The Broken Chariot (16 page)

After delivering the papers and when halfway back, he stopped by a door as if to adjust his cap, unable for a moment to go on, and not being too sure of which direction to go for the main gate. A woman called to him from inside the hut, and turning gave another excuse to brush off the flies which seemed to be eating him alive. ‘Come in here,' he heard.

One step backwards, and quickly into the hut, which seemed free of flies, but was no miracle because the reek of DDT almost pushed him out again. The walls were lined with bunks, from floor to ceiling, as he had seen in the pictures of German concentration camps, but these were clean and in smart enough order, though for the moment unoccupied. ‘The people are out in work parties.' She had read his mind. ‘Putting up tents for others.'

In the light, so much dimmer than the glare outside, he saw a slender fair-haired woman of about forty, with dry brownish skin, sitting at a cardtable. She folded the papers of a letter. ‘Can I trust you?'

He smiled at a question no one had ever asked so openly – you might say brazenly – before. He hoped it hadn't been because they were afraid to get the wrong answer. No fraternizing was the regulation, but instant obedience had been forgotten in the pragmatical world of the factory and its surrounding life, and it hadn't yet worn off. In any case, no was beginning to seem like yes to him. ‘Of course. Why, though?'

She licked the envelope with a precise little tongue, and looked up, saying in an accent he assumed was German: ‘I'm going to ask you to post this letter for me.'

‘Can't you do it yourself?' Maybe they weren't allowed. He'd heard something about it. Or their mail was opened and read, which he thought nobody had a right to do in peacetime. Anyway, you couldn't argue, because if a woman asked you to do her a favour you did it, unless it was to commit suicide. ‘All right. Of course.'

‘There's no stamp,' she said, as if it were a matter for bitter regret.

Perhaps they had no money, though that was unlikely; or no way of buying them, which was possible. The place wasn't provided with a nice clean post office, flowerbeds all round, and that was a fact. Since coming into the hut he'd felt a mad wish to laugh out loud. ‘Don't worry about that. I'll stick one on. Where's it to?'

‘Palestine.' The address was in Hebrew as well as English. ‘But will you be sure to do it?'

Impossible to know what made him say yes, or why she had chosen him. In the lottery of passers-by he'd been the one, he supposed. His eyes stung from the disinfectant, and he wondered how she endured it, and hoped she wouldn't think the tears at one of his eyes meant he was upset about anything. Nothing on earth to get upset about – and even halfway through the gesture he felt a strong urge to change his mind because it might be taken by her as demeaning – he opened his cigarette case and passed three across, while taking the envelope from the table. It fitted safely in his pocket. ‘I'll see it gets there.'

A gold tooth showed when she smiled. ‘Thank you.' He turned to go. ‘And also for the cigarettes.' At such politeness he went back to the table and, seeing one already between her lips, laid a box of matches down. Another insane action, felt himself colouring from shame at her having to accept them. He wanted to say ‘
L'chaim
!' but didn't because he would be embarrassed at seeming to get too familiar. Instead he gave a sloppy kind of salute, which brought a look of amazement – or was it amusement? – to her face already half obscured by cigarette smoke. Then he swung on his heels and went back to the flies and sunlight.

He stood at the door for a moment to orientate himself towards the main gate. A sergeant came by. ‘You been talking to the people in there, corporal?' he said, though in a not much caring tone.

Bouncing between euphoria and undeniable pity, he kept a hard face. ‘Somebody called out.' He held up his wrist. ‘Wanted the time of day.'

‘And did they thank you for it?'

‘You're kidding. Told me I was a swine, and so was the whole British Army.'

They walked on together. ‘And what did you say to that?'

He waited till a pair of low-flying planes had got into the distance. ‘Told 'em to fuck off.'

‘That's the ticket. We've just got to do what we're told, and they don't allow for that.'

‘Can't, I suppose,' Herbert said, wanting to laugh.

