Small Wars Page 7

  At Dodge, she waited outside the shop for Deirdre, leaning against the wooden post of the walkway with the sun on her face and Lieutenant Davis came out of the barber’s, rubbing the back of his newly shaved neck. He noticed her and looked oddly surprised. ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning. Nice haircut?’

  ‘Well, I won’t need another for a while at least,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘I’m just waiting for Deirdre Innes.’

  ‘No shopping to do?’

  ‘Not today.’

  Davis looked at the girls, who were hunched low and close to one another nearby, examining some ants and squashing them occasionally with their short fingers.

  ‘Savages,’ he said.

  ‘Shocking, isn’t it? First instinct – destruction.’

  He looked at her. ‘Are you on Marlborough?’ he asked.

  She had thought he was going to say something quite different, she didn’t know what.

  ‘Lionheart,’ she said. ‘We were in town before, which was horrid, so I’m glad we’re up here now.’

  ‘Yes, much better off. Did you feel in any danger?’

  ‘Everyone was very friendly, actually. The Greeks seem so hospitable. Hal says it’s a shame a perfectly amicable situation can be spoilt by a few troublemakers.’

  ‘Does he? I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, how would we like it if a lot of Greeks moved into the Houses of Parliament and told us what to do?’

  ‘It’s not the same thing at all. And they didn’t complain about it when we were defending them from the Germans, did they?’

  Lottie got up and went over to Clara, leaning on her, pressing her dusty hands against her skirt and twisting her neck to smile up at Davis with self-adoring charm.

  ‘Hello – you’re a sweet little thing,’ said Davis.

  ‘This is Lottie. That’s Meg.’

  Meg was absorbed in the ants still and didn’t hear.

  ‘Twins?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was a twin, but my sister died when we were two.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Clara was at a loss for a moment. Her girls were nearly two; it didn’t bear thinking about. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Well. You know.’

  This remark seemed to finish the topic and Clara searched for another. She wished Deirdre would come out. Lottie wriggled and kept smiling up at Davis, then went over and smiled at him even more, hoping to be picked up, and Clara felt embarrassed, as if Lottie’s behaviour were her own.

  ‘Lottie, what’s Meg doing?’ she said.

  Davis, unused to children, just smiled down at her. ‘I say,’ he said suddenly, ‘I’ve got my batman down here. Shall I give you a lift up to Lionheart? I’m meeting your husband to – Well, we have to go up to one of the villages, but I’ve time, if you don’t mind coming along now.’

  ‘You’re with Hal today?’

  Davis looked at her for a second, then said, as if he hadn’t heard, ‘Should you like a lift up?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Right now?’

  ‘Right now would be best. I don’t want to keep the major waiting.’

  Clara picked up Lottie, put her on her hip and went to the door of the shop, leaning into the grocery-smelling dark. ‘Deirdre? Lieutenant Davis says he’ll give us a lift up – will you be long?’

  ‘Oh, jolly good, Roger’s fading. Right now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll just finish up.’

  Clara was relieved Deirdre would be with them.

  Deirdre sat in the front of Davis’s Land Rover, leaning her arm restlessly on the open window and holding Roger around the middle, and Davis sat practically on the gearstick between her and his driver. Clara and the girls were in the back. Deirdre was quiet, the engine noise made it hard for Clara to speak and she had to keep the girls pinned down over the bumps.

  The Land Rover stopped at the first street of Lionheart, by the Devonshire Road sign. ‘Will this do?’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Clara.

  ‘Will you be seeing Tony Grieves later?’ said Deirdre, suddenly, and Davis said,

  ‘Yes, I should think so.’

  ‘Well be sure and tell him hello, won’t you? From Mrs Innes.’ She said it challengingly, meeting his eye.

  ‘Certainly. Goodbye.’

  She opened the door and put Roger down first, then climbed down after him and hauled her basket out. Davis jumped out and opened Clara’s door for her. He nodded to her obligingly and smiled. He was a little smaller than Hal, possibly, and narrow. His narrowness was boyish.

