Thunder in the Blood (9 page)

‘I will,’ I said, as I got in the cab.

The following week came and went. A doctor’s note spared me from Curzon House and I had a number of conversations with Beth Alloway. At first, she sounded remarkably sane. She’d left hospital and returned to the cottage. Her husband’s suicide had come as no surprise and Laura seemed to be coping. The word suicide was hers. During the third conversation, I asked her how she was so certain.

‘He’d talked about it,’ she said, ‘often.’

‘He came to see you? In the hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He said that life was impossible. He said he was the meat in the sandwich.’

‘Whose sandwich?’

There was a silence at this point. Then I asked the question again.

‘Yours,’ she said at last. ‘Your sandwich. And those Iraqis. Actually, he never told me that much but I’m not stupid. I can tell. Your lot wouldn’t give up. And neither would they. Something was bound to go wrong. He knew it was.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But something
did
go wrong?’

‘Yes.’ She hesitated. ‘The week before he died, before they found him. Something upset him, something bad.’

‘What was it?’

‘He wouldn’t say.’

I nodded, remembering the DTI messages dancing across my computer screen, the Customs and Excise heavies in action in the Midlands. So far, to my knowledge, they’d made only one visit. Maybe Clive Alloway was next on their list. I went back to Beth at this point, trying to pick up the conversation again, trying to nail down the connections, but she told me she didn’t want to know.

‘He’s dead,’ she kept saying, ‘and gone.’

I tried to apologize again, to find some form of words, but Beth had already put the phone down and so I sat there, staring
at the floor, wondering whether I’d got it all out of perspective. Northern Ireland had certainly taught me a great deal about casualties, about the umpteen victims of political violence, but it had all seemed somehow different across the water. There, like it or not, we were fighting a war. In war, you expected bloodshed, grief, loss. Back in the UK, there was no such war. All Clive Alloway had tried to do was make a living. And now, thanks no doubt to the national interest, he was dead.

Mid-summer is a blur. My doctor was kind enough to extend my sick note. I phoned work and told them I wouldn’t be in for a bit. Then I drew £2000 from my compensation and flew to Paris. I booked into a modest hotel on the sunnier side of Montmartre and spent the days walking the streets. I knew the city well from my student days, and each morning I set off with no plan whatsoever, content to surrender to the kind of existential half-life I’d only ever read about in books. When I was hungry, I stopped to eat. When I was tired, I ducked into a bar, or sprawled on the grass in the Bois de Boulogne, or found myself an empty bench on one of the
quais
down by the Seine. In the evenings, I went to the cinema, sitting anonymously in the back, the storylines a mystery, the dialogue pure gibberish.

I returned to London at the end of July, no better, no worse, just as confused as ever. Deep down I think I now knew what I wanted, but three weeks in Paris pretending to be Albert Camus had taught me that getting it was another matter entirely. The priest, bless him, had only been half-right. Maybe in God’s good time. Maybe never.

Rory turned up the day before the Iraqis invaded Kuwait. He arrived, unannounced, at seven in the evening. He was wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase. I was immensely pleased to see him and I told him so. He kissed me at the open door and ruffled my hair. He smelled, I remember, slightly desiccated: that distinctive Whitehall smell that goes with shiny linoleum, mushroom walls and the dusty, bomb-proof net curtains I knew they favoured at the MOD.

I took his briefcase, sat him down and poured him a large Scotch. I’d had the bottle in the kitchen for weeks. I hadn’t touched it. Rory looked up at me, his glass raised. Like me, he was grinning.

‘Cheers,’ he said, ‘your very good health.’

I offered to cook for him but he said he wouldn’t hear of it. He knew of a place in Bayswater. He’d been there a couple of times. It served southern Indian food, wholly vegetarian, and he thought I’d like it. I felt, at a stroke, newborn. I didn’t know why he’d come and I wasn’t about to ask. All that mattered was that he was there. That lovely priest again. Thank God.

