In the Wolf's Mouth

1

And here was a world intact, like a dream of his childhood. After years of war, not a sign except the intriguing sight from the train of numerous unfamiliar young women in the fields, land girls brought in presumably from Birmingham and Coventry, too distant to be seen properly, labouring silently. In London there were shelters, sandbags, militarised parks, blacked-out windows and gun emplacements. Here, nothing, trees washed through with sunshine and birdsong, the smell of the ground breathing upwards through the thick moist heat. As Will started out, his feet remembered the exact rise and fall of the walk home from the station. How perfectly his senses interlocked with the place. He knew that when he rounded this corner, yes, here it was, the peppery smell of the river before he could see it. He could picture the dim bed of round stones, the swaying weeds, its surface braided with currents. A full-fed river. Behind his left shoulder, away up for a couple of miles, was the rippled shape of an Iron Age hill fort where he’d played as a child, battling his brother down from the top. Everything here was still clean and fresh and in place, the countryside sincere and vigorous. It was as though he were walking through the first chapter of a future biography, with his kitbag on his shoulder.

Will decided to avoid the village and headed down through the wood. According to his father this was a recent planting, maybe only a hundred years old. It was still coppiced in this section, which had a peculiar regularity. The evenly spaced, slender trees always made him think of stage scenery. When the wind died the coppice had an indoor quiet, the quiet of an empty room.

‘And where do you think you’re going?’

Startled, Will turned to see his younger brother, Ed, wearing his hunting waistcoat, his open shotgun hooked over his shoulder. ‘For God’s sake, Ed.’

Ed smiled. They shook hands.

‘You didn’t hear me, did you?’

‘Can’t say I did.’

‘Makes a fellow wonder who’s been in training and who hasn’t.’

Ed was much given to stealth. He loved hunting and had a straightforward aptitude for it that Will sometimes envied, often mocked. Ed would appear suddenly in a room, quiet in his body, his senses splayed around him, then smile and go out again without saying anything. Father had been in a way similar, although sharply clever, a quiet grammarian indoors but a sportsman outside, hard-riding, red-faced, breathing great volumes of air, his hair sweated to his head. A mere schoolmaster, he’d been invited to join the hunt after the last war when he’d returned with a medal, with the medal. It was outdoors that Will was allowed glimpses of what he took to be his father’s mysterious heroism, that undiscussable subject. There was a kind of calculated rampaging, his movements very hard and linear. Ed had a different quality. He was less reflective, less troubled by thought, simply a live moving part of the world of trees and creatures and water. Will wasn’t sure how he himself would be described. He wasn’t a natural sportsman although he was efficient and strong enough. He always noticed the moment of commitment, the threshold he had to cross between thought and action, his mind instigating his body. He didn’t think he should notice; it made him feel slightly fraudulent. His movements were effective but too invented. He was playing a part.

‘Why aren’t you fishing?’ Will asked. ‘I can’t imagine there’s anything left to shoot. I thought the woods would be stripped bare with rationing having everyone setting snares and popping their shotguns.’

‘Ah, but for them wot knows the old woods like I does.’ He opened his waistcoat to show hanging inside its left panel a rabbit, teeth bared and eyes half closed. ‘And,’ he said, reaching into his front pocket and carefully lifting out a bird, ‘… there’s this.’

‘You little tinker. A woodcock. When everyone else is working on the nth permutation of bully beef.’

Will took the bird from him. Its head, weighted by its long bill, hung over Will’s fingers on the loose cord of its neck. The small body was still warm, the plumage shining with the airy burnish of a living bird. Will’s senses were lighting up, home again after weeks of training grounds, weapons drills, diagrams, distempered huts and dismal food. ‘That’s a very kind homecoming gift,’ Will said.

‘It isn’t any such thing,’ Ed said and took the bird back, refolding its wings to fit into his pocket.

‘All for you. You going to sell it on the black market?’

‘No.’ Ed was impatient. ‘I’ll give it to Mother. You’ll probably eat it tonight in a pie.’

‘Did she send you out to meet me?’

‘Er, no. How could she if we didn’t know you were coming?’

They walked out of the wood, the shadowy trees gently breaking apart to reveal the river, there with the sun on its back, the fields glowing beyond.

Will narrowed his eyes at the view.

‘Ah, yes.’

‘Pleased to be home?’

‘I won’t be back for long.’

They turned away from the riverside and up a rise to come out into the lane. Either side of them as they walked back to the house the hedgerows were lively with small birds, the verges starred with the blues and purples of wild flowers.

As they entered the front garden, Will called out, ‘Ma! Mother!’ They rounded the side of the house and entered through the back door. Immediately he was inside, dropping his kitbag down beside the boots and walking sticks and umbrellas, Will felt himself claimed by the familiar aroma of the place. It was a combination of many things — carpets, dogs, wood, the garden, the damp in the cellar — too subtle to be separated. It was more a mood, a life. It contained his school holidays, his father’s presence, his father’s death. A world intact.

‘Oh, Mother! Where art thou?’

He found her in the kitchen, leaning over the table with palms pressed flat either side of the newspaper.

‘Surprise.’

‘Oh, crikey, yes. It’s this one. Here he is. William of Arabia,’ she said, lifting her spectacles and fixing them on top of her head before reaching her arms towards him, and waiting. That annoyed him, the quick flash accusation of emulation. As though T. E. Lawrence were the only man in the world to learn Arabic, to be a soldier. He walked towards her and she took hold of his shoulders with hands that were scalded red. She must have just been busy in the sink. He looked into that emotional round face, her eyes moist and diffuse with poor sight, her heavy cheeks hanging. She pulled him forwards over the long incline of her bosom and kissed him vividly on the temple.

‘So you’ve survived training?’

‘Outwardly I seem fine, don’t I?’

‘Near enough.’

‘Some chaps broke significant limbs with the motorcycle training.’

‘Motorcycles?’

Hearing the voices or scenting him, perhaps, the dogs came shambling in. Will bent to Rex first. The King Charles spaniel squirmed down onto its haunches and whisked its feathery tail. He rubbed the soft upholstery of its ears. Will had a voice he used for the dogs, clear, enthusiastic and mocking. ‘Look at you. Look at you. Yes, indeed.’ Teddy, the black Labrador, his large mouth loosely open, panted and bumped against Will’s legs, trying to insinuate his sleek head under Will’s hands. ‘Oh, and you. Yes, boy. Yes, Teddy. Oh, I’ve missed you too. Yes, I have. I have.’ Squatting down now, Will combed his fingers through the rich, oily fur at Teddy’s nape. He felt the upswept rough warm wetness of Teddy’s tongue against his chin.

‘Don’t overexcite them, darling.’

‘They’re dogs, Mother. They overexcite themselves. You do. Yes, you do. Pea-brained beasts. They’re just pleased to see me again.’

‘Broken limbs on motorcycles, you said.’

‘Off motorcycles. Up a hill as fast as you can, whizz round then down again likewise. They disconnected the brakes to make it more difficult. There were chaps strewn all over. And they call it “Intelligence”.’

‘Do they? Ah, would you look at that.’

Will glanced up to see Ed laying his kills on the table, the woodcock’s wings dropping open, the rabbit stiff and grimacing, the fur on one side blasted.

‘Number two son brings great treasure.’

The predicted pie appeared for supper, the fine dark meat of the woodcock, with its flavours of dusk and decaying leaves, and the clean tang of the rabbit were both impaired by a horrible margarine pastry. They ate economically without candles or lights. Through the windows floated a soft lilac light. It hung in the room, almost as heavy as mist, and made the striped wallpaper glow with dreamy colour. Will realised how tired he was at the end of his training, at the end of a lot of things, and posted now, although Mother was yet to ask, off to the war finally. His mother spoke as though overhearing his thoughts.

‘You know I had hoped the war would have finished before you got dragged into it.’

Will sat up. He was horrified. ‘But you wouldn’t want me to miss my chance.’

‘I think I could cope.’

Ed said solemnly, ‘A man wants to fight’, and Will laughed.

‘And how would you know?’

‘Boys.’

‘Look, it’s my duty, isn’t it? It needs to be done. It’s what Father would have wanted.’

‘I’m not so sure you know that about him,’ Will’s mother said quietly.

‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘You’re his son.’

‘I know that. All somewhat academic, anyway. I’ve been posted.’

His mother looked up at him, her dim eyes watery, a rose flush blotching her neck. ‘Have you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

It wasn’t what he’d wanted. It was not what he deserved, with his Arabic and ambition. He had been warned by one NCO during training, a sly and adroit Cockney who seemed to be having the war he wanted, who had friends in the kitchens and spat at the end of definitive statements. ‘You need blue eyes,’ he’d said, smoking a conical hand-rolled cigarette, ‘to get a commission. Take my word for it. You’ll end up in the dustbin with the rest of them.’ There was a look for the officer class and Will didn’t have it. Five feet nine inches tall, he had dark hair and dark eyes, a handsomely groomed round head and a low centre of gravity. This was unfair. In his soul he was tall, a traveller, a keen, wind-honed figure.

The man who sat at the last in a sequence of desks Will had visited, the man who decided Will’s future, considered the paperwork through small spectacles and made quiet grunting noises like a rootling pig. Finally he looked up. ‘All very commendable. Languages. I’m putting you in for the Field Security Services.’ The dustbin.

Will pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘If I may, sir, I was hoping for the Special Operations Executive, you see, I …’

‘The duty to which we are assigned,’ the man interrupted, as though finishing Will’s sentence, ‘is where we must do our duty.’

And so Will had humiliated himself precisely in the way he’d told himself he never would.

‘Sir?’

‘What?’

‘Sir, I’m not sure I should mention this but my father, you see, in the last war …’

‘Yes?’

‘Distinguished himself. He was awarded the VC. I …’

‘Oh, excellent. Jolly good. You should try to be like him.’

The personnel of the unit to which Will was assigned was like a saloon bar joke. An Englishman, a Welshman and a Jew … And lo and behold his commanding officer was tall, blue-eyed, a wistful blond, younger than Will by a couple of years, an Oxford rower, perfectly friendly, unobjectionable and unprepared. To Will he said, ‘And suddenly we’re all soldiers. All a bit unreal, isn’t it?’ But they weren’t soldiers. Not really. The only danger Will could perceive with the FSS was spending the remainder of the war guarding an English airbase doing nothing at all.

Will considered how much of this to tell his mother as she asked again, ‘And?’

‘You needn’t look so worried. I’m not going far just yet. Port protection sort of thing. Security.’

‘Isn’t that police work?’

Ed, leaning low over his plate, looked across to see Will’s reaction.

Will felt an urge to throw his drink in his mother’s face. He pictured vividly the water lashing out from his cup and striking. It was a thought he had now and then, in different company, just picking up his cup and hurling its contents into the face of whoever it was who had provoked him. He wouldn’t ever do it but in those moments the vision of it was so clear and fulfilling that he had to resist. ‘It is what I have been assigned to do until I am posted abroad.’

After supper they listened to the wireless, angling their heads just a little towards its glow and chiselled voices, their eyes vaguely involved in the carpet or what their hands were doing, his mother sewing, the needle rising and sinking, thread pulled tight with little tugs. The dogs slouched around the room, lay down and got up again. Will called Teddy to him and patted his smooth, hard head. The wireless made Will crave action and involvement with a physical feeling akin to hunger, an emptiness and readiness in his tightened nerves. He was very alert. He’d had years of this now: battle reports, a burning, piecemeal geography of the war, and war leaders and chaos, victories and defeats. And propaganda, of course. You couldn’t really know what was going on, but Will with his intelligence, deep reading and cynicism made shrewd guesses. The reports on the wireless were so charged with possibility and vibrant with what was never said or admitted about the battles, the terror and exaltation. The mere cheering of victories didn’t come close to what Will supposed the reality must be. The war was large and endlessly turbulent. There was room in it for someone like Will, for his kind of independent mastery. He could make elegant and decisive shapes out of the shapelessness. He wanted in. By it and with it and on it and in it.

When the news reports gave way to dance band music, Will got up to go into his father’s study.

The room had its own stillness. The book spines. The vertical pleats of the heavy blue curtains. The solidity of the desk with its paperweight, mother-of-pearl-handled paper knife, the blotter and wooden trays. Behind Will, the sofa on which his father had died.

Somewhere in a drawer in this room was the medal his father never took out. The room’s composed silence was like Will’s father. He had always raised a hand halfway to his mouth and coughed quietly before he spoke, preparing himself to do so. Sometimes Will felt as though the empty study might do the same, clear its throat delicately and say something neat and short, something devastating. A terrifying rupture of his reserve had presaged Will’s father’s death. He’d come back from the hunt after being unhorsed. He’d landed badly, apparently, and sat down to dinner looking pale with a deep red scratch trenching his cheek just beside his nose. There was a small notch taken out of his forehead also. Ed asked what had happened.

‘What do you bloody well think happened?’

‘Darling …’

‘What are you leaping into the breach for? Damnfool question. And I have a pounding headache. Christ.’

He leaned over and vomited onto the carpet right there at his feet. They all sat there waiting through the noise, the wrenching up out of his body. Teddy ambled over afterwards and sniffed at it.

Father sat up straight and gulped water. ‘Don’t all gawk at me like that. I’m obviously ill. I’m going to lie down.’

He stood up, swayed, and stalked out to his study. Half an hour later, Will’s mother found him dead on the study sofa. Dead and gone having hardly ever said anything at all to his sons. There was much to cherish, of course, in Will’s memories but he was gone, a man who had always known more than he said.

Will read along a shelf. Something fine and sharply enhancing of his intellect. Lucretius on the nature of the universe? Why not? It had that fine brilliance and fearlessness as a description of the world, bright bodies in space. Distinctive also. Let the other fellows always be quoting Cicero and Virgil. And reading Latin would keep his mind active. Will would have this and his Arabic poetry. The Lucretius was a squarish, green-covered volume. Inside he saw his father’s pasted ex libris, signed with his fastidious, vertical pen strokes. Henry Walker, 1921.

He began reading it that night under the low, sloping ceiling of his boyhood bedroom, intending to remember and look up the words he didn’t know.

In the morning he drew the curtains. A neutral day, the light white and even. There was none of the gorgeous lustre of the previous day and this was almost a relief. The world was a realer place, more practical. Then he noticed in the glass of one pane of the window the twist of bubbles. He’d forgotten about them, or felt as though he had, but if asked at any time he could have sketched their exact distribution, rising through the clearness. They had been a small magic of his childhood, catching the light differently, sparkling a little. And they were part of his room, his world. As a child he’d almost felt them inside himself, a sensation of excitement spiralling up in his breast. And they connected his room to the river, as though his windows were formed from panels of the river’s surface. That river there, brown and steady, rather workmanlike today. The bubbles in the window filled him, even before he’d gone, with a large nostalgia for this house and the landscape and his childhood. It was poetical at first but gradually he became aware of a dark outline around that feeling, a constriction, and realised that it was fear. His life, unexciting as it may have been so far, was still a detailed, complicated thing. In its own way, for him, it was precious. It would be a lot to lose.

He turned away and examined the small bookshelf in this room painted with creamy white paint that showed the tracks of the brush. How to. Boys’ adventures. Alice. The Wind in the Willows. Ah, yes. He realised that it had been in his mind since his return. A full-fed river. By it and with it and on it and in it. He’d loved that book as a boy with its small engrossing illustrations, darkly cross-hatched and tangled like nests holding the forms of the characters. Sentimental, of course, but he decided to take it too.

At breakfast Will told his mother that he was off that day to his posting and she fell silent. They chewed through their rough and watery meal of national loaf and powdered eggs — here, in the countryside, they were eating powdered eggs — and after that she disappeared. Will was used to interpreting her silences, particularly those of the stricken widow period, and he knew what she was saying. A stiff, stoical farewell was all that was required but instead she would force him to think of her, helpless and alone in this pristine place in the middle of England that the dark, droning bombers had swept over on their way to flatten Coventry. She would be here all the while imagining him blown to bits. This thought demanded that he imagine his own death also and that was deeply pointless and unhelpful. Typical: her determination never to make a scene often resulted in strange, cramped, unresolved scenes like this. Useless woman. A boy going away to war without a goodbye from his mother.

Ed walked with Will towards the station, putting on a flat cap when light rain began to fall from the low unbroken clouds. The dismal, factual light looked to Will like something issued by the War Office. They walked together through the quiet coppice with the dogs snuffling at the ground and there they parted with a firm handshake. Will thought that Ed may have held onto his hand a fraction longer than necessary and said, ‘Let’s not be silly about this. I’ll probably be back before you know it. There’ll probably be some administrative delays. There generally are.’

