by Tom Remiger
‘The letter,’ said Breen.
‘Mischief,’ said Clark. ‘Get his brother all rattled. Get some letters out of him—or that girl of his. He’d manipulate people into doing what he wanted. And he was lonely, hanging out for contact with home. We all want more letters than we get.’
God, thought Breen, I’m getting slow. This army life. ‘You’ll have packed up his things?’
‘Yes,’ said Clark.
‘And made an inventory? No surprises there?’
‘There wasn’t much cash,’ said Clark. ‘Honest. If that’s what you’re getting at. When I got there.’
‘That’ll have belonged to someone.’
‘I’m not a thief.’
‘Sorry,’ said Breen. ‘I meant, maybe someone else got there first. It doesn’t matter.’
‘I think we can say,’ said Clark, ‘that he wasn’t killed for his supplies of gold. It’s not a mystery I’ve been bothering myself about, really.’
‘No,’ said Breen. ‘I’ll be seeing you.’
‘Right you are, sir. Did you ever talk to him?’
‘Cousins? Just the once. I think Captain Sinclair knew him a bit better.’
On a visit to the big house where the battalion headquarters had set up, Breen had found Cousins looking at each of the paintings in the hallway. There was a French king and there were chubby babies in the style of Rubens; there were marquises and marchionesses, and deer frozen in elegant panic. Instead of delivering his message, Breen joined the soldier in looking at the ruffled pastel cloth, the enigmatic faces and the bejewelled fingers.
‘A complacent lot,’ said Cousins.
Breen made a noise of agreement.
‘I’d pay to put them here. Good money.’
Diplomatically silent, Breen nevertheless followed his meaning.
When Breen checked the package of Cousins’ personal effects, there were, sure enough, some Crown and Anchor dice and a board printed on silk. There were only a few pence in cash, a bit more in his paybook.
Breen spent the morning demonstrating the new Tommy guns for his subdued platoon, trying to disguise how little he knew of them himself. He slipped away at lunch, down to the pub.
Sinclair caught up with him halfway there. ‘Off for a chat with Tiger’s girl?’
‘I thought I’d call in.’
‘I’ll join you.’
On the way, Breen told the captain what Clark had said.
The pub was almost empty. Two Englishmen sat in one corner; drinkers’ veins made dendriform patterns on their faces. A man in uniform sat alone along from them, under a photograph of a football team. At the bar, Clark was nursing a whisky double. He slipped out as they came in, leaving it half-drunk.
Elaine, behind the bar, looked at them. She was pretty, really. Her black dress made it look as though she were in mourning for something. Perhaps she was; they would be moving on soon. There was a ring on a thin gold chain around her neck.
‘We have some questions for you, Elaine,’ said Sinclair.
‘There’s no harm in it,’ she said. ‘He’s a nice boy.’
‘Two bitters,’ said the captain, coins already in his hand. When she turned away to fetch them, he said, ‘It’s getting rare to have whisky.’
‘We keep a bottle under the bar, for the good customers.’ Elaine didn’t bother to turn around. Her tone made it clear who wasn’t considered a good customer.
‘Clark’s one of those?’
Jesus, thought Breen, let people go to hell on their own.
‘Hardly,’ she said. ‘But he looked like he needed it. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen him before.’
‘We’re not really here to talk about Tiger,’ said the captain. ‘Only incidentally. You’re all right after the other night?’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You’re a pack of gossips, aren’t you?’
‘Lieutenant Jackson seemed quite upset afterwards.’
‘Tiger? Not to me, he didn’t.’ She placed the two glasses on the bar carefully. ‘You know him as well as I do. He—there’s that story, isn’t there, of the king who’s so proud of how his wife looks naked that he invites his general to come and see?’
‘There is,’ said Breen. The beer was good.
‘Well. He wouldn’t go that far. But he’s proud of me, you know? I said we should try and keep things secret. But that’s not the way he is. He wants people to know. And he wants me to be a woman other men make passes at.’ Breen realised the appeal her melancholy intelligence must have to Tiger. She caught his eye. ‘It increases my value to him, to know that other people want me, and can’t have me. He’s flattered by it.’