The restaurant was empty. We sat at a table at the back, the dishes of Chana Dhall and Mushroom Dupiaza garlanded with onion and fresh coriander. For a while, we talked about Ruth. She had, it turned out, gone away on a conference. Rory thought it might have been to do with something called Gestalt therapy.

‘She was very helpful to me,’ I said, ‘last month.’

‘I know. I was there.’

‘It was kind of her. All that time she spent. I must have bored her witless.’

‘Not at all. She showed me the notes.’

‘Notes?’

I stared at him and he grinned back. Ruth had written me up. In two short days, I’d become a case history.

‘What of?’ I said ‘What was the matter with me?’

‘Affective depression.’

‘What’s that?’

‘God knows.’

‘Do you think she’s right?’

‘I don’t know.’ He reached across and touched me lightly on the face. ‘I just want you to get better.’

Afterwards, we walked back to Fulham. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, the grass in Kensington Gardens newly mown, couples strolling in the warm darkness. At home, in the flat, I made a pot of coffee and laced it with more Scotch. Rory had taken off his jacket and was flat on his belly on the carpet next door, sorting through my collection of CDs. His taste in music, like his whistle, was dreadful.

‘No Neil Diamond?’ he said vaguely. ‘Nothing half-decent?’

I knelt beside him with the coffees. He had a long, narrow body, very wiry, thin hips. I’d seen him once in the shower, after a windsurfing expedition to a club in north Cornwall. Like me, he had red hair, though in his case it was slightly sandier. I
touched his arm, indicating the mug of coffee. He rolled over and looked up at me.

‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘how are you?’

I thought about the question, rocking back on my heels. I hadn’t felt so peaceful for weeks. Months. It might have been an illusion, a happy conjunction of good food, Kingfisher beer and the company of this glorious man, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like something entirely different. Something I’d never felt before.

‘I love you,’ I said simply.

Rory said nothing for a moment. His expression, thoughtful, mellow, gave nothing away. Then he reached up for me, pulling me gently down, until I was lying on top of him, nose to nose. Then he kissed my eyelids, one after the other.

‘I know,’ he said.

About three in the morning, I woke up in the tiny bed curled against the wall, my back in Rory’s lap, his arms around me, the warmth of his breath against my cheek. We’d made love past midnight, Carmen on the CD player next door, the curtains drawn back, the wall stencilled with the lights of passing cars. It had been slow and tender and richly physical, the promised land I’d dreamed about in Paris, and afterwards I’d bent over him, blowing lightly, my lips an inch from his flesh, cooling him, caressing him, rousing him again, lapping and nibbling, taking him in, pleasing him. Then, he’d said very little, watching me, his eyes half closed. Now, up on one elbow, he traced a line across my face with his fingertips. When he got to the scar, he paused, feeling me flinch beneath him.

‘You were lucky,’ he said, ‘believe it or not.’

‘You think so?’

‘I know so.’

‘Why?’ I frowned. ‘How come?’

He smiled down at me, his fingers behind my ear now, tracing the knobbly stitchwork. Then he bent low and kissed my ear, his voice the barest whisper.

‘I was there,’ he said, ‘in the car behind.’

9

If I needed a coda for Rory’s extraordinary admission, more evidence that the world was going mad, I didn’t have to wait very long. Early next morning, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and within hours Curzon House was gripped by war fever.

While Iraqi tanks rolled south, our bosses on the top floor cannoned around Whitehall, desperate to secure a piece of the action. The issues were clear cut. The Iraqis were guilty of naked aggression. They’d violated treaties, spilled blood, seized an entire country under the thinnest of pretexts. They had one of the biggest armies in the world and they were plainly prepared to use it. Unless they were stopped now, then God knows where it might end. Saudi Arabia? Dubai? Weybridge? Our bosses eyed the subversives files, the ones we kept on suspect foreign nationals, muttering darkly about the dangers of a fifth column, of betrayal from within, and someone deep in the government machine thought we must have a point, and lifted a phone and told us to get on with it.