Ed put his hands in his pockets and called the dogs. ‘It’s all delays for me.’

Will smiled. ‘Nice for Mother, though.’

Ed hitched an eyebrow, saying nothing, then called the dogs again. They gathered, breathing, at his feet. Will petted them a final time and Ed turned to go, the dogs following after in a wide swirling train. Will watched his brother vanishing and appearing through the trees, slightly hunched, the rain pattering on his cap. Ed was heading home, sinking back into his place. Then Will turned himself and headed towards the station, out into the world and the war, and he was glad to be going.

2

On deck, out of sight, Ray had his notebook open and was trying to concentrate, to collect. It was difficult. The ship’s engines were loud and the wind thumped off the Atlantic making the corners of the pages buzz and blur. Ray became engrossed in that sight. When he was beat, which in the army was most of the time, he found these small impressions dilating in his mind and filling his attention. Often they brought with them forgotten things of his childhood. Back in training, at night, his body tired and tight, twitching into sleep, the blanket he lay under brought back exactly one he’d seen in a cowboy picture when he was small. In the scene, a cowboy placed the blanket over a sleeping boy, a small courageous boy who had followed him out on a journey and now lay in front of a fire. Ray had in his mind the exact weight of the blanket, the rounded, smooth solidity where it was folded over at the top and rested on the boy’s shoulder. Those few seconds of that movie had obviously gone deeply into him. He remembered how he’d imagined himself as that boy after he’d seen it — achieving that perfection of sleep, eyelids perfectly still, the blanket heavy and calm, the fire’s busy, watchful light in all that dark space. Sometimes waking in the Quonset hut he found himself lost in a still earlier time. He expected to see in front of him his brother’s face puffed out with sleep or the hollow in the back of his neck, his sharp shoulder blades, before he woke up and got mean. Ray remembered waking in a new day and lying there in the peace before his brother was up, hearing his father pissing in the bathroom before leaving for the leather workshop, the husky sound of his sister Monica brushing her hair in the hallway, shouts and early traffic outside, pigeons grumbling on the window ledge, their shadows shifting.

In Ray’s notebook were written his ideas for movies, sometimes whole stories, sometimes single scenes or images, things he’d put in if he were making a movie. On some pages were drawings of exactly what he wanted to see on the screen, profiles of faces against backgrounds, landscapes, men walking between streetcars, between skyscrapers. He didn’t expect he ever could or would be but he loved inventing, was susceptible to deep reveries in which things occurred with the glossy smoothness and sureness of movies. He kept having these ideas, ideas he’d wanted to hang on to. Sometimes he wrote down actors’ names, people with the right mood in their faces for the characters. A while ago he’d bought this particular small notebook with a blue and white hardboard cover and he’d brought it with him to war where he expected many ideas to come to him. He held it open at a blank page beneath the left side of which he could see the ink of his last jottings. There was a complete scenario that he was pleased with, an idea for a picture about a boxer, a scrappy kid from the neighbourhood, maybe one of the tough kids his brother hung around with on the corners getting into trouble until one day he wandered into a gym and found discipline, focus, ambition. Of course the boxer couldn’t separate himself entirely from his old ways and friends. In the lead-up to the big fight he gets caught up in a robbery and his trainer, an old guy, a real father figure, gives up on him and quits. The boxer almost gives up on himself also and has a wild night on the booze before pulling himself together, going it alone with guts and determination, and winning. Ray hadn’t yet decided if that was it or maybe even better would be that the old trainer is there at the fight, appearing in his corner after a brutal round, and tells him that he hadn’t given up on him but had said so to shake the kid into showing his real spirit and decency.

Ray liked that story because it was so complete, a very satisfying tale of a bad kid turning out to be good and kind. Every scene fell into place as soon as he started thinking about it. He had the entire picture in his head and could run it any time. That was the only place it would ever be. He had no idea how a picture got made and certainly didn’t think that someone like him would get to make one. He just loved the movies. Lots of people did, for sure, but not like him. Ray didn’t think they really got them in the same way. He’d sneak in through a fire escape and sit with his whole soul wide open in the darkness and filling with the characters, the silver and black, the music, the streets, interiors and landscapes, the camera winding its way through the world, seeing things. Other people there, eating and fooling around and puffing the projector beam full with curling smoke, didn’t seem to get it. They were moved all right and they laughed but the scale of the magic, its possibilities, they didn’t think about that.

The other idea he’d had in his mind recently was a love story but for this he only had a scene, a beginning. He wanted to work out where it would go. All he had was this guy, a Fifth Avenue office type, smalltime and hard-working. Every day he eats his lunch in the same city park, on the same bench. This young secretary appears each day at the next bench, takes her sandwich out of a paper bag and eats it. They start greeting each other, little nods. They sit separately and take quick furtive glances. And one day they say hello and another day the young man plucks up courage and sits on her bench and they talk. Ray could see the girl, her face in the soft light of a close-up: chalk-white skin, sculpted hair, large intimate hopeful shining eyes. The man is handsome but not too handsome, ordinary really. They sit together and sparrows peck around their feet and old ladies with little dogs walk by. All the possibilities of the future surround them, leaning in close. It’s in the way they’re photographed, a hazy brightness, summer light hitting off them. She smiles and turns her head a half-inch and it means the whole world.

That was all he had.

Ray inhaled sharply. The cold ocean air shocked him awake. Now he was in the army, there was a moment of panic when he caught himself sinking into his imagination. He came to and was in actual fact on a warship heading for battle. True and unbelievable.

He’d opened his notebook because he thought he might use it like a journal, to record historic things and make observations about the characters he was meeting. There were plenty that fascinated him. The army had taken him from the cramped, complicated, disorderly world of his Italian neighbourhood and introduced him to the rest of America, to people like George.

Usually Ray kept himself to himself, hiding in the dark, preferring invisibility. He liked to be quiet and think. The army, then, was not a natural place for him. He could be seen all the time. Powerful, watching people shouted at him, making him run and crawl and stand thrusting himself upwards at attention and repeat things after them. Just shouting, ‘Yes, sir!’ was difficult for Ray. Flinging his voice out loud and clear made his heart race. Every day in the army there were terrors to confront. At night he fell fast asleep.

Back home, Ray’s brother was unpredictable and not a pleasant person and much more at home in the neighbourhood than Ray was. He had tough and aimless friends whose attention you did not want to attract. They knew precise ways to twist your skin and take your money from you. They would encircle you and dare you to do something. ‘Dare’ was not the right word — you had to do it or suffer some penalty. They enjoyed themselves. They were street life and that meant they were out there, in places you needed to be. Walking past, Ray could get from his own brother a cold, empty stare, sometimes a kind of malevolent indifference that was the best of it, other times an annihilation, a threat that made him sick to his stomach. Ray hid from his brother and his friends, in different places and inside himself. Until the draft came and he was taken out of that place and put into one so raw and unfamiliar he started to miss home.

From his assumed position of invisibility, Ray looked out at the other men and found them fascinating. They came from all over, from worlds Ray had never seen. Some of them talked with him and Ray replied as best as he could. But there was something different about George. When George noticed him and spoke to him, Ray didn’t feel frightened. He was the opposite of his brother, the opposite of a bully. George was tall, mellow, a decent Midwesterner, the kind of American they put in propaganda films. He had a round-cheeked face, eyelids that hung at a slight diagonal down to the outer edges of his eyes and a small mouth. His neat ears, exposed by his crew-cut, were sometimes comical, sometimes sad. Gentle and unassuming, his easy way with friendly gestures had a powerful effect on Ray. The first time Ray really noticed this was at the end of an assault course. He crossed the line nauseous with effort. His lungs were a tight burning thickness that he couldn’t get air into. He bent double and drooled onto the ground. When he straightened up again, George winked at him. ‘Nice day for a stroll.’ Nothing clever or out of the ordinary. Just a little humour.

When they played cards together, the slow courtesy of George’s manners made Ray think of the real America that he came from, evenings spent talking softly and watching the sun set from rural porches. It was nice to get a feel of that. Ray thought that if you put George in a cowboy picture, he would be the store owner who becomes the sheriff when the sheriff is shot, a man who just knows what is right and sticks to that.

In westerns Ray liked the huge skies. His own had been crowded by buildings, ranks of windows and zigzagging fire escapes, pigeons, laundry, faces. In the cowboy pictures the skies were barred with streaks of cloud or brilliantly hot and empty with hungry vultures spiralling through space. Under those skies the strong, simple stories, men moving with their animals.

Closing his buzzing notebook, hushing the pages together and fitting it back into his pocket, Ray squinted up at the sky. Being on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, no larger sky was possible. A dome, it dropped round to horizon on all sides. Clouds made its colours similar to that of the troopship’s paintwork, sober greys and blues. The ocean churned beneath him. It was easy to think about eternity here, big things of life and death, in this fateful vastness, or if not to think about them at least to say their names. Time. Fate. Courage. Journey.

Ray returned to the noise and smells below decks. Most had stopped vomiting now but odours lingered in pockets, acrid with a tang of burned iron and bleach. When Ray first entered the ship it had reminded him of going down into the subway, that same flickering roar and riveted, heavy, hard-working metal. Ray walked past card games and letter writing, push-ups and smoking and comic book reading to find the boys of his squad. He found half of them together.

A conversation about women. Their shapes, their smells, sweetness and deceit, the variations across nationalities, whores, wives, girls. Women were so exhaustively discussed that Ray felt them almost materialising, wished into existence. Randall was on the subject of freckles, apropos of a girl he knew back home, and what amount of freckles was the right amount. This girl had the perfect number.

Floyd, squatting on his heels, said, ‘Sounds like everybody’d be wanting to fuck her. How many guys are hanging around her now, you reckon? Right now? I bet right now this kid ain’t even vertical.’

Randall leaned back and punched his shoulder.

‘What’s her address?’ Floyd went on. ‘Texas, by the beef cow by the cactus. That it? Maybe if I get a light injury I’ll go pay her a visit.’

Randall put his hand to the side of Floyd’s head and shoved. ‘You’ve got bad morals, boy. No wonder no woman ever touched you.’

Randall was a disappointing Texan. Ray had always imagined them as tall and square, squinting, sun-weathered. Randall had the look of poverty, grey and small. His body was tightly knit, with jerking reflexes. In his bleak wrists and the clever joints of his fingers, Ray saw Randall’s grip on things. Firing at the range, Randall produced the quick rhythmical chuck-chuck sound of a well-handled weapon. There were odd nicks like blows of a chisel in Randall’s scalp where the hair didn’t grow. Ray couldn’t remember what it was Randall did back home, probably because he was cagey about it. Most likely he was living on welfare. What he’d tell you was how great a pitcher he was, how women shed their clothes for him or were devoted sweethearts. That was the army for you. Everyone was at it, being new men, lying freely, old selves left behind with their soft civilian clothes. Not George, though. He was honest, a Christian man who crossed his hands in front of his chest, bowed his head and concentrated when the padre said prayers.

‘You’re making that stuff up. You’ve seen that girl with, like, her boyfriend or something,’ Ray said. George smiled.

‘What are you talking about? Ignorant. Don’t know anything.’

‘So what’s her name?’

‘Daisy.’

‘Daisy?’ Ray laughed, emboldened by the flow of conversation. ‘I knew you was making it up. Daisy is, like, a cow you had or something. Why didn’t you even say something we could believe, Mary-Ellen or Elizabeth-May or something? Daisy.’

‘Listen. Fuck. Goddamn it, listen. You’re a little wop virgin, Marfione.’

‘That’s Italian virgin to you,’ Ray said.

‘That’s nice,’ George said. ‘Like a Leonardo da Vinci.’

Floyd held a cigarette in his left hand. With his right he lit a match against his teeth, poking it far back into his mouth and dragging it along the underside of his molars. A tussle of brightness inside his mouth then he held up a match in full flame. Nonchalantly, he lit his cigarette. That was Floyd announcing he was bored with Daisy. ‘Out of our hands anyway,’ he said. ‘The war will decide if we get to see any of these people again.’

‘Don’t talk that way.’

‘Where are we even going? Nobody knows. Officers don’t tell us.’

‘We’re going to fight, to land. We know that.’

‘Too busy eating that gourmet shit upstairs.’

‘Fuckin’ right.’

‘I’ve got to say I’m looking forward to some fighting. Get some fresh air at least.’

Fear thickened in the ship over the coming days. You could feel it. The men got angry, exercising furiously or stalled, torpid, their faces seizing up. After they were briefed about the operation they had at least a target to think about, an object in mind, procedures. But still in his dreams Ray flailed forwards on the training ground, sweat stinging his eyes and loosening his grip on his rifle. Impotent with his bayonet, he was unable to drive it into the dummy or scream his battle cry. Other indistinct men ran past him into the danger he wasn’t ready to meet.

Bad weather took hold of the ship two days before the landings. The men hung on as the dark interior sank suddenly sideways, rose, slid across, plunged. There were rumours of torpedoes but none came. Vomit rolled across the floors. There was a kind of mad festivity about it as they puked and shouted, kicked about inside a turbulence equal to their dread. Rain clattered onto the metal hull and decks. The engines churned. Men vocalised as they retched, barking, moaning, almost singing. George held onto his bunk. For comfort, Ray watched him. George’s eyes were closed. He seemed to be speaking a prayer. Dunphy, the big machine-gunner in Ray’s squad, fell badly and sat and cursed, holding his wrist. A few of the men had started cheering as the ship reached the summit of its tilt and fell down, like it was all a ride at Coney Island.

When the storm let go of them there was cleaning up to be done, heads to be cleared, as after a wild, violent party.

In the final hours before landing on the North African coast, the boys listened to their instructions again and again, readied their weapons and kit. They were consumed with practical thoughts, or at least attempted to be, thinking things through with a determined sanity: materialist, mechanical, rational, so clear and potent it was as dizzying as moonshine. Army sanity. This was how you did it. This was how you got through. Drills and procedures. There was an opportunity to automate yourself and just fit in. This was what Ray’s urge to hide counselled him — the hope that he could disappear into the military machine and present no individual target. Religion was there to cover the part of them that remained exposed. The padre said prayers. Ray looked at George, standing there, praying along. His ears looked small and serious. There was a Catholic priest as well for the boys who wanted him. Ray was not really a church guy. The priests back home were too friendly with the tough guys, both types parading around the neighbourhood in their fancy outfits, accepting the tributes of the people. But he went for a blessing anyway. His mother would want him to.

3

The waiting to land, like all the interminable waiting, felt like it would never end and then suddenly did. Ray found himself on deck loaded with his equipment waiting to climb down into a landing craft. In a grid all around him in the darkness the others were waiting to do the same. So many of them, Ray felt for the first time the pent-up strength of the force. They couldn’t lose. Men went over the side and everyone stepped forward. Then Ray went over the side, clambering down from square to warping square of netting. Beside him, a soldier Ray didn’t know mistimed the jump and fell between the troopship and the landing craft. His helmet struck the hull with a ringing sound and before he had time to cry out he was gone, disappeared into the black water, and didn’t resurface. A quiet, rapid, weird death — the first Ray witnessed — that no one had time to remark on. It made Ray pant with terror for a minute. This was it. This was battle. This was where men died.

Ray dropped into the craft as it was rising on a wave so that it caught the bottom of his feet and almost threw him. He stepped forward, gripped the handle where he stood. Beside him, Floyd whispered, ‘Let’s hope the Frenchies are sleeping.’

‘They’ll wake up.’

‘Look up at those.’

‘What?’ Ray glanced up: the huge side of the ship, the night sky. ‘What?’

‘Those stars. If I knew astrology then what could I know about what’s coming.’

‘We are.’

‘Maybe it’s all up there already.’

‘Shut the fuck up, you two.’ Another voice, tight with fear.

‘I agree with that guy,’ Ray said.

‘Okay, men.’ That was Sergeant Carlson, standing right behind Ray. ‘Settle down. God bless us and our victory.’

