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  ‘I met a man on the boat who said they make bombs out of car exhausts and food tins.’

  ‘My dear, they’ll make them out of absolutely anything. They have them on timers and tripwires and goodness knows what. They’ve no scruples whatsoever. We’ve had to put poles on the fronts of the vehicles to catch the piano wire they stretch across the road before it can take off our poor lads’ heads – now what sort of a terrible mind thinks up a thing like that?’

  ‘I noticed something of the sort as we drove in,’ said Clara, remembering she had been worrying about the girls and hadn’t asked Hal what they were for. She’d rather not know, she decided.

  ‘Another drink?’ said Mrs Burroughs, and led Clara away from the bar towards a group of women at a card table, playing whist.

  ‘You must join our reading group at the club. It’s terribly good fun, and we often read plays aloud – do you enjoy the theatre at all? We were thinking of starting a dramatic society…’

  Later they were driven home by Kirby through a very black night, stopping for the gates to be opened by soldiers, who peered in at them, saluted and waved them through. The headlights picked out the barbed wire that was looped on the tops of fences or stretched tight between posts.

  Away from the base the road felt lonely; Clara was glad to see buildings ahead of them as they came into Limassol. There was almost no street lighting, and nobody about, just the dark houses and alleyways between them.

  ‘I’m sorry I was so grumpy earlier,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Hal. He put his arm around her. ‘You’ll see the girls in a moment.’

  ‘I’m sure they’re fine.’

  ‘I’m going to be kept pretty busy,’ he said. ‘Do you remember the blokes in Krefeld, shooting up wrecked old cars just for something to do?’

  ‘This will be better.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said firmly.

  He was happy.

  In Germany Hal had distinguished himself, been promoted to captain and served six years after that without having seen a shot fired in anger and it had been hard to take the inactivity. Even with his joy in having Clara at last, after their long engagement, he had been frustrated. His main challenge was keeping his men up to the mark and occupied, and Clara had come to understand that it was not blood-lust that was being thwarted in Hal, but something cleaner than that, and natural. He’d been trained to do a job; he should have liked to do it.

  The car stopped. Kirby got out, opened the door for them and looked up and down the street, short-fingered hands resting loosely on his Sten gun, as they let themselves into the house.

  The Greek girl was sitting on a chair in the kitchen. She stood up and smiled. Hal took out his wallet and Clara went straight upstairs to the back bedroom and pushed open the door.

  A candle was burning on the tilting chest of drawers.

  Lottie was asleep on the bed and the cot was empty. After a very short moment of terror Clara saw that Meg was in the single bed, too, in the shadow behind the heaped-up blankets. She went to the bed and sat down. The twins were jumbled together in sleep. She felt their faces, as she had when they were smaller. She always told herself there was no need to do it, but still, whenever they slept, she checked to make sure they were breathing.

  She picked up the candle and went to the top of the stairs. ‘Where’s the girl?’ she said.

  ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘She left a candle in the room.’ Clara heard her voice shaking. ‘It’s very dangerous. They’re not babies now, they might have pushed it over. Will you tell her next time?’

  ‘We won’t use her next time.’

  After a moment, she said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get used to everything.’

  Hal came up the stairs. He blew out the candle and, in the sudden blackness, kissed her. ‘I’m not worried,’ he said.

  Chapter Three

  Even up in the hills, the walls of the village houses were covered with graffiti. Some of it was in poorly spelled English, although any schoolboy could have read the Greek: ‘BRITISH OUT. EOKA. ELEFTHERIA I THANATOS – freedom or death. ENOSIS – union with Greece.’

  The trucks crawled as the road got steeper. The engines whined, and sometimes the tyres skidded where the roads were still running water from the heavy rain. The villages were built onto the sides of the steep foothills, and the fields beneath them were stepped to make them workable. Hal could see the three-tonner ahead full sideways now, because the road had taken a sharp bend to get around an outcrop before disappearing into trees. The trucks ground and toiled up the steep incline and around the long corner.

  This was how many of Hal’s days were spent, patrolling the villages, conducting searches. At least there was more to do than in Germany where he had been in his office most of the time, signing papers concerning the minutiae of the movement of supplies, or overseeing exercises and patrols that were almost uniformly without incident. The glory of the regiment had been demonstrated mainly in the boxing ring, and the silver cups that were awarded decorated the officers’ mess wherever they were sent. He had envied James, whose first posting had been to Eritrea, and whose letters, almost gritty with desert sand, were full of action.

  Hal’s father had gone into the Great War a lieutenant and come out of it a major. His uncles – those who survived – had had their promotions the same way, in the big conflicts of big battles. His grandfather had fought in both Boer wars, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Treherne – Hal had kept his medals in his room when he was a little boy. In Germany, Hal’s regiment had spent a year living in a palace formerly occupied by Nazi generals. There had been a gold banqueting hall. His first office was a music room and his desk Louis Quinze. It wasn’t Ypres. Now, in Cyprus, England was fighting to hold her territory, and Hal could serve her in some small measure.

  As the last of the convoy made the turn, the road forked, with one narrower part going into the trees and the other climbing up to the left.

