Apple Blossom Time (12 page)

‘I am a lucky man,’ he declared to anyone who would listen. ‘No, really. I am a very lucky man.’

‘Yes, you are,’ said Martin.

Martin had pushed his chair back, balancing it on its two back legs. Through a blue smoke haze, I watched him. Nothing of the gentleness, the kindness of the boy I remembered seemed to be left in the man. Like a dead leaf stripped to its ribs, what was left was a dried replica of Martin. His body was all bone and muscle.

I would have loved to talk to him the way Kate had done, but Kate was not me and I was not Kate. We could have gossiped about all the people we knew at home, caught up with each other’s news, in the easy way we had been able to talk once, a long time ago, when we had been best friends. But I was looking at a lean, hard stranger. Too much sun and sand had scored his skin into a web of fine lines around the eyes. Two bold lines swept from his nose to the corners of his mouth. He looked very tired. I had loved the boy. I wasn’t sure that I even liked the man.

And then he turned towards me, his hazel eyes intent, the pupils large and black, examining, assessing. He could read my thoughts. He could reach into my very soul. And I knew, as clearly as though he’d spoken, that he’d never forgotten me. Again I felt that rush of pleasure and pain, white-hot wire. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before, and when it was over I was left with a weight low down in my stomach.

I couldn’t sit any longer and watch him across a table. I couldn’t bear to sit any longer and let him watch me.

‘James,’ I said softly, but he didn’t hear me. I tugged his sleeve to catch his attention. ‘James, it’s late. We’ll be locked out at eleven.’

‘Plenty of time,’ James maintained.

‘The door is locked at eleven SHARP – in capital letters – and if we don’t get a move on Miss Howell will shut us out. I don’t particularly want to spend the night in a beach hut on Sidi Bishr.’

‘Oh, oh – playing the little wifie already, eh? I hope you’re not going to turn out to be a shrew.’ James gave me a squeeze that almost unbalanced me. ‘P’r’aps you’re right. Well, gentlemen, time to go – newlyweds and all that!’

The others gave a conspiratorial laugh – all lads together – that made me sweat with embarrassment. I didn’t look at Martin as we went through the bead curtain into the blacked-out street.

Miss Howell was waiting at the door as we went in.

‘Ssshhh!’ whispered James as we went upstairs and then he began to giggle. ‘I think I’ll have my allotted weekly bath now. D’you think she’s got the bathroom key handy? Or do I have to apply in writing, in triplicate? Now, now, no laughing, darling. That’s another rule. It’s not funny. We could be bombed tonight and I don’t want to go to heaven with dirty feet.’

‘I will have silence, if you please,’ Miss Howell hissed.

James sat on the bed and pulled off his shoes. ‘Good chaps, tonight, weren’t they? All good chaps.’

I nodded.

He swung his legs up on to the bed and, by the time I’d cleaned my teeth, he was asleep.

I lay in the dark and listened to my husband’s breathing. I’d pulled the curtains back and a cool breeze from the sea came through the open window. James’s body burned mine where it touched. My skin seemed to have trebled its usual number of nerve endings. Each time he moved, I felt the sensation jar through me, irritating and exciting at the same time.

He turned over and flung an arm across me. His hand searched for and found my breast, cupping it contentedly. I could have screamed. There was a tight, angry knot in my belly, hot with longing, dark with shame. And I didn’t know whether the ache was for my husband – or for Martin.

There were lights on the horizon, spasmodic flickers out at sea. From far, far away, so far that it was almost like the earth stirring in its sleep, there came the rumble of guns.

Early in the morning, before either of us had woken up, Miss Howell knocked on the bedroom door. She handed in a folded paper.

‘There’s a driver downstairs and he says he’ll wait.’

Our honeymoon was over.

*   *   *

On 26 May, the Afrika Korps began an attack that was to roll the British right back into Egypt. Not all the
esprit de corps
and individual heroism of the Eighth Army could halt the inexorable push. Out-generalled and out-fought, we fell back from Gazala to Tobruk. In three days Tobruk fell, its loss a terrible blow to British morale. Pursued by Rommel, a defensive line was staked out at Mersa Matruh, where large numbers of British troops were trapped in Matruh fortress. Then, falling back again, harried all the way, we formed a new line at Alamein.

If this fell, there was nowhere to go. The road was clear all the way to Alexandria.