‘He wouldn’t be angry with Cousins?’ asked Breen.
‘Who’s Cousins?’
‘The other man.’
‘Cousins.’ She was realising.
‘Yes. He was that one.’
‘It can’t have had anything to do with it. I went and put some flowers on his grave, you know. We’re tearing out the flower garden for vegetables and I didn’t know what else to do with them.’
‘It does seem a pity to lose the flowers,’ said the captain. ‘Tiger never mentioned Cousins to you before? And Cousins had never tried anything on before?’
‘No.’
Something came over Breen and he moved to Clark’s abandoned glass. He gulped it down.
‘Did either of you,’ Elaine asked, ‘know Tiger as a little boy?’
The captain looked at Breen. ‘No,’ he said.
They finished their beer in silence.
‘One more,’ said the captain to Elaine. He paid and brought it over to a table. ‘It’s yours,’ he said to Breen. ‘I’ve things to do. But a quick chat first.’
‘Sure,’ said Breen. Elaine saw him looking towards her and disappeared through a doorway.
‘I don’t see any reason to disbelieve her,’ said Sinclair, once she was safely gone.
‘No. She’s a nice girl.’
‘A sharp one. So. We can say it’s not Tiger. I think we can say it’s not Clark. It’s hard to see how anyone subordinate to him could have been bullying him, but nonetheless. It should be investigated.’
‘Will I hold back the letter a little while?’ asked Breen. He sensed that this was what the captain wanted.
‘I don’t think it’s really our concern anymore. It becomes a question of platoon management. We’d best tell Tiger and leave him to sort it out.’
‘It would be appropriate,’ said Breen. ‘But I’m starting to think there’s not anything in it.’
‘Maybe,’ said the captain. ‘Maybe not. I’ll have a talk to Tiger. You’d best get back to things. You’ll have heard that we’re on our way come Tuesday.’ He had picked up a stalk of grass by the road earlier and was chewing at it. Now he flicked it away. ‘I can’t imagine Tiger as a boy.’
‘I can,’ said Breen. ‘I used to play a game with my sister and the brothers from down the road, in the factory bush. They would be gypsies, and we would be scared.’ That had been the last time he had been properly afraid, until he became a soldier.
‘Gypsies?’
‘Because we would sing to scare them away,’ said Breen. He recited rather than sang:
My mother said I never should play with the gypsies in the wood
If I did, she would say, ‘You naughty girl to disobey,’
Your hair won’t curl, your boots won’t shine,
You naughty girl, you shan’t be mine.’
‘Except maybe it was to let them know that we were coming, so they could leap out at us. Who knows. It was all a long time ago. The point is: Tiger’s a gypsy boy.’
‘You are a one,’ said the captain, and left without formality, leaving Breen alone with most of a glass of beer.
He had a Penguin paperback in his pocket, but even before he could pull it out the man in the corner came over to him.
‘Do you mind if I join you?’
The accent tended towards the English, if twangily, but t
he uniform was Canadian. A captain, in the medical corps. His skin was very smooth compared with Breen’s: less sun, he supposed.
‘Of course,’ said Breen.
‘Sometimes you just want to be able to talk to someone who isn’t English.’
‘At least the weather must be better for you.’
‘In England? Nope. You should see our summers.’
‘But in the winter?’
‘You gotta insulate, sure. Keep the cold out and the warm in, in your house. Like keeping your friends close and your enemies far away. But then you get these crisp cold days.’
There was an awkward pause in the conversation.
‘You must have men in your own unit to talk to, surely,’ said Breen. ‘You can’t be around the English all the time.’
The Canadians were just down the road, in the same corps. New Zealanders, adrift in a strange country, looked at the Canadians to see another way of being different. They were all right, even if the colonel had once told Breen that they were as bad as Americans, if they weren’t going around being French. They were also soldiers away from home. A placid England looked out of doorways at them as well; the same men out of uniform brought them weak ale in roadside pubs and the same children hid behind hedges to throw stones and reappeared down the road, cheering.