The craft surged forward. For the long ride of five miles to the port that was their target, Ray stood and thought and tried not to think. He noticed how strange it was that this was the same world, the same wind blowing against them, the same sea they were moving over, but now everything was different. All the rules were different. And that falling man — had that happened? Maybe he dreamed it. No dreaming. Look. Think forwards. Think weapons. This was a night-time attack, an attack on sleep. Only the sentries would be standing upright with their eyes open. Enemies. He had a picture in his head suddenly of his older brother with his friends from the corner, different when he was with his friends, hostile. At night Ray and Tony’s breath mingled in the small bed. During the day they separated. The look in his eye, hard and distant, when his kid brother walked by. That was the space you had to shoot across, corner to corner. Ray’s mind was too busy. He had his rifle in his hands. He gripped it, feeling the solidity, wood and metal, remembering the parts, the action. That was all he needed to know. Until they reached the target he should be empty like a movie camera pushing forwards into the world, seeing things. I’m in a war! he thought to himself. I’m in a movie!

Now out. Okay. Just the tiniest moment between knowing he had to get out and his muscles responding, a refusal he overcame. Ray was in the cold sea, taking long slow strides to get out of it, holding his rifle over his head. Then he was on the beach, lying down on the smooth sand. The fort was where it should be, up on the right, smaller than he had pictured it. The sentries weren’t firing. Ray wasn’t firing. Other soldiers started firing and the sentries responded, a put-put-put sound that didn’t seem to be hurting anyone. Soldiers were running up the steps, waving others after them. One of the sentries fell. Then the other stopped firing. Ray was running up the stone steps with the others into the fort where people were already corralled outside with their hands up. Flashlights showed their faces soft with sleep. Hearing American voices ahead, one soldier arrived up the steps shouting ‘Geronimo!’ There was laughter. Cigarettes were lit. Everyone was panting, airy with relief. Randall punched Ray on the arm.

‘I think I shot one of those guys.’

‘Well, it wasn’t me. How do you know, though? Lots of shots, Randall.’

‘Yeah, but the timing. When he fell. Think I got him right in the heart.’

‘I’m shaking. Are you shaking?’

‘Why the fuck would I be shaking?’

‘It’s the sea.’ George appeared. ‘We’re not on a boat any more. Feel how solid the ground is. It’s weird.’

‘That’s it,’ Ray said. ‘That must be why. I feel like I’m on waves.’

Sergeant Carlson collected his men together. His squad was one of three ordered to patrol the town and respond to any signs of resistance. A French soldier was issued to him to translate if necessary, a man now already civilian in his indifferent slouch and muttered opinions. Carlson, a head taller with white-gold hair that sparkled in the darkness, patted him on the shoulder with heavy, meaningful friendliness.

‘Tell him, if he tries anything …’ Floyd said.

‘He knows,’ Carlson said. ‘And don’t be talking about anything.’

They walked through old stone streets, alert for some danger from doorways or alleys but none came. Ray looked up at the ancient buildings of pitted stone. They walked across a deserted square, the sound of their boots echoing back from store fronts, the high façade of a great basilica.

Ray wanted to see it all but by the time the sun was up and the town was alive — Ray imagined shy, fascinated children, dark women — he and the others were in pup tents on the outskirts of the town waiting for tanks and vehicles to be landed before the army headed east. Ray stared across low, faded, biblical-looking hills and turned slowly round to the north, watching the town come into view and rocks, sea, sky. He wasn’t the first to hear the planes but as soon as someone did the reaction was general, people either staring or running. Up in the heights Ray saw glinting fuselages. A formation of small planes around a couple of bombers. As they approached, the Stukas — that was what they were — went into their dive like something sliding off a table, falling then powering down towards the town. They roared overhead. Their bay doors opened and elegant, pointed bombs dropped silently out, turning end over end. Ray fell onto his face in time to feel the first explosion buck through the ground. Then again and again, a fit, an attack. Any one of them could be the end of him, any second. He listened to the detonations and in the gaps between them felt a strange swimming uplift, himself exposed, expanding, until the next one fell. The earth beneath him was blackness, oblivion. He lay on the thin, bouncing surface waiting to die. A frantic, dry popping sound was small arms fire discharged at the sky. He should be doing that, he should be up on his feet. He pushed himself up onto his knees and went to the tent for his rifle, keeping low, running round-shouldered, shrinking from the sky. There was smoke rising from the town as German aircraft made snarling, curving runs and flew away. He wrestled his gun up to his shoulder, chose one plane and shot pointlessly at it. An artillery weapon, possibly in the fort, was being fired with effect: a fighter plane cartwheeled chaotically into the sea. A bomb landed close, less than a hundred yards away, a dark speeding freefalling object that vanished inside a blast that Ray felt against his face and hands. The power was tremendous. It could kill him so easily. Bullying, shaking, the biggest thing he’d ever felt and it was personal, it meant him, it wanted to kill him.

That was the last explosion. Aircraft engines droned into the distance. Gunfire thinned. Soldiers shouted at each other and vehicles raced. No one among the tents had been killed but in the town things were different. Someone said ‘bodies’. The word ‘bodies’ was repeated. Ray heard it. Bodies on the beach, apparently, and in the water. Smoke rose from one place in the town, thick and black, not like woodsmoke or cigarette smoke or anything but dense, full of matter, poisonous, chugging upwards.

Sergeant Carlson was right there, forming his men together. Floyd, Randall, George, Sorenson, Coyne, Dunphy, Wosniak, they were all there. Orders were to get the tents down and be ready to move out. Those not needed in town would be clearing the area. Either way, clear the camp. Carlson walked away to get further orders himself from higher up the chain.

Randall said, ‘Now I got good reason to kill some of them sons of bitches.’

‘Ready and willing,’ Floyd said. He spat hard, checked the backs of his hands a couple of times. ‘I wanna keep on invading. I wanna invade the hell out of those motherfuckers.’

George said, ‘Well, we have come all this way.’

Sorenson said, ‘Would you faggots actually shift and get this shit cleared up.’

‘Invasion time,’ Ray said, wanting to join in and convince himself. ‘You better believe it.’ And he did feel it inside, the havoc he wanted to wreak, maybe it was the fear thrashing away but it wanted out, it wanted action, even though the raid had left something in his mind he knew he wouldn’t get rid of. A small hard certainty was lodged in his brain that he’d just have to ignore. Ray knew that he wouldn’t live long. There was no way. Not against all that.

On the road into the desert, Ray knew his death had come. Planes tore down low over them and the whole column of men fell onto their faces, crawled under vehicles. Strafing fire chattered down, kicking up stones, whining off armour. Ray felt his back blown open in a ragged circle of heat. The planes angled up, turned, overflew again, firing, and flew away as guns chased them from the ground. Crying quietly, Ray felt for the wound. His fingers touched hot metal but it was loose. It was nothing, an empty shell case. He stood up, alive. Some other men weren’t. There was blood, stillness, twitching, moaning, running men. Wosniak was one of them, a red foam of blood around his mouth, eyes open and blank. Just let’s do it again. Another chance. Just go back a minute.

Artillery, guns bucking, jumping back, men feeding them, cringing away from the blast with hands to their ears, reloading, firing, volley after volley. The smell of it drifting back, the blasts felt in the soles of the men’s feet, the spasming light in darkness. And then, into the incoming fire, the tanks rolled forward with a high-pitched continuous mechanical noise. It was like the surface of another planet and a war between machines, like something from the alien adventure comics some of the boys had with them, death rays and strange technologies. Ray felt small, and human. A shell landed near, thumping some men to pieces, and his bowels opened warmly into his pants as the infantry squads jogged forward behind the tanks. Their task was to mop up, to catch any enemy fleeing their burning tanks or whatnot, when eventually they crossed their line. The squad jogged over the soft ground together, only eight of them now with no replacement yet for Wosniak. Sergeant Carlson set the pace. Dunphy bounced up and down with the big Browning at his hip. The tanks, whining, ground forwards, firing shells. It was like herding, Randall had said, pretending to be a cowboy. It was like. It was like. It was like nothing on earth.

One grey exhausted evening, George said to Ray, ‘You know what this is like?’

‘No.’

‘You ever look after a baby? Ever been out on the street with a stroller with a baby in it?’

‘I didn’t know you got kids.’

‘I don’t. My sister has a baby. You’re out there and this tiny thing is right there and you’re totally focused on it, totally preoccupied.’

‘I wanna eat something.’

‘So the whole world is a danger around you. Everything.’

‘I understand.’

‘Yeah, but it’s bigger than that, the feeling. I don’t know. The whole world and the little baby, little fingers, little eyes, you know?’

‘I think so, George. We should … I think we should find out if we can sleep.’

‘It’s everything. That’s what I’m saying.’

Mostly the infantry couldn’t do much, running among the machines. It kept them warm was one good thing. At night, cold space pressed down on them in the desert. The air was full of freezing stars. Heat came from the machines, from the fires, from their bodies. Ray ran past a burning tank once that pushed a furnace heat against him. It was hotter than a stove, so hot that red rivets were weeping out of the metal and sparks fizzed above the turret. Ray pictured white bones inside, luminescent, soldiers heated until they became ghosts. A good way to go, maybe. At least there’d be nothing left. They had passed tanks in the daytime that were loud with flies. They had passed bodies and parts of bodies. The artillery hacked into the distance. Tanks whirred forwards. They jogged after, looking for people loose on the other side. The landscape changed around them. Once they trotted through masses of paper that fluttered and blew around them, a silent storm. Some of the pages were scorched and black. They raced in spirals on the wind. They were letters. An enemy vehicle full of mail, presumably thinking the front line further forward, had been hit. It was a smoking hulk with exploded tyres, flapping shreds of canvas. The driver was still at the wheel, a harrowed figure of red and black. The way his teeth were exposed in his burned face made him look like a rat trying to gnaw at something. The squad was making good progress, covering ground. Ray was getting closer to his death.

4

Battle forms had broken up now. It was pure chasing at all hours. Through glassy morning air Ray and the boys set off in their quiet hunting party. Their uniforms were stiff with sweat and excrement but they’d been promised they were almost out of the desert and anyway they loosened as they moved. Ray felt thin and sinewy, light-headed, lucid, dumb. They were on some sort of rock shelf, the ground beneath them hard, rippled, glittering with tiny crystals. It lasted for hours. Ahead of them they could see mountains now, a greener world rearing up, toppling and fracturing in hard peaks and facets. Ray was looking up at them, dreaming them, when they were suddenly fired on from the right and all dived down. Dunphy let go with a wide swinging arc of automatic fire. Ray, ignoring the pain in his arms from throwing himself onto the rock, squirmed around to see what was what. Floyd was to his right and he was lying there moaning, in trouble, his legs obviously too relaxed like he couldn’t move them. Randall was crawling forwards as shots came chipping across. He pulled a grenade from his belt and threw it. Ray heard it skittering across the rock before it exploded.

‘Got ’em,’ Randall shouted. ‘They’re down in a hole.’

‘Floyd’s bad,’ George shouted.

Sergeant Carlson ordered them forwards. Ray had to get past Floyd who looked across at him with wild eyes. His head was jerking. ‘Please,’ he said.

Ray shot into the oncoming fire. Another grenade was thrown which disappeared down into the enemy hole and sent up handfuls of rock and gravel and maybe some human stuff. Afterwards, a strange sight — hands rising up out of the ground. Small and simple human hands wavered at the tops of arms, empty.

‘They’re surrendering,’ Ray said it to himself then shouted, his voice hoarse and cracking. ‘They’re surrendering!’

Sergeant Carlson shouted, ‘Stay careful! We don’t know. I’m … Randall!’

Randall was up on his feet walking towards the hands that were persisting in the air. He walked until he was standing over them. ‘They are!’ he shouted back. ‘Fuckers are just giving up.’

The others, all but Floyd, ran forward to see. There were four Germans standing in a cleft in the rock with three dead bodies at their feet. There must have been more of them to start with but in a part of the trench hit by a grenade it was hard to work out from the remains.

‘What do we do, sarge?’

Ray stared down at the shaven head of one of them, at the fingerprint pattern of growth visible in the little sparks of hair. The German looked back up at Ray. The whites of his eyes were red. There was a gum of white spit in the corners of his mouth that jerked as he babbled in German. Ray’s bayonet was swinging in front of them. One little stab.

A shot. Then another. Randall was shooting them, point-blank shots bursting down into them. He shot the one at Ray’s feet then Carlson grabbed Randall round the arms and fell with him to the ground. ‘For God’s sake, Randall.’

The last living German was shaking, dancing on the spot, his hands at either side of his head, fingers paralysed into claws. He was trying to lift his feet out of the wetness around him.

‘Ray, watch Randall,’ Carlson said. ‘No fucking choice now.’

Sergeant Carlson stepped forward and shot the last one.

From behind them George called out, ‘Floyd’s dead.’

5

What was he remembering? He had the picture in his mind but couldn’t locate it — paint running in a gutter, white paint very clean against the pasted greys of the street. Ray could only have been four or five. It was Mitchell’s. That was it. The storefront was being painted. Men were washing out the cans and emptying them into the drains. A smooth clean chemical smell. Looking up, a man in overalls smiling. Ray’s brain relaxed with pleasure as the memory came back whole. They were running past a burned-out fighter plane that had crashed onto its face, its tail in the air. Wosniak had been replaced now by a boy they called Red. Floyd had been replaced also: a boy called Alex who insisted on his own name. They called him Alice instead.

Almost there, almost into the colourful upheaval of the mountains. This might be it, the last day. They kept moving under Carlson’s command, his hair now white from the sun. Aircraft, their aircraft, growled overhead on raids. They saw men, prisoners, sitting on the ground with their hands in the air, weaponless, unburdened and exempt. Bodies they kept running past. Some were blackened and swollen, bursting their skin, others neat on a dry stain of red blood. Sometimes their clothes had been blown off and they were randomly naked from the waist down or across the back. Ray was still alive which didn’t make sense. Several times Stukas had spilled down towards them and let out their bombs and the earth had jumped, towering upward for a second, roaring. Men died all around him and he was fine. Once he felt himself inflating, growing larger and larger, filling the deadly space around him and still nothing, no bullet or bomb or shrapnel pierced him.

Such were his thoughts now, big and weird. His mind no longer raced as it had at first. Instead single images, memories, kept catching as in a malfunctioning projector, the actors slowing down nonsensically and stopping, the images blistering and burning through as his mind gave way to exhaustion.

And it was over. The tanks were leaguered. All the surviving soldiers were together. They dropped down to sleep on the ground without pitching tents. They woke up to find themselves in an actual place with facilities being built and a town nearby. Here they’d be rested, refreshed, let loose for a night before the next push.

6

After a shave, Ray’s cheeks felt numb and glassy under his fingertips. After a shower, blasted clean, he felt very small and bare. He looked down at his unhurt body, his white stomach shrunken hard around cubes of muscle, his meekly hanging genitals, his long thighs and bony feet. The only signs of war on him were a few notches in the skin of his hands and arms and the fact that he was slimmer, more sinewy, healthier. He dried himself fiercely, scrubbing at his surface with the thin army towel and dressed for town.

Soldiers in clean uniforms were everywhere. The streets thronged with them, their voices caught and echoing between stone walls. There were so many of them, all loudly alive. Ray looked around at them and saw repetition, like a natural phenomenon with lots of the same thing coming at once, like birds or rain. Around him George, Coyne and Randall were wearing the same uniforms, were talking in the same way, smiling and gesturing. It was a good thing to get lost in. It was safe. A prod in his back startled him. Beside him a small boy stood with cupped palms saying, ‘Joe, Joe, you have cigarette for me?’

‘Sure. Why not?’ Ray tapped one out of his pack and handed it over.

The boy took the gift without thanks and pocketed it, absorbing it quickly into his possession the way the ground absorbs water. ‘Joe, you want fuck?’

‘Not now, kid. Scram.’

‘Hey, you made a friend,’ George said.

‘Not really, I haven’t.’

‘Hey, mister, you want fuck?’

‘Now, son …’ George began and Randall interrupted.

‘Tell him we’ll see his sister later. Right now we want drink.’

The boy circled around them as they walked until Coyne shoved him with his boot. After that he moved on to another group ahead of them, catching the hand of a Negro soldier and examining it.

It seemed there was a bar ahead but already it was too full with a great still crowd formed around it. They couldn’t get close so turned to try another direction. On the top of a wall, looking down at him, Ray noticed a cat. Its large eyes catching the sun were lit a startling green. Its striped velvet face, with wide whiskers and pink fastidious nose, rested just above its forepaws. It shifted as they strode past, holding Ray’s gaze, its shoulder blades undulating under its loose skin. Just a cat living its cat’s life in silence, half out of sight, doing its thing. Ray felt his throat tighten against the threat of tears.

‘Here’s a place,’ Coyne announced.

