The Broken Chariot (15 page)

‘Sorry, Sergeant.'

He winked, passing close. ‘Don't do it, or you'll get me shot with shit. If you hear that klaxon it's not because Sheffield Wednesday's scored a goal. Just wind them doors shut, or we'll be floating like tiddlers in a bowl. Your reading days will be over if you don't, and so will mine. What's it called?'

He turned to the front page. ‘
A Room with a View
, Sergeant.'

His pale face came near to laughter. ‘No fucking view down here!' And went on his way.

Dereliction of duty – damn it, he murmured, getting the book back from his pocket. He wouldn't let the novel be invaded by his present situation, had stopped regarding himself as the perfect soldier since forging his father's name on Archie's pass. Every spin of the ship's screws was taking him forward on a mystery trip, but wherever it ended up he would still be himself. A burst of sea water into the bulkhead suggested panic if he allowed the possibility, though as far as his mind went it was easy to control, the mind being like the ship itself, unsinkable, kept going by its many lockable compartments. If something threatening rushed in you could shut it off, and live in those that were clear of disturbance.

All the same, maybe there was something behind the closed doors that he didn't know about but should. Any door invited opening. You couldn't batter it down to find out – cut your way in, claw steel and shavings away. Such bulkhead doors, or doors of the mind, you had to wait for them to give way or open up of their own accord to reveal the mysteries. No room with a view in the bowels of the ship. The sergeant was right. There was no fucking view anywhere, until you got clear and made your own.

By the last hour of the watch in the dimly lit depths he knew that the terror of what wasn't yet known was only another manifestation of normal life, inflicted by the imagination in the stifling warmth. Strict control of the brain was as much necessary as guidance from the bridge keeping the ship from all obstacles, whether on the surface or half-sunken. Jonah in the whale could only keep calm and wait.

‘That grey blob over there must be Pantelleria.' Pemberton also had a map. ‘It certainly doesn't look up to much.'

It had, at one time, to Herbert. ‘Maybe there are some nice girls there, though, and a lit up café, with a band outside playing stirring Italian music.' Steaming by the island before, he had wanted to throw himself overboard and swim there, or drown on the way, having been told he was to be left at school in England. The pathetic little boy in short trousers sobbing at the rail was an image best forgotten, and he wondered why it had come to undermine him as he turned to watch a school of dolphins making scimitar curves out of the water, the boat track no doubt crossing that of Aeneas on his way to found Rome after leaving Dido to her fate.

‘Sounds good,' Pemberton said. ‘Maybe we'll end up in an even more exotic place, holding the fort somewhere in the Far East, a real Joseph Conrad backwater.'

But after ten days steaming from Blighty they were stepping down the gangplank on to a lighter at Port Said, going ashore with the rest of the regiment. Talk of a Cyprus posting left Herbert discontented, galled at cheers from the ship as it weighed anchor and steered off down the ruler-straight waterway for India and Singapore.

The close, unforgettable odours of the ship were changed for the sun, sand and sewerage smells of a transit camp near Ismailya, a two-month limbo of waiting. Set to guard an enormous encampment of stores, Herbert one midnight prodded a ragbag thief into the guardroom at bayonet point. The man was shivering with fear, and rage at having been caught nicking what he looked on as belonging to him by birthright, hardly able to lift the motor tyre he'd tried to purloin, which Herbert made him carry.

‘Another bugger,' the redcap sergeant behind the desk said. ‘That makes three tonight. God knows what they do with 'em back there. Give 'em a bloody good pasting and let them go, I shouldn't wonder. You can't stop it. There's five born every minute in this fucking country, and each of 'em's got ten thieving fingers.'

From then on Herbert let marauding shadows slide away on velvet feet, and took no action.

There was nothing else to do but put up with boredom beyond all experience, even to the stage of a cultivated emptying of the mind in the hope that time would take off its clogs and whizz along on bare feet. Pemberton passed him a magazine of current affairs called
Compass
, read and re-read till it fell from Herbert's hand in light-brown flakes.

