Small Wars Page 10

  He went soon after, passing Grieves, who was face down on a table in the corner – he patted his shoulder, and Grieves suddenly heaved himself up. His face was dead white. ‘Jesus. God,’ he said.

  Hal, who had felt unusually well disposed towards him, shuddered and went on by.

  He left them – all the rest of them – happy and drinking, and wandered around looking for Kirby outside but couldn’t find him.

  It was very dark on the drive and hard to tell whose vehicle was whose, and he was a little drunker than he’d thought, now that he was out in the air. He felt irritated, not being able to find Kirby. He cursed him and went through the cars and Land Rovers, looking and getting more and more frustrated, and finally back inside to get keys from Sergeant Burns, who took care of transport for the officers. All of this took about twenty minutes. Hal’s impatience was fighting with his euphoria and making him short-tempered. Burns was drunk and annoying. He had to get to his office at the other end of the building for the keys, and Hal followed him along the corridor, cursing his back. In the small dark office, Burns fumbled with rows of keys on nails with numb fingers.

  ‘Bloody hell, man, can you get on with it?’

  ‘Sorry, sir, coming up,’ said Burns, managing to speak and move his hands at the same time.

  Why did everybody move so slowly? It was a miracle the bloody army ever got anything done, with cripples like Burns in charge of essentials.

  ‘Here – it’s a Ford.’

  ‘Well, which bloody –’

  ‘Reg – regi…’s on the ticket label.’

  Hal thought Burns might fall over. ‘Try and sober up, Burns.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Hal took the key, with its brown label on a string and the registration written in pencil, and left him, walking fast down the corridor, out of the main entrance to where the vehicles were. The sounds of shouting and singing from the bar reminded him of his happiness, the music and his thoughts crowding round and round in his head, as he found the car and pushed the key into the lock – Empire 500 runs, not for no wicket, this time, and he shouldn’t think of it like that, but Empire 500 for two, it was 500 for fucking two, and EOKA all out. EOKA all out anyway…

  The engine fired and turned over. He pulled away from the mess and up the hill. The Ford’s suspension was shot and the gearstick needed a whack to jolt it out of second, but the cool air felt good on his face through the open window. It wasn’t far.

  The unfamiliar car entered the empty road.

  He stopped by his house, left it and went straight up the path, anticipating the feel of her, and of being home, so that he could taste it.

  The door opened when he was halfway up the path and Clara was there. He had wanted her, and there she was. ‘Hal!’

  He took her, buried his face deep into her neck so he could smell her; she was almost insubstantial in her cleanness. He got both arms round her, aware of his uniform, thick and rough between them, and thinking how narrow she was and that he was pleased she didn’t have a bra on because she was in her nightdress.

  ‘Hal –’ she sounded cracked and upset; he kissed her.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  Her mouth was beautifully soft. He wanted her very badly. He’d forgotten to close the door. He backed up, and pushed it shut with his back, not letting go of her, and Clara drew her head away from him, bending uncomfortably to look up at him and said, ‘Hal – listen. The girls haven’t been well –’

  ‘Are they better?’

  ‘A bit – but –’

  ‘Thank God.’ He kissed her again and she kissed him back but not properly.

  ‘What?’ he said, stopping, feeling embarrassed, the embarrassment hardening. ‘What?’

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you’re home –’ but she made it sound sad.

  He kissed her again to block out the details interfering with his wanting her, and the wanting came back. He put his hand up onto her face and rubbed the flat of it over her cheek, across her eye and hairline and kissed her harder. He wanted to get her onto the floor, or back her against something, he had to feel the inside of her mouth and get into her, and he felt her breath fast in his mouth as he kissed her.

  Then she pushed him away with both hands, quite angrily. He stopped and looked at her, or tried to: there wasn’t really enough light to see her face by.

  ‘Hal! Will you please! God –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s been ghastly,’ she said. ‘It’s been awful.’

  ‘The girls,’ he said. His voice sounded far away.

  Both their voices sounded as if they were on the wireless with the volume turned down. It was unnerving.

  ‘Yes! The girls, Hal. We haven’t left the house – I haven’t known, I’ve been so frightened –’

  ‘Do you want me to see them?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘The doctor came. They’ve got measles.’

  ‘Just that?’

  ‘Hal, I haven’t slept!’

  ‘Silly.’

  ‘They’ve been coughing, they’ve been terrible –’

  She stopped, staring at him, and he could see her looking at him, but couldn’t seem to recognise her frustration. It didn’t mean anything to him. His own self was overwhelming him and everything else was far distant.

  She turned furiously away from him and went up the stairs. He took a breath, and followed.

  The white door to the girls’ room was ajar, and he followed Clara into his own bedroom. No light was on, just the slightly paler windows behind her. He stood in the doorway as she took off her thin dressing gown. She wore the white cotton nightdress she always wore. The room felt extraordinarily small to him, and very clean. He was too big for it, and not welcome.

  ‘Well, shall I look at them?’ he said.

  ‘No!’

