're achieving there, what the finished thing will look like.'

‘They disappoint you.'

‘Only because I'm stupid enough to expect so much more of them.'

‘My father used to say that a genius might make a pane of glass, but only a fool would see nothing but his own reflection in it.'

‘Meaning what?'

‘I don't know. Perhaps it wasn't meant to mean anything. He was as full of such empty profundities as I am. Perhaps I inherited them from him.' He slid back his sleeve an inch to look at his watch.

‘Show me,' Mercer said.

Jacob turned his arm so that Mercer might see his inner arm and then drew back his sleeve to his elbow.

‘I'm sorry,' Mercer said. ‘I shouldn't have asked.'

‘Your curiosity would have got the better of you sooner or later.'

‘It was still unthinking of me.'

‘It was one of the first things Bail asked me. Mathias, too. Did you not believe it happened?'

Mercer half-shook, half-nodded his head.

‘Then now you need have no doubt,' Jacob said. ‘For what that's worth.'

‘It was still wrong of me to ask,' Mercer said.

‘As unthinking as the men who held my arm while another put it there?'

‘Can it not be removed?'

‘Of course. As easily as one of my bowls might be smashed. Women held my sister's arm, and those same women stripped her naked for the pleasure of looking at her and fondling her while they did it to her. You cause me no offence, Mr Mercer.' He drew down his sleeve. ‘I have to return to my glass,' he said. ‘And to Bail.'

Mercer wished him luck.

They parted, and Mercer followed the drain in the direction taken by the swan.

On the eve of the return of Elizabeth Lynch's husband, he watched Mary and her mother walking on the shore. He lay in the dunes where he had first seen Mary, and he watched the two of them, anxious not to be seen by them, not to intrude on this final evening they shared together.

Elizabeth Lynch walked slowly, occasionally looking around her and gesturing to Mary as though she wanted her daughter to walk closer to her. But Mary kept her distance and walked back and forth across the sand ahead of her mother. They were too far from him for Mercer to hear what they were saying, but even at that distance he could discern that the woman was agitated; whereas Mary, he saw, affected the same uncaring nonchalance she frequently adopted in his own company. She paused occasionally to allow her mother to catch up with her, but then when the woman came close, she resumed her walking. Elizabeth Lynch seemed not to notice this game her daughter played and remained
enmeshed within her own anxious thoughts.

It was clear to Mercer that there could have been nothing except the return of the man on both their minds, and that this was why they had come away from the houses and the others. The woman, he imagined, would have suggested the walk, and Mary would have reluctantly agreed to accompany her. Elizabeth Lynch would be listing her concerns for the future, and her daughter would regret being forced to listen to them, probably believing that the woman was making a fool of herself with everything she now insisted on sharing with her.

Mercer watched them until they reached the point where the road came closest to the sea, and where they stood together for a few minutes before turning back. He saw Elizabeth Lynch finally reach out to Mary as though expecting her daughter to go to her and be held by her, but instead Mary continued to keep her distance. After that, the woman stopped gesturing, and she too fell silent, coming more slowly back along the beach behind her daughter. He saw the two sets of footprints they left behind them, the woman's in a near-straight line out and back, and the girl's forever crossing back and forth over this path, as though she were a dog, restless and searching and ceaselessly running around its owner.

Mercer sank lower in the grass as they approached, convinced they had not seen him, and even when they were directly beneath him, neither the woman nor the girl paused or looked up to where he lay.

He waited until they were long past him and out of sight before rising and returning to the tower.

He worked for several hours on the quartermaster's reports he had been asked to submit, but the work involved little true calculation, merely a great deal
of guesswork, and it did not satisfy him.

He fell asleep where he sat, and was woken after only an hour of restless sleep by a noise which he believed to have come from close by, either from the room below or somewhere immediately outside. He imagined at first that someone from the houses had come in search of him and had called up to him.

It was dark by then, and he waited in the poor light for whoever had called to call again. After several minutes of silence he went to the hatchway and looked down. He called out to ascertain if there was anyone there, but received no reply. He descended the stairs, unlocked the door and went outside.

With the exception of the waning moon and the few stars around it, the world lay in almost total darkness. He called again to ask if there was anyone there, but this time in a much lower voice, unwilling to reveal himself to anyone who might be watching. It was impossible to see further than twenty or thirty yards in any direction. Across the road, the houses lay in complete darkness. His breath formed in the night air.

He was just about to concede that the voice or noise had been part of a forgotten dream from which he had woken, when he heard the sound of someone walking on the loose rubble close behind the tower. He moved quickly and silently around the building, his eyes growing accustomed to the darkness as he went, and he stood against the corner of the wall to look in the direction of the noise. He heard a further sound a short distance ahead of him and, peering towards this, he saw a shape pass low against the ground from one mound of rubble to another. A dog, perhaps, though he had seen no animals among the people all the time he had been there. Whatever the creature was, it then
paused, as though suddenly aware of him. It turned towards where he stood, raised its head for a moment, and then resumed its slow, loping walk across the open ground. He realized then that he was watching a fox – one come out of the fields into the dunes in search of a roosting bird, or perhaps a fish left stranded by the tide. Several of the workers had told him of the tracks they had found in the sand, but these had been ill-defined and easily lost. The animal was briefly out of sight behind the rubble before reappearing on the level ground bordering the road.