  The sky was white, the tops of the mountains were hidden. If they went higher they’d be in mist. They took the wider, left-hand turn and the first village they came to was compact, with a café in its centre.

  The men in the café all stood up and watched as two trucks stopped and the others and the Land Rover drove on through, nearly touching the houses on each side, the soldiers holding their Sten guns and staring back at the old men.

  The second village was more spread out along the road with no clear centre to it. The two three-tonners pulled over and Kirby stopped the Land Rover close behind them. Hal got out and met Lieutenant Grieves, who had climbed out of the truck in front of him.

  ‘Mandri, sir.’

  ‘I’ll try and find the chief. You can get going when I come back.’

  Hal took Kirby and went to look for the village headman.

  He found a bar that was set back from the road with a ragged tree in front of it and metal chairs stacked against the outside wall. Kirby pushed open the door for him, and Hal stepped inside, taking off his cap and looking around. There was a good smell of Greek coffee. At a table in a corner, five men stopped playing dominoes to look at him.

  ‘Good morning,’ Hal said in Greek, and the old men nodded and said good morning back.

  Hal asked for the mukhtar and was told he lived next to the church. He thanked the men and left. As he walked back past the trucks he was aware of Grieves watching him and scowling; he was impatient and bored with waiting and the men were bored too. Well, they could wait some more: relations with the Greeks must be respected.

  There was nobody on the street and just a girl staring from the darkness of her house as he and Kirby walked to the church. In the crooked square, a small boy stood by the corner with muddy feet and Hal felt the presence of the people inside the houses without seeing them.

  He chose the larger of the houses next to the church – although it was still a pretty rough-looking dwelling – and knocked. The door opened, and a woman in a black dress, holding a broom, greeted him.
Hal asked for the mukhtar and was shown into a parlour to wait.

  The walls were plastered but the floor was stone and there was a damp chill in the house, with no sun to warm it up. Hal put his cap on the polished table, which was the only piece of furniture in the room. Kirby, standing in the street outside, coughed and lit a cigarette, and the mukhtar, who was in his fifties perhaps, with dark skin and a moustache, and the voluminous Greek trousers that many of the men in the villages wore, came into the room. ‘Yes?’ he said in English.

  ‘Good morning, sir. My name is Major Treherne.’

  The man nodded. Hal didn’t think he hated him, but he couldn’t tell; it was often hard to tell but it was an important thing to know, to understand how much danger there was. ‘I ask permission to search the village houses for suspected terrorists,’ he said. It was a sentence he used often.

  ‘You’ll do it with or without my permission,’ said the mukhtar, in thickly accented English.

  This was true. If they had intelligence beforehand they skipped the asking of permission.

  ‘If I must,’ said Hal. ‘There are many terrorists who use their families to shield them. I come here as a courtesy to you.’

  There was a silence while the mukhtar looked at him – Hal thought there was every chance he was a terrorist himself. Then, ‘You may,’ he said.

  The soldiers’ searching was methodical and polite, embarrassment rather than belligerence characterising their entry into people’s homes. Hal moved back and forth between the groups. It was so routine as to be tedious, but there was always an undercurrent of tension – at least, it was important to stay sharp. He was only needed if something had been found, or if there was a problem, so when Private Francke came to fetch him, he followed immediately.

  Hal stood in the tiny house and looked at the wreckage.

  The table was on its side. A pool of olive oil moved silently over the floor from a cracked jug. The food cupboard had been emptied and jars shattered. The bedding, which he could see in the back room through the door opening, was tipped onto the ground and the mattresses bayoneted in places. There was china on the floor, too, mostly broken. Hal moved his boot away from a small plate painted with birds and olive branches. ‘I don’t see what you called me in here for, Francke.’

  ‘It’s the empty tins, sir. Who needs that many tins?’

  Hal looked at them. There were ten on the floor near the door into the back room. ‘I can’t arrest somebody for some empty tins. What sort of people are they?’

  ‘Cyps, sir.’

  ‘Yes, Francke – how do they seem to you?’

  ‘Dunno, sir, pretty browned off.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘An old couple, sir.’

  Most of the lads showed an instinctive tact in the dealings they were required to have with the locals, even while calling them wogs and Cyps, but Francke was a bully, and had probably been one all his life. Hal didn’t know the names of all the men in the company; it was the ones who turned up in his office on a charge who stuck in his mind. Francke was one of those.

  ‘Francke.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It seems to me you’ve gone about this with undue relish.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You may have heard the phrase “hearts and minds” bandied about in regard to this campaign.’

  Francke gazed at Hal densely.

  ‘It’s been hard to miss, Francke. It’s been the backbone of what we’re trying to achieve here. This island is under British sovereignty – that means protection as well as rule. We are here to root out terrorism and to protect the population from it, not to give people a grievance and send them scurrying for the hills to grab a bomb with which to murder the next squaddie they see. In other words, this,’ he gestured to the room around him, ‘is too fucking heavy-handed. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘This is no good.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Hal sent Francke ahead of him out of the house. He picked up the olive-branch plate and put it on the table and then he went out into the street.