  She was half turned away from him and doing something to her hair – why would she do that now? Lifting her arms to do her hair was an invitation. Her face was turned away from him, he could only see her body, stretching up. She looked vague, her hair a dark cloud, the nightdress misty white, with no smell and no noise, as if she weren’t really there. He felt something like panic. He was suffocating in it.

  He took the two steps towards her and took her arm, it felt solid, his hand held her bare arm, his other brushed cotton, cool, not hard enough, he took hold of her –

  ‘Hal,’ she said.

  His hand was on her waist, needing more, needing to feel something more than this small vagueness. If he kissed her, if he could touch her better –

  She wasn’t strong, and it was very easy to move her back to the bed and then he pushed her down, leaning down to kiss her and pressing her shoulders backwards. There.

  ‘Hal!’

  Again, the volume turned too low for clarity. He heard his voice, from nowhere, ‘They’re all right, then?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girls –’ and he put his hand under the cool cotton of her nightdress, up onto her thigh that felt secret, well known and beautiful to him. This was real at last, this made her real. She opened her legs for him, or he opened them.

  He got his belt off, and the holstered heavy pistol slipped to the tiled floor with a clunking sound. It was quick and easy now to undo his trousers and he kept his hand on her neck – soft, pulsing – while his other hand got him close to her, he pushed inside her suddenly; it was so hard not to grip her very tightly and push deeper, not to be rough, just to have her quickly and be as far into her as he could. She made a noise. She sounded so far away to him. They were too low off the bed. He had to pick her up with two hands around her waist, staying inside her, and pushing her back from the edge so he could do it easier to her, and have both of their bodies on the bed –

  ‘No. No – Hal – stop,’ she said, and for strange halting seconds his mind absorbed that she was crying and he took that and mixed it with his need for her, her breath on his fingers, her clean skin, all the o
ther parts of her that were his, and he lost it there.

  He needed her badly. She loved him. He wouldn’t make her cry, but he pushed very hard into her, pressing his cheek against hers, and felt her breathe faster just by his ear. It felt so sweet, but her body seemed to go away underneath him, not firm and pressing up to him, as it normally did.

  He needed to be far deeper into her, all of him inside her, taken in, he closed his eyes and pulled her up onto him and kept his fingers on her face feeling her lips on his fingertips, and then sharp need went through him that was like rage, and he forgot about being careful with her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In slow half-sleep, Hal heard Clara washing herself and the girls, and going downstairs.

  When he got up it was later than usual and the room was hot. He had breakfast with a strange out-of-time feeling, because the rest of them had been up before him and he’d been away. The girls, their faces mottled with faded red, were playing at his feet, refusing their breakfasts, and Clara was trying to make them eat, worrying. Hal drank his coffee, watching them.

  Clara came over to him and kissed him on the forehead, with her hands on either side of his face. Her dark blue eyes were infinite; he couldn’t fathom them.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ he said.

  She spoke carefully. ‘Yes, Hal. It’s all right.’

  After that she was very busy with the girls.

  Adile was cleaning downstairs and Clara went upstairs.

  The bedroom smelled different from the rest of the house. It smelled of the night before. She looked around the room. It must have been coming up from the sheets where he had lain on them. The air was thick and burned-smelling. She went to the bed, pulled the sheets from it and bundled them up in the corner, and then she opened the window wide.

  She thought that it wasn’t as if he’d hurt her very much – she’d had two children hadn’t she? There was no need to make a fuss about it.

  She breathed in, putting her hand up to push her hair from her forehead, but the same smell was on her hands – she pulled back from it, sickened.

  She went back from the window, into the bathroom, and washed her hands very carefully with the hard soap. She dried them on the towel and put the towel into the basket to be washed, but on the landing, she caught the smell again, through the open bedroom door. The clean air from the window was blowing it through the bedroom onto her.

  She closed the bedroom door. The room could still be aired with the door shut, she thought.

  PART TWO

  Episkopi, July

  Chapter One

  There were no more slow mornings stretched out on sheets that were lit up like landscapes. There was no more sudden brightening of the day on seeing one another. It was at odds with everything around them. Hal was successful; he was beginning to live up to the expectations put upon him.

  He had written to the families of the two dead soldiers, trying to find, in their deaths, something of which their mothers could be proud. He could not say he was proud. In the quiet times, when he thought of the siege on Pappas’s mountain camp and its conclusion, he felt doubt, like a betrayal, shadowing him. Hal had known these things happened in wars; he had thought the wars would be different.

  Lottie and Meg had got over their measles, and were out of quarantine. They had been pale and difficult for a few weeks, but now their legs were brown between their short cotton frocks and white ankle socks. They would be two years old in August, and Clara took them to other children’s birthdays at the officers’ club, where there was cake and ice-cream – much better ice-cream than there was in England, but Clara missed her home. Her mother sent packages to her, wrapped and over-wrapped with brown paper, bound tightly around with tough string in double knots against the foreign post. ‘The assistant assured me they would fit two-year-olds but they seem terribly big to me,’ she wrote, and ‘Your father says eucalyptus puts off mosquitoes, if you don’t want to put Deet on the girls. But how on earth would you apply it?’ Clara opened the packages meticulously, absorbing the faint traces of England.