  ‘Abyssinia,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she laughed, ‘I expect so.’

  He turned to Deirdre. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Innes.’

  ‘Yes – don’t forget what I told you.’ Deirdre was impatient, and cross with Roger about something, walking away from them, so Clara and the twins waved off the Land Rover as it turned and drove away.

  At Episkopi Garrison, after lunch, the officers often headed home or to Evdimou beach, which was in the next bay along to the west. The café at Evdimou was run by a Greek named Gregoris; they could drink and relax without the formality of the mess. Hal often went there with Mark Innes, and whiled away the afternoon hours when Mark didn’t want to go home to Deirdre. He never said so, of course, but it was understood. Hal would keep him company, staring at the horizon, drinking bottles of Keo beer and resting his mind in peace, between the business of soldiering and the business of Clara and the girls.

  That afternoon, though, as Davis had said, there was a job to be done. Kirby was driving Hal and Davis to find Loulla Kollias’s wife, Madalyn. After the raid on the farmhouse and the arrest of her husband, she and her children had gone to stay at her sister’s farm on the plains in the middle of the island.

  Davis had a book with him on the journey, which he tried to read, whenever the road was smooth enough. Hal found himself irritated by what he took to be an affectation. There was something about Davis that got his back up, a slouching, sixth-form sensibility; he seemed unable to put himself aside for the job in hand, and at one point had said, ‘Rich, isn’t it, sir? Public relations exercise for the widows and orphans.’

  Hal responded coolly: ‘It’s procedure, Davis. A man died in our custody. D’you expect us to put him out with the rubbish?’

  It took three hours to get there from Episkopi; a long drive, not improved by Davis’s company. They made a detour to the local police station where there was a muddle about who was going where, and arrangements for collecting the body from Episkopi. Then Kirby had got lost and driven around the dirt roads, swearing, for a while. Now he was waiting out by the Land Rover as Hal, Davis and the two local Greek policemen approached the house. Hal knocked on the door.

  Around them were olive groves, the silver leaves touched by a low sun.

  They stood, Hal, Davis and the policemen, surrounded by silence that felt deeper after their loud knock than before. Nobody came to the door. Hal glanced around the yard and into the beginnings of the quiet lines of trees, trying to see if there was anybody there. Some chickens pecked about in the dust and perched on the low wall that crookedly circled the house, but apart from that, no life that they could see. Hal thought it was a very peaceful scene that he had come to with the news of death.

  Madalyn Kollias stood in stony earth between the lines of vegetables she had been working on, and heard about the death of her husband.

  Hal looked up from her hands which were twined together; with soil under the nails and in the cracks in her skin. He looked into her face – carefully not into her eyes – as he explained to her levelly that her husband’s body was in the hospital at Limassol. He relied on Davis to translate for him, pausing between his sentences. The police stood at a respectful distance, with their caps in their hands, looking down at their feet.

  Hal told Madalyn Kollias that she was not under suspicion, he didn’t wa
nt to cause her any unnecessary suffering. He was distracted by Davis, who was emotionally agitated. Hal could sense his untrained feelings, near him. He kept looking back and forth between Hal, Madalyn Kollias and the Greeks, stumbling over his words. When Madalyn Kollias pressed them for details of Loulla’s death – which Hal was unable to give – Davis’s voice faltered, and when her children came close, he lost concentration.

  Madalyn Kollias didn’t get hysterical or violent, which Hal had been warned might happen. She was as brave about it as an Englishwoman might have been. She seemed dazed by the news more than anything.

  The Greek police stepped forward and began to talk to her about her husband’s body, the transporting of it back to the village, and offering to take her with them. She refused, stepping back, the shock seeming to slow her as her eyes looked confusedly at them. There wasn’t anything more to be said.

  Hal didn’t want to start playing nursemaid to the woman but it seemed equally uncivilised to leave her standing by a patch of melons in her sudden grief. He debated whether he ought to suggest she go into the house, or find her sister, so that she would have somebody to be with.