Excepting one occasion as a child when he and his brother had got sick on their father’s grappa, Ray had never really drunk. A little red wine at weddings and that was that. But tonight he would drink as a man and as a soldier, battle-hardened and deserving.

With the first glass they toasted victory, then Wosniak and Floyd, and after that to dispel the quickly enclosing gloom George offered ‘Wild nights!’ The wine was cool with a pleasant innocuous fruit flavour. Ray knocked it back as he would any other drink to quench the thirst he now noticed he had. As the wine washed through him, he felt a fibrous stiffness in his face and scalp start to loosen. The tension in his body drifted outside of him as he drank, surrounding him, buzzing pleasantly. Later glasses of wine tasted less and less wholesome, growing acrid with the residue each one left in his throat and the many cigarettes Ray smoked.

With a soft steady fire the sun set along the narrow street, enriching the texture of the bricks, lighting the men, their blue smoke, the red wine, glasses sparkling, everything haloed. Ray was on a chair now, leaning back on its rear legs with his head resting on the rough wall.

‘Would you look at that,’ he said.

George answered. ‘At what?’

‘Just look at it all. At the look of it.’

‘Oh, indeed.’ From his nostrils, George exhaled smoke down around his collar.

‘Man, if I had a camera, a movie camera …’

‘Or you could draw a picture.’

‘You know how sometimes in a movie you can really see what the air’s like, like it’s soft or how much breeze there is? Right now would be perfect for that.’

You wanna get into the movie business?’

‘Sure.’ Ray swigged from his glass. ‘But whoever heard of a person …’

‘Seems all I ever hear about is people. People in Hollywood gotta come from someplace. I can see it now.’ George shaped a banner across the air in front of him. ‘Decorated military hero and movie director …’

‘Hey, what the fuck. Why’s Randall always gotta be making trouble? Christ.’

Coming towards them held under the arm of another man, Randall’s head was a strangled bloody red with thick veins in his brow and temples. Rocking and heaving, reaching up, Randall was trying to throw him.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen.’ George stood with his hands a loud hailer at the sides of his mouth. ‘Save it for Fritz and the Eyeties.’

In the darkness Ray said, ‘Sun’s down.’

‘Planet’s turned,’ George said.

‘Big light gone,’ Coyne said. ‘Big light in hole.’ They were very much drunk now, all four of them. Coyne had in his hand a bottle of wine he’d swiped from a table. He blew across the top of it. ‘Listen up, men,’ he said. ‘And listen good. Good men.’ He swayed. ‘That’s what you are.’ He jerked to his full height, wine sloshing in the bottle. ‘To fallen fucking heroes!’

‘To fallen heroes!’

The bottle was passed around. It kept arriving in Ray’s hand after new toasts were made, grand, sentimental, patriotic toasts. A part of Ray cringed from them and didn’t want to have to say them with the others. He couldn’t have said what but there was something in them defiling of his feelings. At the same time, he couldn’t stop; another part of Ray did want to roar them out with the others and he did so, although each time he registered inside a small violation of his soul.

Randall was spanking his own forehead incredibly hard. ‘Dang,’ he said. ‘Dang.’ He stopped hitting himself. ‘Y’all know what? Battle, fellers, you know. True as Christ Jesus, I used to be dirty, all dirty and torn up. Clean now. Clean ole motherfucker. Fire. Fire coming at you, all around.’ He laughed. ‘It’s a job is what it is. I needed a job and I sure as shit got one now. It’s a thing you gotta do. I’m doing it.’

‘That’s nice,’ Coyne said. ‘I like listening to your pretty talk but really I’d like to fuck a lady.’

Randall reared up, eyes wide. ‘That’s a good idea. We should get one of them kids running around selling the whores. Gotta take your chances when fortune presents itself.’

‘What do you say, George?’ Coyne asked. Ray looked up, waiting for George’s answer.

‘I think it’s what you fellows need.’

‘Why not?’ Ray said. ‘Why not? Could be dying tomorrow.’

A boy was easy to find. Puffing on a cigarette Randall gave him, the kid led them through alleyways on a winding journey that filled Ray with dread. A virgin, Ray had once been permitted to squeeze the breast of a cousin called Rosa, under the blouse but on top of a stout brassiere. That was about the extent of his experience with women. What he knew of the rest was hard to fit together. There was the dirty, mechanical, implausible and disgusting talk of his brother and friends, and in movies the disembodying swerve of a camera away from a kissing couple up into the sky or to a scene of playing fountains. Well, he would know soon enough. They were through a door, handing over money, walking upstairs as other soldiers walked down.

While Coyne and Randall chattered, George was quiet. Ray wondered if he was disgusted and wouldn’t take part but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Frowning, as if at a bad headache, George entered the whore’s room before Ray and the others, even despite Randall’s obscene objections. He emerged ten minutes later drying his forehead with his handkerchief, making Ray wonder what on earth went on in there. ‘She’s a good girl,’ George said, taking out and lighting a cigarette. ‘Don’t you all be scared now. And act like the gentlemen you aren’t.’

Ray was scared. The fear had drained the swagger and abandon out of him and left him with an unwieldy, unwanted drunkenness that he felt trapped inside. Too soon it was his turn inside the room. He entered, struggled to fix his eyes on the girl and to take in the dim surroundings. The girl was small, plump, tired, with loose black hair, lipstick, tin rings on her short fingers. She wore two large pieces of black underwear that she must have replaced between each visitor. There was a basin where she rinsed herself. A large crack forked across the wall over the plain crumpled bed where she had laid some sort of towel or protective cloth to keep the sheets clean. On the wall above the bedstead, Ray saw that she had tacked a picture postcard of some mountains with snow on them.

She looked at Ray standing there. She nodded at him, her mouth hanging open, and reached behind her back to unfasten her brassiere. ‘Yes, Joe,’ she said. ‘Happy time now.’ The garment loosened and slid from her shoulders, revealing two large, soft, unevenly sized breasts that ended with startling nipples of dark brown. Their haloes were textured with little bumps. The bits that stuck out were dented in the middle. Ray stared at them, grimacing. Significant, female nipples. So many facts in the world, so much he didn’t know. Briefly, he thought of the Germans in the trench wilting down into their own blood, the people emptying out of the bodies. The prostitute came forward, seeing him stuck there, and kept coming until the weight of her was pressed against him, her breasts shaping like dough against his chest, her smell floating up and enclosing him. She reached down and undid his belt, opened him up and put her bare hand directly on the nerves of his penis. Ray shivered. He took hold of one of her breasts and tried to kiss her on the side of her forehead as she pulled at him, pulling him out from his centre, unravelling him. Then abruptly she stopped, walked over to the bed, pulled down her drawers and lay down. Ray looked at her, at the breasts spilling off her chest, then he glanced down between her parted legs but was frightened by the dark, split, complicated shape inside a messy tuft of black hair — it had an awful kind of leer to it — and he jerked his gaze away. He decided to close his eyes, to go by sensations. Carefully, he climbed on top of her with his pants round his knees and she touched him again, arranging him in position to push which he did and found he could push still further and then his penis was inside her body, was covered with her, gripped all around. He pushed again, testing. It was fine. She didn’t seem to mind. This was it. This was doing it. He kept pushing and looked down at her face, staring at her dark eyes until he noticed that she was looking back at him. He saw her looking out from inside herself. For a moment they saw each other then Ray hid his face in the damp hair around her neck. He decided not to be ashamed and to try and screw her like a man, to go at it with vigour, but almost as soon as he started he was helpless and it was over. He lay on top of her twitching. She patted his back like he was a little boy. ‘Good Joe,’ she said. ‘Good soldier.’ She squirmed and he slid out and got to his feet, buckling his pants. As he collected himself, wiping the sweat from his face, and walked to the door, he could hear her splashing water up inside herself to wash him out. He glanced back to see her at it, her jaw set, concentrating, a woman at a task. It might’ve been laundry or scrubbing a stove.

After that, what was there to do but drink more? The boys found more wine and then a bottle of some kind of spirit. Ray drank and shouted until he was sick, leaning his forearms against a wall as he retched again and again, exhausting heaves that lifted one foot off the ground, a burning rope slowly hauled out of his guts and leaving him clean and empty, his face wet with saliva and tears.

7

Ray sat staring at the table top, sipping coffee with sugar, remembering snatches of the ghost train ride of the night before. He didn’t know what to make of it all. It was just more, more stuff, more of all of this. He’d fucked a girl; that was a fact. That had happened. Now he knew that at least he wouldn’t die a virgin.

Mail arrived. For Ray there was the moral prod of a parcel from home. Inside was a letter, a bit of an envelope with a Cuban stamp on it and a movie fan magazine called Screenland. The letter was really a short note written by his father entirely in capital letters. It didn’t have much to say. YOUR MA SHE’S WORRIED SICK AND MISERABLE EVERY NIGHT I TELL HER HER SONS A HERO SHE SHOULD BE PROUD. There was news about a dying uncle Luigi (still alive) and he explained about getting the stamp from a neighbour with a cousin in Cuba. Ray’s father was under the impression that Ray collected stamps. This wasn’t true. He had collected them, half-heartedly, for about six months when it seemed that everybody was. Ray’s father must have noticed at the time and this was now a thing he remembered about his son who was away fighting in the war. Ray looked closely at the stamp, its image formed from delicate lines of ink finer than hairs. It showed a woman in flowing clothes holding a baby aloft in front of a double cross. ‘Republica de Cuba’ was printed across the bottom. Beneath the stamp was the carefully torn square of envelope. His father’s fingers had done that. The stamp had travelled the unimaginable distance from home. Ray felt the reality of that suddenly. Somehow, it was like the moment of seeing the prostitute inside her eyes looking out at him. He blushed, heat curdling in his face, and picked up the magazine.

Keep ’Em Smiling! Bob Hope Tells How. Coyne read it aloud over his shoulder and commented, ‘Looks like Claire Trevor’s got some better ideas.’ The actress was pictured on the cover with her neat small breasts snugly defined by a winter jersey. Standing by a white fence with blue sky behind her, she smiled encouragingly at the reader. ‘And would you look at that,’ Coyne went on. ‘Gene Tierney’s Honeymoon Home! Scoop photos! Ain’t that a thrill. I didn’t know you were into these sissy mags, Marfione.’

‘I don’t read ’em.’

‘Evidence is stacking up the other way.’

‘I don’t. My folks know I like movies is all.’

‘Movies and sweet, sweet American titties.’

Later, George saw Ray with the magazine and said, ‘Planning your future.’

‘What?’

‘The movies. Last night we were talking and you were talking about movies. You had a whole theory going about how movies should look more like photos in newspapers. And that thing about the air. Remember?’

‘Drunk is what I was.’

‘Made sense to me. What else are you gonna do when you get back?’

‘Come on.’

‘I’m serious.’

Ray didn’t know what to say. Those words and ideas coming out of another person, coming out of George, made them seem real, seem possible. Ray’s scenarios, the boxer and the lovers unfolded afresh in his imagination, full of light and life.

8

Ray looked out through the back of the truck at the cold white rain, the road shining into mud and the snarling face of the truck behind. They were in foothills on an uncomfortable twisting drive. Either side there was forest, dark and inward, loud under the rain. Actually, through the gasoline and wet uniforms the world smelled good. The main thing was not to jump out of the truck, not to try and escape into the woods. Ray concentrated on not moving and allowing himself to be safely carried to his death. Thoughts kept coming to him, convulsions of his mind that showed bodies, explosions, Wosniak and Floyd ripped and dead, their eyes empty.

They shouldn’t have had that time off. It made it so much harder to go back to running and killing, to a world of possible annihilation from three hundred and sixty degrees at any split second in time. Strangely, one of the hardest things was pulling the trigger, to open fire. Ray had only ever had to do it at a distance, his bullets flicking forwards into so much empty space it seemed they could only land harmlessly. Not like Randall and Carlson who had fired point blank through hair, skin, bone and blood, men swaying and falling, no longer men. ‘Point Blank Range’ was maybe a good name for a movie. Ray would hesitate at such a moment and maybe that is what would kill him, soon, up there in the mountains. He smiled to himself. Going up into the mountains to die.

That night, before the dawn attack, under a tarp drumming with the rain, George spoke seriously to Ray. They were standing together. Ray could tell from the way they were breathing and not saying anything that they were both thinking about the fighting to come and how things had been in the desert. He could tell because there wasn’t much else they could be thinking about. When he said slowly to himself, ‘Yep, yep,’ George answered, ‘Oh, yes, indeed.’

Ray went on. ‘Hell of a …’

‘Sure was.’

‘I’m pleased that part’s over.’

‘Oh, it’s over. Came and went.’

‘Came and fucking went. Boom.’

‘I’ve been thinking, though.’

‘Not sure you ought to be doing that,’ Ray said.

‘Things got awful clear for a while out there. Couldn’t help it, I suppose. I’m going to tell you, Ray.’

‘What?’

George pressed his palm against his forehead then looked at it. ‘It’s about the fighting.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m thinking if it’s a straight out question of you against another man.’

‘Yes?’

‘Then you shouldn’t do it. You should let yourself be killed. I mean me. I don’t want to kill the other guy.’

‘Holy crap, George. Don’t fucking say that. In a fucking war?’

‘You can shoot, I’m not saying that, only above them or to the side. Take them prisoner. But I don’t want to shoot the man. It’s not right. Like I said, it came clear.’

‘George, you son of a bitch, don’t say this. What do you think that does to your chances?’

‘Really? Ray, statistically what do you think it does to your chances, killing or not killing? Do you think it makes a blind bit of difference? And anyway, chances, fuck ’em. You can’t steer by chances.’

‘George, come on,’ Ray pleaded. ‘I think you should change your mind. We’ll be out there in a couple hours.’

‘Change it. Just throw a switch and change it. I can’t.’

‘Goddammit George, I don’t want you …’

‘I know, I know. But what are we gonna do?’

9

The gull lifted its wings, leaned into the wind and floated up from the harbour wall.

Will watched it adjust its angles and move, sliding away, rising up and backwards on a gust. With its pale, shallow eyes, its long yellow bill switching from side to side, it scanned the scene. Its breast feathers flickered as it hung there, thinking, then it planed down, raced low over the water, circled around and settled back on the wall, folding its grey wings away. It tilted its head back and called at nothing.

For Will it was painful to find himself so engrossed, registering this bird’s flight as an event in his day. Boredom this profound was painful. Standing there on guard for long hours of empty daylight made his chest tight, his hands feel weak.

The sea shifted quietly inside the square arms of the harbour wall, restless colour inside a shape. Changing clouds and birds.

The perimeters had to be secure. When cargo came in, as it did every so often, Will or one of the other Field Security men would give it the once over and then try to prevent any of it from being stolen. It was with this task that Will was coming to understand something of the large, rambling incompetence of the war effort. Frequently it was misdirected cargo that arrived. He had checked in a shipload of desert fighting equipment that had arrived from a port in North Africa, sent away for no apparent reason from precisely the place where it would have been of use. Theft was impossible to stop. Moving equipment and supplies was evidently like carrying water in your cupped palms. Several times in one of the town’s dismal pubs, Will had been offered tinned foods that he had checked off earlier that day and which were addressed to foreign theatres of operation.

A kind of low comedy seemed to have taken hold of the town. Petty crime, overworked prostitutes, talkative invalids, suspect fishermen, vain girls. Some Americans were stationed there and the local women had been surfeited with attention. As far as Will could see it had made them all prone to overestimate their own charms, vulgarly capricious and avid for gifts. The girl who enlivened Will’s imagination was not to be found among them. She was dark, different, intelligent, aloof. Will pictured a sharp refinement to her beauty: aquiline, subtly expressive, almost like speech; it spoke to him. She would have little time for the common run of people but she would notice him, she would recognise him, his complexity and command. She would be passionate. Perhaps she was the daughter of a vicar or a medical man. She read into the night and walked along the coastline. She was nothing like the laughing dollies of the pubs, smelling of face powder and cigarettes and beer.

Sergeant Major Henderson wasn’t interested in these women either. He was a practical man and preferred the prostitutes. The other night he had received the men in his room, stripped from the waist down, sitting open-legged in front of the fire, a razor rasping through his pubic hair as he shaved it off. ‘For the avoidance of crabs,’ he informed them. ‘I suggest you strip your area as well. Don’t give ’em anything to hold onto.’ His legs were large and white as wax. Between his feet dropped dry curls of coppery hair. He had similarly forthright advice about dealing with civilians and fellow soldiers. ‘You’ll want to get off on a good footing. I find it helps give the idea if you refer to them as “You fuckers”.’