The sea was calm on the short run to Limassol. Disembarked, they sat in a lorry, kit and rifles heaped by shining boots. The exhaust marked a track from the port, through town and across a dusty plain, much honking around bullock carts, and drab-garbed women in the middle of the road who took little notice. From a bend Herbert saw the mountains had come closer, green with groves and orchards, streaks of snow still on the summits, light green on nearer spurs, a jumble of re-entrants. The view was like paradise, but halfway towards it the driver took a fork and brought them back to a vast area of tents not far from the coast.

When the six hundred men were moved from place to place, an exercise of seeming pointlessness, all complained at being fed up, fucked up, and far from home. The eternal grumbles were raved out with melancholy humour, better that way, Herbert felt, because otherwise they would be inclined to go out on a binge of mayhem and murder, and so would I, he mused, knowing himself better off for being in tune on that point at least.

More training, though with less obvious bullshit, and more sentry-go, all compounded into more and more boredom, unless he laid hands on a paperback book or two from a stall in Nicosia, detritus from those who had already come and gone, not even to be haggled for, thrown across for a few of the local akkers. As the weeks slid by it seemed as if the colonel was going mad with the map, shifting them here there and everywhere. At least the landscape changed, though the island wasn't so big, and eyes soon lost their sense of wonder. Moving numbers to more purpose would call for the unravelling and joining together of subtle organizational threads beyond their capabilities, though much time was devoted to trying, with a talent that in Herbert's view never seemed more than mediocre.

At times he wondered whether he wouldn't have been more content as a commissioned officer, but soon enough doubted it. Being that much singled out had no appeal for him, and to land himself closer to the scene of control would have made him even more exasperated and contemptuous. He lacked the tolerance to understand how time could be squandered and energies blighted. The more hours NCOs spent in offices performing their administrative duties the more was life made dull all around.

Yet he was happy enough being a soldier. His limited experience of other states told him this one was one of the best, interesting, exciting even, when waiting didn't milk the élan out of the platoon's morale. Existence came close to real life, and was a lot improved when echeloning up a hillside between black goats whose neck bells told the umpire over the rocky crest that they were on their way, all surprise gone. Moving at speed between the trees was also mindless, but it was better than sitting around a lorry in the wrong gully, that the driver had brought them to because he couldn't read a bloody map.

They infiltrated remoter parts of the mountains looking for no one knew what, a sense of realism provided by living off what they carried, and occasionally for a day on almost nothing because no lorry turned up at the rendezvous. When there was a lorry they were glad to sleep by its huge presence, as if the vehicle was alive and would give comfort and protection. ‘God knows why we're doing all this,' Pemberton said, spreading his groundsheet.

‘Best not to wonder.'

A wind flipped through the branches of the pines. ‘I can't help it. The people here want
Enosis
. They want to belong to Greece. They'll be fighting us about it one day – in a few years. I'll bet Byron would be on their side.'

‘You don't say?' He wanted to laugh. ‘You mean “The Isles of Greece”, and all that Missolonghi stuff? Well, Byron's dead, and it's different now.' He had read in a pamphlet that the Phoenicians came to the island first, followed by Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, and then Turks who had lost it to the British. ‘Anyway, what difference would it make?'

‘It'll mean a lot to them,' Pemberton said, ‘the people who live here.'

Months passed in eating, sleeping, reading when you could, smoking what fags were available, doing your duty with as little effort as possible, and saying nothing. ‘Let's get our heads down. We have to relieve the others in a couple of hours.'

When under canvas, or at the NAAFI at some base near a town, or in hutments if they were lucky, he leaned with notebook on knee and recollected his Nottingham period. The year, in memory so rich, had elasticated into a decade. A good time, now that he looked back. All good, not a day dead, more at home than he had been anywhere – at least since leaving India at seven, and that didn't count any more. On his last visit Maud had come out with the phrase ‘wage slave', and though he was glad she had been human enough to let the term drop against her intention, he thought it much better to be a wage slave than a soldier – though however you were occupied he supposed you were a slave to whoever paid you. Soldier or wage slave, it was certainly better than being a slave to your own confusions, during these long bouts of idleness and waiting, though you might just as well accept time on its own terms and go with the drift. In the factory there was little tolerance for such uncertainties and quite rightly, because you were sweating to fatten your pay packet which, while you were at work, was all that mattered. Existence then was as close to perfection as it was possible to get, because it was so plain and simple, and only a fool could imagine there was any state on earth that could be called perfection.