Down on the second floor, I and some of my colleagues watched this tiny sub-plot unfold. We all knew the files had been neglected and were way out of date. One or two of us had even written memos on the subject, months before. But headlines about international rape and pictures of marauding tanks do funny things to people and the premium was suddenly on action. Arresting dozens of luckless Palestinians was hardly going to stop Saddam in his tracks, but under the circumstances it seemed the best we could do. Later, in a series of discreet court hearings, the vast majority of the guys we picked up were shown to be completely innocent. Some, it turned out, were even members of the Iraqi underground, exiles
opposed
to Saddam. But at the time, none
of that mattered. War is a narcotic. We lost our heads, our judgement. And even then, some of us knew it.

Not that I cared. The first I heard of events in the Gulf was Rory standing naked by the bed, a cup of tea in one hand, my ancient transistor radio in the other. He was listening to the breaking wave of news reports with obvious relish. For the first time since the Falklands, there appeared to be a real opportunity for him to get shot.

While he looked for his underwear, I tried to pin him down. ‘Tonight?’

‘Ruth’s back.’

‘Early? Before she expects you home?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Tomorrow? Lunchtime?’ I smiled. ‘Here?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Only maybe?’

‘Aye.’ He nodded at the radio. ‘Hostilities permitting.’

He phoned me at Curzon House later in the day. The news, he said, was bad. There were no plans for mobilization, no immediate prospect of the dispatch of British troops. Worse still, if and when the UN got its act together and the prime minister agreed to contribute to some kind of Task Force, there seemed little likelihood of Royal Marine involvement. You didn’t waste your precious commandos on the Iraqis’ tanks. Instead, you sent heavy units of your own.

‘Seventh Armoured,’ Rory said in disgust, ‘and the bloody Crabs.’ The Crabs were the RAF, another of Rory’s pet hates.

We met that evening outside Green Park tube station. He kissed me on the lips, chuckling.

‘Home?’ I said.

‘Home,’ he agreed.

We went home to Fulham. I’d picked up some groceries at lunchtime – cooked Tandoori chicken, potato salad, a bottle of red wine, stuff I knew he liked – but we left most of it in the kitchen, taking the Rioja and two glasses to bed. After we’d made love, a little drunk, I rolled over and asked him about Londonderry again. We’d talked the night before, but I needed to be certain.

‘You’d been out there for a while?’

‘Eight months. I was in barracks. They gave me a room of my own. At Bessbrook.’

I nodded. Bessbrook was a big army base outside Newry. It lay in a hollow behind coils of barbed wire and big thick walls, an old converted linen mill. I’d been in and out dozens of times, sometimes by car, sometimes by helicopter. Looking back, it seemed odd that Rory had been there too.

‘I wish you’d told me,’ I said. ‘I wish I’d known.’

Rory shook his head. ‘Couldn’t,’ he said, ‘and wouldn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Unfair on you. Unfair on me. Plus I was Mr Invisible. Meant to be.’

‘DIS?’

He smiled at me, not answering, tipping the bottle to his lips and swallowing the last of the Rioja. When I kissed him, he tasted ripe, his tongue in my mouth, his hands pulling me on to him again. I resisted, pushing him away.

‘But you knew? You knew about the Londonderry operation? Padraig MacElwaine?’

‘Yes.’

‘Coincidence?’

‘Not really. We had an interest in the man. He’d been on to us before. It came to nothing and we’d had our doubts ever since. That’s why …’ He shrugged.

‘Why what?’

‘Why we suggested cover. Four-five Commando were still finishing their tour in Londonderry. I knew some very good guys in the unit. We needed men on the ground, proper stake-outs. We thought we knew where MacElwaine would be taking you. So I was put in charge.’

I nodded, listening, running a finger across his chest. Last night he’d told me he’d seen everything at the hotel. He’d watched Padraig pull the gun, he’d followed the Escort out of the car park and he hadn’t interfered because he knew exactly what was going to happen next. An informer of his own, a man he said he trusted, had sworn blind that I’d be taken back to the city. The man had two addresses in the Bog-side, one a flat, one a terraced house. Both had been carefully picketed by marksmen hidden in a variety of vehicles. I’d be taken to one address or the other, and before
anything terminal happened to me, the trap would be sprung.