‘I’ve been detached to a Brit hospital, learning about stabilising on the front line. They’re doing new things with plastic surgery down here but you have to change how you first operate; I’m meant to learn and then teach.’
‘Ah,’ said Breen, not sure what was expected of him. ‘Good on them, I reckon.’
‘It’s horrible to see the patients. These beautiful men turned into something else, and you can’t show any reaction.’
‘Beautiful’s a word to use.’
The man looked confidential.
‘You get to start thinking like the English. I blame their schooling, but they’re funny about it. You know what happened to me, last time I was down in London? I’m just standing on the street, having a look around, ya know? And one of their guardsmen, he comes up to me, asks for a light. So I pass him my matches, and he bends to light it. But he’s watching me while he does this, like he’s waiting for me to say something. I say, “Fine city you’ve got here.” And he says, funny-like, “You must be waiting for a friend.” I mumble something about how I’m just looking around. “You’ve been here a while,” he says, and I realise all of a sudden that the man’s trying to proposition me!’
‘I’ve heard about that sort of thing,’ said Breen. ‘Doesn’t really seem to be a problem with us.’
‘Schooling, I tell you. It’s their schooling.’
‘So what’d you do?’
‘I went with him,’ said the Canadian. ‘It’s not like I’m getting any otherwise.’ He had what Breen thought of as typically North American guilelessness: one of their scrubbed and innocent faces.
‘You what now?’
‘I went with him.’
‘What if someone saw?’
‘London’s full of it. Different armies. Ships in the night. Not a worry.’
To Breen’s surprise, it happened again. He felt himself hardening; nothing visible yet.
‘I should go,’ he said. He stood to finish his beer.
‘I’ll maybe see you around,’ said the Canadian.
‘Maybe,’ said Breen, trying for a noncommittal tone.
He began to worry, a bit later. What if it was a deliberate provocation? But when he told Baird, the adjutant, Baird just asked how many Canadian doctors he thought there were.
‘Not that many, I suppose.’
‘So. We go and complain; he gets cashiered. Now there’s one fewer. And you say he’s a specialist. He’s not caused any harm to his own unit, or to ours. We get him gone, we’ve had the same effect as if the Jerries killed him, and only because he’s a dirty sod. If he’d done it with an ATS, same story, but who’d give a fuck?’
‘But you’ve got to stand up for something,’ said Breen.
‘We’ve got to win the war.’
He didn’t see the Canadian again; they marched on out, heading overseas. The people stood in their doorways in the dark to see them off. The mist was heavy and the echoes it gave made it seem like there were more soldiers marching just ahead of them.
Their voices soared up as they called out their farewells. Then, as they left the village, marching to the railroad, the flat country seemed to swallow up all the noise they made into its vast empty spread.
There was nothing but the road and the rolling land and the battalion marching off to war, keeping in step. The foreign fields pushed back at them to make a dry sour rhythm, barely heard—a flat tuneless sort of humming. It reminded Breen of sounds from home: stones knocking against one another in a river in spate, the hum of cicadas in summer, rain falling on corrugated iron.
Travelling
7
Tiger’s investigation, as he would ironically label it, letting all concerned know that he thought it a waste of time, dragged on until they were somewhere near the equator, on a troopship surrounded by shipping. Half the world seemed to be on the move. He had waited to disclose his conclusions as long as possible, vaguely ashamed and perhaps hoping the matter would be forgotten.
Now he was having a devil of a job finding the captain. Their ship was a converted liner, and at times the cruise seemed like a holiday. He went first down a passage with soft lights shining on bare floor where the carpets had been taken up; then he passed a guard at a watertight door—one of the Maori Battalion, smartly dressed, who winked at him—and entered a white-painted room.
But Sinclair wasn’t in his cabin. He shared it with Christie, the battalion’s intelligence officer, who thought he might be at the pool. Out on deck again, Tiger pushed past a lance-corporal looking idly out at the sea like any cruise passenger, and then past one of the Brens mounted for air defence, hunched like a vulture.