German radio broadcast a message to the women of Alexandria: ‘Get out your party frocks, we’re on our way!’

*   *   *

It was 1st July. They called it Ash Wednesday.

Major Prosser had hauled out the contents of the filing cabinets even before I reported for work. They lay in a tottering pile on the floor.

‘Get these burned, Kenton,’ he ordered, without looking up as I came in the door. ‘Then come back for more. And make sure they really
are
burned. I don’t want military secrets blown all over Maadi.’

In a perforated dustbin, I burned papers all morning, stirring them thoroughly to break up the ashes. The sand outside the hut was smutty with trodden-in embers. My uniform was smeared all down the front with ash, ink, smudged carbon. Even used carbon papers had to be burned, in case a newly arrived enemy should decipher their mirror-images. My skin was seared. There was smoke in my nostrils and ash in my hair. A dark plume rose straight up into the dry air, speckled with black, rising flakes of paper, matching other columns all over the camp, all over Cairo, as the British burned their secrets.

‘What now, sir?’ I asked when I had finished.

Major Prosser had the twitchy air of a man who hadn’t expected to find himself issued with a revolver and who wasn’t quite certain whether or not he’d have to use it, or, indeed, be able to use it.

‘Now, Kenton? Well, now you can nip down to the NAAFI, like a good girl, and bring me back a cheese and onion wad. We’ll all have a cup of tea and wait for Rommel – eh? Shouldn’t be long, they say.’

‘Is there anything else for me to do?’

‘Probably not. Not at the moment. No, no – not at the moment. I don’t think. Nothing I can actually … think of.’ He looked round the empty office and tried a little joke. ‘Nothing left
to
do, is there?’

‘May I have your permission to go into Cairo, please?’

‘Good heavens – whatever for?’

‘I have a friend there. She’s – she’s had a baby and I want to see if she’s all right.’

‘Better not. Better to stay put. Much safer here, you know … a woman on the streets, alone … some Egyptians are very pro-Jerry … you can’t really trust them … never trust a Gyppo is the best advice I can give you.’

‘Please, sir?’

‘Go, then, if you must. Perhaps you ought to – yes, perhaps you ought to bring your friend back here.’

There seemed to be more military transport than usual on the road between Maadi and Cairo. I didn’t have to stand for very long before being given a lift in a staff car that was going into the city to pick up its usual passengers. The driver was an ATS girl I vaguely knew.

‘There’s a terrific flap on,’ she told me. ‘My brigadier’s been going backwards and forwards all night. They say there’s going to be an all-out bombing raid on Cairo tonight and that the Afrika Korps’ll just stroll in over the rubble tomorrow. They say they’ve been burning all the papers at the Embassy and GHQ.’ She looked over at my smutty face and hands. ‘So it’s not just a rumour, then?’

‘I really don’t know what is and what isn’t.’

‘The WRNS were evacuated the day before yesterday, but it’ll take more than Rommel to shift the Tatty-ATS, eh! But just in case, I’ve been swotting up on this.’ Out of her pocket she pulled a thin, orange-covered book.
Kriegsdeutsch,
I read:
Easy Texts in Military German.
‘You never know.’

Some people certainly believed the rumours. In the poorer areas, nothing seemed very much different, apart from urchins who ran after the car shouting, ‘Rommel come, you go. Heil Hit-tallar.’ But in the centre of town the streets were jammed with cars heading east towards the canal zone. Some had strapped mattresses on to car roofs as protection against bullets and falling masonry. Outside every bank, jostling, panicky queues stretched for several blocks. The station was jammed with women and screaming children, all entrances blocked by luggage. The British flag was coming down and the most forward-thinking shop owners were already hanging red, white and black bunting.

The heavy Humber staff car was slowed to a crawl, its driver skilfully double-declutching through the low gears.

‘Crikey,’ she said, ‘this is a flap and a half, all right.’

‘Drop me off here,’ I asked, after we’d inched down Sharia Khedive Ismail for twenty minutes. ‘I’ll walk the rest. And good luck.’

‘Best of British, then. See you in PoW camp,’ she laughed and crunched the gears, lurching the car forward.

Alone, without the small protection of a car and driver, I was far more conscious of the turmoil that had taken over the city. The street sounds were different. The new noise was shriller, more urgent. Crowds that a few days ago would have parted before me in my uniform, now obstructed me. Feet, elbows, hands were suddenly in my way. People dragging suitcases didn’t care if they cracked me across the shins. No-one was vindictive, but I was yesterday’s woman and tomorrow belonged to a different army.