  This party had been for Deirdre and Mark Innes’s boy, Roger. They’d had donkeys brought up to the club and decorated their halters with coloured crêpe paper, and given rides round and round the circular drive outside. Afterwards they had all gone back to the garden, where tea was laid out on long tables and Clara had tried to persuade her girls of the merits of egg and cress sandwiches, but ended up eating most of them herself. Mark and one or two other men had been there for a while, looking a little lost in their uniforms, but mostly it was women, with parents’ frowns and party smiles.

  Clara was sitting on a rug in the shade of a tree on the lawn. It was the time of day between tea and drinks: waiters and yard-boys were clearing up fairy-cake cases and paper cups and getting ready for the evening, when the strings of bulbs would be lit and trays of White Ladies would come out. Clara knew she ought to go before then: young children at cocktail hour would not be welcome. People who had no children, or sent them away to school, lived a very different life from Clara’s.

  Lottie and Meg were together, walking without looking at one another, around a circular flowerbed, planted with roses. They had bows at the backs of their short dresses. Roger had been taken away by Deirdre some time before and Clara knew the girls would be bored soon.

  ‘Lottie! Meg! Time to go, darlings. Come along.’

  At the front of the building they walked between parked cars towards the road. Clara’s eye was caught by movement in one of them and she looked again.

  Through the back window she could see the top of the blond head of a child. There didn’t appear to be anybody else in the car. Clara, still holding the twins’ hands, looked around. There was nobody. The windows were closed tight in the car, but the child’s hand appeared then, flat against the glass, streaking it.

  Clara walked towards the car. She let go of Meg and Lottie.

  ‘Stay there. One minute,’ she said.

  Nearer now, she could see that it was Roger. His face was very pink and sweaty from the heat, and he was crying. He looked at her with recognition but no communication. He was shut in a car; he had no plan what to do about it.

  Clara, feeling embarrassed to interfere, tried the handle of the car, but it was locked. She went around to the other side. Then she saw – on the asphalt, almost crushed against the front tyre – Deirdre and a man tangled together, kissing. They would have been just out of sight of Roger in the back seat of the car, and partially hidden, at least, by the car next to it. Deirdre’s hands were clinging to the man’s jacket. Her legs were splayed like a traffic accident, and his whole arm was hidden beneath her skirt. His knees were on the ground and they were both breathing hard against the black driveway and the dirty tyre.

  Clara, absurdly – trained up by Hal to notice these things – saw from the pip on his shoulder that he was a second lieutenant. She thought she ought to go, but then Deirdre saw her and almost yelped, her eyes flying wide open. The man scrambled to his feet. He was very dusty. His face was covered with Deirdre’s rather violent lipstick. It was Lieutenant Grieves. Clara thought immediately that Hal didn’t think much of him.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said.

  ‘God!’ said Deirdre, sounding cross more than anything.

  ‘I’m so sorry – I saw Roger.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ said Deirdre, and Clara glanced back into the car at Roger who was crying with his eyes shut, saliva stringing his gaping mouth.

  She remembered the girls, trying to think how long she’d taken her eyes from them, and saw that they hadn’t moved from the spot but stood there in their party frocks, like little dolls – except that the frocks had chocolate cake on them.

  ‘Just coming!’ she said, although they hadn’t asked. She tried to look back at Deirdre and Grieves without seeing them, and backed away. Then, suddenly, and with anger, ‘I think he’s a bit hot. You oughtn’t to leave him in a car like that!’ She took the girls’ ha
nds and left, more embarrassed for having said that than for having seen Grieves’s hand up Deirdre’s skirt.

  With her back to Deirdre now, she said, ‘It’s his birthday!’ in a rage, to nobody.

  She realised she was dragging the girls and slowed down for them, trying to feel calmer, loving them, and loosening her grip on their hands. She felt the plumpness of their small fingers and stroked them with her thumbs, gently, as she walked, nearly crying.

  At her house, she took off Lottie and Meg’s dresses and ran them a tepid bath. She was washing them when she heard Deirdre calling from downstairs. ‘You there?’

  ‘Yes, wait, just coming.’

  Clara took the girls out of the bath, dried them and put them to bed, taking her time about it, concentrating on brushing their hair and reading them The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit quite slowly.

  ‘…“He doesn’t say ‘please’, he takes it!”’

  She forgot about Deirdre downstairs.

  Deirdre had helped herself to a gin and tonic – at least one. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ She was standing in the middle of the floor, near the cane chair. She looked at Clara defiantly and put her drink down. She lit a cigarette. ‘I didn’t know how long you’d be or I would have made you one.’

  They went outside. There were two white garden chairs, metal, on each terrace of the Lionheart houses, and Clara and Deirdre sat on them, with the white metal table between them.

  ‘Promise me you won’t tell Hal.’

  ‘Hal?’