  ‘Tell her she should come back to the house – if she wants to,’ he said to Davis.

  She nodded. She even took Hal’s arm. They walked slowly across the ridges of soil onto the golden grass and back towards the farmhouse.

  He wished she might behave with wog hysteria and make herself foreign to him, but she didn’t seem to hate him. Her sister would be back soon, she said. Hal nodded to the policemen, whose funereal faces showed relief, and turned to leave, but Davis said something else to her, quietly. He went close to her, bent down to speak into her ear and touched her arm. Jolted and upset, she pulled back from him.

  They left Madalyn Kollias by the door to the house. Hal had recognised the faces of her children, as they followed her, and felt sure they recognised him too, from the raid on their house when he had taken their father. They were too frightened to come any closer. He realised, with sudden disgust, that he was the frightener of children. Still, it couldn’t be helped.

  ‘What did you say to her just then?’ he asked Davis, as they approached the Land Rover.

  ‘I said I was sorry for her loss. Something like that, sir. I don’t know,’ Davis answered casually, looking away.

  There was no need to go back to the village; they left the police at the crossroads. Neither Hal, Kirby nor Davis had spoken since taking their leave of them. The Land Rover roared along the dirt track towards the road, the mountains casting immense long shadows, like night come early.

  The dirt road ran out and the Land Rover bumped up onto smooth British-laid asphalt. In the relative quiet that followed, Hal turned to look at Davis in the back seat. He was slumped down with his hand up to his mouth to bite a nail. ‘Davis,’ said Hal, ‘that was an unpleasant job. It didn’t help the woman that you allowed your feelings to show. It was self-indulgent. And it certainly didn’t help me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Davis was surprised and belligerent.

  ‘Davis, Kollias was responsible for the deaths of soldiers and an American diplomat. You know the details of his crimes far better than I. Do you think his wife didn’t know what he was up to? We could have left it to the Cypriot police. The CO dispatched a car, a driver and two officers to find her and tell her – respectfully – about his death. It’s not my business to pass judgment on the British Army but, if pressed, I’d say we behaved rather well.’

  Davis expelled air in a mixture between a laugh and a groan. Kirby kept his eyes front, but he was listening.

  ‘If you have concerns, express them appropriately. Do you understand?’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Do you have concerns?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Anything to add?’

  ‘…No, sir.’

  Hal nodded. He resumed scanning the mountains and considering the roads that traversed them.

  Chapter Nine

  The three years of the conflict so far had seen restaurant bombings and soldiers’ vehicles ambushed on remote roads, street fights, graffiti and countless arrests. It had seen a fledgling desire for independence harden into a terrorist campaign, and the British government, having missed the opportunity to negotiate early on, was backed into a corner.

  In February that year, with the indoctrination of schoolboys one of EOKA’s key tools, the British had ordered the schools not to fly the blue and white Greek flag. There had been riots, and British troops fired on the crowd. Only one Cypriot schoolboy was killed. Nothing would happen for weeks, then a truck full of soldiers would be attacked, there would be deaths and maimings, more troops brought in, more villages searched and more villagers herded into wire pens. It was a war of intelligence. It was a war of subterfuge and rumour. General Grivas wanted a guerrilla war, and the British swept the mountains in their thousands for training camps, but the actual fire-fights, over three years, could be counted on your fingers.

  Archbishop Makarios, known not just to sympathise with EOKA but to be at its very core, hand in glove with Grivas, was deported in March. There had been a general strike, more riots, curfews, the searching of monasteries and churches by British soldiers. The interrogation of priests was done with distaste, but it was done.

  British helicopters dropped leaflets telling the Cypriots not to be seduced by EOKA propaganda. EOKA leaflets told of the torture and rape of Cypriot women and children in prison camps.