Will nodded. That was what a sergeant major was for: to inculcate the coarseness and expeditious brutality of military manners. Not that Sergeant Major Henderson would have thought in those terms. He simply was brutal and coarse. His shaving left him with scalded pink genitals, nude and obscene. He tried to look away while Henderson stood up swinging to pull on his underpants. At this point Captain Draycott entered and froze, blinking, trying to work out what he had walked into. Henderson calmly buckled his trousers. ‘Lessons in hygiene, sir,’ he said.

Captain Draycott was a very different man, a DPhil in Icelandic Literature from a military family but a man who wouldn’t have entered the army if it hadn’t been for the war. He was gifted with a natural physical prowess that was apparently accidental. He rowed and played handball. With his eyes of clear, rinsed blue, he was obvious leadership material. His eyes weren’t piercing, however, but sensitive, vulnerable. Confronted with the gross, obtuse, often perverse demands of the army, he would halt, blink, and look around as though to catch the attention of someone reasonable who could never be found. Will would certainly have made a better captain than Draycott. Perhaps one day, war being what it is, he would get his chance.

The wind had strengthened, cuffing the water into little waves that raced endlessly into the harbour wall. The gull had been joined by two others. They circled in the air and settled, bowing and calling.

‘Afternoon, squire.’ Travis, come to relieve him. ‘Anything of note? U-boats among the mackerel fleet?’

‘No activity of any kind. Shit all, as Henderson would say.’

‘Smoke?’

‘Abso-bloody-lutely.’

Travis tapped a couple of cigarettes from his pack and flipped open his lighter. Will lit his from the ragged, blustery flame. Travis snapped the lighter shut. He smiled, tilting upwards the cigarette between his lips.

‘Least we’re not in any bother,’ he said.

‘True enough. I detect no immediate peril.’

‘That’s right. And you get to keep all your limbs that way. No sliding about outside Woolworth’s on a wooden tray begging with a tin cup.’

‘Can’t argue with that. You can just stand here and enjoy the view.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And we’ll all die as old men in our beds with nothing on our minds.’

‘Sounds ideal.’

Back in the hut, Will found Samuels reading a magazine, head bent, a cigarette held at his temple, exhaling smoke onto the opened pages. ‘Afternoon,’ he said without looking up. ‘Enjoy the ozone?’

‘Bored. Bored. Bored. Bored. Bored. Couldn’t find a book to read?’

‘My apologies, professor.’ Samuels imitated Travis’s voice: ‘But we’re all safe and sound, ain’t we?’

‘I know. Awfully cheering, isn’t it.’

Samuels turned a page cleanly, slowly, with his skilled fingers. A Jew, Samuels’ father was the proprietor of a wireless shop in London and the young Raphael — who liked to be called ‘Rafe’ in the English manner; Will called him Samuels — had grown up fiddling with valves and wires. He loved the machines and the broadcasts and could be quite poetic on the subject, talking of the invisible radio waves that surrounded them all, beamed through the air and separated into electrical impulses by these beautiful machines. Will suspected that all Samuels knew, admittedly quite a lot, he had gleaned from his listening rather than reading or a real education. An automatic, fastidious recoil from Samuels sometimes occurred in Will. He wanted to distinguish between them. They were not the same thing, not to be confused, even if they shared a stature, an eye colour and a rank in this unsatisfactory unit.

Will sat down and looked at the bustling clouds. The bright window pane shook.

‘I want to do something,’ he said.

‘I know you do. But this won’t last for ever,’ Samuels said. ‘It can’t, can it? Nothing does.’

Will lit one of his own cigarettes, dragging the match aflame with a slow, vindictive scrape. The hut hummed in the wind.

For the next three days nothing happened except the theft from a vessel of a couple of crates of prosthetic limbs. There were jokes about that — checking the town for men with three legs, and so on — but Will didn’t find them amusing. Standing in the hold inspecting an open crate full of arms had given Will a very unpleasant feeling. It was one sudden thought, that those unnatural smooth forms, parodies of human flesh, actually embodied real pain in real men, men with their limbs blown off, or — even more powerful to realise — men whose limbs hadn’t yet been blown off but would be, any moment, possibly that very moment. It was the way the boat rocked as he stood in it. It was all mixed up with Lucretius and the swerving atoms that make up the world and its events and it all came home to him. He was enclosed in the thought as in a dream. The war was very large and complicated and, in some important ways, wrong. The scale of it was disclosed by this one tiny detail, this one negligible fragment of the chaos. The prosthetic limbs lay in the open crate in front of him like bits of outsized dolls, marionettes, things for the theatre. Thoughts thronged in his mind with such force they almost unbalanced him. He said nothing. He told the man he could close the case again. Outside, in the sea air, he breathed and felt better.

That night Captain Draycott gave them the news. They were off. Finally, a proper posting — to liberated North Africa.

10

Two nauseous weeks on board ship, more digression and delay. But beneath the leaden hours, Will could feel, flashing, impatient, the bright incipience of adventure, of the action he was sailing towards.

The first view of the town showed a delicate white human construction set above the sea, very intricate and appealing after the monotonous, elemental voyage. The soldiers disembarked, were processed and billeted and walked through a pretty Islamic place of domes and minarets and blue shadows across whitewashed walls. There were shell holes and craters, pockmarks of bullets in plaster. A late-flowering plant grew everywhere, in gardens and high places, hung with spidery red blossoms. Frenchmen in white suits and straw hats observed the troops with an effortful nonchalance. Will smiled at one, was scowled at. They seemed without gratitude or energy. A strange atmosphere. Lassitude and recent death. The Arab children were more alive, smiling, running up, running away. Will tried an Arabic phrase on one little girl. She caught her sudden laugh in a cupped hand, stopped still and stared as he walked on with the others.

The Field Security unit were given a fine seaside mansion to inhabit. They weren’t told who had been there before. It was simply now theirs, capacious and comfortable with a steep stony garden, grand vistas of the sea and an ideal policeman’s view of the town below to the right. The first sensation was of trespass. The tiled floors gave a clipped response, the high ceilings seemed to know something. It took the men’s loud appropriation, curses, thrown kitbags and slammed doors, to take possession of the place. They discovered a dining room with a long walnut table and mirrors, several bathrooms with baths on clawed feet, canopied beds and simple servants’ beds.

Will and a few others were sent back to the waterfront to collect motorbikes. They returned roaring up the coast after a couple of hours to learn that Draycott had found them a cook. That evening they sat around the long table and ate a meal that would have seemed a hallucination back home: fresh meat, wine from small tulip-shaped glasses, fruits — nectarines and peaches — and soft cheese. The fruit was so colourful, like a platter of tiny Chinese lanterns glowing golden and rose, and so full of juice and flavour. They sucked and gasped.

‘We’re being seduced,’ Will said. ‘They’re trying to soften us up.’

‘That comes later,’ Travis said. ‘With the dusky maidens.’

‘Not tonight it doesn’t, I’m afraid, chaps,’ Draycott said. ‘Meeting in the town hall. Everyone’s got to be there. Laying down the law sort of affair. Apparently I’ve got to make a speech.’

The town hall was filled with voices and different uniforms. With sidelong glances the defeated French assessed the free French, the town’s police, the military police, the Senegalese soldiers, the Arabs, the stiff Englishmen, New Zealanders and Indians. It soon settled into a dullness, however, as speech after tedious speech was made. Captain Draycott had the pleasure of informing the assembly that Field Security now represented the highest civil authority in the city. Whether this was understood was hard to determine although it seemed unlikely. To overcome the language barrier, Captain Draycott had decided to address the audience in carefully correct schoolboy Latin. Will looked around at the various bored, attentive or murmuring faces. He thought that they weren’t really there to find out how the town would be run. They were there to show themselves, to see the others and draw their own conclusions. Later, outside, they would find out the rest.

11

Despite Draycott’s Latin, enough of what he’d said had been understood for the Field Security office to be immediately busy with visitors. The first to arrive was a small man with short, dense, dark hair, as smooth as velvet, rippling twice over rolls of flesh at the top of his nape. He held a leather portfolio with both hands and spoke rapid French from a puckering mouth. With none of the French speakers in the office, it fell to Will to try to determine the reason for his presence. Possibly Will would have understood the man if he’d been able to slow the tempo of his speech but each time Will tried to staunch the flow of words with outspread hands the man fell silent, watched, and then started again with the same incomprehensible gabble. He ended by pointing at himself with his thumb and nodding with great sincerity, drawing up his shoulders, the pantomime of a dignified man denying some affront.

‘I didn’t understand a word of that,’ Will said loudly. ‘You’ll have to wait.’

The man raised questioning eyebrows.

‘Sit,’ Will said and pointed to a chair. The man understood. He sat down, arranging his portfolio square across his lap.

Will returned to unloading into cabinets the prefabricated filing system.

The next visitor was a Monsieur Girardot, tall, with a kindly, vicarish stoop to his shoulders and fingers dappled yellow with nicotine stains. He spoke excellent English and explained that he was a landowner in a small way.

‘I hope that what I say to you now,’ he went on, ‘will be treated as a matter of confidence.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Because you see, I want to tell you what it is here. There are not many people for you to trust in this town. The truth is that everybody, ev-er-y-bo-dy, in this town is pro-Vichy. Of course they don’t say this to you now because you are here and you have the guns. Fine. So, I can give you details of the people to watch, for reasons of security. I can give you evidence of every person of substance, including, I am ashamed to say, my own brother Guillaume Girardot, being in league with the enemy.’

‘Can you?’

‘I am afraid so.’

‘I think perhaps I ought to introduce you to my superior, Captain Draycott. I’m sure he’d be very interested in what you have to say. Follow me.’

Will led M. Girardot — who was expressing his pleasure at the moral superiority of the English — down the corridor to Draycott’s room. He knocked, heard ‘come’, and entered.

‘Captain, this is M. Girardot. He is sympathetic to our cause and has some very interesting information about the local inhabitants.’

An hour later, Will heard Draycott ushering Girardot out of the building. Will went out to see Draycott, his face hanging heavily with relief, returning up the stairs. He caught sight of Will and tutted. ‘Why on earth did you send that awful man in to see me? He sat down without asking and betrayed pretty much everyone he knew, immediately, incontinently, including close family.’

I’m sorry, sir. I thought he might have some useful information. Sir, I’ve just had a thought. Will you excuse me a moment? He can be of use.’ Will dashed out past Draycott and called out after M. Girardot, still just within sight, about to turn a corner between crumbling white buildings. Will beckoned him back.

‘Thank you. I wonder, could you possibly translate for us what this chap’s trying to say.’

‘Of course I will help you.’

Shown the small man with the portfolio, M. Girardot said, ‘But I know him.’ The two men chatted in French for a moment. Girardot turned and said, ‘This is Monsieur Dusapin. He has been trying to explain to you that he is an executioner. He built his own guillotine so it is his property. He can work for you, it’s not a problem. He has photographs with him of his work he can show to you.’

‘He has photographs?’

‘Yes, he has.’

Hearing the word ‘photographs’, M. Dusapin began fiddling at the strings of his portfolio. ‘Tell him to stop,’ Will said. ‘Tell him I don’t want to see his disgusting photographs. Tell him we won’t be needing his services. There are thousands of our soldiers in the vicinity. A firing squad won’t be hard to find. There’s no need for us to recreate the terror of the French Revolution.’

Girardot, with a pained expression, translated. Dusapin began objecting. Head tilted to one side, looking at Will, Girardot listened and conveyed the executioner’s meaning to Will.

Will stopped him. ‘I’ve said we don’t want him. It’s time for him to leave.’

When they’d gone, Will plucked at his uniform, pulling it straight. Nausea surged with the anger that rose in him. Obscene, that executioner — soft, ingratiating, ambitious, argumentative, delicate. The rich hair on his head was somehow particularly sickening. Deeply, sinisterly French. He was precisely why the French should not have an empire. They weren’t clean and decent. Their order was that of a petty, sordid regime.

Will’s opinion of the French was reinforced rather than challenged by each of the colonials he encountered in the town. With little to occupy them, they drank too much, fornicated in shuttered rooms and paid frequent visits to the office to denounce each other as traitors. They drank so much that occasionally one of them would fall from a bar stool and die on the floor. Draycott mentioned a couple of distressing recent incidences of this happening in a morning meeting and Samuels raised his hand to say, ‘It’s the anisette, sir. It’s not safe.’

Will and Samuels had gone to a bar together one evening. Will requested beers. While they were served, Samuels watched the preparation of a drink for their neighbour at the bar. A glass of clear spirit was handed to a customer who added a dash of water, turning the whole concoction cloudy white. The man noticed Samuels looking at him and said, ‘Anisette. You like to try? Very strong. Is good.’ He took the cigarette holder from between his teeth and knocked back the drink, closing his eyes, leaning forwards, tucking in his chin and shuddering. He reopened watery eyes and laughed. ‘Yes, yes, two for you, for victory heroes.’

‘That’s kind,’ Samuels replied. ‘I’m not sure …’

‘But why not?’ Will said, always alert to detect any hint of unmanliness in Samuels, with the urge to punish any that appeared. Will said to the Frenchman, ‘That’s good of you. For victory heroes.’ To Samuels he went on, ‘What are you scared of?’

‘Nothing. I …’

‘Might as well try it. New experiences and all that. See the world. Worried it’ll be too strong for your delicate constitution?’

‘No. It’s not that. I …’

‘So there we are, then.’

The Frenchman was already conferring with the barman. It seemed that some discussion was necessary, some persuasion. Finally, the barman shrugged his shoulders and reached for an unmarked bottle.

‘He is not certain for you,’ the Frenchman laughed. ‘In Vichy time, it was not legal. Now it comes back to legal. But only the pharmacist makes it. Very very strong alcohol.’

Two small glasses were set before Will and Samuels. They added water and observed the colour change like schoolboys in a chemistry lesson.

‘Right,’ Will said. ‘On one.’

‘It smells like pure ethanol with a dash of aniseed twists.’

‘On one. One.’

The drink fell in clouds of flame into Will’s chest. ‘Haaa.’

‘There goes my tongue,’ Samuels croaked.

‘That’s awful.’

‘The second one is always better,’ the Frenchman said, laughing. ‘You will see.’ He ordered two more.

Later, the Frenchman was telling something deeply secret into Will’s ear, his breath hot, his lips wet and explosive. It was something about a particular woman’s vagina, someone’s wife. Will couldn’t really follow. Something to do with the vagina and a kind of fruit. Outside the bar, the Frenchman called over an Arab boy and reached into a pocket musical with loose change. ‘Look at this,’ he said to Will. When the boy was close, the man jerked up one leg and stamped as hard as he could onto the boy’s bare toes. The boy squeaked and fell over holding his foot.

‘Did you see what that fucker did?’ Samuels spiralled into Will’s vision. ‘I’m going to stamp on his fucking toes.’ Samuels staggered towards the man and tried to do the same but missed, banging his own foot on the pavement. ‘I missed.’

‘Why?’ the Frenchman protested, looking hurt. ‘It is normal. It is good for them.’

‘Try again,’ Will instructed. Samuels did but the man backed away as he approached and then turned and kept walking.

Will remembered hurtling home on his motorbike after that, zooming up the slope to the villa and arriving suddenly stock still beside the machine with the engine running. He made himself vomit into the elegant floral lavatory of the villa and went to bed.

The following morning, when called into Draycott’s office, Will’s head felt both hollow and filled with pain. Light drilled into him. He squinted as he saluted and sat carefully on the chair Draycott indicated. Draycott had good news. As an Arabic speaker, Will’s new job was to compile a report on local attitudes to the Allies. Get out of town on a motorcycle and see what he could find out. Talk to the tribal bigwigs. Will watched with increasing interest as Draycott’s fingers swirled over a very sizeable area of the map.

‘All of that?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long?’

‘However long it takes, I suppose. Not too long. If we need you for anything we’ll let you know.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Will stood up and saluted again, suddenly cleared of pain by a rush of real happiness.

