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.
The sight of her made him wonder what he would do when he left the army, where to go, what caged bird refuge find. In a few months he would be on his way out, and the smile on the woman’s otherwise placid features turned away the thought of going back to Nottingham and immersing himself in the rattling machine music of the factory. Better to make his way around the world on a merchant ship, or try a job in London and know what it was like to be an ant among millions. The idea of having to make up his mind was anguish, and he even considered staying in the army for seven and five, though he preferred the heady uncertainty of not knowing what he was going to do till he did it.
At the warehouse a piece of grit had forked into his left boot, which helped the next few miles on the road to weary him even more, so that all he ached for was to see the woman and talk to her. Water still ran in the river, though it was June, and the road snaked between taller trees, their driver wrestling the wheel as if with a dragon whose head he had at last got down on the ground. Herbert envied him the combat, anything but sitting still and watching the all too familiar landscape go by, which only another sight of the woman could bring to life.
The pebble in his boot was easy to ignore the closer they got to the village. Brooding over the girl showed a sickness of the spirit, he was sure, a threat to himself he could do nothing about, a gun to the head. He didn’t want the vision to melt, though wondered whether Pemberton or the driver could detect the thickness of his obsession.
The undulating scrub of heather and olives, and then scattered tall trees whose shade flickered the windscreen, gave off a dry luxurious scent, fresher than at the coast, deepening his foolishness in love, at chasing a picture which had snared him on to a fateful road. Useless to choose it by hoping to avoid that idiot Dominic, the chances being they would meet in any case. He would have been a bigger fool to think it unlikely. Only the woman — though a cooler voice said such revelations never came twice. Even so, he must be driven through the village to prove it true or false.