Off duty in the evening he walked a mile to the village, a glass of resinated red his intention. Opposite the café was a post box, which reminded him of the letter. He took stamps from his wallet and put it, with one for Archie, into the slit. Had he done it because he wanted a pat on the back from old Isaac? Certainly not. He would never mention it, even supposing he ever saw him again. You didn't want approval for any such deeds. Not done. Not easy ones like that, anyway. Nor did you angle for disapproval of the bad deeds, either. Maybe it was a letter to her husband, or to a young man bewitched by her.

Other units were given the job of guarding the camp, and life was more interesting again, at times even pleasant. Cyprus was a neutral ground where he could think of the past without rancour, and the future without anxiety. He spent his leave on a camp on the Troodos Mountains – four beds to a room, plain walls, and plain service. But there was solitude, and paths between the tall pines to walk along. He took a packed lunch, and no map, and lost his way, but instinct for the lie of the land always got him back for dinner.

On a day when he stayed in the complex to read and rest he was disturbed by Mrs Plater, who ran the place. ‘When you first looked at me, as you passed on your way to the huts after booking in, I could see you holding your nose in the air, as if you thought I might try and pick you up.'

‘An involuntary scratch,' he said. ‘It was rather the other way round, I think,' though it hadn't been, and she may have been right, if anything had been on his mind at all. He couldn't remember. In the NAAFI at Berengaria he'd heard a Brylcreem Boy of the air force, with a signals flash on his shoulder, waffle out to his mates over some issue or other, that he ‘couldn't care less'. He said it several times, as did the others. It seemed their favourite, most well-used phrase. Once Herbert's contempt at such an attitude had dissipated he knew that beneath his disciplined attachment to duty he felt much the same, in everything, though it was not a philosophy, he realized, that any Thurgarton-Strang would want to be caught dead with.

It was the middle of the morning, and he sat in the canteen with a pint of orange juice. Mrs Plater, a cigarette smouldering, came back and put her coffee on the table. ‘Still don't mind if I join you?'

‘Of course not, Mrs Plater. I'm honoured.'

Her throaty laugh echoed around the room. ‘That's the sort of welcome I like to hear. Call me Alice, though.'

‘I mean it. Life gets so dull.'

‘You could go for walks. They're lovely around here.'

‘I've done them all.' He had also been to Othello's tower in Famagusta, walking the battlements and looking with pleasure at ships in the harbour, sitting to eat his sandwich, and read about the place from a guidebook Pemberton had found on his assiduous browsing. ‘Busman's holiday, walking. In any case, I thought I'd save my feet today.'

A hand was close to his, too blatant, he wanted to pull away, but couldn't cause offence. Then it wasn't blatant enough, and to withdraw his hand was unthinkable. He didn't know what took place in that converting moment, only that, when her periwinkle blue eyes looked at him, litmus paper flared between them. A fly alighted on the sugar, set for a feast, but he waved it away, though it was awkward bringing up the other hand from the side of his chair. She smiled when he met her eyes. Two soldiers at the end of the hall argued as to who should read what part of a newspaper. ‘Life would be boring for me too,' she said, ‘if there wasn't so much work.'

The image of straw came to mind, a Home Counties corn dolly, except there was something refined in her features. She had worked in Cyprus with the camp organization for three years, and whatever the problems it was far better than being in dreary old England, with rationing and all that. Agreement came easy on such a score, and he found himself enjoying talk with a worldly woman of thirty. ‘You should be in an officers' billet,' she said, after he had mentioned his old school. ‘I spotted it straight away. And then your name, of course.'

The usual thing. Only the other week his platoon sergeant said: ‘You strike me as being a bit of a gentleman ranker, Strang. A perfect candidate for signing on and getting up the ladder a bit.' The sergeant, a few years older, seemed so far ahead in age that acquaintance of a sort was possible, but not friendship. ‘I'll have to think about it,' Herbert said.

But a woman of thirty was close enough to his own age, and their talk made him feel friendly towards her, like her, in fact, so that he kept any trace of the old Bert well hidden – not difficult these days. She must have felt something for him because otherwise why should she have sat at his table? ‘You've got a girlfriend, I suppose?'

‘Not me. People like me don't have girlfriends.'

She drew back, a deliberate gesture meant to be amusing. ‘You're not queer, are you?'

He laughed. ‘I don't keep 'em long enough to have as a friend, is all I mean.'