One of the interminable marches around the deck was going on, the men singing ‘You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean.’ Glumly silent, Tiger passed on through the field ambulance indulging in tabloid sports: the pick-a-back race, the potato race, the three-legged race, the seventy-five-yards sprint, the shot put, the broad jump, the hop, step and jump, the tug of war, and—otherwise they might as well have been back at school—the arms drill.
He found Baird, the cynical young adjutant of the battalion, and Bluey watching.
‘It’s like a school camp.’
‘And everyone wants to be a prefect next year,’ said Bluey.
‘I’ll keep going,’ said Tiger.
Finally he found the captain sunning himself next to the pool, lying on a striped towel while Breen occupied the deckchair next to him. They passed a cheroot between one another, and beside each was an empty bottle of beer.
They had been driven out of the pool by a game of water polo. Knots of naked men formed and dispersed, and water splashed onto the wooden decking and evaporated almost at once, leaving a smell like a sauna.
‘It’s not that dignified,’ Tiger said. ‘I understand while you’re swimming, but you might as well put something on afterwards.’
‘It’s bloody hot,’ said Breen. His sunglasses, the only thing he was wearing, irritated Tiger. He couldn’t tell if Breen was looking at him.
‘And yet you’re fresh as a daisy like this,’ said the captain.
‘I think I’ve found out all I can hope to about Cousins,’ said Tiger.
‘So?’ asked Sinclair.
‘There’s no evidence,’ said Tiger. ‘And it was like pulling teeth to get what I did, but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. Clark was almost ludicrously gentle with Cousins, the boys reckon, and Cousins was a shit soldier.’
‘And, you know, the men?’
Within the platoon, it seemed, he had been disliked by two men: Charlie Brennan, another corporal with whom he had once had a nasty fight outside the New Zealand club in London,
and Jacko Malley, a private in his section who had disliked him back home. There was no reason to believe these enmities were enough to upset the balance of Cousins’ mind.
‘In conclusion,’ said Tiger, ‘I’m afraid there’s no explaining it.’
‘Did you find anyone who knows his brother?’ asked Breen.
‘No,’ said Tiger.
‘Thank you,’ said the captain gravely. ‘Bring that letter here, would you?’
‘Breen’s still got it,’ said Tiger. ‘He only gave me a copy.’
‘Well, could you fetch it?’ Sinclair asked Breen. ‘And bring your copy along as well,’ he said to Tiger. ‘We might as well get rid of them.’
In his shared cabin, Breen tried to remember where he had hidden the letter. It was in one of his books, he knew that. He went through a volume of Browning, Hitler: A Biography, and A Study of Unit Administration, before he found it in a dilapidated detective story called The God of the Labyrinth by someone called Quain. Looking at his books, he realised that he had no proper novels.
‘I’m a great reader of novels,’ Sinclair had said. ‘The rousing sort. But my fiancée…’ He mumbled ‘fiancée’ as if he were ashamed of it. He’d had a little wine; red of uncertain colonial origin was about all you could get on board. ‘My fiancée, as I say, delights in sending me—at exorbitant expense—these pale little things written, as far as I can tell, by frigid women. I try to tell her I can get them cheaper over here, and all she says is it makes her feel like we’re connected to know I’m reading the books she’s read before me.’
‘It sounds sweet,’ Breen said, surprised to find himself talking like one of his sisters.
‘She means well. But they’re a bit bloodless for me. I pass them on to Emmet. Not that I like the way he looks at me through those glasses of his. And he gives me a summary and I get back to reading what I want. I like verse with a bit of swing to it as well,’ he said, as if he feared that he had given up too much of his intellectual capital. ‘She picks good writers, I just don’t think they make good books. Gusto—that’s the word.’
‘Of course,’ said Breen. Emmet, Father Emmet, was the brigade’s Catholic chaplain, who had joined them on board. His wire-framed glasses were like an indictment. ‘I prefer books about things which really happened, anyway.’