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.’