‘Let's see how we go, then,' her fingers touching his wrist and then pulling away, an unmistakable signal.

Chitchat was what he wanted. He settled down to the luxury of benign thoughtlessness, a state of calm without worry, and let things take any direction she cared to go in.

She was like nothing on earth, or in his experience at any rate, a whirlwind who knew what she wanted and so made every move. For that reason the affair lasted little beyond the weeks of his leave, scorched itself out. Regret, surprise, the ditcher ditched, he assumed she had found somebody else. And why not? Yet there was a wound, and it ached, the only consolation being that he learned to separate the heart into compartments, as he had earlier surmised he would before having good reason for it. Like the bulkheads of a ship, if the flood of salty despair broke in, you could shut the watertight doors and keep the rest intact so as to prevent the whole bloody vessel going down into the dark. Life was too short not to write people off now and again, or be written off by them.

Nine

He stood at the door of a shed on the quayside while an RASC fatigue party loaded stores into the lorry. Time for a fag before seeing it back to the rendezvous in the mountains. ‘Have a drag, Ashley?'

‘Thanks. Looks like a troopship's in.'

Among the pink-knees coming warily down the gangway Herbert spotted an awkward chubby figure, then the unmistakable gait and face of his old schoolmate Dominic. ‘There's someone I don't want to see.'

He dodged into hiding. Hallucination was the order of the day. But no, the sky was clear blue, the group illuminated, filing towards the next shed. Dominic stumbled under his kit. It was him all right.

‘Pay Corps wallahs,' the driver said. ‘Our money'll be fucked up for months.'

Another clandestine gaze through the slit of the door, and Dominic waited in line to board a gharry. His face had hardly altered from what seemed all those years ago, the last person Herbert wanted to see. Take a long time to get his knees brown. ‘Have they finished loading our gear yet?'

Another twenty minutes,' Ashley told him.

The new Pay Corps arrivals sat in their lorry, silent and sweating. ‘Where do you suppose they're going?' Herbert asked. ‘Some cushy job at headquarters, I expect.'

Ashley put his paperback away. ‘Same road as us. I asked their driver. He's browned off because he waited for them all morning.'

Dominic must be happy to be on such a ripping adventure, but Herbert thought that if he had to put up with his questions on all that had happened in his life since lighting off from school it would be positively sick-making, at the best tedious. Anyway it was no bloody business of his that he had spent most of the time working in a factory which he, Dominic, would consider a bit of a come down after all that stuff out of
Caged Birds
.

Stores loaded and roped on, Pemberton climbed into the cabin of the fifteen-hundredweight. ‘Get going,' Herbert called. ‘We'll go back through Omodhos.'

The driver unfolded his map. ‘Take a bit longer.'

‘Why not? I like that road.'

‘You're the corporal.'

Carob trees flicked by, long brown beans gangling in the sun like withered turds. ‘Turd trees,' the driver hee-hawed, gunning along the flat and not bothering to slow down, though he almost twitched a sleepy old donkey into a ditch.

Herbert wouldn't bump into Dominic, no chance of it, and the Omodhos route attracted him in any case because on an exercise around the village, between urging his section to take cover, and getting on through the vineyards, he had seen a young woman hanging sheets on a line. She wasn't long in his view, but the picture stayed with the clarity of the design on a postage stamp: a pallid oval face, black hair lengthening behind, dark brown eyes, and white headscarf. An arm reaching up to the clothesline elongated her bosom under a flowered blouse, though it was hard to be sure how much detail his lascivious imagination etched in later. ‘Did you see that woman?' he asked Pemberton at the time.

He'd been half-asleep, as had most of the others. ‘What woman?'

‘In the vineyard, back there.'

‘You must have a touch of the sun.'

She saw him, and smiled. He settled into his outpost on the hillside for a few hours' sleep by his well-oiled Bren, and dreamed about her. Heat in the rocks cooled after dusk, aromas of thyme and juniper drifting on the breeze. When on the march, incidents from the factory were his favourite recollection. Faces invaded space without warning, wanting to take over his soul, solidly and forever. He preferred to be colonized by an obsession with the woman than be a victim to anything from the past.