Pemberton plonked himself down and opened his book. ‘Hope you don't mind.'

‘Push off. You're breaking my train of thought.'

‘We're on War Department property. I can sit where I like.'

‘Any news this morning?'

‘Nobody tells you anything, and when they do it's an unfounded rumour. Those who start them have weird imaginations. I've stopped asking when we're moving.'

He counted six birds in a row along the telephone wire. ‘Maybe they know something.'

‘Shouldn't think so,' Pemberton said. ‘All I know is we've been here six months, and that leaves us with another year before humping it back to Blighty.'

‘Back to the office, eh? Carry on penpushing.'

‘Suppose so. I don't think my parents will be glad to see me. They hope I'll stay in, in fact. I had a letter from my mother this morning and, wait for it, my parents are getting a divorce.'

‘Lucky devil!'

‘After twenty-five years, though. Would you believe it? My father's the manager of an insurance firm, and apparently he's been carrying on a bit too long with a popsy who works there. Mother has lost patience at last. And it's not the first time he's been at such tricks.'

‘I suppose in some way you might say good luck to him.' He couldn't tell whether Pemberton was sad about it or not, though supposed he ought to be, somehow. Such news wouldn't have affected him one bit. His parents seemed as if crayoned on to cardboard, his last visits completely unreal, when they should have been defining moments of his life. In their last letter his mother asked whether he wouldn't like to do something or other at Oxford when he got demobbed. What would he do at a place like that? Do nothing at all. Get into trouble, and go to the dogs. She must have thought he'd just sit there and knit.

Hugh's view, in a later letter, was that while it might be a good experience for him to be getting some experience in the ranks, he wondered if he wouldn't sooner than later like to have a commission and make the army his career. He'll never stop harping on it, Herbert thought, resenting the fact that it made him angry. He pictured his mother going over his father's letter and putting it in such lucid terms. They were a conspiracy sent on earth to give him life, and then try everything to ruin it. He could only go on respecting them if he didn't let them do it. He saw no future in the army, and in his reply mentioned neither of these possibilities, thinking it strange how little they knew about him even though he was their son – and how easy he was able to put them out of his mind for months at a time.

Pemberton looked up from his book. ‘Maybe I'll stay in the army, though. I'm getting to like the life.'

‘Why not? You could even get a commission.'

‘You think so?'

‘No one more suitable. You had such a horrible beginning.' They laughed together. ‘You're a funny old sod, Ashley. I can't understand why you joined the army in the first place. You'd have been better off with the Brylcreem Boys.'

‘I did get called up, you know. There was no choice.'

‘Got any brothers or sisters?'

‘No. There's only me.'

‘Hard luck. Same here. Let's go inside for some more coffee.'

Of all the duties the one he hated most was guarding the camps of the Jews, who were being prevented from going to Palestine. Destiny was keeping him in a grip which there was no possibility of breaking out of, but he did not want to be a gaoler, or a policeman. A soldier had to feel as well as know who an enemy was, and nobody thought these people were. All they wanted to do was go where they weren't allowed, and it made no sense to stop them – though it was no business of his. It was a duff job, being a guardian of the Empire, to which no real soldiering was attached at all.

Routine was the enemy, an unending roster of sentry-go that corroded the spirit, made you feel dirty and useless, an automaton. One day he had to deliver a wad of lists to the administration office, and the sergeant made out a pass which allowed him to go through the camp itself. He walked at his smartest, one of the elect only because he wasn't a civilian, and this was an unexpected effort because he was escorted by a cloud of flies. They landed on him everywhere. They were all he saw, all he felt. They tormented him like the Erinyes. He wanted to murder them, hoped they would magically perish, thought a giant mobile Flit-barrel of deadly gas was about right, except that it would be too good for them. He could only pity the tens of thousands in the camps who had to endure such a plague all the hours of daylight. It was eyes front as if they didn't exist, difficult to look at anyone if he was to keep his stance and not run helplessly off course from the continual thousand-Stuka raids.