  There was no truth. It was a nothing, laughable Mickey Mouse conflict; it was a sinister time of terror and repression. The British were misguided and ignorant; the Cypriots were lethargic and foolish. The Cypriots loved the British; the Cypriots hated the British. The British were torturers; the British were decent and honourable. EOKA were terrorists; EOKA were heroes. There was no heart to it. It had become a thing driving itself with no absolutes to unravel.

  ‘How is the Emergency this week?’ and ‘What should be done?’ were the endless circular discussions at dinners from Government House to the mess at Episkopi, and never a solution and never, like the conflict itself, a final truth you could point to and say, ‘There! A solution,’ because what is a solution? History doesn’t end. Places that are fought over are always fought over, and will always be fought over, and there will never be an end to it, and each conflict is just adding to the heap of conflicts that no one can remember starting and no one will ever, ever finish.

  So, conflict is normal and battles are normal, just as White Ladies are drunk within wired compounds and pipe bombs are made in the front rooms of village houses while supper is cooked. Domestic life continues. As the Special Investigations Branch shared information with Colonel Burroughs in his dim office, and Hal’s next target was identified, and as three young men met a fishing-boat that held a stock of rifles and carried them in crates into the darkened mountains, Clara, in her semi-detached house on Lionheart Estate, took Meg’s temperature, found she had a fever and wondered whether or not to bother the doctor with it.

  Burroughs was a good soldier and a fair man and Hal liked him. He had become used to these meetings in the colonel’s office. Whatever time of day it was, the office had the same slightly removed feeling, an atmosphere of order. It wasn’t exactly luxurious either – a concrete room with louvred blinds, a cheap desk, maps on the wall, and the photograph of the Queen and the EOKA pictures facing it – but it had the richness of rank, and that was enough.

  Hal and Burroughs stood in front of the big wall map, a minutely detailed, not always entirely accurate, Ordnance Survey.

  ‘Kollias was a very busy fellow. We have reports of his contacts and associates all over the island…’

  Burroughs had a light-timbred voice reminiscent of film actors of the recent past – Errol Flynn, perhaps, or Robert Donat as an upright sort of chap in a tight situation – and pale grey eyes that would have been fishy, being slightly bulging, but for the thick, wel
l-shaped eyebrows and strongly boned face. He had old-fashioned ease that inspired confidence. Hal had heard many times from his father what a good man Burroughs was, and felt privileged now to have his leadership.

  Burroughs stood three feet from the map, pointing at areas of the Troodos that now he knew as intimately as the lanes and coastal paths surrounding his house on the south coast of England. Hal watched, visualising the terrain. They had put in the groundwork, were on the brink of reaping the rewards, and they felt that a real victory was in sight.

  Kollias, at the time of his arrest, had been engaged in the movement of weapons up to a secret camp where it was believed a man called Kyriakos Demetriou – codename ‘Pappas’ – was hiding out.

  Kollias had been close to Axfentiou, Grivas’s second-in-command, and Demetriou was another of this select group. Some said that Axfentiou’s time as favourite had passed and Demetriou was the closer of the two now to Grivas, having fought alongside him against the Turks as a young man. To fight alongside somebody, to lose and to survive is a very great bond.

  Now, with Kollias’s information on what – luckily for him, probably – had turned out to be the last night of his life, and other information exhaustively gleaned by the SIB, they had an exact fix on Demetriou’s mountain hideout. The question was, how to get to him?

  It was to be a big operation, with troops from two battalions, and from Famagusta and Paphos as well as Episkopi. Secrecy was very important. Nobody but the essential people knew where, or exactly when, they were going. Rumours, guesswork and tension raised the energy at the garrison as supplies and weapons were ordered and checked, with the utmost quietness: there were Cypriot staff all over the base. Even the wives weren’t told exactly when they’d be on the move.

  Clara ate supper alone. She put the wireless on to drown the muffled noises of argument coming from the Inneses next door. When Hal was there she didn’t notice so much. The soothing sounds of Forces Radio accompanied her joyless meal and then she went up to check on Meg.