In the on-going war, it would be a small but satisfying skirmish. Padraig off the plot. Three or four others off the plot. Another reason for the Provo High Command to start asking each other some of the harder questions. But it hadn’t turned out that way at all. Instead, the Escort had turned left, heading north, and Rory had found himself in enemy territory, no assets, no fall-back plan, just three terrorists, a couple of handguns and a woman he knew he loved. I looked at him.

‘Tricky,’ I said.

‘Very.’

‘You should have let it develop. That’s what the book says.’

‘I know.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘No.’ He nodded. ‘You’re right. I didn’t.’

I put my head on his chest, feeling his hand on my head, his fingers in my hair. I could hear the whine of the Escort’s engine again, Padraig crouched behind the wheel, the smell of roll-ups, scraps of conversation from the back, the harsh Belfast accents.

‘I didn’t want you to get hurt,’ Rory said quietly.

I looked up at him. ‘Great,’ I said.

‘It could have been worse.’

‘I know. I could have died.’

‘Worse than that.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’ Rory nodded. ‘MacElwaine had a nickname. In the Bog-side they call him Tupper.’ He paused. ‘You wouldn’t have known that, the way the operation was set up.’

I frowned. This was new. This, he’d never told me.

‘Tupper?’ I said blankly.

‘The man had a reputation. With the women. Liked to help himself. Famous for it.’

I nodded, absorbing this new piece of intelligence, thinking again about the meal at the hotel, the big meaty hands picking at the Dover sole, how plausible he’d sounded, and how naïve I’d been to trust him.

‘My lot knew all this?’

‘Yes.’

‘And still sent me?’

‘Of course.’ He shrugged. ‘Given the arrangements our end, it should have been routine.’

‘It wasn’t.’

‘I know.’

‘I nearly got killed.’

‘I know,’ he said again, soothing me. ‘And now we’re here.’

‘At no expense to anyone. Except me.’

‘Wrong. I was pulled off operations. Returned to mainland duties.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I didn’t let them run with you.’ He paused. ‘The phrase they used on paper was poor operational judgement. Face to face, they said I’d panicked.’

I looked at him, thinking of Padraig again, the hands, the darkness, three guns and a locked room.

‘Christ,’ I said softly. ‘Thank God you did.’

We met as often as we could for the rest of the summer, sometimes at lunchtime, mostly in the evenings. We built walls around ourselves, pet names on the telephone, letters left under pillows, presents of books, poems or photos snipped from magazines, picnics in bed, a bottle of Rioja or white Burgundy, big fat rolls stuffed with cheese and watercress and ripe tomatoes. We ate and drank and laughed a great deal, the same sense of humour, the same sense of awe and dread at what we were doing, at the risks we were taking, at the whole lunatic folly of the thing.

We drew up rules, agreeing nightly that it couldn’t go on, that we wouldn’t let it, that we wouldn’t want to damage anyone else, that when the real world intervened and the spell wore off, we’d slip quietly back to our respective lives, wiser and fonder, friends for ever. We discussed Ruth exhaustively, how much respect Rory had for her, what a good mother she was, how bright she must be, how important it was to protect her from our terrible secret. And then, with what little honesty we had left, we’d look each other in the eye and giggle and pull up the sheet, shutting out the world, making love all over again. It was an astonishing relationship, a kind of on-going nuclear reaction, the secret no one else had ever discovered, just the pair of us, eternal warmth. I think I knew very quickly that it was the most important thing that had ever happened to me. And I think I knew as well that –
for better or for worse – it would soon change us both.

Events in the Gulf gave Rory the best of excuses for saying he had to work late, and most evenings he’d stay at the flat until ten or eleven, showering before he left. An infinitely more careful man than I’d ever suspected, he went to enormous lengths to avoid detection. He brought his own soap to my flat, refusing to use mine. When I asked him why, he said it was obvious. Ruth knew what he smelled like. Smelling of someone else’s soap would be a total giveaway. At the time, I nodded. It seemed sensible enough. The last thing I wanted was Ruth finding out. Yet that pebble of green Palmolive, sitting in my shower tray, slowly began to get on my nerves. It symbolized her. It was the shackle of his other life. It was the reason we couldn’t meet out in the open, like everyone else.