The unmarried mothers’ home was an oasis. Pansy was sitting in the garden, under the shade of a vine-covered trellis, in an armless nursing chair. She didn’t hear me coming and I stood for a moment, watching her as she watched her son.

Her thin face, still only a child’s, was painfully rapt. She looked at the baby with the same greed that he latched on to her nipple. His eyes were screwed tightly shut in an ecstasy of sucking. Both his fists were clenched and he beat the air with them, in time to the rhythm of suckling.

She had called him Jonathan – gift of God. ‘How else did he come to me?’ she asked. ‘Sometimes we don’t want what God offers us. He holds out His hand with a gift in it and we’re so ungrateful, we ask Him to take it away. But He knows best, after all, and, if we have any sense, we accept His gift in the end.’

I watched her and was caught unaware by the beauty of her composure and the sharpness of my longing. I was a married virgin and I wanted … I wanted so badly.

‘Pansy,’ I said softly, afraid to startle her out of her intensity.

Even though I spoke so gently, she jumped and the baby’s mouth fell away, a milky O. She guided him back on to a breast that was swollen, solidly blue-veined, unnatural as a deformity on her virginal body. She laughed and flinched at the same time as he took a fierce hold again.

‘What a lovely surprise,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed you, Laura. No, I don’t mean that. That sounds as though I’m reproaching you. I mean, it’s always so good to see you.’

‘Things have been rather hectic. There’s a bit of a flap on.’

‘Oh?’

‘Major Prosser sent me to bring you back to camp.’

A lie – well, truth-stretching, anyway, but I’m certain that’s what he meant.

‘But why?’

‘There might be fighting tomorrow. He thinks – we all think – you’d be safer back in uniform.’

‘How silly. Who’d hurt us?’

I looked round the garden. Three or four girls in an advanced state of pregnancy were strolling around in a dreamy calm. From over the wall came hoots and yells, the sound of another traffic jam.

‘Pansy, this is war and if the Germans come you’ll be an enemy alien. God knows what’ll happen to you and Jonathan if Cairo is overrun tomorrow.’

‘The same thing that’ll happen to you, I imagine.’

‘No – I’m safe, I’m in uniform. They can’t do worse than put us all in PoW camps. But there’s no Geneva Convention for you. You shouldn’t be here. You should have been sent home months ago. Supposing the Egyptians decide to rise against us?’

‘They won’t,’ she said, with infuriating calm. ‘Better the devil they know than the devil they don’t know.’ Sated, Jonathan had fallen asleep. With her free hand, Pansy fastened the buttons of her blouse. ‘Look,’ she whispered. ‘He’s asleep. How can I possibly drag him all the way to Maadi?’

‘Sometimes … sometimes I wish I could shake some sense into you!’

But Pansy’s calm was catching. By the time I left her, I felt far less anxious. Who said the Germans were coming? We still had an army and the Desert Rats didn’t know how to give in.

Somewhere out there – I’d no idea where – was my husband. We’d been married for four months and spent one night together. Was he tired? Hungry? In pain? Afraid? I’d no way of knowing. I could only hope that he was safe. My thoughts went back to the frightened boy who’d confided his fears to me as we sat on top of a Pyramid. He knew now – the best of it and the worst of it. He’d never face the unknown again.

I thought of him so often. Pictures flicked through my mind as though someone were fanning through the pages of a photograph album. I saw him jammed with his driver and gunner into the sardine can of an armoured car. I felt the sizzling heat, smelt bodies and high octane fuel. I heard the groan and squeal of tracked vehicles, a factory full of pigs being made into sausages, felt the bone-shaking thrum of engines. My head buzzed with the crackle of the wireless network, hoarse voices falsetto with excitement or fear, order and counter-order, the network-blocking buzz as someone forgets to take his finger off the send button. Over everything, making me break into a sweat, was the smell of burning.

I wished I’d asked Pansy to send up a prayer for James. Her line to the Almighty was such a clear one. Mine had so much static coming over it that He’d find it pretty difficult to hear me. I tried, anyway. I tried.

*   *   *

Madame Bouvier was packing. Her red wig had slipped over one eye and she made no attempt to straighten it.