12

Frightened by the noise of Will’s motorcycle, a deer flew up the mountainside. He watched it go, the pulsing of its strong body, its delicate legs flung out, gathered under. Will shut off the engine and stood on the balls of his feet, the bike balanced beneath him. The winter’s day was as clear as spring water. In the forests of cork oak on either side, every tree was distinct, clarified. He could see the texture of the bark, the shivering leaves, insects twirling in shafts of sunlight. Above, a raptor glided along the valley’s channel of sky. Will tipped his head back and breathed in through his nostrils. Fresh cold air, wood-scented, tainted with the faint reek of petrol and hot metal. He was further inland than any of the Allies had yet reached, out on his own, the first. As he drove between fields, startled women had turned their backs on him, hiding their unveiled faces. The stillness in the forest was wonderful. It reminded him of being home in the wood by the river. Peace settled gently over his shoulders like a shawl. He allowed himself a moment more then kicked the motorcycle alive. There was somewhere he had to get to. The bike rattled and shook, firing up. The Norton was not a powerful machine but it was dogged up the inclines, chugging away. Will was getting to like its dumb, stubborn character as he would a horse.

Standing in the sleepy Esso station, petrol splashing into the hot empty tank of the Norton, it occurred to Will that the open lorry he’d just seen driving away with barrels roped to its back was probably delivering stolen fuel. Petrol was going missing in large quantities from the Allied shipments, soaking quickly out of sight. Of course that was what he’d just seen happen but he hadn’t realised it at the time because he lacked the nasty immediate suspiciousness of a policeman. He hadn’t thought of it until it was too late. He wouldn’t go after the truck now. He didn’t have time and, anyway, if it was delivering there’d be no evidence. He had better things to do, an appointment to keep.

In the next valley, Will terrified a man walking with a few goats by riding at him, even as he tried to get out of the way, stopping and shouting the tribal leader’s name into his face. Eventually the man understood. He took his stick from across his shoulder blades and pointed with it, adding words Will couldn’t understand. Will nodded and gave him a cigarette then drove off, his motorcycle sliding under him as it struggled for purchase in the dust.

Will found a huddle of tents surrounded by animals and children who ran up to him to examine the motorcycle and take hold of his hands and laugh and try to grab the pistol in his belt. Will repeated the elder’s name at them. A man approached, very stately in a long swathe of cloth, and bowed with his right palm over his heart. He beckoned Will to come in, delaying him at the low entrance to remove his boots. Inside, Will felt underfoot the luxury of thick carpets. Seated on cushions were several men smoking and drinking tea. Will assumed the eldest of them to be the man he had come to see and he bowed deeply, his hand over his heart. The man smiled and gestured for him to sit. Will lowered himself into a cross-legged position on a cushion and looked around, carefully smiling at everyone in turn. The soft, rich carpets, the luminous low walls of the tent, the scent of tea and smoke, made a cosiness as piquant, Will thought, as that of an English cottage with a lively fire and rain beating on small panes of leaded glass. In his classical Arabic, he said that he thanked Allah for bringing him to this place and for the honour of being their guest. Some tension seemed to be induced by this greeting. Polite smiles stiffened and betrayed incomprehension. Of course, Will’s accent might not be too accurate. He was a reader of Arabic first and a speaker second. The faces arranged around him in the tent were similar enough for Will to think he saw signs of interbreeding. Recurring round the circle were the same sharp, deeply cleft chins and large watery green eyes. A young lad offered fresh glasses of tea on a brass plate. Will took one and held it by the burning rim. The head man immediately sucked at his glass and growled quietly. Behind him, in Will’s line of sight, an open panel in the tent showed the world outside with browsing goats shaking off flies, low sunlight clinging to the stones and plants and goat fur, and blue smoke rolling across from a fire out of sight.

The old man said something to Will. Will listened but could not understand. The man repeated himself. This time Will managed to hear the breaks between the words and understood that what he’d been asked, a little surprisingly, was whether he was a German.

‘No. I’m British. The Germans are our enemy.’

‘Ah.’ The man reached into his glass with long fingers and pulled out a sprig of mint, chewed it. ‘Tell me, my brother, who will Allah give victory to in this war?’

‘To us.’

‘Ah. Are there many of you?’

‘Yes. Very many. Many thousands. We have many cannons, aeroplanes, bombs and ships. The enemy, the Germans, cannot resist.’

‘Ah. This is what I thought.’ The old man turned to his fellows. He said, ‘They will win.’

Through the bright gap in the tent wall, Will saw a goat suddenly start to piss, a thick jet of liquid, while it lifted its tail and a few turds extruded and dropped softly in a pile. Will had the urge to comment, to make a little joke perhaps, in the English way, but stopped himself. He felt the flat heat of embarrassment pressing under his skin at the thought of the misstep he might have just made. It would have been gauche and he arraigned himself for his superficial civilisation, degenerate, that was scandalised by natural processes. These tribal men in their tent, mixing regal postures, ceremony and unaffected natural squalor, were truly aristocratic, like figures from epic or Arabic hunting poetry. But he hadn’t said anything. All was well. The moment passed. He sipped his tea and imagined in his own eyes, narrowed at the steam, the same farseeing, blue-green clarity of the eyes around him. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘We will win.’

A thoughtful silence. Outside the tent, the dry ripping sounds of a wood fire, the voices of those tending to it.

‘I can offer you,’ the old man said, slapping his palm on the carpet beside him, ‘one hundred horsemen to help you win the war.’

‘Thank you. I will tell the general of your offer. He will be very pleased and honoured.’ Will had no idea whether the man could raise a hundred horsemen. It sounded suspiciously like a symbolic figure but it hardly mattered. Even if they existed, there was no need for them. No, what this exchange meant was that Will had created an alliance, a pact between warriors.

‘Good. Then that is settled. Come outside now.’

The men all stood up and Will followed them in his socks out into the light and air. He thought for a moment of retrieving his shoes but decided he couldn’t double back. He absorbed, with slight tremors, the discomfort of the ground beneath him. Several men lit new cigarettes and Will did also, offering his around. A couple of the men already smoking took one of Will’s for later. That smell: across the fire lay the scorched carcase of a goat, blackened, cracking, its posture rigid as though still resisting giving up its life. Evidently Will was being treated to full tribal hospitality.

More tea was brought by a woman whose similar eyes looked out, downcast, from the gap in her veil. One of the men patted Will on the shoulder and led him over to squat down by the fire and start picking shreds of meat to eat. The other men joined them, sinking onto their heels and laughing. A hawk called overhead, keen, austere, poignant. Evening moisture had started giving body to the air. After this successful mission, Will would get back on his motorcycle and ride down from the mountains to the coast. At the villa, he would lie on his bed and read more classical philosophy. Here he was sitting among newly made allies, tribesmen. At home in Warwickshire was a famous river by which he’d grown up. He was the son of a war hero. Overhead an eagle (probably) was flying. He was eating roasted goat. He was where he’d always wanted to be, in the middle of his life’s adventure and standing at its prow, pushing forwards.

Before he left, they told Will that they wanted to present him with a gift. Two men left and Will filled the silence with expressions of his gratitude and how unnecessary a gift was for him, it was he who should have brought them a gift and so on. They returned accompanied by a young girl and Will, smiling, looked at them each in turn and waited for them to present the gift. ‘Please,’ one of the men said and gestured at the girl. ‘No,’ Will said. ‘No, you can’t mean …’ She was about fourteen years old, short with strong bare feet and thin gold rings in her ears. The expressions of the men seemed to confirm that they were serious, that she was a gift. Will didn’t know what to say. The living presence of the girl, staring down, waiting, her toes contracting to grip the carpet, disabled thought. Will didn’t want to offend the men and forfeit his achievement with them. Still not knowing what he would do, he thanked them with his right hand over his heart. He took the girl to his motorbike, followed by the tribesmen, thanked them again and sat down, arranging her behind him with her arms around his waist. He had to pull her arms around him; they were knotted with fear or shame or some terrible emotion. He waved and they drove off down the valley, Will’s heart pounding, the girl’s breath on the back of his neck.

When they were out of sight, he slowed to a halt to consider the situation. Again he had to pull at her thin, dark-haired arms that were now bound suffocatingly tight around him. The ride seemed to have terrified her. She climbed off. He could see her short legs trembling. She was his possession. A girl. He felt the warmth of her body still on his back. He smelled the acid smell of her body. But there was nothing he could do or could consider doing. He couldn’t take her with him. He couldn’t have her and then send her back. He wouldn’t do anything, he corrected himself. He was a gentleman and so forth. He took hold of her, however, and hugged her, his nose in one small ear, holding her tightly enough that he could feel her small breasts against him, the strong length of her body pressed against his. He felt it and let go, pushing her away again. He pointed at the motorcycle and said, ‘It won’t ride.’ She stared. He made large x-shaped gestures to tell her that it wasn’t working. He said again, ‘It will not go. It will not go.’ She gave no sign of understanding. ‘Home,’ he said. ‘You go home.’ Still she didn’t move. He pointed back up the hill and shooed her away. Finally he took hold of her shoulders, turned her around, put one hand on her left buttock and pushed. She understood. She ran and didn’t look back.

In the villa that night, Will indulged himself and masturbated. He knew that he’d done the right thing but now he imagined himself throwing her down onto that stony track, pulling the clothing from the helpless girl and fucking her there and then.

13

It was a pleasure the following day to sit in the office and type up his report. Cigarette, coffee, the hammering of the typewriter keys loud in the bare, high-ceilinged room. Briefly, he stood up and walked to the window and looked down at the harbour that was seething with brown uniforms of newly arrived men and the turning cranes lifting crates and machines. Returning to the desk he continued describing his singular exploit. The account was dryly factual, understated in what Will imagined was the best Whitehall style; nevertheless the image of his success shone out, not gaudily painted but emerging from the essential substance like a profile on a coin.

And it seemed that word had already spread. In the afternoon an Arab arrived at the office and asked specifically to speak to Mr Walker. Will was called out to meet a small, unhappy, very tidily dressed man who shook him by the hand and said, ‘I understand you are a friend of the Arab people.’

‘I am,’ Will answered. ‘I mean, I’m here in a sense representing the Allies. We’re here for every …’

‘Yes. That’s good. Do you smoke?’

‘Thank you, yes.’ Will accepted the proffered cigarette.

‘I can bring you many boxes. Good American tobacco, if you like it. So. As a friend I ask you, go to the French prison and ask to see the fish pool.’

‘The fish pond?’

‘Yes, the fish pond. Where you keep fish in a garden.’

‘And what is it?’

‘You will see.’ The man’s small brown eyes were urgent, his mouth set. ‘Go and ask like that and you will surprise them and they will think you know everything already and they will show you.’

‘But I don’t know anything because you’re not telling me.’

‘It’s better not to know. You’ll find out when you get there. Then you will know what to do. Goodbye now, friend.’

‘What? I beg your pardon, but what are you saying?’

‘I’m saying I go now. Thank you again. The fish pond.’

14

It was all happening. That night after a good meal accompanied by the oily aromatic local wine the sky began to vibrate. Captain Draycott knitted his hands and leaned forwards over his plate. He said, ‘Oh dear.’

‘Is that …’

‘I fear it is. Yes. Christ. There it is.’ Anti-aircraft guns began hacking from their positions around the port. An air raid siren started it, its long loops of panic rising and falling and rising again. The men sat still and thoughtful.

‘Should we not …?’

‘What?’ Henderson asked, challenging them.

‘Go somewhere. Downstairs. There’s a cellar, isn’t there? I haven’t looked.’

‘You haven’t looked? You’re Field Security and you haven’t looked?’

‘Yes,’ Captain Draycott answered, ‘that might be a sensible prec—’ The rest of the word was lost inside the loud detonation of a bomb.

‘That was close.’

Three of them got up and headed for the door.

‘Don’t shit yourselves, boys,’ Henderson shouted through the noise. He was lighting his pipe, slowly applying the flame to the circle of tobacco.

Draycott was pale, staring. He breathed noisily through his teeth.

‘It’s like being back in London,’ Samuels said.

Will grinned at him. ‘Is it?’

‘Yes. Night after night of this.’

‘Fine old time,’ Henderson said. ‘Grabbing handfuls of fanny in the Underground shelters.’

‘Not exactly.’

Planes were now directly overhead, shaking the room. The chandelier jumped and skipped on the end of its chain. The guns were going mad. Draycott leaned forward and vomited then got up and tried to walk out. He stumbled. Someone was in his path, lying under the table saying, ‘Please, Mother. Oh, Mother. Oh, shit shit shit shit.’ Draycott looked down, bewildered, then hurried out.

Samuels shouted, ‘Seems sensible!’ Another bomb fell and its light flashed at the window.

Seeing Samuels about to go, Will leaned forward and grabbed his wrist, holding him there. Samuels looked back at him, confusion in his eyes, apparently trying to hear what Will was saying and then realising, trying to twist his arm free. Will held him and held him, and then let go. Samuels swore at him as he turned but Will couldn’t hear through the engine noise, the firing and explosions.

Will’s body felt very light and thrilled, like he wanted to dance. He got up from the table and rushed out onto the terrace from where he could see the swinging diagonals of the searchlights, one catching the sea as a bomb dropped into it and cast up a brief tower of black water. The light of the guns stuttered. Fires were taking hold in parts of the city. From a gun position behind him, anti-aircraft fire was dropping red-hot shrapnel onto the terrace. Will could hear it tinkling as it hit. A bomb fell so close that he felt the hot wind on the side of his face, stinging with masonry grit. Still he felt invulnerable, exalted, charged and powerful and really there. He was haloed in his own safety. He was with his father in courage. He was in his presence. It was like they were brothers.

15

The prison was a square building with a central courtyard. A bomb had smashed one corner to a heap of rubble. Rather poetically, from the exposed walls above, twisted iron bars had been blown back like a curtain in a breeze. Apparently three men had been killed. Will could see others, unhoused, chained together, waiting in the courtyard.

Perhaps this confusion might be to Will’s advantage. The clerk or whoever he was behind the desk was evidently without sleep, blinking dry eyes, holding a cigarette in slightly trembling fingers.

‘I’m here from Allied Field Security,’ Will informed him.

‘Name.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Your name.’

‘My name is Walker. I’m here from Field Security. This is my pass and I’m here to see the fish pond.’

The man blinked and took the card from Will. The holder of this card is engaged in SECURITY duties, in the performance of which he is authorised to be in any place, at any time, and in any dress. All authorities subject to Military Law are enjoined to give him every assistance in their power, and others are requested to extend him all facilities for carrying out his duties. The man looked up at Will and back down at the pass.

Will said, ‘I’m not going anywhere until I have been shown the fish pond.’

‘Please wait.’ The man flapped his hand in the direction of a wooden chair then left the room.

Panic. The ants’ nest had been disturbed. Will sat and smiled to himself. The smile faded as he was kept waiting. Repeatedly, he checked his watch against the clock on the wall that filled the room with a chip-chip-chip sound. After fifteen minutes he decided he certainly would not stand for any French nonsense and called out, ‘I say!’ Nothing. He called out again and got up and smacked the desk with the flat of his hand. Noises behind the door and then the man appeared holding it open for someone who was evidently his superior, a slow, fat man with a face composed of heavy circles, dark orbits round his eyes, hanging cheeks, a drooping moustache.

‘Yes, you are here?’ he said.

‘Yes, I am here. I am here to see the fish pond.’

‘For any reason in particular?’

‘At this point,’ Will answered, ‘that is no concern of yours.’

‘Very well.’ The senior man shrugged.

‘What is your name?’ Will asked him.

‘Marchand. Look, I will show you but I don’t understand it can be interesting to you. It’s just the usual dirt.’

‘Nevertheless.’

‘Okay. Okay. You follow.’ Marchand hummed as he led Will out of the room, down a corridor and out into the courtyard. Behind them his junior scurried.

Will looked over the prisoners chained together. All of them Arabs, they weren’t saying anything. They looked at Will. Carefully, they did not look at the other two.

Marchand gestured and the junior bent down and inserted a key into a large manhole cover. The key turned, he pulled up a handle and dragged clear the heavy lid. Rolling up from the darkness below came a stench that made Will recoil.

‘What is it? A sewer? The usual dirt?’

Marchand looked at him with sorrow or contempt, it was hard to tell quite what that dark, slumped expression was. ‘It’s the fish pond,’ he said.

Will stepped forward, his hand over his face as his digestive tract bucked, returning the flavour of coffee to the back of his mouth. He looked down into the darkness. There were noises. Wounded by the sudden chute of light, cowering, streaked with filth, were naked Arab men, bearded, cringing. Slowly one stood up on weakened legs and turned his face upwards with closed eyes to breathe the fresh air.