One evening in early October, Rory arrived late. It happened to be his birthday. I’d taken the afternoon off and prepared a meal I knew he loved, a North African dish, a fiery couscous with chicken and lamb and little peppered sausages called
merguez.
Rory had said he’d be along about seven, the normal time, but it was gone eight before I heard his key in the lock. When he walked in, he looked drained and slightly nervous. I’d sent him a birthday card at work, typed envelope, Moscow rules. On the front of the card was a pen and ink drawing of the Cobb at Lyme Regis, the scene of our one and only excursion out of London, and inside I’d transcribed a line or two from a Laurie Lee book we’d both been reading. The quotation had to do with walking through Spain, another of our fantasies.

Taking off his coat, sitting down, accepting a hug and a kiss and a glass of champagne, Rory didn’t mention it. The day had been a bitch. Planning for the Gulf was grinding to a halt. The MOD was on a drip-feed of funds. The politicians, as ever, wanted glory on the cheap. For the sake of an extra couple of million quid, we were bloody close to putting men’s lives at risk. Listening to it all through the open kitchen door, I began to recognize the diatribe for what it really was, a breakwater, a dam that Rory was throwing up against his own guilt. It was his birthday. He should have been at home, with Ruth. Not here with me.

Over the pudding, slightly drunk, I tried to put it into words.
I wanted it to be tender, concerned. Instead, it sounded blunt and slightly aggressive.

‘D’you miss her?’

‘Who?’

‘Ruth?’

‘What?’

‘Ruth, your wife.’ I paused. ‘I just get the impression…’ I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No, tell me.’

‘I just feel… I dunno, I just feel you’re not here … not with me, not really…’ I offered him a weak smile. ‘You’re not anywhere really, are you?’

Rory blinked and said nothing. We finished the syllabub in silence. Then I stood up, knocking over my glass of wine, pure clumsiness.

‘Come here,’ I said. ‘Make love to me.’

Rory was staring at the carpet. I’ll remember the expression on his face until I die. For the first time ever, to me at least, he looked ordinary, just another man, hemmed in by life, threatened by circumstance.

‘You’ve spilled your wine,’ he said.

‘Make love to me?’

‘There. Look.’

‘Now?’

He got up and went to the kitchen. I heard him emptying the bowl, filling it again, brisk angry movements. Then he came back with the bowl in his hands and a scourer from the sink, and I sat on the sofa, quite numb, watching him on his hands and knees, trying to mop up all that spilled Rioja. After a bit, he looked up. I think he knew by now quite how much he’d revealed of himself and there was a tight little smile on his face.

‘Come with me,’ he said, extending a hand.

We walked through to the bedroom and he took off my clothes, as tender and attentive as ever, down on his knees, kissing me and nuzzling me, while I lifted a hand to my face, glad that he couldn’t see me crying. Afterwards, in bed, we made love, over-athletic, all-too-conscious of the question mark we’d left in the living room, the big wet stain beside the sofa.

‘I love you,’ he whispered in the darkness.

‘Happy birthday,’ I replied.

A little later, I jerked awake. The bed was empty. Next door, I could just hear a voice, tinny, somehow amplified. It was saying something about a train. I recognized a list of stations. I slipped out of bed and went to the door. The door was open, no more than an inch, and when I peered through the crack I saw Rory sitting on the sofa, the phone to his ear, the voice coming from a tiny cassette player beside him. He was fully dressed. He was talking to someone. He was explaining about a delayed train, pretending to be on the concourse at Waterloo. He’d been down to Salisbury. The train had been late arriving. He’d be back as soon as he could. The conversation came to an end. He put the phone down, reached for the cassette player, turning off the sound effects he must have recorded earlier. Then he looked round, over his shoulder, and saw me in the doorway. He managed a smile, but only just.