  About fifty villagers had been herded into the square and were being guarded by Ellis and Trask, who looked embarrassed. A woman was shouting angrily in Greek that Hal had no hope of understanding. Another woman joined in the shouting, some of the men too and the soldiers answered in English, as you might talk to animals, conciliatory and threatening at the same time.

  Ellis and Trask squared up to them, gripping their Stens in both hands. Sergeant McKinney stood nearby, with his legs wide apart and his chin jutting out, overseeing the whole thing with an air of comfortable immovability.

  Lieutenant Grieves came towards Hal out of a side street with two other soldiers. He hadn’t exactly been distinguishing himself with his leadership qualities in the last two hours; Hal hadn’t seen him since the damn thing started. ‘There you are, Grieves. Put those people in the church.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Grieves went off – shuffled off, thought Hal. The WOSB must have been having a slow week when they’d made him a lieutenant, a sneery grammar-school boy with chips on both shoulders and Bolshevik tendencies. No one liked drinking with him and he was hell sober. Hal had nothing against National Service boys as a rule, but Grieves, with his too-civilised-for-soldiering attitude, counting the days to demob, irritated him.

  It wasn’t a big village, no maze of streets and blind alleys to contend with, just the houses along the road and the square, and more houses in a modest sprawl up the hill with rutted goat tracks leading to them. Most of the villagers were in the church and every house searched.

  Hal looked into the back of the truck where a Greek boy, the one arrest, was sitting with his head in his hands. He was flanked by Tompkins and Walsh, who were sharing a fag. On the sandbags at their feet was a muddy stack of EOKA pamphlets, two good-sized clasp knives and a piece of piping, crudely welded closed at one end.

  The boy looked sideways through his fingers at Hal.

  Hal picked up the piece of piping, pushing the leaflets with it. They were familiar to him, distributed by EOKA in their thousands, and although he couldn’t read the Greek, he knew the meaning: ‘We have nothing else to do but shed blood.’ He examined the pipe, then put it down on the floor of the truck again. ‘Are these yours?’ said Hal to the boy, who didn’t answer. ‘Tompkins – was the pipe in the same house?’

  ‘Yes, sir, he had it hidden up in the fireplace.’

  ‘You’re sure it was this boy’s house?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Was he alone?’

  ‘His mum was there.’

  The boy looked about nineteen. Old enough to know better.

  Hal looked around him at the valley, where the mist was shifting, and then up the hill towards the church. He could see the people drifting back to their houses, and the rest of the soldiers coming down the hill towards him, lighting cigarettes and talking.

  He looked back at the Greek boy, who hadn’t moved. ‘On you go, then,’ he said to Tompkins. ‘Good.’

  Tompkins nodded and shoved the boy along into the dark of the truck, to make room.

  Kirby was smoking in the Land Rover, with his collar well up, and hunched down in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Kirby. Come,’ said Hal, and Kirby got out. He was a knock-kneed, heavy young man, whose every movement was reluctantly forced from clumsy limbs.

  He and Hal started up the hill together towards the mukhtar’s house, as the trucks rattled away from them.

  Hal stood in the parlour, the mukhtar’s housekeeper – or wife, or mother – poked the fire and the mukhtar maintained his silence.

  ‘What’s the name of the man we arrested?’

  ‘He’s a good boy.’

  ‘Name?’

  No answer.

  ‘You’re not doing him any favours.’

  ‘Your soldiers have damaged property here today. They have destroyed houses. They distressed the women.’

  ‘Any
complaint you have can be made in writing to the British High Commission,’ Hal said.

  The mukhtar spat. The woman looked at the spit shining in the firelight on the stone floor.

  Hal said, ‘Are you going to give me the man’s name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then thank you for your time and co-operation,’ said Hal, and turned to leave.

  Kirby let him go out and then followed him. The door of the house closed behind them.

  ‘Fucking cheek,’ said Kirby, as they walked away. ‘You could do him for that, sir.’

  Hal laughed.

  The two platoons were back in Episkopi at dusk. Tompkins and Walsh marched the Greek boy off to the guardroom, with Walsh carefully carrying the evidence. Hal didn’t think about him again, but went to the mess and had a drink, then Kirby drove him back into Limassol, to Clara and the girls, with Hal sitting up front and both mostly quiet, comfortable with one another.

  Chapter Four

  Clara lay against Hal in the close darkness. The blankets on the bed never seemed quite dry, but they were warm and heavily tucked around them.

  Obedient to convention, the first bed they had ever shared was on their wedding night, in a hotel in the New Forest, to be near Southampton for the boat back across the Channel the next day. Hal, newly promoted to captain, only had a few days’ leave and they couldn’t have afforded a longer wedding trip anyway. The hotel was accurately, but still somehow misleadingly, described as ‘an old coaching inn’, and had been recommended by a friend of Hal’s. It was a disappointment, and the bed most disappointing of all. The room had uneven, poorly covered floors. Clara’s going-away suit hung neatly in the wardrobe as their every tiny movement was announced through the pipes, boards and hollow bulging plaster of the cold building, a wedding night broadcast to the world at large.