16

This was the worst ever. It couldn’t get worse than this. The noise, emplaced guns, planes ripping over, guns, single shots, bursts, everything. From different heights. The ground surging up ahead, sinking away behind. Ray saw Randall fall just ahead of him. He ran over, crouching, holding his rifle in one hand. In the heavy fire Randall had gone down softly, crumpling into the foetal position. Randall’s eyes were shut. Both hands were closed around the barrel of his rifle the way a mouse holds onto the stem of grass with its little white hands in the picture on the cereal packet. There was a sore on his face but that was old, crusted dry around the edges. Ray yanked his arm. ‘Hey!’ He couldn’t see any blood. ‘Where are you hurt? Where are you hurt?’ Three yards to the right the ground stuttered with impacts. Ray could see Randall’s mouth saying quietly ‘What?’ then he sort of settled his lips together, swallowing. He pulled his rifle a little closer. He was sleeping. ‘Holy shit, Randall! Wake up!’ Ray slapped down hard onto Randall’s face. ‘Wake up! Wake the fuck up!’ He dragged his shoulder and got some movement out of him and then ran. Fire was coming in. He ran up around a corner of ground, tufted with growth. The path was a grease of trodden mud. He glanced behind. Randall was with him. A mortar thumped the place where they’d been.

They sheltered in a slit trench, someone else’s. Whoever had dug it was gone. Now Ray and three others were there. Above them was a bush charred black on one side. On the side closest to them it was green, its leaves dry and warped with heat. The earth of the trench was striped, layered, with stones in it and fine tangling yellow-white hairs of roots, the colour of under ground, of seeing no light, exposed now, like wiring ripped out of a wall. Once Ray had seen a building going up in his neighbourhood. The old one, condemned, had been pulled down in an enjoyably violent, almost festive demolition. He’d seen the new building constructed in stages, bricks and cavities, pipes, laths and plaster, toilets. It shocked him. He’d thought homes were as solidly consistent as prisms, definite places full of families, family odours, meals and arguments and objects. But they weren’t. They were fabricated out of layers of materials. They weren’t really anything. Artillery showed this to be true of the whole world. Life was a skin: it could be peeled away like strips of wallpaper with its coherent pattern. The soil wasn’t that deep. A shell gored it and there was rock beneath. Plants burned, uprooted. It could all be scraped off easily.

A curving arm up ahead. A voice calling. They had to get out and run. They were getting higher. This was good. They were getting up onto higher ground, safer ground. Where was George? Was he firing? Was he safe? There he was. They shivered, shouting to themselves. They ran.

17

All the cloud cover had blown away. The sky was empty. The planes seemed to race through it faster, towards the sun. The mountains were difficult now with light and shadow. Their eyes couldn’t adjust quickly enough from one to the other. It was blind darkness or blazing saturation. Not that they wanted to move from where they were. They’d watched other men run past to be slapped onto their sides by a sniper across the valley. They were safe. They had cover. Alice bounced up and down on his bent legs. He said, ‘Nng. Nng God. Nah. Hmm.’ Below them down in the pass the fighting had gotten insane. All the American boys had to get through the same narrow throat of the mountain where Randall’s brain had given out and fallen asleep. The Germans had artillery positions now above it. The guns were pounding and pounding. Men were stuck there, among rocks, being mixed with the rocks. Stone bowl of his ma — what was it called? — a pestle. Garlic and salt in it. Smash. Her strong round dimpled hand on the stick thing. Smash. Molecules. The fragrance coming out.

Okay, fuck. That was something new now. A crater to their left from a new position throwing up a crown of dirt as it appeared. They couldn’t stay. George was fumbling at his fly. He was pissing himself and trying to get his penis out, spraying his hands and weapon before he could angle the stream clear.

‘We have to run! We have to run!’

‘What?’

‘Run!’

Ray held the brim of his helmet, stooped and ran. Rough ground rising and falling underfoot. Through wet matter, a soldier spread open, daubed across the rocks. Shit from everywhere, from overhead and the sides, the whole world lethal, folding over them and around, swallowing them. A bigger blast. Ray threw himself down. Film this. Take a camera and throw it. Put it on a rope and swing it. See everybody die. Another blast so close it hit him like a punch in the head and his whole body jumped an inch off the shuddering ground. He landed with grit of shattered earth burning him. Got up again and ran. His footsteps sounded strange. Strange that he could hear them, inside his body. His head was light, altered. He felt his face for blood. A high thin tone was ringing in his head. Beneath that there was a crackling, a sifting of something pulverised and shifting about. Voices, the explosions were quiet as though distant. There was blood on his cheek where stones had hit him. He found with his finger that there was blood in the hole of his right ear.

A hand on him. George pulling him. They had all turned to run in different directions but he hadn’t heard them say where.

18

Floating now weightless without sound

fear

Fear so great it had washed him empty

Up through his bones his foot beats told him he was

running

Two thumps of explosion, mud splash, fire in it

small shots pecking the ground in several places

People lying on the ground like what are they?

Running, burn of ankle twist over

Like people, shaped like people?

over rocks. Behind rocks, a piece of sky,

towards that

Like dolls! Dropped.

Everything dead already.

Dead piece by piece

a man lying

with one arm already dead

the rest of him thrashing

Dead and running, fast as he could. Dropping to hide flat with the others and wait and his shoulder against the hip of a man in front solid bone, rapid trembling

Over there a man trying to dig a foxhole with his helmet metal pranging off the rocks

Just in front, something moving, effort to focus

to see, before it was too late, but

it was so close, a bug, nothing, moving in a

small circle

on its disturbed patch, jointed feelers dabbling

the ground.

Smart black. Crumb of sand on it.

Planes screaming over.

All matter just matter, jerking with life, some of it. Just jumping a little bit, tearing against itself, fraying, frittering, bleeding, lying still, scattered.

Whizz of eighty-eight. Just short. Throwing stuff in his face.

Pushing himself flatter against the earth. Nothing underneath. Earth darkness. Up.

Running.

Low ridge to get behind and settle and up.

He had to join in now, pulling his trigger at those shapes over there. The crack of his gun faint by his ear.

George! Was George doing the same? Or was he lying, dropped?

Couldn’t see him anywhere.

Smoke rolling across from something.

Up again, into blasts from all directions that he couldn’t survive.

running

19

Several days after seeing the prison, when Will finally cornered Draycott and told him his story, Draycott listened, wincing and shaking his head, and was no help at all. His gaze kept flickering past Will or over him; that reminded Will of their difference in stature. He complained relevantly at the bloody filthy behaviour of the French and affirmed that in no way could they be trusted. When pressed for support for action, he offered none. Will argued his position — something should be done just for decency’s sake and think of the advantage to Anglo-Arab relations here. Draycott, holding the door jamb, looking at Will’s dusty shoes, countered that they should be very wary of upsetting the local balance of power. Perhaps Will could gather intelligence and write something up. Draycott glanced again over the top of Will’s head, stepped backwards into his office and, without saying anything further, closed the door.

Since the nights of heavy bombing, Draycott had been behaving strangely. At breakfast the other morning, spooning trembling scrambled eggs onto his plate, he’d told Will that, from now on, whenever they were in a public place, Will should refer to him as Lieutenant Bryce loudly enough for people to hear. ‘Price?’ Will had asked. ‘No,’ Captain Draycott looked aghast, his plan about to be compromised. ‘No, “Bryce”, with a “b” and a “y”.’ Samuels had told Will that later that same day he’d walked in on Draycott and found him carefully repositioning every object in his office, dragging his desk to the other wall and changing the left — right order of all the items on it.

It was alone, with no concrete plan to offer, that Will went to meet again the man who had sent him to see the fish pond. He’d left a card days earlier: Dr Zakaria, a physician. In a small Arabic café he explained that he had patients only among the Arabs. He made less money but he didn’t want to risk intimate contact with the French or their idle, dangerous wives. Dr Zakaria sipped from a tiny cup of thick aromatic coffee, an iridescent sheen on its surface. Such contact, he went on, can lead to a bullet in the head or a convenient road accident. He set his cup back on its saucer and rotated it thoughtfully. ‘The prison,’ he said. ‘So now you have seen what it means to be Arab in this place.’

Will wanted to be precise, to resist any theatrics from this little man. ‘I have seen what happens in one part of the prison.’

‘All of this country is a prison.’

‘Dr Zakaria, if I might intrude a note of circumspection, you sent me to the prison, not anywhere else, and the people I saw would therefore be criminals.’

Dr Zakaria laughed, a short blast through the dark tufts of his nostrils. He tilted his head on one side, smiling, his eyes still on his coffee cup. ‘If only life were so logical. They were arrested. They were thrown into a sewer to rot to death. This is all true. But did they commit a crime? Have you any evidence that they did? I don’t. Perhaps there isn’t any. Perhaps they committed no crime. Perhaps they annoyed a Frenchman or the police needed to make up numbers.’

‘Of course I realise that’s possible.’

‘I am telling you as someone who understands that this is in fact the case. There is no justice here. This is not England.’

‘I do understand. You understand I have to ask questions.’

‘Of course.’

‘I do hope there’s something I can do.’

‘A man on his own cannot do anything.’

‘I think that depends on who the man is and what he does.’

Zakaria smiled again. ‘You are either an optimist or vainglorious. Either way, the prison is a small matter — no? Simple to use your authority and make a little bit of change there.’

‘Arguably it would be a small matter. Bureaucracy among us is rather Byzantine, I’m afraid. I have to pursue esoteric lines of inquiry.’

A crashing brilliance of noise outside the café. Trumpets and a rattling drum. Will and Zakaria looked at the doorway. As the band passed, the sound lurched even more loudly into the café. Senegalese soldiers, the man in front whirling a cane at chest height. Behind him, trumpeters blew and threw their trumpets spinning up into the air, caught them and blew again. Their scissoring strides cast rhythmical triangles of shadow across the café floor. At the back were the drummers, two of them, who produced an intricate, thrilling racket despite seeming merely to lay their sticks motionless over the tilted surfaces of the drums with their soft dark hands. Somehow from this languid action their sticks blurred and they generated a terrific battery of sound that was shockingly, almost embarrassingly loud as they crossed the open doorway. As the music receded along the street, Will turned smiling, mildly elated, to Dr Zakaria but Dr Zakaria did not smile back.

‘Our country,’ he said, ‘is not our own.’

Will swallowed, sobering his expression. ‘I understand. It must be horribly frustrating.’

‘Yes. That is one word you could use. It is frustrating. It is frustrating to have your goods stolen, to be killed, to be thrown to die into a pit full of shit for no reason, to have your own land filled with strangers, strange thieves, unclean people. That is all frustrating.’ He sipped his coffee once again then removed his spectacles. He polished the lenses with the edge of the tablecloth and returned them to his nose. He looked at something on the table then something else, checking their clarity.

When he spoke again he was calmer. ‘Of course we are told that Arabs are not fit to run their own countries. We are … what are we? I don’t remember. Are we feckless? I think feckless and also chaotic, and tribal and dirty and lazy. Perhaps you think this also?’

‘I don’t,’ Will said, wondering if there wasn’t a grain of truth there, if allowing them to run their own affairs might not end in a mess.

Another sound from outside: the long tapering wail of the call to prayer. Will loved that sound, so passionately forsaken and faithful. There was emptiness in the sound, empty space that the soul had traversed, a nomad sound. Will also liked the way that people accepted it, registered it without amazement, ignored it, going about their business, or stirred themselves towards the mosque. That outflung spiritual grandeur was natural to them; they lived half in that dimension all the time.

‘I have to go to the masjid,’ Dr Zakaria said. ‘As you can hear, it is time.’

‘Can I come with you?’

Dr Zakaria looked at Will, revising his opinion again, Will thought, elevating it. ‘If you wish. No one will stop you.’

Will walked with the smaller man through the streets to a little square. By a line of taps, the worshippers crouched, washing themselves like cats, looped inside their fluid gestures, rinsing hands, feet and heads, breathing water into their nostrils and blasting it out.

At the entrance, Will removed his shoes. He was noticed by the faithful but they made no comment nor seemed to care, strolling towards their more important business. They found squares of the carpet patterned with these geometric cells on which to place themselves. Again Will felt that rich, assuaging sensation of carpet underfoot, the opposite of desert harshness, a great relief. With no pews or screens to baffle the view, the space was wide. Above was a dome that rested on a ring of small windows. Perhaps, if he could have chosen, Will wouldn’t have included those great brass circles of lamps hanging down on such long chains. They were the one thing that slightly impaired the open effect. Will faded to the back of the mosque and watched as prayers got underway. He watched the men stand and hug themselves and look left and right and read from the book of their empty hands. He watched them kneel, all at once sinking down to the carpet and bending forwards, the vulnerable, human soles of their feet all peeling up towards him.

Will turned away from the worshippers, leaving them to finish their business. He walked quietly along the back wall, admiring the beautiful patterning of the tiles, regular, mathematical but sinuously growing out in all directions from any point so that the eye raced and rested, raced and rested. It was very cleverly done. Will felt he understood its endless elaboration. Its meaning was divine.

20

Ray was kept from George, travelling in a caravan of the half destroyed. At the back of the advance while the delicate membrane of his hearing healed, Ray got used to medical smells, of bandages and alcohol, sometimes also the smell of burning flesh that could be surprisingly similar to the smell of bacon. There were psychological cases also, the shell-shocked, staring and shaking, repeating precise gestures or clawing at themselves. At night he could see them struggling in their dreams but, being deaf, he couldn’t always hear their cries. Deafness made things distant. They looked like figures struggling underwater.

George was distant. Ray yearned towards him, to protect him. Surely he wouldn’t survive on his own, a secret pacifist in the middle of a war, in the damned infantry for Christ’s sake. Ray wrote letters to him in his head, arguing with him. My friend, they began, my friend. Ray would assert how important this war was and how the killing was necessary, the lesser of two evils in the world. George didn’t realise how valuable his own life was, so valuable compared to some useless Nazi. His life was precious and he should defend it. Ray imagined these letters — that he never wrote or sent — convincing George on the night before a decisive battle and saving him. At the same time, Ray imagined George protected by his goodness, a slight shimmer in the air around him, coming through the battle unharmed. George could be the hero of a new kind of war movie, about a man whose goodness triumphed.

All of these thoughts were repeatedly burned up and destroyed in the sudden certainty that George had just been or was just about to be killed, in that moment just gone or coming right now. Confirmation of this came with each new wounded or maddened soldier brought in from the fury of battle to be dragged along behind with Ray, drugged and repaired enough to be returned and properly killed next time.

At night, Ray cried out towards George, his own voice through his deafness high and weightless and weak.

21

‘Is it possible, do you think,’ Will asked Dr Zakaria, ‘that Alloula is a French informant?’ It was a mischievous question, a little flashing out of the excitement that Will felt at these meetings, the dense buzzing in his belly as he leaned forwards, smoking, listening. He asked the question with a hint of a smile.

‘No,’ Dr Zakaria answered, eyebrows raised and eyelids drooping, an expression of serene disdain. ‘Not only do I know Alloula thoroughly but you make the mistake of assuming that the French are interested in us. They aren’t. They don’t think we are capable of anything. We are invisible as far as they are concerned. The Bey is a pet. No one else has any authority.’

‘But now that I’m here and I’ve been meeting with you, their interest might have been piqued.’

Zakaria shook his head. ‘Because you are here, all of you British and others, the French withdraw entirely. They are on vacation. They are waiting for you to go away again and then life will return to normal.’

Alloula was the first of the others to arrive. Tall and sloping, his long heavy belly abbreviated by a tight belt, he looked, as ever, tired. His eyes were vague with worry. He flattened his thick black hair to his head and with the same hand summoned the waiter.

He sat and before he’d made eye contact with Will or Zakaria, he said, ‘My wife is very unhappy about me coming here.’

‘I see,’ Zakaria answered. ‘She likes the French too much.’

Will rose slightly in his seat as he considered attempting a joke about a French lover but decided against it and sank back.

‘No,’ Alloula answered. ‘But she thinks it might be dangerous, that the French are watching us.’

‘That’s precisely what I was just saying,’ Will said.

‘Not precisely,’ Zakaria corrected. ‘They aren’t,’ he went on. ‘They like different kinds of gossip and they’re too busy considering their positions when the Allies go. The Free French supporters will want to take control. As far as they are concerned, we’ll still be their niggers.’

‘Until you commit your first outrage. Anyway, you’re repeating yourself.’

‘To someone else. Repetition. Perseverance. Doing the same thing again and again before it gives way. It’s boring, trying to change things. Boring and difficult.’

‘I’m not bored.’