Mercer left the corner of the tower the better to follow its progress. The creature seemed convinced that it was in no danger and continued moving at the same even pace. It crossed the road and was again lost to him in the rising sand.

He ran to where it had disappeared, climbed the first low mound, but saw nothing. His own footprints, he realized, had destroyed whatever prints the animal had already left, and the light was too poor to see anything ahead of him.

He stayed in the dunes for several minutes longer, until he heard the strained, coarse bark of the fox, now at some distance from him. It was this which had woken him, and though disappointed not to have observed the animal any more closely, he was pleased to have identified the noise.

He left the dunes and returned to the road. He remembered the desert foxes he had seen in Libya and Egypt, scavenging among the mounds of empty cans, scarcely bigger than cats, and with thin, erect ears the size of small plates. He had seen the animals for sale in the town markets, in cages scarcely large enough to hold them. He had known a man in the Seventh Motor Brigade who had bought one of the creatures for a
mascot, and who had then flung it away from him when it had bitten his hand.

A few days later, he had arrived at Sidi Rezegh and had seen the same tanks and support vehicles scattered across the road, all of them smashed and useless, most without either their turrets or their tracks, and some of them still burning, or smoking, two days after they had been caught in the open and destroyed. He had been warned by the men retrieving the bodies not to get too close to the hulks. Unexploded ammunition, they told him. They all wore cloths over their faces against the smell of burning. On the forward horizon lay a second group of tanks, more recently destroyed, and the smoke rising from these was thicker and billowed into the pale blue sky like ink spilled in water. He remembered the line at which it gathered and thickened, and above which it did not rise. He had asked the medical orderlies about the man who had owned the fox, but none of them knew him. It was clear by the way they avoided him that there had been few, if any, survivors of the engagement.

He stopped now at the road and looked out over the water. He knew there was no way of preventing these sudden, powerful and painful memories from returning to him unbidden, and he wondered how long they would remain with him. He waited for a further call from the fox, but nothing came. He identified the solitary bright light of Venus in the western sky.

Returning to the tower, he sat at his desk until three in the morning.

As a boy, he had always had a pet dog, and he surprised himself by remembering and then listing the names of eight of these in the order in which he had owned them. Some of the animals had been shared between himself and his brother, and some had
attached themselves to him alone. He chose his favourites. A letter from his mother had reached him in Naples telling him of the death of the last of these pets. She said the dog had died in its sleep, but it had been a young animal, a terrier, and he had guessed otherwise. She had enclosed a photograph of the dog sitting on the arm of a chair. He had remembered every detail of the room in which the chair stood, and this, he now remembered, rather than the death of the animal itself, had left him speechless with sadness.

He was woken again the following night, this time by the sound of a man shouting. He went to the window. It was half past two and a light rain was falling. He could see nothing beyond the land immediately surrounding the tower. A solitary light showed far along the beach. The line of houses stood in darkness.

The man called again. Mercer did not recognize the voice, but knew immediately that this was Elizabeth Lynch's husband finally returned.

He had been expected all through the previous day, but had not showed. No word had come to explain this delay, and both Mary and Elizabeth Lynch had taken turns waiting at the road's end, looking out for him. Mercer had explained to his workers what was expected to happen there at some point during the day, but most already knew this and considered the event of little consequence.

A light came on in one of the windows, followed by another in the adjoining house. A silhouette appeared at an upper window. The man below fell silent briefly,
and then called out again to whoever was above him. The silhouette belonged to Elizabeth Lynch. She withdrew and was immediately replaced by the lesser outlines of her children. Mercer saw Mary as she opened the window wider and leaned out. Her brother struggled to push himself into the space beside her.

A further light came on downstairs and the door opened, revealing the man in the darkness. His wife had gone down alone to let him in. Yet another light came on further along the row of houses, its occupants woken by the shouting. It was by then clear to Mercer that the man was drunk, that this had been the cause of his late arrival, and that because he was drunk he felt no compunction to keep his voice low, or to ensure that his long-awaited return was the private occasion his wife had been hoping for. Elizabeth Lynch beckoned him to her, but he remained where he stood and continued calling up to Mary at the window above him. Elizabeth Lynch returned inside. She must have called up the stairs to her daughter, because a moment later Mary withdrew from the window and closed it, leaving only her brother looking down and waving. The man approached the doorway and stood there without entering for several minutes longer.

Mercer studied him now that he was fully revealed in the light, albeit distantly. He was shorter and slighter than Mercer had imagined from the solitary photograph he had seen. He held his arm across the doorway, and though Mercer could not see her, a shadow on the ground indicated to him where Elizabeth Lynch stood immediately inside.

He watched closely, convinced that the man would soon go indoors and that the unwelcome public part of this small drama would soon be over. But rather than enter the house, he then backed away from it to the
outer edge of the block of yellow light falling through the doorway, where he resumed his shouting, waving his arms at the boy in the window above. Mercer grew concerned at the extent of the man's drunkenness, and of the humiliating spectacle he seemed intent on creating. Though no more lights showed, others would undoubtedly now be watching in the darkness.

Despite what he had said to Mary, Mercer had anticipated that Lynch might have been brought home by the Military Police, or if not brought, then at least have been met from a train and given a lift over this final, difficult part of his journey. What he now believed was that the man had come by bus to the town, and that he had stayed there, celebrating his release, until it was too late to do anything except walk those final few miles of his journey home through the darkness.