‘Until you do something, until we all do something, my good friend, you are still a spectator.’

Mr Ammar arrived next, sudden through the hanging beads at the door, shaking hands with his right hand, holding a match flame to a cigarette with his left. Ammar was angry. Ammar was always angry. He had weapons in his cellar. He abused waiters, clenched and unclenched his fists during conversation. He was a powerful man, compact and raging. Will liked observing him, feeling him seethe. Ammar was trivially powerful at the moment, powerful conversationally, personally, but Will could see how as events changed he might darkly blossom. He was the one. He could be a great force at the right moment.

Will sat beglamoured in the company of the conspirators who talked about some Italian armaments that could be bought. Several more arrived, argued and departed before the evening was done, faces hovering in the light of match flames and lighters. Dark hands held his forearms as ideas were elaborated. He listened. It was intelligence, pure intelligence.

22

Back at the villa, Samuels was still awake, sitting in a clean cone of lamplight, his hands spidery with shadows as he stripped and fixed the wiring of their telephone. Humming along to some dance music on the wireless, with tools spread out and litter of Bakelite pieces, Will thought he looked as idiotically happy as a child in a sand pit.

‘Evening.’

Samuels looked up, mouth open, and down again at his task. ‘Out with the rebels again?’ he asked.

‘Something along those lines.’

‘Need a drink, I imagine, after all that boozeless Mohammedan plotting. There’s Scotch in that window seat for some reason. Don’t know whose it is.’

‘Excellent idea. Draycott’s probably. According to Travis he’s now hiding things. Travis found one of the maps under the rug. That’s why when you knock on the door he tells you to hang on and there’s a lot of fuss and thumping about before he lets you come in.’

‘There’s a mug on the table as well.’

‘A mug. Ideal.’

Will poured himself a sincere measure of about three fingers and sat with the mug resting on his belt buckle. He tilted his head back and sighed.

‘Aaah. Hmmm. There’s quite a lot I need to remember, actually. I should make a few notes.’

‘I see. They seducing you to their side?’

‘No. What a fatuous thing to say. I’m not being seduced by anyone. You make it sound …’

‘Oops. Sorry if I hit a nerve.’

‘You haven’t hit anything because you don’t know anything.’

‘I don’t see that that follows logically. Anyway, I’m not wrong. You’re sympathetic to their side.’

‘Samuels, I think you’re straying out of your area of expertise. You don’t know the language here. Your brethren are a little north and east of here, aren’t they, somewhere in Palestine?’

Samuels said nothing, then, ‘They’re in London and on the Continent.’

‘Muttering to yourself like an old woman.’

‘Snippety snip. Somebody’s very tetchy.’

‘No idea what the situation is in this country.’

‘Doing my job. Minding my own bleeding business. Not blessed, you see, your excellency, with your understanding of the great game here. I does what I can in me humble way. For example, this telephone now works. You go on and win the war for us, sir.’

‘Oh, for crying out loud. I’m going to bed.’

23

Sergeant Major Henderson stood with his thick, freckled arms folded high across his pristine shirt, his eyes half closed with sceptical curiosity. ‘So who was that fucker with the sharp stick up his arse?’

Will examined the card the man had given him. Tilting it so that the swirling curlicues of black ink caught the light and shone. ‘He works for the Bey. Says here he’s an adviser, a courtier.’

‘Works for the what’s that?’

‘The Bey. Local royalty. As I understand it, he hasn’t had much to do since the French took over. He lives in a palace and he wants to talk to me. A car will collect me tomorrow evening.’

‘Arab johnny?’

‘Yes.’

‘Probably dressed up like the bleedin’ haberdashery department. Don’t tell him anything, will you.’

‘I’m not planning to tell him anything. I’ll tell him that we’re going to win the war and I’m wondering what he has got to tell me.’

‘We are going to win the war.’

‘I know we are.’

‘And what does he want you for anyway?’

‘His adviser, his courtier, tells me that he wishes to make contact with his British friends.’

‘Wants a nice white arse then. And don’t go stealing anything.’

‘I wasn’t planning to.’

‘I know it’s tempting. Some fat Arab with more money than sense. He’ll have a lot of knick-knacks, I reckon.’

24

The car that collected Will was certainly beautiful but he thought that the tyres needed air. They had a rather glutinous grip on the road, stones pinging under the rubber as the car snaked its way along the coast road and Will slid to and fro across the leather upholstery. He held onto the handle above the window to preserve his dignity and looked out at the lilac sea, the landscape pitted with shadows. He looked at the back of the driver’s slender neck that emerged from a wide starched circle of collar; his uniform looked big on him. On top of his head he wore a dove-grey chauffeur’s cap. His gloved hands rotated and Will gripped the handle as the car turned uphill, inland, through orange orchards towards the palace. Will recognised them as orange orchards despite the absence of fruit. The trees were regularly spaced, the leaves waxy dark green. In the dusk, without fruit or blossom, they were dowdy as cattle. Will regretted that it was the least romantic time of the year to see them.

The car slowed to a squidgy halt and the driver sprang out to open Will’s door. Will stood up, ignoring the man, and walked to the palace gate where a guard stood who looked more at home in his uniform. An enormous African, his skin mauve in the evening light, his chest pressed smooth the dark blue cloth of his jacket, tasselled with gold braid. On his head he wore a red fez. In his right hand he held a bared scimitar, its blade shining blue. He pulled open the gate and waited for Will to pass through, his eyes dead ahead. Behind Will, the car rumblingly withdrew.

Another guard or functionary approached wearing a different uniform, a red sash around his waist, and led Will up through a rose arbour to the palace garden. The building itself appeared, large, its many windows mostly unlit, clean cut against the early stars.

And then the man who Will thought must be the Bey appeared in white, smooth-faced, floating towards him. ‘So good of you to come. Welcome.’ He had a neat, subdued moustache and a beard that ran only along his jawline, framing large, plush, shaven cheeks.

‘Your highness.’ Will bowed very slightly from the waist.

The Bey stood still a moment, examining Will or expecting him to say something further. Either way, he was completely motionless, a mannequin standing there, his hands by his sides. Just as Will was about to say something, he jerked back to life. ‘Come. Come and join me.’

He gestured for Will to walk ahead to a table topped with ceramic tiles with a lamp on it beneath an arch of greenery. Will sat and twisted round in his chair when he heard a dry, flustered noise that turned out to be a bird in a large metalwork cage. The bird bounced from perch to perch. A servant approached and placed on the table before them two cups of mint tea, the gold patterning on the glass shining in the lamplight.

‘So,’ the Bey began. ‘Where did you school?’

Will’s school would have been unknown to the Bey. He pretended to misunderstand him. ‘I was at Oxford.’

‘Ah. How excellent. So was I. At Exeter College. Do you miss it? I do, in my maudlin moments. I miss the climate from time to time, would you believe it. Also here there really is nowhere to play golf.’

‘I do miss it I suppose,’ Will said without really meaning it. ‘I’m happy to be out, though. Oxford is where I learned my Arabic.’

Another servant appeared with a silver platter on which were arranged squares of folded cloth. Having sipped his tea, the Bey picked one up with his fingertips, patted his lips with it and let it drop to the floor. When the tray was proffered, Will did the same and discovered that the linens were chilled and scented with rose water. Just dropping it onto the ground was a strange, slightly dreamlike thing to do.

‘Yes, I’ve heard that you speak Arabic. Do you mind, old thing, if we stick to English? It’s such a pleasure for me to speak it.’

‘Not at all, your highness. You speak it so well.’

The Bey tutted at the formulaic compliment and closed his eyes briefly.

‘The reason you were invited here was because the world is at an interesting moment. Things are in flux, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘I would.’

‘Of course. Wars. Empires.’ He gestured with a ringed hand. ‘We’ve had rather a lot of them in this part of the world. It seems that one empire is passing so it is time to consider the future, hopefully without barbarians or dark ages.’

‘I see. I’ve met — I think you know I’ve met — countrymen of yours who are preoccupied with the same questions. They are devising some answers.’

‘So I gather. But are they the barbarians, perhaps? It is an interesting question. Perhaps there are other more time-tested forms of authority that could emerge. Once the ghastly French have gone back to Rouen and Dieppe or wherever, their boulevards and puffy old mistresses, as I see it this country will head in one of two ways.’

‘Chaos or …’

‘No, not that. I mean two kinds of state: either a socialist republic or a stable royalist state. I think the gentlemen you have been meeting in déclassé cafés are rather militating for the former but I think that is really in nobody’s interest. Their activities could be useful in creating the latter but I’m hoping for a way in which such things wouldn’t be necessary at all.’

‘Either way, an independent state.’

The bird started jumping again, half opening its wings.

‘Of course. There are Sicilians here contending for the same choices. Did you know that? They’re here, apparently, because they believe or know that once your lot have swept through here, Sicily will be next, and then up across the Continent, and they wish to free Sicily from Italy.’

‘I didn’t know that. I haven’t seen them if they are here.’

‘Possibly you have without realising. I’m told that because of Norman and Moorish invasions, a Sicilian will look either like a Frenchman or like an Arab. That is very convenient here, evidently.’

‘That would be.’

The Bey sipped his tea again, again the servant stooped forward with his platter. The Bey patted his mouth and dropped the cloth.

‘But we’re getting off the topic there,’ the Bey said. ‘I fear that you’ve leaped to a conclusion there with the notion of an independent state. A fledgling state would be a delicate thing. Complete independence might be too much for it. It should be protected, let’s say, helped into the world. Why you are here is because I’d like to put to you a proposition to take away and discuss with others and quietly to set in motion. I would like us to become here, once the French have finally buggered off or been pushed out, rather, I’d like us to become a part of the British Empire.’

25

Before Will knocked on Captain Draycott’s door, he could hear him at his activities on the other side, in particular the twanging sound of things thrown into his metal waste-paper basket. Will rapped hard, thinking again of the necessity of circumventing his useless superior. The reins were in Will’s hand. He was riding the horse of the world. He could steer the course of this part of North Africa. Draycott opened the door and said, ‘Ah, Walker, come on in.’ His cheeks were flecked with hectic pink, he was slightly breathless, but Will immediately thought that he no longer looked mad. His face was clarified, sober. Draycott’s eyes were meeting his.

‘Captain, I have some news of a very interesting, very interesting, development, possibly actually very significant for British interests here, I mean really significant. I’d need time and further work but it seems, well, I have contacts with senior royals in this area and they have made submissions to me that they are minded to join the British Empire, to become part of the British Empire here once the war is over. Sir, is everything all right?’

Draycott was emptying the entire contents of one of his desk drawers into the bin. Perhaps his sanity had been fleeting, a lucid moment only.

‘The war is over here, Walker,’ he said.

‘Sir?’

‘That all sounds very interesting. Top work on your part, awfully exemplary intelligence work, I imagine. It’s not really my area beyond needs must. We’ll have to find a way for you to pass it on to someone.’

‘Sir, what are you talking about?’

‘Oh yes. I haven’t informed you all yet although I think everyone’s got the gist from the rumour mill. There’s a terrible joke there that I can’t quite think of about gist to the mill.’

‘What gist?’

‘We’re leaving. The war has headed east and we’re heading with it. It’s the lookout of the Free French round here now. There’s a handover being organised, so I’m not really sure how your new colony can be brought into the Empire. Fearfully complicated, I imagine.’

‘But we can’t.’

Draycott laughed, actually laughed at him. ‘I’m sorry, old boy, but we do just have to get up and go. It’s not down to us to decide. You can put it all in a report.’

‘Yes and toss it into the void of complete army incompetence. I’ve made this. Don’t you see? I’ve done important work here and all you can bloody well say is put it in a report and flush it down the lavatory.’

‘Now that isn’t really fair. I didn’t say that.’

‘More or less. You don’t care is the problem. You’re just as bloody idle and indifferent as the rest of them.’

‘Look here, Walker, I’d rather you weren’t, you know, insubordinate in a way that made difficulties between us.’

‘Oh, fuck difficulties. Do you see what I’ve done? I’ve won England a part of the world.’

‘That definitely is insubordinate. There are penalties for that, Walker.’

‘I would be being insubordinate if I were your inferior. But I’m not. I’m your superior in every way so logically I cannot be insubordinate.’

‘In every way except rank so piss off out of this room before you put us both in an awkward situation. Don’t you see what this means? You ask me if I do. This means we’re winning the war. We’re winning it!’

‘Some of us are.’

26

The long, tediously detailed labour of evacuation was housewife’s work, a porter’s work. Every action of it pained Will.

Moving, the sea ran always on their left-hand side. Turning a corner there’d be a shove of wind and the sea would flash and then disappear as the convoy wound through schematic, insignificant towns that could have been won as sleepy corners of the British Empire. Now they were just lagging behind action, not taking it. When they caught up to the battlefield Will saw in one place long lines of stretchers leaning against a wall in the sun, the canvas smudged with quiet shapes of drying blood.

27

Returned to his unit, racing, finding them among the others. All the men looked different and alike. They were pared down by battle, gaunt, in faded uniforms, unshaven. Seeing him, seeing that George wasn’t dead, that he was alive, thin and weary, sliding his pack down from his back, Ray ran to him and caught him, shocking the taller man who didn’t recognise him at first and then did. Ray grabbed the sides of George’s head, the dry prickles of his hair, and kissed him, pressed his mouth to George’s and held it there. George squirmed backwards, his lips wriggling to form words of complaint and then, just for a fraction of a second, before he put his hands on Ray’s chest and shoved him away, he kissed back, an answering pressure in his lips. George flung him off. Ray let himself fall to the ground, laughing. He looked up. He was floating. He was mixed with the enormous sky. He saw George scowling down at him and laughed some more.

With his long straight fingers, George kept whisking particles of dust or lint from his clothes. His face lengthened with the effort of looking down at himself. He said that Dunphy was dead. And Randall was dead. And Carlson. They had all died at the same moment, or two moments, two big shells landing one after the other. Coyne was killed later. George was right beside him when it happened. A sniper blew off Coyne’s jaw and it landed on George’s forearm. George flicked at his clothes, remembering the sensation of this thing, this object, warm and light as a teacup. Coyne had drowned in his bubbling holes.

‘I picked the jaw up, with all of the teeth in there, and held onto it in case it was going to be useful but it wasn’t. He died. I balanced it back on his face so he could be buried with it and we ran.’

Ray and George stood together in the evening air, a soothing moisture in it, a substance in the distances. No sound of fighting, only voices and more men arriving.

George was different now. Sometimes, in flashes, Ray could get his old self out of him, but in the silences George’s face hardened and he disappeared.

Ray asked finally, ‘Did you shoot? Remember what you said that time that had me worried all the time, did you stick to it?’

George opened his mouth and inhaled looking up at the sky. He closed his eyes and Ray understood. But knowing that George had been doing exactly what Ray had prayed he was doing and had defended himself brought Ray no relief or peace of mind. Instead it made Ray sad, awfully sad, to think of gentle George being forced to do that and maybe killing people, to think that they were all forced to do that. Ray stood next to his friend enclosed in this sadness, knowing he would never be outside it again. This had happened to them all. This was for ever.

28

They were done with Africa now. That was the news, the reason for celebration. The men played in the sea. Despite the fact that Ray’s hearing was now crisp, finished and sensitive, he was not permitted to join them. He sat on the beach, pouring handfuls of sand over the gaunt bones of his feet, and looked at the men splashing and laughing in the brilliance of the sun-struck water, the light sliding about their shoulders, over their heads and backs. Feet kicked up and disappeared. George was not among them, as far as Ray could see. Ray had to let go of that, of George, and to try not to panic. He had to care about himself instead. His return to his unit had been short-lived. Ray had been called out to form part of a special division of men, men with Italian names — all the Rossos and Rizzos and Romanos — who would be last to arrive in the invasion of Sicily that was to follow. They were to stay there and secure the peace.

One man rose up in the sea, eyes closed, his hands on his head, water pouring down his face and lips and Ray felt the cool of that over his own head, the relief.

Ray’s head burned often, with memories, with fear. But now he would miss the battle. In Sicily he would not really be a soldier any more. He would be part of the peace. George would have liked that for himself but George was not an Italian. Ray had to forget about George now, to let him go. Perhaps it would be better for him to think of him as dead already. Ray twitched at a memory: in the mess of action once he’d had that thought, that everything was dead already, only some of it moved and lived. That wasn’t really going to help. He just had to hang on until it was over. That was all. He had George’s address back home. If they ever got back home, he would get on a bus and use it.